From PLS pioneers and OSS innovators to cutting-edge enterprises, Go-to-market mavericks is where we talk to GTM leaders about the strategies and tactics they use to drive results.
We recently talked to Silvia Valencia, Vice President of Revenue Marketing at Docebo, about winning the pipeline game in the enterprise and a whole lot more.
Here are three of the top takeaways from that conversation (check out the full recording above).
1. KPI clarity is kindness
Achieving alignment between marketing and sales is an all too common challenge, but it’s much easier at smaller companies.
You can hop on a Zoom call, hash things out over a couple of hours, and leave with a game plan.
Not so at enterprise organizations. When you’re trying to implement go-to-market philosophies and frameworks across hundreds of employees, things tend to get complicated fast.
That’s why Silvia is a big believer in clarity. Namely, clarity on exactly which KPIs teams are measured on.
“I think the foundation of cross-functional alignment really lies on a shared agreement of what each team is going to contribute and just really clear, simple definitions,” Silvia said.
Buy-in from all relevant stakeholders is crucial. Too often marketing and sales teams are working in silos, chasing misaligned metrics.
“It's tricky for us because we may have had an amazing month and blew leads out of the water, and you want to say it and you want to call it a win, but if what you're accountable to is pipeline, then you just have to control that narrative a little bit,” Silvia said.
2. Pipeline should be your benchmark
Silvia is a fan of marketing being held accountable to pipeline.
It’s not that she thinks metrics like marketing-qualified leads are useless. Far from it.
But any org with a growth-at-all-costs mindset can generate leads. Building quality pipeline is a different story.
“You know, if you want me to get a thousand leads this week, I can,” Silvia said. “We are creative. We can put some sort of pop-up somewhere and put a form behind it and call it a day. But what really matters to the business is making sure that you are building an engine of efficient and scalable revenue, and that isn't measured on leads.”
If acquisition is priority No. 1 in the SMB world, revenue efficiency is the name of the game at the enterprise level. And evaluating performance based on pipeline helps.
Full-funnel reporting automationCommon Room’s business reporting auto-captures meeting- and opportunity-level data from your CRM and matches it to your custom definitions of key metrics, automating play reporting across every funnel stage.
Plus, there’s a bonus: When marketing is measured on pipeline, it gets a lot easier to get crisp on ideal customer profile.
After all, it’s harder to get distracted by noise and wiggle out of your ICP zone if you’ve got a pipe number to hit.
“If you're aligned to pipeline or any forecastable deal metric, then naturally your efforts will lean toward, ‘Hey, the noise doesn't matter. Let's really hone in,’” Silvia said.
3. Embrace modern marketing
We’re living in the age of AI, but many marketing teams feel stuck in the stone age when it comes to day-to-day tasks.
Take customer research. Yes, interviewing customers and launching customer surveys is incredibly valuable, but it’s also a manual, time-consuming process fraught with approvals.
Meanwhile, there’s a good chance you’re sitting on a gold mine of customer intel in the form of sales call recordings. AI makes it easy to extract the nuggets.
“We are all over Gong [Ask Anything],” Silvia said. “It's an AI feature. You go into a deal and you ask certain things. For example, what were the main triggers that brought this prospect to a conversation with us? What were the main pain points that they mentioned during discovery?”
Silvia’s also adamant about disrupting another old-fashioned marketing tactic: gated content.
“I am very against gating anything,” Silvia said. “A few years ago, I was the one gating everything. I would fight to gate everything. That was me. I wanted the emails, I wanted the leads, I counted ebook downloads. Today, I am willing to die on a hill for ungating everything that is actually valuable for our prospect.”
Many marketers are fond of gated content for attribution purposes—and justifiably so. It’s often how they prove the value of their work. But as Silvia sees it, it’s a dead end.
“I think where we go wrong with attribution is, attribution shouldn't be a perfectly laid out timeline of sources and events that is going to give you the magic recipe that you just have to put a little bit more money behind to 5x your results,” Silvia said.
Buying cycles are more complex. The funnel is darker. People jump in and out of different stages across different touchpoints.
AI-powered signal captureCommon Room’s AI-powered signal capture automatically fetches contact, account, and activity data from your first-, second-, and third-party data sources. Our machine learning algorithms process this data and turn it into structured outputs for team members to access, analyze, and action on.
The goal for both inbound and outbound teams is the same: Reach and react to your core ICP. Gating content can add a barrier.
These are just some of the takeaways from our conversation with Silvia Valencia.
Watch or listen to the recording for the full story.
And stay tuned for the next edition of Go-to-market mavericks!
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