Lucy Barclay, Head of Field and Partner Marketing at Asana, draws on her background as a storyteller to share her playbook for modern marketing. She discusses the critical importance of cross-functional alignment, why the future will be defined by human creativity, and the need to push sales out of its comfort zone.
Follow The Ortus Club on LinkedIn to keep up-to-date on our conversations with today’s field marketing leaders.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- The Future is More Human and Creative, Not Less.
Use AI to automate repetitive, admin-heavy tasks. This frees up your team to focus on the strategic, creative work and human connections that will cut through the noise. - Cross-Functional Alignment is the Hardest Part of Events.
The biggest challenge in executing a successful event is not the logistics, but managing the stakeholders. Deep, cross-functional alignment is the true key to success. - Experiment and Push Sales Out of Its Comfort Zone.
The best career advice is to constantly try new things. Have an opinion and use data to push your sales team and your strategy in innovative directions, rather than just doing what’s always been done.
Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Asana?
I’m Lucy, and I lead the field marketing and partner marketing teams here at Asana. I have teams based all over the world, in America, EMEA, and APJ. For those that don’t know, Asana is a work management platform that’s really powering human and AI collaboration.
Diving deeper into your role, what would you say is your main focus right now?
My main focus right now is planning for next year. Things like AI Overviews in search results have impacted our inbound pipeline this year. So, as we think about our planning, we are focused on how we can optimise our inbound funnel to tackle those risks, while also ensuring we have the right marketing mix across events, digital, and other channels. It’s all about creating a strong, aligned plan that optimises marketing spend towards our target countries, ICPs and industries.
Can you share an example of a particularly successful marketing campaign you’ve executed recently?
Our “AI Teammates” launch has seen real interest. We started the launch in Japan in August and we recently brought it to EMEA with a great event in London. It was our biggest event ever, with over 700 people in attendance. To put that in perspective, two years ago, the same event had 150 people, so we’ve seen good growth. The atmosphere was fantastic as people really started to see the possibilities with AI. And frankly live, in-person interactions continue to be one of the most impactful things we’re doing from a marketing standpoint – nothing beats in person interaction.
What is the biggest challenge when it comes to organising large events?
The sheer number of stakeholders involved. That cross-functional alignment is consistently the most challenging part of bringing an event together. For our big flagship events, they are led out of the US so we also have time zones to contend with. But we’re lucky that we sell a tool that helps bring all that work into one place and makes collaboration easier, but that internal alignment is always the piece that causes the most challenge, but without it the event will always fail
How do you measure and think about ROI for events?
ROI is an interesting one because there are two types. There is the hard ROI—the numerical data you can collect. For us, that looks like what we call XQLs (cross-qualified leads), pipeline generated, and closed ARR that comes from the event.
But there is also the softer ROI, which is the brand experience and the feeling people have when they come away from an event. That is much more difficult to calculate, but it’s incredibly important for how people perceive your brand. We collect feedback from our customers to understand how they felt and what they learned so we can iterate and make the experience even better next time.
What is the relationship like between marketing and sales at Asana?
It’s the classic question for any marketer! Thankfully at Asana, the alignment is really, really strong. We start at the beginning of the year, making sure our go-to-market planning is in lockstep with the priorities we are setting with the sales team, whether that’s the markets, ICPs or the industries we are going after.
The key is communication. We have good cadences to keep everyone updated, we listen to their feedback, and we report on both the hard and soft ROI. If you’re not aligned, you risk delivering a marketing plan that isn’t supporting the business at all which will only result in lots of busy work but little impact.
How do you ensure you’re selecting the right events?
It goes back to that go-to-market planning. I want to make sure an event has a clear match with our ICP, our target industries, and our use cases. I don’t want to be just guessing and showing up to an audience that isn’t interested in work management. I’m a big believer in doing a few things really, really well versus doing many things badly.
In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?
I think it’s a creative one. AI is joining the party and taking on a lot of the repetitive, admin-heavy work that can bog marketing teams down. This gives us an opportunity to automate those pieces so we can free up our teams to think more strategically, but also to be more creative.
We’re going to see an awful lot of AI-created content and campaigns. The stuff that will really cut through is the stuff that is truly creative and builds a connection with customers in a more human way. And that can only be done by a person, not by AI.
You were a history major. How did you get into marketing?
I did a history degree, and I quickly realised I did not want to be a historian! While I was at university, I had a radio show focused on current affairs, and I loved it. That was my gateway into marketing; I realised I love telling stories. I thought about journalism for a bit, but marketing was the right fit. I call myself a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, if you name an area of marketing, I’ve probably done it. But at my core, I love storytelling.
What advice would you share with anybody starting out in marketing?
Honestly, for me, it’s just trying new things. The marketing landscape is constantly evolving. Don’t just do what you’ve always done. Particularly when you work with a sales team, they often have a very strong opinion about what should be done. Remember that you have an opportunity to have an opinion as well and to push them outside of their comfort zone.
The more new things you try, the more data you will get about what works and what doesn’t. We don’t know where the marketing world is going to go, so we have to keep iterating and be open to that new direction.
More Interviews
