Crafting sales and marketing chemistry with Helen Lancaster of Kerv
Crafting sales and
marketing chemistry
with Helen Lancaster
of Kerv
The Chief Marketing Officer for Kerv has spent a career getting the growth-driving elements of the business working better together. In this episode of On the Road, she tells LinkedIn’s Alyssa Merwin how engaged marketing and sales leaders can come together to decode the changing buyer journey.
Many revenue leaders struggle to pin down what effective sales and marketing alignment really looks like. Helen Lancaster, the CMO for cloud and digital transformation solutions business Kerv, isn’t one of them. As someone who’s held both sales and marketing roles during her career, she knows exactly what it feels like when the two most growth-oriented elements of the business are working as they should be.
“When I was working in demand generation marketing roles, I knew almost instantly how successful I would be when I first met the sales leaders I’d be working with,” she says. “It would all depend on how dynamic and engaged they were. The best marketers I’ve worked with are those that are completely empathetic to sales, and the best salespeople are those most actively engaged with marketing opportunities.”
That type of cross-functional engagement becomes all the more valuable when organizations are confronted with a changing buyer journey – and established ideas about buyer personas go out of the window. As the discussion between Helen and the Global VP for LinkedIn for Sales Alyssa Merwin makes clear, old assumptions about who buys and what motivates them no longer hold true. Marketing and sales need new thinking to map out who to target and how – and cross-fertilizing ideas is a great place to start.
“The days are long gone when you could sit in a workshop and put up a caricature of what you think an IT buyer looks like,” says Helen. “We’re seeing the rise of millennials as decision-makers, and they are buying in different ways.”
The task of understanding expanding buyer committees and shifting buyer motivations becomes easier when sales and marketing teams come at the task from complementary angles. Helen is an advocate for marketers finding different ways to start conversations with buyers. “We can ask clients the questions that you as salespeople can’t,” she says. “We can get them in to explain trends in their sectors or to run keynotes. The types of relationships that marketers build can act as a secret weapon for sales.”
Sales and Marketing Collaboration
Changing Buyer Personas
Success with Sales Navigator
“It’s important for marketing teams to feel comfortable asking questions for sales. If they’re going to create brilliant campaigns and content, they need that understanding of what’s going on in the customer’s world. We can also make sales heroes famous and share success so that others learn. It’s something I’ve found particularly powerful in the past.”
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