Allison Breeding

How CMO Allison Breeding Uses Marketing Synchrony to Get Her Team Comfortable with Experimentation

Allison Breeding, CMO of Apptio and board member at Oteemo Inc. and Elon Leads, talks about her remote onboarding experience, stepping into a leadership role in the virtual environment, and how marketing trial and error led to a better, personal understanding of customer engagement.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has taken away the in-person, experiential functions that so many B2B marketers used to rally around. But for Allison Breeding, the last year was an opportunity to experiment with and modernize paid digital and social marketing mediums to produce consumer engagement.

Breeding’s background is mainly in tech and mixes the best of sales and marketing—although mostly, marketing. With over 20 years of experience leading account-based marketing (ABM) and demand generation teams, she’s held marketing and sales leadership positions at Anaplan, GE Digital, and Red Hat, among others.

As the recently appointed CMO of Apptio, Breeding’s focus is on increasing brand recognition and demand for Apptio’s enterprise technology business management (TBM) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.

In this episode of Change Agents, Breeding shares:

• How she navigated the midmarket and enterprise market uncertainty of 2020 and why there was no “silver bullet” when experimenting with different ABM strategies.
• The new challenges B2B marketers face when determining whether to do live, in-person events or stick to virtual ones.
• Why “modernizing your medium” is critical as we continue to shift to a more digital-heavy landscape.

Breeding’s mantra for marketing experimentation is encapsulated in one mid-episode quote: “Test drive, fail fast, and hold on to those successes when you find them.”

She is eager to take on any hurdle that comes her way—even if that means beginning her leadership role as CMO in a remote environment. When she joined Apptio, aligning her team was the priority.

For B2B marketers, balancing rapid-fire market changes with a well-aligned go-to-market (GTM) strategy can often lead to a lack of marketing synchrony. Breeding, however, believes that synchrony comes from uniting under a common goal. Marketing leaders bear the difficult, but not impossible, task of cultivating that synchrony.

“The way I think about it is like an orchestra. You have a conductor, everyone is working off the same sheet of music, and you’re getting rid of those random acts of marketing in silos. Instead, you’re getting everyone together, either under a campaign [or] a main message.”

Watch this episode to get Breeding’s perspective on the role that leadership plays in forging synchrony among teams, encouraging experimentation, and dismantling the silos that inhibit cross-functional team success.