Marketing

The Power of Being Connected in Marketing

March 5, 2016 By baxter

If you’ve read my post on the PHACE framework, you might recall the C stands for Connected. It also happens to be a core value at New Relic. That’s not a coincidence – I’ve seen the power of this value in action. For me, being connected isn’t the same as being extroverted. You can have introverts who are connected, and extroverts who aren’t. I look for folks that demonstrate the willingness to connect with others: certainly they need to connect with colleagues in your marketing team, and also elsewhere within your organization (Sales, Finance, IT, etc). The value in connectedness is not purely social. What being connected does is provide an amplifying effect for your employees and by extension the entire marketing team. By being able to make (and keep) connections and establish deep, mutually beneficial relationships, each employee is adding man and womanpower to their own abilities.

This isn’t limited to internal connections either. It’s important to seek out the kinds of employees that are eager to network externally and attend conferences, technology user groups, and other local events to broaden their knowledge and network. Much as Metcalfe’s Law applies to telecommunications networks, the power of any individual’s network is amplified exponentially with more connections. On the Marketing team at New Relic, there is a clear expectation that we support individuals attending external events. We only ask that folks create and present a summary afterwards to recap key takeaways of the conference and specifically how we’d apply those takeaways to New Relic. This has led to some of the most important innovations that we’ve applied on our marketing team.

Metcalfe's Law - being connected — Metcalfe’s Law

Think about it this way – if you’re having operational issues between Marketing and Sales systems do you want to turn to a competent, but silo-ed team member, or someone who has made meaningful connections with others in the organization (and externally)? Even the most skilled individual will hit a limit in what they can do on their own — someone less experienced but better connected will not only usually be able to make progress on the current initiative(s), but has a higher ceiling over the long haul because their skills are amplified by the power of their network. I’ve observed that high performers often seek out others proactively to help them achieve their goals, that is they value being connected intrinsically, but it’s also a trait you can encourage and develop in those who don’t do it naturally.

How to encourage being connected as a value within your team:

Ask employees each year to put together a prioritized wish list of events and conferences they would ideally like to attend. Have them list them out by location and date, and state the anticipated business value of attending. Support them attending as many as are reasonable – I’d say 2-3 is about right. By planning ahead it’s easier to make it happen.
Create a list of the people you’d ideally like to have lunch or a drink with over the next few months – people you most admire in the industry for instance, and share it with your team. As you meet those folks, make sure to share details of the conversation. Demonstrate how beneficial it can be.
When new employees start within Marketing, make it a habit to meet them even if they aren’t a part of your individual team. At the end of the one-on-one, give them a list of the other folks they should meet with, trying your best to think of colleagues they might not meet naturally. By doing this you give them an ‘excuse’ to meet others and make connections that could be helpful in the future. If you are starting new somewhere, make sure you ask that question of people you meet with during onboarding. Your goal should be to come out of every conversation with at least 3 other folks you need to meet.

Bottom-line: being Connected is a win-win for employee and employer. I can’t really say it better than Reid Hoffman in The Alliance: “growing their professional networks helps employees transform their career; employee networking helps the company transform itself.”

Sales Marketing Alignment Best Practices

February 13, 2016 By baxter

Sales Marketing Alignment is a hugely (and always) important, yet contentious focus area for Marketers. Sirius Decisions has shown that companies that maintain a focus on company alignment achieve up to 19 percent faster revenue growth, and 15 percent higher profitability than other companies. While it is becoming more prevalent to work on aligning the two functions within a company and is a topic that’s frequently covered at marketing conferences and on webinars, I’m often left unsatisfied with the lack of actionable recommendations to improve alignment. Based on my experience as an adviser and marketer, I have put together some of the techniques I’ve seen drive improved go-to-market alignment within organizations.

1. Communication

The first key to Sales Marketing alignment is communication. Bringing these two functions together will be a continual effort — while there is some foundational work that needs to be done, the players change and the relationship is always evolving. Often the first step is the hardest – reaching out to your counterparts in Sales and starting to engage to figure out how who you need to align with, and on what level. Start with casual conversations between Marketing and Sales leaders (coffee outside the office is always a good option) and then start to formalize the relationship with regularly scheduled check-ins. While it’s crucial that alignment starts at the top, at the exec level, you actually need all levels of the organization to be connected to their colleagues on the other side of the fence. Marketing Ops Analysts need to be connected to Sales Ops Analysts, and so forth.

2. Joint Training

Another method to improve Sales Marketing alignment that isn’t employed nearly enough is combined team training or coaching. It’s best not to do this as a two-hour webinar, but rather in-person interactive group training. As Heidi Bullock, VP of Demand Generation at Marketo, mentions in her webinar ‘Sales and Marketing Alignment Tips’ the amount and type of training you implement is incredibly important. On the webinar she mentions a study where companies that went from two days of training annually to ten plus days annually of combined sales and marketing training saw an increase of 29% more business from new logos for sales. While sales and marketing training alone did have some positive outcomes it wasn’t as effective as combined group training. This just goes to show that jointly investing in your personnel can lead to excellent returns and better alignment.

3. Go To Market Glossary

Another best practice, and one that is rarely done effectively, is aligning around the vernacular of the business by moving from a spoken to written culture. When sales and marketing teams do not speak the exact same language, the amount of misinformation that can flow back and forth is astounding. The solution for this is simple but yet rarely employed: building out a Go-To-Market Glossary. Most organizations spend a lot of time on joint definitions around leads, or they might go a bit further and define all the various funnel stages, but they usually don’t go far enough. What organizations really need is a codex far beyond the formal definition of what qualifies as a lead, and gets in to things like product definitions, explains the acronyms and terminology used by the different teams, the selling motions, etc. This way there is a reference document that can always be referred to and reduce confusion from the respective teams. Some of the things that are difficult to achieve alignment on will surprise you – for instance, I’ve had hours long discussions trying to nail down the difference between ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ sales activities. Without common understanding of the key vernacular in the business, you end up wasting so much time and effort (and can even lead to angry conversations) because you are using similar words to refer to different things entirely.

4. Sales Marketing Alignment Metrics

With at least a draft version of your Go-To-Market Glossary in hand, you can really narrow in on the set of common metrics to better align sales and marketing. When creating your shared dashboard, the key thing to focus on is accountability and transparency. As for the actual metrics themselves, it will depend on your business, but some of the most helpful metrics in calculating effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts will be pipeline influence. Pipeline uses the leads generated by marketing and combines it with the estimated value of said lead based on lead close rates and average revenue per sale to give you the potential bookings for a given time period, typically quarterly. However you need to also track leading indicators at the top of the funnel, especially because it can have an impact in future quarters, depending on the length of your Sales cycle. Reach is a metric that is fairly self explanatory but I don’t see it tracked and shared with Sales enough. Reach is the inventory of people you can reach with your marketing such as social media followers, email newsletter subscribers, folks in various funnel stages, free users of your product, etc.

Of course when it comes to quantitative metrics, your key component will be qualified leads, based on the common lead definitions agreed upon between sales and marketing. This must be put on a common dashboard for sales and marketing leaders to review at least weekly, but preferably something update real-time. Ideally you want this to live in your CRM, through dashboards to help everyone easily stay on the same page and up to date with accurate data, but as long as the data is regularly refreshed and available to everyone in sales and marketing, it will be something to align around.

People often ask me, “How do you know when you have achieved Sales Marketing Alignment?” – well the smartass answer is that if Sales and Marketing leaders are meeting every single day and there is nothing to talk about and everything is going perfectly, TA-DA! you have achieved alignment. The reality is that never happens because healthy, growing businesses always have tension in the system, and that’s not a bad thing. What Marketing has to do is embrace the tension and move it forward positively. By focusing on communication, joint training, common written definitions, and shared metrics, you can build a solid relationship and win together. After all, no one is happy and high-fiving if Sales isn’t successful, so it’s up to you to do your part to align with them and ensure that success.

Predictive Analytics for Marketing – Unlocking the Value

January 31, 2016 By baxter

*Updated June 6, 2016 with information about ABM providers*

Predictive analytics is one of the biggest trends in recent years. With Nate Silver’s bestseller, The Signal and the Noise, a new concept emerged that with the right math and data, anyone could predict the future. There’s an ongoing question of how to best apply Predictive Analytics for Marketing. In this post I’ll go in to the overall concept and how you can unlock the value within your organization.

Marketers love jumping on the next big thing, and Predictive is no exception. Even today it’s touted seen as a plug-and-play tool to unlock the potential in leads that might have just sat in your marketing database in nurture limbo. You can see this on the website of Lattice, one of the biggest provider of ‘predictive solutions’ for Marketing:

Screen Shot 2016-01-31 at 1.14.28 PM — 300% higher ADS? Sign me up!

Now, I’m a fan of using advanced lead scoring as a method to improve both qualification and prioritization of demand for Sales. At New Relic, we were early adopters of Infer and find a lot of value in their solution to apply predictive analytics for marketing. Thanks to the both the methodologies they employ and the access they have to myriad data sources, Infer is able to bring a number of data points into the equation that the average (or even advanced) modern marketer wouldn’t be able to. But there’s a few things you need to keep in mind in order to truly unlock the value of predictive analytics for marketing.

As I mentioned above, the two primary use cases for using predictive analytics in marketing is for qualification and prioritization of demand. If you know what leads have the highest likelihood to convert, you can use that score and implement a threshold to limit the amount of unqualified leads getting to your sales floor. It’s also likely that you’ll find leads you aren’t currently passing on to your sales team that could be assigned. In order to maximize the effectiveness of those leads, you’ll also want to use some sort of view for Sales that prioritizes the leads by score. I like to say that if your reps can make 80 phone calls in a day and you’re sending them 100 leads, you better be sure that those 80 calls are going to the right prospects. Using a predictive score to help prioritize can make your sales reps

Another method to unlock more value is to have your medium or low-rated leads go to a Sales Development team to do manual qualification on. If certain pockets of these leads convert at a decent clip, the next iteration of your model refresh should value them appropriately. This will make sure the right resources in sales are matched to the right set of activities to achieve the highest level of productivity.

Before we get to far into the nitty gritty, it’s important to understand the math concepts that fuel these predictive engines. I can’t really summarize it better than this Harvard Business Review primer on predictive analytics:

Regression analysis in its various forms is the primary tool that organizations use for predictive analytics. It works like this in general: An analyst hypothesizes that a set of independent variables (say, gender, income, visits to a website) are statistically correlated with the purchase of a product for a sample of customers. The analyst performs a regression analysis to see just how correlated each variable is; this usually requires some iteration to find the right combination of variables and the best model. Let’s say that the analyst succeeds and finds that each variable in the model is important in explaining the product purchase, and together the variables explain a lot of variation in the product’s sales. Using that regression equation, the analyst can then use the regression coefficients—the degree to which each variable affects the purchase behavior—to create a score predicting the likelihood of the purchase.

In plain English, for marketing we look at the different demographic and firmographic factors (aka the profile of the individual and their company) and sometimes pair it with behavioral data (website visits, product trials, etc). This gives us a score that we can use to ‘predict’ whether that lead is likely to convert and make a potential deal.

If you’ve bought into predictive analytics for marketing conceptually, then you’ll need to begin your vendor search. This is a fairly crowded market these days and I have not personally used each and every platform below. Based on what I’ve heard from other marketers, these are the top players in the space:

Infer: the solution I have the most familiarity with, Infer bills itself as a Predictive Sales and Marketing platform. It was fairly straightforward to implement – we just had to get them proper levels of access to our CRM, provided some rough guidance in how we wanted to use them, and they create the predictive model based on our data and began scoring leads at regular intervals. They are also adding the capability to add in net new contacts that fit your profile.
6Sense: they differentiate their predictive solution through ‘uncover[ing] net-new prospects at every stage of the funnel’ and focus more on larger B2B organizations. They were born out of a custom predictive analytics project at Cisco and count Dropbox, ADP, and Netsuite as customers. Their founder, Amanda Kahlow, also has a very interesting story in how they came to bring on Salesforce as an investor.
Lattice Engines: also focused more on larger customers, Lattice Engines positions itself as a part of Account-Based Marketing, scoring and helping prioritize accounts for your marketing and sales teams. Dell, Citrix, and Staples are on their customer list.
Everstring: ‘leverages data to predict your next best customer.’ They call themselves a decision platform and seem more focused on the sales side of the equation compared to their peers, specifically calling out how sales development and sales reps can use the platform.

I’ve had many marketers ask me for my opinions about different predictive analytics providers. I’ll tell you what I often tell them – from my experience, you aren’t going to find much differentiation in the models themselves. They all use the same mathematical techniques to create the predictive models, using similar data sources so even in a typical bake-off it’s not likely that one provider’s model would be really good and another would be mediocre. Thus when you are conducting your evaluation I believe the most important factor is whether you like the organization and the product. If you have a good trial experience and the price matches the perceived value, I would move forward and feel comfortable with it.

There is another option you can consider, and roll your own solution. I’ve used this option in the past when predictive as a service wasn’t as developed. If you have access to the right kind of data and the capability internally, it’s a viable option. There are consultants who also specialize in this as well, but I think given the plethora of options out there, most organizations are better off using one of the companies above.

Besides the obvious use cases for advanced lead scoring, almost all of the predictive analytics solutions out there are pushing to add capabilities to build target account lists and generate additional demand by either buying names at sets of target accounts, or highlighting existing demand at certain accounts. In the future, I believe these solutions will partner with account-based marketing technologies like DemandBase and Engagio to find the ‘next’ set of accounts that you should be focused on at your organization. Otherwise, they risk just being an expensive lead-scoring program. I’ll touch on this below when I talk about what’s next.

There's not a one-size-fits-all solution. — There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Implementing a predictive analytics for marketing solution

Once you’ve completed your evaluation and chosen a vendor you can begin the implementation process. It will of course differ between vendors, but in general you will need to provide access to your CRM and/or Marketing Automation solution, the vendors will need time to create the model (if they didn’t do this during the evaluation process), and then will score all your existing demand and net new leads. Simply put, you pair your data with a vendor’s data sources, run it through the predictive model and voila! – we can predict who is going to buy.

However, there’s a simple, but crucially important premise to understand to really unlock the value of predictive analytics for marketing. The key word in the description of predictive analysis above is “regression” – by definition, predictive analytics actually is relying only on what happened in the past, so by using these models you have to assume that what happened in the past will continue to happen. This is fine in a super-stable business where you have a set of products that are consistent over time, sold to similar personas, with no dramatic shifts in the market, etc. Alas, most marketers are working in more dynamic environments. For this reason, you need to be very proactive in properly managing predictive analytics for marketing programs.

Best Practices in Applying Predictive Analytics for Marketing

This doesn’t mean that predictive scoring doesn’t provide value – it just means that marketers can’t ‘set it and forget it’. There are a few best practices you can follow to get the most of your predictive analytics for marketing:

Make sure you get regular model refreshes as part of your agreement with any vendor (at least 2x/year), and that you enable it from your side by providing the right set of resources and access to appropriate systems so this is as seamless as possible.
When you implement the scoring model, don’t make the scores immediately visible to front-line sales reps. Rather have it running in the background for the length of at least one sales cycle (or if your sales cycle is too long to make this practical, try doing this for long enough that you feel confident in the evaluation of a given cohort of leads). This kind of single-blind study will allow you to see how the model performs without changing Sales behavior.
Get Sales leadership involved early, so they are bought in to the concept, and regularly update them on the progress of the project and implementation. If you learn something interesting during the blind rollout, share that with them.
Use other methods of scoring or categorization to complement the vendor’s score. This is really important when going after new markets and buyers, or releasing new products. You may for instance want to segment portions of your audience and adjust scoring tiers as new types of buyers enter your marketing/sales funnel, because the scoring model in place might not see them as valuable until deals start to happen.
Make sure you have regular catch-up calls and discuss new buyer personas and products (or any other changes in your Go To Market motions) with the vendors you work with. They want to make sure you are engaged and happy so it’s best to provide as much info as you can to them so they can set you up for success.
Be proactive in thinking about how predictive analytics solutions might complement other technologies in your Marketing Technology stack – look at what ABM providers are offering for instance to identify possible overlaps and where you might be able to get the most value out of using them together. Or if there’s two much overlap, perhaps you don’t need different sets of technologies to meet your needs.

Can predictive analytics for marketing help you find your next customer?

What’s next?

Currently, predictive solutions are focused primarily on optimizing the demand you already have in your ‘system’ – that is, helping to score and optimize leads you’ve attracted and captured already. The next phase is adding features that help more with the top of funnel (TOFU) part of marketing. Features like identifying and adding in net new accounts (and the right contacts at those accounts) in your database for outreach and nurturing, account scoring/analytics, and stronger integrations with third party data providers (like Datanyze) to do account enrichment and better coordinated outbound activities (in combination with Sales tools like Salesloft, Yesware, and the like).

I believe the predictive analytics providers and ABM solutions (like Engagio, DemandBase) will start to encroach heavily on each others’ turf as they collectively focus on helping marketers identify, target, engage, and measure the effectiveness of marketing and selling to the ‘right’ set of companies. Both ABM and predictive analytics solutions will also start to blend with some of the funnel analytics providers out there (FullCircle, BrightFunnel) as they provide deeper analytics relating to target accounts. Whatever happens, it’s going to be a great time to be a data-driven marketer, as we’ll have a wealth of data and solutions to help us drive efficiency and ROI.

Conclusion:

Remember, while applying predictive analytics for marketing can be super powerful, you need to own and control your own destiny and can’t just run things on autopilot. But if managed correctly, partnering with a predictive analytics provider can unlock a lot of value in your lead database and bring added leverage to your programs and marketing spend.

Empathy in Marketing – why your team needs it

January 16, 2016 By baxter

If you’ve seen me talk about the PHACE talent framework or read my overview post, you know that empathy in marketing is one of the key characteristics I focus on. It’s also something that has emerged in job descriptions as smart hiring managers realize the power of having empathetic employees. The challenging part about empathy, like a lot of soft skills, is the difficulty in quantifying and evaluating it during the interview process. It’s also challenging to develop this within individuals in the work setting. In this post I’m going to dive in a bit and give my personal view of empathy in Marketing, how you can find the right folks, and develop it in employees that may not demonstrate it.

Webster’s simple definition of empathy is “the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions; the ability to share someone else’s feelings.” That’s a fine definition but I like an even simpler one:

EMPATHETIC: putting yourself in others’ shoes

Why Empathy in Marketing is so Valuable

I strongly believe every modern marketer has to get closer to the business side of things to be successful – at a minimum they have to know how their work drives Sales, and strive to make as big an impact as possible in revenue. But as Marketers we’re also working with Product, and are probably working with some combination of Legal, Finance, and IT folks as well. But far too often I see Marketing teams that aren’t adding as much value as they could be to the business, because of strained working relationships they have not only with folks outside their department, but even the colleagues they sit next to and work with every day in Marketing.

When you’re evaluating candidates for Marketing positions, you can try to assess the level of empathy by asking about other jobs within your organization. For instance, “What do you think is the hardest thing about being a sales rep?” or “What do you see is your role in driving revenue?” With the former question, you’re looking to see if the candidate understands the life of a sales rep and the challenges they face, or least can picture it. In the latter case, if the candidate talks about top of funnel activities only (like leads) and doesn’t relate their work to what’s happening in Sales, they might not really understand how they need to affect the business, or may lack the right level of empathy for their colleagues in Sales.

Developing Empathy in Marketing Teams

The root-root cause of lack of empathy is the fundamental attribution error. We each see the world as affecting us, and it’s difficult to think about things from the other side. So how do we develop and encourage empathy in marketing teams? I believe a large part is embedded in who we are naturally as individuals, so you will find people who are somewhere on the range of “Super sensitive” to “Feelings are dumb”. But that doesn’t mean you can’t encourage more empathy in the folks on your team.

There are a few different options to help people put themselves in others shoes — two of my favorites are setting up formalized shadowing programs or temporary job assignments. For instance, at New Relic we instituted a formal Sales Rep Shadowing program, dubbed “Rep Life” where a member of our Customer Lifecycle team recruits a number of sales reps to serve on a roster where folks in Marketing can sign-up and sit with the reps during scheduled times, listening to customer/prospect calls and seeing how reps on the floor follow-up and respond to marketing-sourced leads. That feedback is documented and at the end of each period, the Customer Lifecycle team pulls out the common themes and figures out what Marketing can do to improve the information we provide to Sales, how we alert the reps to different activities, and how we notify them about significant campaigns or marketing activities. It also builds a level of trust and helps to reduce some of the tension between the sales and marketing floor.

Another program I’ve heard other organizations do as part of Marketing onboarding is have new marketers spend a few shifts as a customer service rep. This allows them to understand what their customers’ issues are as they use the products, and help realize where there might be opportunities for marketing to add more value. Marketing might be able to create a ‘fast start’ guide for instance to help customers find value in the product easier.

building empathy in Marketing — Shadowing sales reps is a great way to build empathy in Marketing

Conclusion

However you choose to encourage empathy in Marketing it is up to you – but the key thing is that the programs you develop live on and aren’t done just one time. In your regular check-ins and conversations with team members as you see tension build between different groups, realize that usually it’s a lack of empathy for the other side that can be diffused by encouraging folks to put themselves in others’ shoes. And that attitude leads to a better working relationship that’s great for everyone in the organization.

Framework for Hiring Growth Marketers

December 19, 2015 By baxter

My career path in Marketing is far from typical – I came in to it from a product management role at a research firm, and until for a long time was always in a technical or operations-focused marketing role. As I have matured as a marketing professional I’ve focused my career specifically on driving rapid growth at organizations. At the same time, the technology portfolio that marketers use to reach and engage the market has developed and matured. Obviously there’s been a crazy amount of technologies released to serve marketers and I believe we’ll see a lot of consolidation down the road. Regardless, the importance of hiring growth marketers who understand how to use technology has increased dramatically and there’s no reason to think marketers who can marry the creative and technical won’t be highly sought after in the future. Right now supply isn’t matching the demand when it comes to hiring growth marketers, and thus it’s exceedingly difficult to fill these roles. As a result I’ve evolved my personal philosophy in hiring, and have focused on looking for certain traits that can result in quality hires rather than focus primarily on experience.

Introducing the PHACE Framework for Hiring Growth Marketers

In a nutshell, I use a framework consisting of these talent characteristics: Proactive, Hacky, Analytical, Connected, and Empathetic. These aren’t the only things to look for of course, but I’ve found that if you are hiring growth marketing roles with candidates that rate highly on at least a few of those characteristics, they are likely to succeed. I had a chance to share this framework at the Sirius Decisions Technology Exchange in San Francisco, and the response from the audience (and follow-up conversations) was extremely positive!

In future blog posts I’ll do deep dives into each of those characteristics, but suffice it say that if you can evaluate candidates and use this as a framework, it will allow you to focus on hiring growth marketers without directly engaging in the talent war. After all, experience is a lagging indicator, and I always believe in hiring for upside and potential rather than focus on deep experience (not that that’s a bad thing of course!).

Presentation from the Sirius Decisions Technology Exchange:

Hiring technical talent in Marketing from tbdenney