I met Sangram Vajre, co-founder and CMO at Terminus, at MarketingProfs B2B Forum last month. Since Terminus is a relatively new company, and Sangram relatively new to the CMO role (though he was VP of Marketing at Pardot!), I wanted to ask him what he’s focused on and what his biggest challenges are. You won’t believe what happened next!
What are your top priorities as CMO at Terminus?
My top priorities are pipeline and revenue generation. At Terminus, we don’t talk about leads. I have no idea how many leads are coming in or through what channels. It just doesn’t matter.
What matters is this: Do we have leads that meet the criteria of accounts we are going after? For example, Vidyard is our customer, so we are helping our sales team reach out to video marketing companies with a clear message about our work helping Vidyard win with account-based marketing. If a lead comes in from any of these targeted companies, then we pass it to our sales team and nurture the lead through email and account-based advertising using our platform.
What are your top challenges?
My very top challenge is educating the market on an entirely new set of B2B success metrics, metrics that call into question the status of the marketing funnel. For example, most B2B marketers measure success in terms of the number of leads generated. This gives them a false sense of accomplishment. Why? Because the number of leads has nothing to do with lead quality or pipeline velocity.
Sales people need to engage with qualified accounts and have meaningful conversations with buyers, prospects, and influencers. Marketing should be enabling and facilitating those conversations. In the end, sales people don’t close leads; they close accounts.
What did you learn from your time at Pardot that you have been able to apply at Terminus?
The ability to scale fast. We were acquired by Salesforce very shortly after I joined Pardot. If you assume that the scale of marketing at Pardot was at 1x, the acquisition by ExactTarget required us to move at 10x. Suddenly, when Salesforce acquired us, we had to deliver at 100x speed!
That sort of acceleration is not normal, and it forced me and the entire team to think big, be creative, and adapt at the speed of light. Fortunately, I had the best marketing talent that Atlanta had to offer and the Salesforce marketing team was a breeze to work with. Everyone cared deeply and we made 1 + 1 = 3!
How do you go about positioning a service that will require a culture shift on the part of your clients? I’m thinking specifically here of getting people to think and act differently regarding account-based marketing.
I plan to do this in two ways:
First, we’re focusing on the undisputed facts. In B2B, there are always numerous people involved in the decision-making process, so focusing on individual leads dramatically reduces your chances of influencing the account.
Second, we’re elevating the conversation though events like #flipmyfunnel, which turns the funnel on its head, challenges the conventional wisdom, and demands that marketers work smarter, not harder. In this effort, I am also joining forces with industry leaders like Jon Miller, CEO at Engagio, Adrienne Weissman, CMO at G2Crowd, and Megan Heuer, VP at SiriusDecisions to evangelize the space.
What advice would you have for new CMOs at startups (or elsewhere)?
Think big and don’t be afraid to create your own playbook. What I am doing to drive success for Terminus is very unconventional, untraditional. For example, I did the first #FlipMyFunnel event when we had fewer than ten customers. I am doing video interviews with thought leaders instead of webinars. And I am working with customers to create real success stories instead of polishing the website to make it look better.
As a CMO, you are responsible for customer experience (end-to-end) and that extends well beyond the buyer’s journey. That means you can’t just focus on the product or your marketing collateral or whatever. You need to focus on the customer – What will get them interested? What will get them to buy? And, most of all, what will get them to stay with you?
If you are interested in attending the Flip My Funnel Roadshow when it comes to a major metropolitan area near you, you can use the code Aberdeen50 to get 50% off the price of registration.
Image Source (Creative Commons): Paul VanDerWerf.
Sangram Vajre, co-founder and CMO of Terminus, is a passionate marketing geek who loves to solve problems, both analytically and creatively. Over the years, Sangram has amassed invaluable experience through his work with startups, consulting, and global companies. Most recently, Sangram headed up marketing at Pardot, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2013. Sangram is putting all his knowledge to good use by authoring the first-ever Account-Based Marketing for Dummies, to be released in 2016. You can follow him on Twitter at @sangramvajre.
