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Today’s show featured an interview with Patrick Smith, former CMO at Cvent and Deltek.
Find Patrick on LinkedIn.
PATRICK’S TIP: “Treat sales and marketing as one team with shared goals. Stop passing leads over a wall—sit in each other’s meetings, align on the plan, and build an in-it-together mentality where both sides are accountable for pipeline and revenue.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m excited today, we got Patrick Smith. Patrick, you are a CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, at Cvent. Many people know Cvent because we’ve had a number of the sales leaders on the Sales Game Changers Podcast over the years. You also were the CMO at Deltek, and we’ve had a smattering of people from Deltek on the show in the past as well.
We’re doing today’s show in May of 2025, and we’ve spent a lot of shows talking about how sales and marketing have had to come together more so than ever before. This is a story we’ve been talking about for at least the last decade or so, about how sales and marketing need to work together, et cetera. But we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the need for that at larger B2B and B2G, business to government, selling enterprises as the customer has gotten in more control, and as the entire organization is more responsible for driving revenue, and sales and marketing need to work more effective.
You’re a very successful, seasoned, if you don’t mind that word, Chief Marketing Officer. You’ve given a lot of thought to this. We’ve had numerous conversations, and we’re going to get deep into what CMOs, VPs of marketing need to know and need to be doing to provide true value to their company’s sales efforts. First off, give us a little bit of a brief introduction. I mentioned Cvent, Deltek. Tell us anything else you want to know about us before we get deep into the conversation.
Patrick Smith: I have about a 25-year career or so in software, and really it’s with three large publicly-traded B2B enterprise software companies. You mentioned I was the CMO at Cvent for seven years. Prior to that, I was the CMO at Deltek, and I also spent about six and a half years at Manugistics, which was a big supply chain software company that got founded in the ‘70s and ‘80s and has changed names a few times, but that was a good run too in the early 2000s where I really was the director of product marketing. I’ve owned all functions in marketing over the years. Obviously, as a CMO, it all rolled up to me, but even on the path to being a CMO, I’ve owned a lot of the different marketing equations that really underpin a pretty big organization. It’s been a fun ride and I left Cvent back in July to take a career break to basically retire from the corporate life probably, and it’s still great to stay in the game though, which is why it’s great to be here.
Fred Diamond: For people who don’t know what a CMO or VP of marketing is responsible for, tell us some of the major responsibilities, some of the things that you oversaw.
Patrick Smith: It’s so many different things. At the end of the day, the two big things that I was responsible for, if you want to aggregate it up, was really building the brand awareness of a company and its products. That’s not just to say the products exist, but that there is a real need in the marketplace, that there’s a solution that can solve your problems. A lot of organizations don’t even know they have a problem and that there’s something out there to solve it. It’s brand awareness around a category, around a company, around products. Then it’s generating good solid leads for sales. If you ask the CEOs that I’ve worked for, number one thing they always want is lead generation. They want to make sure that sales isn’t out there alone generating leads for the company.
Obviously, with those two big goals in mind, there’s a ton of things that underpin this, from the product marketing or the storytelling and the solution marketing, the public relations efforts, analyst relations, working closely with Gartner and Forrester and those organizations that work with vendors and end users, marketing operations and technology, the marketing automation systems and those sorts of things. Many other functions roll in there, but ultimately, it’s about making sure your organization has brand awareness and making sure that you drive leads for sales.
Fred Diamond: We’re going to be talking about what the C-suite expects from you in a little more detail as we get into the show, but that’s a good precursor to a lot of the things we’re going to be talking about. We’ve started doing a couple of Sales Game Changers Podcast episodes where I would bring on a chief sales officer or a CRO potentially, VP of sales, and his or her counterpart in marketing. The reason we’re doing those kinds of interviews, and the one with you today, is because the roles of sales and marketing have shifted over the past few years as the buyer has access to much more information than ever before. How do you feel marketing has responded to that?
There was a classic article that you and I talked about in the Harvard Business Review in 2004 with Neil Rackham and Philip Kotler talking about we must end the war between sales and marketing. I’ve spoken still at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling as we talk to sales leaders, in some cases they say that marketing has, and in many cases hasn’t, responded appropriately. Where do you think marketing is in the response to the shift?
Patrick Smith: I would say in many cases the shift was inevitable and everywhere, so everyone had to adjust. But I think some did shift more slowly than others and their financials suffered as a result compared to those that shifted faster. If we can just step back for a second. It is really interesting when you look at the market because it’s akin to what happened with the rise of the internet. Back in the ‘80s before the internet, and the early ‘90s, I didn’t know how much an option cost on a car, but then you go to edmunds.com and all these other things, and you know exactly how much over invoice a car is. Suddenly the information was essentially all in sales’ hands, and now the buyer got it too.
That’s really what happened in B2B and B2G in other parts of the world now too, where there’s so much information out there on products, there’s industry analysts that review things on their waves and magic quadrants. There is lots of people talking about vendors online, whether it’s LinkedIn or through other social media. There’s G2 where users are out there rating software. At the end of the day, the buyer has so much information. I think what’s really important is the key is to inform, to educate, and to partner with prospective buyers. That’s not just marketing, that’s also sales. It’s being transparent about the solutions that you’re selling and your pricing. It’s being a problem solver. It’s not just buy this, it does these 10 things. There’s an ultimate goal that someone wants to spend money on that they want to solve. It’s being thought leaders around your particular space. It’s being community builders with other users.
One of the things we took very seriously at Deltek and Cvent was how do we create a community around the world we’re in? How do we make sure government contractors can benchmark themselves against others? Or how do we make sure people that run events know how to do it right beyond just our software? It was all about running better events. How do I get more people there? How do I engage them? How do I maximize the value? It’s creating the content and the thought leadership around these areas that is part of the response to the buyer having more information, because you need to be a guide to success, not just selling what you used to sell.
Fred Diamond: Up and down the marketing profession. Again, I started my career in marketing. I was in marketing at Apple and Compaq and a couple large software companies. People enter marketing, in a lot of cases they’re on the creative side. You mentioned the branding side, awareness, if you will, and then there’s the lead gen side, the sales tool side, sales enablement, things like that. Not just CMOs, but how do you feel the entire marketing profession has responded to a lot of the changes that we’re talking about? Are they aware that these changes have happened? Like a junior marketing professional on the branding side, is that something that’s being instilled to them that, yeah, branding’s important, but it’s important if it’s going to help drive revenue and achieve the goals?
Patrick Smith: One of the things that CMOs need to do is really, and I spent a lot of time doing this, is really talking about how each function in marketing really reinforces the next function. It all adds up ultimately to the overall goal, which is the brand awareness and the lead generation. We spend a lot of time talking about how a specific great ad might have really been interesting and effective based on number of clicks or other metrics.
We looked at the website at Cvent specifically, if you change this button from orange to green, the conversion goes up by 5%. That conversion generated 10 more leads. Two of those leads closed for this dollar amount. We actually would talk about those success stories. Someone who was a web programmer or someone who was doing web optimization could see how their work ultimately led to success. If you connect those dots within an organization, you’re going to be really successful, because people love what they do, and they see how their help is really driving the marketing engine and ultimately what’s going on with the company as well. I think it takes a concerted effort to connect those dots, but when you do that right, really good things happen.
Fred Diamond: I think one of the reasons why you have been so successful in your career isn’t just your expertise in the marketing side, but you had such a deep understanding of the sales and the BD side and what was happening there. I’m just curious, before we talk about what needs to happen, just tee us up here a little bit. We talked a little bit about this, but what are some of the specific challenges that have emerged over the past 10, 15 years that makes selling to enterprise customers more complex?
One of the reasons why we rebranded from the Institute for Excellence in Sales to the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, is because we’re now serving companies that are truly in B2B or B2G with at least hundreds, if not more than a thousand sales professionals. What are some of those challenges that have made selling much more complex?
Patrick Smith: It’s back to that information that the buyers have in so many ways. It’s so interesting how at the end of the day, you could control the narrative before, and now you can’t control the narrative as much. You can try to influence it, but if someone out there is mad and if they’re going to post something on social media and thousands of people are going to see it, you have to choose how to respond. That is out there right now. I think what I like to counsel people is when you have this information, when there’s all this, the analyst talking about it, and G2 and other users talking about it, then stop denying problems and start listening to customers. Don’t fight the narrative. Learn from the narrative. Don’t sell. Guide someone on a path to success ultimately.
If you do that, I think that’s certainly a way to counteract and really understand and acknowledge the information that the buyer has and how you can’t change that. I think there’s a stat that 70% or 80% of the buying decision is already made before they reach out to a vendor these days. I think that’s important.
Another really big one too is the rise of buyer groups and specific industry nuances that is out there now. People expect that you understand their world. It’s not just selling a generic product. With different perspectives and needs, that means you have to embrace persona marketing. You need to embrace vertical marketing. You need to talk to the specific needs of the industry. At Deltek, we were very industry specific. At Cvent, while the product was a little bit more generic, there was a lot of industry nuances too that we were aware of and were talking to those verticals in their language, so we know they know what we’re talking about.
One message does not fit all. When you’re selling enterprise software and it’s a big sale, the CFO cares about the cost of the software. Do you have a story there about ROI and value? The CIO cares about security? Do you have a story there? Can you talk to the CIO? The general counsel cares about privacy. Do you have a story there? If you’re just a OneNote vendor and you’re talking, you think you have one buyer and you don’t take the influencers in mind, then you’re going to miss the boat because so many different people have to weigh in, especially when they’re spending the scarce capital of their organization. It’s really important to understand the context of the buyer group and speak to their needs in your content and your messaging on the website and so on.
Fred Diamond: Those are some great answers. What needs to change for the sales and marketing organizations that are struggling with this to be successful today?
Patrick Smith: When the buyer is awash in choices and information, I think a big one is selling outcomes, not features and functions. One of the things that I’ve done before in my career is the So What? Test, where if I ask so what about five or six times, I ultimately get to why someone spends hundreds of thousands of dollars or less or more, but a big dollar amount for something. Because you might say so what and you get a generic answer, but when you really dive in and peel back the onion, you can get to the reason why someone’s writing a check.
The other thing I’d say, and this is really a malady throughout tech, I think, is that so often a recruiter would reach out to me about a potential position, or I’d run across a company and I’d go check them out because I haven’t heard of them. No matter what they did, so many of them sounded the same. There’s so much biz buzz on the website when you see an ad, everyone sounds the same. You’re going to get real time visibility into blah, blah, blah. I’ve seen this same language, whether you’re an HR company or whether you are in supply chain or you are in big data, everyone sounds the same.
One of the things that I was pounding into the heads of my marketers over the years is be plain spoken. No one speaks like that. No one buys based on biz buzz, maybe someone who’s deep in the tech world does, but be plain spoken about what something does and what the ultimate value is. I think when everyone sounds the same, I’d also say surround your product with expertise and perspective so you can be a total solution provider. It’s not just the product you’re selling. For instance, how are best-in-class companies using your product? How mature are you relative to someone who is best-in-class and doing maturity models and things like that? That helps I think really become someone taking an organization from a transactional seller to an ultimate partner that’s driving success.
Fred Diamond: You mentioned before in talking to the C-suite, how they were mostly interested in lead generation. For people who are listening today, one of the main metrics obviously, and I’m not saying this to be so obvious, is that revenue and top line is really what the C-suite is really concerned about. Give us a little more insights into that about some of the things that the C-suite would talk to you about as the CMO.
Patrick Smith: I was very lucky to see my C-suite peers at Deltek and Cvent really listen to marketing and were on board because I think they recognize, and rightly so, that marketing scales. Marketing has a massive reach, we can engage with hundreds of thousands of people because we’re online with the right messages and all the right channels. They realized that investing in marketing when done right with the right messages can drive outsized value. But what’s interesting is, while our conversations ultimately led to pipeline creation and revenue growth, so much of the discussion were things that underlied all of that. What was our content strategy? What’s the thought leadership we’re putting out? Are we doing vertical marketing? What’s our event strategy? Are we doing the right mix of events? Are we going to the right trade shows? Are we doing the right road shows ourselves? How deep are we going with industry messaging? I got questions, show us examples, marketing, of how we’re talking to various verticals and industries.
Here’s a big one too, Fred, which I feel is a big shift in software in many ways. So much of the revenue stream anymore is from your customers. A lot of what we focused on in my conversations with the C-suite is how much is marketing helping with post-sale activities such as promoting ongoing training and certification, or how are we helping with product adoption? Because when someone buys something that’s a complex product, oftentimes it’s not adopted that much, or only one person is the power user and you don’t have anyone else. How is marketing helping to expand the use of the product, even if they’re not buying anything else? Are they using it well? If they are, then they’re going to stay sticky and they’re going to renew. Customer marketing is a big part of the equation that has really, I think, taken off over the last 10 to 15 years.
Fred Diamond: When I had one of my first jobs in marketing, my boss said one of my metrics was sitting in on sales meetings.
Patrick Smith: I like that.
Fred Diamond: I was at Apple at the time. He said, “I want you to sit in the back of the room at sales meetings.” I was a junior marketing, so I wasn’t like the CMO or anything. I was a marketing professional in the early stages of my career. I remember in the first couple of meetings, the salespeople would look at me like, “Why are you here?” Then I started listening and studying and researching and talking to customers, and then I started contributing, and the next thing I knew I would be sitting at the table.
My question for you is how should CMOs be interfacing with sales right now? How should they be leading their teams to be more effective at this critical stuff that we’re talking about, which is generating revenue, pipeline, filling the funnel?
Patrick Smith: I think understanding it’s a true partnership is really important. I love the idea that you sat on sales calls. I’ve done that with my marketing team too. They’re on sales calls, they’re in sales meetings. I think one of the major things is partnering with sales is incredibly important. To do that right, you need to have shared goals. I remember in the past I’ve helped untangle this marketing versus sales created pipeline thing. It’s like no, we all work on pipeline together, because we might run a great marketing campaign, but then sales doesn’t have the requisite talk track to take that to its conclusion. Or we might not be doing well in sales and they’re doing everything they can to try to create pipeline themselves and marketing isn’t helping, and that doesn’t help either.
By having shared goals, you can really have your eye on the prize, and then that takes the blame game away because we’re all in this together. Having mutual respect is really important. I love when sales and marketing teams celebrate together. It’s not just sales up on stage getting all the accolades, it’s also marketing as well. It’s embracing hard conversations. A lot of times things don’t work out. One of the things that I believe in marketing is you have to try a lot of different things and some aren’t going to work, and that’s okay. But as long as we’re upfront about why it didn’t work, and we’re not going to do that again, we’re going to do these things that do work, then sales really respects you. It’s really, if you foster an in-it-together mentality, that’s really important.
Marketing can’t spike the football anymore by saying, “Hey, Sales, I gave you a hundred leads. That’s exactly what you wanted, but you just sold poorly and didn’t convert any. That’s your fault.” Sales shouldn’t say, “Marketing isn’t doing anything to help,” when stats are showing that the people they’re talking to in sales did 10 unique engagement actions with marketing before the lead withered away. You don’t want to just pass things over a wall. You don’t want to not engage with sales. You have to have those shared metrics, those shared goals, those hard conversations.
A lot of times my marketers, both at Cvent and Deltek, were literally with sales almost every single day in their sales meetings to learn and listen. Then sales would be in the marketing meetings too about what’s going on. When everyone’s informed on the plan and you start creating that glue between what’s out in the marketplace and how to follow up from a sales perspective, then magic really happens. Sales needs to embrace marketing and understand that we’re going to help sales sell, and that we’re going to give them the tools and the talk tracks and the battle cards and the competition and the five or six ROI points that are going to work. We’re going to give that to sales, but you got to use it sales. If you lean in and have those conversations and you’re working collaboratively together, magic can happen.
Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, what’s not working right now? If a CMO were asking you to audit, top of your head, what would be one or two things that you would say, “Stop doing this. It’s 2025?” What are one or two things you would tell the average CMO to stop doing?
Patrick Smith: One of the things that drives me crazy are vanity marketing metrics. I created 20 pieces of collateral. We did 10 LinkedIn posts. We ran these five events. We got 200 more views of my video on YouTube. The end result, the so what. So what? Did that help sales sell? Did that drive revenue? That is what’s important. It’s not these vanity metrics. I think one of the things that’s driven sales crazy over the years and marketing’s like, “Look, I had this big event, we got 300 people, that’s what we said we’d do.” But if it didn’t result in any revenue, who cares? So what? That’s not all that helpful at the end of the day. Just looking at those metrics and not looking at the ultimate goals at the end is something that I see happen a lot. Things like, “My brand reputation is really stellar.” Well, that’s wonderful, but is it helping drive revenue? I don’t know.
The other thing I would say that you really need to understand is if you’re not doing, is really understanding buying patterns and the journeys that buyers take on the way to a sale. We dove very deeply at Deltek and Cvent on what activities are bringing people in? What content is keeping people engaged? What’s helping at the end of a buying stage to help close deals? A lot of the things you’re doing out there, the various users I talked about earlier, the different personas, they’ll use different things, they need different things. This case study might be really helpful down the funnel. This digital advertising campaign or working over here or doing this webinar type of campaign activity might be bringing people in. You need to understand that.
You don’t just throw things out there and hope. I think one of the things I do see out there is marketing teams just throwing things out there and hoping. I did 10 webinars, that’s my job. But ultimately, what did it add up to? I think when you have this complex world of all these different activities and channels that marketers can use, all these different buyers that have a lot of information, that have their own needs you need to speak to, it’s a very complex equation to get all this right. I think we’re going to probably talk about AI here, I imagine, Fred, and that’s where AI can help, is really creating a lot of clarity out of chaos here.
Fred Diamond: Yeah, that’s a great point. I remember I’ve worked with tons of marketing professionals, and me being one too. A lot of times you thought that activity and quantity of producing things, and like you said, in your annual review, you would say, “Produce 5 new brochures, 10 videos,” all these things, and they seem cool. Then it was like, “Okay, but did this really make a difference in us getting 10 new customers, or growing our market base or percentage of wallet, or those kinds of things?”
We haven’t spoken about AI yet. Give us some insights into how AI is changing the sales and marketing relationships.
Patrick Smith: It’s really interesting. I think right now in its infancy, AI is an efficiency driver. There’s so many interesting things. One time I took a press release that we put out at Cvent, and I asked I think ChatGPT to write a press release with these five ideas. Honestly, in like 30 seconds, it created something that was really close to what we had written ourselves. That’s pretty cool, writing web copy quickly. You can even do things with AI as well, where you put in voice. There’s some tools out there that allow you to put in brand guidelines. You don’t just write copy, you’re writing copy that is uplifting or upbeat or hard-hitting or whatever you want to give it. The fact that you can write on-brand messaging really quickly is great.
But I think it’s when AI can look at a ton of variables to recommend and perform the next marketing or sales action, or when it can do deep customer or buyer segmentation based on propensity to buy, so the limited marketing and sales activities that you have can be optimized toward the right set of customers or buyers, this is when things get very interesting to me. Back to what I was saying before, there’s such a complex equation and there’s so many different organizations potentially to sell to. At both Deltek and Cvent, our market was huge, billions of dollars from a TAM perspective. A lot of it is focus, how do I focus on the right cohort and really carve that out and go after its sales and marketing together. That’s really where AI can help.
We didn’t talk a lot about this, but marketing technology is so important to underpin this entire equation. There’s great tools out there that use a lot of AI to do exactly what I said, to hone in on the right customers, the right cohorts, here’s the next best marketing action to take, here’s what sales needs to do next. These guides is where I think it gets really interesting.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Patrick Smith. Cvent has been a great IEPS partner for a number of years. Matter of fact, Cvent just was the recipient of our first AI for Sales Excellence Award that we gave out in early May at our 15th annual award event. Cvent’s been a Premier Sales Employer and a Premier Women in Sales Employer for many years. I appreciate your having this conversation with us to help the CMOs be more effective in helping their companies achieve their goals.
Give us a final action step. I’m going to ask this a little bit differently. Typically, I’ll say, give us a final action step, something specific that sales professionals can do today to take their sales career to the next level. But I’m going to ask it differently to you. I’m going to say, give us something that CMOs or marketing professionals should do today to help their company take their sales efforts to the next level.
Patrick Smith: I think it goes to the technology, Fred. It’s really understand what’s going on out there. I have a staff of people that I’ve had that are marketing technologists, and that’s one of the things that we’ve seen. Even at Cvent, we embrace the event technologist, which is someone that understands how to use Cvent software so well, that ties back into their marketing automation systems. You can put all those breadcrumbs together. I think really being adept at MarTech is important, and don’t fear technology, don’t think that’s the CIO’s purview. It’s marketing needs to understand the use cases deeply and hire a team that knows this, that can put all these pieces together, because there’s not one vendor out there that does everything. Put those pieces together, embrace technology, and it’s amazing how you can really supercharge pipeline that way with so many of the technologies that are out there.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. Actually, the C-suite that we talked about before, and the VP of sales, if you could use the technology to prove that what you’re doing is the stuff that’s going to be generating revenue. We didn’t talk on this podcast today about the mind of the VP of sales or the CRO. His or her goal is to generate revenue and make his or her people successful. How can you, marketing team, not just help your company grow the goals, but make your sales professionals successful, make the people on the team successful, help the guy or lady who’s covering this account grow his account? Find ways using the technology, and AI if it’s appropriate, to find opportunities to grow.
Once again, I want to thank Patrick Smith for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo