AMA: Calendly Chief Marketing Officer, Jessica Gilmartin on Influencing without Authority

The most important thing around influence is clearly identifying and communicating how your work is contributing to sales success and ultimately having a positive impact on the business. Early on in my career, I learned that the most effective marketers are deeply committed to designing their goals around metrics sales teams actually care about. This essential insight is what inspired me to shift away from measuring leads to measuring marketing-generated pipeline.  Changing metrics may be daunti ...Read More

I love this question. When you’re a small company, the stakeholders are a pretty small group: You’ll work with a small number of sales reps who generally serve similar customer groups and operate using the same sales strategy. As a result, the type of demand gen work you have to do is generally pretty consistent and straightforward (not that it’s easy!). As companies grow, customer bases expand and evolve, making Demand Generation work increasingly complex. For example, companies will begin serv ...Read More

This is a tricky one! First, you should assume that both stakeholders have good intent and that they’re willing to work together to resolve the issue. It’s critical to go in with a positive mindset! Then, try to create a shared fact base so that you’re all working from the same data. Once you have a shared understanding of the facts, then you can begin to build shared goals. Ask lots of questions to find shared goals between the stakeholders, and help them work towards a compromise that meets bo ...Read More

I treat my cross-functional partners as if they’re my customers. So, I spend most of my 1/1 time with them learning about what they care most about, what key challenges they face, and the goals they are working towards. If I need their help, I always ground our conversation in how their support will help us both achieve a common goal. If I can’t find a common goal, then I know I have two options: Figure out who else in the organization does have that goal (and get them involved) or change the sc ...Read More

We care a lot about clarity, both for our customers and our internal teams. So it’s important for us to build clarity into every step of the planning process:  First, we align on goals: We don’t start any project until the team is aligned on the project’s goals and how they ultimately ladder up to our company’s key objectives and mission. On an individual and team level, goals help everyone understand why their work matters and what they should be working towards.  Next, we answer the big questi ...Read More

No matter where I am in my career, I always consider my work in the context of how I’m making the company more successful in achieving its goals. In other words, rather than focusing on my personal priorities, I spend my time thinking about how the problems I am solving show up across the organization, and how I can partner with key stakeholders to solve them. As a marketer, our challenge is often understanding how our work supports sales. I learned early on in my career that partnering closely ...Read More