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Building a High-Performance Revenue Marketing Engine with Demandbase VP of Global Revenue Marketing Tracy Kraft (Pod 555 + Video)

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There are many ways to track your marketing performance, but if you want to understand how effective it is, one metric reigns supreme: revenue.

The most successful marketing strategies achieve short-term and long-term growth by driving revenue year after year. Once you find what works best for your organization, you’ll be able to scale your profits efficiently and stay ahead of the competition with easy-to-implement bottom-line numbers.

Tracy Kraft, VP of Global Revenue Marketing at Demandbase, breaks down her strategy for building successful revenue marketing engines for large multinational companies and small startups.

Revenue marketing brings marketing into focus to generate revenue or a pipeline that will ultimately lead to revenue. It helps eliminate silos by aligning cross-functional teams around the goal of generating revenue through iterative processes.

“Revenue marketing integrates multiple go-to-market initiatives across disciplines, aligning with the entire revenue team, to drive business growth.”

It’s essential for marketing to work in sync with sales and other departments, such as customer service and pre-sales. To grow, marketers need to know what the company values most and work together towards those goals.

There are three key ingredients to help accomplish organizational goals: the right team, the right toolkit, and the right instinct. 

Sample team structure: Small hypergrowth start-up at $30M ARR

Marketing alignment is an essential element for success. Teams need to work together and know each department’s objectives to achieve the same goal. Here are some ways you can accomplish this:

    • Hire for your situation. Understand your goals, budget, current tech, and staff to make the most effective decisions possible to further growth. This knowledge will be essential to activate and execute programs with high velocity as you build your team.
    • Know where to build vs. where to scale. Are you building? Hire specialists with extra skills. Are you optimizing? Scale with SMEs. For scaling and optimizing, it’s best to seek out subject matter experts who can offer in-depth knowledge on the channels or functions that are most important for business growth. With specialized advice, you’ll know what needs to be scaled, rather than relying on generalist recommendations that won’t bring about the specific results you desire.
    • Set and embrace the culture. Cultivate a culture that meets the needs of its unique team and leaders. It will allow everyone to approach things from the same perspective with effective communication, even when things don’t go according to plan.
    • Unlock cross-functional relationships & work streams. As revenue marketers, we must show up as partners. This means reaching across platforms to align on goals that will support company growth and department responsibility. 

“Marketing is not a service provider. Marketing is not a cost center. It is a true partner in the company’s go-to-market strategy.”

Sample team structure: Mid-size, fast-growing startup at $50M+ ARR

Your toolkit contains all the resources and strategies at your disposal. These elements quickly measure your KPIs, enabling you to make smarter business decisions and hit your target metrics.

  • Know your data. Only focus on the metrics that matter most to your company, and then track everything else. You can then extend those business growth indicators back into your campaigns and channels as you set and scale your revenue marketing function.

“Data will never be perfect, so trends matter most.”

  • Have a marketing technology strategy. This clarity will help you determine what technologies are best for your business and how to use them. Rather than buying every technology available, consider where you want to go as a business and the future of your company’s revenue marketing function.
  • Overcome GTM fragmentation. Gone are the days when you could have your data, set, systems, or processes in a silo. We now know that you can see and engage with your targets more intelligently when you link these things together. A clear perspective across these different vectors helps you maintain a deliberate revenue marketing approach.

Sample team structure: Growing, publicly-traded company at $200M+ ARR

Companies rely on you to be creative and think big. Lean into activating growth by taking calculated risks as an agent of change.

  • Place big bets, but be okay with failure. As long as your hypothesis is rooted in data, don’t hesitate to take action. If you’re successful, take risks to double down. But if you’re not satisfied with the results, learn from your mistake and try something else.
  • Forecast with outcomes orientation. Establish your intentions from the start to understand the outcome, rather than trying to comprehend what occurred in retrospect.
  • Be decisive about what you will and won’t do. Have a stack rank of priorities. When you are presented with something unexpected, you can determine if this will affect your outcomes. If the risk is too significant, work on other opportunities instead.

“Focus on the needle-moving activities first and clarify those priorities.”

  • When something works, be ready to scale. Double down when something works, but don’t rely entirely on it. Make sure you’re prepared to get the next flywheel up and running.

“None of these ingredients alone is the secret to success. Success comes from how they connect and interact.”

The most accurate data with the best technology will still need bold people to move on it with confidence. For this reason, knowing your organization’s people and understanding its tools are essential for success. Your team, toolkit, and instincts must all work together to help move this forward.

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Published on May 13, 2022
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