With Ashley Zhang, Marketing Operations Manager at Asana
Having small, nimble teams helps Asana pivot as a global company. Ashley Zhang talks about how Marketing Ops supports multiple sales teams. You’ll also hear about how the direct sales motion is structured at Asana and how it relates to marketing.
Ashley Zhang is the Marketing Operations Manager at Asana. Her undergraduate degree is in sociology and applied statistics, with a masters in journalism. She got her start by monitoring and analyzing real-time information with regard to breaking news, current events, and trending topics through social media for the news division at Domain Expert before making the jump to Content Marketing Specialist at Iterable. Over the course of 3 years, Ashley rose to the role of Marketing Operations Manager at Iterable. She joined Asana in 2019.
What are the multiple definitions of MQLs at Asana?
As marketing professionals, we're so used to the concept of MQL. Ultimately they’re qualified leads and marketing is growing each one of those channels.
At Asana there are what we call inbound leads that come from our website trials. A lot of those are driven by the growth marketing team. We have a direct sales business run by our revenue marketing team, which runs demand generation campaigns that include webinars and events that we do based on engagement level.
Sales does outbound leads, and we also have PQLs. It breaks down into three main pillars of MQLs.
How is the direct sales motion structured at Asana, and how does it relate to marketing?
We have a self-serve team on the revenue side. That team is very small and nimble, and they wear a lot of hats. The organizational structure means we’re a region first.
Asana is a global company. They have different offices. Each region has their own revenue team and original marketing team. That means the agenda and priorities of each region are a little different.
Finally, the revenue team structure itself has different segments, all of which have different motions within them.
Have SDRs always been a part of the MOPs team at Asana?
We’ve been doing that for a couple of years now. They were following leads from multiple channels. Demos and trial leads are so easy to convert, of course following up on MQLs wasn’t a priority for them.
We're trying to figure out what really works for MQLs. In order to do that our marketing team has this really strong belief in disruptive innovation. We start from scratch and hire new people whose focus is MQLs and how this lead generation motion works. That’s where the idea came from.
It’s not a surprise that SDRs sit on the marketing team. With Asana’s revenue marketing perspective, we wanted the SDRs to sit on the MOPs team. Part of that is that our role is not solely on systems or tooling or the traditional operational tasks. We drive a lot of the strategic projects and approaches that drive cross-functional work between marketing and sales.
