Category: Tough Talks

TLDR: Marketing automation platforms play a significant role in how businesses engage with their audiences. Marketo and HubSpot are leading the pack, but which one should you choose? Our latest Tough Talks Made Easy post gives you the tools to help your executive team choose the right platform for your business. Take a look.

 

What you’ll learn here:

• When choosing a marketing automation platform, Marketo and HubSpot are leaders.
• Where HubSpot is a centralized inbound marketing platform with multiple functions, Marketo focuses on moving leads through the marketing funnel.
• You can help your C-suite choose the right solution for your business by exploring these three considerations:
  • your tech stack
  • your products and customer audience, and
  • the maturity of your team.

 

Marketing automation tools are changing the way businesses operate.

On the one hand, they make marketing and sales teams more efficient and productive. On the other, they’ve made it easier for marketers to provide tailored, personalized experiences that meet their target audiences where they are.

At the top of the marketing automation charts are Marketo and HubSpot, two platforms that have led the way in revolutionizing the marketing space. But, which of these tools is best for your business?

To help you guide your exec team in their decision on which software to adopt, here’s an overview of each platform and the considerations you should make as you evaluate them.

 

Marketo Vs. HubSpot

HubSpot

HubSpot is an inbound marketing platform that has four functions:

• marketing
• sales
• customer service, and
• customer relationship management (CRM).

Users can operate their email marketing, CRM software, contact management, and help desk automation from one place with a well-designed user interface.

While many teams appreciate the centralized experience, HubSpot also offers extensibility that allows you to integrate with third-party apps, including Salesforce.

This flexibility makes it easier for companies to customize the experience to what makes sense to them.

 

Marketo

Marketo Engage, meanwhile, is a robust marketing automation platform.

Marketo focuses exclusively on moving leads and customers through various stages of the marketing funnel. It does this in a way that’s customizable to the organization’s processes and structures.

What Marketo offers:

• marketing automation
• email marketing, and
• lead management capabilities.

This focus allows users to create highly personalized content to tailor marketing campaigns to specific audiences.

 

The truth is, this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.

When it comes down to it, both tools serve different functions and have to be considered within the broader scope of your tech stack and where your business is going.

So, the question you and your C-suite should really be asking is: Do you need a centralized marketing and sales hub or a robust marketing automation platform that integrates with other best-of-breed solutions?

 

3 non-technical considerations:

When making this choice, you’ll need to engage with your leadership team to determine which platform makes the most sense for your business.

Here are three non-technical considerations that will help guide your conversation with them.

1. For your CIO: Your existing tech stack

HubSpot reduces complexity for your team

As mentioned above, HubSpot is a centralized solution for sales, marketing, and customer engagement functions.

It continues to expand the offerings on its platform, making it a great place to start if you don’t have any technology serving those verticals—and don’t have the budget to invest in multiple integrated solutions.

The other benefit here is that HubSpot reduces complexity for your team, as they only have one tool to learn. This also makes it easier to transfer data from one function to another for accurate attribution reporting.

 

Marketo helps you build a best-of-breed tech stack

Marketo is the right choice if your company builds a tech stack with best-of-breed solutions leading their verticals.

The tool makes up for not being an all-in-one solution by integrating seamlessly with leading solutions like Salesforce, Drift, and Bizible.

In fact, Marketo was originally designed with Salesforce in mind, and they still operate seamlessly together today. That said, it’s important to remember that each platform has its own price tag, so you need to have the budget available to build and run this integrated ecosystem.

The other consideration is that Marketo is less prone to evolving its software, making it a more predictable investment.

 

How to help your CIO: Your CIO likely has a strategy or roadmap for what your company’s tech stack will look like. Talk to them about it and use the points above to determine which platform fits into that strategy.

 

2. For your CMO: Your products and customer audience

Small product catalogs:

Businesses that only market one product to one or two audiences will naturally have relatively simple customer journeys.

It reduces the need for complex workflows, persona building, and robust attribution models.

HubSpot does a good job of addressing this use case as it easily connects the dots between each step in a single customer journey.

 

Large product catalogs:

Meanwhile, companies that have larger, more complex product catalogs require more specialized tools across every part of the path to purchase.

That’s especially the case if they have a number of customer segments to meet with the right messaging at the right time.

This is where teams can make the most of Marketo, accounting for multiple considerations and customer behaviors.

 

How to help your CMO: Raise these points with your CMO to advise them on where a product like Marketo or HubSpot can be more productive.

They’ll also be able to tell you if there are any anticipated changes in how your business plans to market to new or existing audiences, which will also dictate which platform makes the most sense.

 

3. For your CEO: The maturity of your team

Is your business new on the scene? Or have you been around for decades?

Wherever your team sits on the maturity spectrum should inform how your executives decide on a marketing automation platform.

 

Startups:

For growth-stage startups that are prioritizing their product development, HubSpot tends to be the platform of choice.

A centralized, easy-to-use solution can make it easier for the individuals running your marketing, sales, and customer engagement functions to work towards the same goals in a quick and scalable way.

In addition, since HubSpot is continually innovating its platform, it’s an appealing digital solution for companies that are also evolving within their own markets. There hasn’t been significant innovation with Marketo Engage in some time.

 

Enterprises:

Meanwhile, larger enterprises that have invested in building a robust marketing team filled with seasoned MOPs professionals are more likely to have Marketo at the heart of their marketing operations efforts.

With the right combination of tools and people, these companies can get creative with how they reach their vast audiences.

 

How to help your CEO: This type of insight will matter to your CEO. As you walk your CEO through the platforms, contextualize each within the current and future states of the company.

 

Making the right decision

With so many marketing automation tools on the market now, it can feel overwhelming to find and pick the right one, but it doesn’t have to be.

The three considerations outlined above should help you and your executives weigh one leading product against another.

We help companies around the world with marketing automation platform setup, migration and optimization.

If you’re still not sure which way to go and would like to continue the conversation, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Accounts-based marketing (ABM) has rapidly become a staple in the marketing and sales space. But, getting it right takes a lot of time and investment. Successful ABM requires alignment across your marketing and sales teams, targeting and building relationships with individuals, supporting a robust tech platform and so much more. This leads to an important question: should you outsource this function to an agency?

In a recent Tough Talks Made Easy, we discussed the value of account-based marketing (ABM) in landing deals with high ROI. The benefits are clear, ABM:

• lets you be more efficient by focusing on a finite set of prospects
• fosters alignment between your sales and marketing teams, and
• gives you more visibility into where your efforts are being spent.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at the principles that make a successful ABM strategy, and some key considerations that will help your CMO and CSO decide how best to implement it.

Let’s dive in.

 

A successful ABM strategy

ABM is a strategy for producing marketing campaigns that target particular accounts. So, a big part of that process is determining which accounts you want to prioritize.

This starts by studying your target customer persona.

Your sales and marketing teams should work together to determine the parameters for prioritizing accounts. These can include:

• the size or market share of the organization
• how much influence the prospect has in the market
• the strength of the existing relationship (if any), and
• whether they have money to spend.

 

There is no magic number.

You need enough parameters to ensure that both marketers and sales reps are reflected in the selection process, but not so many that it’s difficult to find more than a handful of accounts to pursue.

Once you know who you’re targeting, you need to be able to create targeted messaging that speaks to the people you’re trying to reach.

It could be a two-pager that outlines what you know about their specific challenges and pain points, and how your solution might address them. Or it could be a targeted billboard that you know your prospect will drive by on their way to their office, calling them out to give you a call.

(Believe me, I’ve seen it!)

For that, you need marketers that work closely with sales to create these assets, with enough time to dedicate to these initiatives.

 

The other consideration is technology.

As ABM has become a more mainstream function for marketing and sales teams, we’ve seen the emergence of various ABM platforms.

This includes the likes of Demandbase, 6sense, and Triblio.

Choosing the right platform comes down to whether it solves the problems you want it to, whether it fits in your budget, and whether it integrates with your existing solutions. But it’s also important to remember that a tool is only as good as the strategy that’s behind it—and the team that uses it.

Any investment in technology also requires a lot of time and effort to craft a robust strategy that has a high chance of success.

Are these all things you and your leaders feel you can accomplish with the resources you have available?

 

ABM: In-house vs agency?

This brings us to the age-old question that surrounds any marketing function. Should you get outside help?

A lot of the considerations here will be familiar:

• Can you afford to hire a full-time employee to drive ABM?
• Do you have the budget to spend on an ABM platform?
• Are you prepared to build the experience you need to get ABM right in the long run?
• What happens if your leaders try it out for six months and decide it’s not worth it?

 

How agencies can create a successful ABM strategy

There are several reasons why working with an agency can create a successful ABM strategy:

• An agency will come with a wealth of experience and perspective from designing and implementing ABM strategies with other companies around the world.
• As agencies have their own technology partnerships, they can help minimize the spending that you would have to put towards an ABM platform. They’ll also have guidance on how to best integrate that tooling into your existing martech stack.
• With their expertise and exposure to the space, an agency team will also help address any knowledge gaps you and your team might have, saving you from making mistakes.
• An agency that’s entirely focused on your ABM strategy will help you get results faster, but they’ll also be easily decommissioned if down the line you and your leaders decide that ABM isn’t the right way to go.

 

Help your marketing and sales leaders decide:

Dipping your toes into the ABM pool with an agency will reduce your risk exposure and likely increase the return on your initial investment in this space.

Plus, working with an agency has the added benefit of giving you access to all the knowledge and resources you need to bring the function in-house when and if it feels right to do so.

 

Start a discussion

There’s a lot to think about, no question.

But, with these points in your back pocket, you’ll be able to have a great discussion with your leaders about what your team’s next step should be when it comes to ABM.

Need more help figuring out how to successfully adopt your ABM strategy? Get in touch.

TLDR: Organizations hiring in MOPs often report a shortage of top talent, but many capable candidates are unsure how to illustrate their value and suitability. Before you apply for an internal promotion or a role in a new workplace, get to know three things: the standards and trends in the marketing operations space, your ambitions and preferences, and how you achieve goals, solve problems, and create positive outcomes. Then, you can enter your next career conversation focusing only on the right opportunities and ready to impress.

 

The job market in marketing ops is becoming increasingly dynamic, driven by the rapid growth of opportunities in the space and a collective reassessment of our relationships with work. Organizations hiring in MOPs often report a shortage of top talent, but many capable candidates are unsure how to show and prove their value.

If you’re considering a new role, whether an internal promotion or a new workplace, you’ll find yourself talking about the things you want from work and the positive impact you create. Hiring managers and your boss (for promotions) are ultimately looking to identify three things: if you can do the job, if you want the job, and if you’re the right fit.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to position yourself as a credible candidate in career conversations.

Your power as a candidate comes from:

• educating yourself about how the expectations of each role compare to the norms of the market
• reflecting on your motivations and preferences, and
• preparing to demonstrate how you achieve goals and solve problems.

 

Research and reflection

Interviews are like two-way sales calls. As you relay how you solve problems and create positive outcomes, your employer wants to excite you with the role and workplace. You don’t want to lose sight of the things that matter amidst the pressure of an interview, so before you enter any career conversation, do some R&R (research and reflection).

Perhaps the most crucial question to answer is this:

What do you want from work? List your must-haves, deal-breakers, and future career ambitions to narrow down the roles and workplaces that fit well. A clear vision and authentic enthusiasm will help you speak with conviction about your skills and suitability for each opportunity, and you’ll likely receive more attractive offers as a result.

Even with what seems like a dream job, gather information before your interview and decide if the working conditions, responsibilities, and development opportunities on offer are what you want.

• What do employee testimonials reveal about an organization or team’s culture?
• Is the list of responsibilities in the job description realistic?
• How does the compensation package compare to market expectations?

Confident knowledge of the MOPs space lets you assess if the role has a fair workload, if compensation is in line with your level, and how the processes and tools used in a workplace compare to the industry standard.

Internal career conversations can be a touch more delicate.

Whether you want extra help, more money, or different responsibilities, give specific examples of the changes you want to your role with a promotion.

Make a case driven by impact data and achievements for why you deserve the outcomes you’re after and illustrate how a change in your role will add value or reduce problems to help the organization achieve better outcomes.

 

Show and prove

Marketing ops is all about optimizing your organization’s Marketing spend to increase revenue.

The following skills and traits are instrumental to doing that well:

• problem-solving
• results-driven
• growth mindset
• confidence, and
• expertise in the latest trends, tools, and practices in the space.

When discussing the role, illustrate your impact by describing how you’ve solved problems and achieved results that have boosted the bottom line.

If you don’t already know the goals you’re working towards, speak with your boss and set specific, measurable targets with deadlines. Establish what success looks like in each month, quarter, and year of your role. Then identify the performance metrics that matter to the business and connect them to revenue.

Read that paragraph again. That is how you can measure impact and build a verifiable case of your achievements.

Showing goal orientation to your boss is especially meaningful if you’re going for a promotion, but still helpful in conversations with external hiring managers too. You’ll benefit from a confident sense of how you meet and exceed expectations. In either scenario, come to the table ready to say things like: “One of my goals was to increase MQLs by 15%. I did so by 20%, here’s how.”

If you don’t meet those goals initially, proactively reach out to your relevant stakeholders to try and solve the problem.

Your manager, Marketing, and Sales are all your “internal customers”— people who should know the value of your work. Discovering why you didn’t achieve a goal or solve a problem and taking corrective action shows that you’re committed to getting results. In a career conversation, “I fixed this problem by working with others to come up with a solution, here’s the resulting progress” is a persuasive argument to make.

All of your research into the MOPs space especially pays off for internal conversations.

When you understand the direction of the industry and are ready to articulate your value, here’s a point your boss can respect: “The industry is changing fast and lots of opportunities are emerging. I like working here and wanted to give you the chance to continue my professional development with X compensation or Y responsibilities, but if not, I’ll have to look elsewhere.”

 

Your value explained

Whether you’re discussing an internal promotion or interviewing for an external position, the most decisive element of any career conversation is how you illustrate your impact and motivations.

Get to know the standards and directions of the MOPs space, what you really want from a new opportunity, and how you achieve goals, solve problems, and create positive outcomes.

Then, you can enter your next career conversation focusing only on the right opportunities and ready to impress.

Want to know more about demonstrating your value in marketing operations? Revenue Pulse is here to help.

 

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TLDR: MOps and RevOps directly fuel the success of their leaders, but they often feel disempowered to speak up for greater input and influence. To get on the map, show how your work impacts the bottom line. When leadership sets strategies and goals, chooses tools, and establishes KPIs, these are opportunities to use your data, research, and expertise to manage upwards. Suggest solutions and best practices based on sound logic and data, and C-level will trust and seek your input.

 

The top goal of many C-Suite executives is to optimize revenue. MOps and RevOps are in a unique position to help leaders accomplish this. You sit on a treasure chest of data about business performance. You surface reports, track meaningful metrics, and interpret insights. Without the contributions of people with these skills, leadership struggles to make effective strategic and investment decisions.

In this way, MOps and RevOps directly fuel the success of their leaders. Still, however, there’s a limited understanding at the C-level of the true impact and value of these disciplines.

And compounding the problem of recognition, MOps and RevOps people often feel disempowered to speak up and advocate for greater input and influence, even when they have the expertise to steer key decisions successfully.

Your leaders want to solve problems. They want to know better and do better, but they can’t read minds. And they want to hear well-evidenced proposals over complaints. In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn strategies to gain recognition, influence, and input by speaking up with leadership the right way.

 

Talking impact

The key thing to boost your visibility is to show how your work impacts the bottom line or otherwise contributes to the specific goals your execs care about.

You might feel like you don’t have much of a voice within the company, but hard evidence is difficult to ignore.

Get to know the particular results leadership wants (e.g. customer retention, attraction). Capture the relevant data to build a business case to support a course of action. Luckily, with all the data you work with on revenue generation and optimization, you have the ingredients to be persuasive.

C-Suite wants data-driven solutions to pressing business concerns. That’s true whether you’re advocating for a particular tool or suggesting a strategic change at a particular point in the sales cycle.

These are the kinds of questions your execs are interested in, and you’ll gain respect by investigating and proposing answers.

• How will that new tool cut campaign deployment time?
• How do the changes you’re testing impact conversion rates and revenue?

Win greater investment into the team

This approach also helps with winning greater investment into the team.

As with many things in business, there are no quick fixes. Some MOps/RevOps projects can seem like daunting investments of time and effort, particularly if leadership isn’t sure what the business stands to gain. Highlight the inefficiencies that are consuming time and resources, then show how certain investments can help to eliminate those issues—value add vs. cost.

In order to give C-Suite the insights and metrics they need to drive good decisions, you need to be properly equipped to do that job. Back up your arguments with data to illuminate the connection between C-Suite and MOps/RevOps: when you’re better, they’re better.

 

Educate upwards

Many C-level execs don’t fully grasp the nuances and minutia of Marketing Operations. They may want you to take on a particular tool, for instance, without your in-depth knowledge of the martech scene and the most suitable capabilities to achieve your objectives. They may base KPIs on vanity metrics rather than data points that can meaningfully steer decisions. Or they may not realize the demands of implementing a platform, and the time it takes to build, test, and tweak until you get the results you want.

There’s a great opportunity for you here to manage upwards. If execs don’t consult you frequently enough at the onset of big projects and decisions, speak up to be heard. You have the evidence to create better outcomes and win credibility. While leadership is in the process of setting strategies and goals, choosing tools, or establishing KPIs, proactively flag the risks and consequences of taking a suboptimal path. And whatever you think is the right course of action, put forward your vision with a rationale based on data, research, and expertise— “I advise X because of Y.”

You are your best advocate

You are your best advocate, so don’t be afraid to start conversations.

Problem-solving is an important part of your job, and that extends to speaking up when you know better. Leadership will appreciate any reality checks and better approaches that you contribute, but they’re especially interested in why. So if you want a say in where strategies and investments go, take advantage of the massive amount of data at your fingertips—it gives you more power than you realize.

 

Get on the map

Your reasoning makes you a credible voice. Offer your perspectives proactively to make yourself heard— if you display the ability to suggest solutions and best practices based on sound logic and data, C-level will trust and seek your input.

Need more guidance on taking strategic decisions in Marketing Operations? Let’s chat.

 

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TLDR: Whether leadership is looking to grow or expand into new service areas, new goals can change which tools are relevant to your business. Speak with your marketing ops team to understand if the proposal requires more time or budget. Before making the shift, visualize how each piece of your tech stack fits together to gauge any impacts. If a new tool is needed, allow for overlapping contracts, time to map out new processes and train people on a new system while they’re still using the current one.

 

Strategy and technology

The link between strategy and technology is essential for any leader to understand:

• Your strategy sets the direction for the business and shapes your goals.
• Your tech stack is the means by which you achieve them.

It’s easy to get attached to particular tools, but strategic intent gives purpose to each piece of tech.

Your stack is fluid. It evolves to solve problems and provide capabilities as your business needs change—a quality that’s especially clear when strategic change is on the way.

Whether leadership is looking to grow or expand into new service areas, the establishment of new goals can potentially change the tools that are relevant to your business.

If martech leadership is working on or has recently announced a new strategy, this Tough Talks Made Easy is for you. You’ll learn how to discuss the impact that strategic changes have on technology, so you can invest the time and budget you need to get your team and stack in shape.

 

Fitting the pieces together

First, your boss should consult with people around the business to better understand the impact of a proposed change. This ranges from director-level and management to the people in MOPs handling tools on a regular basis. Having these conversations early into the planning phase can reveal if a proposal demands more time or budget than first anticipated, along with any additional hires or new pieces of tech.

While putting together a plan, leadership needs to know exactly how your tech stack works across the whole organization. Changes to technology can reverberate across the ecosystem and cause unexpected trouble.

If your new strategy involves using a different marketing automation platform, for example, you then have the task of replacing a platform with lots of data tied into it and integrations with many other tools. Certain tools you’re using might not integrate smoothly (or at all) with the new platform—and that means new problems.

The message to impart here is to hit pause on a big shift until you’ve mapped out the tech stack across your business.

• visualize how each piece fits together to establish the tools you have
• understand why teams use the tools they do, and
• verify how each tool integrates.

By doing so, you’ll better gauge the impact of a strategic change on technology. As an added bonus, you can spot opportunities to consolidate tools with overlapping use cases and save on budget.

Before surveying the market for new tools, ask your leadership to lay out their specific needs.

• Is there a particular problem you’re looking to solve?
• New capabilities to add?
• Integrations that a new tool should have?

This promotes intentional, goal-driven tool adoption.

Sometimes, the trial period for a new tool isn’t enough to accurately determine the fit for your business. Limitations can become apparent after the demo and trial are complete. The clearer they are at establishing the necessary components of a new tool, the better equipped you are to find a tool that’s fit for the strategy.

We wrote an article about explaining your tech stack overhaul to your boss that may also be helpful.

 

Include a human touch

For the time and effort it takes to craft a strategy, punctuate it with clear goals, and make the appropriate changes in technology, the plan risks coming off the rails without a human touch.

You need people with the right skills and time allotted to make sense of any new tools and use them constructively.

When scoping out new technologies for the business, you’ll find that salespeople often understate the difficulty of learning a new tool and the time required to see real results.

The learning curve for the likes of a CRM, CMS, or MAP is steep. Realistically, it’s a job for multiple people. Adding a complex, foundational system onto the plate of a two-person MOPs team, in addition to their current responsibilities, is a recipe for burnout.

If your boss’ new strategy requires significant extra work or a new set of skills, the most sensible step they can take is to budget for new hires or an agency’s help — learn how we can help.

Likewise, leadership wants to achieve a particular result as fast and cost-efficient as possible.

Throughout a tool’s implementation period, allow for:

• overlapping contracts
• time to map out new processes and changes to data architecture, and
• training people on a new system while they’re still using the current one.

 

Optimize your budget

If you can only budget several hours a week for your MOPs team to learn a new system, the timeline to understand how a new tool works and integrate it into the team’s day-to-day workload will naturally take several months.

This learning curve is something to consider when setting strategic targets.

And while your boss sets the strategy, the tactics are best left to the MOPs team.

The learning process is all about trial and error. Experimenting and finding out the best ways to use a tool to do the things you need.

The people using the tool will eventually understand better than anyone which methods work and what results are realistic. Leadership should trust them to decide how to execute daily and encourage their feedback to shape performance goals.

 

The takeaway

While strategy is your guiding star, the capabilities of your tools and the people in your MOPs team are what make achieving goals possible.

Plan for changes in technology and human resourcing as early as possible when developing a new strategy, and leadership can expect success.

Need some support? Drop us a line, we’re here to help!

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TLDR: Marketing automation platforms are difficult to insert and replace, which impacts teams around the business. Your CIO can allocate personnel from IT and Data Science to help implement the platform successfully, but they need to know the investment makes sense. Gather the data to forecast the impact of the platform on revenue and productivity, accounting for costs and long-term personnel demands. Position this platform as urgent for survival, and back it up with a thorough cost/benefit analysis, and you stand a strong chance of getting your CIO’s support.

 

Reading the martech landscape and identifying technologies that can add real value to the business is a key skill for Marketing Operations professionals. While MOps succeed at understanding the relevance and benefits of new technologies, it’s often tricky to translate industry know-how into persuasive arguments that convince C-Suite to invest in new tools.

This is especially difficult when talking about marketing automation platforms. These key pieces of infrastructure impact teams around the business, integrate with many other tools and require significant time and cost investments.

If you’re pitching a new marketing automation platform, that conversation will take you beyond Marketing. You’ll need to speak with your CIO, who can allocate technical personnel to implement the project successfully.

In this Tough Talks Made Easy, you’ll learn how to plan and present a case for a new platform that your CIO can get behind.

 

Building your case

Before putting together a plan, it’s worth reflecting on the scale and value of the implementation. Marketing automation platforms are difficult to insert and replace. They with downstream impact on different teams in the organization — most notably IT and Sales.

 

Get cross-departmental buy-in

By nature, a platform implementation demands collaboration across disciplines. At a minimum, Sales, IT, and Data Science should support the project and contribute their expertise. Marketing might exclusively use and spend on the platform, but getting cross-departmental resources means selling the platform as a lift to productivity and/or revenue that boosts the business as a whole.

Crucially, you’ll need people outside of Marketing to handle the technical wiring and create training resources. CRM Admins, Developers, Data Scientists, and Data Warehousing Specialists are examples of key people who can bring the implementation to life, all of whom usually report to the CIO. Personnel contribution, rather than dollar investment, is why you’d approach your CIO.

To get buy-in, your CIO should understand that the platform you’re advocating is necessary for the organization’s success and survival.

Obsolescence = lights out for any business.

Frame this as a do-or-die opportunity. You can adopt this platform and transform your business, or fall behind.

 

Gather the appropriate data

Assume that your CIO isn’t plugged into the martech space. Your observations about how the platform fares in the industry and with competitors won’t persuade them alone.

Instead, numbers speak louder than words.

• What are the hours saved and efficiency gains per month?
• What revenue increase do you expect?
• How does the platform make personnel quantifiably more productive?

When it comes to revenue projections, you might not have the data on-side to create a solid forecast. This is where you reach out to Sales—it’s equally in their interest to have a platform that brings in the dollars.

Sales projections can help to frame the revenue opportunities on offer with the platform. Consider projections like:

• opportunity and win rates
• lead types and quality gains, and
• conversion rates for the highest-scoring leads.

Gather the data points you need to forecast the impact of the platform on revenue and productivity.

Then, accounting for the costs of implementation, walk your CIO through the hours and dollars that the business can expect to save or gain by implementing the platform.

Even when working with estimates, a thorough cost/benefit analysis is exactly what your CIO wants to see.

 

Thinking long-term

Even after digesting the benefits of the platform, one key question remains from your CIO: How is this going to be a permanently successful venture?

To answer this, you want to factor in post-implementation planning.

Users and people who experience a downstream impact from the platform need to clearly understand how it works. Account for any training sessions, change management, and the creation of educational resources that personnel under the CIO need to lead.

Realistically, the ways your Marketing team uses the platform will evolve over time. This means increased support should be available from technical staff long after the implementation.

Let’s say your current platform requires the support of two admins from IT. You might budget for a surge of 10 system administrators to implement the platform.

After working at this cadence, the demands on your business will change.

Rather than scaling back down to two admins post-implementation, you might need four admins permanently to manage the platform. This is especially likely if you’re scaling upwards to a more robust platform.

Your CIO wants this platform to succeed on a long-term basis. The more precisely you can account for the investment of personnel, during and past the implementation, the more accurately your CIO can size up the investment and commit the resources you need.

 

Selling your vision

Cross-departmental support can be tricky to secure, but it’s crucial to successfully implement a new marketing automation platform.

Come prepared to pitch the platform to your CIO as a vital and sensible move for the business. It’s necessary for survival. Prepare a thorough forecast of the revenue and productivity gains against costs and long-term personnel requirements. This is how you build a persuasive case for buy-in.

Need support implementing a new marketing automation platform? Contact us, it’s our specialty!

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

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

We get it.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Set a foundation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Find the points of alignment

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

1. Landing on collective timelines

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

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

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

2. Building a single source of truth

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

That shouldn’t be the case.

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

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

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

3. Capitalizing on personalization

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

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

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

 

A joint effort leads to success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Surface your best content

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

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

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

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

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

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

• client type
• topic, or
• customizable options.

 

Connect content to dollars

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

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

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

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

 

Before you sign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask your team if the pieces:

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

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

 

The bottom line

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

This production process is crying out for improvement:

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

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

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

 

The basics of Knak

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Brand control

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

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

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

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

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

 

Knak + RP = A perfect match

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

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

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

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

 

Focus on A-list strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The qualities of impact

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

The two qualities of a valuable impact metric are its:

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

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

Email campaigns are especially notable nowadays for yielding vanity metrics.

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

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

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

 

How does marketing affect the bottom line?

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

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

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

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

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

 

Focus on conversions

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

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

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

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

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

 

Input vs. output

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

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

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

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

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

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

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