Episode #337:

Maxime Guirauton, Vice President, Global Head of Marketing and Sales Development at Visa Direct, explains why growth extends beyond the initial sale. He shares how connected marketing, sales development, brand, and customer success teams improve customer value and revenue outcomes. The conversation explores the bow-tie journey, buyer trust, opportunity quality, and healthy commercial tension.

“Bringing together marketing and sales development into one department is when you create a healthy tension between sales and marketing. The power of marketing is bringing all of this together to serve your business and act as a business partner.” – Maxime Guirauton

Maxime explains why sustainable revenue depends on treating the sale as the midpoint of the customer journey. He shares how SDRs can improve opportunity quality, how brand investment earns trust before buyers enter the market, and why marketing must connect the entire commercial system. The result is stronger customer value, better conversion, and a more credible growth function.

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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. Today we’ve got a really special guest on, Max Guirauton. Now, Max, you are currently- if I get it all right, I’m going to read it out ’cause it’s a long title. You’re the Vice President, Global Head of Marketing and Sales Development for Visa Direct. That’s a huge job. And I know you’re French. You were born in France. Your wife is from a different country. Your kids, you described as multinational. You travel the world. So, as someone who oversees global marketing and sales enablement, you really live that as a lifestyle.

[00:00:49] Steve MacDonald: But one of the things that we’re going to talk about and unpack today, the title of the episode, The Right Go-to-Market Tension Is a Growth Advantage, and one of your biggest perspectives is that we stop at the sale, and we don’t put the right amount of emphasis on the post-sale, and actually looking at the buying journey not as a single point from here to here, but that there’s a loop within it. I loved how we had the conversation before, so I’m not going to do much more to tee it up, because your voice is the most important here. But if you wouldn’t mind just explaining a little bit more about your background before we dig in.

[00:01:29] Maxime Guirauton: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me on the podcast. Really excited about it. Really good pronunciation of my third surname, so that’s pretty good. I give you credit for that because it’s not an easy one. As you said, I, you know, work for, um, one of the business lines of Visa today, Visa Direct. Probably the highlight of my career so far, for sure. But actually, my background is in tech. I’ve spent almost 20 years in the mobile phone industry with retailers, manufacturers, and operators.

[00:01:58] Maxime Guirauton: And then I moved into real estate. Nothing to do with that. Just wanted to explore something new. Also moving from B2C to B2B. Tried something else, which was very insightful. Learned a ton. Also that I was probably not the right fit for this industry. Then moved into the fintech world and probably work for one of the biggest, if not the biggest, fintechs in the world today.

[00:02:22] Steve MacDonald: We’re going to take all of that background and your global perspective, and we love it because we interview executives from all over the world. It’s important to get a different perspective. We all put our head down and work every single day, but we don’t lift our heads up enough and look at how others are looking at the same problems, the same challenges, the same opportunities. So I’d love to start by having you explain what you mean by full-funnel growth economics and looking past the initial sale. What does that mean to you?

[00:02:57] Maxime Guirauton: Yeah. I learned that when I joined the fintech world, because I wasn’t in a SaaS environment before. We’re selling hardware, or in the services area, you can argue. But really, when I joined Currencycloud originally, which is an entity that had been acquired by Visa, you are in the SaaS business, and when you’re in the SaaS business, you don’t think through the traditional funnel. You actually think through the bow tie, see? So you don’t look at it top-down. You look at that from left to right. Why is it a bow tie? It’s because the sale itself is in the middle. That’s the middle of the bow, and then you’re looking at what’s happening on the left-hand side and on the right-hand side.

[00:03:39] Maxime Guirauton: The left-hand side is a traditional funnel for a lot of people: awareness, education, all the way to the sale. And then the right-hand side is almost like when the journey starts, or the journey amplifies. Because once you’ve sold your service, in a SaaS environment, what’s really important is that there are transactions. There’s volume going through. In our world, it’s transactions, but that can be licenses, in other words. Marketing still has a role, and the profit comes from what happens after you sell the solution, right? This is where, when you think of profitable growth, it’s really important to look at what’s happening after the sale itself, and how marketing actually contributes to growing the volume, the transactions, whatever metric you use, to create and to generate enough for the deal to be profitable, and for the business to be profitable.

[00:04:35] Steve MacDonald: So we’re all, as marketing leads, we’re all hit over the head with, “You’ve got to be focused on revenue. You’ve got to be focused on revenue,” right? You have a really interesting perspective because you came from Currencycloud and got acquired by Visa. So Visa, obviously household name. Currencycloud probably isn’t, and most of the companies and C-suite executives listening in on this conversation aren’t from household-name companies.

[00:05:02] Steve MacDonald: What is the same when you’re a household name, you’re worldwide, you’re recognized, Visa versus a Currencycloud? How does that change the way that you think as a marketer, and how much is actually the same, like the discipline, the full-funnel growth economics? Not saying we’re struggling with that, but that’s a perspective you’ve taken and refined inside Visa. How much does that apply back to a Currencycloud or other SaaS companies that aren’t a household name?

[00:05:33] Maxime Guirauton: Yeah. That’s a really good question. So obviously, the Visa name opens a lot of doors. This is undeniable. That would be completely wrong of me to say otherwise. What’s really interesting with Visa Direct is it’s probably not the traditional, it’s not the traditional Visa business or what we know Visa for, and so we still have the same work to do as when we were Currencycloud, which is on the education side, really building awareness around who we are, which category we’re playing in, what we’re doing, and why you should trust us.

[00:06:08] Maxime Guirauton: Because, again, sometimes this big name can play against you because people have preconceived ideas of what you do and what you don’t do. Sometimes it’s like, you know, you’re kind of unexpected in conversations because people don’t necessarily expect you. You need to keep doing that, and as I said, whether it’s Currencycloud or Visa Direct, doing it with one brand or the other, the reality is we still have to do the same job. We have to be relevant for the audience that we’re going after, and I think it starts with that. It starts with the audience. It starts with understanding this audience and what their pain points are, and then delivering the message to them.

[00:06:44] Maxime Guirauton: Yes, the Visa logo helps because then there is an immediate recognition. But the Visa Direct offering needs to be explained the same way that the Currencycloud offering needed to be explained, and I would say actually Currencycloud sometimes has a faster, stronger penetration because it was a name that, in this environment, with the audience we were going after, that was very well known, that produced a lot of good results and traction, and is almost probably more expected than, you know, when we started with Visa Direct doing this.

[00:07:18] Maxime Guirauton: I don’t think the approach is different. I think you need to build on the strengths that, and in our case, like the strengths of Visa and the attributes of the brand. But you still need to keep explaining what it is. You still need to sometimes overcome some of the barriers that the brand itself, or at least the perception that people have of the brand itself.

[00:07:39] Steve MacDonald: I’ve been talking to a lot of CMOs and CROs that are telling me even these big, well-established companies that they’re working for, they’re like, “There’s a whole new level of competition that we’ve got to be competitive with,” which is the AI-native companies. They’re like, “We’re competing with startups like we never had before.” They’re bequeathed AI as part of the DNA, right? Where we’re like, “Oh, this well-established but older company, how could you be an AI leader kind of perspective.” So it reinforces that even if you’re a worldwide, well-established name like Currencycloud, you’ve got to be out there defining who you are. You’ve got to be carving out your competitive advantage.

[00:08:24] Steve MacDonald: And so how does the marketer in this environment, how do you go beyond the sale? What’s the role? So we’re not doing the baton pass. You and I talked about earlier: a lot of marketing wants to do a baton pass to sales, and sales wants to do a baton pass to customer success, and then we’re back to doing our stuff. But what you’re defining here is very different. So how do you see the role as different? Because we’re not always asked as marketers to play that role.

[00:08:52] Maxime Guirauton: No, I agree with you. Before answering this question, I want to go back to what you just said: Visa is the right place in the money movement category. This is a highly competitive environment. Very different and probably, you know, what we know about other categories, you know, Visa plays in. Very competitive, and also what I love about it is you have a lot of frenemies. Your partners are also your clients, your competitors all the time, depending on where you are.

[00:09:20] Maxime Guirauton: So I think the point you made around explaining it is super important, but this is also related to your original question, which is, what is the role we play? Because the reality is we need to partner with those frenemies for some things, and sometimes we compete with them, and we really need to understand this environment all the way through the funnel, because we also need them sometimes along with us to actually win some deals. So anyways, going back to your question, we’re not necessarily asked, and, well, my perspective on it, and that’s really only mine, is that marketing needs to be considered in its entirety.

[00:09:57] Maxime Guirauton: And sometimes, people don’t know what they don’t know. It’s our job to also share perspective and thoughts around what marketing can do and how we can help. It is not always natural. We do things at Visa that probably weren’t done before, and there are probably things we don’t do today that we should be doing more. We need to continue doing that. I think it’s dedication. We were talking about the market and our brands. It’s also what we need to do internally about what marketing can do, and how can we be that business partner that’s going to help me grow.

[00:10:29] Maxime Guirauton: The other part of the answer to this question is, and I think all credit to what was done during the Currencycloud world, is really bringing together marketing and sales development into really one department. That speaks a lot to the title of the episode today, because that’s also when you create what I like to call the healthy tension between sales and marketing. The point you made about the baton is we’ve all heard that, especially in B2B marketing or B2B in general: marketing will say, “I’ve generated 5,000 MQLs.” The sales team will say, “Yeah, but only two were interesting. Thank you very much for wasting my time.”

[00:11:06] Maxime Guirauton: Your credibility is hurt. It’s getting harder and harder. People don’t really want to pick those MQLs. And then you end up in this situation where instead of a virtuous cycle, it’s a vicious cycle, and you have a lot of tension and unhealthy tension between the teams. So what we did is we put the SDRs in the middle of it. And I consider the SDRs to be, you know, the cog that made the mechanism work between the left-hand side of the bullseye and the sale itself. Why? Because they were connected to both sides. They are connected to both sides.

[00:11:38] Maxime Guirauton: Really understanding what prospects want, bringing that information back, understanding what a good sale should look like, what a good client should look like for us, that fits what we can do and deliver. Then help the marketing team frame the right campaigns and bring in the right MQLs. They’ve been helping us, like, improving the quality of the marketing all the time, and then the conversion, like simplifying, I would say, the conversion for the sales team because those opportunities were pre-qualified. The opportunities were not just an MQL. They were already pre-qualified based on criteria given by the sales, and I think, honestly, that has been a little bit of a magic wand. And having them in the marketing organization has been extremely helpful. Instead of being like mini salespeople going above and beyond, they were really going after one job and one critical job, and they were helping the marketing team to be much better, but also the marketing team to be more, probably even more commercially driven than it would have been without them.

[00:12:41] Steve MacDonald: So it’s interesting ’cause that’s a trend that’s happening these days, is that more and more SDRs, BDRs are moving over under marketing, and I think you articulated it really well because it helps open up marketing in our perspective in terms of what really is a lead that sales is going to accept. Sales acceptance rates of leads: you talk to some companies, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’s just like such a horribly low acceptance rate,” right? By doing that, how did that increase the acceptance rate? And you don’t have to give any proprietary numbers, but did it have a dramatic impact on the acceptance rate?

[00:13:18] Maxime Guirauton: It has, and actually I think it’s also part of the mechanism of how you compensate your SDRs, and one of the things that we’ve been doing is also looking at not only the acceptance, but the quality of those opportunities. To evaluate that, we’re looking at a percentage of those quality opportunities that actually pass the first stage of the sales process. Usually, in your sales process, you have three, four, or five stages, depending on how complex the deals are and how the deal is structured. But we’re using that to compensate the SDRs as well. And that is massively helping us to not only generate opportunities, but generate good opportunities.

[00:14:03] Maxime Guirauton: Because, again, the, the SDRs are by definition commercial people, sales-driven people. This helps us maintain the right level of quality. When it comes to the acceptance rate, we didn’t really have the issue because our SDRs, in our case, go above and beyond. They don’t just book a meeting for the sales team. They actually qualify based on the criteria and generate opportunities in the system. Of course, then the acceptance rate is pretty high, but we kind of, you know, judge and jury in this instance, if I can say it this way. It makes sense.

[00:14:36] Maxime Guirauton: That’s the reason why that qualitative criteria afterward and looking at what passes, like, the first stage of sales is critically important because it’s telling us what happens. And then, of course, we follow that through all the way to closed won and understand how many of those opportunities actually close won, and we track that very diligently and religiously because that’s how we’re also looking at the overall marketing impact on the business.

[00:15:04] Steve MacDonald: So what you’re describing here is something, there’s a little-discussed issue that’s going on in the industry, and it’s a lack of ABM maturity. I think that was a Claude definition when I was, when I was going back and forth with Claude. The thing is, a lot of organizations are trying to take marketing and hand over leads. They have a low acceptance rate. Sales doesn’t really want them unless they’re, for lack of a better term, BANT qualified.

[00:15:29] Steve MacDonald: But in ABM, these are the companies that we’ve deemed are the ones that we want to have as clients and are going to be the growth of our business. So a big part of marketing’s job is to create the relationship. Now, by definition, that’s an early-stage relationship. They haven’t been qualified yet. In fact, they’re probably part of that 95% of the market that isn’t in the market for what you’re doing.

[00:15:54] Maxime Guirauton: Correct. Yeah.

[00:15:55] Steve MacDonald: So it’s establishing relationships with who we want while they’re still in that 95%, right. That’s where leads fall into the chasm, the gap between marketing and sales, and so that’s where the SDRs really jump in, right. Is that their job to mature, or how does it work? It sounds like you’ve really raised the bar in the ABM maturity gap for where you’re at here at, at, at Visa. And I’d love to just have you, have us all learn from what you’ve gone through.

[00:16:26] Maxime Guirauton: I think ABM is a long journey, and we’re still going through that journey. I wouldn’t pretend that we cracked it, and you have different ways of looking at it as well. But I think you’re right. Going back to the book Cross the Chasm, you need to know who you’re going after, what your segment is, what the right product-market fit is, and really understand the voice of the customer. It’s a hard job ’cause you can do a lot, tons of research, et cetera, but the reality is what the SDRs actually provide, as well as salespeople, don’t get me wrong, is those bits and pieces, those insights from talking to, I call them, the real people. Yeah, and I really appreciate it; it helps us define not only what the characteristics of a good deal or a good prospect are, but also the right persona we should talk to.

[00:17:15] Maxime Guirauton: ‘Cause too often we’re also guilty of this, and this is a bit of what you said as well with the sales team accepting or not accepting. If there is a big logo, you tend to go for them. If it’s a logo you don’t know, you don’t go for it. And the same goes for the persona. You tend to feel like, oh yeah, this guy is the CFO; it must be very important. But it may happen that a CFO is not the decision-maker that you want to go after. I think it’s iterative as well. It takes time, but it takes a lot of instant feedback, and I think the openness we have between sales and marketing is absolutely critical.

[00:17:48] Maxime Guirauton: A salesperson will tell us straight away, this was really a bad deal, and here are the reasons, or this was a good one, or this could be improved by X, Y, and Z. And we encourage that. We need to force that sometimes ’cause it doesn’t always happen. But I think we have, at Visa, and with Currencycloud and other companies are the same, a very open culture, and people really speak to each other, are really candid, are really keen to actually grow together.

[00:18:12] Maxime Guirauton: That’s one of our principles, that we collaborate as One Visa, and I really believe that this is massively helping us. So we need to understand the customer, but we also need to be open to what the criteria are and to appreciate that they evolve because we are in a tech environment. The market evolves every day, so what was a good deal six months ago might look completely different now. It has to be continuous and very open.

[00:18:39] Steve MacDonald: So another area that creates the tension between marketing and sales, and it goes directly to this gap as well, is that in today’s world, if you’re not known and trusted before the shortlist closes on day one, you’re out. And if you’re out, you’re gone because 95% of the time, the buyer picks from that shortlist. I talk to a lot of CROs that are like, “Steve, we’ve got to be like, we’ve got to be like a year out.” If an RFP goes out or marketing identifies buying signals, and we’re too late, right. We’re too late to have the time to develop that relationship and build that trust because that trust is one of the most important things that gets you onto the shortlist.

[00:19:26] Steve MacDonald: And I was talking to a, a CISO the other day, and he said, “Hey, we just bought a new piece of our tech stack. 14 different vendors. We put out an RFP. Every single one of them checked every single box.” And we said, “Do you do this?” So it was like the sea of sameness, right. And he said, “We went with the one that we trusted. We knew what it would be like to work with them after we hired them.” So this idea of building the brand, a trust mark, building trust in advance is more important than ever. How does that come into play in the role that marketing’s playing here, and this, this natural tension, good tension with sales?

[00:20:10] Maxime Guirauton: Very good question, and a passion of mine. I think we just talked a lot about, I would say, this middle of the bow tie and the lead generation side of what marketing does. But actually, what you’re doing, investing in the brand today is your lead generation of tomorrow. And of course, the lead time differs. For some businesses, the sales cycle is 18 months, 24 months, or more, and for some, it’s three months. It would be wrong for me to say your brand is going to deliver in two years or in six months because it depends on the business you’re in and the industry you’re in.

[00:20:46] Maxime Guirauton: But the reality is exactly what you said. It’s just normal human behavior, and it’s the same in B2C and in B2B, and this is where I feel like there is a lot that everyone can learn from each other. At the end of the day, at least to that day, we’re still selling, and we’re still engaging with humans, and investment in the brand is building the trust in the brands that you’re doing, conveying this message through brand, I would say, and I would add comms to it, extremely valuable. It might not demonstrate leads straight away. You might not see conversion in, like, the next couple of weeks, three months, or maybe six months and more.

[00:21:24] Maxime Guirauton: But the reality is this is what’s going to help two things. It’s going to help the 95% who aren’t in the market pay attention to you, and it’ll force people to come to market, or at least be interested in your brand. The second thing is that it’s going to be always there, and that’s really important: to be always there and not on and off whenever there is a bit of investment. Because you’re always there, you create that trust; you share the valuable information that people can actually read about, consume, enjoy, whatever your brand is about. The minute they’re in market, they feel a little intimacy between themselves, the brand, and the representative of the brand they have in front of them.

[00:22:07] Maxime Guirauton: And I think that is very important. But this is also where what’s happening on the right-hand side of the bow tie, once the client is a client, is critical. How marketing is helping that relationship. Of course, you’ve got the account managers, et cetera. They take the big hit, and they do most of the job and the heavy lifting. But marketing continues doing a lot of work with the clients, bringing them insights and working with them on specific things, doing co-marketing activities with them, creating client stories, you name them. There are tons of different things, like your loyalty programs and others, that continue to build that trust because the brand sees that you not only sold something to them, but you’ve been with them on this journey and helped them throughout.

[00:22:51] Maxime Guirauton: Because we also need to think about it, when there is an RFP, it’s also about a renewal, an expansion of a contract, an expansion of the solution they need to provide to their clients, et cetera. And again, you want to be there. You don’t want to be the one saying, “I have a really bad relationship with those guys. I need to find another one.” And so I think it’s both sides: building the brands at the very beginning and building the relationship with the clients, or contributing to building a relationship with the clients, so they think highly of you, and they recommend you.

[00:23:20] Steve MacDonald: So I have an interesting question that falls back to the SDR conversation and what you’re just saying here. ‘Cause building trust in the brand is, there’s no better way to build trust or to ruin trust than with the actual interactions. Interactions with an SDR, and interactions with the sales team, are huge determinants of trust and perceptions of the brand. Yeah.

[00:23:44] Steve MacDonald: Now that SDRs are under marketing, how much are you talking to them about the experience? Not just finding, qualifying, and turning the leads over, but the experience they’re creating that lays the foundation of trust so sales can actually close. Is that an active part of how you’re working with the SDRs?

[00:24:09] Maxime Guirauton: It’s an active part of the training at the beginning, but even before that, I think it’s an active part of the recruitment process. Brands at Visa, you know, speaking of Visa because it’s where I am now, the brand Visa is highly important. It’s like one of the most valuable assets that we have. So in the recruitment process, right at that moment, it’s also our job and our duty to find the right cultural fit and people who can actually speak the brand, be passionate about the brand, and represent the brand.

[00:24:41] Maxime Guirauton: The recruitment of the SDRs, it’s part of the qualification criteria. I think, as part of the training as well, a lot of the work is making sure we speak the same language and, luckily enough, having sales enablement in my team. So you make sure everyone uses those assets, so everyone speaks the same language. Of course, you need the right level of regionalization, et cetera, ’cause each country is different, each culture is different, and so you need to approach things slightly differently. But the reality is, when you speak the same language, when you come from that, that brand language, it makes things easier.

[00:25:14] Maxime Guirauton: The leader of the team, they do really good things. With the prospect’s authorization, they record some of those calls, then listen to them together and learn from each other. They learn: what did you do well, and this is also how you continue to improve. But you’re right. The relationship, the human-to-human relationship, is what’s going to turn the trust up or down straight away.

[00:25:40] Steve MacDonald: You know, I wish we could keep going for a lot longer, but I want to give you an opportunity because we’ve covered so much territory. Our poor human brains can only take in and retain about two or three things at a time, and that’s proven. So if there was one thing you wanted the executives consuming this podcast to take away from our conversation, what would it be?

[00:26:05] Maxime Guirauton: Really good question. I’d say keep marketing together, and include SDR in it. Don’t dismantle marketing and put brand on one side, then demand gen or growth on another, and customer success somewhere else, and SDR somewhere else. The power of marketing is bringing all of this together to serve your business and act as a business partner.

[00:26:30] Maxime Guirauton: Dismantling it might give people, like, an idea of control and the idea that they actually have specialists on each side. But the problem is if you don’t have someone that is really, or, and people, not only one person, overlooking the whole thing, the whole journey in how we articulate marketing across the journey, you will probably have, like, problems down the line. So keep marketing all together.

[00:26:56] Steve MacDonald: So I’ve got to tell you, the whole mission of this podcast is to literally bring different perspectives from different leaders from all over the world so that we all benefit from different experiences and insights in how others are tackling the exact same challenges that we are and learning. And if we all do that, that’s what I call the rising tide that lifts all boats. And you were an amazing part of that rising tide today, Max. I just wanted to say thank you for coming on.

[00:27:24] Maxime Guirauton: No, thank you very much. Thank you for having me, and I hope it’s useful for your audience. I really appreciate it.