Collaborative Velocity: Accelerating Pipeline Together

Revenue Rehab

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Jennifer Hopkins, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Sonar.

Jennifer Hopkins, the driving force behind the marketing strategy at Sonar, has 14 years as a B2B marketing executive. She’s known for driving category-leading brands to unprecedented growth and helping founders successfully exit.

With a knack for sales acquisition, she thrives at the intersection of art and analytics, constantly pushing the envelope to deliver campaigns that not only resonate but also deliver tangible results. As CMO, Jennifer understands the value of building high performance marketing teams and collaborating across the C-Suite to propel growth.

When not crafting the next big campaign, she can be found enjoying time with her family in her new role as mom or mentoring the next generation of marketing trailblazers.

On the couch in this week’s episode of Revenue Rehab, Brandi and Jennifer will tackle sales and marketing success and increasing pipeline velocity via collaboration and a healthy competitive mindset.

Bullet Points of Key Topics + Chapter Markers:

Topic #1 Building Healthy Competition: Marketing and Sales [05:49] “I think the first thing is that you've got to have a marketing leader who's not afraid to put a number on their back,” Jennifer says. “I think that starts this healthy kind of Olive Branch of building a relationship, building trust.” The second thing Jennifer identifies as a critical factor is alignment, “both sales and marketing leaders, they've got to have their teams aligned on the same KPIs, the same targets that they're going after.”

Topic #2 Creating a Collaborative Environment [13:43] “My number three is you've got to bring people into the fold,” Jennifer explains, “alongside your sales leadership, you've got to create a collaborative environment. Oftentimes, these teams that are siloed, they're not even meeting regularly.” The most successful approach, Jennifer stresses, is going to be top-down, “your marketing leader and your sales leader have to find a way to make sure that the team sees the value in these meetings.”

Topic #3 Ensuring Time Spent is Valuable [19:28] “I think this kind of leads me into the fourth point of,” Jennifer says, “you've got to share the data. And you got to be transparent across both teams.” She continues “I think the important thing is too, your entire marketing team, and your entire sales team doesn't have to be in a meeting all the time together…I think it's finding the right meetings and putting the right people in the same room…whether it's your head of marketing, or your head of demand gen who's hearing those conversations, they've got to then bring it back to the team.”

So, What's the One Thing You Can Do Today?

Jennifer’s ‘One Thing’ is: “Audit your current process, like take five minutes and actually sit down and think ‘how am I currently collaborating with the sales team?’ And if you're doing all four of the things that we talked through today, awesome, high five, keep doing it. If there's something that you haven't tried yet, my one homework would be pick one. Try it out for 30-60 days and see if it's helping.”

Buzzword Banishment:

Jennifer’s Buzzword to Banish is ‘frothy’. “I've heard it a lot in the past year and a half in regard to capital flowing around the marketplace,” Jennifer says, “but for me, it just, it's a little cringe worthy.”

Links:

Get in touch with Jennifer Hopkins:

• LinkedIn
• Sonar

Episode 38: Marketing & Sales Divide: Perspective from Both Sides

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