Laura Holton is Head of Field Marketing at The Adaptavist Group, where she leads a globally distributed team focused on events, executive engagement, community, and pipeline acceleration. With experience spanning sales and marketing within the technology and Atlassian ecosystems, her career sits at the intersection of strategy, sales alignment, and experience-led growth, where intentionality, trust, and commercial impact matter more than volume-driven activity.
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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Intentional Marketing Over Volume. Laura’s approach prioritises value-driven B2B events over scale, focusing on fewer, more purposeful activities that deliver meaningful engagement with the right accounts at the right time. This shift enables stronger alignment with sales and builds deeper customer trust.
- Marketing as a Commercial Partner. Marketing is most effective when it is trusted as a commercial partner, not a delivery function. Success is measured not only through pipeline contribution, but through early sales involvement, influence on account strategy, and confidence across go-to-market teams.
- Experience-Led Growth Through Focus and Trust. Rather than chasing visibility across every channel, she champions experience-led, high-touch engagements that prioritise relevance and relationship-building. By stripping back unnecessary activity, teams protect creativity, focus on what matters, and drive sustainable pipeline growth.
Can you tell us about your role and what you do at The Adaptavist Group?
“I’m Head of Field Marketing at The Adaptavist Group, where I lead a globally distributed team.
My role in Field Marketing focuses on events, community, executive engagement and pipeline acceleration. It sits at the intersection of strategy, sales and customer relationships. Because of that, I spend much of my time ensuring marketing effort translates into real commercial impact.
Over my career, I’ve spent significant time in the Atlassian ecosystem. That experience shaped how I approach community led growth and Experience Led Marketing, which now informs how we deliver Field Marketing initiatives globally.
At its core, Field Marketing is about connecting people, ideas and intent in a way that supports growth.”
What is your current marketing focus?
“Yeah, so our focus is shifting from volume to value. We’re being far more intentional about where we invest our time, resources and budgets, particularly when it comes to executive level engagements. That means fewer activities, but with a clearer purpose and much closer alignment with sales, allowing us to drive more intentional engagement, deliver more value to customers and build greater trust in what we’re doing.
A big part of my role today is also helping teams feel confident in saying no, so that the yeses really count when we choose the right activities for the right regions, the right customers and the right account growth or customer acquisition opportunities.”
How do you define success in marketing?
“I would probably define success from marketing as a whole as when we’re trusted as a commercial partner and not just a delivery function.
Of course, pipeline is a key metric and it is the core of any business. But success also shows up in how early sales bring us into conversations and when our work changes how accounts are approached. If marketing influences behaviours, decision making and confidence, that’s real success.
We’re making impact, both internally and externally.”
How do you view the relationship between marketing and sales at The Adaptavist Group today, and how has your background in sales shaped that perspective?
“It makes me appreciate both sides of the coin. Sales and marketing are driving towards the same goal. We just usually go about it in different ways. That’s often why it’s the age old story of sales and marketing not quite finding the right path to collaboration.
Having a background in both sales and marketing, and seeing how they connect, but also where the pitfalls are, has been really important throughout my career.
We’re really starting to see that come to life at The Adaptavist Group. We’ve worked extremely hard since Field Marketing was introduced, and we’re seeing many countries flourish from that collaboration.
There’s a real sense of being in sync between the two teams. We both have a seat at the table. We stay closely aligned to the accounts, understand what needs to be done, how it should be delivered and what the pipeline looks like. Sales is willing to attribute results to marketing, and vice versa.
As a result, we’re both winning rather than working head to head.”
What is the biggest challenge marketers face today?
“I think the biggest challenge marketers face today is the constant pressure to be everywhere, all the time, across every channel. There’s a real risk of mistaking activity for impact.
Prioritisation has become one of the hardest, but also most important, skills for modern marketers. Without clear focus, even good marketing becomes diluted because we’re trying to do too much. Teams become overstretched and overworked, and creativity suffers in that kind of environment.
In Field Marketing, prioritisation is constant, across regions, activities, budgets and balancing global initiatives with local needs. Getting it right all the time is extremely difficult.
But by listening, observing and making informed decisions, we can create strong activities that drive real business impact.”
What are you prioritising right now, and what initiatives are you excited about?
“Our prioritisation at the moment is really focused on intentional activities, the ones that get us in front of the right ICPs, the right accounts, at the right time.
We’re using much more intent data so we can equip sales properly and deliver actionable value for customers.
We’ve stripped things back significantly. Conferences have not disappeared entirely, but they are very much reduced. Large booths and heavy resource investments are now limited to what is truly necessary.
One of the key exceptions is Team ’26, a major global initiative we run with Atlassian in Anaheim. It is one of the most exciting and impactful conferences we do each year, and brings the business together globally.
In local regions, we are prioritising one-to-one engagements. We work with organisations that pre-vet meetings, identifying budget holders, active projects within six to nine months and genuine interest.
It is becoming less about account-based marketing and more about account-based experience, ensuring every touchpoint nurtures relationships and contributes to pipeline growth.
We have both the big and the small, but both approaches deliver impactful Field Marketing in different ways.”
What has been your most successful event or engagement, and why?
“It’s easy to point to our bigger global activities because they tend to drive significant marketing influenced pipeline. However, some of our most successful engagements have actually been much smaller.
By focusing on intentional, high-touch sessions where the guest list, agenda and follow-ups are carefully designed, these initiatives often outperform larger events.
They work because the conversations are meaningful. When something is not performative, it strengthens trust.
We are not there to sell. We want to give people the opportunity to meet peers, hear from industry thought leaders and bring those perspectives together so they can make the right decisions.
Even if the pipeline does not appear immediately, we have seen strong long-term impact, particularly through customer advocacy and storytelling. It is smaller, it takes time and it requires resilience, but it works.”
What shaped you throughout this journey, and were there any mentors or leaders who inspired you?“I’ve been in marketing for well over a decade, working across freelancing, non profit, fashion and now technology. Every stage shaped how I lead today.
Freelancing taught me resilience. Moving into management taught me empathy.
For me, leading Field Marketing is about giving everything to my team, ensuring not only that we deliver results, but that their experience and growth matter too.”
Your philosophy is often described as accountability combined with creativity. What does that mean in practice, and what advice would you offer to those starting out in marketing?“My advice goes back to never stopping learning, especially if you’re early in your career or starting a new role. It’s important to understand the business before you specialise.
Spending time learning how sales works, how revenue is generated and how decisions are really made will make you far stronger as a marketer in the long run.
When it comes to accountability and creativity, you have to own what you’re doing. Whether something goes well or badly, transparency builds trust.
At the same time, creativity cannot disappear under pressure. If something does not land, we pivot. If something works, we enhance it.
Do not lose the creativity, but own what you do at the same time.”
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