How to Win the Sales-Marketing Alignment Game with Sloane Barbour

#10 - Your CRO doesn’t think about MQLs the way you do. Here’s what they’re actually measuring — and what it means for how marketing needs to show up.

Sales and marketing alignment breaks down in the same place almost every time: the MQL definition. In this episode, Mandy sits down with Sloane Barbour — a career sales leader who went from VP of Sales to CRO to CEO and co-founder of Engine, an AI-driven recruiting company — for a candid conversation about what the C-suite really prioritizes when it comes to growth, and where marketing tends to miss the mark.

This is part of the Growth Activated C-Suite Series, where we go beyond marketing strategy and into the executive mindset. If you want a real seat at the revenue table, you need to understand how your CRO thinks — and Sloane brings it straight.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The atomic unit of CRO success: why customer meetings are the metric that matters most
• MQL quality vs. MQL volume: why hitting 300% of your MQL goal might mean you’re sending garbage
• Sales-marketing alignment in one sentence: what CROs say it actually comes down to
• Why outbound broke — and what replaces it in a world of AI-generated everything
• How the CRO mindset shifts when you become a CEO — and what that means for marketing’s role
• Why the best go-to-market strategy in the AI era is more human, not less

Chapter Markers:

• (00:00) Sloane’s Background: From Sales to CRO to CEO
• (04:29) What Makes an Elite CRO
• (12:23) Sales-Marketing Alignment: The MQL Problem
• (23:39) CRO to CEO: How the Mindset Shifts
• (35:59) AI, Go-to-Market Teams, and the Human Edge

Connect with Sloane Barbour:

• Email: sloan@engin.co
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sloanebarbour
• Engine: engin.co

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Transcript

Mandy Hornaday: Marketing and sales — two sides of the same revenue coin, yet often speaking completely different languages. If you’ve ever struggled to get full buy-in from sales, debated whether MQLs are the right success metric, or wondered what a CRO actually thinks about marketing’s impact, this episode is for you.

Mandy Hornaday: This is part of our C-Suite Series, where we move beyond marketing strategy and into the executive mindset — what CROs, CEOs, and CFOs really prioritize when it comes to growth. Because if marketing wants a real seat at the table, we have to think and speak like the rest of the C-suite. Today I’m joined by Sloane Barbour, CEO and co-founder of Engine, an AI-driven recruiting company. Before stepping into the CEO role, Sloane built a career in sales leadership from VP of Sales to CRO, overseeing revenue strategy, go-to-market execution, and sales and marketing alignment at several companies. We’re going to dive into what makes an elite CRO, what a CRO believes marketing should be responsible for, the evolving role of AI in go-to-market teams, and what changed in Sloane’s mindset when he became a CEO. Let’s dive in.

Mandy Hornaday: Hey Sloane, it’s so great to have you on the Growth Activated Podcast today.

Sloane Barbour: Great to see you again. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mandy Hornaday: When I originally had the idea to do the C-Suite Series, I was really interested to talk to you about the CRO persona specifically. In our time working together — a long time ago — we had such a great relationship between sales and marketing. There were so many things you did well that taught me the foundation for a really strong partnership. I’m excited to dive into your mindset and best practices today.

Sloane Barbour: Thanks for the kind words. It was great working with you and excited to be doing this again.

Mandy Hornaday: Let’s start with your background. Walk us through your career journey and where you’ve landed today.

Sloane Barbour: I started my career as an entry-level sales and recruiting person in Chicago and worked my way up at the same company where we met — Ocean Recruitment Partners. It was a great organization if you wanted to cut your teeth in the old-school world of sales, which I actually think is a bit of a lost art. Making a hundred dials a day, talking to 15 to 20 strangers, trying to make money on every call. I carried that mindset with me, moved up into a managing director role, then moved on to a VP of Sales role at a software company that sold recruiting technology, then spent two years as a CRO at a company doing executive search and senior-level strategic recruiting — helping scale the business across marketing, sales, and brand. About three or four years ago, I started my own company with co-founders Valerie and Jamie Leo. That’s Engine, which is in the recruiting space but focused on AI agents and automation using modern LLMs to make recruiters’ lives easier. Throughout all of it, my core focus and where I think I’ve added the most value is just that love of the game when it comes to sales.

Mandy Hornaday: Let’s talk about the CRO persona. From your own experience and from working with CROs, how would you define a really great one? What are the priorities and focuses that separate the strong ones?

Sloane Barbour: The CRO should of course be obsessed with revenue. But that’s a bit of a cop-out, because what goes into it is really what the CRO does day to day. At the core of the KPIs a CRO should care about — it’s customer meetings. A CRO typically oversees sales, success, and marketing, which all drive toward the revenue goals the CFO and CEO have set. But when you look at the atomic unit of what ultimately turns into sales, it’s meetings. The CROs I saw who were really great were obsessed with the customer. If you’re spending 20 to 30 minutes on a Zoom, meeting for dinner or lunch, or going to their office — every one of those interactions is probably three to five times more valuable than anything else you could be doing that same hour. That keeps it simple. How you get to those meetings is a bit more complicated.

Mandy Hornaday: I love that perspective. From a marketing standpoint, we often stop at the MQL. But I personally believe marketing should be pushing for meetings booked. How did you think about marketing’s role in driving meetings? Did BDRs sit under marketing from a prospecting engine perspective?

Sloane Barbour: I could spend hours here. I’ll just preface it with this: the nuances of org chart — who sits where, who’s responsible for what — really only matter when you get so big that it starts to take the humanity out of it. A meeting is booked by a combined probably dozens of actions that happen on a given contact in your CRM. Those actions can be orchestrated across marketing, brand, content creation, and thought leadership, which are touch points at the awareness stage, then consideration, then intent, and then purchase and eventually evangelism. All of that kind of abstracts away from what you’re really trying to do, which is connect with an individual person. In my experience as an old-school salesperson, no matter how much marketing spends, the top salespeople are always just getting it done themselves. For the type of software I sell — enterprise deals with average sizes of $80K to $90K or six figures, sometimes $300K to $500K — it’s about volume of meetings inside an organization and volume of meetings with specific contacts.

Sloane Barbour: I also think outbound broke around 2018 or 2019. Not that you shouldn’t do it — just that it broke compared to what people modeled it after. And inbound kind of breaks now in this AI-slop world of unlimited content and thought leadership. So you’re back to what I learned 20 years ago: everything is about people. Until AI starts buying software and making purchase decisions — and they probably will, to some extent — the value add is still individual relationships. AI might not be able to tell you that someone is a reputable person who really knows their stuff — you have to instinctually figure that out as a buyer.

Sloane Barbour: We recently hired a marketing person, and a lot of what we talked about over the last three months was: what’s the appropriate metric for that person to deliver consistently and reliably? I think it’s still the MQL. But the MQL should be so good that getting a meeting from it can be reliably automated because it’s that warm. Not a download from an ebook syndicated to a million people. A lead that’s scored to earn its place as an MQL — and then you convert a meeting at 35 to 40% from those MQLs. Now you have a real system. Because scheduling is notoriously hard to automate, and people show up to meetings when they have skin in the game. If a rep went back and forth with them and they agreed on a time — they’re probably twice as likely to show.

Mandy Hornaday: One of your comments earlier was that the best salespeople generate their own pipeline. It sounds like marketing hasn’t always been a big contributor to that in your experience. What’s contributed to that?

Sloane Barbour: Salespeople have that title because they can find, generate interest, and close business. Full cycle. If you can’t do those three things, you’re not a salesperson. So the sales team has to be able to find their own business, full stop. What marketing does is set sales up for success. If 100% of meetings are sales-prospected, the sales team goes into a database — LinkedIn, cold messages, or a database of MQLs that marketing generated the week before with intel on them: how many times they visited the site, what they downloaded, chat questions. AI can consolidate all of that into a summary that lets the salesperson take a highly targeted, completely manual approach. Don’t use AI to write that sales email — the idea is it’s so warm that you’re converting three out of every hour of effort. If you take an hour to send three emails and get a meeting, I’d have my team do that forever.

Sloane Barbour: Setting sales up for success means getting your brand known throughout your buyer persona. Even if that’s 100 people — that’s fine. If you’re selling enterprise and you close 20 to 30 deals at six figures, you’re a $3M revenue business. Marketing can set up dinners, do thought leadership, run webinars, bring that community of 100 to 200 buyers in for a value-added conversation. Don’t even bring in the sales team. Brand marketing is industry relations — build trust, and three, six, nine, twelve months later, you can deliver an MQL on a silver platter. The problem is we’re required to act with such urgency that even I, as a CRO and now a CEO, expected meetings to be delivered by my marketing person in the first three to six months. And then my marketing hire and I had an epiphany — we didn’t even have the MQL funnel running. Some of what we were calling MQLs were just leads that needed a lot of work. That was my own impatience. I should have planned for a six-month ramp on broader campaigns.

Mandy Hornaday: When you think about sales-marketing alignment, what has to be true in order for both sides to actually be successful together?

Sloane Barbour: You just have to agree on what the criteria of an MQL is. Just that. That’s the atomic unit of the handoff. And the complaints are always the same on both sides. Sales says: the leads are bad, they’re not converting, I talked to them and they’d never heard of us, they downloaded an ebook and got thrown over the fence because marketing needed to hit a number. Marketing says: salespeople ignore these leads, they sent one sequence, they’re not communicative, they need to do ten touches. The underlying problem is that nobody’s aligned on exactly what an MQL is.

Sloane Barbour: And the biggest thing: if you’re hitting your MQL goal, you’re probably sending garbage. Marketing should struggle to reach the MQL goal. I’ve seen marketing hit 300% of the MQL goal and then the pipeline goal comes in at 40%. What’s buried inside all of that is a bunch of meetings. Those meetings go one way or the other. If they’re all being disqualified because the leads aren’t good, you’ll see it in the numbers. The ratio I use in my models: 10% of MQLs convert to deals. One out of three MQLs converts to a meeting, and one out of three to four meetings closes. You need ten MQLs for a deal. Get to that and close at 20 to 25% — and you have something repeatable.

Mandy Hornaday: How has your perspective evolved since stepping from the CRO role into the CEO role as it relates to growth?

Sloane Barbour: As a CRO, your goal is to hit the number and drive sales. When you become a CEO, you’re responsible for everything. And everything else in a business, compared to sales, is just a lot of things that aren’t directly related to hitting the number. As a salesperson, I get frustrated — I just want to do something that feels like it’s making money right now. But you’re doing a lot of foundational work. On the product side, my co-founder Valerie has an incredible background building software companies — she’s CTO at Engine. Having a co-founder with an opposite skill set, someone very focused on long-term impact, was something I had to learn to lean into. It was difficult in the first 12 to 18 months for me to find the other speeds — to realize I probably shouldn’t sell something that doesn’t exist yet and then tell Valerie about it at the end of the day.

Sloane Barbour: Where I’m still growing as a CEO is in the financial operations side — what you’d normally leave to RevOps or a CFO. We’re small, so I’m ad hoc in that role. And you start to look at the implications of every decision in a completely different way. As a CRO, if marketing needed to go over budget for a dinner to save a pipeline target, I didn’t care — I needed it. As a CEO, you think at the systems level. Are we looking to get acquired? Become profitable? Raise capital? Those six, twelve, eighteen-month milestones require different strategies today, and they encompass everything — not just the sales motion.

Mandy Hornaday: The CFO was actually one of my best partners when I first stepped into B2B SaaS. I learned so much from him about capacity planning and bottoms-up planning — you can have great revenue targets but you need to be specific about how you get there.

Sloane Barbour: The best CFOs I’ve seen aren’t there to save money — their job is to spend money correctly. And the really good ones look at every action through an ROI lens. Where’s the return? As a CEO wearing multiple hats, you have to put yourself in that CFO mindset and stress test the operating model from there, versus the CRO mindset of: number go up, how fast can I make it go up?

Mandy Hornaday: You’ve always struck a good balance between the transactional urgency of sales and a genuine belief in brand and the long-term return. Now that you’re in the CEO role — how are you thinking about the ROI of brand and awareness activities?

Sloane Barbour: Everything should be measurable. It’s just whether the measurement matters to the business and whether it’s precise enough to give you the signal you’re actually looking for. From the standpoint of the short-term transactional nature of great salespeople versus the visionary nature of someone building an iconic brand over decades — that’s the 30,000-foot, 3,000-foot, 300-foot bounce you have to learn in leadership roles. When we were working together, the reason you never felt like I was short-term obsessed is because when I was talking to you, I was thinking about where we’d be in six or twelve months and how marketing was going to fix the problem of sales spending too much time on cold leads. Once you build really good campaigns and infrastructure, it should be fixed for a long time. You just have to garden it. But salespeople want tomatoes today — they go to the store. In our management meetings it was always: where’s the deal happening tomorrow? To be a successful CRO you have to operate at both speeds. Give your team the bigger picture in bite-sized, contextual ways — zero in on the one or two things that matter to each person, right now.

Mandy Hornaday: You’re running an AI company. How do you think AI will evolve go-to-market teams specifically? What’s your vision for the next couple of years?

Sloane Barbour: The reason salespeople don’t do more deals isn’t because they don’t have more AI-generated emails. It’s because they’re spending time on things that aren’t directly related to doing a deal. So coming back to meetings as the atomic unit — how can AI help you get more meetings? A lot of people say: I can send really good personalized emails. That’s true and it works. But I get a lot of personalized AI emails and I don’t think I’ve responded to any of them. The answer to a go-to-market team’s future isn’t all that different from what I learned 20 years ago: can you build a relationship with the person who’s going to make the buying decision? How soon can you start? How soon can you build trust and credibility and then communicate that you have a solution to their problem?

Sloane Barbour: My strategy at Engine is to keep AI completely behind the scenes and really inform the salesperson. Use AI-enriched data to do the research. Then let the salesperson take their time and send a compelling message that feels human and authentic — not written by AI. The research is what takes time. If you can automate that, you make the human element more human. Our product is an AI recruiting agent named Susie — she’s basically the recruiter’s best friend. The whole design philosophy is that she operates through natural communication, not dashboards and data input. Every second someone spends inputting data is a waste. Suzy can source candidates, submit them, even interview them on the phone. The point is: AI works like a great coworker. You exchange information in a Slack or an email or a voice call, and then you do the human part.

Sloane Barbour: The meeting at the bottom of the funnel becomes exponentially more important because everything else gets commoditized. It’ll be too easy and too cheap to automate emails and LinkedIn messages. That will work for a while and then break, and people will go back to what they’ve always done: buying from another person. The CEO and CRO strategy should be: how do you get to the most human part of the job as frictionlessly as possible? So when you arrive at that conversation, it feels like a match.

Mandy Hornaday: I saw a LinkedIn post recently — a CRO making the case that the best future AEs will be the ones with strong personal brands. What’s your take?

Sloane Barbour: It comes back to the meeting being the human piece. Someone has to decide: I like that person, I would buy from that person. Products are going to be commoditized — if AI coding agents can build a CRM in a couple of hours and sell it for $9 a month, what makes someone want to buy it from you versus the hundred other people offering the same thing? The relationship. A personal brand can start that relationship at scale — a one-to-many channel for building credibility. I do think it’s a necessity. But I also see people using AI to auto-reply to LinkedIn comments, and I immediately think less of them. If you’re trying to build an authentic online brand, the last thing you do is click to AI-comment. What’s always going to bubble to the top is authenticity. What’s going to be an anti-AI sentiment in sales and marketing is AI used in the wrong places. Used in the right places — helping both the buyer and seller get to a match faster, with less friction — that’s where it can really shine.

Mandy Hornaday: Any final words of advice for marketing leaders on how to better partner with their CROs and CEOs?

Sloane Barbour: Building a startup is really hard, and marketing is a volatile place to be inside an organization. The best marketing people I’ve seen have the most success when they demand a seat at the table. They come with real insight into what’s viable. They say: I’ve done the research, looked at the numbers, here’s the data, here’s what actually and realistically can happen — and somewhere your numbers are wrong and we need to fix this. As a CEO, that’s something I really need. Understanding marketing conversion in this changing landscape of online media, thought leadership, content, and AI-generated noise is a full-time job. Sales leaders might be relying on conversion numbers from three to five years ago that just don’t work anymore. So the advice is: be prepared, come correct, and demand a seat at the table.

Mandy Hornaday: Love it. Sloane, if people want to get in touch with you and learn more about what you’re working on, what’s the best way?

Sloane Barbour: You can email me at sloan@engin.co. Or find me on LinkedIn — I’m a reluctant LinkedIn presence, but I’m there.

Mandy Hornaday: Thanks, Sloane. Really appreciate the conversation today.

Sloane Barbour: Thanks, Mandy.

Mandy Hornaday: Hey everyone, I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation with Sloane. Sales and marketing relationships can often be contentious and full of friction — we’ve all been there. But whether you agree with your CRO’s perspective or not, it’s always worth taking a step back to understand where your peers are coming from. The best marketing leaders tailor their approach and communication to align with the priorities of their executive counterparts. And when you do that, you don’t just improve collaboration — you elevate marketing’s role as a true business driver. If you took away valuable insights from this episode, please subscribe to Growth Activated so you don’t miss future episodes in our C-Suite Series. And if you enjoyed this conversation, I’d love for you to leave a review or share it with a marketing leader who needs to hear it. Keep activating growth for you and your company. See you next time.