In our Ones to Watch 2023 report, we asked our nominees for their insights into a number of areas, such as what advice they have for people just starting out in the role, what revenue marketers should be focusing on this year, and skills all revenue marketers should have.
But we also wanted to know more about their own roles, such as their motivations, and their greatest achievements within their roles.
You can download the full report for all the insights and expert advice, or you can read the insights into their own roles right here.
What keeps you motivated in your role?
Austin Beveridge, Head of Marketing at Arc
There are two things that keep me motivated in my role: 1) immense challenges, and 2) seeing the tangible results of my efforts.
Mai Fenton, Chief Marketing Officer at Superscript
I enjoy navigating an ever-changing landscape and experimenting. This is why I love marketing!
Specifically, at Superscript, I am grateful that we are data-enabled, which gives us great insight in order to market smarter and more efficiently, and effectively. Marketing here is a revenue generator, and it’s great to see the direct impact that marketing has on our revenue goals.
Charlotte Ford, Head of Brand Marketing and Engagement, heycar
The challenge of growing a brand in a three-year-old business and in a highly competitive, fragmented market is definitely up there. Also, my team because they are three of the brightest marketers I’ve ever worked with, and we have a huge amount of fun together.
Adam Gleicher, VP of Marketing at Bits of Stock
As a revenue marketer, I work hand in hand with sales. Creating feedback loops with my sales team and joining prospect calls when I can is a constant source of learning that pushes me to challenge assumptions and connect my marketing efforts to actual buyers.
The close relationship with the sales team also creates a sense of shared ownership over business KPIs that keeps me motivated to nurture prospects throughout the full funnel from demand generation to happy customer. If you can, I recommend sitting in on prospect calls with your sales team or even taking on a few leads yourself!
Jasmine de Guzman, Director of International Marketing at CivicPlus
I'm a very self-driven individual. I thrive on pushing myself to meet our revenue goals and contribute to the organization. In so many companies, people disregard marketing as those people who ‘just make things look nice’. But with a revenue marketing approach, you can prove that you’re a critical business function.
In addition - I have to say that this year, I’ve really been motivated by other marketers in the industry that inspire me. I’m part of a couple of different marketing communities on Slack, love to listen to podcasts, and in general, I think that LinkedIn is an amazing source of inspiration.
Kristina Jaramillo, Founder of Personal ABM
The revenue and business impact that we have on our clients' organizations keeps me motivated. While many companies focus on pipeline metrics and marketing sourced revenue at Personal ABM, we focus on the KPIs that directly impact our client's revenue growth. Our KPIs are tied to the fundamentals of revenue.
Vinay Khanna, Head of Marketing, Savant
In my role, I ensure to have multi-faceted perspectives for any corporate situation I come across. Analyzing any challenge or goal to achieve, from different viewpoints, and putting stats to those situations helps me create various courses of action. The strategies I create behind making my organization accomplish a goal and executing it successfully to witness the results, is very motivating to me.
Eugenio Panetta, Chief Revenue Officer at AddReax Group
Discovering and learning new skills. With the right motivation, we can learn anything. I believe the best individuals are the ones who are able to perform cross-skill jobs. They’ll also be the future employers of the world.
Ilias Tsatalmpasidis, Head of Growth at Superscript
Definitely the variety and the challenging aspects of my role. No day is similar to the previous one. I love how it encompasses elements of stakeholder management, influencing other departments' decision-making, and pitching new ideas whilst being strategic and at the same time being hands-on at other times. Working under pressure, with loads of ambiguity, and in general in a fast-paced way always following the test-learn-scale mantra.
What’s your greatest revenue marketing achievement?
Austin Beveridge, Head of Marketing at Arc
While in my previous role at Bolt, we decided that we were going to launch an e-commerce site and sell penny hoodies to drive awareness and excitement around Bolt. Three days later, on July 7th, we opened it up for sales. Within the first hour, we sold 500 hoodies, we sold just over a thousand hoodies the next hour, and 1,500+ hoodies in hour three. In the first half of hour four, we sold over 5,000 hoodies, and in the five minutes that followed we sold over 15,000 hoodies.
We processed more transactions in those five minutes than the entire volume of all our retailers combined over the previous Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Needless to say, the initial launch was a success.
The ‘Bolt Collective’ went on to be one of the most successful revenue marketing campaigns we ever launched. Prospects could experience first-hand how the Bolt checkout worked and were delighted with a real gift in return. While the specifics around how much pipeline acceleration the site had are not public, I can say that it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars of GMV.
Mai Fenton, Chief Marketing Officer at Superscript
At Superscript, we have significantly improved new customer ARPU by working closely with data science in developing a lead scoring predictor, and with our sales team to target higher predicted value/LTV that they then convert when the conversion doesn’t happen fully online.
With paid media, we have been optimizing not just to conversion/ROAS but also to predicted LTV, which has been a major breakthrough that in turn has enabled us to improve our LTV:CAC ratio.
Charlotte Ford, Head of Brand Marketing and Engagement, heycar
Over the last year, having launched a large above-the-line brand campaign and focusing on growth initiatives in sponsorships and other activities, we’ve seen fantastic year-on-year growth as a result. Brand-attributed traffic has increased YoY by 45% and leads by 34% YoY at heycar. As primarily a lead gen business, these metrics are the lifeblood of our revenue streams and I’m very proud of the work over the last year to grow the brand in a highly competitive marketplace.
Jasmine de Guzman, Director of International Marketing at CivicPlus
My greatest achievement as a revenue marketer is probably increasing sales and marketing alignment. I recently had one of our sales directors tell me that this is the best marketing support that they’ve ever received. Beyond that, this is also reflected in our numbers. Marketing-generated revenue continues to grow - and continues to be a larger proportion of overall revenue.
Kristina Jaramillo, Founder of Personal ABM
Through revenue marketing and ABM we have doubled deal sizes, increased win rates with tier one accounts by up to 37%, protected revenue with at-risk accounts like P&G, displaced competitors/legacy platforms at large enterprises like GE Healthcare and opened up for clients the 60% of the market that is stuck in the status quo.
Vinay Khanna, Head of Marketing, Savant
I won’t say the greatest, as nothing is ever absolute in Revenue Marketing, but in my previous project when I was required to transform an organization from an individual entity to a group of companies, I was told that I delivered great results from the revenue marketing aspect.
The tasks I had in front of me included reviving a brand, re-shaping the commercial strategy, redefining the value offering and ensuring smooth revenue generation across channels. During the project, I had to make certain hard decisions, which then were very well communicated to all the stakeholders involved and it resulted in a successful transformation without any leakages of revenue from the target customers.
Eugenio Panetta, Chief Revenue Officer at AddReax Group
Developing and deploy one of the first B2B/ cobranded campaigns for ASOS with JustEat in the Netherlands. Also, expanding and leading AddReax Group operations in Europe.
Gastón Tourn, Chief Marketing Officer at Curio
My greatest revenue marketing achievement was to achieve acquisition profitability at Appear Here. When I joined the company, our customer acquisition cost was quite high and our unit economics were not performing well. However, through the development of owned and earned channels and the optimization of paid channels, we were able to achieve positive unit economics. Key to our success was a focus on the quality of our messaging, which helped to make our marketing communications work harder.
Ilias Tsatalmpasidis, Head of Growth at Superscript
I think my best achievement is having my amazing multi-talented group of marketing specialists from PPC to SEO, to social, content, CRM and campaigns all whilst having slightly different mission working like one team moving the same direction. We all work so nicely together and challenge each other whilst delivering on our overall strategy. We call it ABX (credit to Mai Fenton our CMO for the name) which stands for Account Based Experience, and the whole concept is that we strive to offer to our prospects the buying experience/advert/landing page/content that's most suitable and appropriate to their customer lifecycle. We keep iterating and learning how to make it most impactful but the principles are what we base our strategy from.
Do you think more companies will be adopting revenue marketing practices in 2023?
Austin Beveridge, Head of Marketing at Arc
More B2B companies will adopt revenue marketing practices going into 2023. Long gone are the days when marketing could get away with focusing exclusively on Marketing Qualified Leads, without regard for their eventual, or lack thereof, conversion into Sales Qualified Leads, Sales Qualified Opportunites and even closed-won opportunities.
Marketers today are expected to drive meaningful top-line revenue growth. The most effective way they can accomplish this in the short term is by nurturing the leads already in the pipeline that have not yet converted. In the long term, marketers must build a deep appreciation for the needs and desires of their prospects, much like their sales team had to, to truly build messaging that resonates.
To expedite this learning, revenue marketers should get involved in the sales process by taking the first call and qualifying prospects before handing them off to a dedicated Account Executive. They should also get involved in weekly pipeline reviews to understand how leads are progressing throughout the funnel, and if applicable, be present when leads close. This involvement coupled with the shift from vanity metrics (MQL) to revenue targets will position B2B companies to maximize the output of their revenue organizations.
Charlotte Ford, Head of Brand Marketing and Engagement, heycar
I would say so given there’s certainly been a trend in tech companies pivoting to a strategy to drive profitability. Companies that previously invested heavily in growth are now looking to cut costs and create new revenue streams of opportunity. Looking to Marketing as the voice of the customer is an excellent way to target new revenue streams, as any good revenue marketer would tell you.
Jasmine de Guzman, Director of International Marketing at CivicPlus
Yes, absolutely. I think demand creation and capture have been a really big focus for many organizations. However, when it comes down to it, most organizations will ultimately look at revenue growth and profitability. Taking a revenue marketing approach ensures that marketing is also aligned with those revenue goals, and will become increasingly important with a changing global financial situation.
Kristina Jaramillo, Founder of Personal ABM
Yes, we find that more companies are creating revenue marketing positions and revenue marketing departments. This will only increase as organizations adopt revenue operations and marketing becomes a bigger player in the business versus just providing awareness and sourcing the pipeline. We are hopeful that revenue marketing will grow in 2023 and help evolve ABM to what it should be versus what it has become. Instead of being a business revenue strategy that changes how sales and marketing teams interact with target accounts and get accounts to revenue, ABM has become nothing more than targeted demand gen and targeted advertising.
Vinay Khanna, Head of Marketing, Savant
Most certainly. I believe the days where multiple teams such as Sales, Marketing, Business development, Strategy among others; working towards the same goal but in silos are gone.
The new and disruptive market where most of the organizations are opting omni-channel strategies and the customer is privy to many channels of communication, revenue marketing practices will help companies have an aligned course of action towards any hurdles they come across.
Mona Lolas, B2B Solution Partner APAC at Forrester
Companies need to adopt better revenue marketing practices so they can make better business decisions and survive in a volatile environment. Revenue marketing is a critical function and delivering on that means marketing and sales must evolve in their alignment and integration to support buyers and customers — and this cannot be achieved until both their internal operations are tuned to address buying groups and multiple opportunity types.
Eugenio Panetta, Chief Revenue Officer at AddReax Group
Pretty much every company in the world now has a person or agency dedicated to revenue marketing. It’s risk free and give companies higher return on investment and flexibility with their budgets. The pandemic gave revenue marketing a solid boost in less developed countries but I’m sure this is just the beginning.
Ilias Tsatalmpasidis, Head of Growth at Superscript
Marketing nowadays, especially the performance element of it, is all about measuring the impact to the bottom line. So I'm definitely positive that the trend will continue and even accelerate. I feel that the pressure now grows of how not only we justify the lower funnel activities, but how we do the same for consideration and even branding, and how all these are connected — blurring the lines between performance marketing, branding, sales, and beyond.
