Smarter Marketing for Better Results - Michael Berger
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The document discusses how Marketo helps companies improve their marketing efforts through better alignment between sales and marketing, increased scale of campaigns, and deeper insights into lead behavior. It provides a case study of how Marketo helped Egencia achieve these benefits, including better alignment between teams, the ability to quickly build large campaigns, and insights into which programs drive the best leads and how leads move through the sales funnel. The document advocates that by mapping customers' journeys and guiding them through effective nurturing, marketers can transform their role from a cost center to a driver of revenue.
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Smarter Marketing for Better Results - Michael Berger
- 1. Smarter Marketing for Better Results Marketo’s “Secret Sauce” Case Study Michael Berger Director, Product Marketing Marketo
- 2. Page 2 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger
- 3. Page 3 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger ABUNDANCE INFORMATION
- 4. Page 4 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Source: The Corporate Executive Board Company, “The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing,” 2012. Degree of Progress Through Purchase Process Before Engaging Sales
- 5. Name Awareness Friend Engaged TargetTOFU MOFU Opportunity Customer Lead Sales Lead Nurturing Database BOFU Marketo Buyer’s Journey: A Revenue Cycle
- 6. Page 6 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Awareness WebVisitor In-person Appointment Customer Converted Engaged Nurturing Database Advocate Adopt Retain Marketo Customer’s B2C Buyer’s Journey
- 7. Top of the Funnel
- 8. Page 8 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Rent vs. Own
- 9. Page 9 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Source: Marketo data, Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics. Does not include all sources.
- 10. Page 10 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Source: Marketo data, Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics. Does not include all sources.
- 11. Page 11 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Blog, e-books, research data, funny videos, curated lists, infographics, webinars NO YES Thought leadership and enjoyable content to build brand, awareness, and desire Tools that help buyers find you when they are looking for solutions Company-specific information to help evaluate and reaffirm selection Buying guides, RFP templates, ROI calculators, definitive guides, analyst reports Pricing, demos, services information, 3rd party reviews, customer case studies Gated?Early Stage Middle Stage Late Stage MOSTLY NO
- 13. Page 13 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Ready to Buy Source: RainToday 25% 50% 25% 2% Need More Nurturing Disqualified
- 14. Page 14 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Source: Marketo data, Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics. Does not include all sources. Average days to Opportunity: 327 days
- 15. Page 15 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Nurturing: Building relationships people over time through engaging conversation
- 16. Page 16 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger What isn’t an engaging conversation?
- 17. Page 17 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Marketing is NOT a gumball machine!
- 18. Page 18 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger What is an engaging conversation? • Relevant and meaningful • Communications flow one to the next • Listens and responds
- 19. Page 19 © 2014 Marketo, Inc. A B C D 1 2 3Stages 1. BUYING STAGES • Early: Be a Better Marketer • Mid: Why Marketing Automation • Late: Why Marketo • Customer: Success 2. BUYING PROFILES • B2B Marketing • Consumer Marketing • Sales
- 20. Page 20 © 2014 Marketo, Inc. A B C D 1 2 3Stages 1. BUYING STAGES • Early: Mortgage Considerations • Mid: Why Now? • Late: Why Us 2. BUYING PROFILES • First-time Home Buyer • Re-financer • Home Underwater
- 21. Page 21 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger
- 22. Page 22 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger More Targeted Emails are More Relevant 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 100 1000 10000 100000 EngagementScore Email Send Size Source: 100s of Marketo campaigns
- 23. Page 23 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Build a Conversation through Listening • Attends event • Downloads content • Click email • Fills out form • Score is changed Email Social Content MS CRM
- 24. Page 24 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger • Visits specific pages • Downloads loan app • Meets with loan agent • Fills out form • Score is changed Home Loan Auto Loan 1st Time Home Buyer Equity Line Build a Conversation through Listening
- 25. Page 25 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Epsilon Q4 2013 North America Email Trend Results
- 26. Measuring Interest and Managing Leads
- 27. Page 27 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger • Click email: +1 • Visit webpage / blog: +1 • Early stage content +3 • Attend webinar: +5 • Decay inactivity: -1, -5, -10 Standard Behaviors (Engagement) • Free trial or Contact request: +15 • Pricing pages: +10 • Demos: +10 • Late-stage content +12 • Searches for branded keyword “Marketo” +8 Buying Behaviors (Buying Intent) Get The “Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring” http://marketo.com/DG2LS
- 28. Page 28 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Lead Scoring Defined “Shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking leads in order to determine their sales readiness” Nurture DisqualifyNurturePass to Sales Pass to Sales Fit Interest Lifecycle Stage
- 29. Page 29 © 2014 Marketo, Inc. Stars and Flames show priority Full list of Interesting Moments
- 30. Page 30 © 2014 Marketo, Inc. Customer Lifecycle
- 31. Page 31 © 2014 Marketo, Inc. Marketo Buyer’s Journey: A Revenue Cycle
- 32. Page 32 © 2014 Marketo, Inc. Marketo Buyer’s Journey: A Revenue Cycle Retain Advocate Enable Adopt Drive customer success to keep and grow relationships
- 33. Page 33 © 2014 Marketo, Inc. Customer Nurture Streams
- 34. Page 34 © 2014 Marketo, Inc. X-S Scoring Based on Product Interest (PIS)
- 36. Page 36 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger
- 37. Page 37 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Why Measuring Return is Hard • Multiple touches. Seven touches needed to convert a first time visitor into a sale • Unclear success. Measuring campaign success is easy. But what about real success? • Multiple influencers. B2B buying committee has 5-21 people
- 38. Page 38 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Track All Touches Across People Screenshot: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
- 39. Page 39 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Source: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics, Apr 2014 * Percentage of all programs in channel that achieve MT Ratio > 5
- 40. Page 40 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Source: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics, Apr 2014 * Percentage of all programs in channel that achieve MT Ratio > 5 56% of Programs are “Working”
- 42. Page 42 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Revenue Cycle Modeler Screenshot: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
- 43. Page 43 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Customer Revenue Cycle Screenshot: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
- 44. Page 44 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Screenshot: Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
- 45. Page 45 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger
- 46. Page 46 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Tweetable Takeaways 1. The way buyers buy has changed forever – the way we market and sell must change as well 2. Marketers must map out and guide each person through a successful journey 3. Most people are not “ready to buy” – nurture relationships over time 4. Use analytics to turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue driver 5. Think big, start small, move quickly @mikedberger
- 48. Egencia’s Three Big Wins with Marketo Jeff Shearer Acquisition Marketing Manager, Egencia
- 49. Trusted Brands 31 Countries 33 Countries 62 Countries67 Countries
- 50. Page 50 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger 2009 June 2010 September 2010 January 2011 June 2011 Today Email monkeys living in batch and blast world Marketo is the solution Excitement – everyone wants Sales Insight Teething phase – FUD All pistons firing So much more to explore Our Marketo Story
- 51. Page 51 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Alignment before Marketo
- 52. Page 52 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Alignment after Marketo
- 53. Page 53 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Marketing helps salespeople look like superheroes
- 54. Page 54 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Marketing gives sales deep insight on their leads
- 55. Page 55 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger No leads are left behind
- 56. Page 56 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Big campaigns in short order
- 57. Page 57 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Cloning Complex Programs
- 58. Page 58 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger How many marketing touches to close a deal?
- 59. Page 59 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Which programs drive the best leads?
- 60. Page 60 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger How are leads moving through the funnel?
- 61. Page 61 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger Recap • Alignment: Sales & Marketing are now BFFs • Scale: We can build big campaigns in short order • Insight: Deep insight into program influence and lead lifecycle
- 62. Page 62 © 2014 Marketo, Inc.#mktgnation14 @mikedberger What’s next? Data Enrichment Vertical targeting Personalization Advanced nurturing
- 63. Page 63 © 2014 Marketo, Inc. Q&A Jeff Shearer Acquisition Marketing Manager, Egencia jshearer@egencia.com @TheJeffShearer
Editor's Notes
- Case study of how Marketo using Marketo to drive our business. One of the fastest growing software companies of all time. So doing something right. Showing examples of our actual campaigns.
- Marketo’s success is based on a philosophy, based on a belief that the way digitally empowered people buy products has changed dramatically. And therefore we need to change the way we need to market and sell to these buyers must also change. And this should be pretty obvious to us. Just think about how you bought a car 10 or 15 years ago… I am always blown away by the fact that Google was founded 7 years AFTER I graduated college. And before anyone starts cracking jokes, I’m not really THAT old. Not that long ago, there were few 3rd party sources of information – information scarcity – which meant that a buyer had to get most of their information from sales. In this world, it made perfect sense for marketing to pass all leads over to sales. It also meant we lived in a world of attention abundance, with fewer channels competing for a buyer’s attention. Traditional marketing, characterized by Mad Men-style marketing, grew up in this era.
- Google founded 7 years AFTER graduation. Seattle hotels search on Google – (102M results in .39 seconds) Pace of change – busy signal
- If you look across all sorts of studies, you’ll find that people today are somewhere between 50 and 90% done with their buying process before they want to engage with a salesperson. They have so much access to information, that they are actively resisting sales interactions until they feel they have equal information to what the sales person has. 1,500 customers from 22 large B2B companies. Marketing needs to step up and “own” that 2/3 of the buyer’s journey.
- One thing that successful sales organizations have historically done well is break up the sales process into stages, and they often have the technology and sales process to do this – and often it is within the CRM system. They can then say “for my opportunities, I need this many at each stage in order to reach my desired outcome. And since marketing is now responsible for a bigger portion of the revenue cycle, it’s important that marketing applies the same rigor to defining our stages of the revenue cycle that sales does for theirs. awareness, which is all about building our brand. And we do that with content, not with broadly targeted and expensive advertising. And I will show you how we do that. The next step is engaged. Someone who is engaged is in our database and has had a meaningful interaction with us. The target stage represents someone who is engaged and who is also a potential customer - the right kind of person at the right kind of company. That target number is the first metric that we really care about. We don’t report on names that much, but we care about targets, because it tells us whether or not our marketing efforts are attracting potential customers, and not just names. But when you have hundreds of thousands, or many millions (and we have many customers with tens of millions of names in their db) of names in your db, and if you don’t have the right technology to manage this process, it ends up being like Lucille Ball in chocolate factory. When they move slow, all is good, but when the conveyor belt speeds up, it becomes a mess.
- Your buyer journey may look different. For example, here is the journey for one of our B2C customers, curves, and you can see here that they are driving potential customers to an in –person appointment, because if they get someone in the door, there’s a great chance that they’ll convert to a customer.
- Let’s talk about TOFU. I mentioned that we really focus on content to build awareness for our brand. In a world where info was scarce, it was easy for people to pay attention to what marketers had to say. But with so much information available, that attention is pretty much gone.
- Most marketing that evolved from the Mad Men era is all about renting the attention that someone else has built. The superbowl is a perfect example. They get all these people to watch the game, and they rent out people’s attention in 30 second slots for $4.5 M An ad on the side of a website is rented attention. Even a booth at a tradeshow. In the age of info abundance, Renting attention becoming less and less effective, and harder to do well. So what marketers need to, is to own your own attention, and that means publishing your own content. Blog before code - 100,000 people every month who read it. $10K per shot to reach a similarly sized and similarly qualified audience. This event is another good example. Instead of doing many tradeshows…
- Here’s a screenshot from our RCA…actual data. Shows how many targets…etc.
- 7 of 12 of the channels rely on content as the core driver for capturing new targets.
- Owned attention, at its core, is all about content. We think about content in terms of 3 different stages, early mid and late stage, and this framework is really important for our process. Early stage content is going to be educational or entertaining – goal is to go broad and wide, have people share it, never gated. Now mid-stage content we create to help a buyer find us when they happen to be looking for marketing software. To help them with their buying process - we always gate this content, because if you’re looking for that sort of information, we want to talk to you. And late stage content is all about us. Now, at many companies the majority of content is late stage. For us, the pyramid goes the other way. This content is what will help someone learn more about US and either help them make a decision or reaffirm their decision – not gated, because frankly, if you want to learn more about us, we don’t want to get in your way
- So the top of funnel is great at generating awareness, but we want more than just awareness. We want potential buyers. But it isn’t that simple, because…
- Because like in dating, the relationship needs to be nurtured before they are ready to buy from you. This data is from RainToday. It’s a few years old, but it’s still very relevant. And this data is across many companies, not just Marketo. What it shows is when you generate a target, what’s the likely disposition of those targets. And on average, 25% are sales ready, 50% need more nurturing, and 25% are essentially junk. So that’s what the averages are. But if you look at Marketo, because are top of funnel is so wide and so broad, only 2% of our new targets become leads in the first 30 days.
- So we have to take 98% of these new targets that we’re spending money to acquire, and keep in touch with them over time. And the average time it takes to get them back to win-ready is 327 days, and that’s just an average. In some cases we have to nurture them for 2 or 3 years before they are ready to buy. And if you don’t have a good process for nurturing, these targets leak out of the funnel, and the money you spent to acquire them is effectively wasted.
- So lead nurturing is a really important idea, and is central to everything we do at marketo. Key is engaging conversation. If it isn’t engaging, people are going to tune out.
- Anyone get weekly promotions or content that you just don’t care about? I know I do. Instead of a conversation, it feels like one-way communication that gets really annoying.
- The problem is that too many marketers think of their marketing like a gumball machine – put a quarter in, get a candy… put a campaign in, get responses. But that’s not how customers think of it – they see each communication as part of a broader relationship.
- So what is an engaging conversation?
- Relevance… Relevance starts with segmentation. At Marketo, we do it across 2 primary dimensions.. One dimension we use is the buying stage, which maps really well to our overall revenue model, both to the high level funnel stages, TOFU, MOFU and BOFU, and also happens to map to the way we segment our content, EARLY, MID, LATE and CUSTOMER. The other dimension is the buying profile, which we typically define by personas.
- Now, that’s the way we segment, which is very typical of a B2B company. But the same framework works for other types of companies. For example, here’s how one of our customers, a mortgage company, segments their audience.
- And then in Marketo we build conversations that are relevant across the segmentations we’ve built. We do this using CEE. Easy to drag and drop content into a conversation, and system delivers it to the right person at the right time It is is relevant because it is targeted at a particular individual based on where they are in the journey, and who they are.
- The more precisely you segment your audience, the more targeted the message. Which means they are more relevant.
- In the steams I showed you before, we are placing people in the stream based on who they are and where they are in their journey, but how do we stay relevant. At various stages of the journey, what is relevant is going to change. So our segmentations up to now have been based on what WE THINK will be interesting to a buyer. Now, Marketo is constantly listening for behaviors. In fact, we tracked billions of them in 2013 across our base. By listening to their behaviors, we can tell what THEY ACTUALLY are interested in, and the system will automatically move them into the most relevant stream based on their behaviors.
- And this is true for both B2B, B2C as well as B2B2C, because in all cases, we’re marketing and selling to people, and knowing what they are interested in helps us be relevant.
- So the results of using behaviors in order to increase relevance are pretty compelling. Here are email engagement statistics for standard nurture versus nurture triggered by behaviors to determine interest. You can see there is almost a 60% lift in terms of open and click to open rates. And there’s a huge lift for click rate, which is a much more meaningful conversion rate than the open rate, assuming of course there is a call to action in the email. For click rate, we saw around a 150% lift, or 2.5 times better performance compared to the click rate of the standard nurture. Business As Usual (BAU) Email Trends The quarterly analysis is compiled from 7.0 billion emails sent by Epsilon in October, November and December 2013 across multiple industries and approximately 140 participating clients. The analysis combines data from Epsilon’s proprietary platforms. Triggered Message Email Trends Triggered message benchmarks are compiled from more than 297 million triggered emails sent by Epsilon in Q4 2013 across multiple industries. Results track campaigns deployed as a result of an action or trigger such as Welcome, Abandon Shopping Cart, Thank You and Anniversary.
- Now that we’ve built a relationship, and trust, how do we know when someone is ready to buy? That’s where measuring interest (also called scoring) comes in.
- So let’s talk about interests. That’s where we turn to behaviors, because your actions speak much louder than words. So we look at what emails you click, what web pages you visit, what events you attend, and more. There are a specific set of behaviors that have been shown to highly correlate with buying intent, things like going to our pricing pages, or filling out a form to watch a detailed demo. So if you want to be guaranteed to get an SDR from someone at Marketo, go to our website, watch the detailed demo and then visit our pricing page, and then be prepared for a phone call or email.
- And we score across 3 dimensions. Fit, interest and where they are in their buying journey. Fit tells me, am I interested in you. Interest tells me, are you interested in me. So they need to be interested in me (or my company), and I need to be interested in them. Actually, this is starting to sound a lot like dating, and that’s because it is. And in dating, timing also plays a role. So, maybe they are locked into another solution. Maybe they don’t have the budget. And this all relates to where they are in the buying stage. So when we think about passing a lead to sales, we need to look at fit, interest and timing (or buying stage).
- Okay, now that we have a lead, we need to get it to the sales team in a way that is easily digestible. So we have a sales intelligence tool called Marketo Sales Insight that lives natively within the CRM. We use SFDC. And it essentially provides the sales reps with a prioritized list of leads, with their best bets on top…which is why we call this the best bets list. The more stars and flames a lead has, the higher the quality. Stars measure relative lead score, and the flames is a measure of how quickly the score increased over time, which is essentially telling the rep how “hot” the lead is. So a lead with a very high score that has been doing a lot of research on the website over the past few days is someone that is likely to show up very high on their list.
- Once people buy, our job as marketers doesn’t end. So let’s talk about what happens after the sale.
- One thing that successful sales organizations have historically done well is break up the sales process into stages, and they often have the technology and sales process to do this – and often it is within the CRM system. They can then say “for my opportunities, I need this many at each stage in order to reach my desired outcome. And since marketing is now responsible for a bigger portion of the revenue cycle, it’s important that marketing applies the same rigor to defining our stages of the revenue cycle that sales does for theirs. And this is the revenue cycle we use at Marketo, broken into 3 buckets, starting with TOFU, where leads enter the funnel, MOFU is middle of funnel, where the focus is on marketing getting leads ready to have a conversation with sales, and BOFU is bottom of funnel, once sales is engaged. This is central to everything we do at Marketo. In fact, define these stages rigorously in alignment with sales was the #1 most important thing we did in building our revenue process at Marketo. First stage is awareness, which is all about building our brand. And we do that with content, not with broadly targeted and expensive advertising. And I will show you how we do that. The red line is when people enter our database, when we have their contact information. This is where semantics really matter. These people are NOT leads. To a sales person, a lead means something. The CRM systems, and a lot of “lead” vendors get really pumped up when they call these leads. Now, when someone throws their business card in your bowl at a tradeshow, or downloads a white paper, doesn’t mean their a lead. They are just a name. Many aren’t interested, and never will be interested in buying from you. And the semantics here are really important, because if marketers call these leads, and they aren’t what sales people consider leads, you don’t have alignment. They aren’t leads, they are names. The next step is engaged. Someone who is engaged is in our database and has had a meaningful interaction with us. So they threw their card in the bowl at the tradeshow, but that could have been because they wanted to win an iPad. And they may not even remember throwing their card in when they get home. But let’s say they then respond to a follow-up campaign. Now they aren’t just a name. They’re engaged. And now they know they are in the Marketo database…but they still may not be qualified. The target stage represents someone who is engaged and who is also a potential customer - the right kind of person at the right kind of company. Not a student doing research, or a job seeker looking for a new role. That target number is the first metric that we really care about. We don’t report on names that much, but we care about targets, because it tells us whether or not our marketing efforts are attracting potential customers, and not just names. Now, again, semantics matter…targets are not leads. They are just qualified potential customers. So we need to keep in touch with these people over time until they’re actually ready to become customers. This is the process of nurturing, which we’ll talk about. And then, when they show sufficient buying signs, behaviors that indicate that they’re ready to have a conversation with a sales person, their score gets to 100 points, and at this point we call them a lead, or a MQL, and we pass them to a sales development rep, an inside sales person who calls and qualifies the lead. There are some interesting economics here. The cost of a false positive, identifying someone as a lead that isn’t really yet a lead, is relatively low – the cost of an additional phone call. But the cost of a false negative, not identifying someone who actually is a lead, is really expensive. Because of this, you want to have a relatively loose definition of a lead, which means that a significant chunk of leads aren’t yet ready to buy and get recycled for additional nurturing. Now, having the SDR’s call even when someone isn’t quite ready to buy isn’t a bad thing, because the human touch is actually a part of the overall nurturing process. Lead nurturing isn’t exclusively the job of email or any one channel. Now, about 5 to 10% of them do get qualified as being in an active buying cycle, are deemed sales ready (looking to make a purchase in the next 6 months), and get passed to our sales team (an AE) as a sales lead. The sales rep at that point has 1 week to determine whether or not an opportunity exists. And if they believe an opp exists, they enter the opp in the CRM. Marketing doesn’t do it, the SDR doesn’t do it. Only the sales rep created the opp, and that’s important that they do it, because that is how marketers at marketo get paid. Marketing carries a quota. Not for closed business, but for the number of opps created by our customers, i.e. sales. Now, this means that If marketing hits their quota, there should be enough pipeline for sales to hit their quota…and this system of checks and balances is we build very tight alignment between marketing and sales at Marketo. So that’s what the high level process looks like. Now let’s go back to the beginning and talk about some of the specific campaigns and metrics that we use along the way. So that’s what our end to end revenue cycle looks like, and I am going to talk more about how we market at each of these stages. And by the way, I should mention that where this process really matters is when you’re talking about marketing at scale. If you have a few hundred, or even a few thousand people in your database, you can likely get by without such a clearly defined process, along with the technology to bring it to life, which in our case is marketing automation, and to no one’s surprise, we use Marketo. But when you have hundreds of thousands, or many millions (and we have many customers with tens of millions of names in their db) of names in your db, and if you don’t have the right technology to manage this process, it ends up being like Lucille Ball in chocolate factory. When they move slow, all is good, but when the conveyor belt speeds up, it becomes a mess.
- Special nurture streams for each nurture goal
- One example of a goal is upsell/cross sell. One of Marketo’s customers, Dropcam, uses Marketo specifically for this purpose. Dropcam sells small video cameras that record directly to the cloud. They have customers who record different amounts of video in the cloud and access it with varying frequencies. They want to upsell a certain set of those customers to a better subscription, and they want to focus on the customers most likely to take advantage of that plan. So they capture this data in marketo and use it to automate their upsell marketing.
- But of course, probably the most important thing is knowing whether or not the campaigns you were putting your marketing dollars into worked or not. And that obviously lets you make good decisions on how to spend future dollars in order to continually optimize your marketing efforts, and accelerate revenue at a faster pace. So let’s talk about revenue analytics.
- Biggest CMO pain point is not being able PROVE the impact that marketing was having on revenue. They can measure engagement in individual campaigns. When revenue and forecasting is being discussed at a board meeting, it’s sales, and not marketing doing most of the talking. CMO’s sick of being 2nd class citizens. Wanted a seat at the revenue table. Marketing now owns 50% to 80% of the revenue cycle, they should have an equal voice in revenue discussions, and Marketo helps provide marketing with the data they need to have this voice.
- But you know, marketing measurement is hard. And it’s hard for a number of reasons. First of all, people who buy Marketo don’t simply respond to one of our marketing campaigns and then buy. Rather, it’s a journey where, on average, they are responding to 7 different campaigns. So maybe they come in via a tradeshow, then download a definitive guide, then watch a webinar, and so on. It takes 7 campaign successes before a purchase is typically made. Now, the way the CRM works when measuring marketing success is it ties all revenue from a win back to the source campaign, which means that the first touch gets all the credit for the revenue. This worked great in the age of information scarcity, because as soon as a lead was generated by that campaign, it was tossed over the fence to sales. But we don’t live in that world anymore. In today’s world, those other 6 marketing touch points along that buyer journey may have had as much or more influence on a purchase decision as compared to the source campaign. So taking those other touch points into consideration when measuring campaign performance can be hard. Further complicating mattes is that there isn’t often just a single buyer. So what if you have two buyers, and both come into the process at different times, through different marketing campaigns. With Marketo, we’ve seen as many as 21 people involved in the buying decision. FWIW, we don’t recommend this. So how do you measure ROI with that sort of complexity. It starts with actually having the data. I’ve seen situations where sales will close a large deal, and marketers go through a manual effort to figure out, and show the different ways that marketing helped closed the deal, so that they get some credit for it. And that can get crazy pretty quickly.
- We get a complete view of how this deal was won. Marketing was keeping in touch with Sarah before this opportunity was created. And the story behind this deal, which is a real deal we won, is that Sarah had downloaded a DG, gone to an event, and just before the opportunity was created, went to Manny, someone on her team, and asked him to investigate Marketo. Only when you have a marketing system that can show you all of these touches across the buying journey, can you really understand how marketing is driving revenue.
- So with the multi-touch framework in place, we can now get a deep understanding of how our marketing activities are driving pipeline and revenue for the company. In fact, we can PROVE it, giving that Marketing Director, VP or CMO a seat at the revenue table. Here we see all the channels we showed early when we talked about generating targets, but now we can see how they are generating revenue. I can see how much investment we’ve made in each channel. And notice that we call it investment, and not cost. And this is on purpose, because when we as marketers talk about costs, we are telling the world that we are a cost center and not someone who deserves a seat at the revenue table. When we talk about investments and returns, then we’re saying we belong in those discussions at the revenue table. Ok, so we also show how much multi-touch pipeline, and how many multi-touch opportunities we generated from that channel, using the framework we just discussed.
- So for example, our tradeshow channel has an average MT ratio of 12. But that’s the average. If we dig into a program view, we’ll see that almost half of our tradeshows fall below our minimum threshold of 5. In other words, they are losing us money. And its these tradeshows that are the likely candidates to pull, and to use that money for our own events where we can own on our attention. So looking at results across channels as well as individual programs within those channels is really important. And as a sidenote, you can see that 56% of our channels are currently meeting our minimum threshold of 5. That means that 44% are losing money. So our job as marketers is to continue to push this % higher. But have anyone of you see Adobe’s fortune teller commercial. The marketer goes in to see the fortune teller and says “I’d like to know if my marketing plan is working”, and she looks at one of her cards and enthusiastically responds, yes! It’s working! And he nods and then says, can you be more specific? So she points to a few cards and says “Some parts are working, and some parts are not” Then she scoops up the cards and says “that’ll be $85 as the marketer looks at her incredulously”. So in this case, we know exactly which programs are working and which aren’t. And by the way, you should have programs that aren’t working. If you aren’t, your not experimenting enough.
- So, this is how we measure ROI. We also like to look at the aggregate impact marketing is having on pipeline, and that comes back to the funnel that we started with. I know how our deals are moving through this funnel.
- We know because we mapped the same pipeline we just saw in our product. This is the revenue cycle modeler in Marketo, and the stages across the green section represent the funnel stages we looked at before, so you see targets, leads and opportunities. Some stages are boxes because people can stay in those stages indefinitely, some are clocks, meaning there are SLA’s. Once this is setup and it begins tracking movement.
- Customer version
- We get this report, which is like Google Analytics for revenue. For each of those stages I can see how many people are in there, and what is the flow from stage to stage, as well as the velocity at which people are moving between them. Conversion rates and velocities. And I can see this over time so we can understand the trends, and even compare them to previous periods. Having this data at your fingertips is so powerful for a marketer, because it really lets us understand the dynamics of the revenue process.
- Once we understand how the revenue process works, we then use this information to set our budget. So at Marketo, we don’t simply say marketing should be 7% of revenue. What we do is say we need this many wins in order to achieve the revenue targets we set. Then work backwards. Then we can budget for a marketing program that drive the wins we need to hit our revenue targets. That’s really powerful, because if someone comes to us and says “I need to take 10% out of your budget”, we can say “okay, that will have a 12% impact on revenue next quarter, what do you want to do?” Having those numbers let’s you justify your budget. It also lets us look forward, it lets us make forecasts. It lets us talk not just about what happened, but what will happen. At board meetings, they talk very little about what has happened in the past compared to how much time they spend talking about the future. And in too many companies, sales, and not marketing, is the only one participating in this conversation. Which might have been fine 10 years ago when they owned 90% of the revenue cycle, but today marketing owns 50 to 80%. If only sales is participating in the forecasting discussion, you’re missing out on a huge piece of visibility as to what the future holds. Marketing can use this data to step up and make forecasts about pipeline
- The way people buy stuff has changed, and we as marketers need to respond, and market and sell to them differently. Build your revenue cycle. Define those stages of the process. At minimum, define what a lead is, in conjunction with sales so you have a common definition, and common SLA’s for what happens when you have a lead. Build you content engine, mapped to the buyer’s journey. Educational and entertaining for early stage content, mid-stage content that is bait for lead gen, and late stage content that’s about you. And then remember, when you’re generating new “leads”, that there not really leads that are ready for sales, and that you need to keep in touch with them over time. And #5, what we just talked about, turn marketing into a revenue driver, and not a cost center, it has to do with the language you use, and the metrics you use. Now, I want to wrap with a 6th, and perhaps most important point. I just talked to you about all sorts of cool and sophisticated marketing strategies and tactics, and some of you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed. You might be thinking, “I can’t do all that” I don’t have enough people, enough content, enough time. Well, Marketo didn’t start doing all of this right off the bat. It started simple, and got more sophisticated over time. Before joining Marketo, I was head of marketing for a small technology company, that ultimately got acquired by a large company. But I deployed Marketo at this company with a team of ONE, and that was me. I started with the basics. Segmenting my database, creating nurture drips, and reporting on basic engagement metrics. I then brought our events manager into the fold, and she used it to drive attendance at our in-person events. And we had a team of 3, and the 3rd team member would use Marketo to automate the way we promoted our webinars. One year later, I was doing more sophisticated things. I had set up the revenue modeler, began to understand the revenue process, and you know what, it really changed the way I was perceived at my company, from the top down. I remember we had a very sarcastic engineer that clearly didn’t take marketing seriously, and in one executive meeting, he unexpectedly blurted out, “you know what, this is really cool, I never thought marketing could be so scientific”, and that’s where marketing is headed. Currently marketing is transforming from an arts and crafts function, to science. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed…think big, start small, move quickly. Adopting even some of the basics can produce big time results. I hope you found this information helpful. Thanks for joining us today.
- -A brief introduction of who we are. Egencia is the corporate travel arm of Expedia and part of the largest online travel marketplace. We help businesses manage their corporate travel programs and the marketing we’ll be discussing today is focused on the professional at a company who manages the corporate travel person. Depending on the corporate structure and travel footprint, this person or team may sit in Finance, Procurement, Operations, HR or have a Executive Admin role.
- No targeted content, batch and blast by marketing Each activity created a duplicate lead, key engagement missed, no prioritization for sales teams
- Teams can listen and respond with the right message at the right time Marketing is strategic partner vs. tactical admin
- So here’s an example of a huge campaign my colleague Cate, who focuses on customer marketing puts together every year. Before Marketo, we had no way to easily build web content for a campaign like this, and the resources we had were limited. It took days to even get a draft of web content, and even that was pushing it. She was able to start CAW in 2012 once we had Marketo, and as she put it, the campaign was a way to celebrate herindependence as a marketer. There is no way I ever could pull of a campaign of that size before Marketo.
- Another great example of scale is with something like a webinar. These are complex events, with email assets, landing pages, logic, and integrations with third party tools. These are examples of campaigns we’ve built in Marketo: registration pages, invites that are triggered based off of data from our webinar provider. We even automate really personal interactions, like email forwards. These are just baked into our templates. And once the event is concluded, we’re tracking views of the recording. When we have a future webinar, all we need to do is clone the past year’s event, swap a few variables, and go. What once took days now takes under an hour.
- The third win we achieved with marketo has to do with reporting and insight into key marketing analytics. There’s an adage I hear all the time that “it takes seven touches for someone to convert or engage”. But this is a generalization, and something that’s probably different for every business. The really brilliant thing about Marketo is that since we’re tracking all the campaign interactions of our leads, we can then match that data up against our sales opportunities, and see all the activities, when they occurred, and with which key contacts to identify where marketing had a role in the success of a sale. It allows us to go beyond lead source and really dig into the underlying marketing interactions.
- We can also compare our programs on a wider level, and start to understand which channels are performing better, both in terms of qualified leads, but actual opportunity creation and ultimately, ROI. We are actually big users of direct mail for certain specific campaigns, largely because no one does it anymore, so it ends up getting noticed. It too hooks into our Marketo and Salesforce, and through this reporting we were able to understand that direct mail, a channel traditionally seen as a waste of money, was actually a major influencer for many high profile wins with our sales team. That insight has helped direct our marketing spend moving forward.
- And finally, one of my favorite features of Marketo that has been tremendous in helping our sales and marketing teams align is the revenue cycle modeler. It’s basically a flowchart builder within Marketo that lets us define our revenue process, SLAs, and then actually turn those visualizations into business processes that move leads through the funnel. We can then report on the flow between these stages, and start to understand where bottlenecks might exist.
- So what’s next for us? I spend a lot of time watching what fellow marketo users are doing. There’s the marketo champions, some of the top users of the product who are really doing some interesting things, the marketo community which I find myself logging on to almost daily to see how other users and companies are utilizing the functionality. Plus we also have local user groups, one of which operates here in Seattle and on the eastside, which is a great support group to network with other users, understand the product better. Plus, for me, these have been huge opportunities for me in growing my professional network and career. The user group is actually how I ended up here at Egencia. We’ve identified a few areas we can grow in. One is in data enrichment. How can we learn more about leads coming into our system without needing to explicitly ask the questions on the forms. Well we’ve recently started working with InsideView which connects directly into Marketo to append geographic, industry data, and more to our leads. So we can have shorter forms and higher conversion rate, and also get more insight on our leads. Ultimately this helps us do a lot more with vertical targeting and messaging specific to industries, plus really interesting opportunities for personalization and nurturing.