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Luke Rogers
Vice President of EMEA at ComplyAdvantage
about
Luke Rogers
Luke Rogers serves as Vice President of EMEA at ComplyAdvantage, leading the region's sales organisation across Enterprise, Mid-Market, Account Management, and Worldwide Sales Enablement and Business Development functions. With a proven track record in driving sales excellence, his leadership has delivered exceptional results. His strategic approach to sales and marketing alignment has helped transform the company's go-to-market strategy.
How would you characterise your organisation's revenue generation approach, and how has it evolved?
Our company has traditionally been very marketing-led, built on an incredible content engine and strong thought leadership. We publish an extensive annual State of Financial Crime report that generates thousands of downloads, and our trusted brand carries significant weight with both customers and regulators. When companies apply for licenses worldwide, regulators are typically very satisfied when they mention ComplyAdvantage as their financial crime technology provider.
While marketing-led activities still drive the majority of our revenue through inbound requests, we've successfully introduced more sales-led initiatives over the past 12 months. This includes increased participation in events and thought leadership speaker sessions, where our sales team has found remarkable success through networking-based selling. Our approach now combines both elements, with marketing-generated leads being proactively managed by our sales team through value-based selling and carefully routed to ensure optimal customer experience based on their size and needs.
How can marketing evolve to support sales more effectively in today's B2B landscape?
The key lies in moving beyond traditional metrics to focus on specific outcomes. As a sales leader, I'm constantly analysing our funnel - from cold calls to meetings, opportunities, and qualified opportunities. What's crucial is that marketing teams align with this detailed approach rather than just playing a numbers game with MQLs and SQLs.
For instance, treating a £2,500 opportunity the same as a £250,000 opportunity in marketing metrics doesn't reflect their true business impact. At ComplyAdvantage, we avoid this by aligning how teams are targeted and ensuring everyone is pursuing the same goals. This creates a valuable feedback loop that drives more meaningful results.
While the creative elements of marketing are important, I've seen firsthand how powerful strategic content and branding can be in shaping company perception. The challenge lies in measuring this impact effectively, which is why close collaboration between sales and marketing is essential.
How has the increasing complexity of B2B buying groups affected your sales process, and what support do you need from marketing?
The landscape has shifted significantly. Decisions that were once made unilaterally by one executive now involve multiple stakeholders and often escalate to C-Suite level. In our space, this typically includes the Chief Product Officer for API integration considerations, the COO who manages analyst headcount, the CFO for financial implications, and the Chief Compliance Officer as our primary persona.
What sales needs from marketing is targeted content for these various personas that address their specific concerns and help them understand the value proposition from their perspective. Rather than relying solely on the Chief Compliance Officer to champion our solution internally, we need marketing support to speak directly to each stakeholder's agenda; this is work that our marketing team are actively deploying
The key to success lies in understanding that different stakeholders are motivated by different aspects of our solution. While a Chief Compliance Officer focuses primarily on risk management, the CEO and CFO are more interested in how our solution supports growth objectives and cost efficiency. Our Marketing colleagues are developing content that resonates with each of these perspectives.
How do you approach account targeting and personalisation at scale?
The foundation of our approach was establishing a clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). We leveraged the ICP 3+1 framework, focusing on three universal dimensions - company size, geography, and industry type - plus specific factors that influence product-market fit. This helped us narrow our total addressable market from 9,000 accounts to about 25 targeted accounts per account executive.
For outreach, we demand high levels of personalisation. Every communication must include relevant details from the company's website or the individual's LinkedIn profile, recent news, or specific circumstances. While this process is currently manual and labour-intensive, we're seeing strong results, particularly through cold calling, which continues to outperform other outreach methods significantly.
What's your vision for the ideal sales-marketing collaboration?
The key is not treating sales and marketing as separate functions but as an integrated commercial team. In our organisation, despite having different reporting lines, our head of marketing is included in all sales management meetings and we work together as one team. This close integration ensures that both teams are aligned on objectives and can respond quickly to market opportunities.
Looking ahead, the marketing team is working on better visibility into prospect engagement across our entire ecosystem and beyond. Understanding how contacts interact with content, what they're searching for, and their journey before reaching out will be invaluable. This kind of intelligence will help us serve more targeted content based on company type and stage - for instance, differentiating between an early-stage fintech needing their first compliance system versus a century-old bank looking to upgrade their existing infrastructure.
A perfect example of why this matters came from a recent lead from a major telecommunications company. During a conference call, I discovered that this contact had accumulated over 2,000 touches within our marketing ecosystem before requesting a conversation. Yet this valuable information isn’t currently available in our CRM system, where most salespeople operate. Having this level of engagement data, properly scored and presented, will help us better understand the prospect's journey and readiness to engage.
Moreover, progressive marketing team will proactively drive these foundational elements rather than waiting for sales leadership to initiate them. Marketing should obsess about targeting the people most likely to convert into deals and continuously refine their understanding of our ideal customer profile. This involves maintaining a constant feedback loop about wins, losses, and customer behaviour to optimise our go-to-market strategy and ensure we're effectively serving each segment of our market, something our marketing team is actively engaged in.
about
ComplyAdvantage
ComplyAdvantage is a pioneering fintech company that leverages AI-driven solutions to revolutionise financial crime prevention and compliance. Their sophisticated platform helps over 1,600 companies worldwide navigate complex regulatory requirements and manage financial crime risks effectively. By continuously analysing data about high-risk individuals, entities, and activities, ComplyAdvantage enables organisations to make informed decisions and maintain regulatory compliance, ultimately contributing to a more secure global financial system.
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.