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Richard Francis
VP Marketing & Business Development at Foleon
about
Richard Francis
Richard Francis is VP Marketing & Business Development at Foleon, where he leads global marketing and business development initiatives. With extensive experience in both sales and marketing leadership roles, Richard brings a unique perspective on sales-marketing alignment, having previously served as VP Global Marketing. Based in Amsterdam, he drives Foleon's growth strategy across international markets, focusing on vertical-specific expansion and digital transformation of content marketing.
How are you evolving your revenue generation approach, and what role does marketing play in this transformation?
While we've historically been very marketing-led, with 80-85% of pipeline generated through inbound marketing, we're actively pivoting our strategy. This shift is driven by changing sales metrics and investor expectations around profitability and customer acquisition costs. We're implementing new technologies and training programmes to strengthen our outbound motion, aiming for a 72-25 split between inbound and outbound by next year.
Marketing continues to play a crucial role in brand awareness and interest generation, but the approach has evolved. It's no longer just about collecting inbound hand-raises. Marketing now has the responsibility to gather and analyse intent signals from various data sources, leveraging our website as a comprehensive resource—not just for conversions but for all visitors. This data then feeds into our outbound organisation, helping sales prioritise their time effectively.
For instance, while an inbound inquiry obviously indicates strong interest, we know that only about 1% of our website traffic actively reaches out. The remaining 99% might be well into their journey—engaged with our ads, exploring our website, consuming content, watching videos—but haven't yet requested a demo or pricing. This represents a significant opportunity for targeted outreach.
Our approach now operates on two levels: maintaining a broad demand funnel running awareness, consideration, and decision-orientated campaigns, while precisely targeting our optimal audience segments. This strategy allows us to focus our resources efficiently while maintaining visibility across our target market.
How do you manage the increasing complexity of B2B buying groups, and what support does marketing need to provide?
The B2B landscape has become more complex, with expanded decision-making units and increased scrutiny around technology investments. This complexity requires a more sophisticated approach to sales engagement. Multi-threading has become essential; we need to develop broader relationships within target organisations earlier in the buying cycle.
Marketing's role is evolving to support this complexity. We're now developing campaigns that target wider audiences within businesses, understanding the changing composition of decision-making units, and creating tailored content for different personas. It's no longer sufficient to build campaigns aimed at just one or two DMU members.
Crucially, there's an increased emphasis on value creation. Simply discussing features, functions, or efficiency improvements isn't enough. We need to demonstrate hard business metrics and solid ROI cases from the very top of the funnel. If marketing doesn't help prospects understand the return on investment early in their journey, sales faces an uphill battle in closing deals.
This extends to sales enablement as well. Our team needs to develop sophisticated communication skills to engage effectively with different stakeholders. Content touches every part of our customers' businesses, but people in different departments and at different levels think about and value things differently. The ability to pivot seamlessly between what concerns an operational person versus their manager versus the C-suite executive is crucial.
How are you leveraging data and technology to personalise outreach at scale?
We've implemented a sophisticated approach to personalisation that combines multiple data sources and technologies. Our content marketing efforts utilise our own platform's capabilities, enabling immediate personalisation based on form-fill information. For previously engaged prospects—whether lost leads, referrals, or those showing intent—we leverage historical data to tailor content effectively.
AI plays an increasingly important role in enabling personalised email outreach at scale, even across large target account lists. However, we recognise that technology-driven personalisation is just the first step. The real challenge lies in ensuring our sales team can effectively bridge the gap between automated outreach and genuine human engagement.
We're also moving towards a more comprehensive digitisation of our content strategy. Traditional PDF-based marketing funnels create a black box—once someone downloads your content, you lose visibility into their engagement. By delivering our content as HTML5 digital microsites, we gain detailed engagement insights, track sharing and consumption patterns, and feed rich behavioural signals to our CRM. This enables sales to prioritise their follow-up based on actual engagement rather than just download statistics.
This digital transformation extends to our customer marketing initiatives as well. We're increasingly applying new business inbound marketing tactics to our existing customer base, creating targeted campaigns for different divisions or regions within global organisations.
How do you maintain sales and marketing alignment in targeting accounts?
Alignment between sales and marketing on target accounts is absolutely critical. It starts with a crystal-clear understanding of our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)—identifying where we can sell more easily, close bigger deals, and maintain longer retention with lower overhead.
While our product serves diverse sectors, we've identified particular success in professional services firms. This insight shapes our go-to-market strategy, with concentrated efforts in corporate services, financial services, legal, and industrial sectors.
This focused approach requires organisational understanding that we're shifting from a volume to a value game, fundamentally changing our funnel metrics. While we may see fewer leads and opportunities, the increased efficiency in targeting and converting well-fit prospects ultimately drives higher revenue at better profitability levels.
Looking ahead, we're diversifying beyond purely digital channels, incorporating targeted events, strategic sponsorships, and community engagement. This hybrid approach allows us to maintain broad awareness while creating deeper engagement opportunities with our most valuable prospects.
about
Foleon
Foleon is a leading Netherlands-based software company that has evolved from an Amsterdam startup into a global scale-up, serving over 1,400 customers worldwide. Their innovative content creation platform enables organisations to produce interactive, personalised digital content that replaces traditional PDFs. The platform specialises in creating engaging marketing assets, sales materials, and corporate communications, helping companies track engagement and optimise their content strategy through sophisticated analytics.
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.