Ashleigh, what first drew you to B2B marketing, and how has your role evolved as you’ve helped scale marketing at high-growth companies?
I’ve always been drawn to the challenge and complexity of B2B marketing. There’s something incredibly rewarding about bringing clarity to long, multi-touch buying cycles and finding ways to meaningfully connect with different stakeholders. My early career was shaped by my time at SiriusDecisions, where I got to learn how top-performing companies align sales, marketing, and product to drive real business outcomes. That experience laid the groundwork for how I think about growth, not just through campaigns, but through models that scale.
At RainFocus, my role has evolved from focusing on brand and demand to leading a broader transformation in how marketing contributes to the full customer journey. It’s not just about creating awareness, it’s about measuring impact at every stage and orchestrating experiences that move the needle on revenue, retention, and expansion.
Throughout that journey, you’ve prioritized measurable impact, cross-functional alignment, and scaling marketing functions. How have evolving buyer journeys changed your approach to impact, alignment, and marketing’s role in driving revenue?
The shift from campaign-based thinking to journey-based measurement has completely changed how we define success. Buyers don’t follow a neat funnel anymore. Instead, they loop, skip steps, and involve multiple decision-makers. That means we can’t just evaluate a single booth visit or send emails in isolation. We have to think and ask ourselves if this touchpoint truly moved the buyer forward in their journey.
This broader view has made cross-functional alignment even more important. Sales, marketing, and customer success need a shared understanding of what a qualified journey looks like and where the moments of momentum are. Teams are no longer just trying to generate leads, we’re trying to accelerate decisions, build advocacy, and improve lifetime value.
What are the key shortcomings of traditional funnel-based models in today’s complex B2B buying journeys?
Traditional funnels assume a linear progression from awareness to conversion. But today’s B2B journey is anything but linear. It detours, loops back, and often involves teams of people making decisions together. Funnels don’t account for the nuance of that reality, and they tend to exacerbate the silos of campaigns rather than connect them.
As I noted recently, we’re seeing a move away from isolated engagement metrics and toward journey-based thinking. Events, for example, aren’t standalone moments anymore—they’re part of a longer sequence of interactions. You might not close a deal from a booth conversation, but that conversation could lead to an opportunity months or years down the line. We need models that reflect that kind of long-game impact.
Which journey-based metrics provide a more accurate view of marketing effectiveness than vanity metrics like clicks or registrations?
Clicks and registrations might show interest and of course are helpful and exciting to see, but they rarely tell the full story. They’re early indicators but not outcomes. What we care more about now are metrics like conversion momentum—how quickly someone moves from interest to intent—and deal size or customer lifetime value, which tells us if those engagements actually led to meaningful outcomes.
These kinds of metrics give us a better view of whether an event or campaign played a role in accelerating a decision or deepening a relationship. They force us to look beyond what’s easy to track and focus instead on what truly drives business value.
How can marketing teams measure conversion momentum and time to impact, and why are these metrics more valuable than campaign-level KPIs?
Momentum is about tracking how quickly someone moves from passive engagement to real intent. That might look like someone attending multiple sessions in a short window, interacting with sales, or following up with deeper content. These patterns not only show what’s resonating, but also help us prioritize who’s ready—and when—to take the next step.
Time to impact helps us measure how long it takes for a touchpoint to influence pipeline or revenue. This is especially valuable when we’re tying events to outcomes. A conversation at an event might not close a deal tomorrow, but if it accelerates the buying journey or strengthens alignment across stakeholders, that’s a win. These metrics give us a truer sense of how marketing drives progression and impact in the customer journey.
In what ways can marketing directly influence long-term outcomes like Customer Lifetime Value and average deal size?
Marketing plays a big role in shaping the entire lifecycle, starting with how we attract the right customers, but also in how we nurture and retain them. Events are a great example. They’re not just about generating leads. They’re about building lasting relationships and delivering value throughout the customer journey.
When we look at engagement patterns across events, we can identify high-value behaviors like which sessions tend to lead to bigger deals or longer retention. We then tailor content and outreach around those insights. It’s a shift from thinking in terms of “one-and-done” campaigns to orchestrating moments that support lifetime growth.
With buying decisions increasingly made by cross-functional teams, how can marketing better align with sales and customer success to drive and measure the full customer journey?
The buyer journey now involves more roles than ever and that means marketing has to work more closely with both sales and customer success. Shared visibility is key. We need to be aligned on what a “qualified” buyer journey looks like.
At RainFocus, we’re using engagement data to create a unified view of the customer across the lifecycle, not siloing data across touchpoints. That allows all teams—marketing, sales, customer success—to see which touchpoints are actually driving momentum. It’s no longer just about generating leads; it’s about enabling the next best action, whether that’s a sales follow-up or an account check-in.
How is RainFocus using AI and predictive analytics to identify key inflection points that signal customer conversion or long-term success?
With the volume of behavioral data that events generate, AI allows us to more easily and quickly surface patterns that indicate someone is likely to convert or even churn so we can act sooner and in a way that’s more likely to generate engagement. For example, we can identify which sessions or content tracks high-value attendees are drawn to, or which engagement paths tend to lead to pipeline.
This allows us to personalize experiences in real time and optimize follow-ups across teams. It also helps us pinpoint the inflection points that really matter—moments that indicate momentum, not just activity. As an example, following an event, if we see that 40% of attendees of one particular session eventually converted, we know that session is valuable and can model future events after this success. Similarly, we can see patterns of which sessions are resonating with which types of customers, from various sales and marketing roles to certain industries. Armed with these insights, we can tailor future content and follow-ups more effectively to improve conversions.
That’s where the real value of AI lies. AI helps us focus our time and effort where it counts.
In a nonlinear, multi-touch customer journey, how should marketers rethink attribution to reflect reality better?
Attribution models need to reflect how decisions are actually made today, not just who clicked last. A conversation at an event might not convert immediately, but paired with follow-up content or a product demo, it might be what tips the scale. We’re seeing the industry move toward influence models that consider engagement quality and sequence, not just touch count.
What matters is identifying which moments consistently show up in successful journeys. That’s why visualizing the full journey with real data is so powerful. It helps us connect dots across digital and in-person interactions and tell a more accurate story about what’s working.
What advice would you give to CMOs and marketing leaders looking to transition their teams from campaign-focused operations to a journey-centric, outcome-driven model?
Start by shifting the questions you’re asking. Instead of, “Did this campaign perform?” ask, “Did this touchpoint move the buyer forward?” That small change reframes how your team thinks about success and starts to align efforts toward impact rather than activity.
Next, invest in visibility and data-driven collaboration. Build a connected view of the buyer journey that spans digital and physical experiences. With that foundation, you can align your teams, your metrics, and your strategy to reflect how buyers actually behave. The organizations that win won’t be the ones with the most campaigns; they’ll be the ones who tell the clearest story about how they drive results.
A quote or advice from the author
“The biggest shift isn’t just adopting new tools; it’s rethinking how we define success. For years, marketers focused on individual campaigns and isolated touchpoints. But today’s customer journey is anything but linear. To really drive impact, we need to move from a campaign-first mindset to a journey-first mindset. We need to focus on a customer journey that prioritizes momentum, relevance, and long-term outcomes.”
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Ashleigh Cook, Chief Marketing Officer at RainFocus
Ashleigh Cook, CMO at RainFocus, is an accomplished marketing executive with deep expertise in sales, marketing and product best practices and technology. Before RainFocus, she led marketing teams spanning GTM strategy, demand generation, ABM, client marketing and operations at SiriusDecisions and Forrester. LinkedIn.
