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Month: January 2023

Data Privacy and Reputation: Protecting Your Business

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TLDR: Data privacy regulations are evolving fast, and businesses in breach face harsh financial penalties and reputational damage. Bring RevOps, legal, sales, and marketing together every quarter to set the agenda for your data privacy strategy, review your processes, and plan around new compliance requirements. Hiring a data privacy officer and investing in cybersecurity are strong measures to properly process and protect customer data.

The data privacy landscape moves fast. As regulations emerge worldwide, businesses that collect, store, and use customer data face a complex web of compliance responsibilities.

Businesses that breach data privacy regulations, even unintentionally, face steep consequences. Regulators can place data handling restrictions on companies and issue sharp fines. To date, EU regulators have enforced over €1.5 billion in penalties to organizations in breach, with an average of €1.4 million per fine.

In a time when people are more conscious than ever about how businesses handle their data, falling foul of regulations is an easy way to shatter customer trust.

Now is the time to act. To stay compliant, your RevOps team needs to know how the interlocking data privacy regulations apply to the territories where you handle customer and prospect data. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn to identify where the challenges and blind spots lie within your company, and the processes you should implement to keep on top of your responsibilities.

 

Challenges with data privacy

Companies tend not to proactively review their data privacy policy, which causes them to fall behind the times and incur fines. Many major markets (EU, Japan, India, Australia, Brazil, and some US states) have regulations that place responsibility on the organizations operating in these territories or collecting data on their residents.

While data privacy is more complex for organizations operating internationally, multiple regulations can apply even when doing business in one local market.

As the regulatory landscape evolves, it’s important to stay in the loop with how these frameworks shape your legal obligations and data practices. It’s particularly crucial if your business is considering expanding into international markets.

Organizations typically focus on online practices when designing a data privacy strategy, sometimes, to the detriment of offline behavior. The age-old challenge of sales and marketing alignment becomes relevant to compliance here.

Important: As Sales Ops and MOPs send customer and prospect data between platforms, both teams should know how they’re allowed to use and store this data to avoid taking actions that violate the privacy rights of people in the dataset.

 

Measures to take

To set the agenda for data privacy strategy, RevOps should get together with legal, sales, and marketing every three to six months. Across teams, you want everyone to have a good grasp of their responsibilities and have an eye on the regulatory movements that could impact their work.  

 

First, answer these questions during an initial meeting:

  • How are privacy and cookie policies evolving?
  • What are our regulatory requirements for each market we do business in?
  • How might our usage of tools and the web need to shift to meet new requirements?
  • What gaps do we have in implementing compliance policies?

 

Next, review your data processes:

From there, review your data capture, storage, and deletion processes. When capturing data, timestamp the date and time people submit contact forms, why they’re contacting your business, and whether they’ve opted in to receive marketing communications. For logging and auditing purposes, this creates evidence that you’ve lawfully obtained the authorized data.

For sales ops and marketing ops, set up filters to segment the people in your dataset based on the communications they’ve opted in or out of receiving. Read our piece on data hygiene to learn more.

For prospects who’ve unsubscribed from your communications, check in with legal to decide when to delete their data entirely. And it helps to test regularly that your measures are working as planned. Are your filters and timestamps working correctly? Are you deleting data when required? Are you storing it in secure places that don’t violate compliance policies?

 

Finally, hire a data privacy officer:

Hiring a data privacy officer is a smart move. DPOs are experts in:

  • keeping up with regulatory evolution
  • guiding policies and processes, and
  • educating people on the risks of non-compliance is a smart move to advocate.

 
If the budget to hire for such a role is a concern, it’s worth mentioning the penalties that regulators can apply. E.U. authorities, for instance, can enforce the GDPR with fines of up to €20 million, or up to 4% of a company’s global annual turnover.

For similar reasons, cybersecurity training and tools are worth pushing for. Data breaches decrease customer confidence and brand strength while making fines and legal action all the more likely—so by investing in data protection, you invest in protecting your customers and your reputation.

 

Create trust

People want to do business with organizations they trust.

By making a cultural and financial investment in data privacy, you get to:

  • keep your business from appearing under the limelight for the wrong reasons
  • avoid fines and restrictions on how your RevOps team uses data, and
  • better understand the processes to implement if you’re expanding into new markets.

 
Want to learn more about the actions you can take to remain GDPR compliant? Get in touch with us.

Can I Re-Engage Closed Lost Opportunities?

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Hi Joe,

I’m curious if there’s ever a time when it makes sense to reach out to closed lost opportunities.

Our team just launched some new features, and it seems like a waste not to reach out to people that we’ve engaged with in the past.

What do you think?

Thank you,

Intrigued Ivan

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Ivan, you hit the nail on the head.

Sales and marketing teams put a lot of effort into acquiring leads and this isn’t a cheap process.

Collecting all that information, categorizing it, and maintaining those records takes time and resources.

The main thing to remember with closed lost opportunities: just because a prospect isn’t interested today doesn’t mean they won’t need your product down the line.

Ignoring your closed lost opportunities means leaving out a big part of your audience when you have a new feature or flash sale to promote.

 

Categorize your opportunities

There are many reasons a prospect might drop out of the sales process:

  • no need for your product/service at the time
  • budget limitations, or
  • a desire for features you don’t offer yet.

A good practice is to sort these closed lost opps based on the constraints that stop them from making a purchase.

Once you have your subcategories, you create a customized re-engagement approach for each type.

With more focused communications and programming, you’ll have a more meaningful way to reach your prospects, which can go a long way to closing the deal.

 

Dos and don’ts

When re-engaging a closed lost opportunity, you want to ensure they have a net new experience with your brand.

Don’t do this:

You do not want them ending up in the same campaigns, reading the same materials, or hearing the same sales pitch they didn’t respond to the first time.

Do this:

There was a reason they were closed lost before. Make sure that the content and information they’re receiving are fresh and new (to them).

  • Make sure the marketing team knows how to treat these returning leads. They should have distinct nurture campaigns with content focused on a recent product feature or the low-cost nature of the product.
  • Make sure the sales team knows that the lead has been a closed lost in the past. Learn why they dropped off and what could bring them back. This information should be available on your CRM system.

Don’t do this:

Rely on only one channel to re-engage a closed lost opportunity.

Do this:

Some people prefer email because it is less intrusive. Other people prefer phone calls for efficiency.

The benefit of phone calls is that you create a human connection, which can go a long way.

The benefit of email is that you can take a customized approach and incorporate insights from past engagements.

You can also pair email with a paid media strategy. Run social or search ads that reach people who have engaged with your brand without converting.

 

Bottom line: Re-engage

These tactics will take some time to set up properly. Once you have them in place, your team will be proactive and targetted as they reach out to closed lost opportunity.

Need some help setting up the groundwork? Give us a call or email (whichever you prefer).

And remember, you’ve got this,

Joe Pulse

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Beyond The Hype: What to Tell Your Marketing VP about ABM

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TLDR: Account-based marketing (ABM) can help your business land lucrative deals, but does your marketing leadership know how to make an ABM strategy successful?

Account-based marketing (ABM) took the B2B world by storm several years ago and with tight economic times ahead, it’s being called the breakout star of 2023 by Adweek.

ABM gained recognition for its potential to land deals with high ROI. That’s a naturally exciting prospect for any business, but ABM gets results by execution, not magic.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you talk to your marketing leadership about ABM. You’ll learn to explain how it really works, the circumstances in which it succeeds, and the preparation ABM takes to pull it off.

 

What is ABM?

ABM is a strategy for producing marketing campaigns that target particular accounts.

In doing so, ABM flips the traditional marketing funnel on its head. Rather than distributing your content and messaging far and wide to attract as many leads as possible, your first step is to narrow down a subset of customers and prospects to focus on with personalized campaigns.

The rationale is that dedication to specific accounts with specific personalization will yield more highly qualified leads and lucrative deals. If your broad-based marketing efforts are resulting in limited growth, ABM offers a fresh alternative with a trade-off: it takes work to choose the best accounts to target and find the most effective methods of engaging them.

Various models exist for targeting accounts and personas with just one universal truth to the process: marketing and sales need to integrate deeply together.

A more traditional campaign might see marketing and sales work as separate islands. With ABM, the focus on specific accounts demands joint strategic input. Although each sales rep would love marketing to increase their personal list of existing and new business, your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to support everyone with targeted campaigns.

Therefore, ABM begins with a conversation between your marketing and sales leaders. Your VP needs to sit with their sales counterpart and agree on a set of accounts to prioritize. A strong mutual directive is the first spark of life for any ABM campaign. From there, both teams should work together on more in-depth targeting.

 

Unlock the power of ABM

In planning the finer details of an ABM campaign, the idea is to replicate past successes with a fresh twist. To do this, marketing needs to determine how existing personas, content, and tactics can apply to each chosen account.

As with choosing accounts, the types of people you target in each account should share characteristics (e.g., job role, region, vertical) with stakeholders who responded positively to past campaigns and brought in business.

You’ll need data from sales and marketing to identify:

  • the decision makers at each account
  • any individuals who’ve previously interacted with your brand, and
  • the campaigns that got similar personas to sign on the dotted line.

This data is your guiding light for the best tactics to try.

Whether it’s a personalized web experience or a custom event invite, knowing what worked for comparable personas puts you in a good position to engage your chosen stakeholders. Your past campaigns provide a good basis to repurpose content, but the real task is to customize pieces to show an understanding of each individual’s interests and pain points.

In our post ‘The Principles of a Successful ABM Strategy,’ we highlight the platform considerations you’ll need to make as well.

The key to success here is commitment, data maturity, and inter-team communication.

For ABM to really work, marketing and sales need to collaborate closely on various campaign pieces, invest time and effort to research and develop your audience, and share insights about past account success.

Here’s what your team needs to execute ABM:

  • sufficient time resourced to do the work within their bandwidth
  • clear synchronicity with sales, and
  • a wealth of historical data available to cite points of success with similar companies.

Consider your business ready to try ABM once these elements are in place.

 

Continuous improvements

One thing ABM has in common with more traditional campaigns is you want to go the distance. For all your calculated targeting efforts, doing ABM for the first time is still an experiment.

It’s important to remember the results are unlikely to be instant, but instead a product of gradual discoveries and tweaks based on feedback from your campaign performance.

For that reason, frame your first outing with ABM as proof of concept. Your personas, tactics, content, and criteria for targeting accounts are all elements to refine as reports come in from your activity. For continuous success, everyone involved in your ABM campaign—from sales to your marketing VP—must share and respond proactively to feedback and make strategic changes to chase opportunities.

Both your marketing and sales leaders want growth. If the results from your traditional campaigns are tapering off, ABM can help you net those “white whale” accounts, but your leadership should facilitate the things ABM needs. Those needs include joint investment from sales and marketing, accessible historical data, and the will to keep refining it until you strike gold.

For any guidance you need with ABM, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

Is It Worth Learning CSS and HTML?

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Hi Joe,

I keep finding myself in situations where I wish I were proficient in CSS and HTML.

Instead of waiting for one of our developers to change something on a form or a landing page, I wish I could do it myself.

As a MOPs professional, do you think it’s worth learning these basic programming skills?

Thanks,

Technically-Inclined Thomas

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What a great question, Thomas!

The short answer is: yes, it’s absolutely worth learning basic programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Now let me tell you why. 

With the rise in popularity of AI programs, it may seem pointless to learn — there are even tutorials for building a website using ChatGPT.

But today’s MOPs professionals wear all sorts of hats — which means there’s value in having a robust toolkit at your disposal.

When it comes to building a MOPs skillset, I’m a big proponent of learning as much as one can about the things that happen in MOPs.

The reason? It’s a great way to comprehensively understand what’s happening at each stage of a process and why it happens. This way, if something breaks, you’ll also know ways to fix it.

 

3 reasons to learn CSS & HTML

Learning CSS and HTML can greatly improve your standing as a MOPs professional and make you more efficient. Here are three reasons to support that.

1. Reduces your reliance on IT

In most companies, since CSS documents are used to make changes to website colors, fonts, and other design elements, it’s usually owned by the IT or website maintenance team.

So if you’re looking to implement a fancy form in a landing page, you’d likely depend on this team to make those changes.

For big companies with many competing priorities for the website, this could mean a long wait time for a simple form.

With enough CSS knowledge, you can make the changes yourself without requiring the help of another team. 

2. Increases your technical knowledge

Most people know that an engine powers a car, so if the car’s not working, there’s likely something wrong with the engine.

But a deeper understanding of the engine’s workings and various components can help uncover the problem.

The same is true with CSS and HTML.

The more you know about these programming languages, the better positioned you are to take a look under the hood and find the issue that needs to be solved.  

As a bonus, you get satisfaction from adjusting the website and having it work the way you want.

3. Sets you apart

Having CSS knowledge — or even a certification — will be a big differentiator when you’re looking for your next role.

MOPs recruiters understand the value of this skill set, and they’ll be interested in bringing someone in that can reduce the time spent bringing something to life on the company website. 

 

Teach yourself to code

These three benefits are just some ways that increasing your technical understanding can help advance your career.

The best part? You can get started right now.

There’s a wealth of materials you can take advantage of and guide your learning.

For example, W3schools has free online tutorials with great examples and practical exercises to help you consolidate your knowledge.

Other resources include:

You can leverage these options to learn in the way that makes the most sense to you.

You’ve got this,

Joe Pulse

Is My Agency Charging Me Too Much for Emails?

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Hey Joe,

My team and I have been working with an agency to create our emails — but I’m worried we may be paying too much.

Every time we send a request, it takes weeks to deliver. That makes it a challenge to get to market as quickly as we need to.

How much should agencies charge for an email? And how long should it take to create them?

Thanks,

Cost-conscious Caroline

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Hi Caroline,

Thanks so much for bringing up this question.

Email is an important marketing tool for B2C and B2B businesses. It’s tough to feel that your partners aren’t doing the most they can to make your campaigns both efficient and effective.

Trust me, you’re not alone.

 

The truth is, it depends.

I know this may sound like a wishy-washy answer, but bear with me.

When it comes to how an agency scopes out an email project, it depends on:

  • the size of the campaign you’re giving them
  • how many other clients they’re dealing with, and
  • how long they’ve been in the space.

These are all things that can dictate the price tag on an email campaign — as well as how much time it takes the agency to deliver the end product.

 

Hold your agency accountable

You likely first engaged your agency because you lacked the right resources and skills to create emails in-house. And that’s totally fine. It’s the same with many marketing teams.

That said, you still have options to hold your agency accountable or find ways to reduce how much of your budget goes to email. Here are three ways.

 

1. Have open discussions

Have frequent and frank discussions with your agency partners to set key performance indicators.

This can include the:

  • cost per email
  • time spent to develop each email, and
  • performance-related metrics.

 

2. Ask questions

Ask your agency questions so they can let you in on their process and build a stronger relationship with you.

Here are a few examples:

  • How are they building your emails?
  • What tools are they using?
  • Why does it take them two weeks to deliver one email?

 

3. Know that there’s an alternative

You do have the option to bring email in-house — and that doesn’t have to be scary.

With a platform like Knak, for example, you can build emails in 20 minutes and be sure that they’ll reach the right people, render properly, and offer an on-brand experience to your readers.

And you don’t need a whole team to do it.

This last one doesn’t mean you have to say goodbye to your agency partners.

 

Leverage your agency

Agencies are built on bold, creative thinking, so tap into that.

You can work with your agency team to build the next standout marketing campaign in your industry.

And if you feel you still need help with email, Revenue Pulse has an exclusive partnership with Knak — and they’d be happy to help you use the digital platform to its fullest potential.

You’ll be set up for success whichever way you choose to go.

You’ve got this,

Joe Pulse

P.S. Have a question? Contact us here.

Will the EU’s Ban on Google Analytics Affect Your Company?

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TLDR: To date, France, Italy, Denmark and Austria have banned Google Analytics—a trend that could continue throughout the EU. If your business depends significantly on Google Analytics or EU markets, your analytics practices and revenue could be at stake. Wherever the ROI makes sense, focus on using owned data for the countries affected by the ban, explore alternative tools that are GDPR-compliant, and invest in the education of a Data Privacy Officer to adapt to new and emerging regulatory developments.

Several key EU markets recently moved to ban Google Analytics. Data protection authorities in Italy, France, and Austria have deemed the practice of transferring user web activity and IP data to the US a violation of data protection laws. The bodies found the US lacks adequate safeguards to preserve personal data anonymity.

Businesses whose products, services, operations, and infrastructure rely significantly on Google Analytics would do well to explore alternative strategies and software, planning around the likely consequences of the ban and potential developments in regulation. This also applies if your business takes significant revenue from EU countries.

A potential move away from Google Analytics could make your data less accurate and accessible. It would also require setting up alternative web optimization and tracking mechanisms. Therefore, your CMO and CTO are chief among the people who should know the score.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you talk them through the impact and outlook of the ban, along with some solutions to consider. The better educated your leaders are, the better prepared you’ll be to weather any disruption.

 

The impact of the ban

The gravity of the situation depends on how much Google Analytics drives your business. If your MOPs and RevOps teams use it greatly, your data collection, reporting, and forecasting powers are at stake.

No longer able to track web activity and IP data created from top-of-funnel initiatives, MOPs and RevOps will need to refocus analytical practices exclusively onto data they already own (e.g., captured leads living inside their system with consent expressed in compliance with the GDPR).

For now, the Google Analytics ban applies only to France, Italy, Denmark and Austria. To keep doing business in these countries, you’ll need to adapt your website and introduce new processes and tools as necessary to comply with both the GDPR and any local requirements. If your business is based outside of these countries, the ban equally affects your ability to use Google Analytics to process data from users in France, Italy, Denmark and Austria.

The key thing to remember: to stay compliant with the GDPR, you cannot transfer web and IP data from these citizens and countries to the US.

Actionable takeaways

Your CMO and IT will need to investigate the changes required to your website, subdomains, and data analytics processes to stop the tracking and transference of website data for these countries and their citizens.

Your CTO should consider the ROI of tools that offer similar capabilities to Google Analytics. Examples include:

Any new tool you consider should allow you to process data from France, Italy, Denmark and Austria in compliance with the GDPR and any country-specific regulations. Your Data Protection Officer (or a consultant with GDPR expertise) is also a good source of counsel on potential changes to your tech stack and infrastructure.

Of course, these changes take time, effort, and resources. If your CMO and CTO need a hand assessing the ROI of making adjustments and implementing more advanced processes, look at how much revenue your business sees from the countries impacted. If less than 5% of gross revenue comes from France, Italy, Denmark and Austria (and their citizens in other countries), it might make sense to rely solely on the data you own.

 

Future EU bans?

While the ban currently applies to just three countries, it’s sensible for leadership to think about how the regulatory landscape might evolve.

EU countries could increasingly move to ban Google Analytics and restrict the transfer of user data from the EU to the US, potentially leading to an EU-wide ban to streamline regulations in the bloc.

A sweeping EU-wide ban would take considerable time to enforce, though it would be a massive blow to companies whose data storage infrastructure is based in the US.

As a means of ensuring GDPR compliance, US companies wouldn’t see much success from storing their user data in the EU.

Companies exempting themselves from transferring data back to the US would ultimately violate the CLOUD Act, which asserts that US businesses must, at request, provide authorities in the US with data stored in their servers, regardless of where those servers are stored.

One emerging piece of legislation to watch is the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. If codified, the bill would ban large tech companies such as Google from using non-public data generated by business users to benefit the covered platform’s own products. The enforcement of new antitrust practices in the US could result in data transfers to the US being deemed acceptable in accordance with the GDPR.

Amidst it all, businesses that prioritize EU markets or have a significant EU presence may increasingly turn away from Google Analytics and adopt tools that guarantee GDPR compliance. A resulting rise in demand and availability of solutions that ensure GDPR compliance can help your CTO identify an alternative that allows you to keep doing business in the EU in the most optimal way.

 

The bottom line

The Google Analytics ban in various European countries is likely not an existential threat to your business—but if your services, operations, and infrastructure relies on the software or you get a significant portion of your revenue from the EU, it’s a situation that demands building resilience.

Wherever the ROI makes sense, turn your focus towards owned data for the countries affected by the ban, explore GDPR-compliant alternatives to Google Analytics, and invest in the education of a Data Privacy Officer to adapt appropriately to new and emerging challenges with data regulation.

Get in touch for more guidance on navigating your RevOps team through the data privacy landscape.

I Need to Build a RevOps Function—Where Do I Start?

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Hi Jo,

I’m hoping you can help me.

My executives tasked me with building out the Revenue Operations function at our company, and I’m not quite sure where to start.

Should I be talking to my peers across sales and marketing? Or should I be doing a lot of external research?

I’m not even sure that all my colleagues know what RevOps is—and I really want to make sure they’re bought into the changes that will come down the line.

What should I do first?

Thank you,

Directionless Dana

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Hi, Dana. This is really exciting!

You’ve got the chance to define what RevOps looks like at your company and build out the capabilities that make the most sense for your teams.

How cool is that?

But you’re right, being successful will require thoughtful engagement and planning before you can make any changes. Checking in and asking for advice is already a great first step.

To help you make the most of that momentum, here are three other strategies you can use to set a solid foundation for your RevOps team.

 

1. Define RevOps

You mentioned that your executive team has tasked you with this initiative—but are you all on the same page regarding what RevOps is and what it looks like?

Setting a definition that everyone can agree on will help ensure alignment and prevent any confusion (and headaches!) down the road.

Let’s define RevOps: Revenue operations is a business function that’s built to maximize an organization’s revenue potential across the funnel. Instead of having your revenue operations capabilities live under sales, marketing, and customer success, you can have them operate as a single cohesive unit with accountability throughout the full customer journey. This centralized approach helps build a culture that’s intentionally focused on operationalizing revenue—rather than having it be a byproduct of other important work.

Once you’ve defined RevOps within the context of your organization, you can move on to the next step in the planning process. Read our post ‘How to Explain RevOps to Your MOPs Team‘ for more advice.

 

2. Identify your capabilities

Identify where your RevOps capabilities are—and where they aren’t.

It’s more than likely that your company already has some revenue operations capabilities distributed across your sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

Your job will be to:

  • look at these teams
  • identify where the work is happening, and
  • create a roadmap for how those siloed functions can move into your new RevOps structure.

This is also an opportunity to understand how tasks are currently completed. Our posts on finding the right reporting tools for your RevOps team and how to optimize content can help.

Ask questions like these to get started:

  • What tools are your teams using?
  • Are two teams using different tools for the same tasks?
  • How are your peers talking about revenue operations in each vertical?
  • What data are they looking at and how are they using it to make decisions?

 

With a clear picture of the current state, you’ll have an easier time mapping out the necessary changes to centralize your activities and align incentives across the board.

 

3. Build your RevOps network

Like with any big initiative that requires a lot of change, you will need stakeholders on your side.

My advice? Have one-on-one conversations with leaders across sales, marketing, and customer success to talk about the value of RevOps.

Talk to them about what they’ll get out of this new team, and paint them a picture of what the organization could look like over the next one to five years.

Don’t forget: you’re running a very strategic project.

You’re reshaping how your company thinks about revenue and creating a resource for making the data you collect more impactful.

So don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it and have important conversations with other leaders at your organization.

You’ve got this,

Jo Pulse

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