This episode features an interview with Ed McDonnell, CRO at Asana, a software company that helps teams orchestrate their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives.

In this episode, Ed shares with us Asana’s vision for tackling work automation, insight into their Work Innovation Lab, and why attribution for attribution's sake is meaningless. Ed also talks about the importance of treating pipeline like a team sport and how to effectively run a “Pipe Council”. 

Key Takeaways:

• Get focused on your ICP. Partner with your product teams to develop your ICP so you can define use cases and show the productivity you can gain from those use cases. 
• Tell your story through the lens of your customers. Your customers are the inside players of how your product works and what it’s doing in a real way on a daily basis out in the world.
• Pipeline is a team sport. All of your business channels should be involved when it comes to pipeline generation. Pipeline is not one person or function, and in order to succeed, it has to be the highest-performing team in your organization at cross-functional scale.

Quote:

“Pipeline to me is a team sport. It is not one person. It is not one function. It is such a, it is, it, it has to be.  The highest performing team in your organization at cross functional scale, because nobody works for each other. Everybody's in their own worlds, but they have to come together as a team and solve the, you know, a problem that every B2B enterprise software company faces. Which is, do we have enough pipeline to go into the market to be successful? Because every organization is a little bit different as to how much they want each of those. stakeholders to develop into their pipeline. If you're not producing at the right scale or the right coverage model, Why? Like, interrogating the why is equally as important as getting all hopped up as to why not. And too many companies and too many people I have found spend time on, well, why isn't something happening? Like, versus going in and saying, okay, it's not happening. What can we do differently to actually produce a different result? Because you get caught up on poking on sales leaders and saying, hey, you're not hitting your pipeline metrics, like, why, what's wrong, and  that friction, while good and has to happen, you also have to be really open to interrogating so to me the interrogation of it in a healthy way with everybody having a seat at the table and being a team sport is Is the way that I, I have found to be very successful running a Pipe Council.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(03:44) - The Trust Tree: Go to market strategy when you solve lots of problems for lots of people

*(15:32) - The Playbook: Running a Pipe Council

*(37:53) - Quick Hits: Ed’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for pipeline pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Links:

• Connect with Ian on LinkedIn
• Connect with Ed on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Asana
• Learn more about Caspian Studios
• From zero to ten podcasts: How Caspian Studios produces B2B podcasts with Asana