Demand Gen Trends to Invest in According to a Six-Time CMO with Heidi Melin, CMO of Workfront

This episode features an interview with Heidi Melin, CMO of Workfront. Heidi has held the position of CMO 6 times over an impressive two-decade career of developing and executing marketing strategies that drive growth. 

On this episode, Heidi illustrates her approach to pivoting Workfront’s marketing strategies in response to the paradigm shift that companies are experiencing in 2020, and she explains why you need to be viewing your marketing dollars as an investment, not just an expense.

Key Takeaways

• We’re undergoing a paradigm shift driven by COVID and the rise of the millennial B2B consumer that is completely changing how companies buy software.
• Companies can differentiate themselves by deeply understanding how buyers engage with their brand, and then utilizing those insights throughout the selling process.
• Account-based marketing isn’t enough; the strategy must be hyper-targeted across marketing and sales.

Quotes

• “As marketers, if we have learned anything over the course of the last few months, it's that we have to be able to adapt much more quickly in order to be successful. All the things that we knew were effective are changing and they're changing immediately. So how do we adjust and continue to drive demand to support the pipeline that's required for our selling organization?”
• “One of the most important things that we have learned out of the pivot in response to COVID is that the entire business process needs to change, not just a marketing tactic here or there. It's a paradigm shift that we're going through right now that is not only going to change our marketing programs and tactics, but it's going to change how organizations buy enterprise software.”
• “I think in terms of what channels give us the ability to be very focused and targeted in our investments. We're prioritizing those channels that allow us to more accurately target our target accounts. We have the tools today to be very specific about who our messages go to. Leveraging those tools becomes really important, because our spend levels aren't necessarily going up, but the pressure on marketing teams to deliver engagement and demand is going up.”
• “I always talk about marketing as an investment versus an expense. If we want to make sure that each one of those dollars is used to its fullest impact, we want to make sure we get to the people that have the highest likelihood to buy from us.”
• “I very seldom use the term ABM because it's been overused and over promoted. Isn't ABM just a category of software that allows us to deliver on the premise of marketing that's always been there? ABM technology provided the ability for us as marketers to do what we've always said we should be doing, which is targeting the right people with our message.”

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.