Marketers, you are busy in your bubble. You are creating content, designing email templates, and planning your next event. When is the last time you got out of your bubble? When is the last time you talked to sales? Have you sat in on a conversation with a customer recently to learn their pain points?                                      An ABM practitioner, strategist, and the CMO of TimeTrade, Lauren Mead, delivers a call to action for marketers to pop their bubble, step out, and get aligned with sales. She charts the course for a collaborative experience where marketing and sales can work together to establish a target market and better understand their customers. Are your marketing and sales teams not feeling the love? Then this is one episode you can’t afford to miss!   Takeaways: Marketers need to understand customer pain points to leverage marketing as a resource and share best practices. Consider sitting in on a sales call with a customer. Listen to what questions the customer is asking during different parts of the sales cycle. When approaching marketing as a whole, start with your data. Consider your buyers’ industries, company size, and the common characteristics among the buyers. Identifying and understanding your buyer personas is what allows you to segment and target relevant content. You may have thousands of customers but only five personas to prioritize your efforts towards. Align with sales to establish your target market. Buyers that do not fit your criteria, should be not sent to sales. That is a waste of their time. As a marketing leader, task your team with generating sales accepted opportunities. “...if we’re generating a ton of leads that’s great, but if they’re not quality leads, who cares? It’s not tied to revenue.”- Lauren Mead Look at the marketing emails you receive from other companies and learn from them. Reflect on what trends you see and what you can do to improve your own marketing emails. Be willing to jump into new challenges and see things as an opportunity. When needs come up in your company, take initiative and contribute. You may not see the immediate return in your career from this effort, but look at the big picture and see it as a way to develop your overall skillset.   Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenmead/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LaurLeMe TimeTrade Twitter: https://twitter.com/timetrade TimeTrade Website: https://www.timetrade.com/about/management/#lauren TimeTrade Salesforce AppExchange: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3A00000E1l39UAB PFL - Big Sky Big Ideas: https://www.pfl.com/Big-Sky-Big-Ideas.html B2B Marketing Exchange: https://b2bsalesmarketing.exchange/speakers/lauren-mead/    Busted Myths Sales owns the customer relationship, so marketing has to ask for permission to talk to customers. It’s important for marketing to be aligned with sales, but marketing needs to be able to talk with customers to understand their pain points and create targeted content. There needs to be a trust built between the two departments, so that marketing does not feel they have to ask for permission.   Shout Outs Samantha Stone 1:38