Welcome to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, where business leaders turn for actionable strategies to fuel growth and drive results. I’m your host, Kerry Curran. With over 20 years of marketing agency experience driving client business growth I now run RBMA: Revenue Based Marketing Advisors where we help businesses like yours effectively scale revenue growth. Visit RevenueBasedMarketing.com or connect with me on LinkedIn!

Today, we’re exploring how marketing can be a transformative force in fostering cross-functional alignment to achieve strategic business growth in Unlocking Marketing Impact: Amplifying Revenue through Cross-Functional Collaboration.

Joining me is Amy Winner, a marketing powerhouse with over 25 years of experience spanning agency leadership, startup innovation, and co-founding Wheels Up Collective, a full-stack boutique marketing agency. Amy’s expertise lies in designing marketing strategies that not only deliver results but also create seamless integration between product, sales, and customer success teams.

In this episode, Amy and I discuss the pivotal role marketing plays in connecting teams, breaking down silos, and driving organizational alignment. From addressing marketplace education challenges to strengthening customer retention and enabling sales success, Amy shares actionable insights to help marketing become the backbone of strategic growth.

If you’re ready to harness marketing’s potential to unify your organization and accelerate results, this episode is for you. Let’s dive in!

Podcast transcript

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.303)

So welcome Amy, please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and expertise.

Amy Winner (00:07.022)

Thank you so much for having me. My name is Amy Winner. I have been in marketing for a really long time, 25 years. I grew up in the agency world and quickly moved to companies that were going through some sort of change, whether it was an acquisition or competitive pressures. I ended up spending 13, 14 years in the Seattle startup world and just really kind of found my mark there where I love the pace. 

I loved the blurry swim lines, I loved being able to work on different kinds of projects and build teams from scratch. And then after leaving Seattle for some personal reasons to move back east to my family, I co-founded Wheels Up Selective, which is an agency that is a full stack boutique marketing agency specifically catering to early stage startups and small and medium enterprise companies who are moving. So we get to keep up that fast pace and ingenuity hopefully in problem solving with a full team.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:14.167)

Excellent. Well, very excited to have you join today. I know you've got a wealth of experience and expertise to share with us today. Starting with talking about when prospects call you before they become clients or when clients start with you, what are their business challenges or pain points that they are reaching out to you with?

Amy Winner (01:35.564)

Leads, they all want leads. Every one of them. And they want a lead. When they say, they want leads, they want someone who's ready to sign on the dotted line, which, now, especially for an early stage startup that maybe is solving a problem that the market doesn't realize is solvable or they're solving it in a new way. That is a really, that's a leap to go from, I didn't know we could solve this to, hey, take my money. You know, we are frequently brought in … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:46.711)

CSS. Mm-hmm.

Amy Winner (02:05.646)

… to solve that problem. And one of the things that the kind of pitfalls that we find to that is that it's very binary, did it work, yes or no? And so we try to do some expectation setting and just some collaboration setting for how we can tackle this ultimate goal of driving revenue through a marketing growth program that isn't gonna be a silver bullet. Like if there was a silver bullet, it would be easy for everybody.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:14.315)

Yes, Mm-hmm. Right. 

Amy Winner (02:35.5)

I think everybody can agree that driving demand is hard, driving quality demand is hard.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:41.388)

No, and you're so spot on and I like the example you gave of there might be a huge marketplace education element that's required, right? Before they even know that your brand exists, but that there's a solution for that, for your clients audience, you know, a solution that your client can provide to them. So I get it. Like I definitely hear that as well is that now, we just, we just need revenue now and it's like, well, wait, wait, wait, you know, they need to know more about you. So talk about kind of what your process is and how do you convince them that, you know, one, yes, we can do this, but these are all the, you know, initiatives and kind of efforts that it's going to take to get there.

Amy Winner (03:26.316)

Yeah, so we really try to paint leads as part of a bigger initiative, a cross-functional initiative where marketing, you know, we're not just a cost center that sits in a closet and spends money and delivers leads on a silver platter. And I think that like, you know, when I grew up in marketing, there was no attribution. There was no way to track it. You put up a billboard and you hoped that it worked.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:34.615)

Mm-hmm.

Amy Winner (03:55.438)

You know, like we're not in that world anymore. And I think that a lot of leadership still maybe sees marketing that way. And so really having some collaborative discussions around how we can look at the early indicators of a marketing initiative, known, marketing tactics and marketing initiatives to see if it's working or not. The way before we get to that, take my money, you know, here's my signed contract.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:55.543)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yep.

Amy Winner (04:23.106)

You know, and also I think that marketing has a tremendous amount of value that we can add cross-functionally that maybe people don't think about. You know, we can do a tremendous amount of, you know, testing, messaging testing and user, user testing. You know, we have, we have access to customers, prospects and customers and like, you know, the development team loves that and CS loves that, you know, an early stage founder loves that. So, you know, really figuring out what the other departments are doing …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:28.983)

Mm-hmm.

Amy Winner (04:51.754)

… in the organization you care about and see where there's an easy twofer, you know, like we're going to run this marketing program and it's also going to help you with this KPI that you will, you're keeping a close eye on. I think that that's a really good way to, I don't mean, I don't mean this in a cynical way, but you know, to, sort of, harden the marketing investment, you know, it becomes a much bigger investment than just leads.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:52.139)

Yep.

Amy Winner (05:19.982)

And I think that it's much easier to quantify the ROI that way and to show that it's a good investment.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:28.417)

Yeah, right, because there's so many more things that come into play with marketing and to your point of customer examples, case studies, like what else is there? What others know, what has worked well from a storytelling perspective to get that out of the kind of internal dialogue and get, make that part of the story. And you know, I loved you had given an example of, or just kind of framed it up as taking a top down and bottoms up approach with your communication. So talk about kind of how you approach that.

Amy Winner (06:02.324)

Yeah. we, you know, again, it's never a silver bullet, right? And so you kind of have to do a little bit of everything with, without spreading yourself so thinly that you're not getting anything. So we like to think about things from the top down and bottom up, which the top down is that, awareness, how can we go out and build demand? How can we make sure that when somebody does come across an ad or does come across a salesperson at an event or a referral or whatever, like, I've heard of them. I maybe have a vague notion of what they do or, hey, I know there's this problem and I'd love to be able to solve it. But then that bottoms up approach is if there are leaky or sticky spots in your funnel, it doesn't matter how much demand you're pouring in at the top. It's a waste of time. So we really like to pretty quickly do an audit of the sales process of your sellers.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:33.623)

Mm-hmm. Yep. Right.

Amy Winner (06:58.562)

Do they hear the same objection over and over? Like where are deals getting stuck? Where are deals falling out of the funnel? And like, how can we lubricate that funnel and plug the holes so that, you know, that conversion rate at the bottom of the funnel is so important, right? Like if that's a single digit conversion rate, you're screwed. So, you know, like really thinking about how do we make sure that quickly the bottom of the funnel is moving as efficiently as possible.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:13.847)

Mm-hmm. All right.

Amy Winner (07:25.538)

And a lot of times that helps inform the top of the funnel, you know, because if they're hearing the same objections or you're coming up against the same competitors, like you should be proactively seeding that messaging at the very beginning. So it does kind of, they inform each other, but you know, I don't think you can just do one of those two right out of the gates.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:45.66)

Yeah. And I love that example and that framework because it's, you're so right. The communication between sales and marketing is really going to be what makes it successful. I love that, you know, finding out what are the pain points or the objections that the sales team is hearing. I've done that myself. We're like, okay, well then we build that into our narrative to your point of before it even comes up, you get putting that out of their mind and putting them at ease that that's not going to be a challenge. Like we're already ahead of you. 

Like this is something that we can help you with and build that trust there. I love that example because you can't do that without that true integration and communication between sales and marketing. I think the other benefit, now, to your point is if you can keep that sales process pipeline, that close rate going or speed it up a bit while you're working on the bigger initiatives. That always helps the business case as well. So I now had a conversation with a B2B services company and they're like, well, how long is this gonna take? How long is this marketing gonna take? And I'm like, well, listen, to your point … 

Amy Winner (08:55.176)

Yeah, quickly. Absolutely.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:09.431)

… first, we're gonna do the short term, the near term things and get that moving quickly while we build the larger, so the longer term initiatives so that you're building it up for the future. It's to a point that you definitely need that communication. And then, how do you then kind of go forward with setting those expectations and kind of demonstrating and getting the buy-in from different departments. I think that's such a big, from what we talked about, a benefit that you bring your clients by engaging all of the other departments. So how do you go about that?

Amy Winner (09:47.746)

Yeah, so I think it depends a lot on like what, you we start every conversation with every discovery conversation with a CEO or with, you know, a functional leader of like, what's keeping you up at night? You know, like, sure, yes, it's leads, everybody's leads, but like, like, let's dig into that a little bit. Is it that, you know, like your team, your total addressable market isn't big enough and we need to figure out how to appeal to a larger audience. It's that, gosh, we've got this competitor that's, you know, better, faster, cheaper. Is it that?

I don't have sales capacity. Like we can't close the deals that we have, you know, and I, in sales, those are, really easy problems to help solve. But if you can start building relationships cross-functionally with other leaders within the organization and, finding out from them like, okay, what keeps you up? What keeps you up at night? Well, for us, a lot of times our clients are early stage, you know, so many early stage tech companies … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:37.163)

Mm-hmm.

Amy Winner (10:43.926)

… started because a founder had a great idea for a better way to do it using technology, not necessarily because they had a long line of customers ready to buy it, right? And at some point they need to make that transition from we're building things that we think are cool or that we think we can build to we're building things that we know customers will pay for and we'll pay a premium for. So marketing, finding out like where along that continuum the client is, marketing can really help with that vetting …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:52.865)

Right … 

Amy Winner (11:13.55)

… pricing, vetting, packaging, that, you know, or helping to figure out what pricing and packaging is, you know, figuring out what are the features that, you know, we should have an actual launch for and what are the features that should just kind of like roll in without, you know, a lot of fanfare. You know, user testing is always a problem with startups, with tech companies, you know, it's expensive, it's really expensive to conduct user testing. And so if marketing can help answer some of those questions …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:34.049)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Amy Winner (11:42.008)

… through the A-B testing that we're already doing with campaigns, that's fantastic, right? And that perks up a CTO's ears. If you can figure out where they're hitting a little bit of a wall and maybe contribute to that, just, again, it pulls marketing out of this silo where we're just lighting money on fire through Facebook ads or whatever, and we're actually contributing to growing the business …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:47.307)

Yeah. Right, Mm-hmm.

Amy Winner (12:10.048)

… in a very intentional and strategic way. I think a lot about customer success when a company gets to the maturity level where they have customer success. Gosh, what a great, I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine relationship where there's such an easy handoff with like, we're gonna queue up these prospects and we're gonna make it easy for CS to pick up the ball and run with it. And then as far as capturing customers.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:13.27)

Yeah.

Amy Winner (12:35.074)

case studies and getting customers on speaking stages and building those super champion customer contacts. We need CES, but there are ways that they need us too. And so if you can identify them early on, I just think that that builds a great relationship. Even in HR, if you're in a rapid hiring phase, the company's branding is important. And that's very different from the branding that you're doing to your process.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:36.801)

Hmm. Yeah, yep.

Amy Winner (13:04.506)

So, you know, I think a lot of HR people end up with that on their plate and they're not equipped or they don't have the bandwidth to do that. And so, you know, being able to pitch in and say, hey, we can use these tools and programs that we have and tweak them 10%. And here now you can use them too. You know, that's a huge value add for an operations team or an HR team.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:27.819)

Yeah, no, I love all of those examples. And I think to your point, HR and marketing don't always think of that as such an important aspect of recruiting or like even writing the job descriptions and making sure that, know, as how you're describing the company going to market from that perspective, going after, you know, trying to recruit to make sure the messaging is aligned and really promoting that.

Amy Winner (13:42.486)

Yes! Yes! Mm-hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:56.183)

So I love that example.

Amy Winner (13:56.846)

Gosh, I love that, like job descriptions. What a great example of like, please give them to your marketing people to put a little spin on. You're selling the company. You are selling the company to prospects. Like, makes it sound exciting. Be inspiring.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:13.237)

Yeah, I know. Right, right. And I think that's right. It's the persuasive storytelling and narrative that marketing can bring to it. Going back to one of the other examples that I loved that you shared was the integration with product and whether it's you're getting A-B testing through your marketing and messaging, but talk a bit, can you go a bit deeper about the importance of that integration and…

Amy Winner (14:21.891)

Yes.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:42.537)

… helping the product team get out of the product first mindset, I believe you called it, and getting more audience focused.

Amy Winner (14:50.636)

Yeah, so one of my favorite examples of this is, I run a lot of user conferences, customer conferences, and building community through user groups, regional user groups, or in person before, mostly before the pandemic, but Zoom calls, or LinkedIn communities, or full-blown in-person customer conferences.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:57.078)

Mm-hmm. Yes. Mm-hmm.

Amy Winner (15:15.518)

Usually a product is like salivating to be a fly on the wall and those conversations and to be able to hear the customer firsthand and to be able to kind of see the topics for what you talk about. So, you know, I worked at a startup where I ran the user conference for five years in a row. It was the first time we had done it. And, you know, it is an event that's a week long, but it takes all year to plan it. And I am the only one who's thinking about it. The other 50 … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:18.572)

Yep. Mm-hmm.

Amy Winner (15:44.59)

… ish weeks of the year, right? and, but I need products. I need to know, what does the product keynote look like? What features do we want to talk about? What releases? What announcements do we want to make? You know, what, you know, how can we, how can we use it as a news moment? You know, and, and they don't want to talk about it. They don't want to talk about it months in advance. They don't want to, they don't want to practice their keynote. They don't want feedback, you know, because it's, it's not the house that's on fire for them, right? So really again, going back to like the KPIs of like, what makes the product …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:08.629)

Right.

Amy Winner (16:14.734)

… organization successful and then figuring out, well, what programs can we run at the user conference or the customer conference that can help that? We've done user testing booths where we schedule people to come in for five minute little mini focus groups. did a lot of when we were developing content with customers, we brought product in so that maybe product was able to give them a sneak peek of new features and we can kind of use that as a way to tease, you know, an announcement or whatever. And I think too, you know, a lot of engineers are not super extroverted and they, you know, they don't want to, they're not as comfortable being in a user, a user conference environment where there's a lot of energy, if you're talking, you so like, how can you make it comfortable and productive for them?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:59.648)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Amy Winner (17:09.88)

And I think it's a little bit, it's a little bit of a different experience for an engineer to go to a big event like that than a salesperson. And I think, you know, you kind of have to be cognizant of that and set them up for success by creating an agenda for them for the week that is useful.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:28.191)

Yeah. But giving them the opportunity to talk with the customer that is just as passionate about the product and how it's improved their life as the engineer who's developing that or adding features. And so I can see a lot of a very valuable feedback loop in that experience as well. The other thing you made me think about in your answer was creating events for customers or communities.

Amy Winner (17:40.398)

Mm-hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:57.463)

As we're seeing for B2B growth, much of, I'm seeing a shift in strategy of just going ABM, sales and marketing outreach to go to market GTM that really includes customer success and customer service and has a, adds in the KPI of retention and net revenue renewal. And so like, how are your existing clients paying you more each year and what the strategy goes into that … 

Amy Winner (18:24.532)

Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:27.767)

… to me, speaking of user conferences, that was a big theme I got out of inbound, the HubSpot conference. So to me, I'm like, a light bulb went on because so many times there is a disconnect between customer success and marketing and sales. But at the same time as the points you made, there's so much connection there, value sharing … 

Amy Winner (18:37.218)

But

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:57.377)

… But when you have an organization that is willing to or leans into their customers to build that community, that stickiness, is, you know, in a good way, cult-like environment where people just like really get into being part of this brand and this community to improve the retention rate, to decrease churn and give

the market product and marketing and sales, those success stories. You know, I just love that example of that being part of your playbook for your clients, because I do think there's so much value there, whether it's a virtual online community or events.

Amy Winner (19:42.072)

Yeah. And you know, like I think that like what an amazing, what an amazing point. Like how much time is spent renewing customers and like saving deals, you know, and squeaking out expansion renewals. And I think like that, I'm going to say that's marketing's fault. I'm going to say that I'm going to go out on a ledge and say that's marketing's fault because first of all, a seller is going to sell whatever they can sell …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:55.872)

When it's a little too late, right? It's always, Yeah/

Amy Winner (20:12.588)

… and it's marketing's job to deliver on target prospects. Because if you're delivering mediocre prospects, set up, know, the sellers are gonna sell it. They're gonna sell what they have to do. They're gonna annoy a product because they're gonna promise all sorts of stuff. know, like they're gonna annoy CS because they have to, you know, perform all these heroics. You know, they're gonna have to have, you know, a trial or some sort of like, you know, you're gonna spin up … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:25.195)

Yeah.

Amy Winner (20:41.55)

… some sort of elaborate bake-off, which takes a lot of time. And so I think that it really is up to marketing to say, hey, we need to be a little bit pickier with our demand, the demand that we're building, so that you really are delivering the right demand that isn't gonna churn because they are very much in a sweet spot. And when you talk about go-to-market planning, being really rigorous about your ideal customer profiles … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:44.203)

Yep. Yes.

Amy Winner (21:09.502)

… and the use cases that you have and not being starry-eyed and optimistic about the use cases that you have. I think that marketing's job is to drive demand at scale. Fine, if there are fringe cases like sellers, you go hunt them down, right? And you can vet them out. But marketing's job is to deliver demand at scale. And so go after the easy stuff. Go after the stuff that you know is a slam dunk and deliver those prospects … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:16.353)

Yeah.

Amy Winner (21:38.742)

… on a silver platter because they're going to be easier for your sellers to close and they're going to be faster deal cycles and they're going to be easier for CS to retain and you know to manage all your long retains.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:49.041)

Yeah, definitely. I think that's great, it's a great, really great point. And the, you know, all of the examples you have really demonstrate how marketing can kind of be the backbone to the company bringing those elements together, but it comes down to the business strategy, who you are as a company and how you're that messaging is going out internally and externally. That's going to continue that kind of demand Jen to develop, there were those better leads. So, so many great, great examples here today, Amy. Any other last tips or, you know, examples you want to make sure you share today?

Amy Winner (22:30.59)

I think the latest soap box is empathy. You know, I think that, especially coming off of the election cycle, people are jaded. They're tired. They don't want to be lied to. They don't want to hear hyperbole. Like they want real brand interactions. And I think that, you know, especially when you have a gun to your head over a number that you're trying to hit and your sellers are trying to hit their quota, like it's really easy to see leads as just the spot contact records, you know, and, and I think that if you can take a minute to really go at marketing with empathy for your customers and the problems that they're solving … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:17.847)

You. 

Amy Winner (23:19.294)

… and the frustrations of a sales cycle or the frustrations of implementation, because there always are, right? That's not a knock on the customer or the product. I think that it goes a long way. I think that people want authenticity right now and they really wanna feel like they're not getting a wool fold over their eyes or being, you know. lectured about things. I just think that it's missing right now in the general noise of the world. You know, I think it makes me sad that I think the election cycle this year really only made that worse. You know, it kind of made a lot of that acceptable. And I think as marketers, there's a great opportunity for us to humanize our brands and remember the individual people who were helping. That's my soapbox. 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:11.487)

Yeah, no, I love that. That's really, yeah, no, I, well said. And, I think it's very smart and definitely something that all branches should be thinking about. So, I love that advice. Well, thank you so much, Amy. I really appreciate having you here today and, real quick, just let people know how they find you and wheels up.

Amy Winner (24:13.302)

Yep. So we are Wheels Up Collective, which is at wheelsupcollective.com. We are on all the social platforms. My favorite thing to do, and I try to leave time for this once a week, is to have a conversation with the CEO about what's keeping you, or a revenue leader, you know, like what's keeping you up at night. And it's just like, pick my brain. And so you can schedule time with me. There's a button on the website to do that with me or my co-founder, who is also seasoned and you know, those conversations are super fun for me. So I would invite anybody who wants to pick my brain and like, let's talk. I would love to talk.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:15.661)

Yeah well, thank you so much. Again, I really enjoyed having you here today.

Amy Winner (25:19.586)

Thank you so much, it was really fun.