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Surbhi Agarwal
Chief Marketing Officer at Applied Intuition
about
Surbhi Agarwal
Surbhi Agarwal serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Applied Intuition, with over two decades of product and business leadership experience. Prior to her current role, she managed a multibillion-dollar business at Google Cloud that included more than 30 product lines. She also serves as a product marketing and go-to-market adviser for startups at and acts as an angel investor. Her expertise spans enterprise software, go-to-market strategy, and scaling high-growth technology companies.
How has your approach to measuring marketing success evolved beyond traditional metrics like MQLs?
We've moved away from the decades-old MQL approach to focus on two primary areas: brand impact and revenue generation. These two metrics are more valuable to me for better understanding the customer intent, their reasons to make a purchase, and our ability to further grow the business. We start by segmenting our addressable market into accounts based on company size, industry, and historic buying criteria, and then working with a select number of high-value accounts. Our marketing initiatives are targeted to grow within those accounts by either driving adoption of a new product or by increasing the number of users for an existing product. Because we take a white-glove approach, we measure success at the account level rather than by counting leads.
It is typically not easy to transition from a traditional MQL-based demand generation approach. At my previous company, Yellow.ai, I saw weekly discord between the sales and marketing teams over lead attribution and quality of the MQLs. We encountered situations where high-value leads came through our website organically, creating debates between teams on the source, attribution and credit. This shouldn’t have mattered given the ultimate goal was revenue growth and it is not the last touchpoint that truly captures customer buying intent. This experience taught me that success requires moving beyond mere lead scoring to understanding the complete customer journey. No single touchpoint can claim full credit for a conversion.
Moving forward, my marketing team implemented an approach that considers multiple touchpoints and engagement levels within each high-value account. We typically see 8-10 touchpoints and engagement with 7-8 influencers before a successful conversion. This thinking has transformed our metrics from simple lead counting to measuring pipeline at the account level, and tracking conversion rates and win rates throughout the customer journey.
How do you approach buyer personas and engagement strategies in the autonomous vehicle sector?
We see our buyers in two main functions: decision maker and influencer. Decision makers include C-level executives, board members, and investors, while influencers include engineers, team leads, and managers. Within the engineering category, we work with various specialists — from data science engineers to perception engineers and system engineers.
Rather than rely on traditional analyst relationships, we conduct extensive direct market research, track product adoption and maintain close communication through customer support. This hands-on approach allows us to develop multiple-level messaging for each buyer persona, understanding specific pain points and priorities at every level.
The key is recognizing that roles aren't as straightforward as job titles might suggest. A developer might be focused on testing, building, modeling, or working on reinforcement learning. Understanding these nuances is crucial for effective engagement and has proven successful in our enterprise-focused approach. We can often summarize key pain points in under 25 words when focusing on value-based selling, but then we dig deeper when building the sales enablement to articulate individual persona needs to better equip the sales team.
How has your organization structured its sales and marketing collaboration to optimize results?
We've adopted an account-based experience (ABX) approach rather than traditional sales or marketing. In fact, it is different from the ABM (account-based marketing) approach. Sales and marketing have equal input in devising a go-to-market strategy for each account.
This collaborative approach has transformed how we operate. Instead of pursuing uniform messaging across all customers, we tailor our approach for each account, understanding their specific needs, current solutions, pain points, and previous engagement history. This level of customization requires tight alignment between sales and marketing, focusing on creating engaging campaigns that drive growth opportunities through multiple touchpoints across different organizational levels.
The shift to this model required a change in thinking, particularly in how we structure our teams and measure success. Rather than focusing on a typical metric like "30% of revenue must come from marketing," we concentrate on how we're collectively contributing to overall goals for annual recurring revenue (ARR). This has helped create a truly collaborative environment within the go-to-market function, which spans beyond sales and marketing.
Looking ahead, how do you see B2B marketing evolving, particularly with the advancement of AI technology?
With AI we can capture and process customer data much faster, shortening turnaround times in account segmentation and enabling more sophisticated automation and personalization at scale. I expect a migration where we'll have deeper insights into individual buying behaviors and preferences within enterprises. Instead of marketing to accounts we’ll be marketing to people.
To do this, we're evaluating and building tools that combine data from various sources like LinkedIn with our internal insights. The goal is to move beyond traditional account-level engagement to create more personalized, dynamic interactions while maintaining appropriate professional boundaries. This evolution will enable us to better understand and engage with specific individuals within organizations, tracking their journey and tailoring our approach accordingly.
Consumer marketing led the way in personalization, but B2B is catching up. We're seeing opportunities to leverage data in new ways, creating more targeted and effective campaigns, powered by AI-driven insights and automation. There are already tools emerging that can help design campaigns based on key messages and personas, though we still need more sophisticated solutions for dynamic campaign management and real-time optimization based on performance metrics.
about
Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition is a leading technology company that develops comprehensive simulation and software tools for autonomous vehicle development. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, the company enables automotive and robotics companies to accelerate the creation, testing, and deployment of autonomous systems. Their platform helps manufacturers simulate millions of driving scenarios, validate autonomous vehicle behavior, and streamline development from testing to production.
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.