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Marcy Campbell is the Chief Revenue Officer at AppFolio, where she leads sales and client services with a focus on delivering unified, end-to-end customer experiences. With over 30 years of experience scaling revenue teams across FinTech, SaaS, cloud computing, and communications, Marcy has held executive roles at Boomi and PayPal—where she led an 800+ person global team. Her deep expertise in aligning sales, customer success, and operations makes her a standout leader in the GTM space.
Discussed in this Episode:
- How AppFolio’s Unified Customer Experience (UCE) platform aligns marketing, sales, and customer service.
- The evolving role of the CRO and the importance of owning the entire customer journey.
- Why customer experience is a competitive differentiator in vertical SaaS.
- Tactical tips for early-stage startups on aligning go-to-market motion with product-market fit.
- The importance of cross-functional “stream teams” for accelerating GTM initiatives.
- How Marcy builds inclusive leadership cultures and mentors rising female leaders.
- Why how you make the number matters as much as making the number.
If you missed GTM 144, check it out here: How AI is Rewriting Product and GTM Playbooks | with Oji Udezue (CPO – Typeform, Calendly)
Highlights:
10:30 The Chief Revenue Officer’s (CRO) responsibility to understand and optimize the entire customer journey.
12:30 How the Unified Customer Experience (UCE) platform was formed and how it works.
16:00 End-to-end GTM orchestration across sales, marketing, product, and CS.
22:00 Results from the UCE initiative: accelerated deal velocity and customer retention.
26:30 Advice for startups: identifying your ICP and fixing pipeline fundamentals.
29:00 How to scale with customer empathy and GTM precision.
31:00 Advocating for women in sales leadership and building inclusive teams.
36:00 Marcy’s communication strategy for managing a 600-person org.
39:00 Marcy’s favorite business leadership tactic: “Take a beat” before reacting.
40:00 What’s outdated: The belief that only numbers matter in sales.
Guest Speaker Links (Marcy Campbell):
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LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcyc/
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Appfolio: https://www.appfolio.com/
Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):
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Newsletter:https://substack.com/@sophiebuonassisi
Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):
- Website: https://gtmnow.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: /@gtm_now
- The GTM Podcast (on all major directories): https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
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GTM 145 Episode Transcript
GTM 145 – Marcy Campbell – Full Episode Transcript
Marcy Campbell:understanding the customer journey is the first thing A CRO has to do.
It’s about delivering value to your customers and it’s about doing it in a way that creates value for your company.
My career accelerated when I helped other people.
We identify cross-functional streams of work that have dependencies cross-functionally that we need to get done.
And we build what we call stream teams. And these stream teams basically take these initiatives and they go off and they build it end to end orchestration of that initiative.
You have to put yourself in positions where you’re frightened.
Individuals do good things, but great teams do great things.
Speaker: Behind the scenes. It was a small group of people that were doing everything.
Speaker 2: I wanna know how this insane growth actually happened.
Sophie Buonassisi: Hello and welcome back to the GTM Podcast. This is your host, Sophie Boi, VP of marketing at VC Firm, GTMfund, and our media brand here at GTM. Now, I am really excited to be joined by Marcy Campbell. She is a multi-time CRO. She’s built PayPal for over four years. And anyways, I won’t spoil her bio. We’ll get into it.
But Marcy, welcome to the podcast.
Marcy Campbell: Thanks for having me, Sophie. I’m delighted to be here.
Sophie Buonassisi: Super excited to have you, and I’ll get into that bit of a spoiler here. Now, a quick bio for the listeners, but Marcy Campbell is Appfolio’s chief Revenue Officer leading the sales and client services organizations. She’s focused on connecting the entire customer journey by accelerating customer acquisition, delivering exceptional customer value, and maximizing adoption.
Of products and services. She has over 30 years of experience leading high performance sales and services teams and growing businesses across multiple industries, including FinTech, data analytics, cloud computing, SaaS pass, and communications. Prior to joining AppFolio in 2024, she was the Chief Revenue Officer of Boomi, where she was responsible for all revenue and revenue operations for the company worldwide.
Previously, Marcy held several senior leadership roles at PayPal where she managed an 800 plus person global organization at global team, and led two of PayPal’s preeminent business units. She’s got a BA degree in history and communications from the University of Hartford. Now you can see why I said a little bit of a spoiler.
It’s a mouthful, and I know you spent some time at Boomi, actually, which had an office here where I’m located in Vancouver, Canada.
Marcy Campbell: Yeah, I love Vancouver. It’s great. We actually opened up our commercial sales offices there and our BDR offices there. They’re in Barcelona, so two great places to be.
Sophie Buonassisi: What an incredible spread across Vancouver and Barcelona. Someone selected those well.
Marcy Campbell:[00:04:00] Yeah, it was great. It was a really good pool of talent in Vancouver, a lot of great universities, and, it was an opportunity for us to really extend the, our sales focus in the commercial areas.
Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. Very cool. And now. Since your time at Boomie and kinda building out those teams in Vancouver, you’re now building at AppFolio and you have a really interesting intersection as a Chief Revenue Officer. ‘ cause if I’m not mistaken, you actually oversee a lot of customer facing operations, including support, say Yes, customer success operations.
So I’d love to hear a little bit more around just overall your breadth and scope of responsibility as Chief Revenue Officer to begin with.
Marcy Campbell: Yeah, it’s interesting because it is a little bit of a different scope for a Chief Revenue officer. I am responsible for all customer operations. So everything from the time something a customer or a prospect moves from [00:05:00] marketing and our marketing acquisition engine whether that’s through digital or events or whether that comes in through our industry experts and my organization has.
Responsibilities for BDR sales, for our onboarding, for our customer success, as well as support. And I also have the industry principles here because we’re a vertical market and we sell into the real estate industry. We have folks that are experts and who can speak at the industry conferences and develop relationships with the preeminent industry association.
- So pretty much everything that’s customer facing it’s great and it, for me, it’s interesting because I’ve done all pieces of that job. So at PayPal I ran professional services and support for 95 million merchants. I’ve done sales, I’ve done the BDR, business development and customer success in smaller companies, and I felt really [00:06:00] prepared to take on all of these different functions. I also have an extremely talented team underneath me. There’s about 600 people on the team.
Sophie Buonassisi: Wow. Very cool. Very cool. And have you ever had this kind of customer oriented role before as a chief Revenue officer?
Marcy Campbell: Yes, I always think the Chief Revenue officer or anybody who’s in sales is very customer focused. I had the breadth of sales and services at PayPal, so I was responsible for not only selling the products, but actually delivering services to those products and the implementation of those products, right?
The integration of that. And so I’ve always been customer centric. I’ve always put the customer at the heart of everything I do. I love being with our customers. We have very unique customers at AppFolio who are, if you think about it, they’re either owner operators or fee managers, property managers
who care about their residents and I, a vast amount of them are [00:07:00] entrepreneurs, right? They started these property management businesses themselves. They built them from the ground up, and their day-to-day responsibilities are not necessarily thinking about technology enhancements. So it’s a very interesting industry.
In humbling industry actually.
Sophie Buonassisi: I’m sure there’s tons of depth and vertical too. It’s a space we’ve definitely been looking at and investing in a ton.
Marcy Campbell: Yeah. It’s funny because you think about it, everyone thinks they know real estate. ’cause we buy houses and we live in houses and we rent houses and some of us like have rental units that we actually manage and When I talk from one customer to the next, they don’t have the same businesses like everybody has.
It’s very nuanced. The way that they structure their organizations, the way they Go-To-Market, their relationships with either their ecosystems, either they own it or they have close relationships, or they’ve segmented it, or they have different regulations based on where they are in the country. And [00:08:00] the assumptions that you make when you at any part of the customer journey has to be based on their unique needs, and that’s really hard to do at scale.
Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely. What about the overall landscape? You, yourself, personally, have been extremely customer focused across all your varying roles, but as the chief revenue Officer role goes, overall, sometimes we see it in a more kind of sales only CRO capacity. Now we’re seeing it across the entire Go-To-Market organization.
What are you seeing from the overall evolution of the Chief Revenue Officer role?
Marcy Campbell: I think as we’ve become much more metrics focused and we’ve been able to build on. Platforms that allow for us to get more data around our customers, we have been able to expand our ability to touch, then reach those customers, not just on the front end, but also across the organization. And I think for me, understanding the customer journey is the first thing A CRO has to do.
They have to understand like [00:09:00] how they found us, how they interacted with marketing, how they interacted with the company and the website. Where those touch points are when they first talk to a human in your company. And then how do they gather the information that they need to make a decision?
How do they do then. Interact. Once they become a customer, then how do they experience your products? How do they experience your company, and how can you provide the best value possible so that you keep that customer and they grow with you and they become a referral. So it becomes a big circular basically a self-propelling thing where one customer will tell another customer about their experience. And so I think taking that customer journey lens is really important for anybody who’s going into a CRO role regardless of what their responsibilities are. So if they don’t own marketing or they don’t own customer success, they still need to actually have empathy for those other parts of the organization because it’s important for them to think holistically about the [00:10:00] customer.
Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely. Do you think that we’re seeing a consolidation of. Functions under the CRO right now.
Marcy Campbell: I think it’s. Uniquely, I know that OPS is becoming consolidated, so consolidating like sales ops and services ops and marketing ops, that area is somewhere where you can get some efficiencies and you can get scale. I think with all the new technologies that are coming out that’s a service.
Customer touch points, it’s important for you to build out a centralized view. I don’t know that OPS has to live in the same organization, but like, give you an example. Our marketing ops and our sales, our revenue ops actually work really closely together and we’ve built what we call a unified customer experience platform, which I actually have later today where we’re going to go through.
Whatever, cross-functional work streams that involve the customer that we’re working on together, and we use those as ways to [00:11:00] steer the company and align our operations resources in a way that’s seamless to the customer so they don’t feel like they’re getting moved from one organization to the next, right?
You don’t wanna show your organization to the customer.
Sophie Buonassisi: Oh, that’s such a powerful sentence.
Marcy Campbell: You talk about, I’m selling the customer and then, and they’re moving to a, to needs analysis and then they’re, you’re going out and you’re qualifying. And I think if you flip that and you say what is a customer doing? Customer is like evaluating and they’re comparing and they’re.
Identifying right. And so you start using the language of the customer of how they go and experience what you do. I think it makes a big difference in how you show up and it can, and your sales and services experience can be a differentiator for your company. And I think that’s why it’s so important to have that lens.
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, it’s almost like every single touchpoint is a brand touchpoint, [00:12:00] and so the perception of your company from a cs, from a sales perspective, it’s just the culmination of every touchpoint. I’d love to double click on the unified customer experience platform.
Super curious about this. Can we break it down a little bit tactically? You mentioned that you’re meeting for it later today.
What does that look like from a sequencing perspective? How often is this occurring and who’s in these
meetings?
Marcy Campbell: yeah, so the CMO myself and sometimes our CIO will join us and sometimes we’ll bring in. Depending on, in our services organization, I have an SVP of sales, an SVP of service or CMO, and then the ops folks come in and what we do is we identify cross-functional streams of work that have dependencies cross-functionally that we need to get done.
And we build what we call stream teams. And these stream teams basically take these initiatives and they go off and they build it end to end orchestration of that initiative. And then they come meet with us on a monthly basis and tell us, here’s where we [00:13:00] are, here’s where the blockers are.
Here’s like some of the changes in prioritization. Here’s some things we found that we didn’t know that we’re going to change our outlook on how we interact. But it’s very collaborative and we started doing this in December. Our CMO, Lisa and I started working together on it with our SVP of services and our SVP of sales.
And it forces that coordination and collaboration and it’s a little bit of going slow to go fast. And so it’s about delivering like an end-to-end campaign. So give you an example. We launched an end-to-end campaign for the sales organization. We started with marketing. We built out like what the ICP was, we built out what.
The target messaging was in the target market. What we, the deliverables, the product and packaging. So we worked with our product and packaging teams, and then we went to enablement. We enabled it based on materials [00:14:00] for marketing and joint collaboration, and then we launched it across. One segment of our sales organizations for testing, and when that worked, we went into the multiple segments, but we didn’t stop there.
What we did was we then started building the metrics of onboarding and starting to track these particular targeted prospects and then customers as to how many of them onboarded, and then what was their. On what how, what size were they and how did we interact with them from a CS perspective?
And then what was their support needs? And so we’re tracking them end to end. So retention, churn, like on that campaign itself. And that was part of our, that was the first thing we launched in the UCE. And it allows for us to come back. So when we get together, we’re like, okay, let’s look at the market campaign metrics, right?
Let’s look at everything from, you know what, not only the front end of okay, how quickly did we convert them? What are our close rates? What are our win rates? But also things that [00:15:00] you know around what are our onboarding times and what was the. Allocation of resources for the onboarding and how many of them needed a high touch CS team, and what does that look like?
And then what is our cancellation rates? What is our LTV, our churn, our expansion, and our renewals? We’ll go into that over time.
Sophie Buonassisi: Is this an initiative that you came in with? Was it preexisting in the organization? How did this
initiative come to be?
Marcy Campbell: It was actually my counterpart, our CMO, who came and said, it, think of it as like a revenue council. And so basically she’s Hey, I’ve been trying to get this off the ground. We’ve not been able to do it. I’m like, yeah, this is great. Let’s do it. I truly believe as part of my due diligence at coming into this, is like your marketing partner is really important as a CRO, regardless of whether or not it sits in the CRO role or it sits outside the CRO role, the person who does marketing has a, is gotta be really strong and they’ve gotta be focused on partnership.
And I’m lucky enough to have that here. [00:16:00] I think the one thing that. A lot of people come in and they believe that sales is, a singular skill and they can do sales. They run into the sales and marketing friction, right? Like the finger pointing, the friction. You’re not delivering enough pipeline.
The pipeline’s terrible. You’re not, your salespeople can’t close like that kind of pointing fingers. I’ve never really had that because I’ve always believed that the value that the marketing folks bring. Is an amplifier for the business. And you, have to build a platform where you can have hard conversations, but you can have honest ones and ones that accelerate the business.
And that’s why, when Lisa said, Hey, let’s do this unified customer experience platform, I was like, yeah, I’m in. Let’s do it. And let’s extend it out through services. Let’s not just start between marketing and sales. And what’s interesting now is the big, now we have product in, right?
So we have a new partnership with second nature and like we’re using the uc as a way to actually drive [00:17:00] through how do we Go-To-Market there. And so we codify that and then we’ll be able to measure and metric like the success of that at any point in time.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s fantastic. And when you pull together these stream teams on these specific initiatives that you and the CMO and now the service side identify, what does that look like? Do you have dedicated stream teams already built out, or are you pulling people in almost as Tiger teams whenever the need
occurs based on what
Marcy Campbell: they’re tiger teams. They have day jobs.
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah,
Marcy Campbell: Yeah. . Yeah, but it’s a way to accelerate. I tell the board it’s like we’ve, we’re laying the train tracks right? For us to go faster and every little corner of that train track has a metric that we’re gonna, we’re gonna trace.
And once you get those in place, then you can just drive initiatives through.
And you build the muscle memory organizationally about like playing your position and knowing where you can [00:18:00] actually add value. And so when you bring in these tiger teams to actually manage the process, they may use resources that sit in other parts of the organization.
Sophie Buonassisi: Obviously you both have the buy-in, you and Lisa, your CMO, have there been any points of friction that you’ve had to really educate people around laying these train track foundations? Or has it been a fairly frictionless process in terms of standing up this new initiative that spans across the entire revenue organization?
Marcy Campbell: so. I think, it’s always an education. we were a little bit flying the plane while we were learning to fly, you know? And so, you know, you’ve gotta keep the business running. I was bringing in a lot of new technology as well, right? We were bringing in conversational intelligence and predictive forecasting and like a new methodology.
And so there was a lot of change going on, on, on the sales side of the house. Less so services, although services is going through some. Really interesting orchestration I would call it. Now they’ve been through their transformation, but I think [00:19:00] that there was Lisa and I Vince Coley, who’s the SVP of Services and Mcclar Foot, who’s the SVP of Sales, really had to build advocacy for the program with the ELT, with others and, we’re still doing that. Like people still tend to work the way they used to work. And so you’d have to, you gotta slow down and say, Hey, I think that initiative, because it’s cross-functional and there’s multiple decision points belongs in the UCE. Come join us, right? And let’s have that conversation and then talk about like where we can add value.
But it gives them advocacy for the programs that they wanna use.
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. Yeah. And it sounds like a continuous Educational shift, especially
using and leveraging cross-functional resources.
Marcy Campbell: You have to tell people things 10 times.
Yeah. For them to get it.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s a good number to keep in mind.
Marcy Campbell: Yeah.
Sophie Buonassisi: And what about results? You’ve launched some campaigns. Can you speak to any of the either [00:20:00] progress or results that you’ve seen from standing up this you
uc? So unified customer experience platform.
Marcy Campbell: this one campaign that we did. The OI can’t really talk to, you know, as a public company about the results of it, but I can tell you that we hit all of our, we hit all of our markers across every segment in every sales organization, in every sales segment, and. Our board was really complimentary of the work that we’ve done, and it really do is about the coordinated effort.
Like we’re tying these things together, tying marketing, ty in sales, tying sales and services and allows us to go faster. We I am really excited about some of the other initiatives that we’re putting through this process. Expect that we’ll see an acceleration. We saw acceleration in not only the actual size of the deals.
We saw acceleration in the velocity of the deals, and we saw acceleration in the number of [00:21:00] deals and so on, all those vectors, and we didn’t see any drop offs in cancellation. So super happy with like how we were able to measure so far. And I know every. Initiative that we have is not gonna be a massive success, but we’ll learn as we go.
Sophie Buonassisi: But if already you’re hitting those kind of results, what, four or five months into it? That’s incredible.
Marcy Campbell: Yeah, it was fun. It’s always fun
to win.
Sophie Buonassisi: it sure is. How do you think this concept, and maybe it’s uc, maybe it comes in a slightly different form, but it really, that cross-functional alignment at that executive lever level and then how it disseminates to the entire organization. How can that be leveraged for smaller organizations?
Marcy Campbell: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think in a smaller organization, I’ve done startups where, you’re wearing a lot of hats and one of the values of doing startups is you get to do a lot of fun things that you don’t have never done before. And so you get to learn you’re on this hyper learning curve.
And I think that, [00:22:00] the. When I give you an example. I was at a startup years ago where I ran marketing for a year, and I have a lot of empathy for the marketing team because. It is a complex, there’s just multiple pieces of it. You got everything from analyst to pr to product marketing to messaging to branding.
There’s just a lot there that is very different than sales. And so I think as you’re in a smaller company, you may be asked to do things that are outside of your. Actual expertise. I think it’s really good to build a network of people who’ve done it before and really listen to how they’ve done it.
I think it’s also important to. Value and honor the people that have those skill sets, right? That you can get very self-involved when you’re just trying to crush your numbers or you’re really trying to build a sales organization or do a repeatable process and figure out who is your customer.
But you can go a lot faster if you have good partners, you have good marketing. Partners and I [00:23:00] have always been able to maintain not only close professional relationships, but friendships with my marketing counterparts because I have a lot of I have a lot of respect for what they deliver.
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, so it sounds like the relationship piece is definitely key,
Marcy Campbell: yeah, it’s something that I think you have to, if you’re coming into a smaller company or a mid-size company or even a large company, it’s really who are you gonna work with? Like, how do they think about sales? Do they see you? Do they see sales? Do they see the CRO position?
Do they see the services? Is it’s valuable components to the company? And where does it sit in strategy? Where does it sit in execution? And how do they partner is? I think those are filters that you have to use when you join a company.
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. And probably the same goes for founders too, hiring their first kind of executives and promoting. Now you mentioned you are laying the train tracks to be able to move faster, and that was part of that educational narrative that you’re sharing. Obviously in the startup world, everybody’s sprinting.
You’re trying to get [00:24:00] that train to go as quickly as possible. What are in your mind, if there’s any kind of tips and tricks, almost kind of foundational ways of sprinting out the gate or any kind of tips around just creating this kind of alignment initially for, think of it as, maybe it’s a series a company or maybe it’s even a seed company.
Marcy Campbell: Yeah. The CS and series a’s are a little different nowadays because people
are getting larger A’s, but in the smaller companies that I’ve been in, it really is around identifying what a repeatable process is, right? It’s about, you are almost a product manager, right? You’re going out with a technology and a.
A target that you think is correct and you’re go out and you identify a need that a customer has. You have to bring that need and those specifications back into the company because that funnel is really quick. You have to be able to bring, have a [00:25:00] relationship with the engineers, have a relationship with the product folks, and be able to identify something that is repeatable.
That seems like a market, like having a market knows, right? And then being able to say, okay, these are the top things that I’m hearing. When I did one of the startups I did. I went in and there was a one sales guy and one BDR and they had a pipeline, and I’m a big believer in like pipeline economics.
I like their pipeline was like round in the middle, like it shouldn’t be round,
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah,
Marcy Campbell: It needs to be, it needs to.
Wrong shape. So I’m like, why aren’t they closing anything? And so I started to call up their closed lost customers and I said, look, I’m not gonna sell you anything. You evaluated what we did.
Why didn’t you buy? And so rolling up your sleeves and really getting close to the customer and finding out why. And I had this one engineer who came back and he was like, we didn’t buy because of A, B, C, and D. And it was [00:26:00] like, I’m. I’m not on the cloud. I don’t use, I don’t have any big data.
I don’t use an object store, right? And so he gave me the parameters of how to build out the target in the ICP ’cause it all starts with the ICP. And if you are a really smart marketing partner, they can help you develop who it is you’re selling to and what they care about. And then once you find that, you have to identify how much value is associated with what they care about.
Whether or not that’s something that you can build to and expand on, right? then you walk into what does the environment look like? What are the price points that you can get away with? Like, how much is this gonna cost? And then can I repeat the sell enough? Where I can start to build out the structure of the organization in a way that distribution makes sense.
Like you might have to go through channels, you might have to do OEM, you might have to do white label, you might have to do direct, you might have to do inside, you might have to do enterprise. You just don’t know until in a scene. In an in, [00:27:00] sometimes in the old A days, you really didn’t know like where to put the money and how to lay the tracks out because you’re really just in discovery.
Sophie Buonassisi: It sounds like the same common thread though, of prioritizing the customer journey and then as you progress and now you’re at a point where in order to prioritize your layering on this infrastructure like the uc, whereas at that earlier stage how founders and early stage operators can think about.
Operationalizing some of these tactics is really flipping the pipeline, like you said, to the customer experience and understanding what is that customer journey and then how do I optimize against it?
Marcy Campbell: Very well said. Yes.
Sophie Buonassisi: Now, Marcy, you have had an incredible career. I’d love to transition into a little bit more behind the scenes of that career
Marcy Campbell: yeah, sure. I actually am an advocate of women in not only sales, but also in just any professions. I’ve been in the industry for a really long time and I grew up as a salesperson. I’ve managed to do a number of things. I. Horizontally, which added a [00:28:00] lot of value to my career because I actually didn’t, wasn’t able to move up vertically.
And so for example, I would go into business develop, I was in sales and instead of going in and I would like sales management, but before I had my verse VP title, I ended up having kids. And I was like, okay. I then went into business development. I’ve done channels, I ran BDRs.
I ran product marketing. I ran marketing. Like I just had the opportunity to do these horizontal jobs because At the time I didn’t look like what people thought of as a sales executive. And I think now it sits on me to help keep the door open for women who wanna be in this profession and to.
Allow them a seat at the table. I had a number of people do that to me, mostly men, and they were great advocates for me. But I have to tell [00:29:00] you that I, I learned a long time ago that my career accelerated when I helped other people. And so it was really about who could I bring in the room that.
Would be an amplifier for the things that we needed to get done and how could I help their careers by giving them exposure to either leadership or to projects or to industries. And I take that to heart because, I’ve hired a lot of people into BDR roles through my friends kids who need jobs.
But, yeah. But I also have advocated for several women. One who I adore, who’s worked for me three times, right? Who’s now at another company as a first line manager and has, made a ton of money. I. And I’ve known her since she was 17, right? So the opportunity to build out her career and give her a footing and that story.
I have, I don’t know, 15, 20 of those stories [00:30:00] with some of the women that I work with. But I also like if there’s a time to advocate for anybody that gives them an opportunity to stretch, I’m happy to do that as well. I think that, the lucky don’t know. They’re lucky. And I was lucky in that I had some people that believed in me and gave me an opportunity to do things and were willing to gimme the feedback, which is the thing you need.
You need somebody to tell you the truth about, like the things that are holding you back. And so when, I had this one manager, I just adored Juan Bonitas, who ran Braintree when I got there. And he used to tell me Mars feedback’s a gift. And then he would tell me the things that were hard to hear and I could calibrate on those.
And then that allowed me to actually expand my influence and expand my ability to create more money for myself and more value for my family. So I really honor that.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s incredible. Yeah. It’s so important to [00:31:00] have those advocates throughout your career,
Marcy Campbell: I’ve been lucky enough to be coached, right? So formally coached. I work with Jody Michaels, who’s phenomenal. I’ve worked with other folks and I also had. An advocate, especially at PayPal.
I had an advocate. He’s still there. He is great. Who, when I wasn’t in the room, he was a peer of mine. He would always be a proponent for the things I was trying to get done. To me that gave me room at the table. And so trying to do that for both men and women but especially for women to have to look for those advocates because, there’s not a lot of us in sales.
We tend to go into sales sometimes we don’t stay there. And, trying to figure out the path to allow for us to have more women in. Senior positions. I think it’s important.
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. And what advice would you give to, younger female professionals as they look to [00:32:00] Uplevel and they look to build out their network or board of network, for example, females or males, and how to actually operationalize that.
Marcy Campbell: I think you have to. You have to put yourself in positions where you’re frightened. You’re gonna get up and talk in front of a thousand people. No one’s not frightened of that. But like you have to put your, you have to stretch yourself and you have to agree to do things.
Are not in your comfort zone and sometimes you’re gonna fail and it’s like you just gotta keep going and sometimes you’re not gonna fail. You’re gonna exceed your expectations and you have to honor that as well. But I think that’s what I would tell them. I tend to try to do that in my career.
I doing things that I don’t know how to do. I find people who do, and I go and I learn, right? It’s about lifelong learning. And so to me, I think if you look at, we have a saying at AppFolio, it’s better never best, right? You have that idea that I’m gonna get better every [00:33:00] day and I’m never gonna be the best.
And that is a lifelong learning, philosophy that I really believe in. And I think that’s the, what I would tell someone who’s getting started is like, just go ask for things and put yourself in the room and have a voice and interrupt if you have to, who was it? Madeline Albright.
I was lucky enough to see her at one of the PayPal events and someone asked her like, how did you deal with all of these really incredibly powerful men? And she said, I learned to interrupt.
love that, right? Because sometimes you get talked over and so I’d tell ’em, get your voice and believe in yourself.
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. That is great advice. Stretch. Get your voice, believe in yourself. And I’ve often, heard you speak about the importance of inclusive leadership specifically. So there’s the quote you aren’t leading if no one is following you, and it’s really up to leaders to create an inclusive environment. You talked about you personally, what advice would you [00:34:00] give to other leaders to actually create that inclusive environment?
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Marcy Campbell: I think you have to give room for differing opinions. You have some people that. As my sister says, suck up all the oxygen in the room. So you really need to have, if you’re a leader and you have your team or you have people around you, you have to be able to allow for transparent communications, which is really hard, especially, if you’re a nice person and you don’t wanna hurt anybody, or you are trying to. Take two opposing views and make decisions around them. So I would say, to me it’s really around calibrating that communications, that transparency and creating a, I think the most powerful thing a leader could do is create a team and create the idea of a team of putting the team first.
And having this idea that you like. [00:35:00] Teams can do wonderful things together. Like individuals do good things, but great teams do great things. And so being able to put the team first in, creating that communication with my, coming in as a CRO where you had a really talented SVP of sales, a really talented SVP of services.
And were doing a good job. And I came in and I’m sure people were like why is she here? And so what I did was I just started communicating every week on an email to my team and told to the 600 people and told them what I did for the week so that they knew who I was and being able to talk, like I said to them, look, I’m not gonna be able to meet 600 people and get to know all of you, even in a year. So what I’d like you to do is to tell me about yourself. Send me a picture of who you are, what you’re good at, what you like, what your karaoke song is, and what you do for AppFolio. And then what I do in those weekly emails is I send that out [00:36:00] to everybody else, right?
And everyone can actually get to know each other better.
Bingo. And the thing is, then I, we used that when we did our kickoff, so I had everybody. So it’s all about them. It’s all about them feeling like they’re connected to the team, right? And then you mirror the you have to be a mirror to the things that you say you’re gonna do.
My relationship with marketing is really important to me, and I constantly tell people that. And so people will, they’ll recognize that and they’ll emulate it, right? And so it’s about having people know that you have their, your best, their best interest at heart, but the business’s best interest, and that you recognize what they deliver as human beings
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. It’s almost like what you see also.
Marcy Campbell: Say. have it emulated.
Say do. Yeah.
Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible.
Marcy, this has been just super, super insightful, tactical, strategic. Now, to end us off, let’s transition to two questions that are always the same.
[00:37:00] First question is, what is one tactic or strategy that is working for you today?
Marcy Campbell: I have learned to personally take a beat. So to stop before I think my diminishing feature is that I am action oriented. So I’ve learned to stop, take a beat, take a breath, listen, and then move forward.
So to me, that tactic works because it gives people space to, it gives me space to learn more, but it gives people space to actually connect with you and communicate the things that they need to.
So it’s. I think that’s the tactic I use pretty much every day at this point.
Sophie Buonassisi: Take a beat. I love it. And last question. Bit of the inverse. What is one widely held belief that revenue leaders hold that you think is bullshit or no longer serving [00:38:00] us?
Marcy Campbell: That’s a great question. I think it’s widely held that like sales, is focused on the numbers and it’s all about the numbers. And as long as you deliver those numbers, it doesn’t matter like how you deliver those numbers. I think that’s bs. I think it really does matter how the how, because that’s how you connect with your customers.
It’s how you connect with your peers. And so to me it’s just not about making your numbers quarter over quarter. It’s about delivering value to your customers and it’s about doing it in a way that’s creates value for your company.
Sophie Buonassisi: Always customer first Fantastic advice. Thank you, Marcy. This has been an incredibly insightful conversation. Really appreciate the time. Thank you for joining the GTM podcast to all our listeners, thank you for hanging out with us and we will see you next week.
