The State of Sales & Marketing, Dreamforce 2023
Dive into the ever-evolving landscape of B2B marketing and hear from today’s top leaders on the trends they’re seeing in the martech space. They’ll get into the rise of AI, the shifting behavior of today’s buyers, and their predictions on the biggest challenges we’ll face this year.
Welcome to Pipeline Summit everybody.
Just keep mingling, grab a drink or have a seat, whatever is easiest for you.
We've got a great talk this evening.
I am really pleased to present a talk with these two individuals that I've
known for
quite a while.
First I'd like to introduce you to Sarah Varney.
Sarah's the CMO of attentive.
She's also the former CMO of Twilio for four years and she was the SVP of
marketing at Salesforce for 11 years.
Congratulations on your career.
Absolutely incredible.
We have Udi Lettargor who's seven years at GONG.
He was the number one very first marketer at GONG.
Became CMO as the company scaled to hundreds of millions in revenue and is now
the chief
evangelist.
So welcome to the Pipeline Summit.
Let's talk about Pipeline.
Before we get into it, we're here at Dreamforce and some of us have attended
Dreamforce for
many, many years and for some of us it's the very first time at this event.
So quick icebreaker.
Let me start first with Sarah.
Is this your first Dreamforce?
If not, how many times have you been here and what's your favorite memory if
you have one?
It's probably my 13th or 14th Dreamforce has got to be.
A couple of favorite memories.
The one one was MC Hammer and the dancers that showed up.
The keynote once just kind of randomly, totally kicked the keynote off the
right way.
But more seriously, we were launching the force.com platform.
There's a lot of force.com platform people out there.
I can see props to the force.com peeps.
But we were just really excited about getting the thing off the ground and we
had three CIOs on stage and they were like kind of no name companies at the time but we
were just
pumped and they had these people come out of the fog.
They were like literal rock stars.
Like you would have thought Gene Simmons was going to emerge from this cloud of
smoke. But it was these three CIOs and I was like wow, like we have arrived.
So many, many moments in milestones and now to see where Salesforce is pretty
incredible. It's pretty cool.
Uri, how about yourself?
So I need to apologize to Sarah and please don't tell Mark but I've never been
inside Dreamforce.
Oh no.
Despite this being probably my 10th year being in town for Dreamforce, I have
found every way under the sun to gorilla my way around Dreamforce hijacking traffic
from
shared car rides with our branding to renaming Montgomery station to Gungumory
station and
doing a complete station takeover.
I will not pay a dime to sponsor Dreamforce.
There you go.
Hey.
Well my favorite was when it was sometime in 2007 or 2008 we were sitting in
the conference room and somebody said I think we should brand Dreamforce like welcome to the
cloud.
And we're like I don't know.
Welcome to the cloud.
Is that a little cheesy?
But of course hindsight is 2020.
So let's talk about pipeline.
You guys are industry leaders, your industry pioneers, your senior marketing
executives.
I've been talking to you both over the course of the past year at pipeline
summit and it
has been a hell of a year.
I think we all know that one of the hardest selling environments we've had in
the last
13 years so give it to us straight from where you sit, who you talk to at your
company.
How important is pipeline right now in your go to market?
Where does it rank?
Yeah I mean pipeline is absolutely the name of the game.
I think this year we've absolutely had to move from the nice to have activities
to the need to have.
And so you know that means pairing back on things like awareness, pairing back
on things that you can't
see a hardcore return or know the exact pipe to spend you're going to get for
that program.
And we've really shifted towards things where we can be much more targeted or
we can convert people that we know are hand raisers already and that's why we partner with
people like
qualified to pull them through.
How important is pipeline generation at GONG right now?
So I will continue where Sarah stopped to not repeat because I agree with
everything she said.
I think not only has marketing moved from the nice to have to the must have but
everything
marketing is doing is aimed at proving that our product is a must have and not
a nice to
have.
So messaging is tightening up, sales enablement is tightening up, customer
success showing
ROI is tightening up.
Everything is done to make sure that we end up in the must have bucket because
we all know
what was it called the death of SaaS this year or the big massacre of people
just cutting
so many products that were nice to have.
So to continue going strong like many of us are fortunate to be we have to show
that everything
we do is providing so much value that is unquestionably a must have.
So the great tech recession has been upon us for the last year.
We are all striving to make sure that our products are above the line.
You can generate pipeline when your product is above the line.
The question is where is that line?
Sarah you said at pipeline summit one year ago I wrote this down with pipe gen
it's both
a short game and a long game maybe you can explain that but no matter what your
strategy
you have to have solid and provable metrics when budgets get cut.
Now obviously over the last year a lot of budgets have gotten cut but maybe you
guys could get
a little bit specific for us and talk to us about a strategy that you've leaned
into specifically
that's been working in this environment or something that you've just backed
away from.
Yeah I mean if you think about year over year for attentive I mean we're a fast
growing brand
we're a startup in the SMS marketing space which is a very competitive space.
Last year we were all about brand awareness we had billboards in Times Square
we had you
know we spent a lot of money on video and explainers content and things that
were very
top of funnel and this year we really had to rethink how we were going to spend
our
dollars how we could make our dollars go further and so that meant playing back
and going towards
things that we knew had a proven our why that's the short game like you can go
to your sales
leader and say hey maybe we should pull back on SDR sorry for any SDRs in the
house and
take those dollars and put it towards Google or places where we know we can get
a you know
a five to one pipe to spend didn't greater whatever the the benchmark you're
trying to
hit but you know we have to also balance that with the long game and I think
what's what's
tough in this environment is you can't go and do some of those you know broad
based paid
media tactics and so you have to be really smart about content we've been even
though
we've pulled back on some of our splashy video we definitely have thought about
short content
short video programming that we know can kind of bring in influencers from our
community
really again talk to performance of our products and show hey this is really a
painkiller not
a vitamin and you know thinking about ways that we can still get awareness so
that we're
not going to go through all the hand raisers and not having one else left to
market to
but do it in a way that's much more cost effective I think one of the things
that surprised
me about my conversations with Udi over the course of the years have been you
know gong
has always thought content first and one of the things the very first time that
I came
in contact with the gong brand it was it was a PDF basically saying if your
sales reps say
these words you will win if your sales reps spend this amount of time talking
to sales
call like you will lose and so are they all swearing now on their sales calls
is that
what we found yeah that was one of the tactics but it was like whether it's
content marketing
or product launches which is a big thing that you've done this year give us
some perspective
on like what is working right now for your company so again to not repeat
anything the
Sarah says which all makes sense we've found that this year it was about going
back to
basics and I since as you said I was the first marketer gong seven years ago I
didn't always
have the multi-million dollar budgets or a 60 percent team I was a machine of
one for
a very long time on a very shoestring budget and I figured that my only way to
hack the
system is to create really really good organic content because if you do that
you're going
to get free followers you're going to get free email subscribers you're going
to get
free content downloads and then all these people want to talk to you like big
idea right
and so we cracked that way back when and now we've gone back to that so the g
ong lab series
is still going strong creating thousands of new social media followers and
email subscribers
every week and we earned the right to talk to those people about what we do and
so going
back to basics and having more people like myself and my new role share content
leadership
get on stage just like this thank you again for the opportunity to be here and
sharing
our thought leadership is just bringing a ton of organic content which the CFO
loves
because it doesn't cost him anything I mean you paid for the drinks he didn't
even have
to pay for that and beyond that it's again back to messaging that shows why
this is a
must have and really listening and being in tune with what customers are
looking for this
year I was sharing with you earlier over the drinks that there's a product that
we actually
have ready and we haven't launched this year yet because we don't think it's
the right
message that the market needs to hear this year so we're going to launch that
next year
but we did hear the market talking about consolidating their tech stack this
year and so what do
we do in the last year we came up with two new products gong forecast and gong
engage to
help customers go from three four vendors to one and do what they actually want
use fewer
products make the CFO and rev ops happy because they don't have to integrate
all that stuff
make the sellers happy because they don't have five different systems to switch
between
and make the buyers happy because they're getting a much better buying
experience so
as long as you're listening to your customers and obsessing over them you're
probably going
to be fine well vendor consolidation has 100% been the name of the game this
year I think
as marketers we probably all know that but maybe you're wondering well how do I
position
my products like how to expand my portfolio how do I puff up in this
environment and then
of course we've all got this AI thing and it's everything AI and gong AI and
qualified
AI and the 10 of AI and now we're separating ourselves from like the noise but
it comes
back to so much of what you guys did so successfully which is like education
like the basics of
using content marketing for education I think play well in this world let's let
's pivot a
little bit over to pipeline coverage so one of the things that's that I said
earlier this
year in fact I've kind of been saying it in my own company this year 5x is the
new 3x like
we always used to say if you have 3x pipeline coverage for your sales team like
you're
good to go right so that's kind of the job of marketing and so earlier this
year I was
saying like 5x is the new 3x 5x is the new 3x and then I said that to you oody
like earlier
this summer and you're like well yeah but maybe not if your pipe quality is
higher and
progresses at better rates and so when you said that I like jotted that note
down so
look we're all struggling with trying to figure out quantity and quality how
have you guys
changed I think like if you could give some wisdom to all of us out here who
like we're
all revenue leaders right we're either CMOs or CROs or revenue leaders if you
could give
a piece of wisdom to what's your perspective on pipeline coverage has your
process changed
has your acceptance criteria changed what has changed this year Sarah let's
start with
you well I mean I think going back to what you were saying earlier about having
to like
ruthlessly prioritize in terms of the products you're gonna cover we've had to
ruthlessly
prioritize who we're gonna go after and target and you know we we do some of
that on our
own in terms of like thinking about we largely cater to the mid market plus
with attentive
and so we do that in the types of content we produce and making sure that it
would resonate
with an enterprise buyer but we also really partner really closely with our
media vendors
and there's a lot of great products I think this is where AI is definitely
helping marketers
move faster to go after that you know higher propensity to buy higher quality
leads and
to really make your dollars go further and we partner with Google we partner
with LinkedIn
really closely to make sure that you know we're staying within a certain realm
of what
we want to hit from an efficiency standpoint so well we're all struggling there
right it's
like it's quantity and quality and you want to balance the two oodie how do you
guys think
about it at gong or with what you're doing right now if you're you were the
original
one that pushed back on me and said no like we got to be thinking about quality
yeah and
actually that changed I mentioned that to our leadership team and we in our
pipeline
council we started changing like almost immediately what we were measuring and
not only the acceptance
rate and what we call stage two but all then the progression from stage two to
stage three
and then carving that up in different ways and saying well if this is the
source or this
is like the hook that brought somebody in the door it actually converts in
different ways
we have to look at it in all those ways you kind of like shine that light on
pipeline
quality and progression for me at our company but do you have like other words
of wisdom
that you can give to all of us on like how should we be thinking about this and
I love
hearing that correct thanks for sharing so a couple of things first before I
dive into
the go to market and specifically marketing aspects it's important to recognize
that pipeline
is not just a go to market problem it is a product problem and product is an
equal partner
in creating pipeline and what I mean by that is if product is still working on
the product
plan from 12 months ago and hasn't done a reality check at least on a quarterly
basis
is what we're delivering now resonating with the market is this what they truly
need more
than ever not because someone 12 months ago brought it to the top of our
product board
but because now they're asking for it if they're not doing that then they're
making it a go
to market problem when it might be a product problem so I suggest all of the go
to market
leaders here to go talk with your product leaders and check when was the last
time that
they looked at the product roadmap and validated it against what the market
really wants I can
tell you we did that and gone we do it now like on a very regular basis we have
a couple
of moments late last year when I remember a pretty contentious meeting where a
product
was showing what they're going to develop in the next six to nine months and go
to market
leaders which is shaking their head like oh my god no that was last year's plan
aren't you
listening to what's happening in the market so that's number one number two
going back into
go to market so I talked about quality versus quantity and there's so many
dimensions to that
so one of them you talked about is channels and we found and I'm sure many
other market
leaders here have found that the importance of say Google and other search
engines in organic
search is much higher now than we looked at it maybe a year and a half ago
because these are
people still in the zone right now like you don't have to go look under every
rock they're telling
you they're raising their hands they want to buy from you so make sure that you
get back to those
leads in five minutes not five days i can't tell you how many calls i've been
on where the guy said
you know i'm buying from you because the other guy hasn't even gotten back to
me and i i asked
for demos for three vendors on the same day you're the first one to go back to
me sometimes all you
need to do is show up yeah so if the organic demand is coming in they want to
talk to you talk to
them and then one more dimension and then i'll shut up is look at the iCP
because we've seen
certain segments improve their conversion rate because they need us now more
than ever and we've
seen other segments reduce their conversion rates because they see us as a nice
to have right now
so we do a reshuffle of the books every quarter we we don't just do it for the
year and say we're
done we look every quarter are there certain segments that are not performing
as we had planned let's
set them aside deprioritize them and bring more of the good stuff that we see
in the last quarter
not a year ago in the last quarter they're actually converting better one of
the things that i hear
you saying udi is that you seek alignment across your go-to-market team with
your product team
on a regular basis not at the beginning of the year but every quarter and one
of the things that i
want to bridge to next is sales and marketing alignments and of course as cmos
we are constantly
seeking alignment with our revenue leaders and in fact if you have an account-
based approach
to your go-to-market it is more important than ever and somebody forwarded me
this this week udi
and i watched you on a linkedin video podcast and you said you're my new
favorite stalker by the
end of the day it's easy it's easy you said if you're a cmo and you don't know
how your cr o takes
their coffee you're doing something wrong what is the best let's say let me
start with you what is
the spot how does the zero taster coffee what is the what is the mind doesn't
either it brings to
it was a trick question what's the best advice you have for other marketing
leaders out there
about how to achieve the sales and marketing alignment nirvana what is working
for you in
your company well i mean i just want to add on to one thing that you udi said i
think like that
last mile conversion is super critical right now i think in 2020 2021 when the
phone was just ringing
off the hook it was a totally different market we got comfortable and we didn't
have to really
fine-tune things between let's say your sdr team and and your marketing team
and so we are i talked to
my head of sdr probably like every i'd say three hours like we're always
constantly in contact i
can tell exactly when like you know we're a smaller team but i can tell if
someone is on vacation i
can tell you know if something is funky and you know one of our channels like
we are constantly
in lockstep and i think also for us we think about pipeline as a team sport
like if marketing
sitting in their pipeline number but sales is not that is not time for victory
lap i try to make
sure that everyone really sees their part in all the different do you guys
separate it now that
you brought it up do you separate like you have a marketing number and you have
a sales number and
what kind of dynamic does that cause in your organization we do have a we have
a marketing
number a sales number a partner number you know pretty similar to what we did
it we had a similar
setup at Salesforce and you know we always are trying to make sure that
marketing is hurting us
hitting a certain percentage of overall pipeline we i keep a close eye on that
and i always want
it to be improving and then you know we also are like i said no victory lap
until we're
green across all these different channels and we really try to celebrate those
wins jointly so
everyone feels like we're in the boat together it's not like us versus them and
you know keeping
that feedback loop going is super critical to making sure that you're going to
continue to get
better and things and events is another thing you know making sure all right
are we going to the
right events are we saying the right reps are they motivated to talk to these
people or are they
just going to care if there are counts there we've been like hyper focused on
making sure that
again if we're going to target certain accounts that you're getting the right
people in the room
and that you have the highest chance of producing opportunities from that how
do you produce that
bond between yourself and your revenue leadership not even just your cmo but
the vp's of sales
do you meet with them weekly like what is that kind of cadence for you guys
yeah i mean we we meet
we have a pipeline call every other week we go by territory and you know it's
not just when the when
the when myself and the zero on the call it's not just sales having to answer
the question if there's
a patch that's down marketing absolutely has to have input to into that and i
think just having
that accountability and all these different fronts really drives that alignment
sales knows that
we're like really keeping them in mind we're not just doing things because we
think it's a cool event
or you know we think it's like you know something fun to do we're really
thinking about how we can
help them hit their goals and i think that that builds trust between the two
teams and then they
want to help us out on the other side and advocate that you know when budget
season comes around
which is right around the corner for i'm sure many people in the audience you
know they're at the table
pounding their fists as hard as we are to make sure that you know marketing is
well funded and
in producing for them. Udi do you have as you break down your pipeline target
at the company level
do you break in it down it's like sales and partners and bdrs and marketing and
some other
thing. Yeah we have four which i think there are the classic sire talked about
three so there's
partners sdr marketing and ae's self-sourcing those are the the classic four
and partners
a little more complex if someone is overlacing the source we haven't found the
magic number to
how to how to measure that perfectly yet but i want to tag on something sarah
said about
events and going to events so here's what we did last year we did a roadshow
that we did this
year based on on what we found last year i think we hit seven cities now events
are notoriously
difficult to measure because people talk about the experience yeah everyone had
a good time we had
a great conversation and that's usually the last you hear of it so we dug a lot
deeper and then we
came back to sales and finance you know said here's what we did we looked at
all the open
opportunities on q2 when that was when we did our our roadshow we looked at
opportunities that had
a representative at one of the seven events that we did and the control group
was all the open
opportunities that did not have a representative at our seven events here's
what we found uh we found
many things that top two in my eye are this one the win rate for those who
showed up at the event
was ninety six percent higher that's almost double compared to the control
group of open
opportunities in all territories all sizes all industries that we could not get
to an event that
was number one number two the average deal size of those who attended the event
was over a hundred
percent higher it was like a hundred and four percent higher so again double
the average
opportunity size now you show that to finance they look they go yeah please do
more of those
you come with that to sales they don't they don't only say yes let's do more of
those but now they're
screaming at their salespeople you need to get all your prospects to these
events because we're
connection we're creating such a unique experience there and so-called brain
washing them with all
the customer success stories and all the partnerships and all the product demos
that they see there
that they just run out of there and they want to sign a big deal so that's
another way that we
create that alignment with sales and marketing by proving that what we're doing
is working and
then using that to get them to help us help them in return yeah i love that and
it's not just
pipeline influence in some like no no this is real stuff this is real stuff and
it's and it's easy
to show and you get them to buy in it's number one thing and also the power of
event of event
marketing and here we are at Dreamforce so let me bring it on home for this
panel uh i want to
talk about AI um it is clearly the entire conference at Dreamforce has been all
about AI this has
been the year of AI the AI revolution is here um what a year what a year for
our industry we're
gonna look back on this in the same way that we looked back on you know the
iPhone launch i just
watched Steve Jobs's launch of the iPhone actually yesterday so i could kind of
relive what that
moment was like and the internet and cloud computing and here we are it's the
AI revolution and for
so many of us as sales and marketing professionals it's new that like the
technology is new we haven't
heard these words before we're trying to figure out what to do and then as
marketers we're trying
to figure out what do i say to the world and then as sales professionals we're
like what is this
terminology and i have to sound the right way and like and everyone is like a
little bit deer in the
headlights um but you two have been on this journey for a long time and just
like Salesforce and so
many other companies so gong AI i went on your website gong AI has been
analyzing more than a
billion sales calls and 10 billion sales emails for like five plus years right
right a 10 to
AI is trained on 40 billion SMS and email sends so you guys have had products
in market for a long
time this stuff is not new to you couple questions on this front number one
what are you seeing now
as go-to-market leaders how are you bringing your organization to market all of
a sudden this
tsunami this frenzy has been whipped up now we're all in the middle of it and
every single person
out there in the audience and who's like listening to this recording is like
what should i be doing
right now should i just go with the flow how do i differentiate what do i say
so Sarah let me
start with you yeah i mean i think it differs depending on what type of product
you're selling
and in our world a lot of our buyers treat SMS marketing like they would treat
google as an ad
channel it's really a performance channel for them and so in a lot of ways
leading with performance
and showing how the AI can increase performance is one of the best ways you can
build trust with
our core audience i was just with the customer last week of really well-known
footwear brand a
lot of you probably have a pair of them in your closet and just using our copy
assistant which
generates new messages based on you know what we know from our you know 40
billion SMS exchanges
we're able to serve up you know likely higher performing SMS version of their
copy you know
they've been able to 4x their performance so incredible results and and if you
're a performance
marketer you're like great i'm in but you know i think on the brand side there
's also there's
hesitation all right does that mean i don't have a job does that you know or is
it going to sound
in our brand voice and i think you have to be very careful to show that there's
going to be some
control mechanisms in place so that your brand team can have their you know
brand voice and
guidelines kind of baked into your learning model they can also have a preview
of okay hey here's a
set of messages that would go to this particular segment everything look okay
all right now let's
send it to a bigger batch of people so i think it's for for my market in
particular it's showing
that performance showing like hey why wouldn't you want to have a 4x better
return on what you're
doing and then also building in that trust that hey look you're still in full
control you can still
make it sound like your brand voice um yeah but you know uh and you also have
the ability to kind of
take a do a spot check before it's going to really go out to a broader audience
do you find that
your marketing team even knows how to market these capabilities and features or
is it this is
everybody going through this massive education i think that uh it was
interesting this last week
it's very fresh in my mind right now because we sat with these customers and we
're showing them a lot
of our roadmap but i think at first it feels like everyone's kind of you know
uh putting AI on every
product name that they have and so that it just becomes noisy um and i think
what you really have
to do is go to the examples quickly and show no it's real like this is how this
is a text message
before attentive AI and this is a text message after and this is the
performance between the two
and that's a very eye opening like aha moment that oh this is a real product
this is not just them
saying like now with AI you know it's it's a real thing um and i think that's
the um the real kind
of selling moment for us right now it's like it's like the technology in the
demo actually matter
because it doesn't become a bunch of buzzwords it's like oh that totally makes
sense for example
udie you in gong you guys just released this i don't know what you call it but
i call it like
AI summarize and it's spotlight yeah it's spotlight it's like this magical
thing that as soon as people
see it they're like oh it's AI is not this nebulous like weird thing it's like
it's very practical
right it actually helps me do my job so what's your take when we do messaging
and that's always
been the case like any type of customer facing content we start with what the
customer wants to
hear not with what product or the ceo wants to say and i think we see this all
too often where we
have product led founders they're like oh but tell them that we do this gizmo
and that gadget and
these nuts and bolts are so amazing and we've got more gigabytes than anyone
else but if your
customer doesn't care about it they're just going to gloss over and like next
so two things change
this year one i think recent surveys show that over 70 percent of sales leaders
now are actively
looking to experiment with AI for their sales team for a bunch of different use
cases and two
we all know this the last year has been um focused on productivity gains and
efficiency gains so if
you look at what's changing gong's messaging if you went to gong's website that
you just quoted a
year ago you would be hard pressed to find the word AI on it because when we
started the product
we've been doing AI for seven years this is nothing new to us but i never put
it on the website because
sales leaders couldn't care less they cared about cloning their best performer
and understanding
how to close more deals and you don't need to use AI to explain that benefit in
the last six months
we've been gradually introducing more AI as we've seen data suggesting that
sales leaders are
actively experimenting with AI so now they are caring about this and we've
tweaked some of the
old messaging for example for many years we we pitched that gong can help you
onboard new sales
people twice as fast as without gong which is true and we have many many testim
onials to say that
but in this last year that message would not have resonated because how many
companies were
doubling their sales teams very few so we switched that to get more efficient
and make your aes more
productive using AI from gong and that's how we're taking what customers care
about putting that
in front of them and now we're talking about how many billions of emails and
calls were
analyzing because they care about it for the first time people want to know we
're all in this
learning journey together AI is the topic du jour much of our messaging has
converged you guys have
had the technology your product lines for so long and now you're kind of
bringing it back to the
forefront because that's what the customer wants to hear I can't think of a
better way to close
this panel of pipeline summit than on that core message I want to thank you
both please ladies
and gentlemen round of applause for Sarah and Udi thank you guys so much thanks
Greg
great thanks Sarah thanks Udi
you
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