In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin introduces a conversation with Thao Ngo, SVP of Marketing at UpTempo, and Emily Ward, VP of Global Marketing at Anthology, moderated by Bree Sprague of Rev Genius. Both guests come from companies that have recently merged multiple businesses, creating a backdrop of post‑merger challenges. The discussion centers on how to move the relationship between sales, marketing, and RevOps from conflict (“bad blood”) to high‑performing partnership (“badass”). Thao outlines UpTempo’s recent integration of Brandmaker, Allocadia, and Hive9, and emphasizes the need for ROI‑driven marketing as a common goal that aligns all functions. Emily shares her experience on both sides of the table, describing typical sales‑centric views (pipeline generation, urgency, focus on closing) versus marketing‑centric views (lead nurturing, long‑term funnel building, feeling like a support function). Both agree that RevOps must provide measurement and insight to unite the teams around revenue outcomes. The conversation highlights practical takeaways: focus on shared revenue metrics, establish clear communication, celebrate achievements that reflect true company revenue, and implement actionable steps that teams can start tomorrow to build a “powerhouse” revenue organization.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
So there was a fire inspection happening in my building today. I'm like, I can't. We had a live webinar once and the customer speaker had to evacuate. Oh my gosh, cruise ship. Oh my gosh.
Oh my gosh, that's crazy town. Okay, looks like we are started. Okay. Hello, everyone, and your slides are in the media tab, just so you know, the media tab over to the right. Hello, everyone. I am Bree Sprague. I am the partner success manager over here at Rev Genius. We are super excited that you chose to spend some time with us today. Not only do we have Tao and Emily here, who I'm going to introduce in just a second, but we have an amazing list and lineup of speakers and topics. I'm hoping that you check those out. But right here, here we want to know from Hao, who is the SVP over at UpTempo, our partner, and Emily Ward, who is the VP of Global Marketing over at Anthology. We're going to figure out how to take something from bad blood— it's all about relationship— over to badass. Sales, marketing, and rev-ups unite. I'm super excited about this. Please feel free to ask a lot of questions in the Q&A and chat in the chat. And we'll go ahead and get this started, but tell everybody where you're from in the chat, and I'm gonna hop backstage and let these 2 awesome women kick it off. Thanks so much.
Great. So I hope everyone can see my slides. I've done the sharing correctly there. I assume so. So welcome to our session. It's the perfect conference really to talk about everyone coming together. Now, a little bit more about who we are. So as Bri mentioned, I'm the SVP of Marketing at UpTempo. We provide a marketing operations suite that helps marketing teams plan better, spend smarter, and execute with confidence. So now UpTempo is a newly branded combination of Brandmaker, Allocadia, and Hive9. So, this past year, we've been going through the exercise of bringing 3 companies together, which does test those relationships between these 3 groups under challenging conditions. I've worked in marketing for B2B tech companies of various sizes for decades. I've seen the good, the bad, the ugly in terms of working relationships between marketing, sales, and RevOps. And with this speaking opportunity, I thought I wanted someone to join me for a lively conversation and to have fun. So immediately I thought of Emily. Emily, I'll let you introduce yourself. Great. Thanks, Tao.
And I'm really excited to be with you all and with you, Tao, today.
So while many of you may not be familiar with the name Anthology, you may actually recognize the name Blackboard.
And so actually Anthology emerged Pretty recently in the last couple of years as a compilation of a few different organizations in the education technology space, the most recent addition to which was Blackboard. So much like Tao, we're also, we're in a post-merger environment, which presents a whole new set of opportunities and challenges, as some of you have likely experienced firsthand in your own careers. With that, I'll pass it back to Tao, who's going to take us through our top takeaways for this session.
Right. So, you know, we've all attended a lot of conferences and webinars, and sometimes the promised takeaways get a little lost. So we wanna be sure that we hit the key points that we promised in our session. So flipping the conversation, when you focus on ROI-driven marketing, that really brings the groups together under a goal that they can stand behind and understand. And of course, marketing leaders, we're, not here to talk about brand versus demand, but there are some topics that marketing leaders can ramp up on that will help them be seen as an executive that understands the business and the business of marketing. We also wanna make sure this conversation is actionable. What can you start doing tomorrow to build a powerhouse team between marketing, sales, and RevOps? Now, we haven't timed this, Hopefully there will be time for questions at the end. But to start, we want to try to get some of the perspectives that sales and marketing might have of the other, and perhaps these might sound familiar to you. So here we go on perspectives.
Thank you. Yeah, great. So one thing I wanted to mention is that I've actually had a seat on both sides of this table, having built and launched a solution that I eventually moved into a business development role to support the growth of. So I've heard and am likely guilty of saying a few of these things myself, but these are just a handful of generic examples of things we've all likely heard over the years in one form or another. So from the sales perspective, we're really focused on pipeline generation and that grueling task of sifting through a lot of conversations to get those nuggets of gold that are gonna turn into opportunities and eventually sales. So, there's oftentimes a perception that marketing is only focused on the look and feel of things, making them pretty, and that the level that marketing is operating at is a little bit too high, right? So, a little bit too much flash and not really a lot of substance. I'd also say there's probably a high sense of urgency, right, to do a lot of activities with the goal of generating more pipeline. That's really what sales is focused on. From a marketing perspective, the team really wants to know what's happening with the leads once they're actually generated. They're interested in setting that stage for sales, but they know that what they're doing is contributing to a long-term and a larger conversation. It's really difficult because they're oftentimes feeling like they're pulled in a number of different directions, especially when the organization organization sees them as a support or admin function, which makes it a little bit difficult to develop and stay focused on overarching strategies for growth. So, why are we at odds? Well, from the sales perspective, again, we're working with the most unpredictable part of the process, which is people. So, sales needs to tap into their intuition and think about what to do and say, which requires a certain amount of flexibility in positioning their talk track. They're really focused on and accountable for closing the deal. So that's what's right in front of them. Whereas from the marketing perspective, we're looking at this as selling as a series of steps, right? So we're really thinking about how we're gonna draw in potential customers into the funnel by raising awareness and adding value to the conversation. And then we know that this is a long haul, right? We're trying to move prospects through each stage of the various funnel. funnel stages, which really takes time and unfortunately doesn't necessarily happen overnight. So this of course begs the question, what is the factor that unites us?
Yes, in order to work better together, we have to find some common ground because it should be a partnership and not a battle. And RevOps needs to be able to measure everything in order to provide the data and insight for us to make business decision. So what does everybody want? What's on our minds when we get up in the morning? And it's revenue. I mean, that sounds obvious, but sometimes it's not, especially when some salespeople might not think it's something marketers even think about, but we do. I remember being at one company where the marketing team would go on these fun quarterly reward trips because we hit our MQL goals. But the sales team weren't able to close enough deals to hit the company revenue goals. So it didn't make sense for us to celebrate when the company didn't achieve their targets. And today marketing is responsible for pipeline and the team marketing, sales, and RevOps were responsible for net new and expansion revenue together.
Whoa. Another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
