How Sprout Social builds revenue marketing around segmentation (with Hailey McDonald, VP of Revenue Marketing)

Dave Gerhardt (0:00)

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You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show.

Hey, my guest on this episode is Hailey McDonald. She's VP of Revenue Marketing at Sprout Social. They're a social intelligence platform with 30,000 customers. They've been around 16 years. She sits within a 75-person marketing org, three marketing leaders that report to the CMO. Her job is all about revenue marketing. She's the one responsible for the pipeline. This is the hardest role to hire for in B2B right now that we're hearing revenue marketing demand gen. So we talk about her approach at Sprout Social, why it's all about the strategy and the segmentation, not the channels. Enjoy my conversation with Hailey McDonald. Seems like this role, which you are, you're VP of Revenue Marketing, but this is like demand gen, which seems to be this unicorn type of hire today. Why is this role so hard to hire for? This is off the cuff, not in our prep, but like this role of like a demand gen leader. This is you. Why is this role so hard to find?

Hailey McDonald (3:22)

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of people, you know, like the man done isn't new. It's been like the favorite child. They think of this actually B2B tech for a while. I do think right now it's, you know, there's a lot of pressure on hiring this role because ultimately, you're responsible, I do it as my responsibility to attach all of marketing's activity into some sort of like revenue generating machine, right? Like ultimately, for the most part, if you're in B2B tech or B2B marketing, you're there to like sell a service or sell a product. You're not there to just have fun in games. And so it's the serious business of connecting all of that together. And that can be really challenging when you also want to do good marketing. You know, that like feels human and you're connecting with people and you're making people feel things. Like I'm crunching the numbers in the background and someone else has to make that experience work too on the other side.