Episode #341:
Amy Martin, Chief Marketing Officer at TRG, explains why strong sales and marketing alignment cannot be created through shared dashboards alone. She shares how daily relationships, honest discussion, customer understanding, and shared accountability make collaboration real. Her approach positions marketing as an active partner in every important commercial conversation.
“The more that you can market authentically, the better you are, and the only way that kind of reality comes true is that you hear both sides and you really listen and you really understand that both sales and marketing are striving for excellence.” – Amy Martin
Amy Martin shares a practical model for replacing sales and marketing friction with a shared commercial effort. She explains why marketers need direct exposure to customer and sales conversations, how teams can prepare for fewer and more important buyer interactions, and why trust must be built before a prospect is ready to buy. The conversation reframes marketing as an active contributor to revenue, customer understanding, and sales-cycle acceleration.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:10] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we’ve got a really interesting conversation with Amy Martin. Now, Amy, you are currently the CMO and Head of Strategic Alliances for TRG, and I’m going to have you explain in a minute a little bit more about what you do there and your background.
[00:00:30] Steve MacDonald: But you’ve got a pretty extensive background, from nonprofit, a lot of direct-to-consumer. You’re in B2B. You’ve been at startups. You’ve worked with Big Pharma. I mean, you have really gone all over the spectrum here. But what we’re going to be talking about today is the traditional relationship between sales and marketing, especially in a B2B company.
[00:00:55] Steve MacDonald: There’s a lot of friction. Sometimes that’s good. A little bit of friction is good. But when I talk to C-suite executives on this podcast, internal alignment is the biggest challenge, and a lot of the time that is between sales and marketing. It is the number one place where we have misalignment. And obviously, if we’re going to have a successful go-to-market strategy, we have to be on the same page together, right?
[00:01:21] Steve MacDonald: So we’re going to talk about the great sales and marketing turnaround story, because you have a phenomenal relationship with sales. In fact, I think the last time you and I met, they delivered a bunch of pizzas to the marketing department to thank you for something you did. What I’d love to do is just turn it over to you, maybe expand a little bit more on your background before we dig in.
[00:01:43] Amy Martin: Sure. I knew probably my entire life that I was going to do something in engagement, right? So I started writing at a very young age, so it was no surprise coming out of school that I leaned toward kind of that marcom area. I went into consulting, right? I did international business consulting for a couple of years because it was the best way, I think, to hone a broad skill set and stay in that client service area.
[00:02:08] Amy Martin: Then from there, I kind of made sure it was pretty strategic, right? I wanted to go in-house at very big companies, at very small companies, and just decide where I thought I did my best work. Because some of the mentors that I had all told me that coming out of school, you’re not going to know where you shine if you don’t try different aspects of business.
[00:02:32] Amy Martin: So, you know, I went into Big Pharma. I went in-house to a massive kind of nonprofit. I worked at a fund. I did my big take at two back-to-back startups, one in fintech and one in the fitness industry, so kind of building from the ground up. And my last endeavor here in TRG, which I’ve been here for close to five years, was my first time really coming in-house on the B2B side, and that was the last, I would say, lever that I hadn’t explored. I had spent most of my life in the D2C world, and so, as you can imagine, in D2C, you know, marketing is the sales engine. So I hadn’t really ever had to align myself with a true sales team and sales leader. So it was a huge learning curve for me and something that really excited me, at this point in my career, getting to learn all over again. So I’ve loved every minute of it.
[00:03:25] Steve MacDonald: I would love to tap into, kind of, you had this really interesting outsider’s perspective, CMO perspective, now five years directly relating in a B2B company with the sales department. What is your philosophy on why we are not aligned, and that’s the typical, and then what are the foundational things, just I’ll start out that way, that we need to be thinking about and doing in order to create that alignment?
[00:03:52] Amy Martin: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s the age-old question, right? And I’ll have to say, I have to give kudos to my CEO, who, when he onboarded me, in a way, with sales, I was with them from the get-go. That’s how I onboarded with the company. I wasn’t onboarding with marketing people or other C-suite people. I started my first month really just in the day-to-day with my sales team, and that, I think, probably made one of the biggest differences in my time here.
[00:04:20] Amy Martin: But when I think about why that misalignment, and that, by the way, I don’t find a lot of people that have the same experience that I have, that talk about their sales team and their sales leadership as being as close as we are. And when I really have to nail it down, you can’t really put a measurement on getting aligned.
[00:04:39] Amy Martin: Most companies stop trying and just settle for maybe reporting into the same dashboard or the same person, and that’s how they think that they’re aligned. And then they don’t understand why all this friction is happening. But alignment comes from building relationships with humans, sitting across from somebody and understanding them, going on sales calls with them and/or sales pitches, and understanding why they’re losing, understanding why they’re winning, where the disadvantage is, and then them sitting in marketing meetings where you’re trying to figure things out that will make them better.
[00:05:15] Amy Martin: If you’re not willing to give that, you’re not going to get it. And then I think alignment is just a business term that people throw around, but they don’t mean it.
[00:05:26] Steve MacDonald: So many things I want to unpack there. So alignment is the number one challenge. At the beginning of every podcast I do with a C-suite executive, the conversation starts with, “What are your two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?”
[00:05:43] Steve MacDonald: Internal alignment is the number one. So this is not a small thing to solve. And what I got from you there is that you spend time, as the sales department, put it one way, as the internal customer that you have to be aligned with. And we all know, and we all talk a lot, and you come out of the world of consumer, direct-to-consumer; the customer is our North Star.
[00:06:05] Steve MacDonald: And you can work at companies like P&G or Colgate or something, and it’s all about the customer. A deep understanding of the customer is innate to the industry’s culture. The second challenge C-suite executives have told me is a lack of understanding of the voice of the customer. You have defined it, and I want you to talk about how you understand it, because you’re talking about two different things: internal, sales, understanding them, but you spend a lot of time with the customer in ways that you learn from the customer so that you’re bringing voice of customer from internal and external together.
[00:06:46] Steve MacDonald: That was the amazing thing that I took out of our last conversation. So tell us a little bit about, so we understand what you do on the external voice of the customer, and then how you marry that together with what you understand by sitting face-to-face, human-to-human, with your internal customer, the sales department.
[00:07:04] Amy Martin: Yeah. No, it’s a great question. You hear every company say it, and I genuinely believe they mean it: the customer is everything. Be obsessed with the customer. The customer is the North Star. Everything that you do has to revolve around the customer. It’s a hard thing to get clipped on if you do a promo on this, because this is a scary comment, but I don’t believe in that fully.
[00:07:26] Amy Martin: I believe that the reason we’ve been super successful is that I can sit in the middle of the customer and the sales team and understand where the true point of success is, right? So the customer always has the right to obviously voice what they want, and this is what we stand for, and this is what we want in a partner, and all of that, and you have to listen to that.
[00:07:48] Amy Martin: But as a salesperson, you also understand the reality of things that have to happen on the operations side, of things that the customer has to do in order for it to be successful. So because I’m not sitting in there with a sales hat on, I’m able to hear both sides, and a lot of times I’m able to help, my team is able to help, articulate the reality that’s in the middle.
[00:08:14] Amy Martin: That is where I think the North Star is: where the reality hits of where we can be successful together. The customer’s going to shoot for the biggest, best outcome possible, and the sales rep is going to do the same thing. But that doesn’t always mirror the reality of what’s going to get done on the right timeframe or who is going to give what. I think that marketing often, because I am pulled into a lot of these meetings because it’s important for me to hear from the customer, we’re able to sometimes retool our communication around what success would actually look like in reality. I think that’s been kind of our North Star.
[00:08:54] Steve MacDonald: So tell me if this is a good takeaway from what you’re saying. I love the idea of the middle ground here. What makes customers in the B2B world not only understand us, but also trust us, is when they feel like we get them. Not when we’re pitching, not when we’re vendors selling our wares, but when we can truly communicate how we understand their world, their reality, their challenges, their opportunities, and help contribute to that conversation.
[00:09:27] Steve MacDonald: So what I’m taking away here is that you’re doing that with your internal customer, too. You’re communicating to them that we get your reality, right? It’s really hard to get executive access these days. It’s really, really hard to get the second meeting. And the time between those meetings and the duration of those meetings, it’s difficult.
[00:09:50] Steve MacDonald: The sales department, what they have to go through today is that buyers are waiting longer and longer to even want to talk to us. That dynamic is something that they deal with every single day. But you understand that, and you help and support them.
[00:10:05] Amy Martin: I think it’s, not to interrupt you, but I think it’s also super important. It shapes our go-to-market, right? It’s my responsibility to make sure the go-to-market is realistic and true to who we are. So it’s not just promising that we’re going to do everything that the customer wants. Of course, the customer is always right in a sense, right? But there are times that things are not realistic because of things that are going on in the world that are completely out of our control, around tariffs or operational challenges with shipping and anything like that that happens in real life.
[00:10:38] Amy Martin: The more that you can market authentically, the better you are. And the only way that kind of reality comes true is that you hear both sides and you really listen, and you really understand that both are striving for excellence, and you figure out a way to market it in a way that is genuine.
[00:10:59] Steve MacDonald: So tell me a little bit about how this helps in today’s commercial go-to-market. Buyers are waiting longer and longer to talk to us, and Gartner has published all kinds of reports that the sales process today is more of a validation process because the buyer has already determined exactly what they want. And we used to have conversations a lot earlier in the conversation where we were influencing how they thought about their problems, the timing for resolution.
[00:11:27] Steve MacDonald: Is this an internal problem? Is this an external problem? We need help with what kind of budget we should put together? There’s a lot that goes into forming their problem and solving it. So that is a big issue with our go-to-market these days: how do we help influence that when they don’t, when they’re waiting longer and longer to talk to us?
[00:11:50] Steve MacDonald: That is a problem between marketing and sales and the entire go-to-market strategy that we need to solve. The playbook has to be different. What you’re doing, because you brought up what is our go-to-market, how does all of this we’ve been talking about impact how you change the go-to-market strategy?
[00:12:08] Amy Martin: Yeah, I mean, it’s the age-old question, right? For us, it’s very important. We manage full life cycles of endpoints, anything with an operating system. So when you think about all the people that we’re touching, anybody who has a warehouse or a distribution center, front-of-the-house retail checkout, anything like that, anybody that has a phone or a desktop, we can help.
[00:12:29] Amy Martin: When you think about staying in front of that in the go-to-market, and, you know, to your point, in the past customers or potential prospects would want to engage with you before they were actually transactional. What we know now is that a lot of things are based on word of mouth, which is incredible in this time of AI.
[00:12:48] Amy Martin: I love that, but we never devalue, I think, the incredible importance of relationship building and trust. And right now, AI can’t build trust. So as those transactional timelines shrink, you get an RFP or you get a call from a direct possible customer that says, “Hey, we’re interested in working with you.” That time has to be exceptionally valuable and sharp.
[00:13:11] Amy Martin: You have to go in with the right questions. Really spending time figuring out the business questions and the problems that are facing your industry, that has to be top of every salesperson’s mind. And in marketing, our team works with our sales team on that all the time. What is going on in the industry right now? What are the major problems that are impacting retail or that are impacting manufacturing, transportation, and logistics? Because you might only get one call before they make a decision, so that call has to be incredibly prepared for and right on the button, and that’s our job. So I would say in the past years, and I’m still a believer in brand, brand is how I grew up, right?
[00:13:55] Amy Martin: You just continuously build that brand, but now getting the sales team ready with the industry knowledge, with understanding what’s happening in the market, and really talking to them about, “Hey, let’s look at your entire customer base. What are some of the trends that you’re seeing right now that are getting them in problems, right?
[00:14:16] Amy Martin: That’s making them go over budget, that’s not getting them approved for budget as they head into the next year?” And when we get all that information back, we can prepare our teams for one conversation where we believe they can be chosen as the right partner. So I think that two-way communication between marketing and sales, and it has to be in the moment, and that is the number one reason that we’re successful, is because of the relationship we have with sales.
[00:14:47] Amy Martin: We have conversations throughout the day about what happens every day with a customer, with a pitch, with a meeting, with a partner meeting. We sit by each other; we grab each other. I’m upstairs, they’re down here. Because you don’t want to let that conversation go. You don’t want to forget to pass that knowledge off that helps us make you better. Does that answer your question?
[00:15:09] Steve MacDonald: Oh, yeah, in a big way. And in fact, I had a CRO, I don’t know, two months ago, tell me. I said, in the world where there’s so much competition, the average B2B company has over 20 different competitors, and they come in a number of different flavors, and it’s harder to get that access, as we talked about.
[00:15:31] Steve MacDonald: It’s harder to keep that meeting. I just asked him, I said, “What is, if you could articulate to me, what is the key competitive advantage of your sales department?” Because we had talked about the product, and the product is incredibly important. When I ask all C-suite executives, “What are your two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth?”
[00:15:51] Steve MacDonald: Not one in over 150 conversations has said, “Our product, our service is our greatest competitive advantage.” And they are not diminishing it at all. They are just saying, “It’s something else that is holding us back. It’s not the product holding us back.” And so I asked him, and he said, “Our insights into their market, that’s our number one competitive advantage.”
[00:16:15] Steve MacDonald: It’s exactly what you just said. It is getting them prepared so that meeting is not a pitch meeting. That meeting is a consultation; it is a demonstration of our value. We understand, we get them, right? And so you have, yeah.
[00:16:32] Amy Martin: That it’s a two-way conversation, right? To your point, you said it. It’s not a pitch. I think what we do really well here is we go in curious. Look, curious has become an overused term. We go into meetings not with a one-way narrative. We go into meetings because there is still information to find. What is keeping that one person up at night, or why are they worried that they are not going to meet their goal?
[00:16:59] Amy Martin: And so, if you do get that next call, you do make it to the next round or to a decision, you can take all of what they give you, and you can inform it in a different way. I have, and you have probably seen or sat through thousands of pitches throughout your life, whether it is somebody knocking on your door, selling you at a store, or selling you a business.
[00:17:19] Amy Martin: The ones that talk to you and are not listening; you are not having a conversation. So, you know, our job is to give our team the information to have that conversation, to have the data points, have statistics, be informed. But the job of the sales team is to have a conversation with somebody and relate to them, sit across from somebody, and really understand what they are going through. And hopefully, they understand the value that you can bring to that situation.
[00:17:49] Steve MacDonald: Boy, oh boy. I just want to, I want to talk for two hours on just what you are talking about right here, right? Because the typical CMO, they articulate it to me this way, “I feel like I have imposter syndrome. I feel like I do not have a seat at the table. I feel like I am looked upon as one of the largest cost centers in the business.”
[00:18:08] Steve MacDonald: And what you are talking about is a role that marketing plays in the go-to-market strategy that is way beyond lead generation. They feel like they are as good as their last MQL, right? And then trying to make sure that MQL turns into an SQL and we get sales acceptance, and that they feel like they live in a baton pass.
[00:18:28] Steve MacDonald: We create leads, we hand them to you, you take them, we go back to creating leads. And what you are articulating is such a different relationship, such a different role that marketing plays in sales, that I think we all need to stand up. The visual you have created in my mind is that you are in a three-legged race with sales. You are not in different portions of the leg. It is not the baton pass whatsoever.
[00:18:57] Amy Martin: No. And I would say, it’s so funny, and you can ask anybody at the company, when I first started here, one of my biggest mantras in the first month was, “If you start telling me about MQL and SQL, you are not going to leave the meeting.” That metric is outdated, and it is actually what causes friction between the two departments. So from an MQL standpoint, my team can say, “This is a qualified lead. It meets the ICP. It’s within the industry. They opened an email from us. This is 100% qualified,” and they can hand it off to sales.
[00:19:32] Amy Martin: Sales can have a conversation and say, “I talked to this person. It was not qualified,” because that person was not transactional at the time, right? And then they challenge marketing, and marketing challenges them. The MQL, SQL standpoint, I think that was created in the mid-’80s. It was needed because, at that point, you couldn’t actually measure much.
[00:19:51] Amy Martin: That is completely outdated. I have a leadership team here, primarily our CEO, who doesn’t believe marketing is this engine off to the side that is only measured by lead gen. We go so deep. We have a meeting today, which I’m the most excited about, because we have a huge potential customer coming in.
[00:20:08] Amy Martin: I wish I could tell you who, but I can’t. And we are going to start at the parking lot door and walk in with our sales team that is going to be in this meeting and talk about what this potential customer could feel as they walk through our doors. Where are we going to hit them with our signage? What is going to be very specific for them?
[00:20:31] Amy Martin: What is that meeting going to feel like? We are not talking about the pitch deck yet. We are not talking about any of that. And because we work that way, there is real passion behind it. They are explaining the personality of this person that is coming. We are kind of on our computers researching the company, and we are like, “What if they walked in this way and they saw that?”
[00:20:52] Amy Martin: That type of excitement. And then we sit down, and we start to work on what does that feel like in that meeting? What are we going to say? What are we going to ask them to say? All the way down to what we’re going to order at lunch, and what it’s going to feel like when we walk out and shake hands. And by the way, I’m going to be in that meeting.
[00:21:10] Amy Martin: And that is a team that is designed to win together. So look, you have to measure things, without a doubt. You have to show that what you spend has a return. But I think for so long, keeping an MQL and an SQL separate and not talking about what you are trying to accomplish with a pitch or with a meeting or with an engagement, you are missing a true sense of team.
[00:21:35] Amy Martin: That’s why I would put our marketing and sales team up against anybody, because we want to win together. We care about each other, we listen to each other, we share wins, and we share the losses together. And that, to me, is just an incredible feeling, and it’s empowering. To your point, my team knows we have a seat at the table, and that comes from our CEO all the way down to the newest sales rep who walks in the door.
[00:22:02] Steve MacDonald: So I have to ask you, and thank you, by the way, for that articulation. You are really helping us understand the role of the modern CMO versus the CMO in the past. It was literally focused on throwing MQLs over the wall. And there are all kinds of studies that show that the majority of connections between your company, a seller, and a buyer are when the buyer is reaching out to the seller.
[00:22:30] Steve MacDonald: And that only happens when you are known and you are trusted because they are trying to formulate their shortlist. If we are not on that shortlist, we are out. And that shortlist is short. It’s the reason why it’s called short, right? So building trust, building awareness in advance of the RFP, in advance of the close of the shortlist, is a huge responsibility for the organization. What role does marketing play in getting on that shortlist? What role do you see yourself in?
[00:23:07] Amy Martin: Oh, that’s a huge part of our job. So our job, in my mind, if you ask me, you know, from a marketing perspective standpoint, what is my job? It’s to shorten the sales cycle. At the end of the day, my job is to have as few meetings and engagements as possible so those customers choose us. Because our sales reps only have a certain amount of time during the day. They are on with customers, they are solving problems, they are selling, they are being a part of a powerful engagement. And it’s what our team is doing on a continual basis to stay in front of people that are starting to think about being transactional.
[00:23:45] Amy Martin: Our team is constantly coming up with ways to get in front of our ideal customer, whether that’s trade conferences, thought leadership, content, social channels like LinkedIn, and video. In any way that we feel we can be a part of a conversation, it’s our job to do it and to find engagement. Anything from a webinar to a sales kickoff meeting, to a partner meeting, to a major press conference, to a major trade show, to an email that just lands.
[00:24:17] Amy Martin: So our job is to think of every possible way we can start an engagement with our ideal customers to give that support to shrink that sales cycle. And that’s a lot of brands, that’s paid, it’s mixed media, and you have got to have somebody obsessed with the data that’s watching what hits. Okay, watching what’s getting some traction, watching what’s getting those conversations to start, and listening.
[00:24:45] Amy Martin: This is, again, our sales team has to tell us how that lead came in, how that conversation went. “Somebody referenced this. I talked to them at this trade conference. Amy, they talked about this email or this newsletter that you guys sent out.” If that communication is not happening, we are just guessing, and we are throwing away money. We do not believe in wasting money here. We are going to put money where it works, where our sales reps are telling us it’s hitting, and where we are seeing the data show. So that’s our job, I feel like, is that 360-degree approach, trying to touch them where they are, shorten that sales cycle, building that trust before that initial conversation happens.
[00:25:27] Steve MacDonald: So I want to give you an opportunity to boil all this down, because we have covered a lot of really great territory, but the human brain can only remember about two or three things at a time. What would you want for the CEOs, CMOs, CROs, CGOs that are going to be consuming this podcast? What’s the single most important takeaway that you want them to have from our conversation here?
[00:25:53] Amy Martin: That’s a tough one, Steve. Okay. I would say maybe it’s the teams that look aligned from the outside are usually kind of just avoiding each other. The ones that are actually aligned argue in the open and still like each other after. I think you and I talked about this when we first met. We are an argumentative group, and I mean that in a positive way.
[00:26:20] Amy Martin: We challenge each other constantly. So when we see each other in the hallway, when we are in a meeting, when we are on a Teams or Zoom call, we are just trying to find that in. So, like, we dive deep. We press each other. And so, if you are working at a company where everybody’s nodding and hemming and hawing and, sure, okay, and to your point, passing over some dashboards that show an MQL to an SQL and you are just seeing some eye rolls, you are wasting money.
[00:26:49] Amy Martin: You are wasting money on marketing. And so I would just tell you that alignment is not a meeting you schedule. It’s the hard conversations that have to happen about where sales sits, where marketing sits, and how we are going to do our best work together. And so, if you are not sitting across from those salespeople, understanding them, having empathy, and feeling it two-way, you are probably not nearly reaching the potential of your marketing department.
[00:27:17] Steve MacDonald: Well, I have to tell you here, I really do wish we had two more hours. But what you have conveyed to us today is a way of working, a way of connecting and going to market, a way of aligning, a way of understanding that I think we all really need to hear. The mission of this podcast is to bring C-suite executives’ perspectives from all over the world, their experiences, their insights.
[00:27:43] Steve MacDonald: How are they creating an environment of success in today’s go-to-market, which is harder than ever and constantly changing, and we are ripping up playbooks, and we are redesigning things at a rapid rate? So I just wanted to say thank you for coming on and sharing all of this. You’re part of that rising tide that lifts all boats, and I just want to say thank you.
[00:28:04] Amy Martin: Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate that very much. I will just say, when you are looking at bridging that gap, put the time into a relationship. So the senior leadership has to foster it. They have to be the ones pushing for alignment, which can be a fake word. But my team and I and our sales team, we put the time in.
[00:28:28] Amy Martin: I know when there are people’s birthdays. I’m at their birthday parties. We go to lunches, we go to happy hours together. I know my sales team’s wives, husbands, and spouses. They know ours. We put the time in. This is a relationship business, so I appreciate it. I’ve loved talking with you, and I hope more marketers have the opportunity to work with sales teams as I have. It’s been the biggest gift as I entered into the B2B market.