Tech Marketer Talks: Bridging the Gap Between Sales and Marketing with Priority Engine – SolidFire

Tracy Earles, Senior Manager of Demand Generation, runs a global demand generation team for SolidFire. His team manages all aspects of demand generation across all marketing channels with the goal of delivering MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) to inside sales for sales pursuit. Tracy is a long-time digital marketer who began his career in electrical engineering and went on to receive his Marketing MBA. He transitioned from engineering and product management to digital marketing over a decade ago. Can you provide a little background on SolidFire? SolidFire is a five-year-old company in rapid high-growth mode. SolidFire provides data storage equipment for people deploying public or private cloud and has established itself as a market leader in all-flash storage systems built for the Next Generation Data Center. Does SolidFire sell its solutions globally? SolidFire sells worldwide and continues to open new offices in new geographies and deploy staff to support SolidFire’s high growth. Our demand generation services are global in scope but we also have in-region marketing resources who handle local tactical marketing activities. We manage all marketing channel activities from our Colorado headquarters. What changes have you made to drive more alignment within marketing and sales? We are actively doing a few things to address that. We physically moved to new offices and are using that opportunity to co-locate our demand generation team and inside sales team. For the first time, these two teams will be in the same building sitting close together. We think this will encourage more daily interaction and collaboration between the two teams. As marketers, it’s important to us that we understand and hear from the frontlines about how sales is using the information we provide, what’s working, what isn’t, so we can refine and improve on what we need to.