Signal-based GTM is redefining how B2B revenue teams generate pipeline in an era where volume-based outreach no longer works. As buyers conduct most of their research anonymously and engage with vendors later in the journey, timing has become a critical competitive advantage. Instead of relying on static lead lists and broad campaigns, signal-based GTM uses real-time buyer behaviors, intent data, engagement patterns, and account activity to identify when prospects are most likely to buy. By prioritizing outreach around these signals, sales and marketing teams can improve relevance, increase conversion rates, and create a more efficient, data-driven go-to-market strategy.

1. What Is Signal-Based GTM?

Signal-based selling is a modern revenue approach that prioritizes outreach based on real buyer intent rather than static prospect lists or broad demographic targeting. Instead of contacting every company that fits an ideal customer profile, sales teams focus on accounts showing signals that indicate active buying interest. These signals can include website engagement, pricing page visits, content consumption, hiring activity, technology adoption, funding announcements, or competitor research.

The core principle is simple: buyers reveal their intentions through behavior. Signal-based selling helps revenue teams identify those behaviors and engage prospects when they are most likely to evaluate solutions. This shifts sales from interruption-based prospecting to timely, relevant conversations. Unlike traditional outbound strategies that rely on volume, signal-based selling emphasizes timing and context. Reps spend less time chasing uninterested prospects and more time engaging accounts already progressing through buying signals.

2. Why Traditional GTM Models Are No Longer Enough

Traditional GTM models were built for a market where buyers engaged with vendors early, and outbound channels were less crowded. Those conditions no longer exist. Most B2B buyers complete significant research before contacting sales. They compare vendors, read reviews, evaluate alternatives, and build shortlists independently. When sales teams engage without visibility into these activities, outreach often arrives after key decisions have been made.

Outbound efficiency is also declining. Rising acquisition costs, lower response rates, and stricter inbox filtering have reduced the effectiveness of high-volume campaigns. Sending more emails no longer produces proportional results. AI has further compressed the value of personalization at scale. Any company can generate thousands of customized messages in minutes. Message volume is no longer a competitive advantage. Timing and relevance are.

Traditional demand generation also relies on assumptions that no longer reflect how B2B purchases happen. Buyers remain anonymous for much of the journey, decisions involve multiple stakeholders, and b2b buying signals rarely follow a linear sequence from awareness to conversion. As a result, revenue teams generate activity without creating a qualified pipeline. They target accounts based on firmographics, job titles, or static lists rather than current b2b buying signals and behavior. Signal-based GTM addresses this gap by using intent signals, engagement data, and market events to identify accounts actively evaluating solutions. Instead of guessing who might buy, teams focus on accounts showing evidence that they are ready to buy.

3. Types of Buyer and Account Signals 

The strongest programs combine multiple signals to determine which accounts are most likely to convert. Here are the different types of signal-based GTM:

First-Party Engagement Signals

First-party signals come directly from interactions with your brand. Examples include pricing page visits, product page views, webinar attendance, content downloads, demo requests, and product usage activity. Because these signals originate from owned channels, they provide the clearest indication of buyer interest and should receive the highest prioritization.

Career and Leadership Signals

New executives evaluate vendors, introduce processes, and allocate fresh budgets. Key signals include executive hires, internal promotions, department leadership changes, founder transitions, and former customers joining target accounts. These events frequently trigger technology evaluations and purchasing decisions within the first few months.

Growth and Financial Signals

Business expansion usually increases technology needs. Funding rounds, mergers, acquisitions, earnings announcements, market expansion plans, and rapid hiring indicate strategic investment. Companies undergoing growth often require new tools, operational improvements, and scalable processes. These signals help identify organizations with both urgency and purchasing capacity.

Digital Intent Signals

Signals include competitor comparisons, category-related keyword searches, review site activity, social media engagement, industry content consumption, and discussions in professional communities. When multiple stakeholders from the same account exhibit similar behaviors, the likelihood of an active buying signals cycle increases significantly.

Competitive and Technographic Signals

Technology changes often signal evaluation activity. Examples include adopting new software, removing existing tools, integrating complementary platforms, negative reviews of competitors, or discussions about vendor dissatisfaction. These signals indicate potential replacement opportunities and allow teams to engage prospects while they are assessing alternatives.

4. Benefits of a Signal-Based GTM Strategy

Signal-based selling helps sales teams identify and engage prospects based on real buying behaviors rather than assumptions. By leveraging signals such as website visits, job changes, funding announcements, hiring activity, intent data, and technology adoption, sales reps can focus their efforts on accounts that are most likely to convert. One of the biggest benefits is higher conversion rates. When sales teams reach out at the right time with relevant context, prospects are more likely to engage. Instead of sending generic messages, reps can tailor their outreach based on specific events or behaviors, making conversations more timely and meaningful.

Signal-based selling also improves sales efficiency. Rather than working through long, static lead lists, reps can prioritize accounts showing active buying intent. This allows them to spend more time on high-potential opportunities and less time chasing unqualified leads, resulting in greater productivity and stronger pipeline generation. Another key advantage is the ability to revive dormant opportunities. New signals, such as a funding round, leadership change, or expansion initiative, provide a natural reason to reconnect with previously inactive prospects and restart conversations.

In addition, signal-based selling enables teams to act quickly on high-intent opportunities. Real-time insights help sales representatives engage prospects when interest is at its peak, increasing the chances of securing meetings before competitors do. It also strengthens alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success teams. By working from the same behavioral data and intent signals, teams can coordinate outreach, improve lead handoffs, and create a more seamless buyer journey.

5. Building a Signal-Based GTM Framework

Effective signal-based GTM frameworks appear simple but rely on sophisticated systems behind the scenes. High-performing teams build continuous feedback loops that capture, analyze, and act on signals while constantly learning and improving outcomes.

Step 1: Define and Align Your ICP

A successful signal-based GTM strategy starts with a clearly defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Analyze your highest-value customers to identify common firmographic and technographic traits, while also documenting characteristics of poor-fit accounts. Align sales, marketing, and customer success around this profile to ensure everyone targets the right opportunities and avoids wasting resources on accounts unlikely to convert or expand.

Step 2: Identify and Stack Meaningful Signals

Combine fit signals (industry, company size, technology stack), intent signals (topic research, competitor comparisons), and engagement signals (website visits, webinar attendance, content downloads) to create a complete account view. Signal stacking helps teams distinguish casual interest from genuine b2b buying signal readiness, enabling more accurate prioritization and smarter outreach.

Step 3: Score and Prioritize Accounts

Transform signals into actionable intelligence through a scoring framework. Assign different weights to activities based on their buying significance; for example, a pricing-page visit carries more value than a blog view. Create clear thresholds that categorize accounts as hot, warm, or cold. This helps sales teams focus on high-priority opportunities while marketing continues nurturing accounts that need more engagement.

Step 4: Build Context-Driven Playbooks

Signals become valuable only when they trigger consistent actions. Develop playbooks that specify how teams should respond to different combinations of signals. For instance, multiple stakeholders attending a webinar could trigger immediate sales outreach, while increased intent around a specific topic may launch personalized marketing campaigns. Context-rich playbooks ensure every signal leads to a coordinated and relevant customer experience.

Step 5: Automate Workflows and Actions

Use automation to route qualified accounts to the appropriate sales representatives, notify teams of important activity, enrich contact data and buying signal data, and trigger personalized campaigns. Automated workflows eliminate manual handoffs, reduce response times, and ensure prospects receive timely engagement while their interest and intent signals are still fresh.

Step 6: Measure, Learn, and Optimize

Track outcomes such as response rates, meetings booked, pipeline generated, deal velocity, and revenue influenced by specific signals. Analyze which signals and combinations consistently lead to wins, then refine scoring models, thresholds, and playbooks accordingly. Continuous optimization turns your GTM system into a learning engine that becomes more accurate and effective over time.

6. Common Challenges in Signal-Based GTM

Signal-based selling often fails not because of poor execution. Avoiding these common mistakes can significantly improve conversion rates, pipeline quality, and revenue outcomes.

Treating Signals as a Data Problem

Many teams invest heavily in intent and signal platforms but fail to build the workflows needed to act on them. Signals without clear ownership, routing, and execution processes become expensive notifications. Success depends on designing repeatable signal-to-action motions, not simply collecting more data.

Treating Every Signal Equally

Not all signals carry the same buying intent. A pricing page visit from an ideal customer account is far more valuable than a casual blog read from an unknown visitor. Without signal scoring and prioritization, sales teams become overwhelmed by low-value alerts and eventually ignore them altogether.

Relying on Signal Sources and Individual Activity

No intent provider offers complete accuracy or coverage. Teams that depend on a signal data source increase false positives. Likewise, triggering outreach based on one individual’s behavior instead of validating intent across multiple stakeholders and signal sources often results in mistimed engagement.

Delayed or Over-Automated Responses

Signals lose value quickly. Without defined service-level agreements (SLAs), delayed follow-up reduces conversion potential. At the same time, automating every response removes critical human judgment. High-value, high-intent signals deserve personalized outreach rather than generic sequences triggered solely by technology.

Measuring Activity Instead of Revenue Outcomes

Many organizations celebrate metrics such as signals detected, alerts generated, or emails sent. However, these activities reveal little about business impact. The real measures of success are signal-to-meeting conversion, pipeline contribution, win rates, and ROI by signal source. Closing the feedback loop enables continuous optimization.

7. Real-World Signal-Based GTM Examples

The following examples demonstrate how leading companies use signals to prioritize accounts, align teams, and accelerate revenue outcomes.

• PageUp connected intent data with buying group activity to identify accounts showing genuine momentum. Rather than relying on isolated leads, sales and marketing engaged multiple stakeholders across target accounts at the right time. The results included a 30% increase in account list size, 15 influenced opportunities, over 11% of annual pipeline generated, five six-figure deals closed within six months, and a 161% rise in SDR engagement.
• HubSpot built its GTM strategy around identifying and responding to customer intent through educational content. Blogs, webinars, free tools, and SEO attracted self-educating buyers actively seeking solutions. Clear calls-to-action converted engagement into pipeline opportunities. This intent-driven approach helped HubSpot surpass $100 million in ARR within six years and establish itself as a category leader in inbound marketing.
• Randstad shifted from lead-centric campaigns to dynamic account prioritization powered by intent insights, strengthening sales and marketing alignment at scale. Similarly, AVEVA used buying group intelligence to improve targeting across complex accounts, streamline workflows, and provide actionable insights to SDRs and marketers. Both examples demonstrate that combining intent data with operational discipline reduces wasted effort and improves enterprise GTM performance. 

8. Key Metrics for Measuring Success

Measuring the effectiveness of your GTM strategy requires looking beyond vanity metrics to indicators that reflect efficiency, customer value, and sustainable growth. Acquisition metrics such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Cost Per Lead (CPL), sales cycle length, and conversion rates reveal how effectively marketing and sales investments generate revenue. Lower CAC and CPL, shorter sales cycles, and stronger lead-to-customer conversion rates indicate a well-optimized go-to-market strategy capable of turning demand into profitable growth.

Equally important are retention and customer value metrics. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) measures the total revenue generated throughout a customer relationship and should significantly exceed acquisition costs, with an LTV ratio of at least 3:1 considered healthy. Churn rate highlights how many customers leave over time, while retention rate reflects the ability to maintain long-term relationships and recurring revenue. Net Promoter Score (NPS) provides additional insight into customer satisfaction and advocacy, helping organizations understand whether they are creating experiences that inspire loyalty and referrals.

Finally, growth metrics demonstrate whether GTM efforts are translating into market success. Revenue growth rate reflects the company’s ability to expand consistently and sustain momentum, while market penetration rate measures how much of the target market has been captured and how much opportunity remains. Tracking these metrics together provides a balanced view of performance across the entire customer lifecycle. Rather than focusing on isolated activities, organizations should connect acquisition efficiency, customer outcomes, and business growth to evaluate the true impact of their GTM strategy and identify opportunities for continuous improvement.

9. Best Practices of Signal-Based GTM:

Signal-based GTM delivers results when organizations focus on operational discipline rather than simply collecting more data. The first best practice is to start small and prioritize quality over quantity. Instead of tracking dozens of triggers, begin with one or two high-impact signals, such as champion job changes, pricing page visits, or funding announcements. Proving the effectiveness of a focused use case helps teams refine workflows, build confidence, and scale strategically.

Second, orchestrate signals into actionable plays rather than treating them as isolated notifications. Signals become valuable only when paired with context, ownership, and predefined next steps. Enrich alerts with CRM history, account insights, buying group activity, and competitive intelligence so sellers understand not only what happened but also why it matters. Establish signal-to-action playbooks, routing rules, and response SLAs to ensure timely execution. Combining multiple signals, such as intent activity alongside executive hires or funding events, also improves accuracy and prioritization.

Maintain signal relevance through governance and continuous optimization. Build suppression rules to prevent signal fatigue and avoid overwhelming prospects with repetitive outreach from multiple teams. Introduce signal decay windows so outdated triggers expire before they lose relevance. Measure success using revenue-focused metrics such as signal-to-meeting conversion, pipeline influence, win rates, and signal source ROI rather than activity metrics alone. Regularly review which signals and combinations drive closed-won business and refine your scoring models accordingly.

Organizations that treat signal-based GTM as an evolving operating model, combining contextual intelligence, coordinated execution, and continuous learning, are best positioned to identify buying intent early, engage prospects effectively, and convert signals into predictable revenue growth.

10. The Future of Signal-Driven Revenue Growth

Signal-based GTM replaces static lead generation with real-time buyer intent data, enabling personalized engagement triggered by meaningful actions. Here is its future:

Unified Signal Layers Will Power Revenue Teams

Revenue teams will rely on unified signal layers that combine first-party product usage, CRM insights, third-party intent, website engagement, and customer interactions into a signal account view. This shared intelligence enables marketing, sales, and customer success to prioritize opportunities together and act with greater precision.

Agentic AI Will Turn Intent into Action

The next evolution of GTM isn’t just collecting signals. Agentic AI will translate buying intent into coordinated actions across channels. From personalized ads and dynamic content experiences to SDR outreach and nurture journeys, AI-powered workflows will ensure the right message reaches the right stakeholder at the right moment.

Depth of Signals Will Matter More Than Volume

A signal activity, such as downloading a whitepaper, rarely indicates purchase intent. High-performing teams will prioritize stacked signals: multiple stakeholders engaging with decision-stage content, increased product research, and third-party intent surges. These combined indicators create stronger buying narratives and drive timely human intervention.

Signals Will Fuel Expansion and Win-Back Growth

Existing customer signals, such as executive changes, funding announcements, declining product usage, or evolving business needs, can reveal expansion and win-back opportunities. Customer Success and account teams can proactively identify cross-sell, upsell, and re-engagement moments before competitors gain an advantage.

Every Signal Must Prove Revenue Impact

The future of revenue growth is not about collecting more data; it’s about operationalizing signals that drive measurable outcomes. Every signal should justify its existence through pipeline contribution and revenue impact. When integrated into end-to-end workflows and stacked strategically, signals become scalable growth programs that replace guesswork with precision.

Conclusion

Signal-based GTM represents a fundamental shift from volume-driven outreach to intent-driven engagement. In a world where buyers research independently and expect relevance, timing, and context to be the true competitive advantages. Organizations that can identify meaningful signals, align teams around shared intelligence, and translate insights into coordinated action will outperform those relying on static lists and outdated playbooks. The future belongs to revenue teams that prioritize precision over scale, combine AI with human judgment, and measure success through pipeline and revenue impact.

The post Why Is Signal-Based GTM Replacing Traditional Go-To-Market Models? appeared first on iTechSeries.

In this iTech Series Unplugged interview, Bhargav Chandrababu, Senior Director, Demand Generation at Mindtickle, shares insights on building revenue-first marketing teams, creating a predictable pipeline, and navigating the AI era. He discusses the evolving role of B2B marketers, the importance of sales alignment, and the mindset required to drive sustainable growth.

It’s great to have you for this interview, Bhargav. Could you tell us about yourself and your journey as a marketer?

The best careers are rarely the ones you planned. Mine certainly wasn’t. I started in sales, spent time as a coder, and somehow found a way to bring both worlds together as a marketer—building demand engines for Mindtickle, Sprinklr, Freshworks, and InMobi, four companies that collectively redefined their categories in B2B SaaS.

A serious marketing career wasn’t even on my radar when I started. Though looking back, there were early signs. I used to blog about music on Blogger while still in college, making a little money from Google Adsense here and there. Nothing significant, but it got me curious about how digital platforms worked.

What really set the direction was joining InMobi in 2015. Mobile advertising was at an inflection point, and learning digital marketing inside an ad tech company is honestly one of the best educations you can get. You develop a certain tech fluency from day one, the kind that stays with you regardless of what industry you move into later.

From there, every role has been some version of the same challenge. build a team from the ground up, scale it, and make it a predictable source of pipeline. That was true at Freshworks during their hypergrowth phase and at Sprinklr when I was the first digital marketing hire after the function moved from the US to India, and it’s what I’m doing now at Mindtickle.

Thirteen years in, the thing I care most about hasn’t changed: marketing that’s measured by the revenue number. Everything else is in service of that.

What are the key pillars of a high-performing demand generation strategy today?

The first is technology and data infrastructure. Before you spend a rupee or a dollar, you need to know what you’re measuring and how. At Freshworks, one of the first things we did was build an integrated MarTech stack and connect everything to a central data warehouse so insights were democratised across functions rather than sitting in one team’s dashboard. None of that would have been possible without an exceptional data analytics team. Without that foundation, everything else is guesswork dressed up as strategy.

The second is channel discipline. Organic, paid, ABM, field—none of these work in isolation. The best demand generation engines treat channels as a portfolio, not a menu. You make deliberate bets, understand how the audience converges, and optimise the mix over time. I find the teams that consistently struggle are the ones chasing the channel of the moment rather than building something that compounds.

The third is AI fluency, and I don’t just mean tools. I mean building a team that thinks natively in AI, using it for content operations, signal-based targeting, and automating workflows that used to require headcount. The marketers who will matter in the next two to three years aren’t necessarily the ones who know which tools to use. They’re the ones who think in systems and know how to integrate AI into how a team operates. That’s a significant mindset shift, and most organisations are still in the early stages.

And fourth, which most people underinvest in, is sales alignment. The honest reality is that marketing and sales have structurally different incentives; marketing optimises for volume and velocity at the top of the funnel, and sales optimises for quality and close rate at the bottom. Those tensions don’t disappear easily. The best demand gen strategy in the world fails if sales don’t trust the leads or understand the intent signals behind them. The teams I’ve seen consistently outperform are the ones where marketing and sales are operating from the same playbook.

Over the past decade, how have you seen B2B SaaS marketing evolve, especially in the way teams approach pipeline and revenue ownership?

Earlier, marketing was largely seen as a support function. We ran campaigns, generated leads, and handed them over. The conversation with the CEO or CFO was about brand awareness and share of voice, things that were genuinely hard to tie to revenue. That has changed dramatically.

The first big shift was attribution. As MarTech matured, CRMs, marketing automation, and intent data platforms matured. It became possible to connect marketing activity directly to the pipeline and revenue. Marketing leaders stopped presenting share of voice and started presenting pipeline contribution, cost per opportunity, and marketing-sourced ARR. That changed the conversation in the boardroom entirely.

The second shift, which is still playing out, is ownership. The best marketing leaders I know don’t think of themselves as service providers to sales. They think of themselves as co-owners of the revenue number. At Mindtickle, I present weekly to the CEO on inbound performance, channel, and pipeline contribution. That is a fundamentally different relationship to the business than marketing had a decade ago.

The third shift is around how buyers make decisions. Today you’re not selling to one person; you’re influencing a buying committee of six to ten stakeholders, each with different concerns and different stages of awareness. That’s reshaped how ABM works and how the pipeline is built. Campaigns are no longer about reaching a decision maker. They’re about orchestrating a conversation across an entire account. It should be contextual to the journey of the customers we are chasing.

“The best demand generation engines treat channels as a portfolio, not a menu. You make deliberate bets, understand how the audience converges, and optimise the mix over time.”

How is AI reshaping the relationship between marketing, sales enablement, and revenue growth?

AI is doing something interesting: it’s compressing the distance between intent and action across the entire revenue funnel.

On the marketing side, the impact is most visible in how teams operate. Content and SEO programmes that once required large teams and long cycles can now run leaner and faster. Signal-based automation means outbound sequences are triggered by actual buying behaviour, not arbitrary nurture schedules. That kind of precision simply wasn’t practical two years ago.

On the sales enablement side, and this is something I’ve seen first-hand at Mindtickle, AI is fundamentally changing how reps show up to customer conversations. Personalised coaching based on individual skill gaps means every rep is learning differently, not sitting through the same training as others. Real-time deal intelligence flags risks in active opportunities and recommends the next best move before the rep has to ask. Reps walking into sales calls today are better prepared if they’re leveraging the tech well.

Where it gets genuinely exciting is the intersection of marketing and sales. When marketing’s intent signals feed directly into sales workflows, and sales feedback loops back into marketing’s targeting, AI stops being something teams adopt in isolation and starts functioning as a connected system.

The honest caveat I’d add is this: AI amplifies good strategy and good data. If your fundamentals are weak, AI makes the mess faster. The companies that will win are the ones that already have clean data, aligned teams, and a strong context layer that makes that data meaningful.

What would be your advice to marketers on developing the right skills and mindset to succeed?

Three things, in the order that I learned from my mentor, which I often share with others now.

First, learn the business before you learn the tools. I’ve met brilliant marketers who know every platform inside out but struggle to have a conversation with a CXO or a sales leader about revenue. The marketers who grow fastest are the ones who can sit in a business review and understand what the numbers mean, not just their own numbers but the business’s numbers. That fluency is what gets you a seat at the table.

Second, own an outcome, not a function. There’s a meaningful difference between “I run demand generation” and “I own the pipeline target.” The first is a job description. The second is a leadership position. The earlier in your career you start thinking in terms of outcomes rather than activities, the faster you’ll move.

Third, be genuinely curious about technology, but don’t be seduced by it. The MarTech landscape is overwhelming and getting more so with AI. The marketers who build durable careers are the ones who can tell the difference between signal and noise and make technology work in the service of strategy rather than the other way around.

And one mindset thing I’d add is to get comfortable with being wrong in public. Marketing is inherently experimental. A test-and-learn culture has to start with leaders who are willing to say “that didn’t work; here’s what we learned.” That psychological safety is what separates teams that iterate from teams that repeat.

Ultimately, the marketers I’ve seen grow the fastest are the ones who are just as comfortable being uncomfortable as they are being right.

Could you tell us about your most memorable experience as a marketer?

The one that stays with me is from my early days at Sprinklr.

As I mentioned before, I was building the digital marketing function from the ground up, and the self-serve motion was fairly new territory for the company — an organisation that had historically grown through outbound and enterprise field sales. Building that confidence that inbound could work required as much internal selling as external marketing.

What I remember most is the moment, about eighteen months in, when the self-serve motion crossed its first meaningful revenue milestone. It sounds modest in hindsight, but at the time, it was proof of concept for something nobody was sure would work. We eventually grew it fourfold in Net New ARR over the following years, thanks to a resilient inside sales team.

But the number isn’t what stays with me. What I remember is the leadership support through a journey that had no guaranteed outcome and the team that built something meaningful without a playbook. There’s something particular about being a small team delivering a meaningful outcome inside a large organisation; the ownership feels different, the wins feel more personal, and the losses teach you more.

About Bhargav Chandrababu

Bhargav Chandrababu is a marketing leader with 13 years of experience scaling demand generation across four category-defining SaaS companies: Mindtickle, Sprinklr, Freshworks, and InMobi. He also advises early-stage startups on demand generation and go-to-market strategy and serves as an Advisory Board Member at Bhumi, one of India’s largest volunteer-based NGOs.

The post Revenue, Alignment, Demand Gen and AI: Bhargav Chandrababu on Modern B2B Growth appeared first on iTechSeries.

Gigi Chong, Growth Marketing Manager, Asia Pacific at JAGGAER, shares hard-earned lessons from leading growth marketing across APAC’s diverse markets. She explores how marketers can balance global scale with local relevance, align around revenue, build enduring brands, harness AI responsibly, and develop the skills needed to thrive in the evolving world of SaaS marketing.

Welcome to the interview series, Gigi. Could you tell us about yourself and your journey as a marketer?

Thank you for having me! If you’d told me at the start of my career that I’d go from marketing canned soup to marketing AI-powered procurement software, I’m not sure I would have believed you, but that’s exactly the journey I’ve been on, and I wouldn’t change a thing. That winding path has shaped how I think as a marketer and brought me to where I am today.

Today, I’m the Growth Marketing Manager for the Asia Pacific region at JAGGAER, where I lead demand generation and growth initiatives across the region for our AI-powered source-to-pay software.

I actually started in B2C, working in FMCG marketing at Campbell Soup and later in over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, before pivoting into B2B SaaS marketing with a Norwegian data management software company called dRofus. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d like the move at first, but it grew on me quickly, and a decade later, I’m still here and genuinely feeling fulfilled by it. Over the years, I’ve worked across demand generation, field marketing, branding and PR communications, digital marketing, and more, spanning markets as varied as Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and Greater China.

My latest move into procurement technology has been an exciting chapter; it sits at the intersection of finance, procurement, supply chain, and technology, which keeps the work intellectually challenging every single day. But what truly fuels my passion in marketing goes beyond any one industry: it’s the ability to be creative, to stay adaptable, and to keep pace with an industry that never stands still, with new channels, new technologies, and new ways of connecting with people. That’s exactly what keeps me energised after all these years.

You’ve worked extensively across APAC markets. What has been your biggest lesson from managing marketing across diverse regions?

That APAC is not one market; it’s a collection of very different markets that happen to share a time zone block. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that you cannot simply translate a global campaign and expect it to land and get the same results.

Buying behaviours differ enormously even within this region. In Japan, for example, decisions are consensus-driven, and trust is built over long cycles, so relationship-led tactics and local proof points matter most. In Australia and Singapore, buyers are digitally more mature and respond well to self-serve content and peer reviews. In emerging Southeast Asian markets, education-first marketing often has to come before demand generation, because you’re building category awareness, not just brand preference.

The practical lesson: invest in local insight before you invest in local media. A campaign that performs brilliantly in Sydney can fall completely flat in Seoul, not because the message is wrong, but maybe because the channel, the format, or the cultural framing is. Listening to local sales teams, partners, and customers is the most direct and valuable research you’ll ever do.

As a Growth Marketing Manager, how do you approach building scalable growth strategies while adapting to local market needs?

I think of it as “global engine, local fuel.” The engine, your tech stack, data model, campaign frameworks, lead scoring, and reporting should be standardised and scalable. That’s what allows a lean regional team to operate efficiently across many markets without reinventing the wheel each time.

The fuel messaging, proof points, channels, and timing have to be local. At JAGGAER, our core value proposition around an AI-powered, integrated procurement process is consistent globally, but how we deliver it changes by market. A manufacturing audience in Malaysia cares about direct material sourcing and supplier collaboration; a public sector buyer in Australia cares about compliance, transparency, and value for money.

Three principles guide me: first, build modular campaign design assets and journeys so local teams can swap in regional case studies, languages, and offers without rebuilding from scratch. Second, let data decide where to localise deeply. Not every market justifies full localisation, so I prioritise based on pipeline potential and conversion data. Third, pilot, prove, then scale test a motion in one market; document the playbook and roll it out regionally. True scale comes from building repeatable playbooks, not from forcing every market to look the same.

“The biggest shift is that marketing no longer operates in a silo. The walls between marketing, sales, and customer success have come down, creating a shared revenue engine with shared metrics.”

Where have you seen the biggest shift in marketing’s role with greater alignment between the revenue functions?

The biggest shift is that marketing is no longer a function that works in a silo. The wall between marketing, sales, and customer success has come down, and in its place, we have a shared revenue engine with shared metrics.

Practically, that’s changed three things. First, the metrics conversation: MQLs as a vanity number are dead. The conversations I have with sales leadership now are about pipeline contribution, conversion velocity, and win rates, full-funnel metrics that both teams own together. Second, account-based thinking has become the default in enterprise SaaS. Marketing and sales now plan around the same target account lists, with marketing orchestrating air cover and intent-based engagement while sales works the relationships. Third, marketing’s remit has extended beyond the top of the funnel. In a subscription business, growth comes as much from expansion and retention as from net-new logos, so marketers increasingly partner with customer success on adoption, advocacy, and upsell programmes.

The healthiest revenue teams I’ve worked with don’t talk about “marketing leads” versus “sales leads” at all. They talk about one pipeline, one number, and who’s doing what to move it.

As a marketer, how do you balance the need to drive leads with the brand-building aspects?

I push back gently on the idea that they’re in tension; in fact, I think they are complementary to one another. Strong brand awareness lowers cost per lead, improves conversion rates, and shortens sales cycles, because buyers arrive already trusting you. The famous rule of thumb is that at any moment, around 95% of your market isn’t actively buying. Performance marketing captures the 5% in-market today; brand building ensures you’re on the shortlist when the other 95% enter the market.

In practice, I balance the two in a few ways. I protect a portion of the budget for brand and thought leadership, even in quarters when pipeline pressure is high, cutting brand to fund short-term leads is borrowing from next year’s pipeline. I also look for activities that do both at once: a well-executed industry report, customer story, or executive roundtable builds credibility and generates qualified engagement simultaneously. And I measure brand with leading indicators, branded search volume, direct traffic, share of voice, and win rates against competitors, so brand investment isn’t flying blind.

In a considered-purchase category like procurement technology, where deals involve large committees and long cycles, trust is the real conversion driver. Demand generation delivers the leads, but it’s the brand that amplifies every result you get.

How are AI and automation reshaping growth and demand generation strategies in marketing?

The impact has been profound, and I see it on two fronts: how we market, and what we market.

On the “how”: AI has compressed the cost and time of campaign production dramatically. Content drafting, ad variant testing, audience segmentation, lead scoring, and personalisation at scale are all faster and smarter. The teams winning right now use AI to handle volume and pattern recognition, surfacing intent signals, predicting which accounts are warming up, automating nurture journeys so humans can focus on strategy, creativity, and judgment. The differentiator is no longer who can produce the most content; it’s who has the sharpest insight and the most distinctive point of view, because AI has made generic content essentially free and therefore worthless.

On the “what”: working at JAGGAER gives me a front-row seat to this, because we’re applying AI to procurement itself using intelligent agents to automate sourcing, guide buying decisions, and move organisations toward what we call Autonomous Commerce. Marketing an AI-powered platform during an AI revolution means our buyers are simultaneously excited and skeptical. That raises the bar for us as marketers: we have to demonstrate real outcomes, not just sprinkle “AI” into headlines.

One caution I’d add: automation amplifies whatever you feed it. Automating a weak message just delivers a weak message faster. Strategy and customer understanding still come first.

What advice would you like to share with aspiring marketers looking to build a career in SaaS and growth marketing across APAC?

A few things I wish someone had told me earlier.

First, learn the business, not just the marketing. The marketers who advance fastest in SaaS understand the revenue model, ARR, CAC, retention, expansion, and can speak the language of sales and finance. Sit in on sales calls. Read the win/loss notes. Understand what your product actually does for customers.

Second, become genuinely data-fluent. You don’t need to be a data scientist, but you do need to be comfortable building a funnel analysis, questioning attribution, and defending your budget with numbers. In growth marketing, data fluency is table stakes.

Third, embrace APAC’s diversity as your competitive advantage. Marketers who can operate across cultures, navigate different buying behaviours, and build campaigns that work in Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney alike are rare and valuable globally, not just regionally. Take the assignments in markets you don’t know yet.

Fourth, build your AI muscle now. Experiment relentlessly with the tools, but invest equally in the things AI can’t replicate: customer empathy, creative judgement, and strategic thinking.

And finally, stay curious and be patient with your path. Careers in this region rarely move in straight lines; mine certainly hasn’t. Every market, every role, and every campaign that didn’t work taught me something I still use today. The learning compounds.

About Gigi Chong

Gigi is a seasoned B2B marketer with over 14 years of experience, including eight years in SaaS marketing across the APAC region. As Growth Marketing Manager at JAGGAER, she leads demand generation and growth initiatives for AI-powered procurement solutions. Her career spans FMCG, pharmaceuticals, and B2B technology, with expertise in GTM strategy, account-based marketing, brand building, and driving growth across diverse international markets.

The post One Pipeline, One Team: The New Era of Revenue Marketing with Gigi Chong appeared first on iTechSeries.

Every marketing team knows the pressure: inbound promises long-term, compounding growth through trust, content, and SEO, while results take time, and stakeholders still expect a pipeline this quarter. Outbound delivers immediate reach and speed, yet scaling it efficiently is becoming increasingly expensive and complex. The real challenge isn’t choosing between them; it’s building a system where both work together. Inbound attracts high-intent prospects by solving real problems, while outbound proactively engages targeted accounts. This blog explores how to build a high-impact inbound pipeline that consistently converts traffic into qualified, revenue-ready opportunities.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound lead generation is a pull marketing strategy that attracts potential customers by offering valuable, relevant content aligned with their needs and intent. Instead of interrupting audiences with ads or cold outreach, it focuses on drawing prospects organically through search, social media, and educational resources. Buyers typically complete most of their research independently before speaking to inbound sales, making inbound critical for early influence. The process works through three stages: attract with SEO- and AEO optimized content, engage using CTAs, forms, and nurturing tools, and delight through ongoing value and support. Inbound leads are self-qualified, high-intent, and more likely to convert because they already recognize their problem and see your solution as relevant, resulting in greater trust and better long-term business outcomes.

Key Elements of a High-Impact Inbound Pipeline:

A successful inbound engine is an integrated system, not a set of isolated tactics; these five elements work together to turn strangers into customers and loyal advocates:

Precise Audience Targeting and Buyer Understanding

A high-impact inbound pipeline begins with clearly defined buyer personas and data-driven targeting. Understanding customer needs, pain points, and decision triggers allows marketing teams to attract the right audience. This ensures all campaigns speak directly to high-intent prospects, improving engagement quality and conversion potential from the very first interaction.

Value-Driven Content and SEO Visibility

High-performing pipelines rely on helpful, problem-solving content such as blogs, guides, videos, and case studies. When combined with a strong SEO inbound marketing strategy and topic clustering, this content becomes easily discoverable, helping brands attract organic traffic and build trust before any direct inbound sales conversations begin. With the massive shift toward AI-driven search, standard SEO is no longer enough. Incorporating AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) ensures your content is structured so AI search models can easily parse, cite, and serve your insights directly to buyers asking complex questions. 

Optimized Conversion and Lead Nurturing Systems

Once visitors arrive, structured conversion paths turn them into leads. Clear calls-to-action, landing pages, and intuitive forms guide users smoothly. Marketing automation then nurtures these leads through personalized workflows, ensuring timely follow-ups and relevant messaging that moves prospects efficiently through each stage of the pipeline.

Data-Driven Optimization and Continuous Improvement

A strong inbound pipeline constantly evolves through analytics and feedback. CRM integration, performance marketing dashboards, and attribution tracking reveal what works and what doesn’t. Teams use these insights to refine campaigns, improve targeting, and enhance ROI, ensuring the pipeline becomes more efficient and effective over time.

Step-by-Step: Building Your Inbound Pipeline:

Building a strong inbound pipeline requires a structured approach that attracts the right audience, nurtures engagement, and converts them.

Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Start by clearly identifying your ideal audience based on industry, company size, roles, and key pain points. Go beyond demographics to understand buying behavior and decision triggers. A well-defined ICP ensures your inbound efforts attract high-quality prospects who are more likely to engage, convert, and generate long-term business value.

Create Value-Driven Content

Develop content that solves real problems and answers key questions your audience is actively searching for. Focus on blogs, webinars, videos, and downloadable resources. When content is educational, relevant, and consistent, it builds trust, improves SEO inbound marketing visibility, and positions your brand as a reliable solution provider in the buyer’s journey.

Optimize Conversion Paths

Turn visitors into leads by designing seamless conversion journeys. Use clear calls-to-action, dedicated landing pages, and valuable gated assets like templates or guides. Every step should feel natural and aligned with user intent, ensuring prospects move forward without friction while sharing their information willingly.

Nurture Leads with Speed and Personalization

Respond quickly to high-intent actions such as demo requests or contact forms to capture interest at its peak. Use automation and CRM tools to nurture leads with personalized messaging based on behavior and stage. Timely engagement combined with relevance significantly improves conversion rates and pipeline progression.

Align Sales, Marketing, and Technology

Ensure marketing and sales teams work toward shared pipeline and revenue goals. Integrate CRM systems to track lead sources, engagement, and performance. Continuous feedback, data analysis, and collaboration help refine targeting, improve lead quality, and build a scalable inbound pipeline that consistently drives business growth.

Best Practices for Higher Conversion

Higher conversion in inbound marketing depends on aligning strategy, execution, and measurement with real buyer intent. Start by deeply understanding customer pain points and delivering relevant, value-driven content that addresses their needs at each stage. Ensure your website and landing pages are optimized with clear messaging, intuitive design, and strong calls-to-action to reduce friction. Leverage data by tracking key metrics across the funnel, from traffic and conversion rates to pipeline and revenue, so you can identify gaps and opportunities. Fast response times and personalized nurturing significantly improve lead progression, especially for high-intent prospects. In addition, align marketing and sales around shared goals like pipeline and revenue, ensuring lead quality over volume. Use CRM and automation tools to streamline workflows, maintain consistency, and scale efforts efficiently. Finally, continuously test and optimize campaigns through A/B testing, performance analysis, and feedback loops to improve results and maximize ROI over time.

Success Stories: Inbound Marketing Strategy

• Slack uses interactive webinars to educate users on platform features and collaboration best practices. These sessions allow real-time Q&A with experts, helping users learn by doing. This approach strengthens product adoption, builds community, and improves retention by continuously delivering practical, value-driven education at scale.
• Moz attracts and nurtures users through free tools like Keyword Explorer, Link Explorer, and site audits. These tools help marketers improve SEO performance while learning the platform organically. By offering actionable insights upfront, Moz builds trust, drives inbound traffic, and converts users into long-term paying customers.
• Dropbox achieved rapid growth by rewarding users with extra storage for referring friends. This simple incentive turned customers into active promoters, driving exponential user acquisition. The program reduced acquisition costs, improved engagement, and transformed satisfied users into a scalable, self-sustaining inbound growth engine.

Conclusion

Building a high-impact inbound pipeline is not about isolated tactics but a connected system that aligns audience understanding, content, conversion, and continuous optimization. When executed effectively, inbound becomes a sustainable engine that attracts high-intent prospects, nurtures trust, and drives consistent pipeline growth. The key lies in combining strategic clarity with operational discipline, ensuring teams, data, and technology work together seamlessly. By focusing on relevance, speed, and measurable outcomes, organizations can move beyond vanity metrics and build a pipeline that delivers real business impact. Ultimately, a well-structured inbound approach turns marketing into a predictable, scalable driver of long-term revenue growth.

The post Beyond the Basics: Building a Revenue-Ready Inbound Pipeline for 2026 appeared first on iTechSeries.

In this edition of the interview series, Shivani Priyadarshini, Head of SEA Field Marketing at Akamai Technologies, shares her insights on the evolving role of field marketing, customer-centric GTM strategies, changing buyer expectations, customer retention, and leadership. She explains why trust, relevance, and execution remain at the heart of sustainable B2B growth.

Welcome to the interview series, Shivani. Could you tell us about yourself and your journey as a marketer?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about marketing, it’s that it rarely goes according to plan—and that’s probably why I’ve stayed in it for nearly 20 years, not including the seven years I spent in a call centre before transitioning into the field.

The truth is, I got into marketing by accident. Before marketing, I worked in sales and customer adoption for the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft. While I could sell, I realized I enjoyed understanding customers, listening to their challenges, sharing ideas, and helping solve problems far more than closing deals. Eventually, I recognized that what excited me most wasn’t sales—it was marketing.

When I made the switch, I started from scratch. I had no formal marketing education or experience. Everything I learned came from hands-on work, making mistakes, asking questions, and figuring things out along the way.

Over the years, I’ve worked across industries, countries, and cultures, each experience teaching me something new. Today, I lead Field Marketing for Southeast Asia at Akamai Technologies, partnering closely with sales teams, customers, partners, and executives across the region.

What I love most about marketing is that it sits at the center of everything. You’re close enough to customers to understand their challenges, close enough to sales to understand market realities, and close enough to the business to see the impact of your work.

Some of my most valuable lessons came not from successful campaigns but from failures, missed targets, and tough conversations. Marketing taught me resilience. At its core, marketing is about building trust, creating opportunities, and helping people make better decisions. Everything else is simply the vehicle that gets you there.

You have extensive experience leading field marketing across different regions. What makes field marketing a critical growth driver in today’s B2B landscape?

I may be biased, but I’ve always believed field marketing is where strategy meets reality.

You can have great campaigns, messaging, and content, but if they don’t resonate with customers or help advance sales conversations, they don’t matter. Customers don’t care how good your product is; they care whether it solves their problem.

Field marketing is a critical growth driver because B2B buying has become increasingly complex. You’re no longer selling to a single decision-maker but engaging multiple stakeholders with different priorities and concerns. At the same time, buyers have access to more information than ever and often complete much of their research before speaking with a vendor.

That’s where field marketing plays a vital role. It’s not about filling rooms or running events for the sake of it—it’s about creating opportunities for meaningful conversations.

I’ve always seen field marketing as the bridge between marketing and sales. We stay close enough to customers to understand their challenges and close enough to sales to understand market realities. This gives us a unique ability to influence the pipeline, accelerate opportunities, and build trust long before a contract is signed.

One thing I’ve learned is that sales teams don’t want more marketing activities; they want conversations, opportunities, and revenue. Good field marketing helps deliver that.

Having worked across Southeast Asia, I’ve also learned that what works in one market may not work in another. Field marketing provides the flexibility to adapt globally while executing locally.

At the end of the day, people buy from people. Technology and buying journeys may evolve, but trust and relationships still drive business decisions, and field marketing helps create those moments where trust is built.

What are some of the key elements of a successful go-to-market strategy?

I’ve always felt that people overcomplicate go-to-market strategies.

At its core, a successful GTM strategy comes down to answering a few simple questions: Who are we trying to reach? What problem are we solving? Why should they care? And why now? If you can’t answer those clearly, even the most sophisticated marketing plan won’t help.

The second key element is alignment. One of the biggest reasons GTM strategies fail isn’t because the idea is wrong, but because marketing, sales, product, partners, and customer success teams are working toward different priorities. When everyone pulls in different directions, you lose consistency and credibility with customers.

I’ve also learned that GTM strategies must be built around the customer, not the product. Companies often focus too much on features and capabilities, but customers care about outcomes. They want to know how you’ll help them reduce risk, save money, grow revenue, improve efficiency, or make their jobs easier.

Execution is equally important. I’ve seen great strategies fail because nobody followed through, and simple strategies succeed because teams executed them consistently. A good plan executed well will almost always outperform a perfect plan that stays on a slide deck.

Finally, successful GTM teams know how to adapt. Markets evolve, customer priorities shift, competitors react, and what looks great on paper doesn’t always work in reality. The best teams listen, learn, and adjust quickly instead of becoming attached to the original plan.

For me, a successful go-to-market strategy isn’t the one with the most slides or the most complex framework. It’s the one that understands the customer, aligns the business, drives action, and ultimately helps solve a problem customer genuinely care about.

“Great campaigns, messaging, and content only matter if they resonate with customers and advance sales conversations. Customers don’t care how good your product is; they care whether it solves their problem.”

How have changing customer expectations influenced modern marketing strategies?

Customers today are far more informed than when I first started in marketing, and that’s fundamentally changed how we engage them.

In the past, buyers relied heavily on vendors for information. Today, they have access to reviews, analyst reports, peer recommendations, industry communities, and AI tools before ever speaking to a salesperson. In many cases, they’ve already formed an opinion before we enter the conversation.

As marketers, we can no longer rely on generic messaging or one-size-fits-all campaigns. Customers expect relevance. They want you to understand their industry, business challenges, and where they are in their buying journey.

Customers have also become more selective with their time. They’re constantly exposed to emails, ads, webinars, and content. If you’re not delivering value, they’ll quickly move on. More communication doesn’t necessarily mean more engagement; relevance matters far more.

I’ve also seen a growing demand for authenticity. Customers want to hear from peers, practitioners, and people who have solved similar challenges. That’s why customer stories, communities, roundtables, and peer-to-peer conversations are so effective. The human voice still makes a difference.

AI adds another dimension. While it helps marketers personalize and scale engagement, it also raises expectations. Customers can often tell the difference between automated content and information that genuinely addresses their needs.

At the end of the day, customer expectations haven’t made marketing harder—they’ve made it better. They’ve pushed us to focus less on ourselves and more on understanding customers, building trust, and creating meaningful experiences. In many ways, that’s how marketing should have worked all along.

Could you tell us about your most memorable experience as a marketer?

I’ve been fortunate to have many memorable experiences throughout my career, but the ones that stay with me aren’t necessarily the biggest events or the campaigns that generated the most leads.

The moments I remember most are the ones that remind me that marketing is really about people.

One experience that stands out was the very first Akamai Media Leadership Summit. The idea actually came about during a casual conversation over drinks between a colleague and me. We started discussing how valuable it would be to bring media leaders from across India, Southeast Asia, and Australia/New Zealand together to learn from one another.

What made it different was that we deliberately chose not to make it a vendor-led event. Instead of having our executives and product experts do all the talking, we invited customers to take center stage. Some delivered presentations, others participated in panel discussions, and one customer even hosted a site visit to their office so attendees could see firsthand how they operated.

What followed was something special. The conversations were open, honest, and incredibly valuable because they came from peers facing similar challenges. There was a genuine willingness to share experiences, lessons learned, and ideas.

What makes it memorable isn’t just that the event was successful. It’s years later, and customers still bring it up when we meet. They remember the people they met, the conversations they had, and the insights they gained.

The summit has evolved over the years, but there is always something special about the first one. It reminded me that sometimes the best marketing doesn’t come from talking about your company or your products. It comes from creating an environment where people can learn from one another.

Customer marketing plays a key role in growth. How should GTM teams approach engagement, retention, and expansion after the initial sale?

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is treating the sale as the finish line. In reality, it’s just the beginning of the relationship.

Customers engage with you because they believe you can solve a problem. Once the contract is signed, your responsibility is to ensure they achieve the outcome they were promised. If they don’t, no amount of customer marketing can compensate for that.

For me, engagement starts with staying relevant. Don’t only appear during renewals or upsell opportunities. Understand what’s happening in your customer’s business—their priorities, challenges, and evolving definition of success.

Retention is built on trust and ongoing conversations, not transactions. Customers stay when they continue to see value. That value may come from product innovation, but it often comes from helping them learn, sharing best practices, connecting them with peers, and providing support when needed.

Expansion becomes easier when you’ve earned the right to have that conversation. Customers should see you as a partner before they see you as a vendor. When that happens, discussions about additional solutions occur naturally because they’re focused on solving business challenges, not hitting sales targets.

I’ve also found that some of the best customer marketing happens when customers learn from one another. Roundtables, workshops, advisory boards, and leadership forums can create powerful peer-to-peer learning opportunities.

At the end of the day, customer marketing isn’t about keeping customers happy—it’s about helping them succeed. When customers are successful, engagement, retention, advocacy, and growth naturally follow.

What advice would you give to marketers who aspire to move into leadership roles?

My first piece of advice is to stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like a business leader.

Early in my career, I measured success through campaigns, programs, and marketing metrics. As I moved into leadership roles, I realized that what truly matters is whether you’re helping the business grow. Learn how sales works, understand revenue, and know how both your company and customers make money. The more commercial your mindset, the more valuable you’ll become as a leader.

Second, get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Many of the biggest opportunities in my career came from taking on challenges I had never faced before. I didn’t have a marketing degree or a perfect career path, and there were plenty of times I felt out of my depth. But growth often comes from saying yes, learning quickly, and figuring things out along the way. Mistakes are inevitable, and some of my most valuable lessons came from them.

I’d also encourage marketers to invest in relationships. Marketing doesn’t operate in isolation. The most successful marketers build trust with sales teams, partners, customers, executives, and peers. Learn from others, share experiences, and don’t hesitate to ask questions. Leadership is often more about influence than authority.

Finally, stay curious and agile. Marketing is constantly evolving, and the people who continue to grow are those who never stop learning.

Looking back, I didn’t have everything mapped out. I found marketing by accident and stayed because I enjoyed solving problems and helping customers. Stay curious, stay humble, and don’t shy away from opportunities that challenge you—they often shape your career the most.

About Shivani Priyadarshini

Shivani Priyadarshini is a seasoned B2B marketing leader with 28 years of experience, including 21 years in the technology industry and 7 years in customer engagement roles. She has built expertise in field marketing, demand generation, account-based marketing, and go-to-market strategy. Throughout her career, she has helped organizations create customer-centric programs that strengthen relationships, drive growth, and deliver measurable business outcomes across global markets.

The post Where Strategy Meets Reality: Shivani Priyadarshini on Modern Field Marketing appeared first on iTechSeries.

Valentina Kovačić, Vice President Digital & Customer Marketing at Azul, shares her perspective on modern B2B demand generation, AI-driven content visibility, and marketing to technical audiences. She discusses why credibility matters more than volume, how GTM teams can better engage buyers, and what it takes to build trust with developers and technical decision-makers.

Tell us about your role and what your team is focused on right now.

At Azul, I lead digital and customer marketing across our full Azul product portfolio, including Payara, which joined the Azul family earlier this year. The through line across all three is Java, and right now Java is having a moment.

Two things are happening at once. Enterprises are accelerating away from Oracle Java as licensing costs and audit risk have finally hit a tipping point. And separately, as AI moves from experimentation into production, organizations are realizing that most of their AI workloads are running on Java infrastructure and that JVM performance directly affects what they can deliver. Better Java means faster inference, lower cloud bills, and fewer bottlenecks in the stack.

That is where our products sit. Azul Platform Prime delivers the runtime performance enterprises need for demanding AI and cloud workloads without over-provisioning infrastructure. Payara gives Jakarta EE teams a supported, modern path forward. My team’s job is to connect those value stories to the right buyers in a way that resonates with both the architects making technical decisions and the executives signing off on them.

How has your approach to demand gen evolved over the last couple of years?

Honestly, the biggest shift has been moving away from chasing volume toward being more intentional about whom we are actually trying to reach. We have leaned into ABM, tightened our ICP, and started asking harder questions about whether the content we are producing is reaching the right people at the right time or just generating noise.

One thing that has changed a lot is how we think about content visibility. More and more buyers are starting their research through AI tools rather than traditional search, and if your content is gated or not structured in a way that LLMs can surface, you are effectively invisible. That has pushed us to be more deliberate about ungating high-value assets and thinking about how our content gets cited and referenced, not just ranked.

“We have leaned into ABM, tightened our ICP, and focused on whether our content is reaching the right audience at the right time rather than just creating noise.”

What does a strong GTM motion look like for a technical product like a JVM?

You have to earn credibility before you can earn pipeline. With a technical audience, that means leading with proof, including real benchmark data, honest performance comparisons, and customer stories that are not sanitized to the point of being useless. Technical buyers talk to each other, and if your claims do not hold up, word travels fast.

But the GTM motion does not close on technical credibility alone. At some point, you are talking to a VP of Engineering or a CFO who needs to understand the business case and what this actually saves them or what risk it removes. The campaigns that work for us bridge both. The practitioner trusts the technical depth, and their leadership sees the cost and performance story in terms they care about. Getting that translation right is where a lot of B2B tech marketing falls short.

What’s one thing most B2B GTM teams get wrong about demand gen?

The pattern I see most often is treating the entire market as if everyone is at the same stage. Research consistently shows that at any given time, only around 5% of your market is actively in buying mode. The other 95% are not ready yet. But most GTM teams run the same campaigns at both groups, which means you are either pushing too hard at people who are not ready or being too passive with people who are.

The downstream effect is a volume problem disguised as a pipeline problem. Teams keep increasing lead volume, but conversion rates stay flat because the leads were never the right fit to begin with. The other thing I would flag is the marketing and sales handoff. Buyers today complete most of their research before they ever speak to a salesperson. If your content is not present and credible during that self-serve research phase, you are not even on the shortlist when they are ready to talk.

Any advice for marketers building GTM programs for technical or developer audiences?

Do not try to market to them; genuinely try to be useful. Technical buyers have very good instincts for when content is designed to help versus when it is designed to funnel them somewhere. If everything you publish requires a form fill or ends with a sales CTA, you will lose them before the conversation even starts. The other thing I would say is do not underestimate how much peer influence matters in technical communities. A well-written benchmark report or a genuinely helpful migration guide will travel further than any paid campaign. Create things worth sharing, make them easy to find, including for AI tools, and the pipeline tends to follow.

About Valentina Kovačić

Valentina Kovačić is a seasoned marketing leader with over 20 years of experience in PR, digital marketing, and customer engagement. She leads global marketing strategy across Azul’s Java-focused portfolio, including Payara. Her expertise lies in aligning marketing initiatives with business goals, building data-driven campaigns, and translating complex technical value propositions into compelling narratives that resonate with both technical and executive audiences.

The post Valentina Kovačić on ABM, Buyer Intent, and Smarter Demand Generation appeared first on iTechSeries.

In this edition of the interview, Wilhelm Frank, Commercial Marketing Director EMEA at Lenovo, shares insights from a marketing career spanning corporate leadership, agency experience, and entrepreneurship. From building award-winning campaigns to leading EMEA B2B marketing, he discusses balancing global and local strategies, proving marketing ROI, connecting brands with demand generation, and developing future marketing leaders.

Welcome to the interview series, Wilhelm. Could you tell us more about your journey as a marketer?

Well, I started my career in a local role in Austria after my studies. I wanted to have a marketing job from the very beginning, and the offer at HP was very attractive to me, as it covered product management but also included the creative part with campaign management responsibilities within the printing group. After 6 years and after winning a silver lion in Cannes for a Direct Marketing project, I wanted to see the other side of Marketing and moved to PKP Proximity (now “BBDO”), where I learned as Account Director for several clients all the essentials from an agency perspective. After a year, I thought I could do it all myself and established a marketing consultancy with a friend. One of the key outcomes was that we were core stakeholders in the establishment of the first e-gaming trade fair in Austria, called “Game City,” which is still the main event for gaming in my country. But I missed the corporate life soon and especially wanted to have an international role, so I accepted an offer from Lenovo and continued my career there 18 years ago as Campaign Manager for the Eastern European markets. After some years, I moved to the EMEA marketing team, was part of the Channel marketing organization, and then soon led it. In 2017, I further moved ahead and became Head of Commercial Marketing. After some years, I got promoted to Director for Commercial Marketing and owned the full end-to-end EMEA B2B Marketing for the PC business group from brand to demand generation, a great role with broad responsibilities and opportunities, where I especially further professionalized our Demand Generation approach and also established an Account-Based Marketing Program.

Having worked on both the corporate and agency side, how have these experiences shaped your approach to strategy and execution?

Although my time on the agency side was not super long, it was a great time to learn, and I can only recommend that any marketer, at least sometime in their career, see both sides of marketing. It helped me especially in the cooperation as well as in the selection of agencies for all the years after. Getting some understanding about internal processes and how much time different requests take is super helpful in evaluating proposals and quotes. And it overall improves the collaboration with agencies to finally optimize the joint outcomes over time. Especially when it comes to proper briefings, which are the key element for a successful and fair agency-client relationship.

You’ve worked extensively in pan-EMEA environments. How do you balance global consistency with local market relevance?

As I am from a rather small country in EMEA (Austria), I saw from the very beginning of my career as a local field marketer in Austria how difficult it is within corporate organizations to create really locally relevant campaigns. And of course, global consistency and a full alignment with the overall corporate strategy and CI/CD are key to succeeding in the long term and creating a consistent brand experience across all our customers across the world. On the other side, with my local experience, I also realized how important the local flavor is. Even in IT, where products and customers don’t seem to need too much of this local touch. But a really locally relevant approach starting from a close alignment with internal stakeholders, especially sales, but also creative-wise with some local touch, can really make a big difference, and that’s why I have always tried also in my EMEA role to balance out global consistency with local relevancy as much as possible and partly tended to focus even more on a more localized approach. With AI and modern MarTech, this is now also much easier, cheaper, and faster to adapt worldwide campaigns and add local flavors into it, while still remaining fully brand consistent.

“A consistent storytelling approach can be guaranteed from brand to demand, which always needs to start on the brand side first, before we can focus on leads and sales conversions.”

With increasing pressure to prove business value, how do you measure ROI and define success beyond traditional marketing metrics?

At the end, what counts most is the business success. Might it be achieving sales, market share, or profit targets? All that we do on the marketing side needs to have a clear impact on these meta goals. Especially on Demand/Lead generation side, we established an end-to-end reporting where we can clearly measure starting from engaged accounts towards marketing and then sales qualified leads, our contribution to the marketing-driven sales pipeline, and over time, our attribution to won revenue. Even more in our ABM program, where lead velocity and customer lifetime value can be added for a more in-depth ROI measurement. Also, here modern MarTech, ABM tools, and finally AI help us further to visualize the customer journey and conversions across the journey better and finally help us to calculate ROI, but also forecast results more easily and accurately.

As a marketing leader, what has been your approach to balancing brand awareness and demand generation?

First of all, it’s key to analyze your data and the current status of your brand and demand generation achievements. Based on that, it needs to be clearly defined where the main gap is, whether it is on the awareness, consideration, or conversion side or more of a topic around retention, etc. With that, a fact-based discussion with the leadership team is possible to get their buy-in on where the priorities need to be set. At the end, it cannot be only one or the other, but it should be clear where more focus should be set for a given timeframe. And my key recipe is to connect the dots as closely as possible and esp. focus on fully integrated marketing approaches, where a brand and also a product campaign connect closely with a lead generation campaign or, e.g., even a Co-Marketing activity in the IT Channel. With that, a consistent storytelling approach can be guaranteed from brand to demand, which always needs to start on the brand side first before we can focus on leads and sales conversions.

What would be your advice to marketers looking to grow into leadership roles?

Always stay curious, and the more you move ahead, ensure you are not only an expert in marketing, which is the basis, but also understand business, strategy, and sales in more detail. Try to grow your skills also outside your comfort zone, and be part of different non-marketing projects. Try to take ownership, e.g., as a project or team lead, where possible to train your people management skills but also to showcase to your leaders that you are willing to take on broader responsibilities. And finally, you also need to be capable in the “finance language”; as I mentioned before, all that we do in marketing finally needs to contribute to exceeding the financial goals of the company.

About Wilhelm Frank

Wilhelm Frank is a seasoned B2B marketing leader with extensive experience across global technology companies and advertising agencies. His expertise spans strategic planning, brand marketing, demand generation, ABM, digital marketing, channel marketing, and event management. Known for building high-performing international teams and driving measurable ROI through MarTech innovation, Wilhelm is an award-winning marketer, respected industry speaker, and guest lecturer recognized for his contributions to modern B2B marketing.

The post Wilhelm Frank on Connecting Brand, Demand, and Business Impact in B2B Marketing appeared first on iTechSeries.

Christine Doles, an Independent GTM & Demand Gen Advisor (Former AWS), shares insights into building scalable demand-generation engines, aligning global and regional teams, and closing pipeline gaps. She also explores customer-centric storytelling, personalized journeys, campaign execution strategies, and data-driven budget allocation approaches that drive measurable growth and long-term business impact.

Welcome to the interview series, Christine. Could you tell us about yourself and your journey as a marketer?

Thank you so much for having me. I usually describe myself as a ‘Go-to-Market Architect’ and a ‘Builder of Demand Generation Engines.’ I have about 18 years of experience in the B2B marketing space, specifically focusing on taking complex, technical enterprise capabilities and translating them into highly scalable demand generation campaigns.

If I look back at my journey, I truly cut my teeth in marketing at Infor, managing digital demand programs for their complex ERP and supply chain portfolios. That was my very first major corporate marketing role right out of the gate, following an invaluable foundational internship at an office furniture manufacturer where I first learned the ropes of the corporate world.

From Infor, I moved deeper into institutional and research markets at ProQuest and then spent several years at Thomson Reuters leading content and digital demand strategy for the highly complex tax and accounting segment. Most recently, that trajectory brought me to AWS, where I managed global industry marketing programs and built demand frameworks that delivered over $380 million in Sales Qualified Lead pipeline.

Parallel to my corporate career, I’m also an Adjunct Professor currently teaching Principles of Marketing, as well as Consumer Behavior, Personal Selling, and Global Marketing in the past. I love this because it allows me to bring real-world, hyperscaler marketing strategy into the classroom while keeping my corporate strategies grounded in disciplined academic frameworks.

Where does alignment typically break down in global integrated marketing, and how do you rebuild it?

Alignment almost always breaks down in the translation layer between global strategy and local field execution. What happens is that the global campaign teams build these massive, beautifully designed global playbooks in a vacuum. Then they toss them over the fence to regional teams who say, ‘This doesn’t fit our local market nuance, and our sales team won’t use it.’

To rebuild that alignment, I use what I like to call a ‘Squad’ or ‘Center of Excellence’ model. Instead of dictating strategy top-down, you pull regional field marketers and sales leadership into the campaign architecture process early. When I was at AWS, we standardized global playbooks but built in explicit ‘flex-points’ for the local markets. If you give local teams a voice in the framework of the campaign and solve their specific regional sales pain points, they go from being passive recipients to active champions of the engine.

Where do you see the biggest gaps between pipeline creation and conversion?

The single biggest gap is the ‘No-Man’s Land’ between Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Accepted Leads. Marketing teams love to celebrate hitting their lead generation numbers, but if those leads sit untouched in a CRM system for a week, the pipeline dies of cold exposure.

To bridge this gap, you have to shift the metrics from volume to velocity and intent. It’s important to optimize lead management workflows and create a seamless handoff motion with Sales. If Marketing can provide Sales with behavioral data—showing exactly what content a prospect engaged with, what niche trade publications they are reading, and what intent signals they are flashing—Sales doesn’t feel like they are cold calling. They are stepping into a warm, context-rich conversation. When you fix the handoff, conversion rates follow naturally.

Can you walk us through your most challenging yet successful campaign that delivered a strong pipeline and conversion?

One of the most challenging but rewarding initiatives was scaling our global industry marketing campaigns to reach highly specialized business decision-makers. The challenge with enterprise B2B marketing is that you cannot rely on generic, mass-market digital plays. You are trying to engage C-suite buyers who have incredibly high filters for noise.

We shifted our strategy away from broad-brush campaigns and focused heavily on niche targeting, specifically placing content in highly specialized industry trade publications and meeting decision-makers inside their trusted industry associations. We paired this with high-touch, hyper-focused industry symposiums. By solving highly specific, industry-aligned pain points rather than pitching a product, we built an incredibly robust trust layer. That single, end-to-end integrated engine ultimately drove over $389 million in total SQL pipeline and smashed our performance targets by over 300%.

“True customer-centric storytelling means making the customer the hero, making their business pain point the conflict, and positioning your solution simply as the tool that helps them win the day.”

In global multi-channel campaigns, where do you see the biggest drop-offs in the customer journey, and how do you address them?

The biggest drop-off happens right after the initial engagement—the ‘one-and-done’ webinar or whitepaper download. A prospect interacts with a high-value piece of content, and then they are dumped into a generic, linear email sequence that treats them like a total stranger.

We address this by embedding behavior-driven personalization and intent data directly into our campaign frameworks. If a buying group from an enterprise account attends a webinar, our automated nurture logic shouldn’t just send them another generic brochure. It should include a personalized next step—like an invite to an exclusive symposium or a targeted, industry-specific customer story that speaks to their specific corporate hurdles. You fix drop-offs by making the customer journey feel like a continuous, responsive conversation rather than a series of disconnected marketing events.

Where do most B2B marketing teams go wrong when trying to build customer-centric storytelling?

Most B2B companies suffer from ‘feature-itis.’ They are so proud of their software, their cloud capabilities, or their technical roadmaps that they make the product the hero of the story. But the customer doesn’t care about your product; they care about their own survival, their own efficiency, and their own growth.

This is where my background as a marketing professor comes in handy—I always tell my teams to look at consumer behavior. Even in B2B, you are still marketing to human beings. True customer-centric storytelling means making the customer the hero, making their business pain point the conflict, and positioning your solution simply as the tool that helps them win the day. When you shift the narrative from ‘Look what our platform can do’ to ‘Look what you can achieve,’ your messaging instantly cuts through the market clutter.

How do you allocate your marketing budget across channels to maximize impact and efficiency?

I look at budget allocation through a strict data-driven, multi-touch attribution framework. I don’t believe in ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ annual budgets.

I structure spending into a balanced model: a significant portion goes to our core ‘always-on’ digital demand channels—like SEM, paid media, and content syndication—where we can directly track pipeline contribution and ROI. Another portion is strictly carved out for high-impact experiential marketing, like industry third-party events, which drive the final stage conversion and velocity.

But the key to efficiency is maintaining an agile ‘innovation fund’—about 10 to 15% of the budget—dedicated to testing modern marketing tactics, new intent-data platforms, or AI-driven optimization tools. If a test proves it can improve lead quality or lower our customer acquisition cost, we can instantly scale it. If it doesn’t, we kill it fast and reinvest the dollars into our proven pipeline engines.

About Christine Doles

Christine Doles is a senior marketing leader with more than 15 years of experience building and scaling integrated marketing programs for global technology organizations. She specializes in demand generation, content strategy, and go-to-market execution that drives pipeline growth and revenue impact. Known for aligning cross-functional teams and simplifying complex solutions into compelling narratives, Christine is also an adjunct faculty member passionate about mentoring and developing the next generation of marketers.

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Maisie Goss, VP of Marketing-UK at Employment Hero, shares her perspective on modern B2B marketing, full-funnel accountability, and revenue-driven growth. Drawing from her experience leading UK marketing at Employment Hero, she discusses attribution challenges, simplifying ABM, aligning cross-functional teams, and balancing creativity with data to drive meaningful business outcomes.

Could you tell us about yourself and your journey as a marketer?

I lead marketing for Employment Hero’s UK business—which means full-funnel ownership across brand, demand gen, content, paid, and partnerships, with pipeline firmly in my remit.

My career has been pretty varied. I studied at Manchester and Leeds, and early on, I worked across a few different sectors before landing in B2B SaaS. That breadth has been useful—it pushed me to think commercially pretty early, rather than sitting comfortably in one channel.

What I find genuinely interesting about marketing right now is the tension between rigour and creativity. The instinct to measure everything can actually kill what makes a brand distinctive. Getting that balance right—especially as a UK function inside a global business—is where most of the interesting work happens.

How do you define “full-funnel marketing” when attribution and buyer journeys are more complex than ever?

Honestly, the term “full-funnel” has become a bit of a catch-all, so I try to be specific about what it actually means in practice.

For me, it means being accountable to outcomes at every stage, not just the stage that’s easiest to measure. Top-of-funnel brand work absolutely influences the pipeline. The problem is that most attribution models are built to reward the last click, so anything that happens earlier, a billboard, a podcast, or a thought leadership piece, just disappears from the story.

What I rely on more than any single attribution model is pattern recognition. Which channels are bringing in prospects who actually convert? Where does deal velocity improve? When we run a regional campaign or a compliance seminar, does the pipeline in that geography move? Those are the questions I find more useful than arguing about whether a touchpoint gets 20% or 40% attribution credit.

The buyer journey being non-linear isn’t new; it’s just more visible now. The job is to show up consistently across multiple surfaces so that when someone is ready, they already know who you are.

ABM is often over-engineered. How do you keep it simple enough to actually drive revenue instead of just activity?

The best ABM I’ve done has been intentionally lightweight. Pick a short list of accounts that genuinely matter, agree on the definition of an engaged account with sales, and do something that gets their attention. It doesn’t need a 12-step orchestration sequence. It needs a clear reason for them to care.

Where ABM goes wrong is when marketing builds a beautifully complex programme and then presents it to sales as a fait accompli. The pipeline doesn’t follow. The relationship doesn’t follow either.

The other thing I’d push back on is treating ABM as a separate motion from everything else. In a mid-market business like ours, your target accounts are also seeing your brand content, your compliance webinars, and your PR. ABM at its best accelerates and personalises what’s already working—it doesn’t try to replace it.

What are the foundational elements of successful global go-to-market strategy execution across multiple regions?

The tension in any global-local model is between consistency and relevance. Global wants coherence. Local markets need resonance. Both are right, and the job is to hold that tension without collapsing into one extreme.

The things that actually make it work, in my experience, are a genuinely strong understanding of the local buyer—not just the ICP on paper, but also what’s happening in their regulatory environment, their industry, and their specific pressures. In the UK right now, that means understanding how the Employment Rights Act is landing for SME employers. That’s not a global brief; it’s a local one.

The other foundational element is trust between the regional team and the global one. If you’re constantly waiting for approval on things that need to move quickly, you lose market opportunity. That trust is built by showing your work—being clear on why you’re diverging from the global playbook and what outcome you’re optimising for.

“The buyer journey being non-linear isn’t new; it’s just more visible now. The job is to show up consistently so that when someone is ready, they already know who you are.”

What’s been the biggest impact you’ve seen from stronger alignment across marketing, sales, product, RevOps, and customer success teams?

Speed to pipeline. When those functions are genuinely aligned—not just in the same Slack channel, but working to the same definitions and the same goals—the whole machine runs faster.

The thing I’ve noticed most is what happens at the handoff points. The MQL-to-SAO conversion rate is as much a relationship metric as it is a data metric. When sales trusts that marketing is sending them the right people, they follow up faster and with better context. When marketing understands what’s actually happening in deal conversations, it informs content and campaign decisions in a way that no amount of internal briefing documents can replicate.

The hardest part isn’t getting everyone in a room. It’s agreeing on definitions—what counts as a qualified lead and what a “good” pipeline looks like—and then holding to those consistently rather than relitigating them every quarter.

Beyond the usual KPIs, which performance indicators do you rely on to uncover deeper insights into marketing impact?

MQL volume is a vanity metric if it’s not connected to what happens next. So I spend more time on MQL-to-SAO conversion, deal velocity by source, and the ratio of organic and direct traffic to paid—the latter being a reasonable proxy for brand health that doesn’t require a brand tracker budget.

One I find underused is channel-level cohort analysis—not just which channels drive the most leads but which drive leads that actually close and at what contract value. That changes the investment conversation significantly.

I also pay attention to what’s not in the data. If a segment is consistently underperforming relative to expectations, that’s usually a signal of the message, product fit, or sales motion—not just a campaign problem. Those conversations tend to be more useful than optimising click-through rates.

What advice would you give to emerging marketers on developing a strong balance of technical, creative, and strategic skills?

Get comfortable with discomfort on the side you’re weakest in. If you’re naturally creative, spend time in the data. If you’re analytically strong, go and make something—write a brief, run a campaign end-to-end, or do something where the creative output is yours.

The strategic layer builds from both. You can’t develop a genuinely good point of view on where to invest without understanding what the data is telling you and having the creative judgment to know what good looks like in the market.

The other thing I’d say is find a place where you’re allowed to own the outcome, not just execute a task. The learning compounds much faster when you’re accountable for the result. Junior roles in big marketing teams can be frustrating for exactly this reason—you end up specialized too early. If you can find a smaller business, a start-up, or a function where you have to cover a lot of ground, take it.

About Maisie Goss

Maisie Goss is a marketing leader and GTM strategist with extensive experience driving demand generation, pipeline growth, and revenue performance for high-growth technology companies. She also advises PE and VC-backed businesses through Maverick & Co., helping teams scale marketing and go-to-market efforts. Previously, she led global demand generation at Payhawk, delivering significant growth in pipeline, leads, and closed deals. Maisie specializes in full-funnel marketing, ABM, and revenue-focused strategy.

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In this interview, Senior Marketing Manager Suzy Krohn shares insights from her experience leading demand generation and digital marketing initiatives across leading technology companies. She discusses the evolving role of marketing in driving revenue growth, strengthening GTM alignment, leveraging AI, optimizing customer journeys, and building high-performing teams in complex B2B environments.

Welcome to the interview series, Suzy. Could you tell us about yourself and your journey as a marketer?

Thank you so much for having me. My career has been driven by one core belief: that marketing should be measurable, strategic, and deeply connected to revenue outcomes.

I started at Microsoft, managing digital demand for Office 365 and Azure. That foundation in SEM, landing page optimization, and trial conversion shaped how I think about the full funnel. From there, I moved into agency-side work at Wheelhouse Labs, which gave me incredible breadth running paid programs across both B2B and B2C accounts simultaneously.

The through line in all of it has been performance: what’s actually driving the pipeline, and how do we do more of it efficiently? That eventually brought me into enterprise cybersecurity and tech, first at F5, then Palo Alto Networks, and Cloudflare, where I led global paid media and digital demand for enterprise and executive segments. There, I owned multi-channel programs end-to-end, from strategy and audience segmentation through CRO, attribution, and executive reporting. I partnered closely with Sales and BDR leadership to ensure that marketing-generated leads converted into opportunities and pipeline.

You’ve led global marketing initiatives. What are the biggest challenges in scaling campaigns across different regions?

You must be willing to adjust strategies as tactics evolve and new channels surface. You can’t really master Digital Marketing until you’ve realized that success usually comes from experimentation and understanding your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).

At Cloudflare, running global programs for enterprise segments, I learned quickly that audience signals, buying committee dynamics, and even platform performance vary by region. What resonates in NAMER doesn’t always translate to APAC; the pain points, the compliance concerns, and the personas involved in a security buying decision are all slightly different.

Another challenge is budget allocation. When you’re operating globally, you need a disciplined framework for deciding where to concentrate spend based on pipeline signals and intent data rather than just historical preference. I leaned on Demandbase’s account tiering and intent signals to make those calls rather than distributing budget evenly and hoping for the best.

And last but not least is agency and team coordination. I ran weekly performance syncs with external agency partners across channels, and maintaining accountability to shared KPIs across time zones and market contexts is genuinely hard. You need clear measurement frameworks, rigorous attribution, and the discipline to act on data quickly. The best GTM teams create shared incentives and reporting across functions.

As a performance marketing leader, how do you connect campaign performance to revenue outcomes?

This is the question I’m most passionate about, and honestly, the one where a lot of marketing teams still fall short.

My approach starts with instrumentation. You can’t connect marketing to revenue if your attribution stack isn’t built properly. At every company I’ve been at, I’ve worked to ensure that GA4, Salesforce, Bizible, and Marketo are talking to each other and that we’re tracking the full funnel: CPC and CTR at the top, MQL-to-SAL conversion in the middle, and opportunity creation and pipeline velocity at the bottom.

But beyond the tools, the real unlock has been how I engage with Sales. At Cloudflare, I served as an embedded partner to BDR and Sales leadership. We were aligned on territory account plans and pipeline targets before campaigns even launch. That allowed me to increase Sales Accepted Leads 2x in nine months, not by generating more volume, but by improving lead quality and handoff. That’s the distinction between a marketing org that reports on clicks and one that actually moves pipeline.

The industry has started moving beyond MQL-centric thinking toward product-qualified leads and sales-qualified accounts. B2B decisions are driven by buying groups, not individual stakeholders.

How has marketing’s role evolved in the overall go-to-market strategy with greater alignment across revenue teams?

The biggest shift for Marketing I’ve seen is moving from a support function that generates leads to a genuine strategic partner in the revenue motion. Earlier in my career, the relationship between marketing and sales was transactional: we handed over leads at a threshold, and Sales did what they do best, close deals. That model is broken.

At all 3 of my most recent roles, I was deep in a compliance-driven, enterprise security environment where the buying cycle is long, and the stakeholders are cautious. In that context, marketing needs to be embedded in territory planning, not just campaign execution. At Cloudflare, I worked directly with field leadership, aligning digital programs to account plans and pipeline targets. The KPIs we shared weren’t impressions or MQLs; they are SALs, pipeline contribution, and opportunity conversion.

The broader industry is moving toward what some are calling a revenue organization: marketing, sales, customer success, and ops under a unified mandate with shared goals. I think that’s exactly right. And it requires marketers who are comfortable in Salesforce, who can present pipeline narratives to executives, and who aren’t precious about campaign performance for its own sake.

“The biggest shift for Marketing I’ve seen is moving from a support function that generates leads to a genuine strategic partner in the revenue motion.”

Customer journeys are becoming increasingly complex. How do you map and optimize them effectively?

The B2B customer journey was already complex, with multiple stakeholders, long sales cycles, and content consumed across a dozen touchpoints before anyone talks to Sales. The challenge now is that those touchpoints are multiplying: search, LinkedIn, programmatic, third-party content placements, event follow-up, email nurture, and direct SDR outreach.

My approach is to build the funnel view first. At F5, when I launched a net-new SaaS product, I built CRO and A/B testing frameworks spanning across ad creative, copy variants, and landing pages, because I knew the funnel would need continuous iteration. We improved web form conversion 1.5% QoQ through structured experimentation and generated $900K+ in attributed pipeline in six months. This discipline of test-learn-iterate across every stage is how I think about journey optimization.

At Cloudflare, I used DemandBase intent signals to understand where accounts are in their journey and allocate spend accordingly, so we were not treating a low-intent account the same way we treat one actively researching solutions. This account-tiering approach is what drove roughly a 30% reduction in CPL and CPM-to-MQL. Closed-loop reporting, which ties marketing efforts directly to the pipeline at every stage of the buyer journey, is essential. You need to know not only that someone converted, but also where in the journey the conversion happened and what influenced it.

As AI becomes more integrated into marketing, how can teams use automation to improve efficiency while maintaining creativity and authenticity?

This was something I actively navigated at Cloudflare. I deployed AI-assisted analysis to surface performance insights faster; tasks that previously required a half-day of data wrangling were reduced to minutes, enabling near-real-time optimization decisions. We also began utilizing LLMs to keep stakeholders informed on campaign performance and details. Over time, we advanced to building AI agents capable of autonomously handling repeatable tasks, such as passing leads to sales with actionable recommendations, including email follow-ups and call scripts.

Like most marketers, I am fully embracing AI technology to optimize my work, but I’m also cautious of overusing AI and creating a poor user experience. I believe the ideal balance involves human-driven content with AI assistance, treating AI as an amplifier of creativity and productivity rather than a replacement for human judgment and strategic thinking.

In cybersecurity marketing, especially, authenticity and trust matter enormously. You’re talking to CISOs and IT security leaders who are sophisticated and skeptical and have very low tolerance for generic messaging. AI can help you scale personalization and speed up analysis, but the insight into what keeps a CISO up at night has to come from a human who understands the buyer. The best-performing B2B brands deliver experiences that feel human, even when powered by technology.

What approaches do you use to keep your team motivated while driving strong marketing performance?

I think about motivation in two ways: clarity and ownership.

On clarity: People perform best when they understand exactly how their work connects to outcomes that matter. I invest a lot in making sure my team (and agency partners) understands not just the KPIs but the why behind them: why we’re targeting these accounts, why we’re prioritizing this channel mix, and why SAL quality matters more than MQL volume. When the strategic rationale is clear, people make better decisions independently and feel more invested.

On ownership: I try to give people real accountability for things they can influence. At Cloudflare, when I reduced CPL by 30% through account segmentation and channel optimization, it wasn’t just me; it was a team with the freedom to experiment, the data to learn from, and the accountability to act on what the data showed. I build testing frameworks not just for the performance benefit but because testing creates a culture of learning where experimentation is expected.

I’ve had some incredible leaders in my career that I have learned from. What they had in common is that they rewarded and celebrated wins (big and small), but they also encouraged honest post-mortems to learn from failures, mistakes, or unproven hypotheses.

About Suzy Krohn:

Suzy Krohn is a demand generation and paid media marketing leader with over a decade of experience driving global growth across B2B SaaS, IT, and cybersecurity organizations. She specializes in building high-performing teams and scalable marketing programs that increase brand awareness, improve lead quality, and accelerate pipeline growth. Passionate about sales and marketing alignment, Suzy combines data-driven strategy, attribution expertise, and AI-powered innovation to deliver measurable business outcomes.

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