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James Mensforth
Sales Director at Aircall
about
James Mensforth
James Mensforth is the Sales Director at Aircall, overseeing sales operations across the UKI (United Kingdom and Ireland), Nordics, and North America regions. Since joining in January 2022, he has been instrumental in defining regional strategy, establishing processes, and implementing work methodologies to drive consistent year-over-year revenue growth. His role focuses on leading go-to-market initiatives and scaling revenue growth, particularly in the UK and Ireland markets.
How has your organisation's approach to revenue generation evolved, and what challenges are you facing in today's B2B landscape?
We're experiencing an interesting evolution at Aircall. Historically, we've been marketing-led, with our most successful pipeline coming from inbound leads. However, like many SaaS businesses, we're adapting to longer sales cycles and increased stakeholder involvement in purchase decisions. The software space has shifted towards consolidation compared to 18-24 months ago, and both marketing and sales have faced challenges with high-volume, low-personalisation approaches that worked previously.
The buying landscape has become more complex, particularly as we move upmarket. We're seeing more stakeholders involved in conversations – from operations and IT teams to CFOs and procurement. This expansion of buying groups means we need to adapt our approach and messaging for different personas. For instance, while sales leaders might focus on productivity metrics, operations teams are more interested in workflow improvements and technology stack integration.
We're also working to improve our lead qualification process. Traditional MQL scoring hasn't been particularly effective, especially given our free trial model. We're now moving towards a Marketing Qualified Account (MQA) approach, looking at account-level scoring rather than just individual leads. The goal is to combine marketing engagement scores, sales qualification criteria, and product usage signals into a more holistic evaluation system.
How do you envision the ideal collaboration between sales and marketing teams in this evolving landscape?
The dream scenario is moving away from completely cold outreach to having marketing build initial awareness before sales engagement. Currently, we're operating in a two-speed approach – wide-scale demand generation alongside focused SDR and account executive efforts on target accounts. The ideal would be having SDRs and AEs only reach out to accounts that have shown some level of awareness or engagement with either Aircall or our category.
This requires breaking down the traditional silos between inbound and outbound approaches. We're working to create a more unified strategy where marketing helps amplify our sales team's effectiveness. It's about creating a conveyor belt where marketing builds awareness and passes warmed accounts to sales, rather than relying on SDRs for the cold brand awareness piece.
What specific support do sales teams need from marketing to improve their prospecting efforts?
The challenge many SaaS companies face is that Account Executives, now expected to prospect more, are struggling to balance their time effectively. With limited hours available for prospecting alongside their other responsibilities, AEs need better support in identifying and researching the right accounts. Marketing can play a crucial role here by surfacing relevant accounts and insights upfront, essentially providing a semi-warm list for AEs to pursue.
Additionally, marketing can help by proactively serving up the right messaging for different personas and keeping content current. Rather than using outdated sequences, sales teams need access to the latest case studies and messaging that resonates with specific roles – whether that's sales, customer success, support, or operations. It's about empowering sales teams with data and insights that make their limited prospecting time more productive.
How can marketing better support sales teams in understanding and engaging with prospects?
We need marketing's help in three key areas. First, in making case studies more actionable for sales conversations – moving away from beautifully designed PDFs to quick-reference formats with clear bullet points about problems, solutions, and outcomes. Second, in translating product updates into go-to-market language that resonates with prospects. And third, in leveraging new technologies like generative AI to provide better account and industry-specific research.
The ultimate goal is to help sales teams be more strategic in their approach. Rather than churning through leads month by month, we need to plan our focus across entire quarters. This allows for better alignment with marketing initiatives, as building brand awareness and digital campaigns for specific accounts requires a more structured, longer-term approach than simply sending cold emails.
What role do you see marketing playing in maintaining sales team motivation and effectiveness?
Marketing can make a significant impact by helping sales teams understand their metrics better and demonstrating the broader support system behind their efforts. It's crucial to help AEs connect the dots between their activities and outcomes, understanding why certain approaches work and how they contribute to meeting their targets.
More importantly, marketing needs to make their support visible to sales teams. When AEs can see the cover marketing is providing for tier-one accounts, it helps them feel supported in their prospecting efforts. Even if it doesn't immediately translate into meetings, knowing that marketing is helping build brand recognition and warm up accounts makes the next sales touch more effective.
We're also focusing on helping our teams understand buyer intent signals better. We want to identify when prospects are starting to research our category or solutions to specific problems like sales effectiveness or cold call connection rates. By surfacing this information early, we can engage prospects before they've submitted a form, making our outreach more relevant and timely. This approach is particularly valuable as we move upmarket and try to engage in more awareness-stage conversations rather than late-stage pricing discussions.
about
Aircall
Aircall is a cloud-based phone system and call centre software provider that empowers businesses with flexible and efficient communication solutions. Founded in 2014 in Paris, the company has grown rapidly to become a leading player in the VoIP industry, offering seamless integration with popular CRM and helpdesk tools. With offices across major global cities including New York, Paris, and Sydney, Aircall serves thousands of companies worldwide, from startups to large enterprises.
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.