Catarina Hoch went from struggling SDR to VP of Global Marketing in five years. Her path from cold calling to leading marketing at Operatix offers practical lessons for revenue leaders building cross-functional teams.

After moving to London from Brazil six years ago, she started at Operatix, a UK-based lead generation provider for software companies, as a sales development representative (SDR) covering the German market.

The challenge? Cold calling proved difficult, even with her passion for selling.

However, once her English improved, she moved to the United Kingdom as a native German speaker—her background in digital marketing came in handy. Catarina transitioned into a marketing manager role and bagged a promotion to VP, Global Marketing within five years. And she’s never looked back.

Catarina shared how she made the sales-to-marketing switch work, including specific tactics revenue leaders can use when building cross-functional teams.

Listen to the full podcast here.

‍Editor’s note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Making the move across the divide: the shift from sales to marketing

The switch from sales to marketing required learning an entirely different skill set.

“As an SDR, you are often task-oriented. Whereas with marketing roles, you need to be switched on to the trends and always learning, evolving, and understanding what’s going on in the market,” Catarina says.

“Something that worked six months ago, may not work anymore. And you need to try different things to see what works and what doesn’t. Marketing requires constant testing—what worked six months ago might not work today.” she explains.

Plus, she had to learn B2B martech while building up the marketing department from ground zero at the same time. By the end of the first year, she had a fully functioning HubSpot CRM running—making it easier for the team to nurture leads and manage its marketing activities efficiently.

Her approach:

“Every year, I focus on executing one big project and figure out the priorities around it,” says Catarina.

“In my second year, I focused on developing and executing a content strategy. The third year, customer events. The fourth year, we focused on running events for our prospects. But my biggest achievement was relaunching the website at the onset of the pandemic (more on that below),” she continues.

Catarina is always the first one to admit that sales is as critical as marketing.

“The sales team often knows more about the pain points of the customers, because they speak to the prospects day in, day out. But marketing facilitates sales,” says Catarina.

“I still listen to sales calls because you need to hear what the market is saying. That’s doubly important.”

This alignment between sales and marketing drives better outcomes.

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Going with your gut: the impact of a revamped website

Operatix’s previous website was expensive to maintain.

“We were spending a lot of money on fixes to the old website. constant small fixes. When I looked at the budget I had spent through the year on tweaks, I realized we almost spent the cost of a new website. So, I thought we might as well do a new one,” says Catarina.

To get executive buy-in, she presented a presentation to show the return on investment (ROI) of setting up a new website.

“I put together a business case. Looked into the industry standards around the typical average between a visitor to a lead. Plus, we knew our conversion rate in terms of MQL leads to close. We only had to close two or three leads to justify the investment in the website,” Catarina explains.

The results proved the investment was worth it. Catarina exceeded her goals despite launching during the pandemic.

“We changed the back end, design, messaging, and content. Since then, we’ve doubled our inbound leads. And doubled our contribution to revenue,” says Catarina.

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Her two biggest takeaways

Sales reps moving to marketing often hesitate because the skill sets differ significantly. But Catarina knows all about that. Here are her two top tips for marketers making the jump from sales.

The first is to maintain the revenue mindset, which comes naturally as a salesperson but requires deliberate focus once you concentrate more on the top of the funnel.

“The earlier we as marketers understand that we’re there to generate revenue and help the sales team, the faster we can be successful and prove the value of marketing. Many people or companies still see marketing as a cost center. For me, being managed by a CEO with a sales mind was good because he made sure we kept sales top of mind,” Catarina explains.

Her second tip: trust your instincts, but back them with data. Marketing requires both intuition and data. We have tools, data, and benchmarking now to help us with the “science” part, but don’t completely ignore the “arts” which can come from your intuition.

“For example, I knew we had to change the website. Then I found a way to prove the ROI for that project to communicate it with my CEO. Don’t let your gut feeling go dormant.”

For the full interview, tune in to The First 100 Days by UserGems.