Scaling Demand Gen to Build the Next Unicorn with Jamie Grenney, CMO of OwnBackup

This episode features an interview with Jamie Grenney, CMO of OwnBackup. Prior to OwnBackup, Jamie spent 11 years at Salesforce learning from the best in the business. Most recently, he led a large product marketing and enablement team as a Global VP at Okta, and is now working on making OwnBackup into his fourth Unicorn. 

On this episode, Jamie discusses the death of cold outreach, the right way to make impactful video content, how to cultivate a great sales-marketing relationship, and much more.

Key Takeaways

• The big shift that we're going to see in demand gen and marketing over the next couple of years is the switch from cold outreach to warm introductions. Companies are going to come up with a way to break through the noise and get to warm introductions at scale. 
• Cultivating a great sales-marketing relationship requires putting yourself in their shoes, having empathy for their job, and maintaining the perspective that sales closing deals that ultimately pay your salary.
• Video is still a great way to deliver a clear and concise message in a format that’s really easy to share. YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the web, and a YouTube link is a non-threatening way to advocate for a product and help people understand what it’s capable of.

Quotes

• “Inbound pipeline, outbound BDR-sourced pipeline, AE-sourced pipeline, and your partners. Those are the four engines you want to think about. How do you build those for scale, how do you measure them, and how do you grow them 5 or 10X. Think about those engines, and what can we do to increase their respective productivity.”
• “I think one challenge that some companies have is they have a product that is not verticalized, but they go after vertical messaging. It can take a ton of time and energy to maintain a bunch of vertical messaging. When you go into verticals, you've got to think about what is the vertical and how am I going to solve that problem all the way through?”
• “Conversational marketing is an uncuttable [budget item] because I think it's the future of how we engage our prospects and customers. It’s less about forms and more about getting them to the right person who can help. It's about improving the quality of conversation, and it's about making sure that you make the connection in real time.”
• “One thing that I see fading away is cold outreach. Every company has a pipeline gap to fill, but cold outreach makes no sense at all…generally cold outreach is expensive, inefficient, stressful, and it often yields disappointing results. These days, if you're a high value prospect, you're bombarded with unsolicited calls and emails and advertisements that you're going to tune out. So marketers really need to figure this out.”
• "Sometimes you have to relax your ideals to earn trust. You have to put yourself in [sales’] shoes. Understand that it's more important to be effective than to be right. A really good lesson in bridging the sales and marketing divide is to think about what is the right pace to introduce things to sales and how do you build trust in those relationships."

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.