Latané Conant, recently promoted from CMO to CRO at 6sense
Few will argue that Sales and Marketing should not be better aligned. But how best to do that creates intense debates. Recently, 6sense took a somewhat unique approach to address this challenge by promoting Latané Conant, the company’s long-time CMO, to the new role of chief revenue officer (CRO). Might this be a new trend for others to follow? Or is it an anomaly? Should CMOs and CROs report separately to the CEO? Or should they be combined as one function? These questions were posed to Conant for her perspective.
What is your new mandate now that you are CRO?
Latané Conant: For us there, there became a tipping point of maturity, where you're growing and then you start to complexify, which is a good thing. You expand into new verticals, you expand into new geographies, you maybe introduce new product lines and sell to different personas. And this is all part of a fueling growth. But suddenly, there needs to be a lot more alignment between all the go-to-market functions. How do we make sure we're selling the right product mix? How do we make sure we're investing in the new phases of growth and manage our overall headcount and cost? How do we make sure we're servicing the customer in new and innovative ways. So, all of a sudden, all these demands start to come down across the team, and it becomes really hard to effectively see the whole picture and make good decisions because everyone's looking in their own little forest. And that's just what we found.
We found that we wanted to move faster, get more alignment across the team, and form a more holistic view of the customer, from prospect through upsell, cross sell, the whole journey. We also are bullish on our partner ecosystem and felt that was a lever that needed to be more closely integrated with the overall go-to-market. My mantle is “market” and we actually talked about me continuing to just have the titled chief market officer. And I probably would have wanted that had it not been that we sell to sales, and we need to have a bigger voice with sales. I do a lot externally, so we thought that would be a good connection point.
How did your varied career experience prepare you for the CRO role?
Conant: Most CROs have grown up through one path, and that is being a sales leader. What my role represents is a more portfolio approach to a career. We needed to find a CRO who knows sales, who knows post-sale, customers, partners, who knows professional services and can build a services organization. And someone who’s done it at a company our size and above. We started looking around and there were not a lot of candidates like that. So, we just got to talking and it was like, I am not the perfect candidate, but I had enough of a portfolio. I've been in professional services. I've led professional services teams. I've been in post-sale, and then a strategic account manager for some big accounts. I've been a sales leader. I've run sales enablement. I run revenue ops. But ultimately, what I think the board liked about me was I know the customer better than anyone else. I do about 20 to 25 customer or prospect calls a week. We've built these communities of CMOs and sales leaders. I am customer zero of our product. And so, they were like, who better to understand who we sell to, who we market to, and who we want to adopt our product than someone who's been in it so much.
You have previously advocated that CMOs should report to CEOs and not CROs. Why the change of heart?
Conant: In my book, No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls., there's a chapter where I talk about if you're a CMO, you have to report to the CEO. And I was very vocal about not going and reporting to a CRO. If the CRO is just a head of sales, and they want you to do demand gen, that's not a CMO job. So I think you’ve got to look at the scope of the role. There is a quarterly drumbeat that trumps everything! And it you can be swept away in that, and there’s a heightened sense of, this has to go out today and we got to get this closed. It's like this factory. If you're doing marketing, you're placing longer term bets. And you're able to step back and say, okay, this is not going to get us anything this quarter, but this is the right investment, because we want to think about the long term. It's the longer term, what's around the corner thinking that a good CMO should be bringing to the table. If I'm worried about quarterly deals and everything focuses on that, then marketing becomes sales enablement to close deals. As opposed to, where are we going? What markets do we need to be in? What’s our partnership strategy. There's so much more that a CMO should be bringing strategically than just closing deals this quarter.
How do you plan to manage the quarterly sales urgency with the long-term marketing strategy?
Conant: One of the most valuable things that we do here is that we really take the QBRs seriously. We spend a lot of time looking at our numbers, dissecting what the patterns are. We were looking for patterns to be able to say, how is this going to bite us in three quarters? We evaluate those long-term bets and those short-term bets in two full days of looking at all the deals that we won and what's alike about them. And how has that changed? And what does that mean for the next three quarters? We do a lot of like thinking about our ideal customer profile. We do a lot of thinking about our market. And that creates a healthy reflection.
The first part of the QBR is all about market and market trends. What keywords do we see coming up? What personas do we see in our deals that maybe we didn't before? What competitors do we see in our deals that maybe we didn't see before? What are analysts saying? So, the first part is all market, market, market, because a that makes sure that you are getting more out of your P&L statement investments, because you're course correcting. Moving forward, we’ve have made a pretty significant bet on communities, so we always spend a fair amount of time on how are our communities are building? What value are we creating for the people in our communities? And then when we look at our big bets of spend. We do an ROI analysis, but the ROI is its return it's an impact. It doesn't necessarily have to be pipeline. It could be we got this many more engaged pieces of this market or we knew we wanted to be more recognized in this particular segment. I force my team to articulate their results in the form of some form of impact, but it doesn't always have to be an MQL or form fill.
What is it like for a former CMO to now be managing Sales?
Conant: I wouldn't do it without them. That's 100% Sure. I think great leaders always work for your team. I call this period “getting in the flow”, which is understanding and helping. I try to be the leader that you would want to work for and I really thinking a lot about that. My hope is that people have seen the commitment over the last five years to our customers, to our market, to using our own product for ourselves. What gets the entire team excited about the move is the ability to streamline, to bring people together and to get the things done that we want to get done. I just can't let them down.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
