On this Keepin’ it 100, Trinity is joined by Eduardo Valladolid, the Head of Demand Generation & Customer Marketing at Thought Industries, a B2B customer education and external training platform provider.
“I was able to shine a little bit within the sales team and show them that I'm more than just an event marketer. I'm here to help drive revenue for the company.”
Eduardo Valladolid recognizes how a strong relationship between sales and marketing can lead to faster revenue growth. In this episode, Eduardo shares how as an event marketer at BlackLine he successfully built relationships to connect the sales team to strategic clients.
Eduardo is a customer-obsessed marketing leader who understands the end-to-end customer journey in enterprise sales. He's driven by data and results, leads by example, and has a track record of successfully partnering with sales leadership, global teams, and demand gen at enterprise technology companies.
Trinity: Hi, everyone. And welcome to another episode of Keeping it 100 – helping revenue practitioners better tackle a new role or project. I'm your host, Trinity Nguyen. And today we are joined by Eduardo Valladolid, head of Demand Generation and Customer Marketing at Thought Industries. Getting sales and marketing to work together can be a challenge. But for Eduardo, it was all about working backward from what matters most to your business and your sales team revenue. How did he make the partnership with sales so successful? Have a listen. That's amazing that your sales partner is the one who brought you over the next company. Right? Usually if you keep hearing all these webinars about like how to align sales and marketing, how to make them work together better, but it sounds like you have a very strong and amazing relationship with your sales partners.
Eduardo: Yeah, and I'm quite proud of that. It was actually sales who helped elevate me in my career because I started off I'm doing events for BlackLine, but it was the Senior Vice President of Enterprise Sales at the time, Dominick de Paolo, who was my mentor at BlackLine. He kind of helped elevate me into a director role that would then oversee the enterprise revenue segment, which was a fantastic experience for me. But I immediately walked into what you just stated, where there was so much friction between sales and marketing. The two departments were completely siloed, working after two very different goals. That's where we kind of just did a shift in mindset and started figuring out what the sales goal was and then working backwards from there and building a plan to help reach that goal. I mentioned, I started doing events for BlackLine and an event marketer of five years ago, maybe even sometimes an event marketer from last year or last month, they were only focused on registrants and attendees. While that certainly is important, we also need to make sure that's going to convert into deals for the sales team. So, if I'm doing an event in let's say Minneapolis, I need to figure out what the sales team like, who are your target accounts here? If it's 3M, which is HQ to Minneapolis, then let's figure out where we can host this event. Maybe it's something that's at the lobby level, level of 3M's building, or maybe it's across the street. Something that doesn't require them to get on a public transport or have to get an Uber, but something they can just easily go down an elevator and just cross the street to go to this event so we can truly make this about around them and getting them to show up and fill that seat at our event. So when Dominic, the gentleman I mentioned earlier, realized that I was applying this kind of methodology to my venue selection even, he appreciated that. Then, when I was doing a national road show, I was working with a very large restaurant group that had nationwide locations, and so I was giving them quite a substantial amount of revenue. I have formed a bit of a relationship with my sales manager. She became a close friend and I told you, I'm giving you so much money. You're hitting your number this quarter because of BlackLine. So how about you help me with, I'm scheduling a meeting for your CFO and my Dallas rep since the company was HQ in Dallas. So we got a meeting scheduled and the Dallas rep eventually ended up closing that restaurant group, and he mentioned me in the win report. All of that stuff eventually made its way to the ears and eyes of the executive team, and that's where I was able to shine a little bit within the sales team and show them that I'm more than just an event marketer. I'm actually here to help drive revenue for the company and for you. You complimented me and thank you earlier for my relationship with sales team, but I know that's a true thing.
I have more LinkedIn recommendations from sales reps than I do from marketers. I have salespeople out as references on my resume. It's for a reason, I love working with sales reps. I understand what they're going through. I understand the stress that they're under and I appreciate and respect that, and I also know how that impacts the company. There's more beyond just me and my role and my growth. I want to be part of a company where I'm proud of the product and I'm proud of what we do, and we want our customers to have a good user experience. A lot of that starts with the sales team. So it's important for me to help the sales team win because that eventually trickles down to my success at some point.
Trinity: Do you have a note of encouragement or insights to share? Email me and we'll get you on the show at podcast@usergems.com. Thanks for listening.
