For more than a decade, B2B sales and marketing teams have been operating the same way. CMOs spend tons of money to drive qualified leads to your website, and if they want to talk to sales, you ask them to fill out lead capture forms that always end with "Thanks, someone will get back to you shortly."​ The problem? Buyers move onto other things and sales reps struggle to engage buyers and start the selling process. Simply put, the process that marketing teams use to pass leads to sales is broken. A new category of software has emerged, and it's called Conversational Marketing. The concept is simple. When qualified leads land on your site, we'll alert your reps in real-time and allow both parties to start a conversation instantly via chat, voice calls, and screen sharing. Conversational marketing is the rare opportunity for your company to completely change the game on how you interact and engage with qualified prospects. Your buyers will be thrilled about the new experience and your business will feel the impact to the metrics that matter most, pipeline and revenue.

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Every week on Demand Gen Visionaries we sit down with marketing leaders from some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing companies to uncover the demand gen strategies that have been fundamental to their skyrocketing success.

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In each episode, we ask our marketing-leader guests which three areas of investment are most important to their demand gen initiatives. Tune into this special mini-series to hear the budget items our CMO guests can’t live without!

Find parts one, two, three, four, five & six

• Thought leadership content, of all different mediums, gets people hooked and builds awareness
• Demand gen marketers are not content creators, but they are content curators
• Offer a value exchange with your customers, and be relevant in what you’re providing them

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“It’s really about thinking through the lens of your business strategy. Which are the channels that you should be investing in? At what levels? We should be constantly evolving.“ - Suzanne Kounkel, CMO, Deloitte

“What we need to be thinking more about in marketing is what do people actually care about? That’s the content we should create. That’s the content you should package.” - Randy Frisch, Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist for Content Experience, Uberflip

“Ultimately B2B is about connecting with humans, and so it works. It works on the prospecting side, it works on the customer side. We want people associated with us to feel special and gifting does that." -Daniel Incandela, CMO, Reachdesk

“Everybody wants to interact with one click, chat, voice, video. As companies, we need to shift how we meet with buyers and shift how we generate pipeline." -Maura McCormick Rivera, CMO at Qualified

“I see demand as aligning with sales teams. What are the goals? What do we have to hit? How does that break down? What are we going to be sourcing? Managing the SDR team, a large part of their pipeline and funnel is going to be coming from the demand, go-to-market organization of marketing, and sales development. Really that’s a key part of success, sales alignment.” - Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of TripActions

“You break through the noise by offering a value exchange with your customers. You need to be relevant in what you’re providing them. And I think sometimes where we go wrong with content is we sell our product, we don’t educate our buyers, and oftentimes we’re looking to be educated on best practices.” - Jamie Gier, CMO of Ceros

“Community is an organic process. You can try to do things to encourage people to engage, but I think it's understanding. You really have to understand what is it that people are looking to learn, and one of the things that we've realized is that, there's a lot around career definition.” - Daniel Rodriguez, CMO of Simplr

 “You can do all of the email marketing, you can do all the events, you can do all of the things, all of the various marketing tactics that everybody knows how to do, but if you’re not emotionally connecting with your prospects and customers in a way that’s meaningful to them, you’re not getting anywhere, and you’re not doing anything different than anybody else.”  - Anna Kostroun, CMO of NewRocket

“I think platform data is something that everyone needs to leverage. And if you’re a marketer thinking like, “Hey I’m considering joining this new company,” the questions you need to ask yourself, and there are lots of them, is do they have platform data that helps me tell a story, and can I access it?” - Micha Hershman, VP of marketing, Envoy

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Episode Timestamps: 

Part seven of this special mini-series features 9 CMOs and marketing leaders from some of the world's fastest-growing companies, including:

*(03:51) Suzanne Konkle - CMO, Deloitte

*(05:14) Randy Frisch - Chief Evangelist Content Experience, Uberflip 

*(10:50) Daniel Incandela - CMO, Reachdesk

*(14:18) Maura McCormick Rivera - CMO, Qualified

*(18:02) Meagen Eisenberg - CMO, TripActions 

*(21:36) Jamie Gier - CMO, Ceros

*(24:16) Daniel Rodriguez - CMO, Simplr 

*(26:24) Anna Kostroun - CMO, NewRocket 

*(29:31) Micha Hershman - VP of Marketing, Envoy

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Sponsor

Demand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

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