This is the fourth episode of the “Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast.” Every other week, the IEPS posts a new show with Selling Essentials Marketplace partner Julie Murphy from Sage Communications.
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On today’s show, Fred and Julie meet with Rebecca Umberger, Senior Advisor, Public Sector Marketing at Sage Communications.
Find Rebecca on LinkedIn.
REBECCA’S TIP: “Always, always, always work with your sales teams. They want to work with you. Don’t be afraid of trying new things. Don’t get stuck doing the same thing year after year after year. Keep learning, keep changing, reinvent yourself, and keep working with your teams.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Julie, it’s great to see you again. I love this show. We’re getting great response. We’ve brought on some of your clients and we’ve brought on some great companies that are really understanding the importance of the integration with marketing and sales.
Julie Murphy: I’m really excited about our guest today. This is Rebecca Umberger. Rebecca first came into my world as a client. She was originally my client many years ago at Quest Software, and then at Dell. A couple years ago, I was lucky enough to have her join our Sage leadership team, and now we work together as colleagues. I thought Rebecca would be great for this show because she’s really my go-to on all things account-based marketing, which is so important for sales enablement. We’ve really built a trust and friendship through the years. Rebecca, it’s really wonderful to have you on the show.
Rebecca Umberger: Well, thank you. I thank both of you guys for letting me come on the show today. Thank you.
Fred Diamond: I’m excited to be talking to you, Rebecca. I agree with what Julie said. Account-based marketing is so critical because one thing that we talk a lot about on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is being broad just isn’t really working anymore. We’re doing today’s interview in August of 2025, and if you’re not bringing specific value and helping the sales organization or the marketing organization specifically on what they are trying to achieve, they don’t need to listen to you.
Give us a little bit of background. Tell us what your role is at Sage. As Julie mentioned, you worked at some of the big brands like Dell and Quest. How does an agency environment differ than your role in corporate marketing?
Rebecca Umberger: That’s a very good question. To answer your first question, my role at Sage, I joined Sage a little over five years ago after many, many years in corporate. I help run the business of marketing to the public sector, which is the largest part of our business. I’m able to take all of that experience that I had with all of these large corporate companies and even some of the smaller, medium-sized companies I supported, to help companies like Adobe, Lumen, Sigma Defense, Sans Institute, and dozens of others. For that, I’m really grateful that I can bring that experience to our clients.
But life at an agency is totally different than it was at corporate. I say that because we have clients that are startups, large companies, VARs, distributors, and you really need to know and understand all aspects of marketing. When you’re in a corporation and you’re doing public sector marketing, sometimes you’re doing field marketing, sometimes you’re doing digital marketing, sometimes you’re marketing operations. But when you work in an agency, you are doing it all. You’re helping with messaging, lead gen, partner marketing, website stuff. You are literally doing it all. Even though we have specialized people, for example, that do the website development, all of our teams need to know and understand every aspect of what we’re doing because we have to manage that entire life cycle of the project for our clients. If I had to do it over again, I would’ve started in an agency and really learned every aspect of marketing, rather than just coming into an organization and just having a few different roles. This just allows you to just have such a broader view of the entire marketplace, and pulling it all together for clients.
Julie Murphy: I agree with you because we work with clients of all shapes and sizes. I’ve always said, at an agency, it’s almost learning in fast forward because you have multiple things happening at the same time. The good news is, is we’ve got a talented group of colleagues who I lean on all the time, and I know you do as well. There’s always someone who’s done something. Like, “Who has tried this, and what was the response?” We can lean on the collective to give the best advice to our clients. I don’t want to discount the 30 years you’ve spent in corporate marketing, which has been really valuable to us, and I know you’ve seen a lot. One question I have for you is, how have you seen the marketing and sales relationship evolve through the years?
Rebecca Umberger: Well, it’s changed a lot. I would say I’ve always had a really strong relationship with the sales leaders. Part of that is because I used to run PR in addition to marketing for each of these corporations. When I say run it, for public sector, for my little niche that I was in, and that was really important to have that strong relationship with sales leadership. But back when I started, we didn’t have any automation tools. Sales was its own business unit. Marketing was its own business unit. Marketing was getting all of their messaging from corporate. We had to put together various messaging of course to resonate with the public sector, but they were just more interested in sales being more interested in how many leads did you get for me this month? I want leads, leads, leads, leads. We turn them over to the sales team. The sales team, we had no idea what they did with them, because we couldn’t track anything.
I would say those days that we couldn’t track things, it was a little hectic and we tried to work together as much as we could, but oh my gosh, these tools that we have now with the CRM tools, the marketing automation tools, the intent data that we can get from a lot of these tools, that’s really bringing sales and marketing together as a team, because we can look and share that data and we know what works and what doesn’t work. The sales team has gotten so much better about putting the proper data in, and the marketing team has done a better job of putting their marketing programs in. There’s really so much more alignment when it comes to sales and marketing where you can actually work as a team.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great answer. It used to be back in the day where salespeople could get away with not putting in the right data. If the sales professional was the top and he or she wasn’t interested in that, you really couldn’t say anything. Now there’s really no excuse. A lot of the tools, of course, are voice activated and AI has gotten to play as well.
I’m just curious, and I loved your answer, but from your perspective, how do you think sales teams should help the marketing team specifically with message development? One of the big challenges that we have is coming up with the right message, and then of course, getting it into the hands or the ears or the eyes, and then into the brain of the prospect. I’m just curious, especially in an industry where technology or technical literacy is so critical, and so many companies are looking the same. I originally went to a big tech conference and it was really hard to delineate what a lot of the companies were doing. They offer a tool, but then they want to be broad in AI and whatever else it might be. Related to all this, bring it together in what role technology or thought leadership plays.
Rebecca Umberger: In public sector, the buying journey is so long. It’s highly structured. It involves multiple layers of stakeholders. We as marketing have to stay very close with our sales counterparts throughout the entire sales cycle. This means that we need to create a variety of content in every stage of the journey. Thought leadership is absolutely one of them. Case studies, use cases, nurture content, webinars, speaking opportunities. What’s nice is that sales now sees that if they work with marketing, it just goes so much smoother. Marketing has gotten better at making sure that our speakers and our SMEs are much more prepared when they go into these speaking engagements. They’ve got their questions ahead of time. They’ve got all of their talking points. We’ve got the right SMEs or our sales engineers engaged in each one of these pieces of content.
Marketing needs to be really clear as to what each piece of content or whatever we’re creating is actually meant to be. Like, what is the buyer persona? What stage of the buying journey is this in? If we can let the sales team know, they’re the ones who are out there in the agencies, they know which mandates they’re trying to align to, or executive orders. They know what that agency’s mission is. We need their input on every aspect of marketing. It’s just really important. Again, you’ve got the sales funnel working. Now you’re getting the content and the marketing and that messaging working together.
It’s really important, for example, for us in marketing to say, “Okay, this is not a product message,” because some sales reps want to go for just a, “Here’s our product,” and just do a deep dive dump. But when you’re doing thought leadership, that requires really taking a step back and aligning yourself to what’s really important to the client. Then we like to share the results of whatever we produce with the salespeople to make sure that, “Hey, is this message coming across? Are we projecting ourselves the way that we should be projecting so the government wants to interact with us?” Very interactive process now.
Julie Murphy: A lot of what Fred and I have been talking about on these podcasts is how important customization is. How that messaging is both relevant for the customer, it resonates with the customer, and really everything has to be customized, which is a lot of how account-based marketing comes through too. I’d really love to talk about account-based marketing. I know this is one of your core areas of expertise. There’s also a lot of different definitions of ABM. I would love to hear what your definition is of account-based marketing and why you think it’s become so powerful and gained traction with sales leaders.
Rebecca Umberger: That’s a really good question. I think public sector lends itself to ABM in general, just because we have things to align ourselves to. The government is also very open about letting us know what their missions are, how much money they have to spend. We know a lot about them. Whereas in the private sector, we don’t have that information. We even have a list of who they are, what their email addresses are. All of that’s been available to us for many years.
I would say as a marketer, I started long ago starting with ABM, but I would say my definition would be account-based marketing is a highly-targeted, coordinated approach in which marketing and sales work together to focus their resources defined as on high value accounts. It’s delivering tailored content and messaging that aligns directly to specific needs, to pain points, and to the whole buying community across the lifecycle of the sale. It combines the demand generation, personalization, sales enablement, and building that deeper relationship and accelerating the pipeline in these strategic accounts.
Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, do you have any examples or can you share an example of a time when an ABM campaign directly contributed to a big or complex win?
Rebecca Umberger: When I knew this was going to be one of the questions, I contacted one of my customers yesterday and I said, “Hey, is there any chance I could talk about what we just did with them last year in 2024?” They’re like, “Oh my gosh, please, feel free to talk about us.” I’ve got a few notes here.
We started working with a company called Strategic Communications. They are a medium to large size value-added reseller that’s been in the marketplace for 25 years marketing to public sector, both state, local, and federal, great reputation. They wanted to start up a new program that would really target justice and public safety. What they did was they hired somebody who had 25 years’ experience, Rusty Byers, in the public safety area. He came to us and said, “We want to create this new program. We’ve got the expertise.” What they wanted to do was pull this together in a matter of a few months and build their partner community.
The first thing that Strategic did was they diligently chose the best partners. They didn’t want to choose necessarily partners that weren’t in this area. They went out and did their research, which partners out there have this expertise, which ones have the best reputation? They went to the customers that they were going to be supporting. “Hey, do you know these partners? What value are they bringing?” It was really important for them to establish a really strong ecosystem of partners that really complimented each other and added significant value.
They got together and they decided which states they were going after, which jurisdictions, which agencies specifically would be good targets for them. While they were doing all of that, they asked us to come in and put together all of the marketing as it relates to the ABM program. We worked with them for about four months putting together all aspects of this program, from creating new logos, messaging, wording for their websites. We did one pagers, two pagers. We helped them develop an entire webinar program that was to be a sustainable program that they could do with different sets of partners at different times.
We helped them build their sales deck. We built a sales deck that was customer-facing. We built a sales deck that was client-facing. Then we also helped with the entire production of the webinars and stuff. We were working with them for almost five months. When I sent the email to Rusty, he said, “Oh my gosh, I’m happy to give you these stats.” I’m going to read off some stats of the ROI of this particular program, because he was really excited. Their team was really excited.
What Rusty said was, “The JPS Trust Co-Sell Program was a huge success with 14 new partners added since January. With the 14 added, they’ve been able to launch 8 district initiatives.” Examples are agency business processes, personal journey, corrections facility management, etc. Most of the new partners that they were able to bring in were not only applicable for the justice and safety program, which they call JPS Trust, they’re also applicable across other initiatives, which has been able to help them gain a lot more traction, not only in this area, but in other areas of their business. They participated in over 15 events and trade shows using the branding and collateral that we helped them create.
The first webinar that they launched had 821 people register and 525 actually attended, and it generated 23 really, really strong leads. This is insane for an organization who’s not used to doing the webinars. Really great results there. They won five new clients, and Stephanie, their sales rep, has $40 million in pipeline for new deals that have been generated over the past seven months. The other thing is they were able to generate more co-marketing funds via AWS because AWS was really excited about this account-based marketing program going after this, because they said none of their other vendors are actually focusing on that. Those are some pretty remarkable results delivered from this ABM program.
Julie Murphy: I’m so impressed with those numbers. Like you said, it’s nice that we can finally measure things in a way, so you can also tweak campaigns as needed to make sure that you maximize every dollar that goes into it. I love that. I have a fun question for you next, Rebecca. We know that there are a lot of buzzwords out there for marketing and sales that have been used so many times they almost become meaningless. I was wondering if you have one marketing, or could be two, one marketing buzzword that you’d love to see retired?
Rebecca Umberger: It’s funny because Fred mentioned that in the intro, how many buzzwords there are in going to those conferences, where everything sounded the same. It’s funny because when I was starting to work for Quest Software, I had actually been in the defense world for six years prior to that. I really needed to reacquaint myself with some of these buzzwords. As I was driving from Springfield to Gaithersburg the first few weeks, I was taking post-it notes and listening to WTOP at the time, and I was writing down all the different buzzwords on these post-it notes, and I had them all over my car, because you’re stuck in traffic. It’s not like you’re actually driving and writing, you’re just stuck in traffic. I would post them all over the office and I realized, “Oh my God, all these companies sound alike.”
One of the things that I’ve always been thrilled about with what Sage does, and other organizations do this too, is really making sure that your messaging is really succinct and that you can come up with a really strong differentiator. Because you’re right, everybody sounds alike, but the main things that I really don’t like are the words like end-to-end. It’s just like, “End-to-end what? Give us an idea of what you mean by that.” Is it end-to-end means from intake to post-award management? That’s what end-to-end might mean. But there are just so many of them. We all have acronyms with all of the government acronyms, and then we have our technology acronyms, but we want to make sure that any acronym we’re using, or any words or buzzwords, they actually mean something and we define it. If we’re going to use it, let’s define it, not just throw words out there to throw words out. We hear it every day. It just drives me crazy.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great job that Sage does with its clients. People who know me know that my favorite word to use is crisp. Like, nice, crisp messaging. I love the way you just said, let’s replace end-to-end with what is the beginning and what really is the end? That would definitely give a lot more clarity, which goes back to the point that one of the big challenges that we face in the selling world is that customers don’t want to listen to us or don’t even want to hear from us if we’re not bringing specific value for what their challenge is. Like you just said, if I go to them and say, “Well, we have this great end-to-end solution for you,” well, what value is that bringing?
Rebecca Umberger: What does that even mean?
Fred Diamond: It also doesn’t show them that I understand what they’re challenged with. One of the things that you said, which was really impactful for people listening, is that one of the great things about focusing on the B2G markets, business to government, is that the mission is disclosed. Now, of course, we’re going through some challenges. Again, we’re doing today’s interview in August of 2025, and there’s still some disclarity out there, if that’s a word.
Julie, this was a great show. We talked about account-based marketing, which is something that we really haven’t spoken about before, to be honest with you, on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. One of the purposes of the new Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast that we’re co-hosting with Julie Murphy from Sage Communications is focusing on places where marketing and sales need are behooved to work more effectively. I like the way, Rebecca, you described it before, that we didn’t have the metrics and the way to measure and the automation to really see if marketing was helping sales. Then sales will get a bucket full of leads that didn’t make sense, and they wouldn’t follow up on them, so they didn’t give feedback to marketing. That was a historic thing 15, 20, 30 years ago. Now there’s really no excuse for both organizations to continue and finding more crisp and effective ways to work together. Julie, I’m excited for what we’re going to be talking about moving forward with the Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast.
Rebecca, bring us home. We like to end every Sales Game Changers Podcast episode with one action step. You’ve given us a lot of great insights, a lot of great ideas, but give us one specific thing that our listeners should do after listening to today’s show or watching on YouTube or reading the transcript that they should implement right now to take their careers to the next level.
Rebecca Umberger: That’s a really good question. Always, always, always work with your sales teams. They want to work with you. We now share quotas with the sales team. But as far as your career goes, I would say don’t be afraid of trying new things. Don’t get stuck doing the same thing year after year after year. Just coming to Sage, I learn something new every single day, and I’m at the end of my career and I feel like I’m at the beginning of my career, because I just gain so much value learning, not only from our customers, but from the people on our team, from everybody. Keep learning, keep changing, reinvent yourself, and keep working with your teams.
Fred Diamond: Very good. Julie, any final thoughts?
Julie Murphy: I totally agree with you, Rebecca. The way that technology and AI has evolved, our industry continues to change really quickly. We have to take that mindset that we’re always learning forever.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo