Month: April 2022

TLDR: As a sales rep, your instinct might be to keep your core client base as far away from marketing as possible—but that would be a mistake. From working together to define who these targets are and creating joint efforts to reach them, there are so many opportunities to have marketing and sales work together on reaching this key base. Here’s how you can start the conversation and foster that alignment.

Let’s face it, more often than not, sales reps are hesitant (at best) to share their core client base with marketing.

We get it.

You don’t want marketers to get in the way of your communication flows or interrupt them with messaging that might distract prospects from your interactions with them.

However, there’s a lot to gain from having sales and marketing aligned and working together to meet your core clients where they are—and delivering a more optimized path to purchase.

It’s a scenario worth testing if only to see whether it fosters more engagement from your core client base.

Try it out and keep an eye on your key metrics, that’s what should be guiding your decisions. And remember, just because one approach fails, doesn’t mean that a slightly different alternative won’t be effective.

So, if you’re ready to take that initiative and get marketing on your side, here are some insights that might be useful as you talk to your marketers about core client bases.

Set a foundation

The first thing you can do is make sure you’re all on the same page about what the core client base is. If you want to use terms that resonate with marketers, consider the following definition.

What is a core client base? A core client or customer base is a group made up of customer personas that the sales team is targeting because they’re the most likely to need and purchase your products or services. They represent the deals that should be easiest to close and are therefore a high priority for sales reps. This persona is defined with a set of parameters including:

• the industry they operate in
• the number of employees they work with
• their decision-making abilities, and
• whether there’s an existing relationship with someone on your team.

Beyond that, the decision to add a prospect to the core client base is determined by the:

• amount of time it might take to close the deal
• potential return on investment, and
• profitability of the deal.

Ultimately, if a deal isn’t profitable because you have to bring in a bunch of resources for just a tiny slice of the pie, it’s not worth the effort.

A big way you can bring your marketing team into the conversation is by getting their help in reviewing and refining the parameters that define your core customer. How close are they to the parameters they use for determining who to market to?

At the end of the day, your core customer base should align with the target personas they’ve identified, as that will make it much easier for both teams to work together towards the same goal.

Find the points of alignment

Beyond identifying the core client base, there are a number of places where sales and marketing can work together to make those interactions as effective as possible. Consider these as you talk to your marketing team about potential opportunities for collaboration.

1. Landing on collective timelines

When sales and marketing work independently, it’s far more likely that they reach out to the same people with different messages.

This could mean that someone at a prospect’s company is in both a sales sequence and a marketing sequence at the same time, receiving emails on the same day that do little more than flood their inbox. In this scenario—which isn’t uncommon—sales and marketing get in the way of each other.

The alternative is to create an environment where there’s clear full transparency into who is talking to someone in the core client base and when. This strategy creates clear handoff points for when marketing can step in if a sales conversation is paused or vice versa.

2. Building a single source of truth

If you’ve built a robust sales and marketing tech stack, your customer and prospect data likely lives in a number of different places.

That shouldn’t be the case.

Instead, there should be a single source of truth for prospect information that’s available to both teams.

For instance, if you’re logging your prospect data and key activities in Salesforce, any relevant fields should be made readable to your marketing automation platform and any outreach tools.

Taking a step back, sales and marketing are going to have to spend some time getting aligned on what fields you are using and the stages a lead should pass through to prompt a particular activity.

3. Capitalizing on personalization

Don’t forget that your marketing team has the skills and resources to help you be more effective in reaching your core client base.

For starters, they can help you create collateral that showcases your understanding of the prospect and connects the dots on how your product or service can support them.

Marketing can also provide information such as whether your prospect has visited your website and any other metrics that sales can use in an automated approach to personalize messaging.

A joint effort leads to success

Your core client base is a big priority for sales teams and it should be.

Working with marketing, and making sure your efforts are collaborative (rather than combative), can accelerate your success rate with these targets—but they’re not going to help you if they don’t know about it. Start the conversation with your Marketing team, and see how you can work together to strengthen your efforts.

Need help creating an effective, multidisciplinary program for reaching your core client base? We can help.

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TLDR: Seismic is a boost to RevOps teams who’re looking to surface content more efficiently and better understand how content contributes to revenue. But the platform is most successful when paired with ongoing efforts to produce and organize content to a high standard.

Content lets organizations tell the story of their value to customers and prospects. RevOps teams often struggle to surface the value that content provides and double down on what works.

Without reliable insights into how content performs with its audience, marketing leaders find it difficult to prove how content contributes to the bottom line. 

Sales also needs content analytics to determine how best to personalize their story for each prospect. Without a well-organized system to categorize and manage content, sales risks sinking hours into searching for and sending out pieces that are outdated or ill-suited to the customer.

If your RevOps team struggles to optimize content, this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you.

With a single source of truth to categorize and analyze content, RevOps teams can make decisions that help to close deals—and prove it. That’s the essence of what Seismic offers, and this piece will help you discuss the need-to-know aspects of the tool with RevOps.

Surface your best content

Seismic is a sales enablement platform that provides automated content management and analytics to makes RevOps’ lives easier. 

Admins can set permissions so sales only needs to search through content relevant to their accounts and campaigns. Then, sales can identify which pieces of content to deploy based on a series of categorizations that describe the properties of each content piece at a glance (e.g., asset types, relevant personas and products, sales stage to be deployed).

Seismic will save sales a few headaches if you have a well-developed content library but lack the processes to efficiently surface the most appropriate pieces.

Rather than clinging to a few pieces of content and deploying them past their expiry dates, sales gets an easy way to explore the deep bench of your library and engage prospects creatively with various pieces. 

Seismic also cuts down the significant amounts of time that reps spend just trying to get their hands on content. No need to trawl through a disoriented database or chase content people to ask for pieces.

Teams can actively surface the most relevant, useful content to serve to prospect by searching for content via filters like:

• client type
• topic, or
• customizable options.

Connect content to dollars

The platform also tracks and reports on how prospects and opportunities engage with the content your team sends them. Seismic’s analytics let sales and marketing gauge how well each piece resonates with recipients and draw a direct line between content interactions and deals. 

For marketing, Seismic clears the uncertainty of how content contributes to the bottom line.

Marketing can map content engagement stats onto close rates and gain a stronger grasp of what types of content win deals from different prospect segments. 

With clear insight into how content provides value, RevOps teams can rethink for the better how they create content and personalize their outreach to each prospect.

Before you sign

For the ways that Seismic helps RevOps, the platform isn’t a silver bullet for poor organizational systems.

Seismic will be organized similarly to your source information on SharePoint or Drive, meaning that the platform’s presentation and categorization of content will be just as clear as your original folder structure.

In other words: if you’re in a mess, clean it up before you get Seismic.

To do that, RevOps needs to answer a few questions:

• What are your naming conventions?
• How will you tag and categorize content?
• Where will content live depending on its category—e.g., persona groups, internal or external?
  

Your team should work through these details until you can confidently identify content by three key properties:

• what each piece is
• who it targets, and
• the situations you intend to use it.

From there, Seismic allows RevOps to categorize, present, and analyze the performance of content—but it isn’t going to boost the underlying quality of that content.

If your bottom-of-funnel pieces aren’t inspiring opportunities to buy what you’re selling, then your RevOps team should consider doing an audit for quality.

Ask your team if the pieces:

• Well-written and presented?
• Relevant to your persona and industry groups?
• Conveying the right level of information for the stage in the sales cycle? 

As much as Seismic’s analytics let RevOps spot trends and steer the direction of content to capitalize on engagement, the execution of those insights is always going to split the difference between landing a deal or not.

The bottom line

Ultimately, Seismic is a boost to RevOps teams who’re looking to surface content from their libraries more efficiently and better understand how content contributes to revenue.

As long as RevOps puts in the work to organize content and produce it to a high standard, teams can use the platform’s analytics to create and deploy content in a way that wrings more dollars from customer engagement.

For any advice on assessing sales enablement platforms or connecting content to revenue, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Knak is the first campaign creation platform for enterprise marketing teams—and it seriously speeds up the production of emails and landing pages. But together, Knak and Revenue Pulse give you as much control as you want over emails and landing pages, deployed at the speed you need.

When working with agencies to create emails and landing pages, cost and timelines are often out of your hands.

Emails can cost you anywhere from several grand each to tens of thousands for a batch.

After factoring in your partner’s various processes and steps, campaigns might take weeks to get out the door. And even then, code errors and display issues can creep into the final product.

This production process is crying out for improvement:

• high price tags
• high wait times
• limited ability to shift direction mid-campaign, and
• no guarantees of perfection.

Hard truth: Your marketing operations function will struggle to be as productive and profitable as it deserves if these issues slow down and strain the execution of your most basic campaign materials.

Good news: It doesn’t have to be this way. For this Tough Talks Made Easy, pull up a chair with your CMO and CFO. It’s time to tell them about Knak.

The basics of Knak

Knak is the first campaign creation platform for enterprise marketing teams. It seriously speeds up the creation of emails and landing pages.

Knak makes it possible for users to create code-free emails and landing pages. Knak boasts an average production time of 23 minutes. 

If your C-Suite needs a sense of what this means for agility: this is roughly the amount of time you’d spend briefing an agency, or even less. From there, the agency would likely return your campaign materials several days or weeks down the line.

Compare 23 minutes to weeks for one email. Now imagine the productivity gains across a whole working week, with all the coding and drawn-out processes eliminated.

That increased speed also fuels value for money. Putting your previous email budget into a Knak subscription frees you to quickly execute unlimited emails and landing pages against your budget, and it also saves significant cash money.

The result? Greater bang for the buck and streamlined spending compared to working piecemeal with agencies on campaigns. 

Brand control

Persuasive as that might be for your CFO, your CMO also wants to hear about brand control.

Knak lets you populate templates with your organization’s branding, and the platform’s approval workflows and permission management mean that only the people relevant to each campaign can make changes. 

In other words: you avoid a ‘too many cooks’ situation where people spoil your assets with inconsistency. The people in your team who really understand customers unleash their creativity on beautiful, on-brand emails and landing pages—and get them to market up to 95% faster than before. 

That’s a significant leap forward, but for some organizations, time is too valuable.

Your CMO might still prefer to delegate all executional work and have MOPs steer strategy and deliver high-value projects. If that’s the position your leadership’s in, we’ve got even better news for you.

Knak + RP = A perfect match

When it comes to agencies, Knak works exclusively with Revenue Pulse.

Working with both at the same time drives even more value from your investment. Our staff are Knak experts, and you have the option of deferring to our team for the hands-on work while delivering campaigns exponentially faster with Knak.

For C-Suite, this is where the magic really happens: together, Knak and Revenue Pulse give you as much control as you want over emails and landing pages, deployed at the speed you need.

Both sides of this partnership amplify each other to substantially increase the agility and control you have with campaigns. It’s far beyond what other agencies that provide these services can offer.

Focus on A-list strategy

With emails and landing pages being created faster than ever, perhaps off your plate entirely, this opens the door to high-level prioritization.

Your CMO can elevate the workload of your MOPs or RevOps teams so your time and energy are spent achieving A-list strategic items, like:

• lead lifecycles
• lead scoring
• attribution, and
• analytics.

The ability to iterate fast and valuable projects that deepen the sophistication of your marketing operations team leads to evolving maturity.

The more you can execute and refine campaigns, the more you can optimize the ROI and impact of your marketing automation investment. 

Long-term, using Knak and RP together expedites your evolution into an operation that produces effective campaigns with swift efficiency to the benefit of your bottom line.

This is what C-Suite ultimately wants marketing operations to achieve. Knak and Revenue Pulse give you the tools and the expertise to get there.

Knak was born of a necessary need to simplify complex processes with emails and landing pages. As it develops to become the starting point to create any campaign, we’re excited to see how else we can make the lives of marketers easier.

Curious about Knak and/or Revenue Pulse? Contact us or our friends at Knak for a chat.

TLDR: Some marketing metrics power better decisions; others can’t. Learn the difference between vanity and impact metrics to stay focused on the data points that matter.

In the past, marketers who didn’t have analytics tools relied on vanity metrics to interpret the impact of campaigns on business growth.

Today, marketing is an increasingly data-driven profession. There is a strong emphasis on analyzing and reporting campaign performance and how it contributes to revenue.

In organizations where the data literacy of senior leaders and stakeholders around the business is underdeveloped, Marketing has a challenging but important task: Choose the data that matters and translate it into narratives the business can use to support growth and improvement.

By the end of this article, you’ll be able to discuss the real value of marketing data with your C-Suite.

You’ll learn the difference between vanity metrics which focus on optics, and impact metrics that power better decisions and encourage your leaders to gain a firm grasp on data points that matter for understanding and improving commercial performance.

The qualities of impact

In conversation with your CMO or CEO, they’ll want to understand, at a glance, what’s happening with your campaign tactics to drive ROI.

The two qualities of a valuable impact metric are its:

• accuracy, and
• capability to project or calculate the impact on pipeline or revenue.

If you can’t be sure of its reliability or apply insight from that data to make campaign decisions that generate growth opportunities, what you have is a vanity metric—a number that might seem impressive at a glance, but has a very limited ability to inspire constructive actions.

Email campaigns are especially notable nowadays for yielding vanity metrics.

Many organizations have implemented bots to screen for and block malicious email components. These bots pre-open emails before delivery and may even click links and follow through to scan for questionable content, which produces inflated engagement metrics.

C-Suite might view opens and clicks as a helpful baseline to gauge the extent of positive response, but you can’t bank on any deeper insight than that.

This is ultimately a siloed data set that doesn’t correspond with any activity that increases pipeline or revenue, nor is it reliable.

How does marketing affect the bottom line?

For top-level metrics to convey any strategic value to C-Suite or answer questions about Marketing’s impact, your reporting must prove a connection between particular engagement stats and down-funnel activity.

Following an event, for instance, it would be methodologically impossible to base any ROI calculation or forecast on the number of registrations or interactions you’ve experienced.

Instead, C-Suite needs to see deeper into the data:

• How many of your engagements converted into opportunities?
• What are your close rates from this?
• Are Marketing’s campaigns and content increasing the likelihood of closure?

These are the links that help C-Suite understand how marketing activities contribute to deals and allow you to form and test hypotheses with your campaign expenditures to optimize growth.

Focus on conversions

Let’s say your webinar nets 50 closed deals from 4,000 attendees—will ramping up spend on webinars produce a proportional increase in conversions?

Your CMO and CRO want to know how Marketing contributes to the bottom line. By analyzing conversion metrics, Marketing can play with levers to increase conversion ratios at each stage of the funnel and significantly support the achievement of financial targets.

C-Suite should understand that this requires investment. The cost of engagements sets your budget. If leadership wants to see Marketing optimize their rate of conversions to opportunities, they’ll need to sign off on a larger campaign budget.

If C-Suite has only had exposure to vanity metrics in the past, the way to convey impact is to continuously forge connections between various data points and their bearing on deals.

Here’s a good example to illustrate this. MQLs to SQLs is a strong indicator of how well Marketing is qualifying leads, but its meaning is limited in a silo. Connect the dots between MQLs, SQLs, and deals, and you have a story to tell C-Suite about how your campaigns drive dollars into the business.

Input vs. output

Depending on the numerical literacy of your organization’s leaders, you may have to strip away the technical jargon that comes with metrics and get straight to the essence of value. In a nutshell, it’s input vs. output.

By analyzing and reporting on data about conversions to opportunities and closed deals, you assess how much output the business receives from a given input, and where the opportunities lie to increase spending and maximize return.

By comparison, vanity metrics (i.e. engagement stats in siloes) reveal nothing about ROI, and so can’t influence well-informed decisions about the direction of your Marketing activities.

As your business ramps up, and senior figures become more confident in their understanding of meaningful Marketing data, it’s wise to flag that this input vs. output analysis cannot happen manually at a large scale.

In order to evolve your metrics, leadership should invest in attribution modeling to gather and synthesize campaign data so you can continue to understand how marketing efforts make an impact and unearth opportunities to generate growth.

For any guidance you need with interpreting the value of your data, or getting attribution off the ground, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

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TLDR: Marketo Sales Insight provides easy access to deep intelligence that helps sales close deals, but the value is only apparent when sales and marketing work well together.

Why collaboration matters: If your marketing and sales teams don’t collaborate closely with each other, it’s likely that sales underestimates just how much marketing’s data and technical knowledge can help them perform.

Hidden features, big impact: For the various ways that Salesforce and Marketo integrate, there’s one particular feature of Marketo that can set sales up to succeed but siloed work environments often cause it to fly under the radar.

What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you explain to sales the value of Marketo Sales Insight (MSI) and how sales and marketing teams need to work together to get the best from it. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Lift up sales

➡️ Demonstrate credibility

➡️ Influence a greater appreciation from sales towards the value of marketing’s work.

What is Marketo Sales Insight?

Marketo Sales Insight (sometimes called Sales Insight Marketo) is an application that runs directly in your CRM. It effectively gives sales a direct portal to marketing’s analytics, with a range of features that allow sales to better understand how leads and prospects respond to campaigns and engage with your brand.

Among the capabilities that Marketo Sales Insights has, there are a couple to call out that really drive home the benefits.

• Best Bets: Best Bets provides an at-a-glance ranking of leads scored by recency—the most powerful indicator for propensity to buy. Sales can use this to prioritize the best leads and strike while the iron is hot.
• Interesting moments: Reps can then see an activity history for each lead. The history includes a set of interesting moments defined by marketing —engagements like form fills, webinar attendance, and links clicked.
• Personalized outreach: Based on this information, sales can personalize their outreach with knowledge of each lead’s interests and needs.

Marketo Sales Insight provides easy access to a depth of intelligence.

Marketo Sales Insight provides easy access to a depth of intelligence.

Using it regularly can make sales more productive and enhance their ability to close deals. But, as with all tools, the benefits don’t reap themselves.

Before you get started with MSI, it’s important to address any structural issues that have prevented your teams from already using it.

Partners in growth

The value of MSI is clear as day in the parts of your business where sales and marketing work as a well-oiled machine. That means:

• the integration between Marketo and your CRM is set up
• marketing punctually updates Marketo Sales Insight with the latest campaign response data, and
• sales then uses it to have timely and engaging conversations with leads.

The reality often differs. Marketo Sales Insight is notably underused for a default Marketo app, partially due to confusion around licensing.

Teams often mistake Marketo Sales Insights for a Salesforce plugin that renders marketing emails in Outlook.

A useful point to clarify for sales: unlike this plugin, MSI doesn’t require a separate license from Marketo (and extra expense) to use.

The organizations that use MSI do so to varying degrees of competency, which brings up a deeper problem.

Here are a few examples of the powerful capabilities in MSI that are lost on teams that lack the maturity to execute them:

• comprehensive lead scoring
• prioritization models
• buyer activity tracking, and
• customer engagement monitoring.

Get your house in order

If your marketing and sales teams work in a siloed environment without the mechanisms or appetite to share data and knowledge with each other, then using MSI is only viable if your teams treat it as the foundation on which to build a collaborative relationship.

The key to getting sales on side is to make sure your house is in order.

Marketing should be properly set up to capture and report on customer behavior across your website, email, and other online channels.

Marketing must also be prepared to define elements in MSI like nurture program reporting and Interesting Moments from each customer’s engagement history.

Frame Marketo Sales Insight to Sales as a partnership that helps their performance.

If you have that figured out, frame Marketo Sales Insight to Sales as an opportunity to create a partnership that helps their performance.

Offer to train sales on MSI, and you’ll encourage them to consider how marketing’s efforts, and collaboration with marketing, ultimately aid the pursuit of growth.

The takeaway

In summary, MSI makes your sales team’s lives considerably easier. It allows them to:

• prioritize the most urgent leads
• drill down into their historical interactions with your brand
• build compelling stories that produce more effective outreach communications, and
• save time otherwise spent digging through tools or waiting for reports to get the most vital information.

That said, MSI demands that teams resolve their maturity issues.

For one, marketing’s data collection and reporting should be robust enough to feed sales with the most useful information. Both teams should prepare to overcome friction and work together, which, for sales, means being receptive to marketing’s guidance towards interpreting the numbers.

When that agreement’s in place, Marketing Sales Insight helps both sides of your revenue operation to perform.

Need some Marketo advice, MSI or otherwise? Get in touch