How to Build a Must-Know Profitable ABM Strategy: Chats with Evelyn

Tell us a little more about you, your role, and Seismic.

“One of the things I have to say that I’m really proud of is how we’ve transformed our growth engine. We’ve driven six profitable quarters in a row. We were able to significantly improve our roaming and return on market investment and achieve record engagement with both net-new accounts as well as existing customers. But beyond the metrics, my role here is building an engine that’s scalable, accountable, and delivers pipeline, strengthens partnerships, and unlocks impact.”

 

What is your main marketing focus at the moment?

“So there are two big areas. I lead growth marketing, and the first, which is always a focus, is scaling our demand engine. We are doing this a lot with AI today, personalising everything we do, using predictive insights and intent data, and creating agile campaigns so we can meet buyers where they are.

The second thing I would say is to elevate our brand because the demand engine helps us build trust with our buyers and customers, especially right now, as we’ve moved from a product-centric business to more of a platform. It’s really important for us to start to build trust with the tech buyers, think CIOs, because they’re really starting to influence the deals that our sellers have. So we’ve done the work to modernise our go-to-market. Now we’re focused on just showing up with a clear, differentiated voice.”

 

How do you define success in marketing?

“Um, so it’s really important that we’re not looking at marketing as just this engine that brings top of funnel, right? Or leads. Leads are not even in our vocabulary here at Seismic. To me, marketing success is all about the success of the business. So what does that mean?

Well, did we deliver the pipeline? Is the pipeline quality converting and able to move through the funnel quickly to convert to revenue? How has our velocity improved? How many new logos did we win? New logos are crucial for expanding our wallet share and market share. How about our customers? Did we retain our customers? Did we grow our customers? Did we get that unlock? But it also means our brand affinity, did we grow? As well as  our visibility into the marketplace, and so that’s really important, so to me success isn’t just when we’re supporting the business, it’s actually also to accelerate the business and the growth of this.”

 

What are the biggest challenges marketers face today?

“Oh wow. Well, I mean, there are so many. I think marketers today have to do a lot of things. I mean, we’ve heard the terms before, you know, do more with less. But what’s really important here is that we’re balancing speed with substance. Because there’s a lot of pressure. There’s a lot of pressure to move fast. There’s a lot of pressure to produce more content, to adopt AI, that’s all real. That pressure is real.

But great marketing still has to start with the customer. Customer insight, the differentiation in our positioning and tight sales alignment. So the best teams I’ve seen are ruthlessly focused not only on the right accounts but the right signals within those accounts and those buyers, and then the right narrative. They’re going to use AI to amplify and not replace the strategic thinking that they have. I did a talk recently at Pavilion and Inbound, where I talked about AI being more amplified intelligence.

It’s not here to replace us, but here to amplify and help us. So again, I think the real challenge for marketing today is staying focused on what moves the needle. While making room for creativity, experimentation, and long-term brand building.”

What has been the most successful event or engagement at Seismic recently?

“Most recently, in September, we held our 10th in-person customer conference called Shift. It was the largest one ever. And what’s interesting is that 10 years ago, we only had 22 people in a room. This year, we had 1,200 people in the room.

And what was even amazing was that we had representation for every room in the house. Our typical audience has been just an enablement practitioner. So now we have like our revenue leaders, CROs, CMOs and marketing leaders in the room. Our rev ops teams are there. So everyone who’s really kind of helping to drive the transformation within the business.

That was really exciting, the theme was supercharge your future at shift, so we really celebrated customer impact. We brought our customers up to talk about the things that they’ve done, we’ve talked a lot about product innovation as well as the transformation that’s happening within the industry. So the results I mentioned were record-breaking.

For the attendance, we saw three times the value of our pipeline get influenced as a result of that event. And we really received the best feedback, like the highest score in terms of NPS, which is great. What made that work is that we made sure that the event was customer-centred. We brought the voices of the customer to the forefront. It was our customers talking about their problems and challenges.

So there was a lot of learning that was imparted. Obviously, there was a lot of brand building as well. One other thing that happened there, which I really, really felt great about.
Every year we do this, we pick a charitable organisation, and we really rally our whole community, our shift community, behind the organisation.

This year it was OFR Operation First Response, and we raised over $13,000 within like an hour, two hours. We brought the founder up, Peggy Baker. So, this is for the veterans and first responders, who work day-to-day to save lives, and how are we helping support them. So it really reminded me at that moment that marketing, yes, we move the business, but we can also move the hearts of people to do good.”

 

Do you focus on large-scale events or smaller, more intimate gatherings?

“Yeah, we definitely, I mean obviously, that’s our flagship event, we call it our Super Bowl, but we follow up with city tours. So, we go to three different cities as well. And then we do a lot of small, intimate events because our strategy here is account-based.

So, how are we bringing a cohort of accounts together? So we then bring experiences to them. We might hold a dinner at a round table. In fact, when we were on shift, we had a small breakout for executives. So think CMO, CRO, CIOS, CEOs, even founders. We had 33 executives in that room. It was an event within an event, and that was extremely successful as well. But yes, we can do a smaller group, 10 or 12 people for our city tours, some might have 300 people, and then of course shift that has about 1,200 people.”

 

What are the biggest challenges when holding events?

“I think it’s always that you know people’s time is scarce. And so the biggest challenge will always be how to get them to invest their time with us. Now you do that only by crafting an agenda and conversations. That is relevant to the people that you’re inviting, something that they’re going to care about because it’s something that they’re facing today, and also curating the people in the room that are like-minded. I would say the biggest challenge would always be the time, but if you are intentional and smart about the way that you curate the people in the room and then craft the agenda and the topics of conversations, then people are going to give their time to you.

 

What advice would you give to someone starting in marketing?

“I would say yes to the hard stuff. Run towards growth. Listen, the best marketers I know didn’t get there by staying in their lane. You can’t just say this is what I was hired to do. This is all I’m going to do. No. Right? Go beyond that. Think about what needs to happen across the business. Can you sign up for a project even though it might stretch you? Um, so those marketers just really jumped into unfamiliar territory. Another thing I would say is learn your business, know the numbers.

Get fluent in data, get fluent in the financials. Like that, business acumen is going to be really important. Um, because great marketers, it’s not all about the headlines or the copy that you write. It’s about the outcomes and the results that you deliver. And finally, I will just say be curious. But also be kind and build people up. Because if you’re trying to be a leader, it’s only that leader that builds people up, that puts people first, that people will follow.”

 

What are the biggest opportunities for marketing leaders today compared to the past?

“I would say owning the entire customer life cycle from first touch all the way to advocacy and retention. There are a lot of tools that are in front of us right now that have given us, uh.. the ability to do a lot more. So… think AI. AI has done wonders for us. Digital data. That’s really helped put marketing at the centre. We’re the growth engine today. We can now influence the business, not just awareness, but also again from that customer journey. We could influence because we have the insights, we have the data, we understand what’s happening to that customer, and we know where they are in their journey. If we’re using all of that, then we can influence where they are in terms of adopting and using the products, in terms of keeping them happy and delighting them.

This means the CMO will really have that seat at the revenue table. We’re not going to be viewed again as just the organisation that brings top of the funnel. That we will have the seat to really drive the strategy for the business, and not just be the kind of order takers. We’re driving the strategy for the business. Because I mean, it’s important to not only obviously grow net new, but customer turn is going to be so critical to the growth of the business. You want to reduce churn. You want to grow your customers, and as a CMO today, as a marketing leader today, we have that opportunity again to own the full customer life cycle.”

 

What was your biggest marketing win of 2025 and your focus for 2026?

“Okay. Boy, a lot of reflection. 2025 has been a breakthrough year for us right here at Seismic. So we launched a new website. My teams did that in seven months. New design, advanced personalisation, really like treating that as not only our digital front door, but as our primary lead engine. As I mentioned, we activated our largest shift ever. So, that was, a highlight of the year. We also hit aggressive pipeline goals. We had to cut our budget by about 10 to 12%. We reduced the number of people. We weren’t able to add more, but even with that, we were able to deliver 30% more to the business.

The quality of the pipeline was so strong that we helped the business close within our first half. I think we had 35% year-on-year growth in terms of bookings and revenue. That’s something I feel we can be really proud of as an organisation. We scaled our engine with purpose and just really, really proud of the team, my teams and the wider marketing organisation for the impact that we’ve made. Now, if I look into 2026, in 2025, as I mentioned already, we kind of changed our narrative to be more product-centred, moving to a platform as we come into 2026. Now that we’ve scaled our demand engine, how do we fuel that acceleration? The brand is going to be critical for that. We have to elevate our brand because the brand is really going to put the power behind the engine now.

That just really means as we move, we’re also expanding our audience in 2026 again, because this platform, we have to start thinking about the tech buyer, the CIO, CTO, and the COO. So we really have to invest more in our brand, not a brand refresh; the brand already looks great. This is more about our story. What are we saying in our narrative, our story to the market? How are we driving and building trust with those new buyers? So that we can build both affinity and demand. So yeah, I would say brand is going to be the critical thing that we’re going to focus on in 2026. And as I mentioned already that customer-centric growth is the other focus for us.

If you had to describe the role of a CMO in one word, what would it be and why?

Wow. Um, I feel like there are so many words. And we can say transformation, we can say change agent, but I would say right now the word that I would think about is translator. As CMO and marketing leaders, we really sit at the intersection of strategy for customers of our sales teams and our product teams.

So we have to translate any insight that we have into action. We have to translate the vision that we have for the business into velocity, and we have to translate the data into decisions. So when we do that right, I believe that marketing then becomes that connective tissue across the whole business. Uh, and we can turn that complexity into clarity and translate all of that to drive growth that’s durable and lasts.