Atlassian’s Ashley Faus has warned marketers against “tossing messaging and campaigns over the wall to sales” arguing that businesses risk hitting individual targets while completely missing the bigger picture.
The head of lifestyle marketing at the Australian-founded tech giant, who sat down with B&T during HubSpot’s Unbound conference in Boston, likened the problem to cooking dinner with your spouse where “one person handles the vegetables, the other handles the meat, but neither communicates about timing”.
Everyone can technically do their job correctly, but the vegetables can end up sitting cold while the meat is still cooking.
“You’re in the kitchen and you’re not saying, ‘Hey, I’ve turned on the oven for the vegetables, they’ll take about a half hour, you can start the grill for the chicken,’” Faus told B&T.
“Even though we might see each other doing our tasks, if we don’t communicate about where we are in that process, you’re going to end up with the vegetables being done substantially earlier than the meat.”
For marketers, Faus said the same breakdown occurs when marketing develops messaging in isolation before handing it to sales and expecting the team to simply deliver it to customers.
“Marketing will create this perfect pitch deck, they’ve got all of their messaging, they’ve got the latest features – but they toss that over the wall to sales.”
Faus said sales is then left trying to translate that messaging into a live conversation with a prospect whose specific problem may not have been accounted for in the original marketing work.
Faus said the answer is for marketers to get much closer to sales and customers — including listening to sales calls themselves — rather than treating the handover as the end of marketing’s job.
“Marketers should be talking to customers themselves as well, and they should be listening to those sales calls and pulling those insights,” she said.
The next step, she said, is for marketers to take those insights back into their messaging, pitch decks and outreach — and then return to sales to find out whether the changes actually work.
“Here’s what we heard in the calls and the research, therefore, we’ve adapted the messaging,” Faus said.
“Sales, are you hearing this? Okay, go try this out. See how it works. Come back and tell us, is this resonating? Does it land? What objections or questions are you still hearing?”
‘We have curse words in our values’
Founded in Australia, Atlassian has grown into a global software business while retaining a significant Australian footprint, including major customers such as ANZ and Macquarie, alongside offices in both Sydney and Melbourne.
Faus told B&T that due to its expansion, the company has changed the way it goes to market.
Atlassian initially leaned heavily into product-led growth, allowing customers to discover, trial and adopt its products themselves.
That strategy remains an important part of the business, including a free plan for teams of up to 10 users, but the company’s expanding product suite and enterprise customer base has pushed it towards a hybrid product-led and sales-led growth model.
“We’ve now shifted to more of a hybrid strategy,” Faus said.
The company now has premium and enterprise tiers designed for organisations requiring greater governance and security, while its global footprint also means navigating different regulatory and market requirements.
“We’ve had to add more of that kind of enterprise go-to-market functionality as well,” she said.
But while the go-to-market model has become more sophisticated, Faus said Atlassian has deliberately retained the Australian personality that helped define the company in the first place.
The brand continues to use distinctly Australian language such as “G’day” at flagship events, while maintaining a more irreverent and informal tone than might be expected from a major enterprise technology company.
“It is very common for people to curse on stage,” Faus said. “We have curse words in our values.”
For Faus, that informality is not simply a branding exercise. It is intended to reinforce the idea that Atlassian is working alongside its customers rather than talking down to them.
“We’re not going to talk down to you. We’re not going to treat you like you don’t know. We’re going to bring you along on that journey,” she said.
Why Aussie brands can struggle in the US
That Australian identity also creates an interesting challenge as the company competes in the US, according to Faus.
She said Australian brands looking to expand into America need to understand that simply being good at what they do may not be enough to cut through.
One of the biggest cultural differences she identified is Australia’s tendency towards humility — particularly the phenomenon of “tall poppy syndrome”.
Atlassian itself has had to overcome the instinct to let its product “speak for itself”, Faus said.
“In the US, culturally, we tend to be more direct, we tend to be louder, and we also tend to do a lot more of the building ourselves up and praising what we’ve done and kind of championing what we’ve done,” she said.
Australian brands therefore need to become more comfortable explicitly communicating their strengths when entering the US market.
“You do have to be a little bit louder and a little bit more bold and confident with how you speak versus leaning into more of the humility or kind of just the quiet excellence that I think is more common for Australian brands,” Faus said.
There are also differences in how audiences respond to the style of marketing itself.
Faus said US audiences generally expect brands to be more direct and less formal, particularly compared with some APAC markets.
“If you can say it in five words, just do that,” she said.
‘The marketing funnel is becoming a playground’
Faus also believes marketers need to rethink one of the industry’s oldest organising principles – the funnel.
Rather than assuming customers move neatly from awareness to consideration to decision, she described the modern buyer journey as more like a “playground”, where customers can move backwards, forwards and sideways — or skip entire stages altogether.
“If we treat the buyer’s journey as a playground where people can go up, down, and sideways, they can use the content the wrong way,” she said.
For marketers, she said that means moving away from the idea that there is one correct path through the funnel and instead creating content that can work wherever a customer happens to encounter it.
Faus likened the traditional funnel to telling someone how they should use a playground — starting with one piece of equipment, then moving to the next, and eventually finishing at the merry-go-round.
“If you think about it, what’s the right way to play on the playground? Is it to go on the slides, and then the swing, and then the merry-go-round, or is it to skip the slides altogether?”
The same applies to the buyer journey, she said.
Customers are not necessarily going to consume marketing content in the order a brand intended. They may jump straight to a product page, encounter a piece of mid-funnel content first, or move backwards to find information they need before making a decision.
“You have to meet them wherever they are,” Faus said.
B&T travelled to Boston as a guest of HubSpot.
