Sydney Sloan works as the Chief Marketing Officer at SalesLoft. Sloan was previously CMO of the enterprise open-source software company Alfresco, where she helped the company achieve record quarterly growth and pass its $100 million milestone in 2017. Prior to Alfresco, she led the customer experience team at Jive Software.
This episode features an interview with Sydney Sloan, CMO of SalesLoft, a leading sales engagement platform whose most recent funding round valued the company at over a billion dollars.
Sydney is a two-time CMO and seasoned marketer with more than 25 years of experience as an advisor, investor, and marketing leader for numerous companies, most notably Adobe, where she spent 15 years in product marketing, customer marketing, and demand generation.
On this episode, Sydney delves into the inner workings of SalesLoft’s website, explains how to personalize your marketing team’s communications, and shares the framework she uses for having difficult conversations at work.
“You have to personalize your communications. Email is the primary channel, but you have to use more than email….When you're doing email, phone call, a social touch and a direct mail, that is the holy-quad-fecta. You'll get a 4.7 X higher lift than sending email alone.”
“Everybody in SaaS knows that you have to continue to work really hard to maintain a customer, especially in a competitive marketplace. So having those programs where customers can come and learn about what we're up to and learn from others is important.”
“I love my website. First of all, I believe the website is the first door, the reflection of your brand. It should speak like a human and we've worked really hard to make it sound like a ‘Lofter’ and even our chatbot’s called Lofty. Just having that ability to communicate in the way that sellers want to be communicated to– that’s so important.”
“My one piece of advice to give to a CMO who's trying to rethink or figure out their demand gen strategy would be to don't try and fix it all at once. Try and find one part that you can focus the team on and fix that first and then go to the second one. Trying to do it all at once can be overwhelming and take too long. Get quick wins.”
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Links
Dare To Lead by Brené Brown book
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Dare to Lead podcast by Brené Brown
Connect with Sydney on LinkedIn