The Marketing Team of Tomorrow

Look carefully at how your team is organized—it may be out-of-date. How will you know? If your structure doesn’t align with your strategy. When Kelly Hopping joined Demandbase, she told her team: “My number one goal is for Sales to love us. To send a message that we’re ready to be dynamic with our customers and our Sales team.”  

From there, they established strategic pillars: a product marketing team as the linchpin between sales and customer success, growth teams targeting Ideal Customer Profiles both globally and regionally, and a content team amplifying thought leadership. This demand-oriented focus has turned the org into a center of excellence.

Speaking of Sales… enough with the silos! Gary Sevounts shared his proven, next gen ABM strategy, which he has coined “Treasure Ops.” 

The problem: It’s hard to find the best opportunities for Sales to go after, the “treasure.” 

The answer: The Treasure Ops team consists of staff who look at leads daily, so they can identify the most promising leads based on ICP, behavior, and intent signals. This team enhances the names, brings BDRs and SDRs into the fold, and then works with product marketing and the content team to develop bespoke content that drives prospects into the pipeline, and to completion. 

Does this treasure-seeking deliver? Yes. Gary cited generating about $80 million within 6-7 months in his previous role at Socure. At Simpplr, they’re approaching $10 million in pipeline creation after just a few months of implementation.

There were two interesting takes on how AI is redefining teams, both laddering up to efficiency. 

To Kelly, “AI is a revenue accelerator, not a cost cutter.” AI can cut down those mundane tasks so your team can spend more time on relevant, impactful work. She cited Clay, an AI-powered tool that’s helping SDRs quickly augment account data, allowing them to spend more time outbounding rather than researching. 

For Gary, it’s not about cutting the team; it’s about scaling fast to accelerate growth. AI-assisted content teams were able to produce 3-4 high-quality blogs weekly, which would previously have required larger teams and longer timelines. They’ve also found success in using AI to identify journalists, analyze their focus areas, and craft personalized pitches—skipping the PR agency altogether.

Attribution is a huge challenge for marketing departments. But if you’re not tying your marketing team to metrics that drive revenue, you’re setting up for failure. It’s a muscle you need to firmly establish in your team (and across the org, if possible).

How? Kelly shared how Demandbase brought in a company-wide OKR coach (objectives and key results) to build a high-performance culture. The OKR model helped them develop quarterly themes, programming plans, and big bets across the company; and then they were able to tie pipeline numbers to marketing programs.

Empowered teams deliver the best results. When Lesley Davis joined Waggoner Engineering, she built the company’s marketing team from scratch. Nine months later, she’s expanded her team’s ownership of high-impact objectives, moving beyond the daily slog to focus on long-term, high-impact projects. 

This is tough when you’re a small team with big ambitions, but it’s necessary. The focus gives team members clear objectives and ownership, so they can align with the company’s strategic vision and can say “no” to anything that doesn’t get them there. And that then clears up a CMO’s time to focus on future growth opportunities.