Marketing Management – Practical Strategies for B2B Technology Companies

Investing Strategically for Marketing Performance in 2021

In 2021 as we return to a new normal, how do we strategically invest to maximize pipeline creation and close?

Challenge: In 2021 as we return to a new normal, how do we strategically invest to maximize pipeline creation and close?

With vaccine shots going into arms around the world, we can see a return to ‘normal’ in the coming months and years ahead. But what will this new normal look like and how do we prepare best for it? Many trends were accelerated with the pandemic: work-from-home and online shopping to name a few. But I believe the buyer’s journey has also changed fundamentally which, in turn, requires us to change how we prioritize our investments.

For many years, we have talked about the customer journey – and even recognized that 70% of this journey happens before a prospect ever engages with our brand. So we responded by creating early, mid and late stage content to make relevant offers building awareness and engagement.

However, in the years before the pandemic, consumer application technologies have increased expectations of the buying process. With a few clicks on your phone, you can get a ride (Uber/Lyft), get food delivered (Postmates/Grubhub), transfer money (Venmo/Paypal), buy groceries (instacart/Amazon Fresh), and more. The most precious thing our prospects have is their time — and they have less of this than ever as their job responsibilities have expanded. And the pandemic has only accelerated both their expectations with these services and the demands on their time (going from Zoom meeting to meeting).

This is the new normal environment that will be slowly returning over the coming year. So how do we meet these new demands from our prospects? I believe there are four key areas for investment in 2021: Deep and Relevant Content, Smart Sales Outreach, Multiple Product Demo Options, Improved Product Experience.

Deep and Relevant Content:

As B2B marketers, we know that we need early, mid and late stage content: infographics, explainer videos, blogs, case studies, whitepapers, eBooks, analyst reports, ROI calculators, and more. All too often, this content is written by marketing people who don’t live the experience of the prospect – whether they be a security engineer, data analyst, software engineer, CFO, supply chain director, etc.

What our prospects really need is useful content that teaches them something and not a 10 page graphical eBook that barely scratches the surface of the topic at hand. Imagine content that actually educates them about the challenges they face with relevant information. This could take the form of code snippet samples, security breach mitigation recommendations, tips and tricks for handling month-end close, excel pivot recommendations to cleanse data, etc…

We expect the prospect to ‘tune-in’ to our channel of communication — but why would they do so unless there is something in it for them? I realize that this advice might mean making their life easier with their current solution — but it builds awareness and trust of our brand. Isn’t that what we wanted after all? Certainly it’s OK to insert content that shows the benefit of our solution, but if we only insert promotional content — we should only expect engagement at the very end of the buyer’s journey when they are really considering alternatives. Therefore we need to invest in deeply relevant content that builds engagement earlier with our prospects.

The challenge here is to create more deeply meaningful content which likely requires our internal subject matter experts to write or create content. Therein lies the challenge. We can’t have people who are removed from our prospect experience to write insightful and enlightening content. They can assist our subject matter experts (likely who are not writers) but the source material must come from a subject matter expert. Getting these SME’s to create this deeply relevant content should be part of your 2021 plan.

Smart Sales Outreach:

Who likes getting an unsolicited call? Anyone? These calls are an interruption of your day — and we must remember this as we make our outbound call plans. To make matters worse, often B2B BDRs are calling on sophisticated prospects with little more than scripts, qualifying questions and a request to set up an appointment. No wonder we get a bad reputation here.

Imagine if the callers were more deeply educated on the buyer persona, the challenges and the solutions faced by their prospects. If they can ask smart questions, provide relevant information and actually help the prospect in some way, the call becomes actually more interesting. As a demand marketer receiving unsolicited calls, when a BDR called me with an understanding of the challenges I face, asked smart questions, listened and offered relevant solutions, then I would gladly set an appointment. But they only had 30 seconds to earn my trust and two minutes to prove they could help me. If they just wanted to set an appointment – b’ bye.

This takes ongoing training to raise the level of our BDRs or AE’s to make smart calls. This is a significant investment in training by internal subject matter experts and the creation of supporting materials for the BDRs. We can hire BDRs for critical communication skills and process, but we need to enrich them with the detailed knowledge that will be useful to our prospects. [As a side note, some organizations actually hire target personas to become BDRs or AE’s – preferring to then train them on sales and communication skills.] So investing in your BDR skills to truly understand the challenges and issues faced by your prospects should be a key investment area for 2021.

Multiple Product Demo Options:

Full disclosure – I am a fan of product led growth. If we claim our product is better than the prospect’s status quo — let’s show them directly. Now some products lend themselves more easily to a freemium experience than others. For larger, integrated solutions requiring significant deployment services, it may be impossible to provide freemium or similar experience. However, there are many different options to consider because customers expect the ability to explore on their own – especially if they are not ready to speak to a sales person.

I advocate creating a number of different experiences to drive early engagement with your product:

Recorded product demonstrations
Turning ‘features’ of a solution platform into freemium products of their own
Screenshot demo as step-by-step, guided tour
Short-lived, virtual instance of your fully deployed product for exploration
Customer webinar recording of their deployment and benefits
Weekly live demo webinar one-to-many

Most products have different use cases which then would require different versions of these product experiences above. Well, that is the hard work that needs to be done in 2021. Identify these use cases and the best options to display this to your prospects and get to work on creating this extremely helpful content. No doubt it will take time from systems engineers and product marketing, but the resulting assets can be used repeatedly at various stages of the customer journey.

I encourage you to be creative in thinking about how you can create various types of product experiences. Prospects today want the ability to explore on their own and ‘see’ your product in action. The real challenge is for us to consider how we create these compelling experiences as part of the revised journey. These experiences need to create a ‘goose-bump moment’ — that moment where the prospect clearly sees how your product fixes their challenges. If you can deliver this — you will drive further consideration and likely some direct engagement with sales. Invest in 2021 in creating new and compelling product experiences appropriate for various stages of your customer journey.

Improved Product Experience:

The product engagements defined above assume that the prospect’s product experience is compelling. Sometimes we need to look critically at our own solution, compare it to alternatives and be honest with our assessment. I recommend you go through the complete onboarding and usage process to really understand what your prospects will see as they become customers or as they trial your product. You do not want to accelerate prospect engagement with your product if this demonstrates that your solution is non-intuitive, clunky, hard to use, etc…

So, spending time to identify and improve the product experience is worthy of marketing effort. If these experiences are not compelling, I would rather take marketing headcount and/or funds to accelerate remediating these issues. It may be time to slow down demand generation to fund key improvements before stepping on the accelerator. So my recommendation for 2021 here is to have an honest assessment of the product relative to both the prospects current solutions and to your competitors.

So There you have it — four strategic recommendations for guiding 2021 investments that will take advantage of the new normal. Give your prospects more of what they want as part of their buying journey. These tips should help your content, communications and engagement have greater impact — all while helping you scale.

Lesson: With prospect demands to get relevant information when and how they want it, in 2021 you can provide: Deep and Relevant Content, Smart Sales Outreach, Multiple Product Demo Options, and Improved Product Experience.

B2B SaaS Marketing in a Time of COVID

Challenge: With our new ‘COVID normal,’ how do we deliver against our increasing pipeline requirements?

[First, let me say that my heart goes out to all those impacted by the COVID pandemic. It impacts everyone in different ways – and to some whose lives have been tragically disrupted.]

OK – the pandemic has been with us for seven plus months. We have executed our initial fire-drill response programs to show our customers and prospects that ‘we are in this with you.’ We have adjusted our team operations to work remotely and be sensitive to the varying needs of our team members. We now have back to back Zoom calls that suck up all the time ‘gained’ from no commute. And we have even figured out how to manage our hair with little or no external help. Yes – we are now operating at our ‘new normal.’

But more importantly, we changed our marketing go-to-market. Let’s summarize these top level changes:

Shifted from in-person events to online events
Re-allocated funds to digital marketing
Optimized our landing pages for conversion
Improved our nurture programs

OK – now what? Quarterly revenue targets are increasing for sales and therefore so are our targets for marketing sourced pipeline. Unfortunately, reaching buyers on the phone is more difficult than ever because no one is in the office, which also makes mailing packages and ABM programs more difficult. So where do we turn next? How do we convert more MQL into Opportunities?

Before making recommendations, let’s first recognize that our prospects are facing the same issues we’re facing, namely:

A tsunami of Zoom calls
Stress about COVID
Stress with increased family responsibilities
Feeling isolated

My recommendation – let’s make their life easier. I know this might be radical, but what if we:

Provide truly helpful content that helps them do their jobs
Educate them about things they don’t know that will actually help them
Make it easy for them to learn about how our products and services work
Simplify the process to successfully trial our product

Now more than ever our prospects need us to make their lives easier and we can do so by making the process of engaging with us simpler and more satisfying. Let’s give them what they crave most: a bit of time back in their day with informative and easy to consume content. And most importantly, a great experience to trial our product and see for themselves how their life improves with our company’s product.

Lesson: Focusing on our customer’s needs is more important now than ever in every step of the buyer’s journey.

What’s in a Name?: Demand Orchestration vs. Demand Generation

Does the term ‘Demand Generation’ really reflect what we do?

Challenge: Does ‘Demand Generation’ Reflect What We Do?

Over the past 10+ years, my functional marketing role has been called ‘demand generation,’ and certainly in the tech community, this term helps quickly communicate where we fit within the marketing org. However, recently I was speaking with a prospect the other day about a project, describing my typical engagements, how I work with clients, etc. When I was summarizing the typical activities, I found myself describing what I do as ‘demand orchestration’.

Let’s look at the functional areas managed by the “demand generation” leader:

Marketing KPI’s, Dashboards and Attribution
Customer Persona and Lifecycle Definition
Lead Flows and Processes
Marketing-Sales Interface and Handoff
Marketing Campaigns, Programs and Themes
Third Party Demand Programs
Webinars, Field Events & Tradeshows
Paid and Organic Search
Website Design and Conversion Rates
Martech Stack and Team Enablement
Lead Nurturing and Qualification
Lead Engagement, SLA and Qualification
Lead Development Rep Training and Playbooks
Account Based Marketing
….and so on…

However, as a demand team leader the most important responsibilities are actually more like this:

Align with Sales on Business Plan Targets & Splits w/ Marketing
Build Forward Looking Demand Model for Opportunity and Lead/Account Targets
Create KPI’s, Dashboards and Measurement Processes
Design Bottom Up Demand Plan Across Various Channels
Build Out Demand Team and Assign Functional Areas
Create Planning Process Leading to Program Execution
Track and Optimize Programs Ongoing
Ongoing optimization of people, process, programs and systems: weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually

So what struck me at that moment in our conversation was that demand gen leadership is really about orchestration. The areas that most frequently rise to the top of my attention are:

Do we have the right mix of programs to address top, middle and bottom of funnel?
Do we have the right skill sets on our team?
Are we optimally executing against our plan?
Are there opportunities to optimize demand funnel volumes and conversion rates?
What is our prospect/account user experience and how can we improve?
How are we assisting with customer lifetime value in retention rates, upsell, and cross sell?

These activities essentially have to do with orchestrating people, process and systems to accelerate growth, therefore the role is more accurately described as orchestration. In my experience, I contribute most to an organization in the orchestration of these resources to ensure the team meets and exceeds pipeline and won business targets.

Should we call the function Demand Orchestration? Does that more accurately describe what we demand leaders do? Does it even matter what we are called? What probably matters most is that demand generation leaders focus on the people, process and systems to optimize performance and growth. Let me know your thoughts.

Lesson: As demand generation leaders, our focus is to orchestrate people, process, programs, and systems to optimize revenue generation that meets or exceeds business goals

Revenue Attribution Maturity Assessment: The Journey to Reporting Nirvana

Challenge: Accurately Reporting Marketing Contribution Without Over-Investing Time and Budget

For many years marketing teams have aimed to identify their contributions to their companies’ success. Over the last five years, there have been significant advances in the tools available as well as the business processes by which data can be managed to support greater insights and gain competitive advantage. In fact, marketing groups today are frequently responsible for driving a specific percentage of company revenue so identifying revenue sourced by Sales or Marketing is critically important to measuring business performance.

But measuring marketing contribution is time, resource, and budget hungry. So how much should you invest? What tools will contribute to success given the maturity of your organization? In working with many different organizations, I have noticed common themes on the road to attribution maturity. Knowing where you are on this maturity timeline will help you plan for what may come next for your organization. While every company is unique, I believe there are common attribution lifecycle stages – and companies move through them as they need greater detail and insight.

So check out where you in attribution maturity so you can balance investment against the value of increasing visibility.

Stage 1 – Early Startup

Definition: Sales and Marketing have agreed upon revenue contribution percentages
Typical Revenue: $0-$500K ARR
Sales-Marketing Alignment: Handshake agreement on total new account revenue sourced by Marketing vs. Sales
CRM Deployment: Early deployment often still optimizing data and reporting process/structure
CRM Usage: Consistent campaign association is not yet defined for Leads, Contacts and Opportunities; Marketing automation may not be integrated with CRM
Attribution Process: Manual monthly or quarterly update of opportunities as Marketing vs. Sales sourced
Primary Challenges: Manual update of opportunities becomes overly time consuming

Stage 2 – Maturing Startup

Definition: CRM deployed with basic campaign attribution reporting
Revenue: $500K ARR – $5M ARR
Sales-Marketing Alignment: Attribution to Marketing or Sales identified and defined by first or last touch for new business; starting discussion on up-sell and cross-sell attribution
CRM Deployment: CRM standard utilization enforced, Sales forecast process optimization ongoing, Marketing automation integrated
CRM Usage: Both Sales and Marketing have created a data dictionary and have established standard processes for updates that have moderately successful usage
Attribution Process: CRM reporting using first or last touch for Marketing vs. Sales attribution
Primary Challenges: Both first and last touch neither accurately describe opportunity drivers nor comprehensively reflect Marketing and Sales program impacts

Stage 3 – Growth Startup

Definition: Specialized attribution software deployed in first version
Revenue: $5M ARR – $50M ARR
Sales-Marketing Alignment: Comprehensively defined Sales vs. Marketing source new business, upsell/cross-sell business and optimization of handoff processes
CRM Deployment: Utilize industry best practices for data integrity and reporting, generally solid compliance from Sales and Marketing teams, and relatively accurate sales forecasting; Initial deployment of third-party attribution tools
CRM Usage: Sales operations focusing on tight rep compliance with CRM, Marketing Operations focused on data quality and completeness
Attribution Process: Sales vs. Marketing sourced opportunities identified by campaign touches driving the MQL; utilizing both Sourced and Influenced models to optimize marketing performance
Primary Challenges: When sourced and influenced models do not accurately capture full account-based attribution impact or when weighted touch models are required to adjust campaign influence over customer journey

Stage 4 – IPO Readiness and Public Company

Definition: Specialized attribution software deployed in second iteration
Revenue: $50M ARR – $500M ARR+
Sales-Marketing Alignment: Business operations teams fully integrated across Sales and Marketing with BI dashboards/reporting; Monthly/Quarterly attribution reviews for program and process optimization; Early deployment of predictive revenue models
CRM Deployment: Sophisticated CRM deployment managed by business operations team with sophisticated reporting (BI tools) and data accuracy for regulatory compliance
CRM Usage: Well established guidelines and training; key processes are reinforced with end user compliance
Attribution Process: Multiple attribution models including weighted touch attribution and account-based models supported by analytics team to assist in utilization and interpretation of the data
Primary Challenges: Managing time, cost and complexity of attribution reporting as well as the ability of most marketing team members to absorb the complexity of these models

What has been your experience? Do these levels ring true? Was this helpful to your planning?

Lesson: As organizations grow, so do their needs for better attribution. It is important to make the right investments at the right time to keep attribution management time and costs in line with overall revenue goals.

Three Factors that Jeopardize Outbound Program Results

Challenge: Identifying Personas Within Buying Centers is Difficult

I had a brainstorm last week that I believe will lead to more productive outbound programs by identifying a problem inherent in many Account Based Marketing (ABM) programs. In sum, we need to improve how we develop our target buyers at the early stage of program launch. Since this is a new insight for me, this post focuses more on diagnosing he problem rather than recommending solutions. Have you found a better way? Love to hear your thoughts.

We must address several layers of issues to accurately target prospects in a scalable way providing the foundation for outbound/ABM programs. These layers act like concentric circles to get to the ideal program target list. Here are a set of three ‘formulas’ or reasons that describe the top three challenges:

Because:

ABM ≠ Buying Center

AND

Buying Center ≠ Persona

AND

Contacts ≠ Updated

Therefore

ABM ≠ $ROI Potential$

Let me explain.

First, we all love Account Based Marketing and understand that greater customization and effort focused on a limited set of accounts who represent your ideal customer will deliver higher conversion rates. However, when targeting enterprise accounts, there are different buying centers. More specifically, your offering may address the needs of and be purchased by multiple departments, so targeting a ‘company’ does not sufficiently address the buying center because there are actually multiple buying centers. For example, if you sell to developers, your target account many have many different groups of developers who will make different purchase decisions. And this raises further questions. Do these different departments (buying centers) have the same needs, pain points and interests? Do your value proposition, primary contacts and other key elements change across every buying center? If so, then many ABM programs may be missing the mark by not tailoring to a specific buying center within a target account. Factor #1: ABM ≠ Buying Center.

As we dig further into our outbound programs, the buyers are often not in the same department. The personas leading the purchase may be part of one department but in most cases there are personas from different departments involved in the buying decision. To accurately target an ‘Buying Center’, your programs need to consider all of the different contacts associated with the buying center (the collective group of people responsible for making the purchase decision). In many outbound/ABM programs, contacts are selected because they fit key personas but their position in the organization may not be identified in terms of how they fit within the buying center. Factor #2: Buying Center ≠ Persona.

Finally, the targets of our programs often shift jobs — up to 20% of contact details may change every year. While many organizations have deployed CRM account alignment solutions (DiscoverOrg, DataFox, D&B, …), few automatically update contact information. As contact take on new roles/responsibilities and as contacts change jobs, is your database staying current? Likely not. (Personal note — I would love to a cloud solution that automatically updated contact details as they change) Factor #3: frequently Contacts ≠ Updated.

While ABM provides a mechanism for better account and contact selection for outbound programs, there remains a huge gap between this method and how internal enterprise B2B purchase decisions are made. Therefore, your ABM may be delivering less revenue than it could if the programs were more carefully targeted. Clearly there are major gaps in our ability to map organizational buying decisions to a level where our systems can help us execute these programs at scale. That’s the bad news — but realizing this gap is the first step to designing better processes.

If we, as a marketing department, take our ABM efforts to the next level with tailored targeting processes, we will be more closely aligned with the actual purchase process. For now this starts with a careful examination of the purchase process, personas, target accounts and more, in order to develop a strategy with available tools. As we identify target accounts, we must identify all of the personas across the organization associated with the buying decision to increase success rates. We will need to lean harder on our tech stack providers to give us greater insights into these areas for better and easier segmentation at scale. In the end, this will be an optimization of outbound programs to have more precision and greater results.

Lesson: If we take the time to identify and target all of the contacts associated with organization buying centers, our outbound campaigns will be more productive and drive greater revenue.

The Road to ABM: Baby Steps Not Leaps

Challenge: To Cutover Hard or Migrate Gradually – that is the Question.

During a recent conversation about migrating from traditional inbound marketing to Account Based Marketing (ABM), a colleague noted that the optimal method was a hard cutover but that this would put a serious hole in his pipeline. He reasoned that this would entail a complete shift in targeting, team capabilities, tools, programs and more. Given that there is a certain sales cycle associated with driving Leads and Opportunities in this fashion, he believed this would blow a hole in the pipeline for six to twelve months due to the product sales cycle. This colleague is super smart leader with deep demand gen experience. However, I disagree agree with this assessment and I have yet to see this method in practice so I thought I would share my thoughts with my network for feedback.

My experience for over 20 years has been as a content and funnel marketer building programs to scale inbound leads and automate qualification into the sales funnel (see my recent blog on ‘continuous pipeline’). The concept of ABM is compelling, with benefits including increased focus, activity orchestration and higher conversion rates due to customized messaging targeting specific accounts and personas. Since I have also seen funnel conversion rates drop over the last five to ten years, ABM is a natural solution. However, in my experience at several different companies, the migration to ABM was a gradual process, not a hard cutover.

At one company where the focus was to drive end user trials in a land-and-expand model, we developed a target Account list based on the past customer lifetime value (LTV) selecting a prospect list most likely not only to land but also to expand. These prospects were run through a series of phone, email and postal outreach programs. The results were quickly positive resulting in significant pipeline in just two to three months. Gradually we added additional components including digital marketing and more fully integrated our online and field events to better address all stages of the customer journey. The result was positive pipeline impact in just a few months all while we continued most of our inbound marketing programs.

At another company with a SaaS based enterprise software application, the goal was to add-in a focused outbound ABM program to the existing inbound programs. We started by identifying the use cases where we had high win rates and successful deployments. We then selected accounts based on size, industry, technologies deployed and other key criteria as a target list from which the sales reps selected the specific accounts based on their past experience. The marketing team then built out contacts lists using agreed upon personas, designed email and phone outreach programs and rolled out the new systems and processes to the reps. In just two to three months we drove over $500K in new pipeline – again while we continued all the inbound programs. Going forward the plan is to add-in both digital marketing and events.

In neither case did we stop our inbound funnel, rather we designed the new programs to work with existing programs while we developed outbound ABM muscle. We made sure that there was capacity within the lead qualification teams to run the outbound ABM programs while still qualifying inbound leads. Also in both cases we started with simple email and phone campaigns and later moved to a more fully orchestrated ABM program. Some might not consider these programs “true ABM” but rather a targeted sales play — but I believe that’s just semantics. The bottom line is that my job is to drive pipeline and deals and these methods have been successful.

My experience has been mostly positive gradually migrating to ABM. How about you?

Lesson: I believe that the adage ‘moderation in all things’ applies to ABM migration. What have you seen?

Define Your Sales Motion First Before Applying Demand Generation

Challenge: When to Invest in Demand Generation?

Demand generation is a perennially ‘hot topic’ because every organization needs to ensure a consistent flow of prospects ongoing to ensure it can meet its sales objectives. Take the recent focus on Account Based Marketing as refinement of programs, processes, systems and data to orchestrate and optimize demand generation results. Every emerging organization must have a clear customer acquisition strategy – or at least a plan to get to one. These involve go to market channels/programs, MarTech stack, programs and ultimately the expected cost of customer acquisition. Since all early stage companies need to quickly scale sales, isn’t investing early in demand generation the sure fire way to do this?

All too often, companies are pouring money into the demand generation programs and systems without a clear understanding of the customer journey. Demand generation is a set of tools and processes designed to support successful customer acquisition, onboarding through to customer success and advocacy. Without clearly understanding both the buyer persona and their journey, marketing cannot hope to make this process faster and more reliable.

This thought was raised in a recent article posted by a CEO entitled “How I Burned 10 Million Dollars So You Don’t Have To”. In the article, Matt Munson notes:

“We went ALL IN on an inside sales driven model. For good reason. With solid proof. But we nearly broke the company. We certainly caused incredible heartache for dozens of people.

I wish we’d tested earlier. More thoughtfully.

I regret not staying smaller for longer. Living off $3M to find product-market fit, with a real, scalable acquisition channel. And keeping the other $5M in the bank for scaling powder.”

Matt’s quote is spot on. It is so clear that we need to get this right. Every discretionary dollar is precious – and we can’t start data gathering and testing early enough. Moreover, before we spend anything, we need to clearly understand where in the customer journey this program or tool will have impact and how we will measure its effectiveness.

The best early stage companies I have seen most recently focus solely on sales in the early stages before engaging marketing to help scale. Even later, with a defined sales process, these early investments need to be scoped and measured appropriately. Over the past several years, I have been continually surprised with results and had to make significant resource allocation changes. Matt’s advice is true for us all. First identify the buyers and their process from awareness to engagement to purchase and to ongoing success. Set in place expectations for your programs – in cost, conversion rate, timing and more. Doing this on a shoestring marketing and sales budget is the right place to start and forms the basis of ongoing testing and optimization.

Investing in demand generation people, systems and processes too early can easily drive interest and engagement that does not result in revenue. The result is a recipe to burn cash and miss key milestones.

Lesson: Understand your sales motion first and only then scale demand generation with a measurement and test plan in place.

To Incent (a trial) or Not To Incent? It Depends.

Challenge: A case study in paying prospects for a trial experience

Blog Note – this is an edited version of a longer write-up.

Summary:

Many companies rely on a free trial experience to drive prospect engagement. I had this very experience at with a company, a journey that took 18 months.

The objective was to drive the target buyer into a 14-day free trial (which, at the time, influenced more than 70 percent of closed-won business). Marketing’s goal was to dramatically increase the quantity of trials at the same conversion level while closely managing the cost of customer acquisition.

We experimented with a $25 Starbucks gift card offer for installing the trial as well as attending the daily demo. By tying the incentive to both the trial and demo, prospects would see the product capabilities and try it out for themselves in rapid succession in an attempt to drive that “a-ha moment” when the prospect clearly sees the value to them personally and to their company.

To evaluate impact of this offer, we broke this down in phases. First we tested it as a one time email offer to our database, then identified mechanisms to automate both the offer and card delivery in select channels like our integrated nurture process and finally expanded to an offer on our website to dramatically scale the offer. And after 18 months of great results, we eventually pulled the offer – and this is the story of that journey.

Evaluating Results

First, the team sent a one-off database email with a split test comparing a basic trial offer with no incentive to the offer of the Starbucks gift card, requiring both trial installation and daily demo. We measured impact on both click thru rate (CTR) and form completion rate. Email CTR increased by 3x (.9% to 2.7%). However, in order to qualify for the gift card, the prospect had to fill out two forms – the trial and the daily demo. When comparing the single trial landing page conversion rate with the rate of those completing both forms, the completion rate went from 68% for the trial alone to 42% for both forms. Digging deeper, the trial form completion rate was identical (68%) – so the subsequent demo registrations represented a net gain and therefore was viewed as a cost-effective promotion (and down funnel conversion rates remained unchanged). Net – 3x increase in CTR with the same trial landing page conversion rate with incremental increase in daily demo registrations. After 4-6 weeks, the down funnel conversion rates were comparable to non-incentivized trials.

With this proven one-time offer, the team evaluated ways to expand the reach of this offer. The decision was to run an A/B test of the trial incentive in our ongoing integrated email nurture. The trial was a middle of funnel (MOF) nurture offer to prospects who met quality scoring thresholds. Again, the results were positive. The CTR for the trial alone was 3.9% versus 10.6% for the Starbucks offer with similar landing page results above. However, now we had instrumented an automated delivery and fulfillment of this offer – so we dramatically increased trials while only rewarding for success events – namely participation in daily demo and trial campaigns that were highly correlated with closed-won business. But we only made this offer to qualified prospects who entered the funnel from a variety of other marketing programs. And with automated fulfillment, there was minimal additional labor required from the team. But could we do more?…

Next, the team examined if it was possible to further broaden the offer but still maintain high down-funnel conversion rates. At that time we implemented a website conversion optimization technology called BounceExchange (BX), which detects web visitors ready to abandon and raises an offer via a pop-over window. BX would make the Starbucks trial incentive even more broadly available to some/all website visitors. We added the Starbucks offer to BounceExchange with great results: the website trial CTR increased from 1.72% to 2.48%, a 44% conversion rate bump. With our growing website traffic, this had a tremendous impact on our trial conversions, driving over 4000 incremental trial conversions at a CPL of approximately one-tenth of paid search campaigns.

Remember that the offer was designed such that the $25 incentive would be delivered only if the prospect were to both download the trial and attend the daily demo. So the team felt really good about top of funnel results. Looking down funnel, for the next 12 months, we saw a consistent ~20% MQL to SAO conversion rate for these trial offers – consistent with non-incented trials. Finally, putting an ROI lens on this offer, it increased cost per opportunity by $125 ($25/.2) – staying within our cost-per-opportunity target.

Incentive EOL

Alas, the good times did not roll on forever. Over time, two developments led to our halting this offer. The first was an erosion of conversion rates, which happened gradually. We suspect that there may have been saturation of the offer with our target prospects. Second, we encountered fraudulent postings to this offer beyond our target audience. While we were able to respond quickly to limit potential expenses, the time required to monitor and correct these offers represented ongoing support by resources that could be focused elsewhere. So approximately 18 months after the start of this journey, we removed the offer.

Lesson Learned

Incentives to drive the right prospect behavior worked well for a while and supported scaling at a key time of company growth. Designing both the offer and automating fulfillment were key. However, as with many marketing campaigns, great programs have an end-of-life and should be constantly and closely monitored.

Marketing Attribution – Worth the Effort?

Challenge: Considering the Challenges of Marketing Attribution, How Deep Should You Go?

Marketing attribution is a hot topic. You need to know which programs are worth the effort and expense and marketing must demonstrate its contribution to revenue. In fact, both marketing and sales must both carefully plan and measure their unique contributions to more accurately predict revenue.

However, Sergio Maldonado’s recent guest post on Scott Brinker’s Chief Martec blog raised some very important questions about the veracity of marketing attribution. The article challenging various aspects of marketing attribution is timely and worth a careful read. It also caused me to re-evaluate my ongoing efforts to focus on attribution.

The journey starts with developing a standardized way to tag Leads, Contacts and Opportunities to marketing campaigns, followed by a methodology to differentiate sales from marketing contribution (as well as sourced versus influenced). Adding various program costs and labor investment to the formula provides a more complete picture. However, this tells just part of the story as it analyzes attribution from first ‘form conversion’ to closed deal, without consideration for pre-conversion activities.

Tracking and attributing the activity of all stakeholders before form conversion is more difficult. Furthermore, attribution-to-revenue calculations only provide results for Contacts associated with a closed-won Opportunity, whereas other Leads and Contacts not associated often influence the deal. Therefore, this methodology ignores Leads and Contacts that influence but are not associated with the opportunity as well as all awareness phase marketing touchpoints that positively affected the opportunity.

By focusing only on campaigns with direct attribution, marketing may erroneously optimize for those programs only – at the expense of awareness and early stage funnel activities where attribution is much more difficult. The resulting focus on ‘directly attributable campaigns’ that occur at or after the first form conversion can easily result in a decreased ‘share of voice’ and ignore important early stage touch points. Often, sales prospects are unaware they have a problem or they’re unfamiliar with solutions better suited to their challenge. Awareness programs focusing on the earliest stages of the sales cycle are key to growing sales in the long run.

So if strict adherence to attribution metrics will lead to sub-optimal marketing resource allocation, should marketing invest time and resources in it? Unequivocally yes. At the highest level, Lord Kelvin was right when he said, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.” The attribution process is not at fault here (though it can and will certainly improve), rather the issue is how this data is used to make marketing investment decisions. Even though early stage program investments are not measurable in the same way that later stage programs are, they remain an important part of the marketing mix. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the marketing team to explain and defend these ‘awareness’ investments for the long-term health of the organization. The marketing team should also look for important correlations to justify these programs (correlations of direct/organic traffic with various programs, for instance).

In my opinion, marketing must continue to pursue attribution while keeping in mind the limitations of the current systems. Marketing investments should be made recognizing that the team cannot measure all aspects of the marketing mix, and more importantly, additional attribution effort investments should be made with an eye on overall effectiveness. While imperfect, I am reminded of the saying, ‘Even one candle sheds a lot of light in a dark room.’ Without attribution, marketing has no guidance about future investments. But at the same time, marketing programs with impacts that are difficult to measure must not be ignored.

[Important note: Management should also look at the costs and benefits of the attribution process itself to ensure it is worth the effort. Tracking every last ounce of attribution adds significantly in terms of labor and cost, and at some point, these programs reach diminishing marginal returns. How a marketing team should optimize its spend on marketing attribution is a discussion for another time.]

Lesson: Spending time and resources on marketing attribution is critical, but it is just as crucial to realize program and system limitations to make truly optimized investment decisions.

If You Don’t Know Where you’re Going, Any Road Will Take You There

Challenge: How do you build and maintain long term motivation from your team?

Start with the end in mind. That’s a really simple statement but it can be challenging to put into practice. How often do you leave the office and say ‘What did I do today?’ or ‘Did I really accomplish what was most important?’ In today’s multitasking work environment, we’re pulled in so many directions and by so many means: Phone calls, emails, meetings, travel – and all in an environment of change. Yesterday’s plans are put aside for new action plans.

Fortunately, a few simple steps can bring clarity, sanity and most importantly, increased motivation for your team members. This starts with a process of developing organizational objectives from the executive staff and then translating them for everyone in the organization. Organizations just need to translate CEO objectives into those that fall onto the VP Marketing and so on to all in marketing. Simple, right? What if your organization does not have this in place? Good news – you can still put this into action, all on your own.

In outbound marketing and lead generation, you are responsible for sales targets. You can take the quarterly sales objectives and drive these into executable programs. These might impact new opportunities, increase awareness, target verticals or geographies, support sales enablement and more.

So you can ask – do these new requests I just received via email or on a call support my target objectives? Are these tasks somehow more important than the ones already on your plate? Our time is a zero sum game. We only get one chance to complete the day ahead of us and spend our time most effectively. If we get new incoming requests, we need to compare these to the current tasks in plan. Put your plans into place and take these to your manager, Director or VP. This will start a conversation regarding which programs will best support the target objectives. You may even develop a set of quarterly objectives for the team (positive steps!). Once agreed, as plans change, you can raise these up to ensure that the new plans better support your objectives.

The result? Not only will you have better alignment and coordination in your team, but also better motivation by feeling more connected with the organization. You will feel more engaged knowing that your activities directly contribute to the advancement of the organization. Being a part of a successful organization and knowing the role you play is a great source of ongoing motivation.

Lesson: Aligning objectives throughout the organization drives increased motivation