Georgina Beard is Head of Sales Enablement at SEON Fraud Fighters, where she leads all aspects of sales enablement for the commercial organisation. With extensive experience in sales and enablement, she plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between sales and marketing teams while driving revenue growth. Her expertise spans sales process optimization, content strategy, and cross-functional alignment in high-growth technology companies.

How has the evolution of B2B buying impacted the relationship between sales and marketing?
The B2B buying landscape has become significantly more complex, with buying committees expanding and more of the customer journey happening before any sales interaction. This shift demands a fundamental change in how marketing supports sales. While sales has traditionally been heavily marketing-led, we're now moving towards a more balanced approach where sales and marketing work in tandem.
What's particularly interesting is that we're seeing increased C-suite involvement in buying decisions. Five years ago, you might have had certain budget limits that didn't require senior approval, but that's no longer the case. This evolution means we need to be much more strategic in how we engage different stakeholders. While we excel at understanding our technical buyers and individual champions, engaging C-suite executives, particularly CFOs, requires a completely different approach.

What specific changes do you believe marketing needs to make to better support sales in this new environment?
Marketing needs to adapt its content strategy to address the expanded buying committee. Currently, there's a noticeable gap in content tailored for specific personas, particularly at the C-suite level. Unless a business is directly targeting CFOs, for instance, you rarely see content specifically crafted for their needs and perspectives.
Another crucial area for improvement is the alignment of success metrics between sales and marketing teams. Often, marketing focuses heavily on generating MQLs, while sales teams are primarily concerned with closing deals. This misalignment can create friction and inefficiency. Businesses need tighter alignment across these metrics to ensure everyone is working towards the same goals, rather than pulling in slightly different directions.

How do you envision the ideal sales and marketing collaboration in today's environment?
The perfect collaboration involves side-by-side work throughout the entire sales process. Currently, there's often a heavy focus on demand generation and product marketing, but what I call 'sales marketing' is missing – the crucial middle ground. This includes developing materials for post-meeting follow-ups, competitor-specific content, and resources for different stages of the customer journey.
What's particularly important is establishing a strong feedback loop between sales and marketing. Rather than just measuring content effectiveness through customer interactions, we should also consider how often sales teams are using these materials and why. Understanding whether low utilisation is due to poor content quality, unclear use cases, or distribution challenges can help strengthen our overall process.

Looking ahead, what capabilities do you wish marketing could provide to help sales be more successful?
The dream scenario would be moving from company-level insights to individual-level understanding. Currently, we might know that a 5,000-person company has been engaging with content, but identifying which specific individuals are showing interest remains a challenge. Having a centralised view that brings together all interactions – from LinkedIn engagement to content downloads and event attendance – would transform how sellers can sell.
Additionally, our content formats need to evolve our content formats to match modern consumption habits. Video and audio content are becoming increasingly important. People are more likely to listen to a voice note during their commute or watch a 90-second video while running errands than to read a lengthy document. Marketing needs to adapt to these changing preferences and create more digestible, multimedia content formats that align with how busy professionals actually consume information.
SEON is the leading global fraud prevention solution that stops fraud before it happens, at every point in your customer journey. Founded in 2017, SEON has stopped over $200 billion in fraud-related losses and actively supports over 5,000 businesses worldwide. By integrating real-time digital footprint analysis, device intelligence and a customizable AI-driven rules engine, SEON equips businesses across various sectors like igaming, fintech, financial services, payments and ecommerce to proactively identify and mitigate potential threats.
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.