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Gianna Fornesi
VP of Marketing, GTM at Flex
about
Gianna Fornesi
Gianna Fornesi is the VP of Marketing, GTM at Flex, where she leads integrated B2B marketing efforts across the full partner journey—from awareness to expansion. At Flex, she has built the marketing function from the ground up, shifting the company from a solely sales-led motion to a full-fledged marketing and sales support engine. With deep expertise in brand positioning, design, customer marketing, and executive thought leadership, Gianna believes the future of B2B growth lies in activating existing accounts and building community—not just chasing net-new leads.
How has Flex evolved its approach to measuring marketing success beyond traditional metrics like MQLs?
At Flex, we've moved beyond just generating top-line pipeline to focus on driving deeper engagement across the customer lifecycle..We prioritize post-sale activation by empowering property partners to promote Flex directly to their residents. Rather than relying solely on MQLs, we track how many properties are leveraging Flex tools and resources, which correlates with new user growth.
On the B2B side, we're moving from a company-account model to one that measures engagement across multiple stakeholders within an organization—particularly important in property management, where different contacts may oversee different sites under a parent company. Our engagement metrics include unique inbound activity, self-initiated outreach, and how frequently contacts interact with Flex over time. Given the rent cycle's time-sensitive nature, we also rely on time-based metrics to assess partner momentum and account health.h.
You mentioned Flex is still building its account-based marketing approach. What challenges have you faced in this transition?
Our biggest challenge has been structuring data in a way that reflects how our industry actually operates. We're transitioning from HubSpot to Salesforce, which has required redefining our account relationships to align with buying groups and influencers, rather than just individual contacts.
To market effectively, we need clearer visibility into contact roles and ownership structures. whether we’re engaging with a single independent operator, a regional decision-maker, or a corporate ownership group. This level of insight is critical for crafting campaigns that resonate with different segments of the market.
We're also investing in more robust attribution models and activity tracking to better understand who’s engaging with us, both online and at events, and whether we’re reaching the right stakeholders at the right time. Creating this activity calendar is something that didn't exist previously for us. While the transition has been complex, it's also laid the foundation for a much more scalable, insight-driven approach to marketing.
How has Flex's approach to revenue generation evolved, and what strategies are you implementing to drive advocacy and community building?
Until I joined a year ago, Flex had limited marketing infrastructure – it was primarily sales-led with minimal post-sale engagement. Since then, we’ve built a more holistic approach focused on retention, expansion, and engagement. We’re now defining and measuring key touchpoints that occur after the deal closes, which helps drive long-term value and customer success.
For advocacy, our goal is to make our customers the heroes: "You're the hero because you've offered Flex, which helps your residents." We're not marketing to them, we're marketing with them–encouraging them to share their stories internally and externally
Word of mouth has become a powerful driver–property managers often bring Flex to additional properties or refer peers because they belong to the same ownership or regional networks. This relationship-based model builds engagement at the contact level, especially when multiple champions emerge within an account. It fuels a virtuous cycle of advocacy, demand generation, and referrals.
How have you approached the alignment of marketing and sales teams at Flex?
At Flex, we’ve focused on aligning marketing and sales around the entire account journey—not just lead generation. We've built out clear personas and defined handoff points between SDRs, AEs, and our post-sale partner success team, especially during onboarding and quarterly business reviews. The post-sale phase is where we've made the biggest strides, ensuring that both teams stay engaged long after the deal is signed.
One of our key challenges has been connecting the dots across contacts tied to the same parent account. We’ve worked to ensure that sales isn’t just seeing isolated leads, but the full picture of engagement—how different stakeholders are interacting across channels and over time. That’s required refining our data models and reporting so both teams can view account engagement holistically.
By emphasizing trust-building and brand awareness early in the journey—and continued engagement after the sale—marketing is positioned as a full partner in revenue, not just a source of leads.
You emphasized the importance of content-driven marketing. How do you tailor your strategies for different segments?
Property management is a unique industry—residents are digital-first, expecting to manage rent from their phones, while the business side remains highly relationship-driven and analog. Our marketing bridges that divide by tailoring our strategies to both audiences.
Events work incredibly well for us to build trust and engagement. We track session topics at conferences to identify trends that Flex can speak to—often centered around operational efficiency or the resident experience, which are natural tie-ins to Flex. This audience is moved by trust-building and thought leadership before they know what they want, which is why we focus on education first.
We’re also evolving our messaging to focus on outcomes over features. Since flexible payments isn’t a commonly searched term, we emphasize time savings, staff morale, and resident satisfaction as core value drivers, helping audiences discover solutions without having to search for it explicitly.
about
Flex
Flex is an innovative payments platform revolutionizing the way rent payments are made. By bridging the gap between when rent is due – typically on the first of the month – and when people actually get paid, Flex gives renters breathing room to pay on a schedule that works for them. The platform enables renters to split their rent into two smaller payments, and pay it directly to Flex. Flex then pays the property or landlord on time and in full. Through its technology-driven approach, Flex transforms rent collection into a valuable financial amenity while eliminating the stress of fixed payment dates for renters.
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.