Category: Tough Talks

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

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

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

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

This production process is crying out for improvement:

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

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

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

 

The basics of Knak

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Brand control

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

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

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

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

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

 

Knak + RP = A perfect match

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

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

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

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

 

Focus on A-list strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The qualities of impact

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

The two qualities of a valuable impact metric are its:

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

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

Email campaigns are especially notable nowadays for yielding vanity metrics.

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

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

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

 

How does marketing affect the bottom line?

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

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

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

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

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

 

Focus on conversions

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

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

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

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

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

 

Input vs. output

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

➡️ Lift up sales

➡️ Demonstrate credibility

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

 

What is Marketo Sales Insight?

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

Partners in growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Get your house in order

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

The takeaway

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

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

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

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

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

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

TLDR: Pardot is one of the more powerful marketing automation platforms available, but is it the right fit for your goals and organizational maturity?

Pardot is one of the more prominent marketing automation platforms available to businesses. While its capabilities are more sophisticated than others on the market, Pardot requires a certain level of organizational maturity, goals that align with the functions that Pardot provides, and realistic expectations about what it takes to get up and running with the platform. If your leadership is interested in implementing Pardot, this is a conversation you need to have.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll unpack:

• what Pardot offers
• how to assess if your business is compatible with the platform, and
• the practicalities to account for if you decide to go ahead.

 

Why Pardot?

Pardot differentiates itself from more basic email service providers (e.g., MailChimp) with its support for more complex campaign structures.

The benefits of Pardot:

You can send mass email blasts and build landing pages and forms, but you can also use Pardot to create:

• lead scoring models
• lead lifecycles, and
• lead nurture campaigns.

You can use templates to clone and reuse these more advanced systems at scale.

How does Pardot compare to Marketo?

Compared to platforms of similar stature, like Marketo, Pardot offers a more accessible UI that users can navigate with relative ease. Pardot also has less complex backend configurations to establish compared to Marketo.

Pardot is owned by Salesforce, which brings some notable benefits if your company uses Salesforce as its CRM. It’s a more seamless integration than other marketing automation platforms, and a discount on purchasing Pardot.

Implementing Pardot

Before onboarding any marketing automation platform, your CMO needs to communicate a clear direction for the near future.

• What strategic plans do they have for the next year or five years?
• How suitable are Pardot’s functionalities to help the company achieve them?
• Is Pardot the platform most compatible with those goals?

These are the level-setting questions leadership should answer to determine whether Pardot is a sensible choice.

You don’t want to spend the time, money, and energy onboarding a complex platform only to switch direction in a couple of years.

The clearer your CMO’s strategic intent, the better your chance of making an effective decision about Pardot. Read our post ‘How Strategy Changes Impact Tech‘ for more.

 

Know your maturity

Another essential consideration to ask yourself is: Is your company mature enough to handle the cost and complexity of Pardot?

The general growth journey that companies follow with marketing automation starts with an email platform at an early stage. Then companies generally progress to a mid-range tool like Hubspot at a medium size. To make the jump to Pardot, you’ll need to have more substantial resources.

The least expensive subscription option for Pardot comes at $1250 USD a month—and that doesn’t include the cost of hiring at least one dedicated expert to own the platform.

If you already have Salesforce or are considering Salesforce then bundling both can lower the price significantly.  The financial difference can mean $1000s of dollars in savings.

$1 million in revenue is a healthy approximation for when the investment makes sense, but your database size is also crucial. A database with hundreds of contacts is better served by a lighter and more economical email platform—scaling your tech upwards while your database is still in its infancy is putting the cart before the horse.

At a ballpark of 10k prospects and customers, you can take advantage of Pardot’s more advanced features.

For leadership: Evaluating whether you as a business are ready for Pardot is just as important as sizing up the opportunities the platform’s functions can provide. Encouraging your CMO to think clearly about where you are, and where you’re heading, will help your company make the right decision.

 

Expectations vs. reality

The complexity of the technical infrastructure that powers marketing operations is often lost on leadership. Lead lifecycles look nice and simple in diagram form, and campaigns of just a handful of emails can seem like little work.

If your CMO expects to quickly get up and running with more ambitious projects and see fast results, this is where you offer a reality check.

Completing the likes of advanced lead scoring models and lifecycles can take months of work on the backend, not including the organizational dependencies at play.

Web and IT also require close involvement to build the necessary systems and load Javascript code onto your site so that Pardot can capture visitor data. The turnaround time here is wildly variable, depending on how robust your approval process is for technical changes.

The most sensible advice to offer leadership here is that your requirements should start small. Templates for landing pages and emails can be created in days – or minutes using Knak.

And with that support, your Marketing team can progress from simple campaigns to more advanced projects in several months. This is how success becomes achievable.

 

Is Pardot right for you?

Key takeaway: Pardot’s applicability depends on your maturity and goals as a company.

If you’re a Salesforce organization with healthy revenue and a large database, that’s a good start.

If your CMO has also expressed a clear strategic intent for the platform’s functionalities and will invest in the expertise required to run it, you’re in a position to seriously consider Pardot.

If any of these pieces is missing, there’s probably a more suitable solution for your needs.

For any advice you need with assessing marketing automation platforms, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Revamping your tech stack is rarely an easy task. A tech stack overhaul can take 18 months, so set realistic expectations with leadership. Assess the current state of the tech stack, gather information from different departments, and build a case for change. Present the tech stack as an interlinking diagram and position the project as a technological and cultural change. Finally, a tech stack overhaul requires an ongoing time investment.

It’s easier than you think for a tech stack to get tangled. Maybe each department chooses tech in silos, acquiring tech without regard to the overall strategy. Or your company has grown through acquisitions, bringing tools together that don’t sync well.

Either way, the results are bad: Lagging campaigns, reporting errors, or an inability to show marketing’s contribution to revenue.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll cover how to set realistic expectations for revamping your tech stack. Creating and pitching a successful plan means taking a consultative approach around your company, so we’ll advise you on how to approach the discussions you’ll need to have along the way.

 

Set fair expectations

The VP and CMO don’t see all the work MOPs does to keep things working. They just know you get things done.

When they tap you to overhaul the tech stack, they’re doing it with an optimistic view of the time and effort involved.

A core piece of tech alone — your CRM, CMS, or marketing automation platform — can take 3-6 months to overhaul correctly. It can take up to 18 months if your workplace is particularly complex or slow-moving to get all the pieces together.

What leadership needs to know: turning your stack around is a gradual process.

It’s a project of finding the roadblocks that stop your team from working well and unearthing opportunities to improve your tech use.

Putting your assessment into action can help marketing gain revenue, reportability, and productivity — you just need time and space to do a thorough job. 

 

Build your case

Your first step is determining just how messed up your tech stack is.

Start getting friendly with people in different departments, chiefly marketing, sales, and IT.

Ask them to walk you through their processes with questions like:

• How do lead flows work between marketing and sales?
• How do you get campaigns off the ground?
• What features do you use (and not use) in the tools you have?

 
These questions will help you determine how your stack interlinks and which tools are essential versus substandard. 

This is how you frame a case for change to leadership. The heart of your tech needs to be healthy and additional tools should sync well with your core tech: CRM, CMS, and marketing automation platform. 

If not, each tool should be best-in-class at what it does, fulfill a relevant need for your business, and have strong momentum in the market.

Tech you can eliminate: Tools that duplicate functions, lack useful integrations, or are no longer relevant to your business only add costs and put pressure on your infrastructure.

 

Influence the outcome

Overhauling your tech stack will impact more teams beyond marketing. Leadership needs to believe in your assessment to push it through. Illustrate how all the pieces gel and clash to your bosses to get their support.

Present your tech stack as an interlinking diagram that maps out how:

• your tools sync
• how each set of features contributes towards revenue and productivity, and
• redundant, siloed, and poorly-utilized software bloats your stack.

 
Some of those suboptimal tools will be popular with the teams that use them. Naturally, removing or replacing these solutions can create tension. So, position this project to leadership as equally about refreshing the culture of your workplace along with the tech. Read our advice column on choosing the right martech stack for more info.

What to tell your boss: Now we know the flaws in how our teams use tech to build landing pages or host webinars, we can rethink how to do those things for the better. Partner with MOPs to change the culture here, and we can implement procedural and technological changes that help to create better outcomes for the business.

MOPs should own new tech: Propose that MOPs be fully involved with evaluating and signing off on new pieces of tech. As you screen apps for quality, market momentum, and complementary fit for the business, your input saves the company from repeating past mistakes.

Once you have untangled the knots, the next challenge is keeping your tech stack healthy.

 

Turn your tech around

Untying the knots in your tech stack isn’t an easy task.

Make it clear to leadership what is involved — ongoing time investment, holistic evaluation, behavioral change with tech — and you’ll stand the best chance of partnering together to succeed.

For any guidance you need throughout the process, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

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TLDR: Last-minute webinar requests often arise from a lack of awareness of the work involved. A little education and extra time can significantly improve the results of your webinars. 

If you’re in MOps you’ve seen this request before:

“Hi Marketing Ops Friends, we need to host a webinar next week, so can you get me the landing page link so we can get the invite out?”

Put your stress on hold. It doesn’t have to be this way.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we cover how to have a conversation with your friends and colleagues about how to get the most out of a webinar.  A little extra time can make the difference between a webinar that’s mediocre and one that’s great.

 

Tip 1: Plan for education

They really mean well.  Truly.  What we’ve found is that there often isn’t any education around building a webinar program.

They haven’t seen what’s under the hood.  Like many things we can’t fully appreciate how hard things can be (e.g. skateboarding tricks, memorizing lines in a play) until they are explained to us. Take your stakeholder on a journey with you by taking the time to show them all of the ingredients for a successful webinar, including its promotion.

Ask the right questions and let them know all the elements you need before you can even start building the registration page. Sharing is caring, right?

 

Tip 2: Gather the basics

Here is a list of what’s required as a starting point for any webinar conversation:

        1. Speakers and presentation

        2. Webinar software integrated into a marketing automation system

        3. Promotional budget

        4. Promotional copy & assets

        5. Promotional channels

This list on its own can help get things on track. It’s a far cry from the webinar request that we saw above.

 

Tip 3: Webinar blueprint

Now we start to get practical. You’ll need a friendly guinea pig to start.

Get a stakeholder to work with you to develop a webinar blueprint or briefing form that gets at all of the pertinent information.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it can help translate the scale of work that is involved in building a successful webinar.

This friend/victim can also be an advocate for the process, moving forward.

 

Tip 4: Look at the big picture

There are two key questions to start with here.

        1. What is the objective of the webinar?
        2. Who is the target audience?

This may seem like table stakes for some but it’s overlooked or assumed knowledge in many instances.

We can get into logistical questions like where and when will the recordings be available, later on down the list.

 

Tip 5: Be a partner that adds value

Shift roles from order taker to collaborator. Consider providing advice such as:

• Promotional channel suggestions.
• Typically subject lines in this format have performed better.
• Conversions by channel, by segmentation.

If you have data to back it up, it will give your advice some extra weight.

 

Tip 6: Visualize

There are certain members of the team at Revenue Pulse that love a good process flow.

They can often be seen in real-time playing around with sequences in Lucidchart, just for fun!

A good process flow can help show your colleagues the steps and complexities in a single snapshot.

The magic happens when you can communicate clear timescales and dependencies against the sequences, as well as who is responsible for what. “I need x weeks to deliver this from when I get the assets. If I only get them next week, I will need x weeks from that.”

 

Tip 7: Templates

Program templates will definitely save you some time.

Most often we find that a couple of templates can address 90% of the need.

If you have a system like Knak, you can create a series of modules that will allow you to assemble templates in minutes.

 

Tip 8: Test

Once you have the templates and the details uploaded, it’s time to find a friend to test things out.

Testing is often overlooked. But, if you can sign up for the webinar, get all the right emails flowing into the right lists, and have a link to access the webinar, you are golden.

 

Tip 9: Self-servce

Here’s one tip that can make your life easier after you start the program: self-service updates.

Create a shared space where relevant teams (e.g. Sales) can see registrants/attendees (e.g. SFDC campaign). This saves you time from having to provide updates.

 

Tip 10: Follow-up

Make suggestions on what to do after the webinar has taken place. You might suggest that a nurture program be set up for engaged audiences.

You could also ask if a follow-up email with other webinar suggestions, might be helpful.

 

Tip 11: Share the results

Once you have the form and process smoothed out and underway, it might be time to bring the team together to share results.

Show how the process worked and share data on the results. This is the fist bump/high-five moment. Don’t skip this one.

There probably isn’t much we haven’t seen when it comes to webinars at Revenue Pulse.

We know that some patience and education of internal stakeholders can go a long way in improving results and quite frankly the quality of work-life for those in MOps.

As always we’re ready to chat whenever you need a hand.