How Marketers Can Be Better Partners with Sales (with Jen Allen-Knuth)

#232: Sales | Dave sits down with Jen Allen-Knuth, founder of DemandJen. Jen shares her insights from her 15+ years in B2B Sales, from managing a quota to building great working relationships with marketing. Jen and Dave cover:Co-creating content with Marketing and Sales that drives better customer engagement and grows your pipelineHow Jen successfully built her audience using video on LinkedIn and leveraged it to start DemandJenHow companies should focus on genuine diversity efforts rather than superficial inclusivity Timestamps (00:00) - – Intro to Jen (07:43) - – Why you should have a mentor and how to get one (09:33) - – Sales experiences and becoming a Chief Evangelist (13:04) - – Making the leap from side hustle to full-time (17:31) - – Why your career experiences should be diverse (21:59) - – The shallow impact of diversity panels (26:03) - – How Jen built her personal brand (29:24) - – Creating unscripted content that’s still clear (32:56) - – Being authentic in marketing (37:51) - – Don’t use templates for customer conversations (44:13) - – Strong relationships between product marketing and sales (45:00) - – Being customer-centric (50:22) - – Why you need to be a good storyteller (52:11) - – Challenges of data analysis Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.com Join the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter Check out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/ Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership *** Today’s episode is brought to you by Grammarly. Ever have one of those weeks where you spent more time replying to Slack and email than doing actual marketing work? You’re not alone. The average marketing team spends 28+ hours a week just keeping up with comms. That leads to burnout, frustration, and a whole lot of performative productivity that doesn’t actually move the needle. AI-fluent marketing teams are changing that. Grammarly’s 2025 Productivity Shift Report shows how they’re using AI to: – Cut down on back-and-forth – Automate content, research, and reporting – Eliminate busywork – Make space for strategy We’re marketers because we love crafting campaigns, driving revenue, and proving impact – not spending all day buried in messages. Get the report and see how top teams are making AI actually useful. Visit go.grammarly.com/exitfive to grab it. *** Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more