Embedding SDRs in Marketing: The New Growth Engine with Nancy Chou

Embedding SDR in marketing is a strategic organizational shift that transforms traditional lead chasers into demand shapers. By aligning Sales Development Representatives with marketing strategies, companies can replace vanity metrics with value-based KPIs like pipeline velocity and intent signal capture. This model utilizes a collaboration framework of shared attribution and daily intelligence loops to accelerate the revenue engine and optimize the entire buyer’s journey.
 

Nancy Chou

She is a CMO with over 20 years of experience in marketing and communications. She represented Belkins as a speaker at Mopspalooza 2025, where she presented on “Embedding SDR in Marketing: Your New Growth Engine.” She advocates for shifting SDR teams from sales to marketing to accelerate pipeline creation and align go-to-market strategies.

Transcript

Kawal: Hi, Nancy.
Kawal: Welcome to our next episode of Roundtable Ops in Motion.
Kawal: We have Nancy Chou here with us today.
Kawal: She’s been CMO in many organizations with 20+ years of experience in marketing, marketing and communications.
Kawal: She has represented Wilkins in Mopspalozaa 2025.
Kawal: She was one of the speakers, and she spoke about one of the exciting topics at MOPSA, which was like embedding SDR in marketing.
Kawal: Kawal is your new growth engine.
Kawal: So that was really interesting.
Kawal: I think a lot of us had a lot of diverse conversations about that topic.
Kawal: And it’s a new engine and people are thinking about what the impact would be, why it would be helpful, and, you know, different types of topics around that.
Kawal: So, what I personally believe is marketing today isn’t just about capturing demand, it’s about creating demand.
Kawal: And then your SDRs are right there with marketing, you are turning campaigns, content, intent signals, and demand programs in the pipeline faster and smarter.
Kawal: So SDRs.
Kawal: They are not just going to be appointment setters or people who just book meetings.
Kawal: They are going to be that marketing or market intelligence hub.
Kawal: They would be accelerating the pipelines, and they would be the storytellers, and they would be belonging to where the demand is.
Kawal: And I see personally, I believe that the advantages of embedding SDR would be a few of them.
Kawal: Like it helps you personalize outreach and helps in alignment of content.
Kawal: And that really gives a brand, you know, more approachable and alive, you know, branding.
Kawal: So that’s really helpful for any brand.
Kawal: Then SDRs bring in real-time field intelligence by including messaging, objections, and persona insights directly from the marketing strategies.
Kawal: So that helps in faster optimization, which is again equivalent to more.
Kawal: Relevant demand program again helpful for the organization, and it also accelerates the pipeline, which means that outbound is going to reinforce inbound and vice versa.
Kawal: So it’s going to be outbound, reinforcing inbound, inbound is going to reinforce the outbound.
Kawal: That’s really cool about it.
Kawal: And I think the topic was again fascinating.
Kawal: We all enjoyed the discussion.
Kawal: And I already see some of the organization, even in the event when we were talking about it, Nancy, people were saying that, OK, we are already starting to follow it, and some they were looking at, you know, in favor of it and thinking of, you know, we should start thinking on these lines and all that.
Kawal: So that was really exciting.
Kawal: So, Nancy, what’s your observation?
Kawal: So once we embed, you know, SDRs into marketing, what do you see the KPI, the metrics, how they should change?
Kawal: For example, now we see SDRs more on, you know, engagement.
Kawal: Or SQL creation.
Kawal: What do you think about it?
Nancy: So, we think obviously a new model calls for new metrics, right?
Nancy: And the most different, the key difference is, we want to see a shift away from vanity metrics.
Nancy: We used to measure things like number of emails sent, number of calls dialed, right, meetings booked, response to individual campaigns and email open rates.
Nancy: We consider these all vanity metrics.
Nancy: So we think by shifting SDRs to sales and giving them more marketing focus, the new metrics need to measure the relationship in the pipeline, right?
Nancy: So we advocate things like touch points, points created, intense signals captured, pipeline velocity, cost per opportunity per appointment, optimization, and, of course, ultimately, what matters is pipeline created.
Nancy: So we think this is new.
Nancy: Set of metrics that really moves the needle.
Nancy: The focus would be more on, you know, moves from volume to value that SDRs can bring and can add to the organization.
Kawal: Yeah, that’s really.
Kawal: I think we make a distinction between output and results, right?
Kawal: Output versus outcome.
Kawal: So, the latter metrics that matter are really outcome-oriented rather than output quantity-oriented.
Kawal: That’s really right.
Kawal: So the shift of SDR is like from one process, a team we can see, to another, impacting many ways, right?
Kawal: For example, just now we discussed the KPI and the metrics.
Kawal: So what are the different challenges?
Kawal: Again, we are changing, we’re shifting SDRs from one process to another, which is a huge change, right?
Kawal: Because sales do things very differently and marketing does things very differently.
Kawal: They have a different, you know, way of looking at things, different processes to follow.
Kawal: They are totally very, very different, even though they.
Kawal: Follow the same goal in an organization, but the two are very different.
Kawal: So what are the challenges and tensions that typically can, you know, arise when moving SDR under marketing?
Kawal: Like all of a sudden, you’re moving SDR from sales to marketing.
Kawal: How do you suggest like organization can manage this because there’s gonna be enormous tension in the beginning when the leadership team says that, OK, SDR, you’re not part of sales now, you’re gonna move to marketing, and, you know, there could be a lot of challenges in terms of maintaining.
Kawal: The, you know, the organization goals and reaching those outputs and at the same time maintaining both the teams and also the SDRs.
Kawal: So a huge take on, I think, the leadership team.
Kawal: So, how do you suggest that they can manage that?
Nancy: I think the first thing we need to remember is that going to market is a team sport, right?
Nancy: Nowadays, to be effective, sales and marketing really have to be aligned and share common goals.
Nancy: So, I believe.
Nancy: You can ease the tension when, right from the top, leadership demonstrates that they understand that and that they are committed.
Nancy: As you know, I just went to another conference recently at the CMO conference just last week, and I was really excited to see that one of the notable speakers we had was from Snowflake.
Nancy: Now, they have written a book, it’s their current CMO with their former CRO, who wrote a book called Make It Snow.
Nancy: I’m excited to read the book to see if they cover the subject of SDR and if they address the tension issue.
Nancy: But what I can tell you is they are an example of two leaders who worked in tandem hand in hand and made Snowflake a very successful organization.
Nancy: So I think again, tension is something that can.
Nancy: Be alleviated when leadership is aligned and understands that they’re on the same team working towards the same goal.
Kawal: Yeah, right, he said, I think it’s going to be on the leadership team, how they’re going to manage that tension and how they’re going to manage the shift from team to team and how these teams are going to work in alignment.
Kawal: Yeah, definitely, going to the market is going to be together with sales and marketing.
Kawal: Sales cannot do it, and marketing cannot do it alone.
Kawal: They need each other’s, you know, back and.
Kawal: Help each other to get this to reach the goal, definitely, yeah, yeah, definitely, there’s going to be a communication gap, there’s going to be misaligned metrics and all of that.
Kawal: So if the leadership team is aligned, as you give an example of Snowflake, I think that’s a very real good example of how they managed it.
Kawal: So I think many organizations can learn from that or, you know, look at that perspective of, you know, having those SDRs and marketing, and then they can see how they can progress and how they can, you know, have their own set of.
Kawal: Goals and their own set of, you know, things to work towards that goal.
Nancy: Yeah, and one thing, so you saw, you were there at the session, my session, where we were fortunate to have someone who told the Intel story, right?
Nancy: Intel successfully moved SDRs from sales over to marketing, and then you were also there when I believe there was a qualified CEO who voluntarily said, Hey, I’m in favor of that model.
Nancy: We’re already seeing that people are standing up, saying When we tried it, and it’s been very successful for us.
Nancy: And I think just to add to that, these processes and mechanisms to ensure alignment, right?
Nancy: So, in the session, I think I went over a collaboration framework, and the collaboration framework basically includes, you should have a daily stand-up, right?
Nancy: Where is that where you review content performance?
Nancy: Performance engagement data, intent signals across the various marketing channels and the high-priority prospects for sales handoff.
Nancy: The second thing is you need to have a shared attribution model.
Nancy: This is where people oftentimes get into the weeds and get into a political battle, trying to take credit for where a lead comes from.
Nancy: Rather, we think a shared attribution should be, you need to track your pipeline across all the touch points.
Nancy: Points, marketing and SDR activities are measured together, and then revenue spans the entire buyer’s journey.
Nancy: And last but not least, the organizations must have a unified knowledge-sharing orientation.
Nancy: You need to share buyer insights in order to drive changes to marketing strategy, you need to have content creation based on prospect feedback, and then you need to take to heart.
Nancy: Sales objections and update your messages for the SDRs to execute.
Nancy: So, to us, that’s the three-part framework that will enable any organization considering this shift to implement it successfully.
Kawal: Yeah, I mean, rightly said, those are the good points that you highlighted.
Kawal: I think if any organization would like to move in this direction, and if they’re trying to follow these things, I think they would be successful. Of course, they should try that, doing that.
Kawal: So.
Kawal: When we are trying to do this and moving out of tension, we have also seen how we can change the KPIs and metrics.
Kawal: So coming on to, you know, when SDR should sit or operationally to, to maximize pipeline creation.
Kawal: So, where do you think the SDR should sit to do, to do well? I think where they sit is less critical than them owning the kind of mentality shift, right, from hunters to gatherers.
Kawal: And nurturing hunt us together.
Kawal: Right.
Kawal: So, what we have seen most often when people have made the shift is we see that SDRs report into typically the demand gen director or manager, which obviously reports into the CMO organization.
Kawal: So that setup we have seen.
Kawal: Others may do something different, but that’s a, that’s a very popular setup.
Kawal: Yeah, I think.
Kawal: As you said, they move from hunters to gatherers, or we can say that if they are embedding into marketing, they are like lead chasers to demand shapers, something like that.
Kawal: And I think if the leadership team is like has set clear expectations, goals, they’re able to celebrate the new metrics together and reinforce the SDR as an extension of both the brand and the revenue engine.
Kawal: I think this model can really work and really help the organization.
Kawal: To grow to the next level, wherein they can see, so we have seen all these sales and marketing have those quarrels over attributions like whose touch point it was, who has got these leads and all that.
Kawal: So with this model, if the leadership team can bond these two teams together and see that, you know, any results or anything or any pipeline that they have generated can be viewed as a common goal between both the teams, I think that would be really, really helpful for.
Kawal: Organization to reach the goal, and the teams are aligned to get to the go-to marketing strategies and to be successful in their GTM and have those revenue engines impacted or accelerated with that.
Kawal: So I think that’s an excellent way of looking at changing the way the SDR should be embedded into marketing.
Kawal: Yeah, I really like this topic, and we also discussed the qualified and Snowflake and Intel.
Kawal: So these are excellent examples of how we can, you know, move forward and look at this differently.
Kawal: Perspective.
Kawal: Most of us are in favor of it, but some of them have tried it, and many of them are thinking, Do they try or not?
Kawal: But I think it’s worth trying and seeing how it impacts the organization.
Kawal: So it was a really nice topic.
Kawal: Again, brushing up on that, it was really lovely.
Kawal: Thanks for your time, Nancy, today.
Kawal: It was great chatting with you.
Nancy: My pleasure.
Nancy: And if we can be of any help, please feel free to reach out to us.
Nancy: We’re Belkins. OH, and it’s our pleasure.
Kawal: Sure.
Kawal: Thanks, Nancy.