Alignment with Sales and other stakeholders to improve pipeline outcomes

01 — How I worked with Sales and Product Category to reshape a campaign around the real business need, not just the original marketing plan.

Following guidance from the global team, I worked with Sales and the Product Category teams to develop a local campaign for the latest entry-level infrastructure server, and we had slightly different views on how to take it to market.

The risk in adopting the global strategy was that it would become another product-heavy digital campaign, focusing on speeds and feeds. However, I believed the real opportunity was to speak more directly to SMB business outcomes.

The challenge was to get alignment on a plan that still met the product brief but was more relevant in market.

02 — Action

Understanding what the Product Category team was trying to achieve was the starting point.

From there, I worked closely with Sales to reshape the campaign so audience, message, and follow-up all pointed in the same direction, and partnered with the SDR team on qualification standards and conversation scripts, so Sales received leads with real context, not just volume.

Rather than pushing a marketing-led view, I anchored the conversation on the commercial outcome we were after:

• stronger awareness,

• better engagement, and

• a more credible path to conversion.

We tracked progression through Salesforce directly where we coordinated stage-gate definitions with Sales so a lead's movement from MQL to SQL to commit reflected one consistent pipeline picture, not separate marketing and sales interpretations.

03 — Result

This alignment strengthened Sales and Product Category buy-in, improved execution, and delivered measurable pipeline impact, including:

• 30x initial MQLs,

• 15% conversion over twelve months, and

• $750K USD in incremental closed digital sales from 12 net-new logos within six months, new business the original product-led approach would have likely missed