Guest · AI in the marketing organisation
Jonathan Beeston
Senior Director, Product Marketing EMEA, Salesforce
Jonathan Beeston, Senior Director Product Marketing EMEA at Salesforce, sits at the centre of the Venn diagram between sales, marketing, field marketing, and product. His job is to make sure every account executive has what they need to have the right conversation at the right time, at scale. His mantra is four words: no AE left behind.
About
Jonathan Beeston is Senior Director of Product Marketing EMEA at Salesforce, where he has spent nearly seven years spanning Datorama, Marketing Cloud, Agentforce, Data Cloud, and the broader data and AI platform. Product marketing at enterprise scale is his specialism: the discipline of translating complex product capability into messaging that resonates with customers, and making sure that every salesperson in a large organisation has the tools to have the right conversation.
Jonathan began his digital marketing career at MultiJac in 1999, where he project-managed a multi-lingual CD-ROM for the European relaunch of the Ford Mondeo. At Mindshare he built the paid search marketing practice from scratch, quadrupling the team through revenue growth, at a time when paid search had to be actively sold and evangelised to clients as a new channel. He joined Efficient Frontier in 2006, one of the first hires in its European operation, eventually managing a team of over 30 across London, Paris, and Hamburg generating eight figures of annual revenue. The business was acquired by Adobe for $400 million in 2012.
At Adobe he led product marketing and sales evangelism for Adobe Media Optimizer across EMEA, then joined Integral Ad Science before consulting independently. He joined Croud as Managing Director UK in 2015 before moving to Salesforce in 2019, where his focus has been on how AI, particularly the combination of generative and predictive AI, can help marketers do their best work without compromising data trust or security.
Career27 years
- 2019 to now Salesforce Senior Director, Product Marketing EMEA
- 2017 to 2019 Integral Ad Science Senior Director and Director, Sales Strategy and Operations, International
- 2015 to 2017 Croud Managing Director UK, then Non-Executive Director and Advisor
- 2012 to 2014 Adobe Director, New Product Innovation, EMEA
Show earlier roles: Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe), Mindshare WPP, Tribal DDB, MultiJac
- 2006 to 2012 Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe) Client Services Director Europe, then Global Marketing Director
- 2002 to 2006 Mindshare WPP Operations Director, Search Marketing
- 2001 to 2001 Tribal DDB Account Manager
- 1999 to 2001 MultiJac Account Manager
How Jonathan thinks3 convictions
-
No AE left behind: scale enablement systematically
At Salesforce, product marketing is not a messaging exercise. It is an operational discipline. Jonathan’s job is to ensure that every account executive across a large global salesforce understands what the products do, can articulate it in customer-relevant terms, and is supported by the right field events, ABM programmes, and marketing materials to generate demand. Doing that at scale requires process, not just passion.
-
AI without a trust framework is a risk, not an opportunity
Every company is sitting on interesting data. Generative AI can pull it together in real time. But that data includes confidential customer information, personal data, and proprietary commercial intelligence. The question is not can you use AI on it, but how can you do so without that data leaking into a model that someone else will access later. Jonathan’s view is that trust is not a constraint on AI adoption. It is the prerequisite for it.
-
Personalisation is a data unification problem, not a creative problem
Marketers have been working with marketing data for years. But that is only part of the picture. If a customer has an open service ticket, a salesperson should know before upselling them. If someone came to a B2B event last week, that intelligence should shape what email they receive tomorrow. Personalisation becomes meaningful when it draws on the whole customer relationship, not just the marketing channel.
