Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Growth Activated is a podcast for B2B marketing leaders who want to elevate their marketing strategies, lead confidently, and drive real business results. Each episode offers actionable insights and proven frameworks to help you activate growth for your team, your company, and your career.
Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Think Like a CRO: How Modern Marketing Leaders Drive Revenue, Not Just Leads - with Sloane Barbour
#10: This episode is part of our C-Suite Series on Growth Activated, where we dive into the minds of the C-suite—helping B2B marketing leaders better understand, align with, and partner with executives to drive real business impact.
Sales and marketing alignment has always been a challenge, but what if marketing leaders could see things through the eyes of a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)? Understanding the CRO mindset is the key to building a stronger CRO and CMO relationship, proving marketing’s value, and ensuring marketing is seen as a true growth driver—not just a cost center.
In this episode, I sit down with Sloane Barbour, CEO & Co-founder of Engin, an AI-driven recruiting company. Before stepping into the CEO role, Sloane built his career in sales leadership, serving as VP of Sales and CRO, where he oversaw revenue strategy, GTM execution, and sales-marketing alignment.
We unpack:
- The #1 metric great CROs obsess over (Hint: It’s not Revenue)
- Why outbound sales broke in 2019—and what actually works today
- How AI is reshaping GTM teams—and what B2B marketing leaders should pay attention to
- The evolving CRO and CMO relationship—and why marketing must prove its impact on revenue
- What changed when Sloane became a CEO—and how he now sees marketing’s role in business growth
- The key to true sales and marketing alignment (it’s simpler than you think)
If you’re a B2B marketing leader looking to strengthen your partnership with sales, align your strategy with revenue leadership, and gain real influence at the executive table—this episode is a must-listen.
🎧 Hit play now and start thinking like a CRO.
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Welcome to Growth Activated: Sales, Marketing & the C-Suite
Mandy Walker (00:03)
Hey Sloane it's so great to have you on the Growth Activated Podcast today.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (00:07)
Hey, Mandy, great to see you again. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mandy Walker (00:11)
Well, hey, when I originally had this idea to do the C-suite series, I was really interested to talk to you about the CRO persona specifically, because I think in our time working together, which albeit a long time ago, we had such a great relationship, I think, between sales and marketing. And there were so many things that you did really well that taught me the foundation for a really strong marketing and sales relationship. So I'm really excited today to just...
dive into your mindset, dive into some of your best practices and your thoughts and perspectives on things. And I think everyone will really have a lot to learn from you.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (00:51)
Awesome. Well, thanks for the kind words. It was great working with you and excited to be doing this again. Man, it be 10 years later.
Mandy Walker (00:57)
I know 10 years later. Wow. So, hey, let's, let's start with a little bit of your background. walk us through some of your, your career journey and where, where you've landed today.
Meet Sloane Barbour: From CRO to CEO
Sloane Barbour - Engin (01:09)
So I started my career as an entry level sales and recruiting person in Chicago and worked my way up in the same company where we met Motion Recruitment Partners, which is a great organization, especially 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, which maybe we talk about later, but making 100 dials a day, talking to 15 to 20 strangers, trying to make money in every call.
and sort of carried that mindset with me, moved up to that organization into eventually managing director role and then moved on to a VP of sales role at a software company that sold recruiting technology and then was in a CRO role for two years at a company that was doing executive search and senior level strategic recruiting and helped scale that business in both marketing and sales and brand and then yeah, eventually started my own company about three or four years ago with a co-founder named Valerie and
Me, her, and Jamie Leo, who is our third co-founder, sort of launched the business, and that is also in the recruiting space, but focused more on AI and agents and automation using modern LLMs to make recruiters' lives easier. So the whole time, though, very close, my core focus and what I think I've added the most value in the teams I've been on or the teams I've led is just that love of the game when it comes to sales.
Mandy Walker (02:32)
Yeah. Yeah. And I'd love to start there. Let's talk about the CRO persona a little bit. So in your perspective, either from your own experience being a CRO, but also working with CROs in your career, how would you define a really great CRO? What are the priorities and focuses that they're obsessed over that would sort of qualify a really strong one in your perspective?
The Elite CRO: What Top Revenue Leaders Prioritize
Sloane Barbour - Engin (02:58)
So I think it's a simple answer. The CRO should, of course, be obsessed with revenue. But that answer might be a bit of a cop out because what goes into that is really what the CRO does on a day-to-day basis. And to me, at the core of the KPIs that a CRO should care about, it's customer meetings.
Mandy Walker (03:45)
Yes.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (04:07)
Because generally in my experience, ACRO is in sales, success, and marketing, overseeing all those functions, which then obviously drive the top line revenue number and then working if it's a large organization with other people like revenue operations, CFO, CEO, of course, to unite on whatever the goals and objectives are. But when you look at the atomic unit of what ultimately will turn into sales, it's meetings.
And of course, there's a lot of different criteria for that. So when I think of being and the CROs that I saw that were really great, it was obsessed with the customer. And if you're meeting with customers and you're spending 20, 30 minutes, an hour on a Zoom, or if you're meeting for dinner or lunch or come into their office to show face, every one of those interactions is probably three to five times more valuable than anything else you could be doing with that same hour. So that keeps it simple. How you get to those meetings is a bit more complicated.
Mandy Walker (05:01)
Yeah.
Well, and I love that perspective because I think so often from a marketing perspective, where marketing sort of stops at the MQL, sort of the infamous MQL level. And what I personally believe and having also worked in B2B SaaS running sort of the full growth strategy and operations is that we should, from a marketing perspective, really be pushing for meetings booked. And there's a lot of ways to get there. And I know BDRs can be a big
part of that and would actually love your perspective on how you thought about marketing. Were you looking for marketing to deliver meetings booked? Did the BDR function, how did the sort of the BDR function play into that? Did BDR sit under marketing from like a prospecting engine perspective? Would love to just kind of hear your own experience.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (05:54)
Yeah, we're into org chart technicalities. I could spend hours here. at the end of the day, I just want to preface this with, I think the nuances of your org chart, who sits where, who's responsible for what, is kind of only important when you get so big that it takes a little bit of the humanity out of it, I guess you could say. And what I mean by that is a meeting is booked by
combined probably dozens of actions that take place on a given contact in a CRM. And those actions can be orchestrated across marketing, brands, content creation, thought leadership, which are just touch points with your audience at the awareness stage. And then you bring them into the consideration stage, then the intent stage, and then finally the purchase and eventually evangelism stage. But.
All of those things I think kind of abstract away from what you're just trying to do, which is like how you connect with this individual person. And in my view, as an old school salesperson, I've seen in a lot of organizations as much as marketing does and as much money as they spend, the top salespeople are always just getting it done themselves. And...
If you can manage to get 30, I'm talking the type of software that I sell today, the type of deals that I've done, average deal size is high, 80, 90K or six figures typically. And sometimes it's three to $500,000. So in those types of sales, what I would call the enterprise sale, I do think that it's just like volume of meetings inside of an organization and volume of meetings with a specific contact is what matters.
And I also think that outbound broke probably in 2019, 2018. When I say outbound, mean like this sort of cold sequence, just pray and pray. And I don't think you should do it. I just think that it broke compared to what people kind of modeled it after. And then I think inbound kind of breaks as you come into this AI slot world of unlimited content and quote unquote thought leadership.
So you're back to what I think 20 years ago was the same thing that I learned, which is that everything is about people. And until the AI start buying the software and making purchase decisions, which they probably will and probably should to some extent, or at least advise on that, even then it still, that even becomes more abstracted towards the value add is the individual relationships because a lot of our.
So a decision tree might be supplemented by artificial intelligence helping us make more strategic, well-informed decisions, but I gotta trust you because even, you the AI might not be able to tell me that Mandy Walker's a reputable person with a great personality who really knows her stuff, but I should instinctually as a buyer be able to figure that out. So you just wanna.
take all those inputs where the SDR sits, whether a BDR is doing outbound or inbound, whether you call it a BDR or an SDR, I think these are extractives. Right. And I think you need to, especially with what we're doing now, I have a six, seven person team, you know, and we're driving two and half to three X annual growth, you know, a million dollars plus an ARR, you know, after a couple of years to get there and moving into the two to $3 million ARR range this year. And we
Mandy Walker (09:06)
Yeah.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (09:28)
hired a marketing person recently. And a lot of what we talked about over the last three months was what is the appropriate metric for the marketing person to actually deliver consistently and reliably and put all their emphasis into that. And I think that is still the MQL. And I don't think that can necessarily should change because the MQL though should be so good
Mandy Walker (09:50)
Interesting.
B2B Sales Strategy: Meetings Booked vs. MQLs
Sloane Barbour - Engin (09:59)
that getting the meeting from the MQL is also a process at the top of the sales funnel that can be reliably automated because they're that warm, right? That MQL is not just a download of a, you know, ebook at a million people downloaded through a syndication. Like that lead is scored to earn its place as an MQL. And then you convert a meeting at 35 to 40 % from those MQLs.
Mandy Walker (10:14)
Yeah.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (10:27)
Now you have a really great, I think, system because the scheduling of the meeting, scheduling is like notoriously difficult thing to automate. for people to show up to the meetings, they have to have some skin in the game or feel a sense of connection. People don't mind dropping out of a meeting if it was scheduled on a Calendly or clicking reschedule or whatever. But if they heard from Daniel and Daniel said, looking forward to speaking to you and answered a few questions, went back and forth and they agreed on a time.
Mandy Walker (10:47)
Yeah.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (10:55)
Maybe they're twice as likely to show up to that meeting. So to me, that's a sales motion and should be owned by that AE. And that AE should want to hunt those MQLs and book meetings and then obviously supplement that with whatever campaigns are ongoing outbound on the sales side.
Mandy Walker (11:14)
Yeah.
Interesting. Well, I'm so curious too, because one of your comments a few minutes ago was that in all of sort of what has rang true for you throughout all of your experience is that the best salespeople are the ones that generate their own pipeline, it sounds like, and desk. so it sounds like marketing maybe hasn't been a big player for you in doing that. And so is it, I guess,
What has contributed to that in your perspective? Like is marketing focused on the right things?
Sloane Barbour - Engin (11:46)
What were you doing all those years ago? How many needs were you getting for us?
Mandy Walker (11:52)
Not much 15 years ago, but definitely evolved as-
Sloane Barbour - Engin (11:57)
It's a while. Sales people are sales people and they have that title because they know how to generate and close business and that find, generate interest, 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, period, full stop.
Mandy Walker (12:00)
It's been a long time.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (12:24)
I personally believe from an efficiency perspective that what marketing does is it basically sets up sales for success. And I know that's like this broad sort of like platitude, but it's the easiest way to think about it because if 100 % of the leads are sales prospected or meetings are sales prospecting, meaning the sales team is going into some database.
whether that's a LinkedIn database firing off cold messages, or whether that's a database of MQLs that are sitting there in the morning that Mandy and the team have generated the week before that have a lot of intel on them, how many times they visited this, how many times they downloaded this, what any chat questions, et cetera, et cetera, that then AI can basically consolidate and help spot Salesforce for doing this into a summary that can then allow that salesperson to take a very
specialized, targeted, completely manual. Don't use AI at all to write that sales email. Because the idea is that it's so warm that you're going to convert three out of every email. So if you take an hour to send three emails but it results in a meeting, I'm going to have my sales team do nothing but spend an hour sending three emails for the rest of their lives, as long as they can possibly do that, because that's just so efficient. It's basically 30 minutes or 25 minutes and you get a meeting book. So setting them up for success is
Getting to the point where the brand at the awareness stage is known throughout your buyer persona, and even if that's 100 people, that's totally fine. Because if you're selling an enterprise and you've got 100 people and you do 20 or 30 deals, and those are six-figure deals, you're now $3 million revenue business. That's a great thing to be, and that can be done with a target list of 100 and 200 names, individual names.
buyers. And so the marketing team can set up a dinner, right? Do thought leadership, do all the sort of content, bring people into webinars, reach out to people in that community of 100 or 150 or 200 buyers, and bring those folks to the table for a value added conversation with the marketing team, right? Don't even bring in the sales team. We run the podcast, we're the industry relations people, right? Like rebrand marketing is industry relations to make it really communal.
build trust and then three, six, nine, 12 months later, whatever that process does take time, they can't hack that. Then you can actually deliver an MQL that's basically out of silver platter. I think what ends up happening is we are required to act with such urgency that even myself as a CRO, now a CEO, expected meetings to be delivered by my marketing person in the first three to six months, really in the first.
months and her and I kind of like had an epiphany with him like you know what we don't even have the MQL funnel running and some of these MQLs aren't even MQLs they're just a lead that we're like need to do a lot of work on so maybe it's my own impatience as a salesperson that then kind of I stubbed my toe instead of saying let's plan in the operating model for you know a six month ramp time on these broader campaigns if we're selling and again I'm contesting this this is enterprise size deals if you're selling a you know
$49, $99 a month SaaS product, you're probably using PLG, completely different motion that I'm not as familiar with. So I think that the campaigns that work nowadays from a marketing perspective are all community driven. And I think the campaigns that work from a sales perspective are really, really warm leads that have already built trust and then have an authentic relationship built that's not pushy and is more focused on value add and has a certain.
patience associated with it that is strategic. You still got to run the deal cycle and you your numbers, but I do believe, especially if you're selling a product in this AI revolution, that every single person working in a position of authority in every single business is going to implement some sort of AI investment in their group over the next three to five years. It's going to be 100 % penetration of this product, right?
Mandy Walker (16:35)
Mm-hmm.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (16:41)
Like there's still companies that aren't on the cloud. There's still companies that, you know, aren't using modern development technology and don't have good websites. I think AI is going to be a different phenomenon because one, it's going to be so inexpensive comparatively to implement. And two, the ROI is going to be so significant that if you don't do it, you either have to completely change your business to be like, we're a non-AI business and you're going to pay a premium because there's going to be a percentage of the population that hate AI. And you become like a... like a detox, you know, hotel chain and you don't use any AI, right? That might be a business that doesn't, but if you are a, you know, if you're a corporation looking to compete in the tech industry or in, you know, manufacturing or any modern industry, that's going to be the growth engine over the next 10 to 20 years, AI is a requirement. So I do think you have to look at like, what are you selling? What is the time horizon of your, your overall market saturation that you're looking to achieve in whatever niche you're in? And then how do you have marketing work backwards from there and have good enough salespeople that really are salespeople that can prospect their own deals early on so they can go out and actually win those first 10 to 15 accounts?
B2B Marketing’s Role in Sales Enablement
Mandy Walker (17:52)
Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And where, I guess, when you think about sort of the term of sales and marketing alignment, what have you found that has to be true in order for sales and marketing to be aligned under some key principles or certain areas in order for both to be successful and both to be successful in their partnership?
Sloane Barbour - Engin (18:16)
You just have to agree what the criteria of an MQL is.
Mandy Walker (18:21)
Just that.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (18:22)
Well, I mean, that's the atomic unit of the handoff, right? That is where things go from MQL to meeting or SQL to meeting, whatever, right? That marketing to sales handoff, the biggest, so I'm sure marketing people complain about salespeople. I know they do because they complain. And they complain about each other and it's always the same thing. It's the leads are wood.
Mandy Walker (18:39)
Never. I'm sure they complain about each other, right? I mean, it's...
Sloane Barbour - Engin (18:52)
These leads suck. They're not converting. Or there's not enough of them. And I can only convert 5 % of the MQLs. And no one's opening my emails. They're not warm. And I talked to them. They never heard of us. They downloaded an e-book, and they got thrown over the fence because the marketing team needed to hit an MQL goal.
That's the narrative and that hasn't changed. And then on the marketing side, it's, you know, the salespeople take forever. They ignore these leads. They don't like, yeah, but look, they're not even reaching out to these. They sent one sequence. They need to do 10 touches, right? They need to give more feedback. They're not communicative. And the underlying problem there is because no one's aligned on exactly what an MQL is. And the biggest thing is if you are putting, if you're reaching your MQL goal,
you're probably sending garbage. So the marketing team should like struggle to reach the MQL goal because oftentimes we go, we got to 300 % of the MQL goal this quarter.
And then I'm running the VP of sales. I'm like, yeah, but like we got to 40 % of the pipeline goal. So you didn't actually deliver what you needed to. And this is when you think about like, is it number of MQLs? Is it the revenue associated with the MQLs? It's just the number in my view. You try to associate and assume certain revenues, unless you get really good and you're like a series B and you have a really consistent product market fit and pricing and packaging. If you're anywhere before your first hundred customers,
I think you don't know what a deal is going to close at. Maybe within 20 or 30 percent. But the problem is, salespeople always inflate what they think it is to make their pipeline bigger. And then marketing seems like in aggregate, they're crushing the pipeline goal. But again, what's buried in there is a bunch of meetings. All that's buried in there is a bunch of meetings. Those meetings go one way or the other. And if they're all being dequeued because the leads aren't good, you're going to see that come up in the numbers.
and if they're all making it to a future stage, a proposal stage, et cetera, then something about the product or the packaging, the pricing isn't good, and you can kind of figure out where the problems are, but you really can't start to go there until trust is built that the MQLs are quality, and that one out of three of these is gonna convert into a meeting, and then of those meetings, another one out of three of those, or four, is gonna convert into a deal, and now you need 10 MQLs for a deal, and you're in the sort of...
ratios that you want to be looking at, in my view, like a 10 % conversion on MQLs. I don't know what you see, but that's sort of like what I use in my models is something that can be reliably repeated and that is actually getting a high enough quality MQL to deliver the four meetings. And then also of those four meetings, you're closing at least 20 to 25 % minimum. And ideally you're closing in, know, 35%.
Mandy Walker (21:38)
Yep. Yep. Yeah. And I guess if you're being incredibly stringent on what an MQL is, then that's probably a realistic conversion rate.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (21:41)
What are your MQLs closing at nowadays?
Mandy Walker (21:50)
Well, nowadays I'm a fractional CMO and a consultant, so I unfortunately don't get to go into the heavy demand gen like we were, at Revenuebase, we were driving a lot. I ran the prospecting engine, so we were less on MQLs and more on meetings booked. And so was more.
Executive Alignment Starts with MQL Clarity
Mandy Walker (23:53)
Yeah, I was brought on to be the chief of staff to the CRO and not run marketing. That was actually one of our big misses at the startup was that we didn't invest in marketing. We staffed up heavy on sales. And I think about it now as like a production line. Like we staffed the middle of the line really heavily, but did not staff the front of the line. And so the AEs were
prospecting all on their own and we weren't really doing any marketing at the time, which I think was a, looking back was a big miss.
From CRO to CEO: How Sloane’s View of Marketing Evolved
Mandy Walker (24:35)
Yeah. Yeah. So I'd be curious, Sloane, what about your perspective has evolved as you stepped from the CRO role into the CEO role as it relates to growth? Have you just brought all of those learnings to the CEO role or has your perspective evolved now that you run the entire company and the entire growth function?
Sloane Barbour - Engin (25:01)
The entire company is six, seven people who are all great and it's the best team I've ever worked with. Mandy, you'd make a great addition because you're one of the best marketing people I've ever worked with. We don't have a, you know, right now like a, I'm gonna cut this out. Let me start that one over.
Cause I was going to say something about my marketing person and I was like, wait, I probably shouldn't say that. Cause she's definitely gonna listen to this. I just have like a very junior like marketing manager and she's great, but like she's not, she would like never know like the MQL conversion goals that like coming in. So, okay. So CRO to CEO.
Mandy Walker (25:31)
Ha ha ha!
Sloane Barbour - Engin (25:46)
Well, the transition from a CRO to a CEO for me and just from a sales only position where my goal is just hit the number and drive sales or work across marketing and sales to... Ultimately get to that top line, you know revenue target when you're a CEO You know, you now obviously become responsible for everything and everything else in a business compared to sales in my view sucks they have to do because it's just a lot of a Lot of things that are not directly related to hitting that number and just driving that growth now Of course all of them are important
Mandy Walker (26:16)
you
Sloane Barbour - Engin (26:28)
But as a salesperson like sometimes I get frustrated. I'm just like I just want to be you know doing something that I feel like is making money in every call so you're doing a lot of things that are what I would call foundational and Evolving from that sales instinct how you need to actually build up whether it's a software product or a service offering and things that On the product side, you know my co-founder Valerie She has an incredible background of building and leading companies, software product companies, as the VP of engineering for them and CTO and now obviously co-founder and CTO here at Engine. And so having a co-founder that you can work closely with who has a opposite skill set, if you will, very focused on building and very thoughtful about the impact of each decision over the long term. Whereas a salesperson, by nature, we have a bit of a short-term view on things. Because it's like, have you done for me lately? Where's my net? You're only as good as your next deal. All those platitudes about salespeople are true in how, at least for me, I feel like the best ones operate. And having met a pretty good salesperson, it was a bit difficult in the first 12 to 18 months for me to find the other speeds and for me to think about I probably shouldn't just try to sell something that completely doesn't exist and then tell Valerie about it at the end of the day. I should probably make sure that what we're trying to build here has a bit more future kind of balance. And I think it does, it is something that if you find the right co-founder, it can be an incredibly healthy relationship. And I think the one thing that as we get into this next phase of growth and I think about CRO to CEO, where I need to continue to make strides as a leader and as a performer is across the sort of financial operations of the business that you would leave up to rev ops or you'd leave up to the CFO. And obviously we're small, we don't have a CFO. So I'm sort of ad hoc in that role. And you'd start to look at the implications of a decision on like the sales team or on a marketing campaign. And you think about it in a completely different way and it's much more systems level versus I just want to make this happen marketing if you go over budget I don't care I need this dinner because I'm you know 30 % off of my pipeline and this is gonna get me over the goal and this is gonna allow us to sell enough product to hit our number so I can make my commission and that's like that is critical I think probably one of the most important elements of a successful enterprise software company is having someone to do that
But if that person doesn't have the excellence on the product and engineering side and the FP &A side to be able to make sure that the business can not only achieve these goals and deliver the value to the customers that's been promised, but can also do so in a way that is financially scalable and also appealing to whatever your goals are as a business. Are you looking to get acquired? Are you looking to become profitable? Are you looking to raise additional capital? All of those
forward-looking 6, 12, 18-month milestones require different strategies today. And those strategies transcend your sales motion and they encompass everything. And that, for me, was really hard. And I'm still learning every day and trying to get better.
Mandy Walker (30:08)
Yeah, I, when I first stepped into the B2B SaaS company, I actually stepped into a rev ops role and a growth strategy and operations. And the CFO was actually one of my best partners and I learned so much from him, um, around just even capacity planning across the organization and bottoms up planning and really like, you know, we've can have these great revenue targets, but how the heck are we going to get there? And being very specific about it.
I'm actually going have him on an upcoming episode because I think there's a lot of really great details there that everyone can learn from.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (30:41)
The CFO role is very misunderstood and having worked with really great CFOs in my day as well that understood the sales side of things. It's a very interesting dynamic and exercise because as a salesperson, when you are like, okay, we're talking to the CFO at some prospect or customer that we're trying to close.
Usually the CFOs, if you're not selling a financial product, usually they're coming in because they're going to negotiate with you and you they're going to try train here and there and be tough to sort of negotiate with. But at the same time, I found that CFOs, if it's a good investment, they love spending money, right? Because their job is not to save money, it's to spend money correctly.
And I that's sort of the shift. Obviously, every CFO, I'm sure, is very different, but the best ones I've seen are very good at, like you said, where is the ROI from each of these actions? And the sales ROI, if you're just explicitly looking through that lens, might be the sales team's commissions, right? I mean, they're going to try to maximize their commissions, maximize how much money they can make. The VP of sales is going to advocate for them, hopefully.
as is the CRO. But at the same time, then you're going to have to balance that with what does product need to deliver better features that can ultimately make the sales team more successful next quarter or the quarter after. And then they can make more money because we hit the bigger number and accelerate. So there's all these really interesting trade-offs that when you're wearing multiple hats, as a lot of founders and CEOs do early on,
You kind of have to put yourself into that different mindset of, I'm now the CFO. When I'm in this world today, I'm CFO land. And how am I going to look at the operating model from that perspective and stress test it versus from VP of sales or CRO hat, where it's like, number go up. How do I get that number to go up as fast as possible?
Measuring Brand ROI: The CEO’s Perspective
Mandy Walker (32:42)
Yeah. Well, and I think it's interesting because I know we've talked a lot about MQLs and sort of wear it with your CRO hat, but I do have to say in working with you, I know that you're also sort of a visionary that really believes in branding and networking and I think the long-term as much as yes, can be very transactional and sort of short-term minded.
I never felt like that about you. I think you had a really, you struck a really good balance between understanding the long-term return that would come out of branding and a lot of those awareness activities and perception activities and balancing that with the short-term transactions. And so I'm curious, like, we haven't really talked about that. Now that you're in the CEO role, how are you prioritizing
And where does your mindset go on like the ROI of those types of activities, building your brand, investing really strongly in product marketing, driving awareness is to you, is it all still boiled down to the MQL and you're just thinking about all of how all of those marketing areas will lead to MQLs or what's your thought around that, around the greater ROI of marketing, I guess.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (33:59)
The greater, the greater, the immeasurable, the tough to measure.
Mandy Walker (34:02)
Everything should be measurable. It's just whether that measurement matters to the business, right?
Sloane Barbour - Engin (34:09)
or whether it's precise enough to give you actually the signal you're looking for. So from a standpoint of the short-term transactional nature of great salespeople who have a tremendous amount of urgency compared to the visionary nature of someone who wants to build an iconic brand over several decades, again, that's the 30,000 foot, 3,000 foot, 300 foot sort of.
bounce that you have to learn to do when you start to get into sort of leadership roles, especially in high velocity environments where there's a lot of product iteration, brand iteration, marketing iteration. But I think the answer to your question is when we were working together, the reason you never felt like I was maybe a fanatic about urgency or short-term thinking is because you were the marketing person. And so when we were talking,
It was all about what I think is equally valuable, which is where are we going to be in six months or 12 months, and how are going to make this today, things that are happening today that are not ideal because the sales team is spending way too much time on cold leads. How is Mandy and her team going to fix that three, six months, 12 months from now? Once it's fixed from a marketing perspective, when you build really good campaigns and infrastructure, the idea is it should kind of be fixed forever. You just have to of garden it a little bit, but you shouldn't have to rip it out every year and replace it.
And so I do think you have to look at it like a garden, which is if you want tomatoes, go to the store. That's what the salespeople do. And when I would speak to the salespeople in our management meetings, you know, it like, where is the deal happening today? Which deal is happening tomorrow? And so it was like, I got one for next week. It's like, I don't care. Next week doesn't exist right now. The only thing that matters the next 48 hours. And so you have to have both of those speeds, I think, to be a successful.
CRO and you'll set the people in the various leadership roles if you have directors or VPs or even just managers underneath you You have to be able to trust you'd be able to give them this sort of bigger picture in enough bite-sized ways And in a contextual way that matters to them Zero in on one of those one or two things that they're gonna do right because even though the marketing Initiative might be multi-quarter and the brand initiative might last for years like Or a decade to build an iconic brand
Mandy Walker (36:04)
Mm-hmm.
How AI Will Impact B2B Go-To-Market Teams
Sloane Barbour - Engin (36:18)
But the actions that lead to that happen every single day, every single hour. So you have to just figure out what is the strategy and how does this tie into that? And then what actions are taken by each individual, you know, each day. And when you're running a small company, these individuals are really in multiple seats and also then therefore wearing multiple hats. So that's the joy of an early stage startup is that, you know, it's sort of everything everywhere all at once.
And the noise level is like at 11 and a great CEO who is able to keep a team together and achieving success on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis consistently for even three or four years. Um, you know, I think the skillset that resonates with me is, not whether this is short term or whether this is long term. It's we're on the continuum of where we are and where we want to be. Does this fall?
And how can I get the person that's ultimately responsible for that excited about making progress on it today? And that's just the easiest for me, easiest way to take out all of the anxiety that's inevitable in the infinite choices that are available to us in any moment, especially in this modern chaotic transition to an AI driven future. I think there's a lot of shiny objects. so knowing where the puck's going to be,
Mandy Walker (37:33)
Mm-hmm.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (37:48)
and then also knowing how to take that next sort of push to move where you need to be in the next few seconds are equally important.
Mandy Walker (37:56)
Yeah. And that's such a nice transition because I did want to talk to you about, obviously you're running an AI company right now, which is awesome and very exciting. And I'd love to hear your perspective on how you think AI will evolve or how to go to market teams specifically need to be prepared for how AI will evolve their roles. What's sort of your vision and understanding of how that will evolve maybe in the next couple of years?
And it can be more short term than that too. know AI is like exponential. So if it's in the next six months, that's fine too.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (38:32)
Well, the way that I think about it for salespeople in particular is the reason salespeople don't do more deals is not because they don't have more AI generated emails. It's because they're spending time on things that are not directly related to doing a deal.
And so when I come back to meetings as like just this atomic unit of a business's success, sales organization success, how can AI help you get more meetings? And I think a lot of people are like, well, can send really good personalized emails. And I believe that is true. That will be one way that AI helps you get more meetings. I don't know how long that really lasts. I get a lot of personalized AI emails. I don't think I responded to any of them. I know people do. And I know that, you
it is an effective channel, especially if you have a really niche product and you have a really strong target on your ICP, like you should do it. It's not that expensive to do. And I think AI makes it even cheaper. But I don't know if the answer to a go-to-market team's future is any different than it was when I started almost 20 years ago, which is...
Can you build a relationship with the individual that's going to make the buying decision? And how soon can you start that? And how soon can you build trust and credibility and then communicate that you have a solution to their problem? one of the ways, kind of a funny story that I think is relevant to sort of this transition to AI, there was a sort of very old school sales leader that was part of motion recruitment that we started at. And when I was first starting,
Mandy Walker (39:55)
Mm-hmm.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (40:16)
He flew out to California. I was working in the offices out there, did a little seminar for the day and pumped everyone up. Super cool guy. Took me out to dinner and I said, hey, I just can't get enough meetings. Where can I get meetings? And he looked around the parking lot he said, see that? That car costs $150,000. That's a Ferrari F50. He's like, the person running that owns that car has enough money, probably owns a business and is probably hiring people. You should go just wait to see who that is and wait until they walk in the car. I was like, my God.
Okay, that's your answer. And I'm like, well, I'm gonna do this. You know, I'm sort of 22 years old. I'm like, why not? So I walk over to the car and I linger around it for a couple of hours. You know, I'm just hanging out. And the guy walks out, I see him, I'm like, oh, this is definitely the guy. And he comes to the car, like, excuse me, sir.
And he's like, who the hell are you? And I'm like, hey, look, really cool car. What is it? I try to make small talk. We start chatting. Nice guy. I'm like, do you by any chance own a technology company and are hiring for software engineers? And he goes, no. What are you talking about? I'm like, sorry. He's like, but I appreciate that you asked. He's like, go get him. He was cool. And he got in his car.
got out, went away. didn't obviously get a meeting. It was totally random. And if I would've gotten a meeting and done a deal, it might've been a better story. But the point was that it was, that was just like any other marketing activity at the top of the funnel. Like there's some person out there and eventually you're gonna need to bump into them in some way to start a conversation.
And AI will probably make that easier, better, faster for the next 18 months in a lot of ways. And then I think it will break just like everything else breaks and people will be like, I hate the AI slop. And they'll go back to doing exactly what they've been doing for hundreds of years, which is buying from another person. So my strategy is to actually go to market for our product is to keep AI completely behind the scenes.
and really inform the salespeople about the intelligence on this company using AI-enriched data, and then allow that salesperson to take the time to do their own research and send a really compelling message that feels human and authentic and is not written by AI. Because it just doesn't take that long to write that kind of a message. And what takes the time is the research. So now that's the piece that you can automate to make that human element more human. And our product
that we sell at Engine is an AI agent. It's a recruiting agent that we call Suzy. And she's basically the recruiter's best friend. And the way we've designed this user experience for the person that uses it, the recruiter, the recruiting team, the staffing agency, Suzy is not a dashboard you log into. It's not a place you click a bunch of buttons. It's not a place where you input a bunch of data. Because
That is where people waste time every second someone inputs any piece of data into any piece of software is a waste of time and that Eliminating that same thing for recruiting anytime someone like has to manually move data around or update stages or do anything It's a waste of time and recruiters like salespeople the way they like to interact is through Normal human communication. That's what they should be really really really really good at
is how to just talk people. So if you can just talk to your AI agent, like people talk to Susie and she helps them fill jobs, she helps them submit candidates, she helps them source candidates, whatever it is that she does, she can even interview candidates on the phone using AI voice. The point there is that I think the way that AI is going to help us is the same way that your coworker who's your SDR or your marketing coordinator or whomever helps you today, which is in a Slack message or an email or even in a voice call.
Mandy Walker (43:51)
Mm-hmm.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (44:07)
and exchange information and they give you information that's really valuable and then you do the human part of it. And so that very bottom of the funnel that's like the meeting, which is always gonna be with a human and a human, is just that much more important. That becomes like exponentially more important because everything else is completely commoditized. It's just gonna be too easy. There's just gonna be too much shit flying around.
because it's going just be too cheap to go and automate and have AIs sending every email and messaging people on Twitter or LinkedIn or everywhere else.
And while I do believe it works and will continue to work for a period of time, I do not think that is a long-term strategy that a CEO or CRO should implement. I think the strategy should be how do you get to the most human parts of the job as painlessly and frictionlessly as possible so that when you do arrive at that, it's like a match made in heaven. Like, my god, my problem is exactly where I need to be having the solution. You have the exact solution I'm looking for.
And somehow the AI gods and the machine have orchestrated that behind the scenes, but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like it's meant to be. And that is an abstract sort of long-term future of where AI can get us. But today, I would suggest don't use AI to write your emails because it's very easy to tell.
Mandy Walker (45:14)
Yeah. And I actually saw a LinkedIn post recently. It was another CRO talking about how they felt like the future of hiring salespeople and the best AEs are going to be the ones that have really strong brands, like personal brands that have built a lot of influence to help break through the noise. What's your thought on that?
Sloane Barbour - Engin (45:59)
You know, I'm not much of LinkedIn influencer, although I probably should spend more time on it. Maybe after this podcast I will be. The personal, look, this comes back to, again, I don't want to be a dead horse, but this notion of the meeting is like, this is the human piece where someone's like, I like that person. I would buy from that person. Because the products are gonna be commoditized too. Like if I can build an AI sales force with AI coding agents in a couple of hours and be like, have a CRM that can do everything you need it to do and is fully customizable and will get so good so quick. And you can sell it for $9 a month or less.
So what makes Mandy want to buy that for me or that from the hundred other people that are offering that exact same commoditized software product? And it's going to be the relationship. So I think the relationship can start because someone follows you online and you're a thought leader and you have credibility and you have personal brand quote unquote. and is that going to increase your surface area of the people that you build a relationship with because you're able to build a one to many relationship
I think that's 100 % a necessity. I do think, once again, that I see on LinkedIn a bunch of people doing the reply to comments with AI replies. They're are we building a LinkedIn? And it's like, these are supposedly legitimate people, but I'm like, I immediately think you're an idiot. Because if you had any credibility about trying to build an authentic online brand, the last thing you would do is use a LinkedIn.
Mandy Walker (47:22)
it's awful. It's awful.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (47:39)
click to AI comment on this. And so I do think that once again, like what's gonna bubble to the top is what's always bubbled to the top. Humans, we love authenticity, we love cringe. People are like, that's cringe. People love cringe. Why don't you watch TV shows like this? They love it. They say they're like, it's so cringey. But you love it, you're watching it. And it's because it's authentic in a certain sense. And you're trying to find this connection between you and this individual.
and you want to feel like they get you or like you get part of them. So that's all the same as it ever was. How we tap into that I think is going to be, there's going to be an anti-AI sentiment in like sales, marketing, recruiting, a lot of areas.
if the AI is used in the wrong places. If it's used in the right places, however, because buying software is a pain in the ass. Finding it, researching it, who to talk to, is this person credible, are they gonna be around in six months? So selling it's hard, and so is buying it. So if both parties can somehow make that process easier because you have this intelligence layer, that eventually evolves to be really, really useful and high utility that can basically say, Sloane, you should speak to Mandy Walker because she's looking to buy something that you have and you guys would like each other because of this. And here's a little bit of information about her background and some of the podcasts she's been on at Hosted. Here's her philosophy on sales and your product I think would match with what they're looking for because of this. And I can get an AI.
basically prep call and I can come in and talk to my prospect knowing exactly what their pain points are and making them feel like this is a really good solution. And then you can also feel like, wow, this has kind of been put on a silver platter for me and I don't have to go and spend a bunch of time researching 10 different software companies and having a bake off.
And I'd like to see that be the place where AI really shines so that me and you and all the other people that are conducting business and building businesses and industries together can just spend more time doing human stuff.
Final Advice for B2B Marketing Leaders
Mandy Walker (49:47)
I love that. Wow. What a vision. I love it. All right, Sloane. Well, thank you so much for this conversation today. So many helpful nuggets. I've really enjoyed this. Any final words, any words of advice for the marketing leaders out there on how to better partner with their CROs, their CEOs, or show up in their jobs?
Sloane Barbour - Engin (50:08)
You know, I don't necessarily have any advice specifically. one, you obviously have created an incredible podcasting community of marketing leaders and they're lucky to have someone like you kind of.
Creating all this value so great great job and really great to see all the success you've had I would just say that you know building a business especially if you're in a startup like building a startup is really hard and marketing is a very volatile place to be inside of an organization and I Think the best marketing people and the people that I've seen have the most success You know they demand a seat at the table. They they come with
Mandy Walker (50:26)
Thank you.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (50:53)
really good insight into what's viable as you know CEO or CRO is gonna basically be like well this is what we need to do and this is what the model says and this is what's in the Excel spreadsheet so we need to get X amount of know conversion X amount of MQLs.
And a lot of times I've seen marketing people disagree to that and then go out and throw shit against the wall. And if you're stuck in that because you've got the number and you didn't help create the number, it is what it is. I think if, in my experience, when marketing people have come and said, I've done the research, I've looked at the numbers, here's the data, this is what's happened. This is what actually is realistically can happen. And somewhere your numbers are wrong and you're going to need to either fix them or we're gonna need to change this, this, and this. So that also, I think, as a CEO, is something that I really need and look forward to because understanding marketing conversion in this changing landscape of online media and thought leadership and content and AI slop is a full-time job.
Mandy Walker (51:57)
Yep.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (51:57)
Right? And oftentimes a sales leader might rely on the numbers that they saw five years ago, even three years ago about what an outbound email will convert at ultimately. And those numbers just don't work anymore. So I do think the advice is just be prepared, come correct, and demand a seat at the table.
Mandy Walker (52:19)
Love it. Awesome Sloane. Well, if people want to get in touch with you, what is the best way? How can they learn more about what you're working on?
Sloane Barbour - Engin (52:27)
You can email me, slone at engineengin.co or find me on LinkedIn. I am a reluctant LinkedIn participant from time to time.
Mandy Walker (52:38)
Awesome. Well, thanks Sloane. Appreciate the conversation today.
Sloane Barbour - Engin (52:41)
Thanks, Mandy.
