How to Run a Pipe Council: Approach Pipeline as a Team Sport
In this episode, Ed McDonnell, CRO at Asana, helps us understand why pipeline generation is a team sport.
Asana helps teams orchestrate their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Asana has more than 131,000 paying customers and millions of free organizations across 190 countries. Global customers such as Amazon, Japan Airlines, Sky, and Affirm rely on Asana to manage everything from company objectives to digital transformation to product launches and marketing campaigns.
Guest Bio
Ed McDonnell is Asana's Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for all facets of global revenue and field operations. Ed brings deep Enterprise software expertise to Asana. He joins the company from Salesforce, where he was an early leader within Marketing Cloud and most recently held the role of Executive Vice President of Sales with responsibility for two of the fastest-growing Clouds, Marketing and Commerce, and two emerging industry verticals, Retail and Consumer Goods–empowering renowned brands with the full Customer 360 portfolio. McDonnell also previously served in senior leadership roles at Eloqua (acquired by Oracle), McGraw Financial, Pivot (acquired by CME Group), and Thomson Reuters.
Guest Bio
Ed McDonnell is Asana's Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for all facets of global revenue and field operations. Ed brings deep Enterprise software expertise to Asana. He joins the company from Salesforce, where he was an early leader within Marketing Cloud and most recently held the role of Executive Vice President of Sales with responsibility for two of the fastest-growing Clouds, Marketing and Commerce, and two emerging industry verticals, Retail and Consumer Goods–empowering renowned brands with the full Customer 360 portfolio. McDonnell also previously served in senior leadership roles at Eloqua (acquired by Oracle), McGraw Financial, Pivot (acquired by CME Group), and Thomson Reuters.
Episode Summary
This episode features an interview with Ed McDonnell, CRO at Asana, a software company that helps teams orchestrate their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives.
In this episode, Ed shares with us Asana’s vision for tackling work automation, insight into their Work Innovation Lab, and why attribution for attribution's sake is meaningless. Ed also talks about the importance of treating pipeline like a team sport and how to effectively run a “Pipe Council”.
Key Takeaways
- Get focused on your ICP. Partner with your product teams to develop your ICP so you can define use cases and show the productivity you can gain from those use cases.
- Tell your story through the lens of your customers. Your customers are the inside players of how your product works and what it’s doing in a real way on a daily basis out in the world.
- Pipeline is a team sport. All of your business channels should be involved when it comes to pipeline generation. Pipeline is not one person or function, and in order to succeed, it has to be the highest-performing team in your organization at cross-functional scale.
Quotes
“Pipeline to me is a team sport. You get caught up on poking on sales leaders and saying, hey, you're not hitting your pipeline metrics, like, why, what's wrong, and that friction, while good and has to happen, you also have to be really open to interrogating so to me the interrogation of it in a healthy way with everybody having a seat at the table and being a team sport is Is the way that I have found to be very successful running a Pipe Council.” ––Ed McDonnell, CRO, Asana
Episode Highlights
*(03:44) - The Trust Tree: Go to market strategy when you solve lots of problems for lots of people
*(15:32) - The Playbook: Running a Pipe Council
*(37:53) - Quick Hits: Ed’s Quick Hits
Episodes Transcript
- Get focused on your ICP. Partner with your product teams to develop your ICP so you can define use cases and show the productivity you can gain from those use cases.
- Tell your story through the lens of your customers. Your customers are the inside players of how your product works and what it’s doing in a real way on a daily basis out in the world.
- Pipeline is a team sport. All of your business channels should be involved when it comes to pipeline generation. Pipeline is not one person or function, and in order to succeed, it has to be the highest-performing team in your organization at cross-functional scale.
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