5 Things Sales Teams Want Marketers to Know, According to Dropbox’s VP of Sales

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Hi, I'm Deb McClure. I am the vice president of sales in the Americas at Dropbox, and I'm responsible for sales in the Americas. And that means new customer acquisition, that means expansion and renewals, and it means our channel.

I'd love to start with top of the funnel and thought leadership. Thought leadership is typically a marketing activity that is not directly tied to selling. Why do you think thought leadership matters for sales?

I think it is absolutely tied to selling. So the sales organization really wants to serve our customers and help them achieve business outcomes. And in order to earn the right to talk to our business or customers about business outcomes, then we have to demonstrate that we have a degree of thought leadership. So thought leadership absolutely matters, and we talk about what we know best. So, for example, in the sales organization, as we drink our own champagne and use E Signature in the sales cycle, we know that we've accelerated sales by 33%. The other thing that Dropbox is proud of is our Virtual first environment. And through Virtual first, we really shaped our company around the Virtual first attitude. So systems, processes, team cadence. And as a result, we've not only seen business results, but we've been a talent attraction. So talent's coming to us from all over, and we're really raising the bar on the folks that we're hiring. And 90% of people that are coming to us say that they want to work at Dropbox because of Virtual First. So it's these types of thought leadership that we're proud of, and we feel that we can help other companies achieve same or similar business outcomes. So thought leadership is critical to serving the customer.

How do you wish marketers would approach audience segmentation?

If I look at audience segmentation, I think everything we do and should do is around customer centricity. So how do customers want to be served? How do they want to buy from you? And I look at our routes to market from a segmentation perspective. We have self serve, we have our channel partners, we have marketplaces, and we have direct. So how do we marry that route to market with marketing to understand who's going to lead there? Is IT marketing leading? Is IT sales led? And then how do we craft messaging around segments, either vertical or horizontal in nature, whether it's manufacturing or construction or tech and software or creatives, and then the horizontal piece, sales, marketing, hr. How do we make sure the customer is at the center of it all? And what's really worked for us is how we address those customer settings. We do it as one team. So sales and marketing Together one strategy with one set of common metrics that are from top of funnel to through the life cycle, with a cadence that we review on a regular basis to understand what's going well and the curiosity and understand why and what's not with the same curiosity to understand why so that we can address anything and keep the strategy dynamic as we move through the customer journey in all the various customer segments.

I love that. And you talked a little bit about customer centric marketing and sales alignment. How can a marketer play a customer centric role even after the deal has closed?

I think once the deal closes, the relationship just starts. So marketing is critical in the lifecycle journey. And if you think about it, when we talk to customers about the business outcomes that they can achieve, we want to help be responsible for that business outcome. So is there onboarding? Is there the value driver that they're receiving and what's the next value driver? And then again, is that sales led or marketing led? So it could be product led, could be messaging and product, it could be digital marketing to help that user along the journey. It could be a one to many that marketing sponsors. So a lunch and learn if you will. It could be a case study and did you know that marketing sponsors or it could be sales led. That's more one on one activity. But marketing brings us that scale to help accelerate the business outcomes for our customers. So I think it's really critical that marketing plays a part throughout the lifecycle journey and continues to check in in three places. I call it people, pipeline and priorities. So if we continue to check in along the life cycle of people, meaning our customers, our channel partners and in our employees, how we're doing and what's working well, the pipeline, every metric from top of funnel all the way through the life cyc. So are they onboarded? How many seats are being used on a regular basis, on a monthly basis and we check those critical statistics together and objectives together and then priorities once a quarter, review the priorities. Are we still in line with marketing sales and with our customers and channel partners, most importantly. So marketing absolutely plays a role.

What advice do you have for marketing teams that may have the best intentions but aren't delivering effective enablement materials to their sales teams?

Really goes back to the partnership with sales. I tell you, when I love story, when I got first got here to Dropbox almost two years ago, we were doing so many great things in marketing and so many great things in enablement and it was very noisy because there was so much going on, but they weren't connected. So something that we did that's really worked for us is we just slowed down to move faster and we connected the dots. So we have a few plays that are large plays every quarter and we have enablement, we have role plays, we have marketing material, we have contacts targeting the right marketing or the right folks provided by marketing within our customer base. So and, and we're connected all the way through. And whether it's a blitz day or it's a social media play, we're connected and we do this as one team. Next month we're going to do a sales play so not vertical. We're going to go back to that horizontal play and talk about how our products can help attract top of funnel, how Dropbox can collaborate with a customer in your pipeline, how our Docsend can we can see sales analytics once we send a proposal out so that we can understand how who, who is really qualified in that pipeline where we should spend our time increasing productivity. And then of course e signature once the deal's done to accelerate that deal cycle by 33%. And this is why I love the partnership with HubSpot because HubSpot is plays all through that journey. We go hand in hand all through that journey helping the sales teams that we serve have a better experience with their customers.

That's great and I'm happy to hear that. My last question is what deal acceleration tips would you give for marketers?

So from a deal perspective I think it's really just understanding the flow of TAPA pipeline throughout the life cycle and how we can accelerate accelerate the deal moving through the funnel. And like I mentioned, if we can feel deal analytics and understand who's opening up proposals, who's sending proposals to procurement perhaps and whose proposal isn't open, I can tell a level of qualification in the pipeline to accelerate where I should target and where I should do account based marketing perhaps and in the conjunction and in partnership with marketing. And then once that deal's done, how do I leverage everything that I've learned in my CRM and send a signature out to accelerate the deal by 33%. I think that I would just leave you with sales and marketing. That connection is so powerful when the teams are in sync. So the three tips I would have is one make sure you align objectives and goals as one set of objectives and goals for to one united strategy and clearly mark out what what's what's success look like? What are those KPIs that will be measured and what's the cadence into which you will measure those and have clear lines of accountability. What's marketing led? What's sales led? How do you empower the teams to exist next side by side? And then lastly, you know, how do you create the cadence to review what's working and review what's not and continually add to that dynamic strategy with the customer, of course, at the center of it all?