Throughout her presentation, Hopkins will discuss how to transform existing martech stacks from a budgetary burden into a powerhouse of efficiency with a focus on:

• Practical and free tools to audit tech stacks and compare to 1,400 similar companies;
• Action plans to consider how to move forward with owning the stack; and
• Actionable and creative solutions.

To learn more about her session and dive deeper into the world of martech efficiency, the Demand Gen Report team sat down with Hopkins for a deeper discussion.

Demand Gen Report: In your opinion, what are some of the latest trends or factors impacting the modern martech landscape today?

Jeanne Hopkins: There is an increased focus on first-party data and privacy compliance along with a growing importance of martech stack integration and interoperability. There are a lot of trends, many asks and little support in terms of budget or people.

In addition, with the rise of AI and machine learning for personalization and automation, an emphasis on omnichannel marketing and seamless customer experiences call for a complete integration of customer data platforms (CDPs).

DGR: Being that practitioners are working in a world oversaturated with marketing technology, what steps can they take to audit their tech stacks to determine what’s essential and what’s not?

Hopkins: First and foremost, do a complete map of current tools and their functions. Who owns what? When is the tool/platform up for renewal? Who pays for it? Who is the administrator?

Then, identify overlaps and gaps in functionality by gathering feedback from users across departments (it’s not just marketing!)

Finally, prioritize tools based on strategic alignment and performance and define clear business objectives for each with KPIs that are reported. No data = no ownership.

DGR: What are some of the factors that led to over-accumulation of technology?

Hopkins: I’d start with the siloed decision-making within organizations. Many times, the owner of technology sits with IT. And, with a lack of visibility or training, they are not able to properly vet the technology needs of sales, customer support, or marketing teams.

Throw on top of this a lack of long-term strategic planning AND insufficient evaluation of existing tools before new purchases, and the tendency to chase what is ‘shiny and new’ causes waste of time (which marketers do NOT have) and budget (again, ‘do more with less, please’).

DGR: What’s your biggest piece of advice for practitioners who want to onboard a new piece of technology?

Hopkins: Ensure alignment with overall marketing strategy AND clearly define goals and success metrics for the new tool. You also need to involve key stakeholders from the beginning of any new purchase and develop a comprehensive implementation and training plan. Consider starting with a pilot program or phased rollout.

Additionally, regularly assess adoption and gather user feedback. Consider a debrief discussion six months into the purchase and develop a document that assesses the value received from the technology.

DGR: Similarly, do you have any advice for those who want to eliminate a component of their tech stack?

Hopkins: You have to ask yourself, ‘How would eliminating the component impact current workflows and integrations?’ In other words, what does that tool ‘touch’ in the stack?

Have a data migration and preservation plan to ensure a smooth transition to alternative tools or processes. Don’t kill something without having a backup and make sure there is solid, consistent communication to all affected teams about this modification of the tech stack.

Then, provide the necessary training (often overlooked) for any workflow changes, and monitor your performance metrics to validate the decision for the change.

To learn more about how your martech stack can you hold you back from achieving great results, make sure to register for #B2BMX East now and add Hopkins’ session to your agenda!

The post Why Commitment Is The ‘Real Magic’ Of Martech Effectiveness appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Last year’s B2BSMX was a highly successful in-person event, with many B2B marketers and organizations walking away with expert insights into ABM, revenue ops, AI, the changing role of CMOs and more. Attendees such as TopRank Marketing‘s Lee Odden also had the opportunity to network with their peers.

“On top of the great educational content, there was plenty of networking with both new connections and longtime friends in the industry,” Lee Odden wrote in a blog post. “It was great to see familiar faces like B2B guru Ruth Stevens and conference photographer Steve Hall, as well as new connections like the publisher of Chief Marketer, Beth Negus Viveiros.”

With the success of 2019’s B2BSMX event, Demand Gen Report is determined to make this year’s virtual event just as content-filled and engaging with relevant content and themes that reflect the current state of the B2B industry. Demand Gen Report has also, once again, partnered with The Pedowitz Group and Terminus to help bring the virtual event to life.

“The theme of this year’s event addresses the new revenue realities B2B companies are dealing with during this challenging time,” said Andrew Gaffney, Content Director for the B2B Sales & Marketing Exchange. “We have some really great sessions featuring both marketing and sales executives who will share creative approaches their teams are taking to engage prospects, even when they really don’t have opportunities to get in front of them face-to-face.”

Facing A New Reality

According to a recent virtual event survey conducted by Demand Gen Report, 62% of respondents stated they would benefit from listening to virtual keynotes, and 55% would love to learn about the latest technology and strategies marketers are using to find success. B2BSMX will tackle all three at once, helping marketers gain the industry insights they are seeking through from the comfort of their home office.

This year’s keynote sessions will explore the new normal of B2B, how to find success and overcome internal and external challenges, how to keep up with your competitors and more.

The first keynote session, The New Plan A: How To Regain Clarity, Get Proactive & Do Exceptional Work Again, will come from Jay Acunzo, who will discuss how to get an organization back on its feet and become better prepared for the future. Acunzo will expand on his previous discussion on the B2BMX podcast, helping attendees understand the importance of authentic connections and build a community with buyers.

Another keynote session will feature Casey Foss of business technology consultancy West Monroe. The session, titled: David vs. Goliath: How A High-Growth Company Is Combining Brand & Demand To Topple Industry Giants, will explore how B2B marketers can surpass their competitors through unique branding and demand generation strategies.

Sales and marketing alignment expert Jeff Davis of JD2 Consulting Group will also take the keynote stage to share how the B2B buyer-seller relationship has changed and why companies must have a sense of urgency about alignment transformation.

In addition to the keynotes, the B2BSMX agenda features a variety of case studies, lunch & learns and breakout sessions presented by top B2B voices from Forrester, ITSMA, Demandbase, Terminus, GumGum, The Pedowitz Group and many more.

Some standout sessions include:

• ABM In The C-Suite: Lessons Learned From Five Epic Failures from FireEye and ITSMA. Listen to ITSMA’s Rob Leavitt and ABM strategist Marlowe Fenne’s discussion on common pitfalls when marketing to executives, and learn how to reinvent your C-suite ABM programs;
• Communication. Collaboration. Orchestration: How Effective Sales Enablement Is Fueling Revenue Engines, Even In 2020 presented by Roderick Jefferson of Roderick Jefferson Associates. Jefferson will share the importance of and best practices around how to re-evaluate and re-invent, as well as establish new ways to communicate, collaborate and orchestrate with teams to wow customers and buyers.
• Marketing In Times Of Crisis: Embracing Empathy Is The Key To B2B’s Future from the Marketing Insider Group. Join author and CEO Michael Brenner to learn how storytelling can bring focus to customer value, and help deliver better business outcomes as a result; and
• How TikTok Can Shape Your 2021 Revenue Strategy from The Pedowitz Group. Hear from Revenue Marketing Therapist Debbie Qaqish about the impact of the social media app TikTok and three ways marketing and sales can use it to grow revenue.

There are tons of sessions to choose from for the entire team, so there is plenty of content for marketers, industry insiders and businesses to learn from.

Building A More Personal Network

According to the virtual event survey, 55% of respondents believed they would benefit from topical discussions with B2B experts, and 30% would participate in peer-to-peer networking opportunities. This year, Demand Gen Report wanted to provide those opportunities to ensure attendees get the opportunity to network with like-minded peers and learn from industry experts in a more intimate setting.

B2BSMX 2020 is also hosting a B2B mentorship program that allows rising sales and marketing professionals to register for 1:1 meetings with established heads of sales and marketing teams to gather personal insights into their success. These 15-minute private discussions allow marketers to ask for advice about their own marketing and sales programs and obtain guidance on topics ranging from collaboration, requirements and skills for success to tactics for negotiating with partners and much more.

In addition, day-one will include a variety of hands-on workshops to provide participants with actionable advice from industry experts. Some of these workshops include:

• How Marketers Can Support Sales When They Can’t Visit Their Customers with B2B marketing consultant and author Pam Didner. Join Didner to learn how marketers can alleviate sales’ pain points and support them throughout buying journeys;
• Pressure Test Your Message with Tamsen Webster of Find The Red Thread. Attendees will work with Webster to learn how to keep their message consistent throughout marketing campaigns; and
• F The Funnel — How Marketing Loops Will Turn Leads Into Lifelong Loyalists with Jeff Pedowitz, President and CEO of The Pedowitz Group, who will teach the audience to depend less on the lead generation funnel and start focusing on the customer for true revenue impact.

Lastly, B2BSMX will be carving out timeslots for multiple networking roundtables, providing attendees with an opportunity to socialize and have discussions on topics of their choice. Topics include new approaches to direct mail, sales enablement, the rise of virtual events and partner marketing. Everyone participating in the roundtable will be able to share their personal experiences in these fields, finding like-minded people to network with for potential future interactions.

This is just a small chunk of what the B2B Sales & Marketing Exchange online experience has to offer. Visit the website for more information, full agenda and registration options. We hope to see you there!

The post Event Preview: Adapting To The New Normal & Building Personal Networks At B2BSMX 2020 appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

“It’s still a bit of an evolving situation every day and it’s forcing people to adjust and rethink things,” said Jeff Pedowitz of The Pedowitz Group, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “In the near term, we are seeing that the vast majority of events scheduled over the next 60 days are being canceled. And the people that are holding events in the late summer and fall are holding off. For those marketers, they’re rapidly moving to some type of digital format. They’re still trying to find ways to deliver content.”

The shuffling of the deck on the events calendar has resulted in a surge of virtual presentations, meetings and webinars being launched. B2B companies such as Demandbase, Oracle, Adobe, Outreach and Inverta have opted to host online events to supplement the content and engagement gap from events that had been postponed or canceled. Other companies, including Allocadia, are embracing direct mail to replace booth meetings with virtual ones.

“From a marketing point of view, everyone is just still continuing to focus on anything they can do digitally,” said Pedowitz. “They’re holding back and being a little bit more conservative with spend.”

Shifting To Virtual Events

One of the biggest shifts among B2B marketers is a move to supplement the engagement lost from physical events during March and April with online events. Mark Bornstein, VP of Marketing at ON24, a digital experience platform, noted the company’s phones have been ringing off the hook with organizations looking for quick and easy ways to present thought-leadership content and presentations to prospects who had to cancel travel plans and even work from home during the pandemic.

“It is amazing how many organizations have such a significant marketing investment in physical events and when those events are threatened, it really throws companies into a really difficult situation,” said Bornstein. “We’ve been working with companies of all sizes to help them get their events moved to digital in different forms. In some cases, we see companies moving seminars and turning them into interactive multimedia webinars, which is great. In some cases, there are larger trade shows and conferences, which we’re moving to more Netflix-style content or engagement hubs.”

Coronavirus concerns or not, webinars have played an integral role in B2B buyers’ journeys for a long time. In fact, Demand Gen Report’s 2019 Content Preferences study revealed that:

• 39% of marketers said webinars are one of the top types of most valuable influencer content formats;
• 63% said they are willing to share information to access webinars; and
• 63% are willing to spend 20 to 60 minutes watching a webinar.

Webinars and digital events have come a long way since the days of audio-heavy PowerPoint presentations. In fact, Bornstein notes that they can be just as entertaining and engaging as live events. He noted two successful case studies of live events that turned to digital experiences:

• Box saw 112% ROI on first touch opportunities from an event that was physical and then got repurposed as a digital event; and
• Thompson Reuters saw a 73% increase in global attendees by taking its live event digital.

“You don’t have to abandon all of the different ways in which you were planning on delivering an experience physically when you move them into the digital space,” said Borstein. “You can still have multi-tiered events; you can still have multiple presenters. It allows you to expand your event in a way that you never could before. A lot of the companies that had physical events may have only expected 1,000 people to show. Now that event can be promoted to a much wider audience and suddenly, organizations are going to see events that had a limited potential in terms of attendance — now that number may go way up. It can still be fun; it can still be engaging and still be human.”

Inverta Hosts Unique Virtual Meeting To Support Marketers During Outbreak

The coronavirus outbreak has left many marketers feeling overwhelmed and concerned over event cancellations and necessary budget shifts. With a strategy that is based around creating intimate, experiential events with clients and prospects, Inverta saw this as an opportunity to help the marketing community overcome some of these pressures.

On March 12, 2020, Inverta hosted a Virtual Networking Lunch, titled: “Making the most of pivoting to a virtual environment,” to allow marketers to get together and share ideas, concerns and strategies on an intimate level.

“There’s this big pressure to reallocate budget reallocate quickly, to get to a place where we’re going to be able to fill this gap in demand that we were relying on for these shows,” said Ashley Shailer, VP of Marketing at Inverta. “I was thinking about the fact that it seems like we’re all going to have a version of the same problem really quickly, and that we all just want answers. And the best way to do that would be to hear from each other, brainstorm and figure out how other people were navigating this pivot.”

The virtual event was developed with unique criteria:

• Registration was not mandatory. ZoomInfo access was shared on a landing page.
• An incentive to register and provide information was a $20 virtual UberEats gift card, which paired well with the “networking lunch” theme.
• Attendees were given the opportunity to join late, and hop on and off whenever they pleased, making the event more casual than a typical webinar.
• There were no presentation materials or an agenda. Shailer simply came prepared with questions to ask attendees in case the conversation didn’t flow organically.

“I wanted marketers to get together and discuss how they’re dealing with these event cancellations and budget reallocation, and really anything else on our minds right now,” said Shailer. “I lined up one person, Elle Woulfe [Vice President of Growth Marketing at InVision], who I knew had just successfully conducted an internal virtual event with her company, just in case we had a participation issue. I just put it out on LinkedIn and had some of my co-workers at Inverta also post it. We did a highly targeted paid social campaign through LinkedIn that was account- and title-specific.”

The event proved successful, as more than 120 people registered to receive the $20 gift card and 60 of those attended the event live.

Leveraging Direct Mail In Lieu Of Booth Engagement

While webinars and virtual events are an obvious choice for marketing organizations to invest in while coronavirus concerns continue to rise, other companies are increasing their direct mail spend to stand out and get virtual face-to-face meetings during the outbreak. Like ON24, PFL, an automated direct mail solution provider, is experiencing an uptick in calls from field marketers looking to shift their budgets and maximize opportunities.

“We’re getting a lot of phone calls from event marketers saying, ‘Hey, these events got canceled. Now, what do I do?’ Because they’re looking for an alternative to meet those goals,” said Nick Runyon, CMO at PFL. He noted that research the company published with Demand Metric shows 78% of CMOs said integrated, branded personalized direct mail is very effective.

For Allocadia, a marketing performance management software provider, it was important to first analyze budgets and reinvest in demand gen efforts that would help book the same number of meetings as an in-person event.

“When receiving the news of event cancellations, my first port of call was, ‘Okay, where am I at with my money?’ Because, really, I need to know how much money I’ve got in the bank and how much I now have to reinvest,” said Bróna O’ Connor, Director of Demand Generation for Allocadia, in an interview with DGR. “For us, the biggest show that’s been canceled so far is the Adobe Summit. These things happen, but I think in marketing, we always try to be agile. We obviously are now reallocating dollars away from the Adobe Summit into other programs.”

A key strategy for Allocadia was to leverage direct mail, which the company was already planning to leverage to drive meeting signups among target accounts attending Adobe Summit. Now, O’Connor said the company is expanding those efforts towards a wider audience beyond event attendees.

The campaign revolves around a direct mailer with a faux, Allocadia-branded $100 bill. The goal is to communicate that money doesn’t grow on trees and how, with Allocadia’s marketing platform, people can make smart investments and reallocate marketing dollars towards programs that are driving the most demand. The target account is asked to accept a meeting with Allocadia, and in return, the company will plant 100 trees in their name. The entire program aligns with the company’s values around sustainability and philanthropy, giving prospects “a tangible feeling of who Allocadia is,” according to O’Connor.

“When we think about our show goals, we think about driving meetings from target accounts and that brand awareness,” O’Connor added. “We think about really driving that top-of-funnel demand from our presence on the show floor from booth traffic. Direct mail was a key component in helping to drive meetings with those target accounts. So, we already had a program in place to get those meetings booked with the Adobe audience. But now with Adobe no longer on the table, we can actually pivot really quickly (with PFL’s help) to expand that program beyond the reach of the Adobe audience, but for other audiences too.”

Staying Human Through A Digital Screen

While no one knows when the outbreak will stop and business will go back to usual, it’s important to remember that today’s technology allows us to still maintain a human connection. Digital experiences are available to fill gaps in prospect engagement, customer support and thought-leadership content offerings.

“What marketers should do is evaluate the marketing calendar for the next three months,” said Pedowitz. “Continue to go with any events you already had digitally, but anything that’s live, start making plans to convert that to some type of digital experience. And contact all the speakers, contact attendees and just move the event to the cloud.”

In the meantime, Inverta’s Shailer noted some important things marketers should keep in mind:

• Think about reallocating budget towards the things that have worked well for you in the past digitally.
• Set some budget aside for things that might get rescheduled in the fall or if you’re asked to cut your budget.
• Be aware of webinar fatigue, as there will be an uptick of options for your audience to choose from. Consider podcasts and other multimedia experiences.
• For webinars and virtual meetings, don’t be afraid to be human and have fun.

“I think one of the things that people like about live events is that they are extemporaneous,” said Shailer. “People aren’t afraid to connect on an emotional level, use humor and be themselves. Whereas, I think in a virtual environment, there’s this culture of, ‘Oh, we’re going to record it; we’re going to replay it over and over again, it has to be super hygienic. If we’re going to double down on these virtual events, we need to not be afraid to connect with people in a human way, even though we’re not there in person.”

The post Amid COVID-19 Conference Cancellations, Field Marketers Focus On Digital Events, Direct Mail appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

More than 1,200 marketing professionals in a wide range of industries gathered to connect and learn from their peers at the three-day event — held on February 24-26 at the Hyatt Regency in Scottsdale, AZ. This year’s event featured six tracks: Content2Conversion, Demand Gen Summit, Sales Impact Summit, Channel Marketing, ABM in Action Live! and Marketing Strategy. Here’s some of what the attendees learned on day one.

To Get the Green Light From Customers, Tell Stories They Believe

At its core, marketing is about telling stories — but what stories must B2B marketers tell to get customers to say “yes?” In her keynote, titled: Getting the Green Light: How to Build Messages People Say Yes To, Tamsen Webster, Founder and Chief Message Strategist at Find the Red Thread, shared insights into the kinds of stories that get the “green light” from prospects vs. those that get the “red light.”

Webster began by identifying the three common red lights that keep customers from buying:

1. No attention: They don’t want what you to sell.
2. No decision: They may want what you to sell, but they don’t buy it — from you or anyone else.
3. No confidence: They want what you to sell, but don’t have the confidence that you can deliver it.

When presented with new information (which includes your marketing message), Webster explained, customers are looking for three things: whether or not they want what you have, whether or not they believe what you’re saying about what they have, and whether or not your marketing message validates the other two.

“If we lead with something people want, it’s easy for them to say yes,” Webster said, citing philosopher Blaise Pascal: “‘People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they themselves have discovered than those which have come from the minds of others.” But all too often, she noted, B2B marketers’ approach is just the opposite: We try to sell people something they don’t want — an approach Webster contends is as likely to succeed as “telling a child to eat his vegetables.”

Another tactic, the “challenger approach,” relies on convincing customers they are wrong. But while this may lead to a one-time sale, it won’t build a long-term relationship, Webster cautioned. “Making people feel wrong by invalidating what they believe is dangerous,” said Webster, because “humans are not rational decision-makers; we are rationalizing decision-makers. We tell ourselves stories to justify what we do.”

Customers will reject your marketing message if it conflicts with what they want and the story they believe. Instead of widening the gap between what customers want and what you are selling, Webster says, tell a story that validates their desires and beliefs.

“What new information can you provide that’s consistent with both the perspective they have and the perspective they want you to have?” As an example, Webster shared an ad from Human Workplaces that targeted prospects’ desire to drive engagement. The ad asked, “How can you get more engagement from your team?” and cited research showing that success drives engagement and makes employees happier.

To get the green light, Webster summed up: “Don’t build your case. Build their case — the story they would tell themselves.”

C-level Executives Rely On Alignment, Accountability, Agility To Meet Modern Marketing Challenges

Webster’s presentation on aligning marketing messages with customers’ wants and beliefs dovetailed into a panel discussion highlighting the importance of sales and marketing alignment. During Executive-Level Perspectives: Aligning Go-To-Market Strategies With Evolving Buyer Behaviors, Moderator Jeff Pedowitz, President and CEO of The Pedowitz Group, led an energetic discussion in which David Alexander, VP of Marketing at F5 Networks; Jeff Marcoux, VP of Marketing at TTEC; and Cristina Brava Olmo, VP of Marketing at Sigma Computing shared their perspectives on some of today’s key marketing issues.

When it comes to the eternal marketing challenge of alignment with sales, all three CMOs agreed that establishing credibility and trust with the sales team is critical. “There is no alternative but to be hand in hand with sales,” said Alexander. To do that, he focuses on establishing clear goals for marketing’s contribution and identifying problems in the process.

At Sigma, “it’s really about speaking the same language and being obsessed with the same metrics,” said Brava Olmos. Furthermore, Marcoux recommended sending marketing team members on sales calls to listen to what customers are saying: “This gives you an incredible amount of credibility with sales.”

With new channels, personas and KPIs springing up every day, Pedowitz asked the panelists, how do successful CMOs prioritize and focus? TTEC has adopted an agile operating methodology. “We never say no, but it’s prioritized regularly,” says Marcoux, acknowledging that it can be a challenge to balance a focus on immediate needs with longer-term needs.

F5 has adopted agile as well, but annual and quarterly planning cycles are what really keep Alexander’s team on track. “Everything is focused on either getting revenues in the door or building for the future. Building a solid plan and working the plan is key,” Alexander explained. Sigma is still a startup, with many competing priorities, which Brava Olmos manages by aligning around OKRs at the executive level and waterfalling.

The war for talent is real, and all three CMOs agreed that finding good product marketers is particularly challenging. Panelists also said expertise in marketing ops, revenue ops and ABM is difficult to find.

In fact, the panelists agreed, attracting top talent requires its own marketing strategy. “You have to create a compelling story and vision of where your company is going and why they should get on board,” advised Marcoux, who also recommended offering remote work as a way to expand the talent pool while lowering costs. It’s also important to continually “re-recruit” your existing team, Alexander said: “Be an amazing leader and invest in people.”

When it comes to investing in new technology, all three believe that less can be more. Marcoux notes he often sees teams fail to use their existing technology to its full capabilities. “Mature the tools you have and squeeze the most value out of them before you ask for the new shiny object,” he advised.

The post #B2BMX 2020 Day One: Creative Storytelling, Alignment & Accountability Take Center Stage For B2B Success appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Sessions throughout the rest of the day provided a variety of actionable insights to help organizations address their revenue, digital transformation and customer-centricity challenges with the right processes and tactics.

Tim Riesterer Spotlights Importance Of Differentiating Messaging For Acquisition Vs. Retention

 The modern B2B buying experience is extremely complex, and delivering authentic, personalized messages is critical in acquiring new business and keeping existing customers. But what most people do not realize is that messaging for retention and messaging for acquisition cannot be the same. 

This was the theme of Corporate Visions’Chief Strategy Officer Tim Riesterer’s keynote at #B2BSMX, where he highlighted the importance of differentiating engagement.

“When you go out and try to acquire a new logo, realize you are only creating and driving only about 20% to 30% of company revenue,”he said. “Sixty-two percent of the market we work with provides the same messaging and campaigns to new logos as they do to existing customers.But this can actually backfire on you.” 

According to Riesterer, the reaction and perception of a stimulus, like messaging, is affected by environmental factors around us.

“The context your customer is in has a great impact on your products or services than who they are or what the product or service is,” said Riesterer. “Customer centricity is less about who your customer is and more about the situation they’re in. We tend to overestimate the disposition of our customers and underestimate the situation of our customers when crafting messages … It’s not your product or service; it’s the situation they’re in.” 

He continued to discuss the “status quo bias” — or the four reasons why people do not change their mind: 

• Preference stability — Once we make a decision, we establish stability. 
• Cost of change – The change is where the cost is. There are additional costs, and it requires change management. It will cost me time and money. 
• Selection difficulty – People believe everyone is offering the same, and you must overcome that sameness. 
• Anticipated regret and blame — We anticipate, project and prophesize that we will regret this because it will not go well.

“It’s not a buying journey, it’s a deciding journey,” said Riesterer. “Humans don’t make purchases, they make decisions. The story needs to recognize that persuasion is not possible without uncertainty. Show them there is a cost to stay here. People move away from loss and cost much faster than they lean toward a gain … You must show a clear contrast. You must have a good proof story – before and after. Reinforce the biases that keep them to the status quo because you are the status quo.” 

New England Biolabs Balances Reputation With Innovation To Bolster Customer Experience

New England Biolabs (NEB), a 45-year-old supplier of life science research, has been leading its industry in not only offering high-quality products but unique customer experiences that keep the brand top–of–mind within the community.

For Andrew Bertera, Executive Director of Marketing and Sales at New England Biolabs, reputation is what helps the company continue to experiment with new go-to-market initiatives designed specifically to give potential customers a memorable experience.

“Customer experience is not only the source of excellence for marketing,” he said. “Itis the source of all competitive differentiation.”

During the closing keynote of the show, Berterashared a variety of things that NEB coordinates differently compared to other businesses, including:

• Continuing to offer a printed version of its trade magazine, while adding digital opportunities through augmented reality that can be utilized alongside the magazine with a mobile app to better understand reader preferences;

• Having the research product staff act as the company’s customer service team. This “brings the production side to the customers” while also providing greater feedback on the products and services; and

• Offering a variety of digital apps and tools designed to simplify researchers’ workloads. Bertera said that these free tools alone “drive a quarter of all traffic” for the company. NEB is also testing a new Amazon Alexa assistant to help researchers in their tests.

“Intimacy is the ultimate customer-centric model resulting in long–term customer relationships,” Bertera said. “We now have a direct connection between customer success and revenue.”

Bertera went on to explain the three key areas of customer experience that should be prioritized when looking for new ways to engage customers in a relevant and relational way:

• Ease of Use: buyers want answers as easily as possible; 

• Speed: how quickly buyers can get to the answer they’re looking for; and

• Personalization: buyers expect to be known, and you should know your buyer before you engage with them.

Bertera concluded that he truly believes that, “if you have a good reputation, you can experiment with new technology fairly easily.” Therefore, he suggested businesses find areas where they believe they can address the ease, speed and personalization of a buying experience and continue to improve it. For example, he highlighted how his teams are always constantly testing new channels — such as AR and voice assistants — to see how buyer education is changing.

“We don’t know how our customers like to learn, so we’ve been playing with communication tools and analyzing engagement to understand that preference,” Bertera said.“Our marketing mix keeps getting broader and broader.”

The post #B2BSMX Day 2: Customer Centricity, Digital Transformation Key Focuses For Businesses Rethinking Marketing Operations, Revenue Strategies appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Kevin Joyce, VP of Strategy Services at The Pedowitz Group, sat down with Demand Gen Report to discuss the report, how ABM fits into revenue marketing and what B2B companies can do to make sure they have the right organizational structure and talent management process to prime themselves for revenue growth.

Demand Gen Report: Tell me about the Revenue Marketing Index. Why did you create it and how did you decide on the six pillars and 30 capabilities that make up the Index?

Kevin Joyce: I think the powerful thing about indexes is that they tell you the state of the state. If you think about the S&P index or a lot of the other stock market indexes, they’re used by people to say the state of the state, or where things are going. The reason we published the Revenue Marketing Index is we wanted to give people a yardstick to measure themselves over time and help them in their revenue marketing transformation.

Use it as a tool to say, “What do we need to work on?” You can’t work on all 30 capabilities at once, so pick the ones that are the low-hanging fruit and that are going to make the biggest difference to revenue this year, and work on transforming them. That was why we published it and why we did it — we thought there is no yardstick out there, no tool to help people in their transformation to revenue marketing.

We started working on this five to six years ago and it took months and months. There are some obvious things we wanted to include: the people, process and technology. But we asked if data should stand on its own or does it get embedded in one of the six controls? We ended up putting data inside process more or less. Once we arrived at the six controls if you will — people, process, technology, customer, results and strategy, then you have to say, ‘OK what is the capability?’ We recognize that with marketing, you can’t measure an organization by skills or by talent alone. It has to be capability. What is it capable of doing? What level of maturity do they have for these capabilities? In the end, we came up with 30 capabilities, so five for each of the controls.

DGR: According to the report, the market has a RMI score of 2.3. What does this mean for B2B marketers today?

Joyce: It’s 2.3 out of 4. So that means that, in general, the market is not as mature as you might imagine. If you think about how fast and furious new technologies are coming in and bringing new techniques and new capabilities, you would think, “Boy, we must all be brilliant whiz kids and we’re all customer centric and holding ourselves accountable.”

But this tells us that no, that’s not the case. People are not moving nearly as fast as we, who are the service and technology providers, want to think they are. In our business, we see that all the time. We come across companies that are very product centric, but marketing isn’t held accountable for producing anything. The main message is that it’s more prevalent than you might imagine. What’s funny is we’re here talking about AI, and it’s all the buzz and AI is going to change marketing, but the reality is there’s still so many firms out there that haven’t figured out how to do nurturing campaigns.

DGR: About 60% of CMOs said organizational structure was fairly-to-very important to their revenue marketing success. What are your tips for achieving this?

Joyce: We end up with all these silos. So we have a silo of the website people, a silo of the digital marketing people and we have a silo of the inbound people who are kind of closely associated with the website people. The reality is when you say, “I want to use demand generation and I want to do multichannel in how I work,” all of those silos are a killer because now you have to try to get people to work across them. Trying to coordinate all these channels if they’re in different silos doesn’t work.

My advice is to put the customer at the center, not your organization or the product. Put the customer and the customer experience at the center and then make decisions from there on out. That includes decisions on how your marketing organization should be structured. And you’ll very quickly arrive at the idea that all of demand gen should be centralized, so that you can do multichannel campaigns and optimize the experience for the customer.

You’ll also probably want to centralize content. You’re going to have some debate with yourself as to what to distribute versus what to centralize — how much of a center of excellence should I build in headquarters versus how much power do I give out to all my field officers? How are they going to leverage best practices? There’s a lot of questions in there. My main message is put the customer at the center and think about the customer experience first. If you were to start from scratch ignoring everything, what would that look like? Then ask yourself, how can you get there? You may not do it overnight, but how can you evolve to that?

DGR: Another important capability noted in the report was talent management. How can B2B companies improve their talent management strategies in 2019?

Joyce: If you look at the universities, I’m sad to say it, but very few have figured out revenue marketing. They’re still teaching the 4Ps of marketing, so finding young people coming out of college who truly understand modern demand generation is hard.

My first message would be to cultivate it internally. Do what you can to grow it, learn it, train it and set yourself on a course for revenue marketing transformation, which really just means learning modern marketing. Don’t expect that you’re going to hire people that know it and are using any of the technologies from Uberflip to Marketo and Eloqua, because you’re going to pay a premium and you’re going to have to go out and use a headhunter to try to find those people.

And don’t go and deploy all the shiny technology without having the people in the right place. It’s so easy to say, “Well, I’ll bring in new technology and it will solve everything.” But we all know that’s not the case. It really is about the people and the talent and the training and development. Whether you call it content marketing, revenue marketing, accountability marketing, it’s got many names. But it is in any sense modern demand generation, and you have to train your people how to do it.

DGR: How would you say ABM fits into revenue marketing and how can it help accelerate sales and marketing alignment?

Joyce: I tend to not get caught up in the buzzwords. We run into organizations that want to do ABM because they think it’s cool. ABM is good, but it’s only appropriate for firms that have a few, larger, strategic accounts they’re either selling to or want to sell to and they’re going to build very, very targeted marketing campaigns for them.

We go into firms where they say, “We want to do ABM to these 100 accounts,” and we’ll smile because that’s not really ABM. That’s picking a segment, the top 100 accounts — and hopefully they’re all in one industry — and targeting them. You can call it ABM if it makes you feel better. There’s lots of destinations with ABM and people want to say they’re doing ABM. But really, it’s about choosing some target accounts, and it is an appropriate and a very good strategy for some firms who have large, strategic accounts they want to go after.

There’s no better way to get sales and marketing aligned than to do an ABM campaign because it means they have to work really closely together and all of a sudden, it can open sales’ eyes up to, “Hey, marketing can do all of this stuff for me. I never realized that before.” It’s actually quite a powerful campaign idea when it’s appropriate for the firm.

The post The Pedowitz Group Executive Chats Revenue Marketing Maturity In B2B, New Index For Measuring Revenue Transformation appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, check out this collection of resolutions from industry experts, including authors David Meerman Scott and Pam Didner, Jeff Pedowitz of The Pedowitz Group, Masha Finkselstein of Google, Kelvin Gee of Oracle and Michael Brenner of Marketing Insider Group — all of whom will be speaking at the B2B Marketing Exchange in Scottsdale, Ariz. on February 25-27, 2019.

Discover a plethora of trends and tactics B2B practitioners are planning to focus on in 2019. Topics covered include:

• Operationalizing the customer experience;
• Creating more customized and personalized ways to communicate with existing customers and prospects;
• Developing more engaging B2B content through effective storytelling.

CHECK IT OUT HERE.

Keep your marketing resolutions in 2019 by attending #B2BMX. Early bird pricing is available until January 16, 2019! Rooms at the Hyatt are selling out fast, so make sure to book your room when you register!

The post Top B2B Marketers Share Their New Year’s Resolutions appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Step 1: Drive A Unified Vision Of What Great Customer Experiences You Seek To Deliver

A no-brainer, right? Start with the end in mind. But in practice you will find that different customer facing teams have wholly different views on what it takes to achieve great customer experiences. So, someone must do the internal research and reduce the results to simple customer experience vision statements that the entire company can get behind. This is not simply a marketing task. It is much bigger than that and if marketing tries to go at it alone, they will fail.

Step 2: Create Your Customer Journey Maps

By engaging with your sales teams and customers, you can learn exactly what their customer journey map is for each of your products and services. Hopefully, you can then reduce the number of unique journeys down to a handful and validate the results with clients, sales teams and channel partners.

Step 3: Define The Role Of Each Internal Group In Each Of The Journey Stages

It is especially important for the marketing, sales and customer support teams to agree who is on-point at which stage of the customer journey and what communications are taking place there.

Step 4: Modify Existing Processes To Put The Customer Journey At The Center

A great example of a process that must be changed is the sales funnel and lead management process. In many firms, this process is seller-centric, and probably ends with “closed won” or “closed lost.” That is not “customer-centric” and certainly not focused improving the customer experience. Don’t panic, you don’t have to toss it all out, you simply need to expand it to recognize that in addition to customer acquisition, you must also consider customer expansion.

Operationalizing the customer experience starts with acknowledging where your customer is in their buying journey at all times, especially after they have become a customer. By updating your CRM and MAP to track where customers are in their journey, you can adapt how you engage them with sales, marketing and support. You can then start to give your customers a better experience across all your functions.  

Step 5: Adapt Reporting To Present Data From The Customer Journey Perspective

Imagine looking at your funnel based on where customers are in their buying journey. If they are not progressing along that journey as fast as you expect, you may look to the behavior of your marketers and sellers. You will also be compelled to ask what is the customer experience in this stage and what is keeping them from progressing?

Evolving your reporting to include the customer journey map will probably mean adapting your data model in CRM, MAP and CDP. The changes don’t have to be radical, but they will result in a truer picture of your customer and prospect database and the strength of your pipeline.

Step 6: Leverage Your Customer Journey Maps For Content Planning And Program Planning

Good customer journey maps represent your customers’ entire lifetime of engagement with your firm. Leveraging the same customer journey maps for content planning, program and campaign planning, and campaign reporting will be much easier for your marketing organization to accept, adopt and hold themselves accountable for getting results.

Step 7: Plan 2019 Programs Around The Customer Journey And Customer Experience

Start the program planning for 2019 with the customer, not the product, at the center. Use the customer journey map to lay out what programs, campaigns and content are needed to move prospects forward in their journey. Be sure to define what experiences you want them to have in terms of marketing interaction for each stage.

Step 8: Ensure Your Martech Stack Can Support All Stages Of The Customer Journey

Analyze your martech stack in terms of support and usage for each stage of the customer journey map. Identify areas where your technology support for a stage is weak or the existing technologies are underused. Then, put a 2019 plan in place to get the technologies and adoption to support the entire customer journey.

Step 9: Define 2019 KPIs That Are Tied To Forward Movement In Your Customer Journey Maps For Each Product Area

Better customer experiences will not just happen because the website UI is improved, or web chat is available 24/7. Better customer experiences arise from learning where the customer is in their engagement and adapting your firm’s behavior to align with their current state. The customer journey map should be the touchstone for all customer-facing organizations to optimize their customer engagement and customer experience. Follow these nine steps to deliver outstanding customer experiences and create customer advocates for the lifetime of your business.

Kevin Joyce is CMO and VP of Strategy Services for The Pedowitz Group. He is a marketing executive with 34 years of experience in high tech, in positions of engineering, marketing and sales. In the past 16 years, Joyce has worked with many companies on their revenue marketing and demand generation strategies. With a unique combination of marketing skills and sales experience, he aims to help bridge the gap between sales and marketing.

The post 9 Steps To Operationalize CX And Achieve Advocacy appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The focus is now on revenue; marketing operations leaders are tasked with helping visualize and execute plans to meet short- and long-term goals of the entire company — not just the marketing department.

Demand Gen Report reached out to eight leading industry experts, analysts and practitioners to discuss how they have seen the marketing ops role evolve to incorporate other aspects of the business — such as revenue ops — as well as what the connections are between these roles under the marketing ops umbrella.

Jocelyn King, President, MOCCA Marketing Operations Professional Association

In the 12 years since marketing operations was recognized by IDC as a function and MOCCA was established as the dedicated professional association for marketing operations leaders and practitioners, marketing ops has evolved from exclusively planning marketing technology roadmaps and demand funnels to becoming the CMO’s essential strategic leadership over operational excellence in marketing.  

Today, marketing ops is continuing to evolve rapidly as it leads the steep change curve that marketing finds itself on. CMOs are under more pressure and scrutiny than ever, and marketing ops’ charter is to ensure that marketing excels and scales. The recent rise of revenue operations is challenging marketing ops leaders to additionally own greater mastery of sales and customers. The focus of revenue operations is ensuring that marketing and sales excel and scale. Marketing ops leaders must step up to meet this greater need. Since sales ops tends to focus on fiscal weeks and quarter-end results, while marketing ops focuses on quarters and long-term strategic plans, marketing ops is uniquely positioned to ensure both effective short-term results and long-term revenue operations scaling and effectiveness. Today’s marketing ops leaders must rally to stay relevant not only to marketing, but also to sales and customer needs to be valued and relevant to company revenue growth. Fortunately, managing continuous change and driving difficult conversations and decisions is in marketing ops’ DNA.

Linlin Li, VP of Marketing Ops & Strategic Projects, Centrify

Marketing Ops has a unique advantage to lead or evolve into a revenue ops function, whether formally or informally, because at the core of revenue ops is customer journey operations, brand experience and customer insight. The advancement of the martech world and data science practice has enabled marketing ops teams to have a new arena to influence the organization’s top-line growth for scale, efficiency and efficacy of all revenue-driving efforts across marketing, sales, customer success, product, support and services.

At Centrify, I see this manifest in three areas where marketing ops is taking the lead and connecting the dots:

1. Drive cross-functional efforts to design, execute and report company revenue models;
2. Focus on a holistic view of the customer journey and end-to-end touchpoints and engagement for both prospective and existing customers; and
3. Challenge the status quo and innovate via advanced martech and data science to future proof processes and alignment for scale and intelligent growth.

Debbie Qaqish, Principal & Chief Strategy Officer, The Pedowitz Group

We are seeing a rapid expansion in marketing operations’ responsibilities because of the talent and skill they bring and the changing requirements for marketing. I see five stages of marketing operations maturity that reflect the additional responsibilities to the broader business and to revenue operations. 

The first stage is efficient — meaning marketing ops is working to do things as well as they can. This is a reactive state centered on getting and using technology. The second state is effective. In this stage, marketing ops begins to be more proactive and works more with re-engineering processes that then help define technology requirements. This role is still very marketing-centric and includes rich integration with sales to attain revenue goals. 

Marketing’s ops impact on the business really takes off in the customer-centric stage. At this level of maturity, the marketing ops group is key to operationalizing the customer journey for both net-new acquisition and account expansion. At this stage, marketing ops works across functions as a practice. The final stage is next gen. In this stage, we see more changes in organizational structure to support marketing ops’ new responsibilities. We see sales and marketing ops combine and other functions, such as customer success, also join to create one unified function. This new function provides the best opportunity to operationalize the customer journey across every part of the company.

As described above, the marketing ops’ set of responsibilities are rapidly expanding because they serve as enablers of customer-centric strategies. Marketing technologies allow marketing to have a digital relationship with clients at every stage of the journey. This digital relationship produces data and insights that can be shared with all customer-facing functions of the organization. Customer engagement is the new battlefield and the MO function is perfectly positioned to help win the fight.

Jason Keller, Marketing Operations Manager, Logi Analytics

I’ve seen that when marketing ops is involved in the execution, tech implementation and/or automation of a business process, the reporting related to that process tends to get adopted by the marketing ops team as well.

The kinds of projects adopted are usually closely related to the top of the sales funnel (i.e. ABM, martech tools, data services, etc.). Typically, this is a good thing, as it usually ensures that the metrics align with the intended outcomes of these processes (given the person measuring knows how and why the processes were created to begin with).

That said, it also means that every time a marketing ops team attempts to help with a new process or work-stream, the demand out of that team is always getting compounded by the reporting needs that follow the original request for support. This makes it really easy for a marketing ops team to accidentally overextend itself, thinking they can take on the extra bit of work without thinking of the extra bit of reporting that will likely be requested as well.

Jon Russo, CMO & Founder, B2B Fusion

Marketing operations is a passion area of mine, as the function represents the heart of reporting on the business impact a marketing organization has. In my 10 years as a CMO and my five years on the board of MOCCA, I’ve seen marketers achieve revenue operation responsibilities in unique situations.

If a company is a growing SaaS organization, it is more likely to find one person in charge of all operations (sales and marketing) from a revenue marketing or revenue operations perspective.

In a highly transactional B2B sale where marketing sourced revenue is greater than 50% of the revenue, we also see marketing operations owning the revenue operations function, regardless of company size.

According to LinkedIn, sales turnover is 13% per year and marketers turnover is 17% per year. So, the third situation we see when revenue operations is under marketing operations’ responsibility is where the revenue ops person leaves the company. The next logical place for an organization to look for talent is internally.

In larger organizations, typically more than 500 global employees, we more universally find two different functions — revenue operations and marketing operations, typically reporting to different entities in the organization.

Paul Green, Director of Marketing Technologies, Extreme Networks

I continue to see the marketing operations role grow in prominence throughout many organizations. I believe marketing operations has now become the central layer of glue to true alignment between sales and marketing, in addition to other key stakeholder departments like sales and channel operations, finance and IT. This is so important as marketing operations purview expands from budgeting and planning, and now has a keen focus on the operationalizing and optimization of marketing technologies. These marketing technology investments are becoming key growth strategy enablers and require deeper cross functional team designs to maximize effectiveness and efficiencies centered around long-term growth.

Cristina De Martini, Research Director For Marketing Operations, SiriusDecisions

Marketing operations is certainly evolving — moving from a tactical project management role that facilitates organizational efficiencies to a more strategic role informing marketing strategy through solid performance measurement and analytics, and aligning that marketing strategy with sales and the go-to-market plan.

Revenue operations is putting an organizational design solution on top of an alignment problem to the age-old question of how to align organizational functions. The true objective is to establish an integrated approach to align marketing, sales, customer success, finance and all direct contributors to an organization’s revenue strategy to enable scalable growth. We don’t always have to have a direct reporting structure to attain the desired alignment. Think of it as a team sport where each player must play their respective position for the team to meet its goal. To gain alignment, strong operations leaders will ensure that:

1. All parties are involved in planning at the front end and establishing a common set of goals;
2. Communication is consistent and allows the strategy to drive the processes and technology selection; and
3. There is interlock around a common measurement framework that provides both description and predictive analysis, technology integration and master data management.

John Hurley, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Radius

This evolution of ops roles has created a new paradigm — one where ops is a direct contributor to an organization’s top-line and a major stakeholder for an organization’s revenue strategy. What started as a response to address marketing and sales’ technological destiny has quickly spiraled into a massive undertaking that directly feeds into an organization’s revenue engine. 

Think about the following initiatives, all of which are top-of-mind for progressive marketing organizations:

• Diagnose and fix core data gaps;
• Develop 360-degree customer profiles;
• Uncover total addressable markets;
• Build hyper-targeted campaign audiences;
• Implement new scoring models; and
• Orchestrate channel experiences across platforms.

Now ask yourself, could any of these initiatives be successfully executed without core marketing operations people? 

According to the Harvard Business Review, B2B organizations with advanced data strategies are twice as likely to grow revenue by more than 30%. This is why investing in data and intelligence is their number one priority for reaching their goals. It’s clear that companies recognize the opportunity and what they need to do. Business leaders can no longer ignore the importance of having reliable data and a smart data strategy, and they can’t go without a strong marketing ops function.

The post Industry Experts, Practitioners Sound Off On The Evolution Of B2B Marketing Ops appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Challenge

Advent’s initial Marketo implementation was done in 2016 on a tight, one-month timeline. The sales team could not be a part of any initial conversations on processes for setting up the basic Marketo instance. This led to severe misalignment between marketing and sales departments. The company stated that communication between the two groups was strenuous, with limited understanding and almost no common nomenclature between the groups.

In 2017, despite no real lead management system yet in place, the marketing team was tasked with sourcing 25% of total bookings. The company understood that this goal wasn’t feasible without reassessing its lead management process.

“Initially, there was this enormous lack of trust in the value of the leads we prioritized and passed along to the sales team,” said Nat Cramer, Senior Manager of Demand Generation Marketing at Advent. “There was not a lot of confidence in the demand gen team to target and score. We had a huge reliance on IT and sales ops for list pulls and data hygiene, and making sure things were passing correctly through our system.”

The Solution

The goal was to get Advent’s sales and marketing teams to agree on all lead management processes across Marketo and Salesforce. The company brought in The Pedowitz Group to review existing lead management process, including the definition of a sales ready lead, defined lead statuses, lead scoring and routing, lead processing, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and reporting and analytics.

The Pedowitz Group sat down with Advent’s marketing and sales team to:

• Define the critical elements of the lead management process and create a guide for optimization in the marketing automation and CRM systems;
• Confirm/define a qualified lead and lead (funnel) stages;
• Document the life of a lead;
• Confirm/validate lead routing and processing;
• Validate lead scoring; and
• Confirm/define standard funnel metrics.

“The key was trying to think of the internal teams that might be questioning, and think about what makes them tick,” said Cramer. “We had to understand what’s in it for sales, IT and all the stakeholders to approve and go with Marketo.”

The Result

With the new lead management process in place, and by using Marketo programs and channels, Advent’s marketing team can attribute and track pipeline and revenue back to marketing programs and campaigns. With the implementation of a coordinated lead management process, the team is better positioned to track their lead funnel and see their impact on revenue. Cramer and his team ultimately surpassed their goal to source a quarter of the company’s bookings by 8%.

Once the lead management processes were in place, the team was able to better understand where leads were in the lifecycle and market to them appropriately. They could now automate nurture programs, which increased the number of deals in the pipeline. As a result of improved communication and alignment, lead scoring models and thresholds were refined, driving MQL accuracy and acceptance up to 80% from 5% within 90 days.

“We’re feeling a sense of triumph,” said Cramer. “Sales ops has turned into our biggest fan; they see it working and they are happy we have an effective process in place.”

The post Advent Surpasses Marketing-Sourced Booking Goals With Revamped Lead Management Strategy appeared first on Demand Gen Report.