About Melanie Le Sage
Melanie Le Sage is a marketing leader focused on driving and accelerating change and fostering collaboration across teams and functions globally. Having established best practices across multiple marketing disciplines and driving initiatives in areas such as digital marketing, lead generation, and strategies, her efforts are aimed at aligning marketing initiatives with sales objectives and leveraging new and emerging technologies to enhance marketing outcomes. Melanie is dedicated to creating impactful, data-driven marketing approaches that support business growth and innovation.
How has account-based marketing changed B2B measurement, and what challenges have you faced aligning marketing with sales?
Account-based marketing has certainly influenced my approach to measuring marketing effectiveness. While demand and lead generation remain key metrics, it is useful to become much more focused on tracking the engagement of target accounts over time, evolving to more quality-focused metrics across the entire customer journey.
However, aligning marketing with sales has been challenging, mainly due to misalignment of goals and targets set at the beginning of the year. Sales typically have shorter-term goals, while marketing often has a more supportive role with longer-term strategies.
To tackle this, I have found that focusing on fostering open and clear conversations about the challenges faced by our sales teams has been effective. We’re essentially working towards better alignment, collaboration, and transparency which includes establishing shared goals and metrics. It's an ongoing process, but demonstrates positive results.
One key strategy is changing the narrative around the marketing-sales dynamic, emphasising that we're one commercial team, with the customer at the heart of everything we do. This shift in perspective has been key in breaking down departmental barriers.
"While demand and lead generation remain key metrics, it is useful to become much more focused on tracking the engagement of target accounts over time."
"We've shifted from reporting on the number of leads generated to focusing on opportunity conversion rates. This demonstrates marketing's tangible impact on sales and revenue."
What key metrics do you use to measure marketing's revenue impact, and how have you made these metrics more relevant to sales?
I aim to focus on three main KPIs: qualified leads generated and passed to sales, the conversion rate of these leads to opportunities, and tracking the full sales process from lead to closed deal.
However, if I were in the CEO's shoes, I would emphasise two key metrics: direct revenue generated as a result of marketing efforts and spend, and the identification of net new customers and business contributed by marketing. This approach positions marketing as a profit generator rather than a cost centre.
It’s important to evolve the reporting to focus on metrics that directly translate to sales outcomes, moving away from 'vanity metrics' like website visitors. For instance, shifting from reporting on the number of leads generated to focusing on opportunity conversion rates. This demonstrates marketing's tangible impact on sales and revenue.
By aligning our language with sales objectives and discussing the entire customer journey, you create a more cohesive narrative that resonates across both teams. Tracking these metrics in the CRM system, provides a centralised platform for monitoring these crucial data points.
How do you use data and AI for account insights, and what's AI's future in B2B marketing?
Being heavily data-driven and leveraging both the database and analytics tools to map out the data, helps us better understand our customers, and gain insights into market trends to drive the decision-making processes. I have seen significant investment in technologies to capture and analyse customer interactions across all customer touchpoints, improving our ability to predict buying behaviour.
Generative AI is playing an increasingly important role in B2B marketing. Having trialled it for content idea generation, data summarisation, and cross-product training material development. One major success has been using AI to summarise complex scientific content in a way that's accessible to others, fostering internal collaboration and creating a more unified language.
I have also found AI as a brainstorming tool to be effective in creative processes. Rather than relying on AI to produce final content, you can integrate it as an additional team member to generate diverse ideas that can then be refined and developed.
However, I do believe that we should remain cautious in our approach, implementing comprehensive training on potential pitfalls like data security and AI-generated hallucinations. It’s important to instil a culture of always verifying AI-generated content and view it as a starting point rather than a finished product.
"To truly impact business beyond traditional lead generation, marketing needs to address its perception problem. There's often a view of marketing as a support function, while sales are seen as the primary revenue generators. This outdated view doesn't reflect marketing's true value."
What trends will shape marketing-sales collaboration, and how can marketing impact business beyond lead generation?
Transparency, communication, and technology adoption will be key trends shaping marketing-sales collaboration. We'll likely see sales teams more engaged with emerging technologies like generative AI, potentially improving alignment between the sales and marketing teams.
To truly impact business beyond traditional lead generation, marketing needs to address its perception problem. There's often a view of marketing as a support function, while sales are seen as the primary revenue generators. This outdated view doesn't reflect marketing's true value.
To combat this, we need to be running internal marketing campaigns to educate stakeholders on marketing’s true value. This involves changing our language to resonate with our internal audience, much as we do with external customers. By articulating our impact in terms that align with broader business objectives and demonstrating our direct contribution to revenue and growth, we can shift perceptions.
The future of marketing lies in adapting and leveraging new technologies, demonstrating direct business impact, and fostering closer sales collaboration. This approach will elevate marketing's role and drive significant organisational value.
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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.
6sense are changing the world of marketing, one customer advocacy programme at a time. Ready to transform your business?