Marketing to Sellers Before Customers (with Gillian Hinkle) | Ep. 249

Mason Cosby sits down with Gillian Hinkle to discuss the complexities of marketing within a portfolio company. When an organization moves from a single product to a suite of services, marketers often struggle to build intentional sequencing. Gillian shares her approach to identifying customer behaviors and mapping the overlap between different buying committees.

ㅤ

She explains why you cannot go it alone: you must work with other teams to find commonalities in lead information and problem sets. A critical part of her strategy is to market to the internal sales team first. If sellers do not understand the deal cycle or how a new product addresses a specific pain point, they will not present it to their customers.

ㅤ

Gillian also details how to protect the customer relationship by validating data with product managers before launching a campaign. She emphasizes the importance of "small measures"—tracking observable behaviors and engagement rates in internal channels like Slack—to understand program success before revenue numbers come in.

ㅤ

Guest Bio

Gillian Hinkle is a seasoned marketing leader currently serving as the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce, with a focus on Heroku, a cloud platform as a service (PaaS). Her career trajectory transitions from an initial background in arts administration and education to technical B2B marketing leadership in the SaaS and cloud infrastructure sectors. Before joining Salesforce, Hinkle served as Director of Growth Marketing at Earnix.

ㅤ

What We Cover

1. Using behavioral data to identify which customers are ready for expansion products.
2. How to map the overlap between different buying groups—like marketing buyers versus data buyers—in a portfolio company.
3. Why you must understand sales compensation before asking account managers to sell a new product.
4. The strategy of "marketing to sellers" first: using enablement sessions to test if an offer is right for the current market.
5. Protecting customer relationships by excluding unqualified accounts and validating pain points with product teams.
6. Using Slack channels and lists to manage program execution and track internal engagement.
7. The importance of reporting "small measures" and observable behaviors when revenue data is not yet available.

ㅤ

Resources

1. Heroku: A cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages.
2. Slack: The primary communication tool Gillian uses for program management.
3. Connect with Gillian Hinkle on LinkedIn
4. Scrappy ABM: Visit for more ABM tips and strategies.
5. Connect with Mason on LinkedIn for a conversation about ABM.

ㅤ

If you enjoyed today's episode and found valuable insights for your business, be sure to subscribe to the Scrappy ABM podcast for more expert discussions. Don't forget to leave a review and share this episode with your team or fellow marketers!