Author: rpadmin

TLDR: Bloated, inaccurate databases cause all sorts of problems: lost revenue and productivity, risks of data privacy violations, and unreliable decision-making. Everyone from the CEO to your SDRs should think critically about data hygiene. Standardize how data is collected and handled across systems and conduct periodic audits to check the quality of your data. This will drive the business forward, allowing teams to support each other and reach customers as effectively as possible.

Data runs the world, and it also runs your business.

Many leaders know this and have strategies for data hygiene and protection, but too often, the enforcement of policies and best practices is inconsistent.

This creates a culture where teams don’t know how to collect, handle, and categorize data, and lack insight into why data hygiene is so important.

The results? Inaccurate data and bloated databases—sources of pain for people in many different roles and threats to the revenue and reputation of your business.

If you’re feeling the strain of dirty data, this article for you.

You’ll learn to explain to leadership the deep impact of bad data and influence a shift to a data-centric culture, suggesting policies, practices, and perspectives on data that help everyone in the team do their jobs more effectively.

 

The damage of dirty data

A database filled with entries that are inaccurate, outdated, miscategorized, or duplicated has a profoundly negative effect on the business.

People doing tactical work burn hours to correct and clean data.

Concerned with the quality of their information, SDRs get distracted from reaching out to people, which slows down the sales cycle. CX-wise, missing pieces of information compromise your interactions with customers, who’ll know when your outreach is less than seamless.

Between marketing operations and sales operations, bad data and unclear accountabilities cause infighting, as teams blame each other for disarray. Everyone who needs reporting, from C-Suite downwards, simply cannot surface or grasp the performance and impact of their work.

With a messy database, extracting the insights to fuel strategic decisions becomes a near-impossible effort.

If you can’t trust your data, you can’t trust your decisions.

Bad news for the productivity, revenue intake, strategic potential, and inter-team collaboration of your business.

Then factor in some more explicit financial costs. You’re getting charged for your database per row—bloat = dollars spent.

Excess data also heightens the risk of breaching data privacy compliance requirements.

EU regulators have issued an average of €1.4 million per fine to companies in breach of the GDPR, so if your database includes old and duplicate records of people who’ve opted out of communications or asked to have their data deleted, you need to clean up ASAP.

The larger your tech stack, the greater the likelihood (and consequences) of disordered data.

Coming up with and implementing a system for data hygiene may seem like an effort that’ll slow you down in the short term, but it’s the smart choice every time over tolerating a messy database and all its chaos and revenue loss.

 

Develop a hygiene plan

Data hygiene is a company-wide project—everyone from the CEO to your SDRs is responsible within their remit for thinking critically about how they handle data and contributing to policies.

How does data enter your system?

The first thing to think about is how data enters your system. Your sources are often things like:

• enrichment tools
• CRM data
• web forms, and
• purchase lists.

But could also include people like SDRs manually inputting information.

Verify the source

With each new entry, verify that the source is reputable and the data is both factually correct and accurate (e.g. checking for spelling errors and duplicates). And take extra care with data obtained from gated content—in the earlier stages of the cycle, people are more likely to offer untrue or incomplete information to easily access your content.

Standardize your data types

Lots of different people touch data when it’s in the system, and without a strict policy on how to handle and categorize it, things can quickly get out of hand. Standardizing the data types you collect and fields used across your systems can help to ensure you’re handling only the most relevant information and organizing data consistently.

Form a data compliance team

To further help keep things clean, advocate for a dedicated data compliance team. This team comprises a board of people who assess the impact of introducing any new field, data type, or source into your database.

Review your approach to data collection

It’s also worth interrogating your approach to data collection. More data doesn’t necessarily make you better informed, and it’s certainly not worth the excess storage costs and risks of violating data privacy requirements.

Additionally, not all data created or data sources are equal. You may have one or several usual suspects for creating bad data. Get ahead of it by shutting those sources down so you’re not creating bad data to start with.

Ask of each piece of data you solicit:

• What’s the purpose, use, and relevance to your goals?
• What categories of information are relevant to your customers and prospects?
• What information do Sales need to move through the cycle?

Auditing your systems and data on a regular basis (e.g. monthly, quarterly) is crucial to determine what your baseline for hygiene should be. This is your opportunity to detect and remedy any flaws in your database.

Steps you can take to improve data hygiene:

• delete old and unused records
• remove white spaces
• merge duplicates together
• check your integrations are tight, and
• ensure your records are enriched with the correct information from quality sources.

 

Dealing with data

The way you handle data can make or break your business.

Dirty data results in losses of revenue, productivity, and decision-making power—to avoid the fallout, C-Suite should treat data hygiene as a priority initiative for everyone in the organization to partake in.

Clear, enforced policies that standardize how people collect and handle data across systems, and periodic audits to check the quality of your data and sources, will drive the business forward and allow teams to support each other and reach customers and prospects as effectively as possible.

Struggling with systems and data in disorder? Drop us a line. We’re here to help.

TLDR: Migrating to a new marketing automation platform is a demanding project. We’ll help you plan it carefully to get the results you want.

Why migrate platforms? The decision to migrate to a new marketing automation platform is one to treat with care. You might be looking to solve the pain points of your current platform, gain more advanced features to support your growth, or see more value for money by focusing on specific capabilities.

Why it’s a heavy lift: Moving to a new marketing automation platform can get strong results and revitalize how your marketing team performs, but this isn’t a project to underestimate. Migrating to a new platform is a technical, resource-intensive effort that requires careful planning to yield results with minimal disruption.

What’s in this article for you? If your CMO or Marketing VP is pursuing a new marketing automation platform, this article is for you. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Set realistic expectations on timelines and performance.

➡️ Advocate for the processes.

➡️ Understand how to execute the project correctly.

 

Size up the task

Before you get off the ground with a platform migration, your marketing operations team needs to be clear on the demands of the project. Leadership might assume that features shared between platforms will translate identically from one to the next, and therefore expect a much faster turnaround than what’s feasible.

There are a few points of guidance you can give to address the project scope.

👉 Migrating to a new platform means rebuilding your marketing automation system from the ground up. This means you can’t resume with your new platform exactly where you left off with the previous one.

👉 Present how key features differ between platforms to leadership and your team.

👉 Determine the pieces you can migrate cleanly versus infrastructure to build anew, similar processes versus functions the team needs to relearn.

Before your team starts building any infrastructure, Marketing’s evaluation should deepen until they’re able to set priorities for the migration.

Some of the key questions that should be answered at the initial risk assessment, include:

• What assets and programs are critical to migrate?
• Which prior integrations will you need to reestablish?
• How deeply will you need to clean your database?
• Without historical data on your new platform, how will you interpret the first few months of reporting?

 

Time it right

Naturally, a significant project like this will have productivity consequences for the team.

 

“You’ll want to budget 12-16 weeks to get your assets and database from A to B.”

 

You’ll want to budget 12-16 weeks to get your assets and database from A to B, accounting for all stakeholder approvals.

While your team handles the migration and gets to grips with the new system, advocate for this to be a cool-down period for campaigns, events, and other intensive projects like rebranding or moving to a new website.

After all, Marketing will be best set up to succeed by ramping up to normal only when they’ve mastered the new system.

To make that happen, highlight the need for a dedicated team to help with training and project support. Whether your experts come from SOPs, MOPs, or IT, they need hours in the week scoped out in advance to assist.

Continuity is another key thing to account for.

Base the timeline for your migration on the contract with your current vendor. A crossover period between the two platforms, where you gradually dim the switch on your current system, is essential to prevent from going dark. To stay up and running, suggest to leadership that you begin the migration with at least a month left on your outstanding contract.

Ultimately, your planning should conclude with key stakeholders all on the same page about the work to come. Encourage your team to contribute to a project management resource that breaks down tasks and responsibilities, dependencies, tactical elements, and required buy-in.

This, along with agreed-upon and documented definitions for key terms and processes (e.g. lifecycle modelling, lead qualification criteria), is crucial for your team members to work in sync with one another during the migration.

 

See it through

Once your migration’s in motion, effective project management is vital to ongoing success.

 

“A delay in one area of the migration has consequences for other moving parts.”

 

A delay in one area of the migration has consequences for other moving parts, so encourage your team to participate in weekly sync calls, sprints, and targeted meetings to share status updates and proactively keep on top of risks.

As the project progresses, all of the stakeholders involved in the migration are going to be learning about how your new platform works; to help with onboarding and knowledge transfer, have them contribute to a resource that outlines how all new processes and functionalities work.

A platform migration is a project made of many different factors—from timelines to training, priorities to vendor contracts—and the closer your team collaborates to understand the task at hand, the better the odds are you’ll put together a plan that works.

No matter the size of your organization, migrating to a new marketing automation system is a complex and resource-intensive process. For any support you need with planning or executing a platform migration, we’re here to help.

Follow Revenue Pulse on LinkedIn and join the conversation.

TLDR: Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) characterize the customer groups that best fit your services. ICPs aim to help businesses sign more profitable deals with shorter close times. Sales and marketing create ICPs by analyzing data from past customer engagements and deals, coalescing around a shared set of customer profiles to target. Marketing operations helps sales and marketing evaluate whether the data supports the personas created and guide them to refine the ICPs with each reporting cycle.

 

What is an ideal customer profile?

Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are sketches of the buyers who best fit your services.

ICPs are similar to buyer personas, though they tend to characterize groups of customers rather than individual buyers. In theory, these groups are the easiest to close deals from and the most productive for sales and marketing to focus on in their initiatives.

Accurate ICPs help revenue teams do more deals in larger sizes and with shorter times to close.

But when sales and marketing teams create ideal customer profiles in poor alignment with each other, guided by personal biases over data, they risk approaching the wrong prospects with disjointed campaigns and processes that don’t attract business.

In this guide, you’ll learn to explain to sales and marketing what it takes to create ICPs that work—a data-driven approach with 100% alignment.

 

ICP 101

How to get started with ideal customer profiles: Ideal customer profiles begin with data. By analyzing past customer engagements and deals, sales and marketing can identify the most common traits of customers interested in your products and services.

A team will use a variety of behavioral identifiers (e.g., types and topics of content engagement, webinars and events registered) and demographic identifiers (e.g. job title, region, company, industry) to craft ICPs along with sales data.

Sales and marketing use these insights to create personalized content, messaging, and processes to attract increased business from these groups.

Note: We also conducted an experiment that used ChatGPT to help us define our ideal ICP – and the results were pretty fascinating! Check it out here.

 

The goal of ideal customer profiles:

The goal of ICPs is to help businesses sign as many deals as quickly as possible and as profitable as possible.

Factoring in additional metrics like monthly recurring revenue, time to close, retention rates, and deal size can help sales and marketing succeed by focusing on the prospects most likely to engage positively with the business and return sustainable profits over time.

 

How to know if your ICPs are right:

There’s no magic recipe for crafting ideal customer profiles, but if sales and marketing are coming up with many disparate profiles, it suggests that your targeting efforts aren’t specific enough.

To get results, both teams should unite around a shared set of ICPs.

Without close alignment, sales and marketing might have completely different ideas about which customer groups to pursue. When marketing’s campaigns and messaging aren’t in sync with sales’ processes and understanding of the buyer journey, it’s unlikely that your efforts will strike a chord with any particular customer profile.

Between your sales reps and marketing colleagues, your revenue team might be a broad tent of past experience and expertise with different industries and customer segments.

Personal experience can lead your team to infer the best customer traits and groups to target, but data is the only reliable basis for your ICPs.

Past success stories and sector-specific knowledge can be helpful starting points for creating ICPs, but sales and marketing need to validate any assumptions by looking at past engagements and deals.

 

The overall theme with creating ICPs:

More alignment means more success.

Sales and Marketing should use the same bedrock of data to target shared customer groups with campaigns and processes that complement each other.

 

Continuous success

Ideally, ICPs lead sales and marketing to meet and exceed their targets:

• Marketing creates campaigns that generate better MQLs.
• Sales develops these MQLs into higher rates of opportunities, conversions, and accelerated conversations.

To validate that your ICPs are working, encourage your team to think of ICPs as projects of continuous refinement, where each new reporting cycle is an opportunity to reevaluate if the data justifies the personas that Sales and Marketing have created.

MOPs comes to the table as a valuable source of guidance.

By analyzing the composition of your database and where deals come from, MOPs can pinpoint the percentage of leads, opportunities, and closed sales that meet your teams’ profile criteria and advise on the most optimal ways to segment your customer base.

With the latest data, consulting sales and marketing at regular intervals can help answer a range of decisive questions including:

• How are particular ICPs performing at different sales cycle stages?
• What profile characteristics can you tweak?
• How might you account for ICPs in industries (e.g. government, education) that are significant seasonal buyers?
• Are there any metrics not currently accounted for that are emerging as influential?

Whatever your reporting cadence—weekly, biweekly, monthly—a continuous process of analysis and adaptation is how your ICPs stay relevant.

Sit down with sales and marketing regularly to go through the reports, and you can encourage a well-informed and agile process of decision-making, where teams can pivot fast in response to ICPs that aren’t yielding results.

 

The takeaway

ICPs are valuable for Sales and Marketing to identify and refine how they target customer segments, but executing them effectively requires 100% alignment between teams and continuous analysis of engagement and deal data.

By working closely with MOPs to arrive at data-driven decisions, Revenue teams can create campaigns and processes that win more lucrative deals with shorter close times.

For any guidance with creating and executing ICPs, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Getting a new tool often seems like an attractive solution to a pain point, but without careful planning and an audit of the solutions in your stack and on the market, another tool to manage = another problem to solve.

Why bring in new tech?

When your team has a pain point or stress-inducing process to iron out, adding a new tool to your stack often seems an attractive solution. Perhaps leadership brings experience of using a certain tool to solve the problem at hand. They might know of comparable companies using a piece of tech and benchmark your stack against theirs. Or, they’re excited by the promise of results — ‘plug-and-play’ accessibility, increases to revenue and productivity that justify the investment.

How to assess new tech:

Beyond the hype, however, these flashes of inspiration alone aren’t solid enough reasons to adopt another new tool. As we write in the Martech Optimization White Paper, careful planning, evaluation, and an audit of what’s currently in your stack are crucial to identify the most sensible solution for your business. Without these, more tools can easily add complications, go to waste, or run counterproductive to what you’re trying to achieve.

What’s in this article for you? In this guide, we’ll help you influence a more critical approach to tool adoption to maximize the return on your dollars and your time. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Assess new technology adoption

➡️ Understand the demands and challenges of a new tool

➡️ Evaluate your current tech stack and the options on the market

 

The real demands of new tools

Sometimes, leadership will advocate for a tool they’ve used in previous companies.

While the solution may have the correct capabilities to solve the problem at hand, selective experience with a tool can cause decision-makers to view it through rose-colored glasses.

If they only began to use the tool after the implementation or ramp-up period were completed, they’re likely unaware of the more challenging elements of getting off the ground. You need to ensure the solution that leadership advocates for has the correct capabilities to solve the need at hand.

Concerns to address before adoption

 
👉 Downplayed complications during sales process: During the sales cycle, the complications of running a tool are often downplayed. Vendors might portray a solution as “out of the box” with minor setup, or demo a version of the tool with features, integrations, and reporting already well-established. In reality, the baseline you see in demos won’t be there when you first configure the tool. Ramp-up periods can be prohibitive, and 6 to 12 months down the line, you might be miles off achieving the results you were promised.

👉 Stagnation in your tech stack: When the effort involved in managing a tool far outstrips expectations, and you haven’t planned to inherit the responsibility, that tool can sit in your stack gathering dust. Before leadership takes the plunge, advise them to wait until you’ve gathered feedback from current customers—get a real shot of truth about what it takes to onboard, implement, ramp up, maintain, and get results from the solution.

👉 Assessing impact and viability of new tools: Leadership needs to know if any shift in headcount occurs from using the tool, whether customers are using it to accomplish what you’re aiming for, and the renewal vs. churn rate past the initial contract. Before your CMO reaches a decision, they should be able to answer key internal questions: What are the hours involved with adopting this tool? Who’s responsible? Do we have the budget to give that person additional compensation or to hire someone new to run point? Given our investment, what kind of revenue and productivity lift can we expect?

Tools are vehicles for results – to get anywhere, you need a driver.

Getting a handle on the practicalities will help leadership identify if a tool is right for your needs or viable for your resources.

 

Evaluating your stack and the market

Mid-to-large organizations often lack a deep understanding of what’s in their tech stack.

When departments have the size and autonomy to buy their own tools, there might be significant overlap between the functionalities of tools owned by different teams.

If this is the case, leadership should explore the possibility of adopting a solution that your organization already uses.

Start by reviewing any documentation that outlines the tools in your workplace. If your organization already owns the functionality you’re after, speak with the tool owner and spend some time using the solution to get a sense of how appropriately it addresses your needs.

An important point for leadership: You might find a tool that facilitates what you’re looking for, but not in the most competitive or sophisticated way.

For any internal or external tool you assess, establish where it stands in the market

👉 Is this solution best-in-class or tertiary in its lane?
👉 Can this tool evolve with your business and perform long-term?

C-Suite’s are after the greatest possible ROI, and that comes by choosing the tool you’ll need five years from now.

To justify any technology investment, leadership needs a clear case for how it adds value.

Confidence in how a tool’s functionalities and integrations work is crucial to making that assessment.

If there’s a risk of integrations or data flows breaking down between updates, for instance, flag this to leadership. Any manual processes or convoluted workarounds a tool introduces compromise your ROI. Conversely, a tool that’s less adept at generating revenue might save the team significant amounts of time — productivity gains that prove ROI.

 

The bottom line

The martech boom shows no signs of slowing down, which means plenty of noise to cut through.

Approach tool adoption with these principles, and you’ll make every dollar and hour count.

 

✅ Be intentional with martech investment to work smarter and achieve more.

✅ Balance your current and long-term needs.

✅ Size up the options in your stack and on the market.

✅ Determine the ROI from adding a new tool into the mix.

✅Plan carefully for how you’ll use it.

For any guidance on evaluating your tech stack or the martech landscape, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

P.S. Want more ideas for improving your tech stack? Get a copy of our Martech Optimization White Paper

TLDR: Aligning sales and marketing teams is critical to achieving a better balance of lead quality and quantity. By fostering collaboration, creating shared definitions and workflows, and analyzing first-party data, sales and marketing can work together towards common goals and make data-driven decisions. By taking these steps, organizations can improve collaboration, work with a clearer sense of purpose, and ultimately win and keep more business.

Sales and marketing want the same thing: Great leads that quickly turn into revenue.

Achieving the right balance of quality and quantity is a continual challenge. Even with a perfect ICP and stellar demand funnel, prospects ditch demos, opportunities fail to close, and customers churn.

What often happens when KPIs are missed? We typically see finger-pointing, defensive postures, blame games, knee-jerk reactions, and other behaviors that simply don’t benefit the organization.

Instead of declaring your teammate is underperforming, look at the data and the levers available to pull. Conjecture is not a reliable strategy for creating revenue. Double down on data and alignment to avoid the perils of blame and divisiveness.

 

“Conjecture is not a reliable strategy for creating revenue.”

 

If friction and missed KPIs are common in your company, this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you. You’ll learn how to get your demand gen back on track by fostering better sales and marketing alignment and implementing a strategy driven by meaningful data analysis.

 

Coming together

When sales and marketing work in siloes, internal dysfunction creates disjointed customer experiences. Sales can’t close the most suitable business for the company if marketing’s campaigns don’t resonate with the needs of these audiences. Likewise, marketing’s efforts to attract the best leads won’t fuel growth if sales’ outreach lacks personalization.

The North Stars of value and revenue should bring sales and marketing together to collaborate on strategy and goals.

Create shared definitions and workflows

First, both teams need shared definitions of common terms. For instance: what specifically qualifies a lead as an MQL, SAL, or SQL? Sales and marketing should also create an agreed-upon methodology for lead scoring, which involves investigating a few data points.

Based on the kinds of customers you successfully do business with, what budget, authority, and demographic traits suggest that a prospect is highly matched to your company? From past closed business, what behaviors at different stages in the buying cycle suggest they’re ready for sales to pursue?

Both sales and marketing have valuable perspectives and reports to share with each other.

Sales, for example, can tell marketing more about why opportunities have been won or lost, what prospects have felt or wanted, and why past MQLs haven’t matched their needs. And marketing can advise sales on the content types that are likely to appeal to the priority leads they’re targeting.

Share workflows and communication structures

Sales and marketing leaders can incentivize a cultural shift towards alignment by creating shared workflows and communication structures. Establishing SLAs together, for instance, makes sure that both teams understand each others’ accountabilities and the exact work that makes a lead progress through the revenue cycle.

 

“Lead with data-driven decision-making.”

 

Leaders of both teams should create shared KPIs and encourage a clear understanding of how sales and marketing’s individual KPIs contribute towards achieving overarching goals.

Taking these steps contributes to a higher quality of collaboration and understanding between sales and marketing.

At the heart of every good strategy, however, is knowledge of why your campaigns or outreach efforts are valuable to the people you’re targeting—because if that value is limited or unclear, the people you’re targeting may not match well with your business, and are unlikely to be sources of revenue.

To help with this, sales and marketing leaders must lead the way with better data-driven decision-making.

 

Finding trend lines

When sales and marketing leaders meet quarterly, they often bring data points to the table like:

📊business closed in the quarter
📊pipeline for the months ahead, and
📊lead volume.

Dig into first-party data

Less frequently do they dig into their first-party data from a forensic perspective, allowing anecdotal observations about customer trends to guide strategy. This is a significant reason why lead-gen efforts fall flat.

To determine who your ideal customers are, leadership should instead look at the data on your total addressable market for months and years past. Are prospects of particular company sizes, verticals, regions, or job titles more prone to churn or dropping off the funnel than others? Where in the funnel do they go?

From this analysis, you can answer questions such as:

✋Is your lead qualification criteria sufficient?
✋Are your target customer types and markets optimal for your business goals?
✋Do your sales and marketing teams need more training to reach higher-value customers?

Identify demographic and firmographic trends

Identify the demographic and firmographic trends within metrics like closed/lost rates, closed/won, open opportunities, and sales-accepted leads. By doing so, you can make a confident hypothesis about the customer types that are most valuable, sustainable, and receptive to your business.

 

“Steer decision-making away from hunches and towards clear evidence.”

 

This outcome justifies contracting the support of a data scientist to parse through your systems and establish the trend lines, but if your budget’s tight, marketing can lead the way. Even just pulling closed/won rates from your CRM, you can begin to steer decision-making away from hunches and towards clear evidence.

Once you’ve identified the prospect types to pursue as priorities, both sales and marketing should research and share insights on these prospects.

🔍What are the emerging and relevant trends in their industries?
🔍What concerns are likely to motivate them at their level of seniority, region, or company?

From this, you’ll get a greater sense of how to approach your target audience and what you can offer that truly speaks to their needs. This understanding should steer the direction of both marketing’s campaigns and sales’ outreach.

 

The result

When sales and marketing leaders invest in aligning their teams, everyone wins.

Creating communication structures for sales and marketing to share goals, set strategies, and refine approaches together based on first-party data analysis substantially improves how you work.

It leads people to work with a clearer sense of purpose, more effective collaboration, and more confident decision-making—all of which are conducive to winning and keeping business.

Do you need help to better align sales and marketing? Get in touch today!

 

TLDR: Scope creep and burnout are exceptionally common in MOPs. Explain your role’s real value and demands so you get the credit you deserve.

The boom in marketing technology has seen marketing shift from a heavily creative discipline into a revenue engine. It’s increasingly capable of optimizing commercial performance and depicting high-level organizational impact. Marketing ops has assumed the responsibility to steer the ship, but recognition has yet to match the reality.

Does any of this sound familiar? Scope creep, burnout, loneliness. Then this guide is for you.

We’ll characterize the challenges of working in marketing ops so you can confidently speak to leadership about your role’s demands and the value you bring. Whether you want a new role or a helping hand, rewards or respect, it all starts with this conversation.

 

The many shades of MOPs

Few functions are as multidisciplinary (or as misunderstood) as Marketing Operations.

• You’re the custodian of an ever-complex technology infrastructure that must surface clean, accurate data and sync correctly between solutions to support campaigns successfully.
• You’re the analyst that reports on budgets and maintains the performance of systems and campaigns.
• You’re the advocate for processes and products that increase revenue, reportability, and productivity.
• And when things go awry, you’re the engineer that fixes integrations by hand to redeem sunk cost investments.

This list is getting long, and you get the picture. In a nutshell, marketing ops makes marketing work.

 

The big MOPs misconception

The big misconception is that you do this critical work by pushing buttons on platforms and taking orders.

Marketing operations is a highly strategic role at the crossroads of many different corners of the business. It takes an exceptionally well-rounded skill palette and a lot of effort to perform well in Marketing Operations. This fact goes underappreciated by the many departments with whom you interact.

The point to qualify for leadership: In MOPs, the magnitude of this invisible labor is extraordinarily high.

There is no other function in the business facing the pressure to:

• resolve the age old question of marketing and sales alignment
• learn the ins and outs of products and play the role of procurement
• inherit impact reportage from senior leadership, and
• build systems and dataflows in step with IT, data science, and legal.

 

Finding focus

Marketing operations is a constantly evolving space, with thousands of new tools entering the market every year. This growth causes expectations and responsibilities to pile up without a greater appreciation of the value MOPs provides.

You may have spent your first few months owning one particular platform or optimizing unused or ill-fitting tools, creating the impression that executional work is the sum of your job. Friction between sales and marketing might be particularly high in your workplace, where your rationale for qualifying leads and passing them to sales is often disregarded. 

Leadership might note that MOPs isn’t the only function challenged by the complexities of workplace tech (just ask IT). But while IT is typically a broader team with an established status, MOPs is often an island on its own, where a handful or even a single member of staff performs multiple jobs at once.

Your CMO or CFO might ask for numbers, but invisible labor in MOPs is difficult to quantify.

 

The source of out-of-scope work

Every organization has its unique mix of strengths and stressors. A slick data science operation can coexist with a chaotic procurement department.

Because of this, the main sources of out-of-scope work will differ between organizations. But here’s the common thread: as MOPs interfaces with many departments, they’re vulnerable to misunderstandings and dysfunction from all around the organization, inviting excess demands by design.

This is a consequence of a hiring drive in MOPs that has sought generalists for roles designed to do many different things. That many people in MOPs are spread thin, their skills poorly utilized and understood, confirms that this has been an unviable approach to hiring.

 

The silver lining

If you relate, there’s a silver lining: Slowly, the industry is catching up.

As MOPs shifts to a more specialist field, where expertise in particular areas like attribution is becoming more prominent, the case for a role with more focused responsibilities has rarely been so convincing.

If leadership wants to take advantage of your skills and retain your loyalty as an employee, it’s time to give your role the focus and recognition it deserves.

 

Work in progress

Most labor in marketing ops is invisible to others.

• You build complex campaign infrastructure and surface Marketing’s contribution to revenue.
• You fix the flaws in your tech stack and cut through the noise of new solutions to find opportunities.
• You coordinate buy-in between teams for processes with leads, data, and product purchases.

This work takes more time and expertise than outsiders assume. As a result, MOPs are spread thin, applying a mix of skills to fulfill unviable expectations.

Despite the progressive energy of the MOPs space, there’s a poor understanding of what it takes to successfully hire and design these roles.

If you’re struggling with excessive invisible labor, it doesn’t necessarily reflect your professional abilities. This causes frustration for many people in MOPs and a look at the active MOPs communities will show that you’re not alone.

Explaining to leadership the true demands and value of your role is the start of you taking charge of your career direction and gaining visibility and respect around your organization.

For advice with defining your role or managing excess work demands, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: If you’re considering a new marketing automation platform, learn the processes, goals, and challenges to plan around before you make a firm decision.

No matter your organization’s maturity, implementing a new marketing automation platform is a significant undertaking.

There’s a tendency for C-Suite to believe that getting off the ground with a new platform is as straightforward as flicking a switch. In reality, there are processes, goals, and concerns your marketing team should establish before deciding on a platform and continue to account for during the implementation process.

In this guide, we’ll break down the considerations and challenges that arise at different stages of the process. We’ll will help you talk with your CMO and encourage them to:

• arrive at clear motivations for implementing a new platform
• get a sound grasp of what the implementation process demands, and
• establish realistic performance expectations.

 

Weighing your decision

As a growing business, making the leap to a marketing automation platform can provide powerful features and data management capabilities for scaling upwards.

For established organizations, the decision to implement a new platform can correct the course of a tech stack mismatched with your strategy.

A new marketing platform is a reasonable step forward if you’ve:

• reached a point of momentum where you need to attribute the value and ROI from marketing activities, or
• found it difficult to consolidate data from disparate sources and act on insights with your current platform.

Still, it’s crucial that leadership thoroughly understands the current state of your marketing machine and what you’re looking to gain by onboarding a new platform.

Beyond the financial cost of running a platform, the real investment here is time.

Once marketing activities, data, and integrations start flowing through the platform, it becomes increasingly difficult to untangle yourself over the years.

With that in mind, your CMO needs to have full confidence in your chosen platform’s trajectory.

While it’s challenging to predict how you’ll use the platform in five years, leadership should at least be able to identify how it supports your marketing team’s current and near-future ambitions.

Encourage them to set out how platforms with good momentum or established status in the market can help the marketing team to address its performance needs.

 

Getting off the ground

All tools come with a learning curve and marketing automation platforms like Marketo have particularly steep gradients to conquer. We wrote a whole post to help you explain Marketo to your CEO.

Besides pushing for additional help and support from the vendor, your marketing team should meticulously plan all that you’ll use the platform for.

Processes ultimately underlie every decision you make to get off the ground.

Make leadership aware that, before you really get up and running with the platform, your marketing team needs to clearly establish how to improve existing processes.

As an example: if your team has been sending lead lists manually to sales, marketing and sales need to agree on a point in the lifecycle where sales can take over before automating the handover.

 

Define processes centrally

Organizationally, your CMO should be prepared to define processes centrally.

Each member of your marketing team doing their own thing without a consistent methodology or shared set of definitions can scramble your reporting. When processes are disparate or data potentially missing, it’s difficult to verify the efficacy of your data or insights.

It can be as simple as standardizing fields and fonts in list uploads, but having your CMO advocate for clear and established ways of using the platform can help to preserve the integrity of your data and encourage clarity in the team.

Breaking down the sweeping task of implementation into smaller, achievable goals is crucial to see success from the platform.

You can make this argument to your CMO to incentivize them to work with the marketing team and define action items at various intervals of time, for example:

• day 1
• day 30
• day 90, and
• year 1.

These action items should be need-based yet realistic, so while leadership might have their eye on a new lead scoring model, you’d be wise to prioritize the likes of creating templates for emails and webinars and lead lifecycles for SQLs.

After you work towards your chosen milestones on Day 1, take stock of whether you met them. If not, it’s likely because the experience of using the platform is more complicated than you thought.

If your CEO’s expectations are still riding high, remind them that the demo viewed during the selection process presents a simplified version of using the platform, where the technicalities are already fine-tuned.

For your marketing team to develop a comparable level of efficiency, it’s going to take time using the platform to really optimize your processes and understand how to optimize different features.

 

Continual improvements

For the ways that a marketing automation platform can make your life easier and improve your performance, “automation” is somewhat of a misnomer.

There is always more work to do.

You’re never going to flip a switch and have everything run like clockwork, and years into using a platform, your marketing team will still be learning on the go.

Through consistent processes and realistic goal-setting, each milestone will see your Marketing team achieve more with your platform.

For any additional guidance with implementing a new platform, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

 

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TLDR: Marketing aims to invest in the campaigns and channels that offer the most significant returns. This doesn’t mean assigning credit so much as investment optimization. Discover why multi-touch attribution is vital for making those decisions.

Here’s a puzzle for you: Someone visits your website. Weeks later, a blog post shared on LinkedIn brings them back to your site, and they register for a webinar. Several emails down the line, this person becomes a customer. (Congrats 🎉)

Now, the BIG question is: What data can you take from that journey to optimize and accelerate future marketing engagements?

The prevailing view in B2B on attribution is to credit one single touchpoint for driving revenue. But we’re big advocates of multi-touch attribution because most customer journeys comprise multiple interactions with your brand. We’d love to be able to make it a ‘credit’ and ‘magic bullet’ conversation, but that’s not the reality of how customer journeys work.

What’s in this article for you? In this guide, we’ll help you explain to your team why multi-touch attribution is essential for accurately measuring campaign impact. You’ll learn the:

➡️ Types of multi-touch attribution models that allow marketers to tailor their strategies based on specific goals.

➡️ Importance of choosing relevant metrics besides cost-per-lead to help optimize campaign effectiveness.

➡️ Difference between single source and multi-touch attribution models.

 

Choose your attribution model

It’s important to note that single-source and multi-touch attribution methods have unique advantages and limitations.

The choice between them often depends on the specific goals and business circumstances. We outline the strengths of each below.

 

Single-touch attribution

 
What is single-touch attribution? Single-touch attribution associates pipeline and/or revenue to one touchpoint (e.g., an ad click or webinar registration) that a customer had with a brand before converting.

It helps you answer particular questions about campaign performance, for instance:

👉 First-touch attribution: Details which campaign sparked initial interest.

👉 Lead-creation attribution: Identifies which campaigns get people into your database.

👉 Last-touch attribution: Pinpoint which campaigns convert the most leads to opportunities.

Each method is effective at evaluating performance against KPIs, but no one interaction accounts for the sum of marketing activities that influence revenue.

A lead could have anywhere from 5 to 50 interactions with your company on their journey. Limiting your analysis to a single or handful of interactions means the vast majority of your activities have impacts that you’re not even measuring—and if you don’t measure it, you won’t optimize it.

 

Multi-touch attribution

 
What is multi-touch attribution? Multi-touch attribution associates pipeline and/or revenue to multiple touchpoints along the customer journey. It allows for a more nuanced understanding of how different touchpoints contribute to a conversion.

 

“It responds to reality because there’s no one correct answer for where to spend your budget.”

 

It responds to reality because there’s no one correct answer for where to spend your budget.

These models assign dollars across different touchpoints, and by doing so, the analysis leads to insights that a single factor can’t explain.

Revenue from pipeline or bookings or realized revenue are allocated based on percentages assigned with each model.

Define your motivation: Are you using these models to try to describe credit between marketing and sales, or are you trying to maximize your campaign operations? How you set up the model ultimately determines the data that comes out of it.

This means you need to set up the model to support the conversation you want to have after the fact. Whether it’s a conversation about optimizing campaigns, measuring ROI, or ascribing credit to specific teams in your organization.

Here’s a rundown of what insights some common multi-touch attribution models can tell you:

✅ U-Shaped: Allocates a larger portion of pipeline and/or revenue to the first touch and the lead creation touch and an equal allocation to all other touches.

✅ W-Shaped: Similar to U-Shaped but includes the touchpoint just before opportunity creation. All other touchpoints share the remaining allocation based on all other interactions a customer had with your brand.

✅ Full-Path: Allocates pipeline and/or revenue to all touchpoints in the customer journey. Full-path can be equally weighted or custom-weighted depending on the type and maturity of the full-path model.

✅ Sourced (or Even Weighted Up To Opportunity): Focuses on pre-opportunity creation touchpoints and equally associates pipeline and/or revenue to each touchpoint.

✅ Accelerated: Looks at post-opportunity creation at any marketing touchpoints that may have helped to close deals.

✅ Influenced: Allocates pipeline and/or revenue based on the entirety of the customer journey, including pre- and post-opportunity creation touchpoints.

✅ Time-Decay Allocates pipeline and/or revenue to all touchpoints in the customer journey, but the allocation percentage is weighted more for touchpoints closer to time of conversion and less to touchpoints that occur further away in time.

The takeaway for your marketing team: Both single- and multi-touch attribution have their place in your game plan, but multi-touch leads to various discoveries that help you double down on campaign success.

 

“As a marketer, you’re a revenue driver.”

 

As a marketer, you’re a driver of revenue. One of the most important decisions marketing makes for the business is to allocate campaign dollars to the places that give you the highest return on investment.

Your company’s invested in martech to make sense of the data, but if you’re making that call without multi-touch attribution, you’re spending in the dark.

Your marketing manager is probably focusing on cost per lead when making spending decisions.

If you pump more money into the sub-channels where you get cheaper leads and get more leads for your money. By that logic, organic SEO wins every time, then platforms with the next-lowest spend, and that’s where you’ll invest.

When you take a more gradual approach to the analysis and let lead data play out until you can calculate cost per deal.

Estimate revenue based on deal size, and you might see the picture shift.

Platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn may be more expensive per lead but more efficient per deal, bringing in sales at much higher values than sub-channels with cheaper leads.

 

“Not all leads are created equal.”

 

This is where ROI really comes from—revenue vs spend—and it produces a different decision than if you’d focused on cost per lead. The lesson for marketing here is that not all leads are created equal. If you reduce spend based on leads, you could lose out on deals in the long run.

Multi-touch attribution takes figures from across your brand activity and tells you what’s creating deals and ROI. That lets you double down on your strategy and determine how to max out spending at multiple levels:

• channels (e.g., social, display)
• sub-channels (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook), and
• tactics (e.g., whitepapers, webinars).

This is the essence of how attribution helps your marketing team succeed — from your CMO setting growth targets and strategic aims to your marketing manager running campaigns.

 

Drive better decisions

Multi-touch attribution connects the dots between marketing interactions and revenue, letting you accurately measure and spend on impact.

That understanding puts everyone on the same page about what campaigns really boost your bottom line, and it gives Marketing a more effective way to think about and surface value.

If you’re facing pressure to optimize right this second, just remember: this is an engine for long-term success. Take time to handle your modeling with care and collect the data you need as campaigns progress; you have more of both on your side than you think.

For any advice on succeeding with attribution, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

Contact us to start a conversation.

TLDR: Asking for help shows you’re prepared to solve problems and get results, but it’s not always easy. Explore some of the arguments that can strengthen your case.

Let’s see if you can relate to the following scenario:

Your leadership has made an investment. That is the investment in you, your team, your colleagues and your tech stack. The challenge is that your team is SO successful that you make it look easy.

You’re like the surfer/musician/ballerina who moves so effortlessly that it’s hard to appreciate all the hard work that makes it possible. The outcome for many is that you’re drowning in work, requests, deadlines, and deliverables.

The solution? You need some help.

This blog looks at some of the arguments that can support your request for help.

This is not an exhaustive list.

Our team has worked client side and agency side. Not only does this give us empathy for your current challenges, but we understand how to position the rationale and benefits of some outside help.

Let’s get started.

 

1) Speed

The first and easiest argument is one of speed. You need someone fast.

Agencies can deploy resources faster than hiring. Depending on which market you’re in, and/or flexibility in remote work, it can take a long time to hire someone.

If you’re in the crunch with timelines coming fast and furious, this is one easy argument to get some help.

 

2) Experience and perspective

There are knowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns when it comes to MOPs.

Bringing in an outside perspective can give you experience in areas that you’re not familiar with or feel like you’re not optimizing.

For example, take attribution. We’ve seen all kinds of implementations that are not working, or worse, collecting dust. Attribution reporting to leadership can be extremely powerful. Getting expertise can improve your marketing automation’s performance by complementing your skills with others.

An outside perspective in the form of an audit is a place that we’ve seen pay instant dividends. Another benefit of an agency providing help is that you have the benefit of their consultants’ collective experience.

 

3) Time and volume

You don’t have the time to do everything.

This is a harder argument to make when your leadership doesn’t fully appreciate marketing operations.

However if your team can do 50 programs a week and there is a need for 100, the time argument can work. The smaller your team, the easier the argument that you can’t do everything.

Increasing volume is a better argument than time. Keep time in your back pocket. It is better as a supporting argument than a leading one.

Leadership sometimes can hear that everyone is busy and be perfectly fine with that.

 

4) Skill gaps

We’d like to be good at everything, but there can be times when you just don’t have the skills to execute.

We see this with analytics and dashboards all the time.

You can be a Marketo genius but are you also super savvy with Snowflake and Tableau? (If you are, contact me, we love unicorns like you!).

Your team might have some gaps that outside help can fulfill. The best part is that maybe you only need 15 hours a week in that role. A consultant can save the hiring of a full-time resource for part-time needs.

 

5) Test your needs

This one is straightforward. You may not be able to accurately estimate the skills and time you need with support.

If you start with a base number of hours, you can decide whether you need more time or build the case to hire your own resources.

 

6) Off books

This one is interesting but it’s more common than you would think.

Clients often look to consultancies to assist them for the simple reason of not increasing payroll/headcount.

This is a financial hygiene decision. An expense to a consultancy looks better than a salary in valuations.

You could do some probing to see if this argument would fly, but it’s generally one that your boss’ boss might be more concerned with.

 

7) Neutral/unbiased

A consultant can really help when there are tricky dynamics at play like introducing change within an organization.

The perception of a neutral/unbiased perspective can go a long way in bridging divides and finding common ground.

It could also just help you make your case.

If an outside audit gives weight to the point you’ve been making for months, this can really help move things forward.

 

8) Accountability

Possibly the best part of having outside help is their accountability.  They have timelines, deliverables and outcomes to get done for you.

They are responsible for creating a plan and executing it.

Need something done for the end of quarter? Done.

That type of accountability can go a long way in delivering what you need against your leadership’s asks.

 

9) Costs

This is always part of the equation. You will have to present the numbers.

Many of the points made above validate the costs you have to present. The magic is if you can equate the cost of help and the return on investment. ROI doesn’t always have to be dollars in business closed. It can be a better alignment between sales and marketing. It could be reducing the costs of dirty data. It can also be the costs of moving with speed and predictability.

These are just some of the arguments that you can make in building your case for help. It isn’t always easy to ask for help.

Some people see asking for help as a sign of weakness or failure.

We couldn’t disagree more.

Asking for help is a sign of wanting to get things done. Period.

As always, we’re here to help when you need it.

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Scaling up your martech stack at a rate that aligns with your company’s growing needs can be quite difficult.

With so many tech options out there, how can you be sure you’re making the right choices with your investments?

You’ll want to avoid as much tech bloat as possible, while also ensuring your team has the proper tools they need to grow operations efficiently.

It can be a tricky balance, but I have some tips that will set you on the right path.

1) Size is your primary benchmark, not time

When looking to invest in new software tools, the most important consideration is the size – and future growth- of your company.

You might be thinking: when will we get use from this tool? One year from now? Three years from now?

This is okay, as long as size is the primary benchmark for these time-based predictions. For example, let’s say you have 25 clients now. How long will it take you to get to 50 clients, 100 clients, and so on?

Think of buying clothes for a child. You could buy the next 10 shirt sizes for them, but those shirts could be sitting in a closet for the next five years before they fit. Or, they might fit much sooner than expected and you need to go shopping again.

Similarly, it’s your responsibility to track the progression and maturity of your martech stack so you can keep developing it to meet your continuously growing needs. Doing so will require continual communication with leadership.

For example, they might have information about revenue projections for the next two to five years, certain KPI targets that have been set, and so on. All of these factors go into understanding your current and future needs, which will direct how you invest in your tools.
 

2) Tech for now or for later?

Now that you’ve established a reference point for what you’ll need and when you’ll need it, I recommend you future-proof your tech the best you can.

In my experience, it’s better to invest in tools that will last as long as possible to avoid the costly process of ripping out the entire system later.

For example, one option might be to spend $100,000 on a tool that you won’t fully use for another few years. But the alternative could be spending $50,000 on something you need right now, only to spend another $300,000 in a few years ripping out the entire system because it needs replacing.

This “rip and replace” process, however, will be a bigger deal for some tools compared to others.

To simplify things, think of your tech in two categories:

1. Backbone tools, and
2. Peripheral tools.

 
Backbone tools are the core of your martech stack, including your essential marketing automation tool such as Marketo, Hubspot, etc. These tools will be much more painful and costly to “rip and replace,” so you’ll want to grow with them over the long term.

In some cases, depending on your current budget and needs, you can invest in the baseline offering of a certain tool now.

Then, later on, you can upgrade and layer in added services and functions as necessary. These add-ons, which can be applied dynamically, are your peripheral tools – in addition to other things like data enrichment software.

As you can probably tell, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to choosing the right tech.

Your needs will depend on many factors including your company’s structure, size, and projected growth. But as long as you’re constantly synchronized with leadership, and you plan ahead to future-proof your backbone tools with room for peripheral upgrades, I’m confident you’ll have an efficiently designed martech stack that can grow alongside you and your team.
 

3) Next steps

Once you’ve worked out which tools to invest in, make sure you’re absolutely clear with your boss about what a tech overhaul will involve. It’s going to take an ongoing time investment, thorough evaluation of your tools, and behavioral change from team members as they adapt to the new tech.

Effectively communicating all of this to your VP and CMO will increase the likelihood that they support your proposed changes. You can read more about how to explain your tech stack overhaul to your boss here.

You’ve got this — and if you need any help bringing in new technology, drop us a line.

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