Steve Reny and Jennifer Griffin Smith of Acquia on why the lead model is broken in complex B2B sales, how digital accessibility unlocks a fifth of addressable market that most companies ignore, and what it means to put the customer at the centre of every go-to-market decision.
"Your existing customers are your best sellers. If your install base is not happy, all the best marketing in the world cannot help."
Why the lead model is broken, why accessibility unlocks a fifth of your addressable market, and what customer-first truly means
Acquia was built from the Drupal open source community and has carried that open ethos into every part of how it operates. In this conversation, Steve Reny and Jennifer Griffin Smith make the case that the customer-first principle is not a values statement but an operational decision that changes how you structure teams, measure performance, and make trade-offs.
Griffin Smith is direct about where B2B marketing has got things wrong. The lead model, in which one person completing one action on your website is treated as a qualified pipeline entry, does not reflect the reality of how complex software is bought. Buying committees of ten or more people need to be identified, profiled, and brought together. And digital accessibility represents one of the most underexploited growth levers in B2B marketing.
"Marketing is too often thought of as the part of the company that executes activities. If we in marketing are not hyper-focused on customer needs and innovating for those needs, then we are just doing activities."
Griffin Smith argues that the CMO role as typically practised is focused inward on campaigns and output metrics. The Chief Market Officer framing reorients the role toward understanding the market and the customer first, and only then deciding what activities are worth executing.
"The notion of a lead drives me bonkers. One person doing one activity on your website does not make a lead. There is a buying centre and probably ten people in that organisation need to be involved in the purchase of one solution."
Griffin Smith describes using intent-based tools to build account-level profiles from anonymous site visits. The goal is to understand who in an organisation is researching a purchase and how to progressively bring the full buying committee into the conversation.
"I have never in my history of being a marketing leader built digital accessibility as a core part of my digital strategy. To know that your PDFs cannot be read by anyone with a visual impairment is terrible. Up to 20% of the addressable market is not available if you are not considering accessibility."
Griffin Smith came to accessibility expecting a compliance discipline and found a growth lever. Twenty percent of any addressable market has some form of accessibility need. For a B2B company selling to large organisations, the probability of a key member of a buying committee being locked out by an inaccessible PDF is significant.
"It is not about what sales is sourcing or what marketing is sourcing. It is about are we generating the right goals for the company. We look at it as a go-to-market function, not as individual team attribution."
Pipeline and revenue are owned collectively between marketing and sales rather than attributed competitively. The most useful high-level metric is total sales and marketing spend as a percentage of revenue combined with lifetime value to customer acquisition cost.
"The thing I am super excited about is digital accessibility. If we as marketers want to address all our audiences, we need to make sure all of our content and all of our channels are accessible to everyone. Location, gender, and ability."
Both Reny and Griffin Smith point to accessibility as the most underexploited growth lever in modern marketing. If up to 20% of every addressable market is inaccessible due to poor digital experience design, addressing that gap is not a marginal improvement but a fundamental expansion of commercial reach.
"Up to 20% of the addressable market is not available if you are not considering accessibility."
Host Tell us about Acquia and your roles.
Reny Acquia was started by Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal. Today we are the open digital experience platform company. We help customers produce productive digital experiences: frictionless, accessible, relevant, and safe across whatever channels they use.
Griffin Smith I am Chief Market Officer, not Chief Marketing Officer. Marketing is too often thought of as the part of the company that executes activities. Everything we do is for our customer. If we are not hyper-focused on customer needs, we are just doing activities.
Host Why is the lead model broken?
Griffin Smith The notion of a lead drives me bonkers. One person doing one activity on your website does not make a lead. There is a buying centre and probably ten people need to be involved in the purchase. We use intent-based tools to understand unknown people coming to our site and grow a profile of an account, not just an individual.
Host Tell me about digital accessibility as a growth lever.
Griffin Smith I have never built digital accessibility as a core part of my digital strategy and I feel a little shameful for that now. To know that your PDFs cannot be read by anyone with a visual impairment is terrible. Up to 20% of the addressable market is not available if you are not considering accessibility.
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