How and Why Marketing Has Full Funnel Sales Responsibilities Video

How and Why Marketing Has Full Funnel Sales Responsibilities Video

by | Apr 20, 2026

In part 2 of  “Marketing Ops New Full Funnel Support Mandate” Video Series we address how and why marketing has full funnel sales responsibilities.

(Watch Time – 2:15)

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Summary

Why marketing has full funnel sales responsibilities – The pandemic fundamentally transformed marketing’s role, with 80% of enterprise companies shifting to digital-first content marketing as their primary go-to-market strategy due to remote work and canceled in-person events. This shift drove content marketing spending to double over four years, with another doubling expected. Marketing automation investment followed the same trajectory, with companies discovering that automated digital approaches are more effective for customer acquisition. By 2024, marketing became responsible for top and middle funnel activities, with 85% of companies embracing automation. The results are compelling: proper implementation generates 4x more quality leads, increases sales productivity by 14%, and improves targeting efficiency by 30%. This ROI has made marketing automation essential for 91% of marketers across all company sizes and industries.

Transcript

The Pandemic Shift: Marketing’s Move to Full Funnel

Marketing’s journey towards full funnel responsibilities was initiated by enterprise companies, reallocating both focus and budgets during the pandemic. With buyers working remotely, face to face meetings and events canceled, and direct dial phone connects plummeting, 80% of enterprise companies quickly shifted their focus to digital first content marketing as their primary go to market sales process.

Rising Investment: Content Marketing and Automation

As a result, over the next 4 years, content marketing spend doubled, and it’s expected to double again over the next 4 years as marketing continues to move deeper into the funnel. In parallel, marketing automation investment also doubled and is expected to double again over the next 5 years with the adoption of marketing automation software across all sized companies and the predicted extension of these tools across all stages of the customer life cycle.

Marketing Takes Ownership of the Funnel

So by the end of 2024, marketing became primarily responsible for the top and middle of the funnel, as 85% of companies now believed that an automated digital first approach is a more effective process to acquire new customers. They discovered that fully leveraging these tools for both sales and marketing alignment and automated connected buyer relationships drives growth.

The ROI Case: What Automation Delivers

Because when executed correctly for nurturing and lead scoring, it generates more than 4x the volume of higher quality leads. When leveraged for both lead scoring and sales enablement, it increases sales productivity by over 14%. And when the data is organized and leveraged effectively for attribution and insights, it improves targeting, content budgets, and top of the funnel ad spend by 30%.

The Verdict: Automation Is Now Essential

With this type of ROI, 91% of all marketers across all size companies and industries now consider marketing automation essential for their go to market success.

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B2B Marketing’s Shifting Role and Overview of Marketing Ops New Full Funnel Support Mandate Video

B2B Marketing’s Shifting Role and Overview of Marketing Ops New Full Funnel Support Mandate Video

by | Apr 15, 2026

B2B Marketing’s Shifting Role and a quick overview of our 12 Part Educational Video Series that explains  “Marketing Ops New Full Funnel Support Mandate” Video Series 

(Watch Time – 5:50)

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Summary

This B2B Marketing’s Shifting Role Video presentation addresses the rapidly evolving marketing landscape where roles have transformed more in the past five years than the previous fifty, with marketers increasingly overwhelmed by technology demands. The speaker discusses how marketing responsibilities have expanded beyond brand and lead generation to include sales support and the entire customer revenue cycle. With 56% of marketers feeling overwhelmed and 48% experiencing burnout, the presentation focuses on how Gabriel Sales can help organizations optimize their marketing automation, Salesforce capabilities, and AI processes. The three-part presentation covers the current marketing situation and future with AI, challenges teams face with technical support barriers, and Gabriel Sales’ solutions including proven frameworks, risk-free audits, and flexible service options. The goal is to help B2B companies and digital agencies reduce team frustrations while maximizing 

Transcript

The Evolving Role of Marketing

The marketing function is in the middle of an accelerating shift in roles and responsibilities. Several years ago, Adobe’s CMO made the clear point that because of the increased role of content marketing and technology, that marketing’s role has changed more in the past five years than the preceding fifty years as their responsibilities expanded from brand and lead generation to lead development. And Gartner now predicts with the rapid increase of automation technologies, data, and AI, the next five years will be even more disruptive than the past five years.

And as part of this disruption, Gartner also predicts that marketing will see increased accountability for sales and closing support. It will eventually extend well beyond the initial close through the entire customer revenue cycle.

The Burden on Marketing Teams

And with all these new technologies, processes, strategies, and channels to manage, fifty six percent of marketers are feeling overwhelmed keeping up, and forty eight percent are reporting feeling burned out over the past twelve months.

The Goal of This Presentation

So how do marketing leaders cost effectively alleviate their team’s frustrations and struggles with their evolving tech stack and support their team’s capability and capacity to maximize their use of marketing automation, sales enablement, and AI processes to accelerate specific stages of the funnel. The overall goal of the first seventy percent of this presentation is to explain why and how increasing your marketing automation and Salesforce capabilities, capacity, and support is critical at b to b companies and digital agencies when to reduce their team’s frustrations with technology, data hygiene, and advanced AI, and simultaneously empower your organization to achieve more with less.

Key Areas We Will Cover

We will discuss the impact of this support in specific areas, including the efficiencies and the competitive advantages your organization will gain when you optimize your tech stack to increase adoption, use, and the ROI of multiple processes, accelerate your funnels with proven automation workflows and lead scoring, scale sales productivity with sales enablement tools, increase visibility for smarter decisions with dashboards, attribution, and insights, implement best practice data governance for improved personalization, AI readiness, and AI deployments, and receive ongoing training and stewardship to keep up with your constantly evolving tech stack, all geared towards helping you build mature automation processes across the entire customer life cycle.

And throughout the presentation, we wanna help you decide if we are the right fit to support your team so you will gain an understanding of how Gabriel Sales can deploy certified technologists and seasoned frontline sales ops and marketing professionals to maximize your processes, tech stacks, data, and reporting with proven and strategic best practices.

Structure of this “Marketing Ops New Full Funnel Support Mandate Video Series”

We’ve organized this presentation to help organizations think about how to generate short term results while building towards long term success.

These insights and tips have been developed over ten plus years using these tools, encompassing hundreds of implementations and thousands of optimizations and campaigns, including leveraging AI for multiple efficiencies and tech stack consolidations on top of Salesforce in these datasets. We’ve divided this presentation into three parts in twelve smaller sections.

Part One: The Current Situation and What’s Next with AI

In part one, we discussed the current situation and with AI, what happens next. Topics will include why and how marketing’s roles and responsibilities shifted and where they’re headed next, how this shift permanently changed b to b buyers’ needs and expectations during the sales process, how these needs and expectations have now extended to the entire customer funnel, what is now required for your team to successfully meet and exceed your buyers’ needs and expectations, and the ROI you can expect from mature automation and sales enablement, especially with the addition of AI.

Part Two: Challenges Most Companies Face

Part two addresses challenges most companies face, including the specific tactical and technical support barriers most teams now need to overcome, what this type of support looks like and why it’s hard to find, the frustrations and challenges this lack of support creates for your teams, and the increased strategic complexities and disadvantages this can create for marketing and sales leaders, especially if your data and data governance is not AI ready.

Part Three: Why Gabriel Sales Is the Right Solution

In part three, we explain why Gabriel Sales is the right solution for companies serious about short term results and long term success. We share our proven frameworks, capabilities, services, and pricing models. We explain our risk free audits to identify quick wins and to build long term road maps, and we explain the flexible options we provide to help you achieve your goals, including technical quarterly sprints, point solutions, consulting projects, managed services, and training, all anchored in our proprietary maturity model to ensure alignment, quick results, and smarter long term investments.

We then conclude with what makes us unique in our value, including an overview of our fifteen year history in sales and marketing ops, data analytics, and our early experience with…

 

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Marketing Automation Managed Services Case Study for Enterprise Industrial Products Manufacturer

Marketing Automation Managed Services Case Study for Enterprise Industrial Products Manufacturer

by | Aug 1, 2024

In this Marketing Automation Managed Services Case Study for Enterprise Client with Complex Sales Gabriel Sales  Deployed Salesforce and Account Engagement (Pardot) Optimization + Training and Transition to generate 420 Sales Ready Leads

Gabriel Sales Helps Scale Company’s Marketing Automation Engine from 2 to 24 Campaigns to Produce 420 Sales Ready Leads

Situation

The five-person marketing team was very skilled in brand awareness, creative, strategy, tradeshow & event support, product marketing and inbound marketing. After years of successful event marketing, media and PPC marketing, they had captured and created an opt in database of close to 70% of the existing market.

They made the strategic decision to maximize the value of their existing database and committed to lead nurturing and ongoing buyer and customer education. Simultaneously, they were tasked with developing leads by increasing content education to move them deeper into the sales funnel.

Challenge

No one on the marketing team had frontline sales experience or marketing automation expertise. The team knew how to create great content and great events but had no familiarity with Salesforce, Sales Operations or Marketing Automation Platforms. They were tasked with maximizing the value of their database and their investment in marketing automation tech. They were also tasked to create prequalified sales ready leads to support their Global Sales Team as well as measuring their campaigns, content and efforts.

Solution

After leveraging Gabriel Sales to optimize their Account Engagement (Pardot) Implementation and Salesforce Integration, the Company moved to an ongoing Monthly Marketing Automation and Salesforce Operations Managed Services engagement. Gabriel Sales staffed a blended team of a marketing automation manager, database administrator, email marketing expert, Senior Salesforce Administrator & Pardot Specialist and account manager.

The Senior Salesforce Admin, Pardot Specialist and Account Manager worked with the marketing team turn their nurturing goals, visions and strategies into reality helping the team to:

  • Prioritize a systematic roll out of campaigns
  • Optimize technologies
  • Integrate additional technologies into Salesforce and Pardot
  • Seamless hand-off of leads from marketing to Global Sales team
  • Set up systems for long-term measurement and reporting

Simultaneously, Gabriel Sales took on the day-to-day management executing a wide variety of campaigns including:

Trade show pre and post support:

  • Account-based Marketing Programs to Subsets of the Database
  • Landing Pages for Co-Branded Trade Publication Campaigns
  • General Nurturing Campaigns
  • Event Based Campaigns (Webinars)

Day to Day Tasks Included:

  • Email Templates
  • Landing Page Builds
  • Dynamic Content Builds
  • Form Builds
  • Campaign Workflows
  • Lead Tracking
  • Automations and Completion Actions for Lead Assignments
  • Lead Scoring
  • UTM Tracking and Profiling
  • Testing and QA
  • Data Management and Cleanliness

In Addition, Gabriel Sales Continued to Implement Best Practices and Expand Reporting Capabilities in Quarterly Sprints as More Data Became Available

  • KPIs
  • Data Governance
  • SOPs and How-To Guides
  • Dashboards
  • Quarterly Train the Trainer so tools could be rolled out to Senior Marketers and Sales Teams

Results

Year One Results

Company’s existing marketing team was able to focus on strategy, core competencies and content generation.

Gabriel Sales Launched a Lead Nurturing Sales Ready Lead Process

Company and Gabriel Sales collaborated to introduce systematic content marketing and Sales Ready Lead workflows. This resulted in a 10x increase in New Leads, the introduction of pre-qualified Sales Ready Leads for a seamless hand off from marketing to sales, resulting in 4X the lead conversions in 70% less time.

Scaled Sustainable Marketing Capacity

Gabriel Sales blended team also created the infrastructure, defined, documented and executed multiple day to day tasks leveraging company’s existing technology stack. This maximized their investment in technology, database and content creation. This also created a clear path to ongoing, affordable and sustained sales funnel and pipeline development.

Developed Numerous Measure and Insight Capabilities

Gabriel Sales was also able to provide dashboards, reporting and quarterly reviews to measure:

  • Content attribution
  • Marketing attribution
  • Message measurement
  • Specific campaign ratios
  • Sales team activity dashboards
  • Form productivity and lead source attribution
  • Time to conversions

This allowed the marketing team to make smarter decisions which optimized campaigns and empowered sales teams.

Year Two

After the marketing team’s and Gabriel Sales initial success, the decision was made by CMO and Chief Sales Officer to roll out the program across additional divisions.

Gabriel Sales crafted and documented initial SOPs, Workflows and Best Practices and is currently in the process of scaling to 3 additional Divisions within the company.

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About the Company

A building products manufacturer selling with over $2B in annual revenue.

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About the Division

Marketing team was responsible for selling engineered materials to building supply manufacturers. Team was tasked with generating new Sales Ready leads and educating existing customers to accelerate sales cycle and increase order sizes.

Lead Scoring Case Study for Mid-Market Client – Building Materials Manufacturer

Lead Scoring Case Study for Mid-Market Client – Building Materials Manufacturer

by | Jun 8, 2024

In This Lead Scoring Case Study for Building Materials Manufacturer​ Gabriel Sales Deployed Salesforce and Account Engagement (Pardot) Optimization + Training and Transition

Gabriel Sales Optimizes Systems to Manage, Nurture, and Distribute 10,000 Inbound leads a month within 3 quarters and then trains Company’s team

Situation

Leadership at a mid-market building products’ manufacturer was responsible for providing both the internal sales group and distribution partners with a constant flow of sales ready leads.

The team was supported by a Marketing Director, Marketing Assistant and Salesforce Administrator. The company worked with several outside media agencies to generate 10,000 plus inbound leads a month. Over time their multi-million dollar marketing budget had granted an in-house database of 500,000 plus targets across the United States.

The marketing team and agency were great at promoting the brand, producing great creative and educational content. The Salesforce Admin had no experience with Account Engagement (Pardot) and the marketing team was experienced in content production but had limited expertise in lead nurturing in the system.

The Agencies were managing content and forms on the Company’s website and on third party sites. Their accountability stopped once the lead was generated.

Challenge

Leadership, Marketing and the Salesforce Administrator had multiple challenges and goals.

  • The team had implemented Account Engagement (Pardot) with no prior experience leading to over design and/or missing solution and as a result the systems failed at volume and scale   
  • There were multiple sync errors
  • Leads were being lost or routed to the wrong reps/distributors, so they were being ignored and abandoned.
  • The company could see what channels were producing the most leads but had limited visibility into what marketing channels and campaigns were producing the highest quality leads and/or which leads were transacting. 
  • The company wanted to leverage account engagement for ongoing market and buyer education with lead nurturing campaigns to maximize their existing database of 500,000 existing leads. 

Solution

Leadership of a mid-market building products’ manufacturer was responsible for providing the General Managers of each product group with a constant flow of sales ready leads. The General Managers then shared these leads with 24 plus in-house reps and 100s of distribution partners with contractually well-defined relationships and territories across the United States and Canada.

Quarter 1

Month One – Discovery, Audit, Scope, Budget, Timeline and Final Strategy

The engagement started with senior leaders, the Salesforce Administrator and Marketing Director to understand:

  • Who is using the system?
  • How are they using it?
  • Lead Distribution Requirements
  • Marketing Teams Background and Area of Expertise
  • Existing Inbound Campaigns
  • Segmentation requirements and what criteria defined a good lead

Gabriel Sales then conducted a system audit with particular attention to:

  • Alerts and Notifications
  • Sync Errors
  • Automations 
  • Grading and Scoring

Gabriel Sale then provided a scoping document with goals outlined and what was required to technically achieve those goals with:

  • Process Gaps
  • Technical Gaps
  • Skills Gaps (Training Required)
  • Recommendations
  • Prioritized Road Map
  • Preliminary Budget

After reviewing this document with the Company, Gabriel Sales provided a one-year plan with timelines and final budget. Company opted for staffing a blended team at a monthly recurring fee to implement and execute the plan (including training of his existing staff).

The plan was organized into four “Quarterly Sprints” with the goal of providing their team with optimized Account Engagement tools and processes deployed as well as have the team trained within the first year.

 

Month 2 – Systems Clean Up and Features Streamlined

  • Gabriel Sales quickly corrected issues related to the initial implementation, so Salesforce and Account Engagement synch errors stopped.
  • Turned on and turned off features.
  • Pre-subscribed additional custom fields to align systems and company and turned-on automated data enhancement with a third party (Zoom Info) to support both sales rep visibility and make lead scoring and lead grading possible.
  • Implemented simpler Form and Form Handler best practices to streamline the flow and distribution of leads

 

Month 3 – Key System Process Optimizations and Training Started

  • Implemented new lead scoring and lead grading criteria.
  • Integrated ZoomInfo to augment and append data to improve grading.
  • Trained existing team in best practices that were implemented.

 

Quarter 2

New workflows, campaigns and processes are implemented and custom training of Company’s team kicked off:

  • Optimized triggered email and alerts.
  • Launched initial drip/lead nurturing campaigns to support one of the product line divisions. Content and strategy supplied by the company’s marketing team.
  • Marketing team went through Gabriel Sales quick start online training program (hosted on Udemy)

 

Quarter 3

Systems and campaigns are scaled with initial reporting for leadership:

  • Gabriel Sales worked with existing marketing team to launch three additional product division campaigns and conducted customized best practice training in their systems.
  • Gabriel Sales worked with leadership of the company to define their reporting and dashboard needs.

 

Quarter 4

Final transition takes place:

  • Gabriel Sales builds the final required custom dashboard and reporting
  • Gabriel Sales moved into a support role answering questions for existing marketing team as they took over the day-to-day management of the systems and campaigns

 

Ongoing

For a modest and affordable monthly fee Gabriel Sales continues to monitor Data Governance on a monthly basis and functions as a support desk for marketing team when any best practices or technical issues arise in their management of the ongoing campaigns.

Results

Gabriel Sales was able to optimize, launch, manage and transition the following tactics and capabilities with the following scaled results in the first three quarters:

Company’s marketing team and Salesforce Administrator were able to take over the day-to-day management of the following best practices:
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About the Company

A Mid-Market Building Materials Manufacturer with a National Sales Team of 24 in house reps and 1000s of National Distribution Partners needed to effectively generate and route 10,000 plus leads monthly with strict governance needs.

The entire process was managed hands on by Leadership and a small support team of 2 marketers and one Salesforce Administrator.

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Marketing Automation Case Study Healthcare Software and Consulting

Marketing Automation Case Study Healthcare Software and Consulting

by | Nov 8, 2023

Quick Start Account Engagement (Pardot) Implementation + Salesforce Optimization + Training and Transition

Gabriel Sales Launches Multiple Awareness and Lead Nurturing Campaigns and then Transitions in 150 Days

Situation

Post merger, this mid-market software company needed to integrate and align the new company’s lead lists, sales funnel and marketing programs into one inclusive system and process. A decision was made to move from HubSpot and Mailchimp to Salesforce and Account Engagement (Pardot) to support the more complex sales environment the new company would need to address.

The new entity had strategic marketing experts, great content marketers, inbound marketers and a seasoned Salesforce Administrator with no expertise in Account Engagement. The company had a wide-range of content ready to be leveraged in both demand generation and lead nurturing campaigns and an opt in database that represented close to 70% of the market.

Challenge

The marketing team was skilled in brand, creative, strategy and inbound marketing. The CRO and Salesforce Administrator were tasked with taking two different sales processes and multiple inbound and outbound marketing processes into one consistent sales and marketing operations process.

Company had developed their new go-to-market strategy and defined their new sales process. They needed help launching their new technology stack and then wanted their new combined sales and marketing operations team to take over the day-to-day management of the system.

Solution

The company hired Gabriel Sales to implement Account Engagement (Pardot)- deploy features, train on best practices, streamline Salesforce connections and integrate several additional third party technologies. Company then wanted Gabriel Sales to initiate several initial Marketing Automation Campaigns and Content Management Tools before training and transitioning the entire tech stack to their existing team for ongoing day-to- day management and execution.

Month 1

The engagement started by meeting with the Company’s CRO, Salesforce Administrator and Marketing Director to understand:

  • Who is using the system?
  • How are they using the system?
  • Success Criteria for Sales
  • Success Criteria for Marketing
  • Sales Process
  • Campaign Strategy
  • What They Wanted to Measure/Track
  • Reporting and Insight Needs

Gabriel Sales crafted a final plan for a basic implementation and a systematic 90 day roll out of campaigns with final timelines and critical dependencies.

Gabriel Sales then quickly launched into the technical setup of Account Engagement (Pardot) including all Salesforce.com integrations and third party integrations.

Month 2 and 3

Gabriel Sales worked with the Company’s marketing team to launch the systems with:

  • Initial campaigns
  • Initial database segmentations
  • Continued quality checks and testing 
  • Continued best practice workflows
  • Conversion reports and insight dashboards

Gabriel Sales worked with the CRO to refine automated:

  • Lead scoring
  • Prioritized lead lists
  • Weekly engagement reports

Simultaneously, the Salesforce Administrator and Marketing team started their basic training in Account Engagement (Pardot) using Gabriel Sales online subscription training course on Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot): Build Your Basic Skills on Udemy.

 

Month 4 and 5

Worked with Salesforce Administrator, Marketing Team and Sales Team to ensure they understood how to leverage and maximize the effectiveness on the new sales and marketing technology. Training and transition included:

 

  • Email Templates and List Emails
  • Engagement Studio – Marketing workflows and best practices
  • Dynamic Lists
  • Triggered Automations
  • Custom Redirects
  • Page Actions
  • Segmentation Rules
  • Automation Rules
  • Lead Scoring and Grading
  • Forms and Form Handlers
  • Landing Pages and Templates
  • Lead Views
  • Prioritizing Leads
  • Campaign Tracking and Reporting

Results

Within 3 Months

The Company’s Account Engagement was fully implemented, launched with best practices and multiple initial marketing campaigns were up and running and producing scored leads prioritized in their CRM.

Within 5 Months

Gabriel Sales’ Certified Salesforce Administrator and Certified Account Engagement Specialists were able to train the company’s marketing team and Salesforce Administrator with all they needed to know to take over the systems and campaigns on a day-to-day basis.

Ongoing

Company contracted Gabriel Sales for an ongoing 8 hour/month of additional best practice training and support for an additional 6 months.

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About the Company

A Mid-Market Healthcare Management Software and Consulting Services Company acquired a Compliance Software provider allowing it to service a broader range of customers.

Company had substantial sales and marketing talent and the CRO needed to quickly fold two different marketing and sales organization into one technology stack to support a team of 30 sales reps, account managers, and trainers across the United States.

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