Minimizing The Inheritance Tax

When marketing leaders switch roles to a new organization, the Inheritance Tax can lead to unforeseen and often underestimated expenses. To lessen this burden, marketing leaders can take several steps. First, they need to prioritize understanding the originally intended marketing strategy and business goals associated with the inherited martech platforms.

By uncovering the “who” and “how” of the platform’s usage, marketing leaders can effectively navigate the challenges of a new instance. Seeking insights from key stakeholders and utilizing available learning resources, such as customer portals and consultancies, can expedite the onboarding process and minimize the Inheritance Tax.

Uncovering The Context

With more than 11,000 martech tools in 49 categories, it’s important to know the role and responsibility of each tool you’re investing — or currently invested — in. Keep in mind investment isn’t only in terms of software; business process is a critical factor in determining absolute ROI.

Leaders need to gain a holistic understanding of the current business goals associated with each platform and assess for technical updates. Are there new features that have been rolled out in the last year? Are you utilizing the full feature set of the platform relative to the capital expenditure/operation expenditure costs being spent on software licensing? If not, you’ll want to schedule a demo to review your software or consider having an external stack audit.

Identifying Key Stakeholders

Knowing the key stakeholders is crucial when inheriting systems that run your marketing and sales engine, as it enables effective collaboration and ensures alignment with team objectives. Additionally, it’s critical to have a pulse on team usage and adoption, particularly when organizational shifts happen that lead to user base churn. With that in mind:

1. Know your active users versus license holders/seats.

This helps you inform who is a part of the discussion group versus decision-making group on technical upgrades, enhancements and integrations.

2. Determine your super users and know your user productivity calculation.

The productivity calculation is total output/total input, which can help you determine your risk of churn in people and inform your process decisions.

Understanding Capabilities

Extracting performance analytics and information from a new (or new-to-you) platform is important. Equally important is understanding the systems’ capability, function and features. 

Lean into support for product info to ensure you are leveraging your tools and enhanced features. For example:

• Ask for a 20-minute sales demo on the platform and have your team of experts listen for required customizations/configurations to achieve what you need from the tool or identify blind spots to functionality that exists that you may not be leveraging; or
• Consider getting a tech roadmap audit or playbook to quickly identify opportunities, redundancies and challenges within your tech stack.

Understanding Cost Optimization

Knowing where to save and where to spend is critical. To create long-term value, executive leaders must identify spending areas that drive differentiation and support critical capabilities. Organizations can make informed decisions about resource allocation by analyzing the lifetime value of costs and recognizing that not all revenue is equal. This approach ensures that spending aligns with strategic objectives, enabling sustainable growth and profitability.

Streamlining Legacy Martech Tools

Legacy martech tools can become burdensome when they are underleveraged or overly customized, leading to longer ramp-up periods and frustrations during onboarding. Marketing leaders can mitigate these costs by adopting a proactive approach. Regular martech audits, conducted by outside partners or consultancies with unbiased views on the history of the systems, can assess the overall stack fitness and readiness to support business objectives.

These assessments help to identify opportunities for optimization and can limit the switching costs associated with new leadership and improve operational efficiency. Through careful cost containment and investment, organizations can position themselves for sustainable growth and profitability in the dynamic business landscape.

Arturo Mendiola is the Chief Growth Officer at Shift Paradigm, a digital marketing agency.

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OfferFit’s reinforcement learning AI seeks to accelerate experimentation for lifecycle marketers, as it continuously learns and adapts in response to customer actions.

“We’ll use this funding to continue to scale, of course,” said OfferFit’s Co-founder and CEO, George Khachatryan, in a statement. “But we’ll also invest heavily in our product. We’re making OfferFit quicker and easier to deploy and giving marketers more tools to leverage the insights they gain from automating experimentation.”

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Channel99,

“Peter brings more than 20 years of experience architecting and building some of the leading B2B martech solutions — with 14 years at Microsoft, eight years as Co-founder of Bizible and most recently, four years at Marketo/Adobe following the acquisition of Bizible,” said Chris Golec, Founder and CEO of Channel99, in a statement. “He will round out our bench of go-to-market experts and lead our technology and innovation.”

Thompson joins an all-star list of leaders, including former Brightcove exec Erin Cullen as SVP of Revenue, former Demandbase VP of ABM Nani Shaffer as CMO and former Drift exec David Kim as VP of Product.

The company recently raised $5 million in seed funding to help revolutionize the way marketers manage investment and collaborate with sales and finance to measure the performance of marketing channels.

“With its incredible vision for the B2B marketing sector, Channel99 is connecting marketing investments to tangible outcomes by providing a turnkey way to measure, benchmark and predict the impact of marketing investment,” Thompson said in a statement. “The team at Channel99 is passionate, innovative and obsessed with customer satisfaction and success. I am thrilled to join a company dedicated to building and delivering technology that supports the next generation of B2B marketing.”

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Foundry Intent unifies real-time signals from a variety of sources to deliver a high-fidelity source of B2B buyer intent within a single platform. The product aims to support B2B marketers as the technology buying journey becomes increasingly dispersed by consolidating and scoring varied signals for a single, actionable view of both account and buyer-level intent.

“Until now, the intent market has offered points of view from a single category of data source and marketers have been left to aggregate and standardize account-level data in hopes of constructing their own insights,” said Kumaran Ramanathan, President of Foundry, in a statement. “The market has signaled that bid stream data and cookies are too limited both in the scope and detail needed to reach an actionable and accurate view of the buyer journey. Our solution in Foundry Intent is to forgo these types of subjective datapoints and instead create a robust view of the buyer journey built entirely of concrete, multichannel signals from the contact level up.”

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To help increase engagement and promote more consistent monitoring, Stack Moxie’s marketing team envisioned a customer success campaign that delivered a single view of weekly statistics about the product activity to each user — specifically the account admin.

The Challenge

As a product-led growth company with legacy marketing automation, Stack Moxie faced challenges in executing its weekly digest. Compiling and pulling in product activity data for all users from an organization became a mammoth, manual task for its lean marketing team. Additional challenges included:

• Bottlenecks due to dependency on developers; and
• Friction in personalizing emails and scaling up its manual effort to cater to Stack Moxie’s growing customer database.

To show the value of Stack Moxie’s product, the marketing team spent a lot of time identifying the right product events and extracting relevant data. That challenge came with its own complexities, such as dependency on engineering resources to get the data from a product analytics tool or writing SQL queries that fetched data from a database table.

The company was also struggling to:

• Identify users from the same organization or team;
• Target the account admins; and
• Personalize the weekly or monthly metrics to each account.

One person from Stack Moxie’s marketing team would spend nearly 50 hours every month compiling a list of all organizations from its database, dedupe and extract a final list, match and group users by the organization, fetch their email addresses and run a compilation to match the org IDs in product statistics with the group IDs to generate the metrics matrix.

To summarize, Stack Moxie’s marketing team encountered hurdles in translating the right product events to personalized metrics that visualize value to customers. Additionally, dependency on developers or the data team was a huge clog in the wheel. To help alleviate those issues, the company turned to Inflection.io, a marketing automation platform built for B2B product-led companies.

The Solution

Stack Moxie leveraged Inflection in three key areas:

1. Fetching Product Activity

Stack Moxie tags and pushes its product events to the Snowflake database through Segment. Since Inflection connects with both Segment and Snowflake via an out-of-the-box integration, Stack Moxie can connect Inflection and product activity events quickly.

2. Embedding Value

With Inflection’s token editor, Stack Moxie pulls the product metrics relevant to its customers. At the same time, Inflection reads the person and account information from Stack Moxie’s CRM. The unified product data, user and account information provides a single view of the users to Stack Moxie’s marketing team. With that information in hand, the marketing team can then mobilize it into an email.

3. Scaling Campaigns

Inflection automates the previously manual process of querying data and matching it with account information. For the admin user, the digest email gives an overview of the health of their marketing, sales and revenue tech stacks while saving them from the pain of monitoring individual testing activity and their team’s progress.

The Results

Through those efforts, Stack Moxie’s marketing team was able to:

• Save more than 50 hours of manual effort each week;
• Showcase the value realized from their product to admins and organizations by summarizing the key data points;
• Drive product adoption through their weekly communication to admins with valuable insights and nudging them to log in to the product;
• Engage their users with a hyper-personalized customer success email digest;
• Reduce repeated, non-value-add time for Stack Moxie by automating the process and scaling it to their growing user volume; and
• Provide air support to their customer success (CS) team with deeper insights to identify early signs of churn and see hand-raisers among the accounts to upsell and expand.

“How Inflection enables us to do product-led growth is brilliant,” said Stack Moxie’s Lines. “Stack Moxie’s digest email has been a huge success in driving product adoption and improved customer engagement. We continue to grow and so does our ability to scale marketing and customer success with Inflection.”

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Drift

Ernst brings more than three decades of experience at the intersection of marketing technology and consumer data. He was most recently the CEO of Tubular and has experience taking Macromill through a successful IPO, which had an enterprise value of over $1 billion.

“I am humbled and honored to be Drift’s new CEO,” said Ernst. “I have been a customer and advisor of the company for years, so having the opportunity to take the helm at such a critical point in the company’s history is incredibly exciting. The opportunity ahead of us has never been bigger. I look forward to partnering closely with David, the rest of the board and the entire Drift team to lead the company into its next phase of growth as we further our momentum in the marketplace and execute on our mission to transform the way businesses buy from businesses by harnessing the power of conversations and human connection.”

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Over the last 10 years, technology has accounted for the largest proportion of marketing budgets (26.2%) and demands have never been higher for marketing to prove ROI. To achieve this, tech must be part of any marketer’s ROI strategy. But as you consider martech investments, how do you tell the money wasters from the money makers?

Separating The Solid From The Shiny: The Martech Selection Process

As of the latest count in 2021, there are more than 8,000 martech solutions on the market — a 5,000% increase in options from 2011 — and there are more tech-enabled possibilities for marketers than ever before. But it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and develop “shiny object syndrome.” This is the tendency to chase the newest trends, opportunities and ideas without first evaluating their benefit. 

To break through the distractions of a crowded solutions landscape and stay focused on goals, marketers must take a structured approach to cut out the noise. In my more than 20 years as a marketer, I’ve found that one of the best ways to do this is through a tool called the “Purpose Alignment Model.”

Created by Niel Nickolaisen, this model has been used in IT for years. It plots the purpose or importance of each business activity to make it clear what you need to prioritize and who should be responsible for those priorities.

Putting The Model To Use

Use the Purpose Alignment Model to categorize the importance of each marketing activity you perform according to two factors: 

• Will it create market differentiation?
• Is it mission critical?

The Purpose Alignment Model can be broken down into four quadrants: “Differentiating,” “parity,” “partner” and “who cares.” Once you understand each of the quadrants and how they relate to your organization, you can begin to determine how to set up your version of the model, analyze it and then make decisions. 

Once you complete this exercise, your most vital marketing activities will help categorize your priorities, and you can then align your martech spending to the most impactful technologies. 

How To Build Your Model

Before building your model, you must understand the four quadrants:

• Differentiating: What sets you apart in the marketplace;
• Parity: The “table stakes” in your space or within a particular activity;
• Partner: Activities that are important and differentiating, but not mission-critical; and
• Who cares: The initiatives that aren’t very important to your marketing team’s mission.

When building your model, it’s important to look first at highly market-differentiating and mission-critical items. This is where you want to spend the bulk of your money. 

Differentiating: To belong in this crucial category, activities must rank as highly market-differentiating and mission-critical. These differentiating activities are the few things that you must do better than anyone else and are core to your differentiation. An example might include your ABM capabilities that help you deeply personalize your communications and touchpoints to some of your highly targeted prospects. Questions to ask:

1. Can I draw a direct line from this activity to our strategic competitive advantage?
2. Will it create and/or maintain a strategic competitive advantage?
3. Can I relate it directly back to our business strategy?

Parity: This category is for low-differentiating, highly mission-critical activities. Some examples might include your regulatory compliance functions, opt-in and consent requirements or maybe even your website if it’s purely informational. Your goal for activities in this quadrant should be to apply best practices, mirror the competition and keep things simple. Questions to ask:

1. Does this activity support our business goals and strategy?
2. Does it help us keep pace with the competition?
3. Will customers notice if it’s missing?
4. Would doing this activity differently increase our sales? If so, this may be a differentiator.

Partner: Activities that are highly market-differentiating, low-mission-critical fall into this quadrant. Your marketing technology implementations, deployments, audits and advancements, as well as the development and execution of your campaigns and content, belong here. These activities are NOT core and you must decide if you need to carry these skill sets in-house or if you prefer to find alternatives.

You may find both benefits and trade-offs when working with a partner. Make sure you have a solid off-boarding plan so that your team can continue to build upon a partner’s work. Examples include most martech point solutions (e.g., webinar providers) and external consulting agencies. Questions to ask:

1. Is this activity differentiating?
2. Is it critical that we do these activities?
3. Are these skills I need to maintain within my team over the long term? If not, are others better equipped to offer these skills?
4. Would it be more cost-effective to find a partner that can complement our team?

Who Cares: Low-market-differentiating activities that are also low-mission-critical belong here. This quadrant might include features within a technology that don’t align with your differentiators or mission-critical needs.

Anything that isn’t making an impact on your sales resides here. You should be actively trying to exit or sunset these activities. An additional option would be to negotiate a move of these functions to other areas within the company. What is a non-core, non-priority activity for you may be a core activity to another department. Questions to ask:

1. Does this activity generate market share?
2. Who does it serve, and would they notice if it disappeared?
3. To achieve our strategy, do we really need to focus on this?

Putting It Together To Become A Ruthless Decision-Maker

Once you clarify your business’s differentiators, identify gaps in parity, decide what you can outsource to a partner and remove the activities without value, you’re a ruthless martech decision-maker!

Not only can the Purpose Alignment model help you select and optimize your martech investments in a focused, decisive manner, it can also enable you to share key decisions with other executive teams, such as finance and IT — an all-around win on added value. 

Eric Hollebone oversees the optimization of day-to-day operations and the smooth delivery of all client work at DemandLab. As COO, he works closely with the CEO and executive leadership team to plan and manage the company’s operational policies and develop and help implement a plan to attain the agency’s short and long-term financial and operational goals. Eric also plays a vital role in building on DemandLab’s culture of collaboration and success.

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Looking back on the last couple of years, it’s clear that B2B buying has finally gone digital. Mirroring E-commerce’s rise to dominance in B2C, B2B buying groups prefer to research new products and services online. Members of these buying groups, which have grown to include up to 30 people in complex sales organizations, also tend to stay anonymous. They only fill in a web form or contact sales when they’ve already completed the majority of their buying journey and it’s too late for a salesperson to influence their final decision.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses can no longer fall back on tradeshows, events and in-person meetings to drive growth. Sales has lost control of the buying journey, and it’s now up to marketing to take it back. As B2B marketers embrace the digital age, ABM has proven to be the most efficient practice.

I predict the following trends will shape ABM strategies and investments in 2022 and beyond:

1. The Convergence Of ABM & Demand Gen

ABM doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Some companies run closely aligned ABM and demand generation initiatives successfully. In fact, Forrester reported in early 2021 that, “ABM and demand gen — both as practices and as a set of enabling technologies — are beginning to converge.” Some companies are already merging their ABM, demand gen and SDR/BDR teams and calling them “Revenue Growth Teams.”

We’ll see this reflected in the technology investments marketers make in the year ahead. Some ABM platform vendors have already added native email marketing automation. While it remains to be seen if ABM platforms will replace MAPs, an integrated solution that offers both account-based advertising and email marketing automation is a great choice. This type of solution will help engage both anonymous and known contacts throughout the buying cycle and reduce the resources required to support omnichannel ABM programs.

2. The Shift From Leads To Insight-Driven Sales Opportunities  

MQLs have long been a key success metric in B2B marketing. But leads alone aren’t enough anymore as companies make their purchasing decisions in groups, not as individual contacts. Forward-thinking marketers will look beyond web form fills and seek out anonymous intent signals from key accounts. Marketers will become more strategic and measure how their ABM campaigns and insights are impacting new sales opportunities, pipeline, win rates, deals sizes and contract renewals.

How will marketers see these new anonymous buying intent signals? Some ABM platforms can collect, identify and analyze anonymous account-level buying intent data from across a company’s website, webinar platforms and omnichannel marketing campaigns.

With AI, marketers can set up alerts when the ABM platform detects surges in key account engagement with important content — indicating a buying group may be forming. This helps marketing prioritize accounts for later-stage marketing tactics and provides sales reps with timely insights for reaching out to target accounts before the competition.

3. The Demise Of Third-Party Cookies

Though Google has delayed its ban on third-party cookies until 2023, marketers shouldn’t waste any time preparing their digital advertising programs for the change. Better yet, privacy-compliant alternatives are already available and marketers should proactively take the time to explore these options.

IP advertising is set to become the dominant choice for highly targeted B2B advertising. It’s the only completely reliable, privacy-compliant method for sending relevant and personalized display ads to both known and unknown buying group members based on their company IP address. It enables zero wastage and “always-on” account-based advertising, with no third-party cookies needed.

4. The Rise Of New Digital Marketing Channels

Marketers see the best results with a coordinated omnichannel approach, delivering consistent, sequential and highly personalized messaging to buying group members wherever and whenever they are online. This includes IP display, Google ads, website personalization, email and LinkedIn marketing.

Moving forward, marketers will begin account-based advertising on channels not typically considered for B2B, like Facebook, Instagram and even TikTok. Exciting new video channels are also opening up with CTV ABM.

5. Bringing It All Together Under One Roof 

With so much involved in running a successful ABM program, many companies value the ease of using a single vendor for their digital B2B marketing. This avoids the time and expense of building and maintaining a “best-of-breed” martech stack. Those going the single vendor route should look at: 

• Omnichannel marketing capabilities, including IP-based advertising, email marketing, LinkedIn, Meta and Google;
• Global reach, regardless of location or language; and
• Account-based analytics that provide insights from both known and anonymous buying group members using IP tracking and data pulled straight from the major advertising platforms.

Finally, given the increasing shortage of B2B digital marketing skills, we’ll also begin to see more marketers outsource campaign execution so they can focus on ABM strategy and alignment with revenue growth teams. A good MSP can fill most skill gaps for in-house marketing teams. And if they specialize in particular verticals, they’ll bring deep experience and the know-how to apply best practices in those industries. 

Overall, 2022 is sure to be an exciting year for B2B marketers. With the right strategy, new technologies and expertise, they’ll be poised to take the reins and become the main drivers of revenue growth for their organization.

*Hear more about omnichannel ABM from Nick Heys by checking out his episode of CXO Conversations!

Nick Heys is an English entrepreneur based in Paris. He has a background in database marketing in both B2C and B2B. Heys grew up in the UK, Belgium, Spain, U.S. and France. He worked as European Marketing Director for The Franklin Mint, then he founded Emailvision, which he sold to Francisco Partners in 2012. Today, Heys is the CEO of Jabmo, a leading ABM platform that he founded in 2014. As a hobby, Nick is co-owner of three Paris restaurants ensuring that he gets a good table when he goes out.

The post The Top 5 ABM Trends To Expect In 2022 appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

In response, buyers are overhauling their decision-making strategies to optimize their software spend. The “2021 B2B Software Behavior Survey” from G2 highlighted the shift to smarter buying decisions when searching for new marketing and sales technology and the impact of third-party software reviews on solution adoption. The report also explored how vendors are renewing their engagement strategies to reach buyers in various stages of their buying journeys.

The research found that 86% of buyers turn to peer-review websites to reach a final verdict, while 70% have implemented a formal review process among organization leaders to vote on individual software purchases or renewals. Interestingly, while only 4% of buyers said they trust the information given to them by sales reps or research firms, 60% felt more confident in the solution they decided on after consulting their coworkers or reading peer reviews. As a result, technology vendors are now leveraging positive reviews and customer stories to build brand reputation and gain buyer trust.

“Companies are making software decisions more quickly than ever by taking their research and evaluation into their own hands,” said Amanda Malko, Chief Marketing Officer of G2, in a statement. “Our data points to the growing consumerization of software buying, with the large majority of companies, including in enterprise, turning to trusted peer reviews to inform their decisions.”

Other standout stats include:

• 83% of respondents required security and privacy assessments before implementing a new solution into their tech stacks;
• 67% of software vendors engage target accounts after they have reached a purchasing decision; 
• 60% of SMBs and enterprise buyers will always consider alternative software when their current subscriptions are up for renewal;
• 55% needed three months or less to decide on which solutions to invest in; and
• 55% believed their technology spending will increase going into 2022.

For more insights into how buyers are making their B2B software purchases, check out the full report.

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“Making MarTech Pay Off” explores the growing relationship between marketing and IT teams, and how CMOs and CIOs are collaborating to build stronger martech systems through optimal investments. The report also highlights how data governance processes have changed when analyzing martech performance and the strategies organizations are using for martech innovation.

One major takeaway from the report is that CMOs and CIOs are striving to become more data-driven when managing their martech stacks. The research showed that 80% of respondents use customer experiences, omnichannel engagement and customer satisfaction as standout KPIs for measuring martech performance, with an additional 60% measuring revenue, customer lifetime value and ROI. These datapoints provide CMOs and CIOs in “very effective” relationships with a steady stream of insights that allow for optimal martech investment.

Another area of interest was the increase in integration and alignment, as four out of 10 respondents claimed CMOs and CIOs that closely collaborated on martech usage had access to better data and more integrated core systems. This created greater internal alignment between marketing and IT, providing both teams with higher quality first-party data to inform their workflows.

“CMOs in very effective relationships with IT, who get the most out of martech, also have the largest martech stacks and spend the highest percentage of their marketing budget on martech,” said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council, in a statement. “These CMOs are more likely to be responsible for digital transformation, customer experience and revenue generation — the ‘big three’ — and play a larger role in the future of the company.”

Other key takeaways from the report include:

• 79% of CMOs and CIOs in a “very effective” relationship are able to choose digital and E-commerce solutions that synergize with their organization’s tech stack;
• 60% of CMOs in “very effective” relationships with IT created multi-year strategic plans for martech adoption and implementation;
• 48% of CMOs and CIOs in “very effective” relationships report being in equal partnership when deciding on martech solutions;
• Only 23% of companies have “very effective” CMO-CIO working relationships.

For more insights into how both marketing and IT are innovating their martech solutions, read the full report.

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