The Evolving Role of Marketing Leaders

SPEAKERS

Jessie Paul, Leela Gill

Sun, Jan 22, 2023 11:23PM • 31:55

Jessie Paul  06:48

Hello, everyone, and my guest today is a b2b SaaS marketing leader with more than a decade of experience focused on high growth companies. She has experienced marketing and selling to large enterprise clients like Walmart, Eli Lilly, Home Depot, Nestle, Dell, Lockheed Martin, and also the SMB and direct to consumer markets. In her role as CMO she go too owns go-to-market strategy drives demand gen, and account-based-marketing strategies and helps build brands as category innovators. We are super excited to have her with us. Please welcome Leela Gill. Leela, it is an absolute pleasure having you with us on the podcast today. And maybe before we start, you could also tell our audience a little bit about yourself.

Leela Gill  07:40

Absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you so much, Jessie, for having me. I’m very excited to be on this podcast today with you, a little background about myself- I actually started as an engineer, and then I turned into a marketing leader. I like to tell people that I’ve been a SaaS base, b2b marketing leader, my whole adult life, which is almost true, but a little bit, you know, early in my career, I started in engineering, and I ran a manufacturing plant. And that’s a whole another episode probably about how that fell into my lap. But I’m based in San Francisco, California, and I’ve worked as a marketing leader for many different verticals, including FinTech, retail tech, HR tech, martec, and currently healthcare tech. I really enjoy working in these growth companies. It’s, you know, for me, it’s a very creative and, and I would say, courageous process, because early stage, companies go through those ups and downs, and it makes it very exciting. And you feel like you have a direct impact on the success of the company. So it’s, it’s a great place for me personally. And beyond my work profile. I’m a mother of two boys. I am married to a social worker-turned-surfer and I am very active on to non-profit boards in my community. So that’s a little bit about me.

Jessie Paul  09:16

You do a lot. And I think we’re going to benefit from the very wide variety of experience that you have. So let me ask you the first question based on your experience, which is actually a great intersection, which is, how can small and medium enterprises maximize their investment in martec?

Leela Gill  09:40

Yeah, I love this question. Being an engineer, you know, you’ll hear me lean into process and analytics a lot. I think the very first thing I recommend for marketing leaders is really to make sure you have a process around alignment before you even think about your tech stack, make sure or that you are aligned with your partners in sales and in product, and even in finance, and really make sure and what that means to me is that you are all on the same page with respect to things like your ideal customer profile, your target personas, your value proposition, and that, you know, those fundamentals are in place. And I find a lot of times, even, I was just talking to a marketing director at a very large company today who just started at this large company, you know, about six months ago, and we were talking about value proposition and whether or not he understands that how the ROI is for them as a, you know, as a marketing person within this company. And he’s like, Yeah, I’m not really sure. I’ve been trained on, you know, how to actually calculate the value proposition. And so, first step in the process is really to have an alignment. And then I think the second step is to make sure your basic tech stack is working properly. And what I mean by that is, you know, first of all, for me as a basic tech stack, as a marketing leader would be, you have a marketing automation tool that probably syncs with your CRM, you have lead sourcing tools, like seamless or zoominfo, that are really helping you find your personas within your target accounts. You have website tools like WordPress, or Google Analytics, you have SEO tools. And there are other tools like project management tools, and maybe you know, customer success or ticketing tools that you need. But that’s the basic tech stack. From a marketing perspective. Obviously, I forgot about zoom. But everybody has, you know, you have to have that webinar tool as well, today, but that’s the basic tech stack. And I think that you need to be the second step is making sure that that basic tech stack is actually working properly. So for example, often I come into new companies or these companies where the integration between let’s call it Salesforce and HubSpot, or Salesforce and Marketo, is not working properly. And so

Jessie Paul  12:31

I’m going to cut you in there and ask you to elaborate a bit. So how do you know that this tech is not working for you? I mean, what are the signs that you look for?

Leela Gill  12:41

Right? So the signs that I look for – First is whether or not you have a subject matter expert that knows the tool, right? So do you have people that really understand how to use that tool to its fullest capabilities? And secondly, I would say, are you using that tool every day? Or at least weekly? So do you have people that know how to use it? And is it a basic must have for your day to day operations? That’s how I would start to evaluate again, you know, I’m talking about small to midsize companies, larger companies, you know, I’ve seen their tech stack, and they have very expansive tech stack, different, maybe a different set of criteria, if you’re looking at somebody that’s, you know, 500 million to a billion dollars in revenue, but that’s what I would do as my first steps and understanding whether we’re using this tech stack properly.

Jessie Paul  13:48

That that’s absolutely great advice. And you also talked about, you know, understanding whether it’s generating results. So in your experience, have you used analytics in a creative way? Any examples? 

Leela Gill  14:09

Great question. First of all, I believe in metrics and making sure that you have a solid baseline for your metrics, like you understand how many meetings are getting booked. I mean, this is really easy stuff, right? But you’d be surprised when you look at some of these smaller to mid-sized companies, how everybody may not be measuring the same number of meetings or conversion    , you know, especially as it relates to the relationship between marketing and sales. And, you know, are your sales qualified leads actually being accepted by your sales people? So, metrics are really important. And having a baseline around those metrics and then you’ve got to look at tools that help you can, you know, optimize your conversion around those metrics, right? So conversion metrics around website traffic, for example, that’s a really easy one, everybody, and everybody sort of understands conversion on your website conversion on landing pages conversion, conversion on paid ads. But what I find is sort of missing in this process of looking at analytics in a creative way is that a lot of people don’t know how to set up good tests and good experiments, right? So they measure but they don’t actually do proper experimentation. And what I mean by that is really isolating one or two things that you’re going to change over, whatever that time period is, maybe it’s a two week time period, we’re looking at a before and after, and really understanding whether those changes are helping to drive better conversion. And to talk about just to wrap up this particular question about, you know, how I use the analytics and a creative way of I’m not sure it’s super creative, but one of the tools that I’ve used our, you know, website, heat mapping tools like Clary, or Crazy Egg or Hot jar, or even Google Optimize. And I’ve used those heat maps to really understand how people are moving on the website, where do they get stuck? Where are the friction points? Where do they leave? How long? Are they on the homepage? Do they go to the book meeting link? After you know, so really using those heat mapping tools to analyze where your friction points on your website? I think that’s the most creative answer I have for you on that.

Jessie Paul  16:58

Well, martec is kind of, you know, Picasso with some really strong boxes to jump into. So we also talked a bit about, you know, before you actually get into the tools and the martech piece, we need to have alignment across the team. And do you have advice like for a young company? What would be the process for planning the marketing efforts? And, you know, what do you think? How do you go about that?

Leela Gill  17:34

Yeah, so there’s two questions there. I’m going to tackle one is an alignment question. And the other one is about, you know, planning the marketing process. And I’d like to talk about the alignment process first, because I think it’s so critical to success for marketers, especially. And when I talk about alignment, I’m not just speaking about salespeople, I’m talking about alignment with product and even alignment along the the, with your CFO, for example, and making sure that you’re all measuring the same things, right. So, with respect to alignment, I think it’s very important to have regular touch base meetings with your sales team or sales leader. So in our case, for example, we meet every week, I probably talked to my VP of sales, once every two days, if not more often than that. And then formally presenting to the whole sales team. You know, here’s what we’ve done in marketing and hearing what they need just being very open and listening to their needs. And being responsive. And as somebody that’s helped close deals, I understand the pain and the pressure that the salespeople are under. So I think that is a really important element of being a good marketing leader is understanding and being empathetic with the sales team and being aligned around that. And then the other thing I want to mention about alignment is I aligning your organization around your product launches. And I think, you know, I’m a big fan of David Sacks, who has this podcast or I think it’s a, a webinar or something that he talks about how to build your SaaS army, how to create your company as a SaaS army, and he talks about how product and marketing are very aligned in a quarterly cadence, where you’re launching a new product every quarter whether you know and maybe you have one large launch in the middle of the year, but then every quarter there’s something else that it gets launched. Maybe it’s a small feature, but it gives the salespeople things to talk about out and keep the energy out there. And I really believe in that process as well. So when I’m joining these new companies, I try to instill that quarterly cadence aligning with the product team, and also aligning with the sales team.

Jessie Paul  20:17

Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s perfect in terms of the planning of marketing efforts, and like the emphasis that you put on alignment with sales. So I have a follow on question, which is, do you think the traditional funnel is still relevant?

Leela Gill  20:37

I love this. This is funny, because I know I don’t think that traditional funnel is still relevant. But that’s really hard for us as marketers to let go of MQLs, and SQL and ungate, all of our content, especially in these smaller, smaller to midsize companies. Because we don’t have anything else to justify, you know, our existence, if you will, to the salespeople. And we really are partners to the salespeople. So I do believe that the traditional funnel is not relevant, like, everybody knows the stat that in b2b 70% of buyers are doing their own research. And they know everything about your product, before they even asked to have a meeting with you. They’ve seen demos they’ve heard about you through, you know, maybe their networks. So the traditional funnel is dead. That said, I would say, you know, you still have to gate some content. And you have to balance, what content you provide for free versus what content you might want to gate. And in general, you know, getting more sophisticated content, maybe research reports, things that are going into a lot of detail, maybe a case study that’s, you know, pretty exhaustive, that goes into an ROI calculation, those types of content could be gated, and then of course, your blogs and your other types of content, or ungated. And you just have to hope to drive traffic to your website using that on gated content.

Jessie Paul  22:23

I think it’s reassuring for me to hear that the traditional funnel is kind of on its way out because you always feel guilty, right? Yeah, with the effort you put in, and when it’s just out there. I’m here. And

Leela Gill  22:38

I think I think we struggle. I mean, I as we go into 2023. And we go into 2024, where, you know, I think cookies are going to be obsolete. We as marketing people are going to struggle with how we measure ourselves. And, you know, I think that’s why we’re starting to see this trend towards customer marketing, community building, you know, and really moving in a direction to use your customers as your best advocates.

Jessie Paul  23:16

So given that, that’s an interesting point where we’re counting on the customers now just not just for business, but really also to help us with marketing. And in many organizations, there is a bit of an overlap now between marketing and the customer experience. So in your view, what does the intersection of marketing and customer satisfaction look like?

Leela Gill  23:44

Yeah, this is a great question, because I think there’s a whole emerging area called customer marketing, right? Where everybody is doing their building communities, as I said, there, have everybody has their customer conferences, they are leaning into their customers as thought leaders promoting them as speakers at conferences, outside of their own events. And I think that marketing is really starting to take ownership of the customer experience. You know, and especially in the small to mid-sized companies. I think, as a marketing leader, I want to make sure that there’s a good customer success process in place, right, and that I get access to customers and I’m talking to customers, and that that feedback is going directly back to the sales and customer success and product teams. So I think that it’s an emerging area customer marketing is you know, for those for those larger companies that already have people allocated to managing the customer advisory board that they’re putting together or planning those customer events. But if you’re a scrappy early stage company, it’s you got to get a lot more creative. And engaging those customers and lunch and learns or providing roundtables for them specifically, to meet each other and benchmark and create some communities, within your own circle of customers is are some ways that you can start to build that customer marketing, strength.

Jessie Paul  25:40

And do you see increasingly marketers being called upon to manage the customer satisfaction?

Leela Gill  25:50

Not yet, I am not seeing it myself. But what I am seeing is marketing people feeling a lot of ownership again, talking about the small to midsize companies. I, I see a lot of marketing leaders in those companies taking ownership for making sure there’s a customer success process and making sure that those customer stories are being told correctly. And yeah, so I see marketing, taking ownership in that way with in the smaller companies. Yeah.

Jessie Paul  26:31

So, you know, um, I once wrote a blog post on how, you know, if marketing does its job really well, you don’t know, you don’t need sales anymore. And that kind of rustled a lot of fethers. And typically, you know, sales and marketing are often at loggerheads. So you, on the other hand, have written and spoken about, you know, sales and marketing harmonization. So what’s working for you? What would you give as advice to people who want to play nice and work in a more collaborative way with their sales and marketing partners?

Leela Gill  27:17

Yeah, so for me, I have always been a partner to sales, because when you’re a growth company, you basically marketing and sales are measured the same, like you’re both getting measured on whether or not you’re delivering pipeline, and, you know, converting pipeline. So I’m helping the salespeople with, you know, making sure we have those ROI calculations, and that they’re all trained, you know, on on giving them the sales enablement tools, for example, designing battle cards and training them on on things like overcoming objections, those things that in a larger company might be in a sales enablement organization, I’m finding that I have to take on as a marketing leader and make sure that those things are being implemented within our within our own sales team. So I’ve always found myself being a partner to the sales leader, because ultimately, we’re all being measured on the same thing. We’re all getting the big bonuses at the end of the year, based on whether or not we hit the targets. And like I said, I think one of the keys to success in making sure that you have that alignment is making sure you’re meeting your sales team and your sales leader at least once a week, if not on that, and talking about the. So you know, for example, one of the things that I used to do is like, it was kind of a little painful, but we really go through the SQL and whether or not those SQL are accepted. We classified them as sales, accepted leads or sales rejected leads, and talking about why something was rejected or accepted. And then taking that back to the whole marketing team and really refining our process so that we’re driving more of the accepted leads.  

Jessie Paul  29:29

Leela it’s been great speaking with you. And before we wrap up, I just wanted you to answer a surprise question, which is if there’s one thing you wish you had known when you were starting your career, what would that be?

Leela Gill  29:50

Oh, that’s a great question. Um, I think how important alignment is and really focusing Hang on the big picture as a marketing leader, you need to be aligned with the C-suite, your CEO, your sales leader, your CFO, your product leader, like you’re in the middle of it, all right, as a marketing person, and you can use that as an opportunity to really drive alignment. And I think, you know, what happens is, people get heads down in doing activities, like getting content written and producing videos and looking at their conversion on their paid ads, and can sometimes fail to realize how important that alignment process is. And I’ll just end it with a quote. I don’t know who said this, but I heard it at a conference. Being aligned is more important than being right. And I always love that quote, because I it really speaks to what I think is important in successful companies is getting that alignment correct.

Jessie Paul  31:09

Thank you. And that’s an amazing way to wrap up this discussion, which I think has focused a lot not just on the mechanics of marketing, but also on building a harmony within the organization and how marketing can enable that which is really, really nice to hear. So thank you so much, Leela, for joining us today. And it’s been a pleasure having you on this podcast.

Leela Gill  31:36

Thank you, Jessie. I really enjoyed it.

Jessie Paul  31:39

And I’d also like to thank Comviva for sponsoring the podcast and making it possible!

Leela Gill  31:46

Thank you. All right. Well, thank you, Jessie.