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Matt Taylor
Senior Vice President of Marketing at Hawk Ridge Systems
about
Matt Taylor
Matt Taylor serves as Senior Vice President of Marketing at Hawk Ridge Systems, where he drives business growth strategy and oversees marketing across multiple business units including software, hardware, 3D printing, and ed-tech. In this senior leadership role, he collaborates with executives to establish roadmaps and foster workplace culture while heading teams focused on performance, product, and content marketing to drive consideration, accelerate acquisition, and expand revenue streams.
How has your organization evolved its approach to measuring marketing success?
We've structured our marketing department into two distinct tracks – though not formally reflected in our org chart, they function as specialized tiger teams. The first focuses on go-to-market initiatives, tying directly to our source pipeline metrics, while the second centers on lifecycle marketing, connecting to our customer lifetime value metrics. These North Star metrics keep us closely aligned with revenue on the new business front while maintaining strong ties to the customer experience. This structure has created additional layers of commitment, focus, and accountability within the department, with team members developing into subject matter experts within their respective tracks. However, implementing these changes hasn't been without challenges. One significant hurdle has been ensuring our data accurately reflects our impact during this transition period. We're actively addressing this by investing in our marketing tech stack to clean our data and fostering closer alignment with sales through regular go-to-market conversations around target accounts and new opportunities. This evolution represents a natural progression from measuring marketing activity to a more sophisticated approach that better captures Marketing’s true impact on revenue and customer relationships.
How do you maintain effective alignment between marketing and sales in a traditionally sales-led organization?
While we operate in an environment that prioritizes scalability and quantitative metrics, we've found tremendous value in qualitative data and direct conversations. For instance, when analyzing our CRM data, we noticed 'status quo' frequently appeared as a reason for lost opportunities. By engaging directly with sales reps and their managers about what truly lies behind that designation, we've uncovered insights that drive meaningful changes in our approach. These conversations not only strengthen the partnership between marketing and sales but also inform our messaging and targeting strategies. It's an approach born from our history as a sales-led organization, where sales traditionally created product goals and territory maps, with marketing providing support. However, we've evolved this dynamic by demonstrating marketing's ability to transform how we approach our market. This evolution required significant trust and confidence, but it's opened up exciting opportunities for both teams. Once you've built that credibility, you can expand beyond purely ROI-driven advertising to invest in brand building and more creative initiatives – not just because there's room for these activities, but because there's a very justifiable need for them based on proven results.
Could you share an example of how marketing has transformed your approach to high-value sales?
Looking at our larger deals, particularly industrial 3D printers that carry price tags over $600,000, we noticed sales had limited data to work with due to the infrequent nature of these transactions. Marketing stepped in to transform our approach, moving away from the traditional 'spray-and-pray' mentality to something much more targeted. We effectively flipped the model, taking ownership of territory mapping, ICP development, and opportunity mapping. This informed our geo-targeting and industry-targeting strategies. We collaborated with sales on sprint message testing to hone in on what resonates most effectively, delivering a smaller pool of much higher quality leads. This transformation allowed the sales team to reevaluate their staffing strategy, operating with smaller, more highly skilled sales teams, which ultimately benefited the overall business growth strategy. This shift required significant trust and presented a challenging chicken-and-egg situation: either maintain a large sales staff experiencing reduced lead flow or right-size immediately and bank on marketing's ability to deliver. We chose the latter path, which placed considerable responsibility on marketing but is ultimately proving successful. The key was having enough confidence in our strategy and data to make such bold decisions while maintaining the flexibility to adjust our approach based on results.
How are you adapting your marketing strategies to engage multiple stakeholders within target accounts?
We've found success through high-touch, in-person events that bring together multiple stakeholders. A perfect example is our Partner Summit, where we created a full-day agenda bringing together our key experts and industry-focused specialists from partners like Dassault Systems and HP. We carefully curated the attendance to around 25 customers from key strategic accounts, encouraging multiple stakeholders from each organization to attend. The event provided exclusive previews of product roadmaps and deep dives into technology utilization opportunities. We also created a 'board of advisors' moment where customers could provide direct feedback to product developers about their pain points and desired features. This approach proved highly successful – we secured our largest renewal ever from an attending customer, which we directly attribute to the event as it led to expanding into additional products that weren't previously under consideration.
Looking ahead, how are you preparing for significant changes in B2B marketing?
We're focusing on two key areas. First, we're adapting our SEO strategy to account for how large language models and AI will change search behavior. We're maintaining our current approach while also preparing for what these models look for, conducting training and experimenting with different content on our site. Second, we anticipate a greater emphasis on creative work in B2B marketing. With more B2C marketers entering the B2B space, we're seeing increased attention to polished, sophisticated messaging. We're investing significant effort in creative briefs and strategy sessions that go beyond simply aligning product features with benefits, focusing on understanding the core insights and pain points that drive our campaigns.
about
Hawk Ridge Systems
Hawk Ridge Systems is a leading global provider of 3D design and manufacturing solutions, specializing in SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD software, 3D scanning, and 3D printing technologies. As the world's largest SOLIDWORKS reseller, the company serves over 40,000 clients across diverse industries. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area with offices throughout North America, Hawk Ridge Systems delivers comprehensive services including software solutions, 3D printing technology, Manufacturing as a Service, and professional training, helping businesses optimize their design and manufacturing processes through cutting-edge technology solutions and unmatched technical expertise.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.