In our Ones to Watch 2023 report, we asked our nominees for their expert insights into a number of areas, such as what revenue marketers should be focusing on this year, skills all revenue marketers should have, and how they operate within their own roles. One crucial question we asked is for them to give their best advice for others just starting out in revenue marketing.

You can download the full report for all the insights and expert advice, or you can read their amazing advice right here.

What advice would you give to those just starting out on their revenue marketing journey?

Austin Beveridge, Head of Marketing at Arc

Revenue marketing is incredibly hard, it's also incredibly rewarding.

Getting your feet under you will take time, but eventually, things will get easier: you’ll understand the industry jargon, you’ll be able to identify and eliminate objections before they come up, and though you’re not fully in the trenches every day, you’ll see deals through to close and feel proud of your contributions towards the business’s top line revenue growth. That said, here are a few pieces of advice to ensure you are positioned for success.

• Ask questions. The more questions you ask, the quicker you’ll understand what’s going on in the business.
• When you need help, ask. Your team is there to support you, so speak up when you can no longer keep up with your workload.
• Have conviction in your beliefs. Every perspective adds value. Even if it contradicts that of your direct supervisor.
• Agree to disagree, then move forward. When a direction has been decided, regardless of whether or not you agree, put your full effort into achieving whatever milestones have been outlined, or whatever strategy they wish to pursue.
• Realize that everyone is on the same team. Ultimately everyone inside your organization strives to achieve the same goals, to pick each other up, and to celebrate the wins and learn from the losses together—remember that.
  

Mai Fenton, Chief Marketing Officer at Superscript

These are the three things I would recommend, that from my experience will accelerate how you can impact revenue as a marketer:

1. Ensure marketing and sales are fully connected and aligned, from a customer journey perspective and from a systems and workflows perspective (e.g. CRM).
2. Don’t stop at demand/lead generation, and work with sales to convert through revenue enablement at each stage of the customer journey.
3. Make your CFO your best friend! By understanding what drives revenue, measuring the impact of your marketing activities, and reporting on ROAS/ROI and LTV:CAC. You will then be enabled with more resources and power to impact revenue.

Charlotte Ford, Head of Brand Marketing and Engagement, heycar

Take the time to get to know your colleagues, their roles, and what they do to ultimately contribute towards business growth. It’s a quick way to immerse yourself in a new role and understand how the business you’re in makes money. I’d also encourage new marketers to get comfortable with data, whether or not that’s attribution modeling or in-house data management.

Adam Gleicher, VP of Marketing at Bits of Stock

Sit in on sales calls when you can. It helps you develop empathy with your prospects, and better understand the buying journey and their motivations. It also helps you appreciate the sales function and how to best collaborate on hitting shared KPIs.

As a revenue marketer, you’re sharing responsibility with sales for the full funnel. Just as you iterate and learn from your marketing campaigns, it's critical to capture learnings from the conversations your team is having directly with sales prospects.

Jasmine de Guzman, Director of International Marketing at CivicPlus

Get into the numbers! Don’t be intimated. Giant spreadsheets used to frighten me, but once I started to really understand how we were performing, I was able to connect it to new ideas for growth and translate them into executing amazing campaigns.

In general, just be curious and dig into anything that isn’t working as you expected. If you’re handing off leads to sales and they’re not converting, dig into it and follow up with the sales team. Is it because they forgot? Is it because they don’t understand how this lead came in? Is it because they lack training in product messaging? Revenue marketing is about connecting the dots in the marketing process and optimizing it for conversion toward revenue.

Vinay Khanna, Head of Marketing, Savant

For people who are starting their journey as a Revenue Marketer, I’d advise them to keep a holistic view of the entire commercial operations of their organization. With a comprehensive outlook, they will be able to understand the challenges of individual teams and key reasons for the resistance they experience while aligning with other teams. This will enable them to have a better result-oriented approach towards streamlining business functions and strategizing their goals.

Mona Lolas, B2B Solution Partner APAC at Forrester

If you are starting out on your revenue marketing journey you should first start with uniting your team with a shared language: marketing and sales teams are not just unique in their purpose and business they serve – each has their own language, mindset, and background.

All stakeholder goals should be mapped on a common framework. Documenting and prioritizing objectives, ensuring visibility into your marketing spend and distribution, and reallocating resources based on performance or demand. Track results on multiple dimensions by campaign, channel, business unit, and more to compare budget to actual spending. Create more accurate revenue plans and forecasts based on historical sales data, marketing performance metrics, and predictive analytics. Ensure marketing performance achieves business objectives.

Define what success looks like for your company and ensure you can answer the below questions.

1. How do you report results to the Marketing/Regional Sales Leader?

2. How aligned are your CMO and Regional Sales Leader goals?

3. How do you measure marketing's contribution to the organization?”

Eugenio Panetta, Chief Revenue Officer at AddReax Group

Be curious and experimental. Don’t be afraid to speak up and make out-of-the-box recommendations to your clients, colleagues, or managers. Keep yourself always up to date with the latest trends and make sure you dedicate time to network.

Ilias Tsatalmpasidis, Head of Growth at Superscript

Be ambitious, don't be afraid to try new things, and get stuck on any kind of projects that are even in the wider vicinity of your team/world. Get as technical as possible, maybe even learn SQL to be able to call the databases yourself but don't forget to study marketing principles to understand the product and your prospects. Ask as many questions as you can and pitch ideas even if running the risk of being let down or worse. And finally, don't ever stop experimenting.