B2B Sales & Marketing Exchange

LeanData’s Karen Steele On How To Achieve Go-To-Market Excellence

If there’s one word that should be top of mind for every marketer, it’s alignment. We can create as many eye-catching social images, educational webinars and blog posts to engage prospects as we want, but if marketing and sales aren’t on the same page about the goal of these tactics, the efforts are all for naught.  

Ahead of #B2BSMX, we caught up with Karen SteeleChief Marketing Officer at LeanData, to hear what modern demand gen looks like to her and to get a sneak peek at what she’ll discuss at her panel during the event. 

 

B2BSMX: What does an ideal revenue team look like to you?  

Karen Steele: Especially in today’s complex B2B selling environments, the ideal revenue team brings together Sales, Marketing, Operations and Customer Success organizations that plan and execute all go-to-market motions to drive revenue, including new business, upsell and renewals. These teams may be increasingly unified underneath a Chief Revenue Officer but are more often separate teams united by strategic alignment and shared metrics. Regardless, all revenue teams are responsible for pipeline, revenue, funnel metrics and customer experience.

 

B2BSMX: How are you creating a one-team mentality within your organization?  

Steele: As with all B2B orgs today, LeanData understands that delivering a more seamless customer experience is vital to accelerating growth. Our mission centers around helping B2B companies do this at the data layer. But we realize alignment of the organizations supporting the go-to-market process is also important. At LeanData, our CRO leads the entire Revenue Ops team and all Sales functions. We have consolidated our revenue operations team to encompass sales ops, marketing ops, customer ops, enablement and deal desk, reporting to the CRO. And the management structure of our GTM team is comprised of the CRO, CMO and Chief Customer Officer.  

 

B2BSMX: What does modern demand gen look like to you?  

Steele: Demand gen today starts with deep alignment between Sales, Marketing and Operations. It is a true partnership and the institution of best practices around revenue and GTM excellence. Modern demand gen is the combination of people, processes and technology to enable organizations to flexibly plan, execute and measure all GTM motions.      

 

B2BSMX: What are you hoping to talk about at your session?  

Steele: I’m really looking forward to speaking on the ‘Modern Approaches to Operations & Martech’ panel discussion on day one. The emerging role of Revenue Ops is highly relevant to this discussion, of course, and a market development we’re helping to spearhead at LeanData. But overall, I’m looking forward to talking about the changing role of GTM/Revenue teams and best practices for driving revenue orgs with a view toward growth and a better buying experience. I am interested in how companies are innovating in this area with a customer-centric view. 

 

B2BSMX: What else are you looking forward to at the event?  

Steele: I’m really looking forward to all the great sessions I see on the agenda, including those from FlipMyFunnel and REVTalksas well as the Demand Gen Summit. I’m particularly interested in the closing keynote on Monday with executives from People.ai, Pendo.io and Lionbridge, discussing innovative revenue growth strategies and moderated by our Co-founder and CEO Evan Liang. 

Karen will be participating in a panel in the Demand Gen Summit track titled “Modern Approaches To Operations & Martech.” Check out the session on MondayAugust 12 at 2:00 PM.

Sign up for updates

Submit the form below:

Fill out my online form.

Submit the form below:

Fill out my online form.