RX 9 - Rewiring GTM: The age of the connected marketer | Hailey McDonald, SVP of Growth Marketing, Marigold

In this week's episode of the Revenue Xchange, host Davis sits down with Hailey McDonald, SVP of Growth Marketing at Marigold. Together, they unpack how top go-to-market teams are breaking down silos by organizing around buyers instead of org charts, and why traditional alignment isn't enough anymore.

Key Takeaways:
1.) Buyers Don't Care About Your Org Chart: GTM dysfunction starts when teams ask "what do we need?" instead of "what does the buyer need?" Organizing around buyer behavior, triggers, and timelines creates natural alignment across marketing and sales.

2.) Revenue Pods Drive Real Collaboration: Weekly cross-functional pods bringing together AEs, BDRs, and field marketers create proximity and relationship building that transforms execution. This isn't alignment, it's connection at the territory level.

3.) Incentivize Deal Progression, Not Just Creation: Shifting BDR compensation to reward advancing deals rather than just generating them creates better buyer experiences and builds trust throughout the sales cycle. Accounts are a limited resource, not an unlimited one.

Closing Note:
Hailey offers a practical blueprint for restructuring GTM operations around the buyer journey. The message is clear: proximity breeds collaboration, and collaboration drives results. For revenue leaders looking to move beyond surface-level alignment, this episode provides the tactical framework for building truly connected go-to-market teams.

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants: 0:14

What's going on, Hailey? Hey, how's it going? Welcome, welcome, welcome all to our live podcast, and welcome to those Listening on Demand. We have a great one today on our next episode of The Revenue Exchange. So today we're gonna be talking about, rewiring go to market, the age of the connected marketer, and intent for ABM. So quick housekeeping per usual one. Please ask all questions, either live or in the chat. We want this to be as relaxed of a setting as possible. We will get everything we can within the hour or the time that we have today. Whatever is left over, we will carry over into our community or. You could reach out directly to Haley for her insights. The on demand recording will be on our Forge X Research hub if you want to watch this live. And then of course, for the ones tuning in on the podcast, Spotify, iTunes, apple Podcasts where wherever you listen to your podcasts, you will find this there. So. A couple of the big rock topics that we're gonna get into today. One, rethinking how your go-to-market teams should be connected around buyers versus the rigidity of org charts. Second, what it looks like to actually implement and think through a strategy for implementing revenue pods, and then how to actually align all of your go-to market teams or your revenue teams to really unify as one. These are really the, the, the first two we've never talked about on a revenue exchange before. And we have the genius of Haley McDonald, the SVP of Growth Marketing at Mayor Gold on today. She's going to share her insights behind this, what's working, what she has seen in terms of best practices behind all things Hailey. Very excited to have you on. I'm going to stop the screen share here, here, and pass it over for a brief introduction and then we can get into some of these topics. That's great. Thanks so much for having me, Davis. I'm, I'm really excited to be here. I'm a big fan of the community. I'm a big fan of the podcast. yeah. And excited to talk to everyone today. a little bit about me, just background to kind of give context, especially for what we're talking about today. I've been in marketing, more than 15 years, and I guess something a little bit unique about me is across those years I've really moved through most of the functions of marketing. slowly getting closer and closer to demand generation As soon as I got into demand gen. Got that taste of, oh, if I do this, it's connected to this dollar figure and it's real. The proof is in the pudding. I was hooked, really into revenue marketing and then over the years knew I just needed to get closer and closer to sales. Because every time that that happened, my results were always better and it eventually led to, one of my previous roles, I was able to both manage sales and marketing, which was an experience. Experience that was. A fundamental game changer for me at work, and I've since kind of come back into that marketing world really specifically. But I, I know that I will forever kind of take that connective tissue in my experience in sales forward in every one of my roles and certainly inspired, what I wanted to talk with you about today. I have so many questions in regard to that as well, but, okay. So let's kick this off, Hailey, because I'm really intrigued in this whole, concept of how top go-to market teams are connecting around buyers versus org charts. What does that mean? Right. so I, I guess I can first say that I, I in no way think that I am going to convince any viewer or their boss to like eliminate org charts. Right? But I will say that as I kind of started working with sales more closely and then had the opportunity to manage two functions like that, that are typically, you know, split even if they do work together, I realized that that. Is you really kind of have to work around that org chart in order to get the results that we need today, especially just with how buyers are behaving now. Right. That that has been evolving so quickly, not only with technology and you know, like. Just our socioeconomics, but then you throw AI into the mix, not to like get keyword heavy already, but you know, like that has now accelerated how buyers are are buying. and so I really have started thinking that every go-to-market motion should really orbit around, you know, one question. This isn't, news I think for most people, but you know, it should orbit around what does the buyer need right now? Like, what does the buyer need? And I, I guess what I've seen historically is that a lot of g like go to market dysfunction starts when teams answer What do we need right now? Instead of what does the buyer need right now? So what do we need right now leads pipeline attribution, right? That's when campaigns really start to drift away from the actual buyer journey. and so I found that when you kind of recenter on that buyer behavior, the triggers, the timelines, the anxiety, your org naturally like sinks, your messaging sharpens like what you need to say becomes really easy. Your spend deficiency approves and channel selection just becomes obvious. And so how do you build a team around that? For me, it's really led into how can I create a system where like, marketing and sales are not just aligned, but really connected and what does that look like and what are our ways of working? And yeah, so I can, I'm happy to share where we might wanna dig in and what's been effective or Let's do it. Yeah. I'm, I'm, how are you? How are you? Restructuring or rethinking the way in which these teams are partnering? Are there different roles or how does the, how do the workflows come together? How are you thinking about your account investment strategy as well? Yeah, no, that's a great point. So I think there's kind of two really core areas, especially as of late, and I have an incredible team that I work with at the moment at Marigold that is really. Helped me have a lot of these, like realized a lot of these things in an even bigger way.'cause you know, many people are better than one. but it's kind of two streams for me. Like one is really the alignment on our ideal customer profile, our ICP. and I know a lot of people. That's kind of textbook marketing in a way, right? Or at least gets like thrown out there. But I think that it often ends up just being like a box tick. Like, oh, we did that. You know, there was a template that we filled out about what our ICP was. And that's like, that's that. And I think I actually was having a really interesting conversation the other day from someone with a, from one of the leaders at Align, ICP and we were talking about how man, somehow, and especially the bigger your organization gets. Your sales team can have a different ICP as your marketing team. Like, it just, it, it kind of grows apart like that over time just through like natural things. So I think number one is like getting really aligned on that together and, you know, using data where you have it to prove that out rather than. Someone's opinion, right? I do think a lot of like sales are, account is data, right? They're boots on the ground. They're talking to people in a way that oftentimes marketers, we don't get to do that. Even if we're doing like industry research, we don't get that sort of like qualitative data. But pulling all of that in really aligning on what that looks like and who you want to go after, so that both teams are working toward that same goal. And then the other stream is like how then you're working together. And so, I mean. I would say historically what I've seen happen are, you know, a weekly check-in or readouts about what teams' plans are at best, right? Like sometimes it would even happen monthly or quarterly at certain organizations. And oftentimes it was kind of just this one-way stream of information of marketing to sales. If, if it was, if the teams were disconnected on who they were going after. I don't know how much impact that really made in sharing that information, you know? But like instead of doing something like that, we're now organized around working together in what we call pods. You could call'em. Teams, squads, whatever you want, but it's really, a collection of people from our marketing organization. And we also, BDRs are in marketing with us, at Marigold, but it can be, you know, wherever they may live in your organization. and so BDRs are field marketing teams and then our sales teams, and we do that both regionally as well as all the way down to a territory level. So you can get really, really close to the ground. and working through those like same kind of accounts and it 100% is like the heartbeat I think, of what makes our ABM work as well. That was a lot of. Awesome insight. I I was just ripping down some notes. First off, align, ICP is great. I don't know if it was Dan or Bob or someone else from their team, but, yeah, Dan. That's right. He's great. I like just connected with him. He's a super smart guy. Shout out to them. He's awesome. Huge shout out to Align. The targeting and segmentation. Couldn't agree more. I, I would love to emphasize that data-driven piece and I think Align, ICP, there are some other tools, but at least having that review into your historical data to prioritize where the revenue growth opportunity is within your organization. And Haley, one thing that you touched on too was the actual KPIs and the measurement and the reporting of which those KPIs, whether it was historically m qls for marketing or for the SDR team, it being, sourced, lead, sourced, SQ leads or, so meetings. Sorry, I'm completely butchering that one, but No, no, you're good. Thinking through, you know, those KPIs are the incentives that drive compensation, and so how you can re-architecture. The measurement and the reporting so that both of those teams are incentive, incentivized to partner versus a first touch or a last touch, or just driving some form of volume-based MQL metric. I'd be curious to hear your perspective on that. Did you shift any of the measurement and reporting or the compensation structures, or how did that look? Yeah, so, that's actually, it's a great question. and it is, it is. Definitely a place. My mind goes right away. Right. I both, I mean, I am pipeline and goal revenue pipeline and goals driven, just like as a person and then as a leader, I am like, it's my job to make sure that my people do well, you know, like for themselves sort of thing in that regard. And so I very quickly go there. I have a really smart C-suite leader. And my current organization that is really good at though, reminding me when I kind of, when, when I've brought that up in a call, you know, we've been like, well, we're having this pipeline challenge. Like, and or this, something like, let's, let's look at the compensation. We wanna make sure that, you know, people are getting compensated. Right. He always stops and says like. We need like outside of that, sure we care about people, but like we need to do what's right for the buyer first. And I always thank him for that. Like I, I have that in the back of my mind at all times now. Like, you're right, I always need to go back to that fundamental. Principle and then I, I've learned that things, the right things really flow from there. And so when we kind of were looking at like, all right, do we have leaks in the funnel? All the classic things that you kind of look at, especially when you're looking at bringing a BDR organization into marketing, or maybe they're moving back to sales or something, right? I think it's really about where you need to apply pressure. It was something we certainly, looked at and I think the biggest thing that we found that was both true for it was the right thing for the buyer as well as like, Hey, this really makes sense that we start to think about like how we align people and incentivize them was around, progressing deals. Not just creating deals, not just constantly. Right, right. Like buyers and accounts. Are a limited resource. They're not an unlimited resource. You cannot just forever and ever and ever keep like throwing those against the wall, right? At some point you have to really get into that lifecycle marketing, and so that was the biggest shift that we made was that we. Worked with the BDRs to incentivize progression of deals, and it ended up being really great for those account, for the AEs and for the accounts because they were getting that kind of extra love, that extra attention, that extra helping hand for longer in their deal cycle versus kind of just like meeting someone. And then if you've ever, you know, been a buyer, you've experienced that for the first time where you're like. I'm really excited to get into this tool. You meet your person for the first time and they're like, now I'm handing you off to this person. And you're like, where are you going? We just need friends. Like, so they get to build that relationship. It helps our organization establish, I think, better credibility and more trust. And so while it certainly was the right move, compensation wise, I think even more so again, it really created an even better experience for the buyer. Okay. And, I have a couple more questions, but I saw Emily, came off of mute briefly. So Emily, I wanna make sure that we get your question answered. Yeah, thank you. I didn't wanna interrupt you there, so thanks for highlighting Please. Anytime. I'm a bit of a chatter box, so feel free to interrupt. I mean, to be honest, I'm still wrapping my head around buyer versus org chart a little bit, but where I sit, I sit on the, kind of the COE side. So, and I think our, our org is. Set up in the way that you would describe the revenue pods are, are field marketing account team pods. so, so I, I guess my question is, I'm trying to view it from my lens and what can I provide for my revenue pod teams, from, you know, in terms of. Templates or frameworks and things like that. Because when you talk about buyers instead of org charts, you know, I think that gets pretty niche, unless I'm not understanding this correctly, but it feels like you really need to talk to each salesperson to understand exactly who the buyers are. so from my perspective, from a COE perspective, how do I. How do I tangibly support revenue teams that way without actually going through the org chart, if my question makes sense. Yeah. So maybe I'll see, maybe I probably could have been a bit clearer too. I think it was a bit of a attack at like your org chart. Like we are in sales, we are in marketing, right? Like we're in customer success. Like your buyer, your buyers don't care about that. Right? And so like, I think, oh, it's more, but I do think even. As an organization gets even bigger, it just becomes easy, you know, like there's no malice in it, but it becomes easy to kind of get into those silos. Like, I'm in marketing, I'm in sales, right? And these are our remits and the way that like organizations have historically. Worked together is just still too fragmented in my opinion. And so like, just really tactically, what we do is at, and it's the easiest probably to understand at like the lowest territory level, as in like the most specific is we would have an ae. Their BDR that supports them. And then the field marketing manager that owns, normally it's more than that territory, right? They have other territories too, but that's one of our pods. And then we end up having like dozens of those basically across the world. And then every week they have kind of a cadence monthly on how they get together, but they're looking at both that territories. AEs owned accounts as well as other accounts that would be within our ICP profile, that are also in that territory that may not be necessarily the right, like an owned account or like named to them. Every organization does that differently, but they go through that and they kind of like work through those lists. Every, every week, every month, just depending on what it is. The BDR has like certain roles that they play as far as delivering kind of outbound A BX plays. The field marketer is bringing in like, Hey, these are the larger kind of marketing plays that we're doing. The AE is normally talking about like. Do I have a full pipe and we need to progress some deals, you know, to close one or do I have an empty pipe and we need to like build that pipeline up. So everyone kind of has their roles, but they're connecting on a weekly basis about that. So it's just Got it. I think I misunderstood. It's really close to the ground. It's, which is helpful. Right. Other than otherwise we're all just kind of like building spreadsheets and ivory towers. Yeah. That's what's happening. I mean, you've been there, right? It's just like, it's too easy. It happens. Okay. I think I misunderstood, that concept earlier, so that, that actually makes more sense now. So then I guess from a COE perspective, what, what. What can I pro, what do you think I can provide to help support those smaller revenue pods? Especially with, salespeople who, like you said, they're ver they are traditionally very different. And what I found with salespeople is they think marketing is all. The same. There's no difference between event digital, you know, in mail, direct mail or anything. It's all marketing to them. Totally. It's really hard to explain, right? I mean, like, it's all sales to me, right? Like, I don't know what pro, like what is that? You know, what exactly a deck is different from this deck. And it's like, it is hard to get kind of into those intimate details with each other. I think the thing from a COE perspective, and really, I guess in our organiz, our organization, we're not, we don't have like a center of excellence per se, right? It's just kind of like our leadership team that really helps. And what was most helpful to those pods was like. First the definition of what that is, why we're doing it. The roles and responsibilities, right? Just getting really tactical and then like suggestions for like how you might meet up in a way that's going to be really impactful to making your goals essentially. The, which that's pretty like. Honestly, it's a bit administrative. I'm happy to share some kind of like thoughts and resources afterward that describe that and like, you know, have very specific KPIs for sort of each group that they can align on. but yeah, that's kind of administrative. The other thing that really fuels, I mean, honestly, I think. Most of the marketing that, my team is doing, but all but is very fundamental for these pod groups is our A BX playbook. So we have a full playbook on like, you know, there's kind of an outline of the strategy of like what A BX is to us, and we say A B, X. Some people say ABM, you know, like it's like. You've really gotta kind of like define those things for your organization, especially for new people that might be coming in with other experiences. And then we have plays for each, plays just kind of being like a motion or a program, some people might call it, for every different stage of the buying journey. We're pretty aligned to the technology that we use for that. But like, you know, just awareness, consideration, decision and purchase. And then it really kind of. It's almost matrix in that it then breaks down for awareness. You kind of have your one-to-one, your one to few, and your one to many plays. Right. It can, it very, I would say the one thing that we, it, it was very helpful to bring in that structure, but I think we're also thinking about like not over engineering like we want, we also. My CMO always says progress over perfection. And I like absolutely love that. And so I think we, we balance between like, Hey, here is the framework that you can use, but then like, work together and figure out what's gonna be best for you guys in this territory, in this region. What do you need most according to like what, where that sales team thinks they're gonna make money this year. Okay. That's actually very encouraging to hear'cause I'm, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. Yeah. so that's, and we use six Sense because it sounds like the same totally stages. I mean, they're all kind of the same, you know, as far as that goes. But I can share some resources too. I mean, or just like a little, like a little outline of kind of what we do. Again, it just gets like, it, it is helpful to get pretty tactical to say like, okay, this is what it looks like. And then the real work is like. Putting those tools to use, right. It gets messy really quick and just kind of knuckling through that together as a team. It has really helped us. I think it's helped. The biggest things that it's done is it's really, I think, helped our AEs feel far more supported, because like we're really, really in touch. We're really listening to them. and then for our, you know, sure. Our BDRs, but like all our field marketers for sure. I think it, it certainly has given them a sense. Not just a sense, it has helped make sure that like the work that they're doing is the right work, right? Right. Like we have all these ideas and marketing of what we can do. And I think a lot of'em are pretty good, you know? But like sometimes it's this really simple little thing that an AE just needs to communicate. Like, I'm struggling with this. And field can be like, oh, well we could do this. And it's like world changing for them, right? So that connection has been, I mean, it's just, I've been so. So pleasantly surprised how well it's worked with our organization. And I plan to continue to bring that into like anywhere I go in the future, if it, you know, if I can. Yeah, I mean if you can share those, KPIs and those structures a little bit more. Yeah, I think that, I think that will help because I think right now, and the, that's not clear. And so sometimes sales might not be clear on where, where or what to ask and not be clear on, oh, that's actually something that you can't. Or, or supposed to help me with and field is not sure exactly what they're supposed to ask from sales and what information they're con they're supposed to get from sales. So I think having some structure or guidance and framework, with the KPIs that you were talking about could help, yeah, drive some clarity there. I also think a, just another thing to add as far as if you're coming, you know, as if you're either in a leader position trying to help your teams or coming from a COE sort of perspective. Also just enablement on what these things are shouldn't go understated. I would suggest some kind of, you know, kickoff when these things are done. And as part of the kickoff, historically, one of the things that I found really helpful is that's a good opportunity. You have to be balanced so you don't bore them to death, but it's a good opportunity to kind of go in. And explain a little bit of like where, where marketing is getting its insights, right? Explaining a little bit of the behind the scenes, in your ABM tool. What sort of information is going in, what information is being spit out, and how that's kind of informing all of your programs that you're doing. within that enablement, it's also a really good time to be like, Hey, just planting seeds, like these are the types of things you can use. This meeting, these meetings for asking for support and coming up with like examples. That's been, I think that was something I really underestimated in what value it would provide. We just kind of did it. We're like, I guess we should do this, and it really, it landed really well when we did that enablement call. That's good to know. That's that's something. Think through, they have their, you know, periodic meetings. I can just jump on and share, those kind of insights. So that's really helpful. Thank you. Yeah, and I would love to hear like any, you know, like let's stay in touch. Any questions or reactions you get as far, I'm like very happy to kind of help work through it. I. also deployed similar things in much larger organizations that I'm at now in the recent past. And have I, it gets, it gets tricky when you're very large matrix and you have COEs and stuff like that, so happy to stay in touch about it. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, of course. Those are amazing questions, Emily. Thank you so much. Yvonne, I saw you just jumped on camera. Do you have a, do you have a question too? No, I just think that it's validating and I think a lot of us experience similar challenges and a lot of what Emily was saying around kind of the, the AEs, not knowing what, like what the services are, how they can be supported. And Haley, you talking about providing the playbooks and the guidance, that's similar experiences that we've had where. You know, they think it's just, they might just think that A, B, X or ABM is deck support. I mean, that tends to be the first one. And then making meetings cool. Right. And it's really important to outline all the different services and support you can provide, but also show the value. And figure out a way to measure it or promote it and create that. Because I've been in scenarios where at the end of the whole engagement, they still just saw the deck support as the biggest thing. And it's like, that's just'cause we made your life a little easier there. But we did so much more. So much more. So it's so important to, I think, have that structure and those outlines that you mentioned, Haley, so. It is like that's just a classic thing. It's really funny. I think I posted on LinkedIn earlier this week about that I started this little, like this funny little advice column and put a Google form out there to let people kind of pop in. Any questions you wouldn't ask in an all hands is what I said. And one of the first ones that came through, I was like, oh, this isn't like a funny one or anything, but I felt so strongly about it was that kind of mutual understanding, like how do I get my sales team to understand what I'm doing? Right. And I think like that is such the classic question. I don't know that we're ever gonna solve it, but I think the two things that I have reflected on is one you that you gotta, you have to like want to understand, right? And I think a lot of times, like we're just like different, potentially different types of communicators and all of that, and it's. So it's, you know, you have to knuckle through it together. It can't just be this one-sided thing. It's not just on marketing to kind of get that information through. and the other one was just like I have experienced is leadership alignment in both of those areas. Like when the sales leader and the marketing leader. Get along and value and respect each other. Oh my gosh. It makes such a huge difference. And so I think, you know, that's something I certainly consider in my sort of selection on like, Hey, where do I wanna, where do I wanna work? What, what adventure do I want to be on? Like I really want those two people to get along because everyone else kind of follows suit. And then these frequent touch points, I think have made an enormous difference because to some degree it's like. Relationship building, right? So the in proximity, what do they say about like, proximity in relationships? And so when you're seeing this group of people every week versus like, you know, once a month readout or once a quarter readout, that's made a really big difference too. Just humanizes everything. Huge emphasis on the marketing leadership and sales leadership. Getting along that is, that is massively important. And Hailey, you mentioned something earlier around the pods, which was they almost have autonomy to kind of place where their tactics or where their accounts are, in the journey stage. So for example. If they're low on pipeline, they can put more tactic and budget into generating pipeline versus, you know, maybe something more middle or bottom stage. If they're really going for revenue, how do they think about the autonomy behind what they can deploy within their accounts? And then. How does it, how do those pods, how do they think about the target account list in general as well, and what does that look like in terms of rolling up into some form of larger target account list? Or maybe it doesn't, Hmm. Yeah. Okay. So the autonomy, it's funny, I'm sure like my, my teams would be like, we wish we had more autonomy. Like, you know, there's, that's, there's a balance. So I think first. There is, you know, we have a strategy organization wide, right? That I think it's our, the, especially on the leadership side, it's our responsibility to make sure that we're steering the ship in that direction, right? And that everyone's on the ship sort of thing. but I also think that it's easy, again, I think as an organization grows as well, it becomes easier that when you're in a siloed situation is you. Like things can be treat if you're siloed and scaling. It's like a lot of one size fits all right? Which is like the opposite of ABM, so, or a, B, X. So when you start thinking about like, how are we gonna do A, B, X, and how are we going to not treat this like a one size fits all thing? You realize that within your regions, within even your territories, based on who, what accounts are in there. And then. You know, other factors as well. Sometimes like outside of the organization, like economics, political things going on, the needs are different. And so you've got to acknowledge that. You've got to acknowledge that, you know, the needs in France are going to be different from the needs of your territory. That includes like Florida or whatever. You know, it's just like different in general. and so we, we do, within the pod meetings, we really try to figure out like how to support that. And I think a lot of times the uniqueness in decision making ends up around very specific field activations. So a lot of the times it would, you know, like we can support certain areas of like deal progression. With executive breakfasts or executive dinners, right, that are true truly field. It's not some like broad brand activation across the entire organization. there's oftentimes where honestly, the AE could just use a little love from product marketing. Like they like really with some, like better messaging points on these really specific things, like based on the accounts in their area. They're seeing this competitor a lot, right? And so that time, normally at that point, our field marketers are like, well, we know someone who can do that. Go back to product marketing and pull them in and pull them closer to the AEs to get that support, which is really great. and other times it can be, like it ends up maybe being a little bit, a little bit more categorical, but we'll see like heavier. You know, vertical representations or something like that in one territory versus another, right? Like the California territory might have very different accounts than, you know, the rust belt or something like that, right? And so being able to kind of like ramp up certain campaigns and content or whatever that was in the plan at large, but, you know, push the pedal down a little bit more. Where the territory needs it is something that we're generally able to do either through marketing programs and, you know, field will kind of coordinate with performance marketing and stuff like that. Or like a, again, a lot of times the answer isn't so complicated. It can be BDR R is just really like pushing down, in that department a little bit more. which is, so your second question was on the account lists. Is that right? Yeah, the account list. That's a good, it's so, it's a good segue because it's really like it. You heard me say throughout that a lot of times, like what accounts are in that territory, right? What accounts are that pod is that pod representing as far as like rallying around this? This has been, this has been the one thing that I think almost every organization I've ever worked at just treats differently for like, for whatever reason it could be for historic. How do you come up with your, your account, your territory plan, your account, your named accounts, your, your whatever, right? Your tam, your som like, it just like there are, what do, what does PETA like to say? There's more than one way to skin a potato. We peel a potato. That's right. We don't, I like that. We don't skin cats anymore. We peel potatoes. so there's like a lot of different ways to do it. I think where we have seen success is our sales team and our revenue operations team has a healthy approach to creating a named account list. They work on that themselves. It's not like we don't contribute to it, but it is like an exercise that they do every year. Right. I think that's common in organizations. Great. Love it. Love that. They're rallied around that. We also rally around that. I think where marketing has added the most value though, is leveraging the data that we do have. And we've been able to expose like, Hey, our ICP actually like expands outside of that lens that you're looking at. And so we would, we would be remiss if we never looked at those accounts that are outside of those named accounts, particularly if there's like an intersection of this kind of, you know, like. ICP that surrounds those named accounts where there's like intent patches, right? Those are still dollars. We know we still sell to organizations like that, and so that's kind of where we've really pulled. Hold that from marketing in. And our field marketers, are really, honestly, they're like brilliant with working with all of our kind of account data and they partner with our BDRs to make sure that they're providing that coverage. The AE is very, very, very focused on their named accounts as they should be. They're working with their BDRs specifically on how we go about working that. And then the BDS and fields typically are working what we would, you know, refer to as that other like. The territory list of accounts that maybe aren't named but really are the ICP in their region. and we're normally able to pull up a lot from that, our BDRs experience, like wins and success there, like make their quota through that and yeah, it's great. I love it. And on these pods do, does the amount of budget allocated to each pod differ and then also do the pods leverage different A BX deployment models as well? Is there maybe like a one to-one pod versus a one to many pod? How, how are you differing across each of the pods? That's a great question. I wish we were like that sophisticated in general. but honestly it's a great proposal too, I think. Look, I like many organizations, we're kind of looking at, you know, a top down sort of thing or like, what are the goals globally? Globally? What are the goals regionally, right? and that's really where for most extent, we kind of organize our budget around that top line stuff. That said, we do, I mean we, our pod goals would basically represent. The AE quota, right? So like that ae of that pod, that quota would be their goal. And it is fundamentally our job to make sure that they're making their goal one way or another. Right. And we have some territories that benefit more from inbound, just by nature. Like New York, right? Like New York, California. Like you get more inbound requests and we have other territories where we have to go really heavy handed outbound or, you know, that the culture in that region is just more like a. In-person sort of thing, or like a relationship sort of thing. And so we, while it's not, I wouldn't say it's super structured by the nature of our kind of regional plans, we do kind of accommodate different programming for those sort of needs, you know, but I, it's not like, Hey, here's your budget. Go make some go crazy, right? Like it's, it's not like that. yeah. What was the second? What was the second part? That totally makes sense. And I, I forget the second part on, I know I got like lost. I'm sorry. But it's, that's, it's really interesting. So almost you have the sales team and the overarching go-to-market strategy setting that revenue. Objective. And then the AEs have their specific quota goals. Yeah. Which map back to that overall revenue target. And then you're looping in the marketing function or that marketing piece of the pod. So you have sales, marketing and then, maybe customer success if they have expansion accounts. Is that, is that the way. That's right. It's, it's almost structured. Okay. That's exactly how it goes. And then like by that and by proxy, right, we then kind of cover 100% of our pipeline goal as an organization, right? So we have this kind of top down approach, but the pods really supported like a bottoms up approach as well. And hopefully in that way, right? We're gonna meet in the middle and like get it done, come hell or high water if we will like, oh, you know, get to goal or overachieve. and you had asked. the other thing was the, the like, do you have one-to-one pods versus whatever. So that had, that's actually funny that you asked that too. It's something that we just kind of tackled in, the last couple of quarters and it's, we, we really kind of designed our pods around how sales works for us. It wasn't like, it wasn't about bending over backward, but it was really about like, I mean, they. Sales are why we're here, kind of, you know, I mean, like, it's like they, they do some pretty tough work. They're out there and so we didn't just wanna like meet them in the middle. We really wanted to extend a handover and really near the way that they think about selling and the way that yes, the way they sell. And so they, our sales team has like a strategic. Sort of segmented, you know, group of AEs that are focusing on the largest enterprises globally. And so we, we tend to have a more, bespoke approach in that pod in general about like, very selective about what we do. We're going after very specific verticals. It's not always just one to one. I think that always you're getting into like. Resource allocation always gets really hard. It's, it's hard to organize around one-to-ones, right? It takes a lot of technical prowess to do that in a scalable way. so oftentimes it's kind of like these cohorts of one-to-one of like, okay, we've got three. Three accounts that you're working that are super large accounts that are all in athletic apparel or something, right. And so we start to kind of like organize around that. I will say those are like the tougher pods for sure. Like it just is, they've got bigger goals. The needs are incredibly specific. yeah, so, and then everyone else pretty much, you know, benefits. Everyone's benefiting from our kind of one to many really programmatic campaigns that are organized around go to market or go to market. And one to few is really where we're kind of, I would say most of the pod activity takes place. We're really looking at those a, BX plays that are like targeting, like, you know, doing competitive take down or showing feature functionality or, addressing like RFPs that we know are coming. Things like that. H how do you balance? This is a question we've been fielding a few times in the past couple weeks where it's, you have your a, BX pods, you have your campaign plans in place, and then maybe there is some initiative. That comes out, whether it's a competitive takeout or some urgent campaign need within a specific subset of either the named accounts or accounts that might even be outside of the named accounts, but leadership is really pushing for the marketing team to put something together. How do you think about that? How do you, advise your teams and how do, how do you build the strategy to incorporate that? Or do you. Not incorporate it and, and push back. What's the, what's the balance behind that? What, that never happens. Yeah. No, never. Never. Nope. Never. Strategy. Never. I know Avan never experienced that. Neither is Emily. I'm sure it's fine. Like no, I, I mean it happens all the time. Right. And I. I always think, first of all, I mean, again, I mentioned at the beginning a little bit about my background, like the stint that I did when I was managing sales and marketing. Like I have a lot of empathy like this. People aren't doing that for funsies, you know, it's just good folks with good intentions that are trying to like accomplish goals and for the better of the organization in general. but I think, you know. I, I am also, I also feel really strongly about aligning on priorities, you know, in your planning phases and really trying to stick to those, or if you, if you need to kind of reprioritize, have those. Strategic conversations. Like if someone's coming to me saying like, Hey, go do this random campaign, or We really need you to go do this competitive takeout. I, I wanna know why they're asking. I wanna know the why first, right? Like, let's not talk about what we need right now. Let's talk about what the buyer needs right now. Go all the way back to the buyer. and I mean, like. I can pretty easily explain it and try to get that strategic conversation just by sharing, you know, every wasted dollar in marketing started as a good idea that wasn't anchored to a buyer need. Mm-hmm. And typically that opens the door. For that conversation. And then, you know, I'll walk away and come up with a strategic approach. And there might be, Hey, we need to take something off the table. We need to delay something. Or, this is easier than I think you, you know, like, I don't think it has to be some big production, right? Like, what do you think about this? And when you have that conversation, I've also found that my sales, my sales partners. Are over the moon at some of the simplest suggestions too, right? Like I think a lot of times as marketers we're like, oh my gosh, we have to go produce this whole thing. And sometimes you can just say like, Hey would like some messaging work from product marketing just to have in your back pocket? And you know, we can give it to the BDRs and like, yeah, great, that would be wonderful. Right? Or, Hey, what about these? Did you remember that these things exist? And they're like, oh my gosh, no, I haven't thought about that in forever. Like this already exists. Here you go. You know? So I really try to be like. A ball player, like, you know, like I'm really just trying to help them. But I, I would, I would say the overall suggestion is like, always go back to strategy, always go back to buyer needs, and then really try to have the conversation, which, I mean, not, I know I'm like beating a dead horse. Oh no, Pete's not gonna like that. I'm gonna have to figure out the one for that. But I, like, I, that's why it kind of goes back to pods for me too, is like we've developed, we've now developed a relationship with our sales team. Where like everyone knows that that's the expectation that we'll have the conversation like that, you know? And so it's like there's less resistance and it's, it just becomes part of the culture. I also wanna add, of course that never happens to me either. Like Hayley said, never. I, I also wanna add, yes, we, I have a conversation and try to understand the why and if I'm sort of, you know, like. Fishy about it, or I, I also want to try to provide suggestions that forces the field marketers or the salespeople to do more things themselves. So, if they say we need more budget for some sort of digital campaign, well, like Kayley said, did you know there's this sales outreach sequence? have you tried doing that? And then. The more you try to get them involved, if they're unwilling to be involved and to do some work themselves, it shows the lack of priority there and they're just trying to make you do something. so that's also a way I try to shift. Okay. Is this really, something strategic and that is a priority? Is it really a fire drill or whatnot? Or is it just you like. J you know, just needing, X, Y, and Z or whatever. So, mm-hmm. So that's, that's something else I wanted to add as well. That co-ownership is so great. I love that. Like just having everyone bought into it Right. And ready and willing to do some of the labor. I love that. It's a great stress test. Yeah. Stress test. There you go. That's the word I'm looking for. Yeah. But again, that never happens to me. So no. If, if it did, this is what we may, this is how we may approach it. We don't have experience here. This is, these are just ideas. This is, this is a brainstorming session. So, well, and, and something I was thinking about,'cause that's from a more program perspective, I was thinking from the one-to-one that happens as well where, you know. I would say historically the theory has been you've picked your accounts and you kind of stick with your accounts and try to lock'em in and don't switch'em in and out, and that's kind of best practice. But what I'm seeing now, and I just saw a post on LinkedIn, I'm not sure if it was someone from Forge X and Davis. Maybe you'll know if you if I when I talk about it. But he talked about really having more of a promotion demotion mentality with AB, with one-to-one accounts because. To your point, Haley, the buyer journey of something from the buyer surfaces that they're ready now, but they weren't part of that initial selection at the beginning of the year. It always puts the ABM people in such a pickle.'cause you're trying to stick to your guns. You don't want to be abused, you know, by reps pulling in accounts or not. So I think having the conversation on the why and the what and understanding that it's a buyer. Driven need. Like,'cause you do have to follow the momentum, right? Yes. You think you pick the top accounts and you don't always get it right. Even as you know, sometimes that's the value of a b you find out they're not ready right now, you know, and that's what you learn. But I think that, I just think that that happens a lot in, I like the way the, I forget who posted it, positioned it as promotion demotions. Maybe you have. Some possibility for flexibility there of, I think that's so important. Like, and that's honestly one thing that I feel like is very challenging for operations teams at large. Like what, no matter how your organization does it, if it's like G TM ops or rev ops and marketing ops, however, you know, is like we've, we see it in the buyer, right? We see buyer psychology changing and the way that people buy. Changing, but we're still kind of trying to force people in this funnel. Yeah. You know, like I even say it, I say all the time I talk about the funnel and like the stages and whatever, but I mean really the way that buyers buy and now that we have the technology, it should be a living, breathing ecosystem and promotion demotion makes 100% right. Sense. We have certainly, I think. Within pods and then just in marketing in general, have tried to leverage our segmentation strategies to make sure that we're capturing like who's coming into market, who's maybe not in market or false signals sort of happened. but perfecting that all the way into like your CRM and then your next planning cycles and stuff like that, I think is still a really difficult thing. I don't know a lot of people that have like aced that yet. Yeah, I agree. And, and the risk of one-to-one ABM is really high too. Given the amount of resources, if you have dedicated headcount, you know, you are really making a bet on this small subset of accounts. And if you're not able to prove the ROI on top of campaign spend, you also have your headcount spend as well. And so it's, you really have to nail it. Especially on one-to-one, one to few, one to many. You, you have more in the portfolio to be able to get that lift, but one-to-one is you, you really have to make a strategic bet. That's, that's, I think the, A bet is, not a bad word choice, honestly. It does feel like that often, right? There's so much going on behind closed doors in an organization, right? And so I think. It takes a really special AE to nail the, the accounts that are getting one-to-one too. Like I am, I'm really not, I really, I'm not really an advocate of doing one-to-ones in a marketing silo. I mean, like, I'm just saying I don't wanna do anything in a silo, but I know that some organizations right, have kind of just approached, like, this is how we define these things and then we just go do it. Right? there's no asking or anything like that, but. If you don't have your AE that's developing like a tremendous relationship with an organization that's getting a one-to-one, it's it's an easy way to waste money. Yeah. A hundred percent. And Haley, I know we have your insights. We have four minutes left. One thing I'm dying to get your perspective on ai, how are you and your teams leveraging it? What are you thinking about for 2026 as well? Is this impacting budgeting campaign spend where you're placing your. dollars in terms of tactics and channels. How, how is AI making an impact? Yeah, yeah. So I think, I, I have a. I've kind of been really fortunate to have a handful of wonderful experiences with ai, really since the emergence of gen ai, you know, what was it, 2023, late 2022, something like that. and I, I really now as a marketer, think about it twofold, right? I think about like, how am I and my team as marketers or, you know, like within revenue in general, how are we using ai? To be better or more effective or do cool things or whatever. And then I'm also thinking about like, how is ai. Impacting the way that my buyers buy. and so I know, you know, it's hot topic everywhere right now, like A-E-O-G-E-O, like AI search, like the whole thing, right? And I would say first and foremost, that has been number one, it's just moving so fast. I think like you, you, we have an incredible team that really laid out like a very solid strategy and then went at it right away. we were also, I mean, kind of serendipitous, but we were going through a rebrand and a website launch at the time, and so there was a really natural inflection point for them to start applying some of those tactics, but full, full force in general on just making sure that we're showing up in AI search. And I think it's. From what I've seen for, I mean, truly, I, I don't know. I don't know that there's any experts on this yet. We're all still kind of like learning and testing together, but from what I've seen, it's still early enough days that any amount of work that you do on this actually has pretty high yield, right? Like I think the more mature that a channel gets, the harder it is to like hack it and like be the best at it and stuff like that. So it's early days. I would encourage everyone, like rip the bandaid off, do like a little, like a one little thing, right? And you're gonna get like. Some results and that's better than no results. I'll just put it like that. And then as far as like using ai, I think like. Arts. The one thing that I've really learned with teams in general is that, like I, in the last year is that there seems to be a lot of curiosity and a lot of appetite for it, and I love that. And the thing that I feel most passionate about it now is really assessing a team's readiness for, and not just like an individual level or like a, like I know how to use AI sort of level, but like, do you have the fundamental. The fundamentals down of marketing. Like do you have a defined ICP? Do you have, you know, some of that core and basic structure? And that would, because AI is only going to multiply whatever it is that you have in a way, right? And so if you don't have like those fundamentals and foundations down. Focus on that first, right? And then ease your way in with some like really fun use cases or whatever, where you have like maybe a tiger team of people that are really passionate about it. There's obviously, we could have a whole podcast about that as far as all the things that you need to do to be prepared for it, but would really say focus on the foundations. Yep. Amazing. And I know we're just coming up at time. Are there any additional questions from our live audience? I don't have any more questions, but I do need to hop, but I wanted to say like this has been very insightful, so thank you very much. Yeah, I'll definitely follow up with you, Emily. It's been so nice for you guys to jump on too and just like have other people join the conversation. I love Ma, like it's always good to make a new marketing friend, so I'll be in touch. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Davis. Bye. Thank you for joining Emily and Hailey. Thank you. This was incredible. this was great. Thanks for having me on. It's so you have such a, I mean, the community is so engaged in general and just like loved chatting with you today. It was honestly a, a real privilege. It the Well, the privilege was all and privilege and honor was all ours. Mm-hmm. Where is the best place for people to get in touch with you with additional questions? I'm sure we'll have some from the On Demand podcast as well. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you can always find me in the four X community. I'm there and then also like LinkedIn's a great spot. Like just look me up Haley McDonald, or it's linkedin.com/in/. H-A-Y-M-C-D-E-E. I'm pretty easy to find. I'm out there, so I, but I'm good. I'm good to connect on LinkedIn. Like I would love for people to, you know, throw a hand up, say, Hey, like I said, I love making new friends. I work remotely at the moment and so I'm always, you know, I'd love to speak to another adult. It'd be great. Like, it's good other than my cat, you know, like, it's like I got my coworkers and my cat and like, so Well, I'm with you on that and we definitely need to get some form. A for J event out in Seattle. Yeah, for sure. So we can bring for sure, rally the community members out there together. Well, thank you all for joining on live. Thank you for tuning in to our on demand listeners and most importantly thank you Haley, and we will catch you next week for our next revenue exchange. Great. Thanks Davis. I really appreciate it. Thank you. See everyone.