5 Myths About Sales and Marketing Alignment Debunked

Author: Stacey Thornberry

When it comes to sales and marketing, there are plenty of misconceptions due to lack of understanding and collaboration.

As a field marketing professional, I have the pleasure of working with sales team members on a daily basis. And yes, I do mean that it’s a pleasure! It’s one of my favorite parts of the job. Let’s get a myth out of the way right off the bat: we don’t hate each other! I promise.

To strengthen marketing and sales relationships so both teams can more effectively and efficiently work together to drive revenue, we consistently need to squash any negative myths in the universe that exist. Here are five sales and marketing alignment myths that you should stop believing right now:

Myth #1: Sales and Marketing Work Independently

Sure, they CAN, but they SHOULDN’T. When sales and marketing aren’t aligned, you’ll run into inconsistent messaging, battles over lead quality, and an “us vs. them” mentality.

Sales teammates are out in the field speaking with prospects and customers more often, so it’s important for them to share their learnings with the marketing team: what content is resonating? What message isn’t getting a response? What are prospects’ top concerns? Gathering pertinent data will help everyone engage with prospects better and improve the customer experience. Breed cohesive outreach by coordinating efforts, and ensure that you have a mechanism for closed-loop feedback.

Myth #2: Face-to-Face Encounters Are Dead; All Selling Happens Online

Yes, the digital experience will get you far since prospects engage with your marketing content on the company website, through a Facebook ad, or in their inbox. But, relationships are still the most important part of the selling process. 

Whether you’re selling B2C or B2B, you’re still selling to a person. So both teams need to be working together to engage prospects and customers both online and offline. While sales reps might be the ones outbound prospecting, marketing can help create opportunities to drive in-person experiences. Think: field events, customer on-sites, calling campaigns, etc.

Myth #3: Sales and Marketing Have Different Goals

While marketing and sales may focus on different objectives, we all have one goal: drive revenue. We have a motto here at Marketo, “ONE TEAM.” Our marketing team even has goals tied to ROI like opportunities created, pipeline generated, and revenue won. But with an engagement platform, we can prove our marketing program ROI to track exactly how we’re helping sales influence and close deals.

Myth #4: It’s Hard to Coordinate Due to Lack of Transparency

Information may live in multiple locations that both teams don’t have access to, or teams may not have processes in place for sharing information regularly. However, tools abound to help sales and marketing collaborate. With sales enablement tools, marketing can disseminate new product messaging or updated go-to-market playbooks en masse. You can even give sales a direct view into how their prospects are engaging with your company with lead and account scoring, plus visibility into email sends, web activity, event attendance, and more. And regularly scheduled communication will help bridge any gaps that technology leaves in collaboration.

Myth #5: Sales and marketing are like cats and dogs; they’ll just never get along.

First of all, YouTube has proven that cats and dogs CAN get along. Which means that sales and marketing should be able to as well! The key: getting on the same page.

The first step to this is to dismiss all of the myths that these teams are meant to disagree rather than agree. Set up agreed-upon service-level agreements (SLAs) that everyone respects and fulfills, and align leadership to remove disparate goals. Bring both teams together regularly, and expand sales kickoff to be a REVENUE kickoff by including marketing and encouraging both teams to meet in person and establish stronger bonds.

The best companies succeed when their revenue-driving teams of sales and marketing work in tandem to create more pipeline and opportunities. No (wo)man is an island, so we should all work together to take our companies to the next level of greatness!

We work hard at Marketo to make these dreams a reality. You may be in a situation where it’s more challenging and feels like you’re constantly battling the other team. Here are some small ways that you can work towards peace:

• Recognize contributions from all sides
• Be outwardly grateful for small acts of teamwork
• Establish common goals for your collaborative programs
• Communicate openly and honestly, and on a regular connection
• Remember that we’re all human; forge meaningful relationships with your counterparts

Hopefully, small steps will take you closer to winning the longer battle to ultimately work better together. Teamwork makes the dream work!

What are some sales and marketing alignment challenges you’ve faced that others may benefit from conquering? Share them in the comments below!

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How to Protect Your Company’s Reputation on Social Media

Author: Sapir Segal

Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.” It’s true, many brands invest valuable time and resources into building their online reputation over the years, but sometimes it takes just one foolish mistake for it to come crashing down. From account hacks to controversial statements, brands often struggle to recover from embarrassing social media blunders.

In fact, social media marketing requires a lot of patience and maintenance. Once you’ve established your social media presence and are generating engagement and measuring your ROI, the most important stage is to protect your hard work. Companies well-versed in social media marketing have taken all these steps to grow and establish their brand’s online presence, but are they doing enough to protect it? Monitoring and protecting your social media presence from decline or extinction is just as pivotal as demonstrating it in the first place.

Every company that engages in social media marketing needs to uphold a strong and credible reputation while looking for ways to continuously improve it. Controversial posts, account hacks, and inadvertent mistakes are all examples of threats that could harm your brand’s reputation. Luckily for marketers, many of these troubling factors are avoidable or correctable. To protect your social media reputation, you must have a careful eye for potential problems, a plan for handling crises, and a team you trust to write and manage the content. Here are three common mistakes that plague social media marketers and the best ways to avoid them:

1. Content Publishing

Imagine a situation where multiple employees have access to your corporate social accounts and one member accidently posts an image with poor taste that was meant to go on their personal profile. If you have a large and distributed social media team, an incident like this is more likely to occur and will require major damage control. In fact, something very similar happened to US Airways when their employee inadvertently tweeted an inappropriate image as a response to a customer complaint. This reply went out from the company’s official Twitter account, and worse, it stayed up for over an hour before being deleted! By the time US Airways apologized, it was too late and the damage had been done.

One way to prevent this from happening is by controlling the roles and permissions of your social media accounts. For example, Facebook allows you to assign different roles to different employees including admin, editor, moderator, advertiser, and analyst. Simply go to your Facebook Business Manager page and follow the steps listed. For Twitter, you can use the “Teams” feature on TweetDeck to control who can be granted access as an owner, admin, or a contributor. For LinkedIn, another popular social platform, there are limited options for managing team roles—either you’re an admin or not—but you can avoid posting mishaps by only granting admin roles to select members in your team.

If you’re looking to take the level of security a step higher, consider adopting a social media management platform that will allow you to manage highly distributed social media teams and protect your data. This way, you’ll ensure that each employee has the level of access necessary for their role (e.g. administrator, contributor, or editor) and prevent employees from posting content that falls outside of corporate guidelines.

2. Controversial Content

Even if you’ve avoided personal content from being shared with your company’s followers, there’s still a possibility that controversial content will slip through the cracks. For example, if you’re using artificial intelligence, then things can get ugly. This is a lesson that Microsoft quickly learned after their newly launched A.I. bot “Tay” was shut down after making offensive and racist statements.

But since a situation like this isn’t likely to happen to everyone, it is, at the very least, imperative that social media managers understand right from wrong when it comes to writing and posting content, which should not be offensive or incite a damaging reputation. Those who manage social media should also be trained on handling negative mentions, aggressive commenters, or unhappy customers so they are prepared for whatever comes their way. It’s also a good idea to create a social media escalation policy to indicate who should respond and how for these unique situations.

3. Account Hacks

Online hacking has become a sharper reality on social media. It can also have adverse effects on all strides a company has made in trying to portray a positive brand image and engaging potential and existing customers. That’s why you need to tightly guard your social accounts by implementing some of these simple tricks:

• Keep your passwords complex and frequently change them. This is especially important after an employee who had access leaves the company. A simple trick to creating robust passwords is to turn letters into look-alike numbers or symbols, for example ‘O’ can become the number ‘0’ and an ‘a’ can become an ‘@’ sign.
• Review social media platforms’ privacy settings. Keep an eye out for blogs published by Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to stay on top of their new updates.
• Turn on notifications to be alerted about suspicious activity. Implementing a system like LogDog will ensure that your Facebook and Twitter profiles are constantly monitored for suspicious activity such as hacking or identity theft. In case something does happen, they will immediately alert you so you’re ready to take action.

Following the general guidelines of a smart social media strategy will help you create safe content that engages your audience, leads them to a solution you’re offering, and forges the essential relationship for generating sales. The founding rule of social media marketing is to expand your reach and communicate your company’s core message. By sticking to these values and implementing an effective strategy, you can protect your social media reputation and ensure it doesn’t decrease or spin out of control.

Have you ever had a social media crisis? How did you recover? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

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How to Protect Your Company’s Reputation on Social Media was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Fired From Bakery Job, Alonzo Lerone Resets His Life as a Successful YouTube Creator

This is a story of inspiration for all of you wannabe YouTube creators who are afraid to follow your dreams. Alonzo Lerone was working in a bakery, posting some videos on YouTube, but not really believing that he could make a living from YouTube ad revenue. Then Alonzo was fired and his life took a turn for the better.

Check out Alonzo on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/Alonzo

How it Began for Alonzo

"Being from a small city, I didn't think I could make a living off of YouTube," says Alonzo. "No one heard of Goldsboro. I was working on YouTube during my stint at the bakery. I didn't have a nine to five, I had a nine to nine job. YouTube was an outlet for me, it was to escape my problems."

"I was getting vibes so I knew it was coming, I just didn't know when," commented Alonzo. "When I got fired from it, I shook their hand and said thank you for the opportunity. When one door closes, another window opens and I left it at that."

Hard Work and Consistency

"I made an oath to myself in late 2013 where I said, when 2014 comes along I'm going to my classes and I'm going to upload at least one video a week," said Alonzo. "When people were at the beach during the summers I was working in the books and doing YouTube. By the end of 2014 I realized, oh my gosh I've been doing it! If I ever win an award I would totally give my boss a shout out saying thank you for firing me, it gave me more time to do what I love to do."

"I am able to make a living," said Alonzo. "I bought a house, paid my car off, paid my school loans off. It's about saving and being consistent. I don't want to get to that moment where YouTube feels like work. I'm not uploading three videos in one week. I don't take a six month break. I'm really consistent.

Advice for YouTube Success!

"My advice is don't get discouraged because of low views," says Alonzo. "Don't delete your videos. When I first started out I was in competition. When I stopped concentrating on the numbers and started focusing on my own content that's when the numbers came in. I just hit a million subscribers. I feel like I'm on top of the world right now with my channel!"

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IBM Watson Brings AI to H&R Block Tax Preparation

IBM announced a partnership with H&R block to use their artificial intelligent platform IBM Watson to radically improve tax preparation. "Introducing the biggest advancement in tax preparation technology," exclaimed IBM in an announcement video. "Say hello to the partnership between H&R Block and IBM Watson. Imagine being able to understand all 74,000 pages of the US tax code along with thousands of yearly tax law changes and other information, plus locks deep insights built from over 600 million data points."

"Imagine being able to understand all that information," noted IBM. "Watson will learn from it and help your tax pro find every credit, deduction and opportunity available. The one of a kind partnership between H&R Block and Watson is revolutionizing the way people file taxes."

H&R Block is marketing the new AI integration as "the future of tax prep" as seen in their new Google ad:

"H&R Block is revolutionizing the tax filing experience," stated Bill Cobb, President and Chief Executive Officer of H&R Block. "By combining the human expertise, knowledge and judgement of our tax pros with the cutting edge cognitive computing power of Watson, we are creating a future where every last deduction and credit can be found."

"Tax preparation is a perfect use for Watson," noted David Kenny, Senior Vice President of IBM Watson. "Just like Watson is already revolutionizing other industries like healthcare and education, here H&R Block with Watson is learning to process incredible amounts of information, helping create tailored solutions for H&R Block customers."

IBM expects Watson to learn through H&R Blocks millions of unique tax filings how to maximize credits and deductions for every customer, elimination inconsistencies caused by human tax preparation experts. The more information Watson receives says Kenny, the smarter Watson gets.

"This is a major shift in how man and machine work together to help us in our everyday lives," says Kenny.

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How to Drive Considered Purchases in Consumer Marketing

Author: Patrick Groover

Today, marketing revolves heavily around influencing the consideration stage. In this information age where self-education and research define most of the criteria used to make a final purchase, ensuring that your brand’s differentiated value reaches your audience at the optimal time is critical. Your ability to be top-of-mind throughout the buyer’s journey can be the difference between making or losing a sale.

Brand awareness is the first step in being included in the consideration phase–the start of the buyer’s journey. While it’s certainly vital for your brand to be found, are you able to consistently build enough brand equity to deliver through to the final purchase and beyond?

The Caveats of an E-Commerce Platform

Many consumer marketers have rightly sought out e-commerce platforms to drive revenue, without recognizing that their brand must first establish enough consideration collateral to support a purchase decision. An e-commerce platform enables brands to focus on product management, product placement, in-purchase experience, and cross-sell/upsell. But for those features to be relevant, your brand must deliver personalized, consistent experiences that match your consumers’ expectations and needs.

To ensure that this connection exists, brands must build intellectual and emotional collateral with their target audiences all throughout the customer lifecycle. For consumers who are in the market for a considered purchase, this relationship is especially important since they’re often purchasing products with high risk and reward. To consistently deliver authentic and personalized experiences that guide the buyer journey, marketers need to leverage an engagement platform to listen to, learn from, and engage with their prospects and customers at scale.

In this blog, I’ll cover five features of an engagement platform that allow you to differentiate your brand and keep it top-of-mind, while properly supporting the downstream conversion of purchases:

1. Centrally-Captured Interactions

Interactions with your buyers happen across multiple channels at multiple times. While e-commerce platforms focus largely on product placement, many lack the ability to look more holistically at the entire journey. In the sea of touchpoints, it can be very difficult to know what and when to communicate, or even which marketing channels to use for specific audiences.

Access to a system that will listen to all of the points of interest can greatly improve program impact and optimize marketing spend. An engagement platform will allow you to integrate data from each of the important consumer touchpoints, such web page visits, PPC ad interaction, retargeting click-throughs, shopping cart abandonment, purchase history, and more, to listen and respond across all of your marketing channels.

2. Tightly Defined Audiences

Once all your touchpoints are centrally connected, an engagement platform will allow you to easily query customer history. Sophisticated systems allow marketers to draw upon interactions and provide deep-and-wide access to behavior-based classification. Rather than simply looking for a specific event, you can set criteria-based thresholds that listen for the quantity and frequency of those interactions. For example, someone who visits your pricing page or information page three or more times is much more likely to be interested in your product than a one-time visitor.

3. Proper Audience-Communication Alignment

The ability to quickly access information, listen for changes in behavior, and respond in real-time through any number of marketing channels is what makes all of the difference between good marketing and great marketing. A true engagement platform allows marketing to deliver these experiences at scale through automation.

Many systems claim to deliver connected, multi-channel marketing; however, they are actually disconnected clouds of solutions that are hard to connect. In contrast, an engagement platform leverages a central and connected methodology for communicating to target audiences through the increasingly complex ecosystem of touchpoints.

After capturing interactions at the front end of the buyer’s journey, an engagement platform allows you to engage your audience with the right messaging through the channels where they are most likely to be influenced. Beyond having access to the right information, you should be able to pass audience membership to the right points of communication at the right time and execute a number of multi-channel marketing natively, such as email, text messages, in-app advertisements, direct mail, or more.

4. Connected Experiences

One of the best ways to ensure that your brand is top-of-mind throughout the buyer’s journey is to coordinate timely, multi-channel nurturing. With the ability to tightly define your audience and capture interactions from relevant touchpoints, an engagement platform can set conditions that automatically adjust the types and timing of content so that it reaches targets with the greatest amount of engagement and personalization.

Marketers today are not only responsible for listening to interactions across multiple channels, but they are equally responsible for reaching audiences through each of those channels as well.  Whether it is social media, SMS/MMS, mobile app, website, etc. a true engagement platform makes it easy to define when and where a specific line of communication will reach your target audience based on the latest behaviors.

5. ROI Measurement Across Channels and Programs

Delivering the optimal customer experience starts and ends with data. Many consumer marketers look to impressions as a key measure of campaign success, but they still struggle to understand the total impact of their programs. The reality is that consumers are building a perspective of your brand, with or without your assistance, and a single impression is rarely what leads to selection. Take for example the investment that goes into pay-per-click (PPC) ads and retargeting. These programs require multiple impressions to deliver value, and they must be coupled with tangible, real experiences that anchor brand value in the mind of their target audiences.

To properly identify, personalize, and respond to interactions, you need to be able to measure your impact across channels and programs. The right solution will allow you to categorize engagement, identify impact, and adjust programs as new insights come to the surface. Consumer marketers tend to leverage three key solutions to understand ongoing marketing impact: Google Analytics, a marketing platform, and an e-commerce platform. Respectively, these solutions represent the initial capture, ongoing engagement, and final conversion. At the core of the customer experience, an engagement platform will connect marketing programs, channels, and results to show where conversions are taking place, providing a full view of the activities that are doing the most to help you build consideration equity.

It’s time to look more holistically at what’s driving total revenue across the buyer’s journey. Pulling together all of the touchpoints and coordinating cross-channel communication is possible with the right solution that connects top-of-funnel marketing, nurturing, audience management, and customer experience.

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3 Account-Based Marketing Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make

Author: Joe Paone and Vyoma Kapur

Account-based marketing is gaining in popularity in large part due to its high potential for improving return on investment (ROI). Couple high ROI with the fact that new technology allows marketers to conduct ABM at scale, and you’ll quickly realize how it can transform your business. But how do you ensure your strategy is headed in the right direction?

Whether you’re an early adopter of ABM or just venturing into it, there are many mistakes that you could be making that will limit the effectiveness of your strategy. Hopefully, we can help you avoid some of those pitfalls with a closer look at some of the most common mistakes in the world of ABM. We’ll take a look at three mistakes now, but if you’d like a deep dive on the below and/or are interested in learning about additional mistakes, you can register for our upcoming webinar, 8 Biggest Mistakes Account-Based Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them.

Let’s jump right in and take a look at three big mistakes account-based marketers make and how to avoid them:

Mistake #1: Poor Account Selection Methodology

Nothing will derail your ABM strategy faster than selecting the wrong accounts to include in your programs. If you rely solely on sales to select accounts, you may end up with subjective accounts that look good to a sales rep, but are not the accounts that will generate the most ROI. On the other hand, if you act unilaterally and attempt to select accounts only using a marketing lens, you may find it difficult to get sales buy-in when it comes to execution.

Start off strong by identifying the right accounts for your organization. There are many different strategies and approaches you can use for selecting accounts, and each of them has their own merits. For example, some organizations may target companies that are using a solution that complements their own, while others may target key verticals or accounts that meet other specific criteria. If you have a large list of accounts, you may want to create a tiered strategy that prioritizes your focus on different levels of high-value accounts.

As a rule of thumb, account selection should include some or all of the following:

• High yield: Accounts that are likely to result in larger than average deals and generate substantial revenue over the long term.
• Product fit: Accounts that have business needs that clearly match your solutions, which increases the likelihood they will purchase.
• Strategic importance: Accounts that align with your company’s strategy. For example, winning a big logo in a new territory or vertical to help your company enter those new markets.
• Competitors’ customers: Accounts that are using your competition’s products or services.

It’s also important to consider accounts that exist outside of your database. There are many different vendors that you can use to help you find net new companies to add to your database. You’ll want to leverage the critera above to determine which accounts you should purchase from your chosen vendor.

Regardless of which inputs you use to select accounts, all stakeholders should be part of the account selection process. This will ensure everyone is on the same page and each group feels ownership of the process.

Mistake #2: Operating in Silos with a Disjointed Strategy

Once you have selected the right accounts, coordinate your channels and work cross-functionally to deliver a seamless customer experience. The biggest mistake you can make in ABM is to work in silos with only a few channels and tactics. For ABM to be successful, multiple functions not only need to be aligned, but also be committed to playing their part in penetrating the target accounts.

Here are some of the ways account-based marketers can work with other teams and departments to leverage their programs for an integrated ABM strategy:

• Events: Event marketers humanize your brand, creating opportunities for buyers and sellers to meet face-to-face. There are plenty of opportunities to leverage events when it comes to ABM. Work with your field and corporate events teams to prioritize target accounts before, during and after an event, whether it involves alerting your sales reps when attendees from target accounts check in or giving them an exclusive offer after an event.
• Content marketing: Because ABM is a targeted strategy, you’ll need to leverage relevant content to engage your accounts. The good news is that ABM in itself requires a deep understanding of your target accounts and their pain points, which can be leveraged to create relevant content or repurpose existing content. At the same time, think about how you can leverage content launches for your programs. One way to prioritize target accounts is to give them exclusive early access to premium content. This could go a long way in building relationships with these accounts.
• Paid programs: With multiple vendors offering paid advertising solutions for the purpose of ABM, there are plenty of opportunities to reach your target accounts across the web. You can target your accounts precisely and layer on additional filters such as intent data, engagement history, and types of content consumed to target the right people at the right time.

Mistake #3: Measuring the Wrong Metrics

Account-based marketing is different from broad-based marketing in multiple ways. While the goal of broad-based marketing is to drive as many high-quality leads as cost-effectively as possible, ABM flips the traditional B2B marketing funnel and starts with identifying key accounts, penetrating them, and then landing and expanding them. Accordingly, the metrics that matter look very different.

In broad-based marketing, conventional metrics such as leads, conversions, and MQLs are used to determine program, channel, and campaign performance. Because ABM is a very targeted approach, only tracking these metrics will not give you a complete and accurate picture.

Here are some key metrics, which can be found in your engagement platform or CRM system, that are instrumental in determining the success of ABM:

Early-Stage Metrics

ROI-centric metrics take time to mature as prospects become familiar with your offerings, but until then, there are early indicators that you should be tracking to make sure that your campaigns are progressing in the right direction.

One metric that you’ll want to track from the start is account score. An account score groups the individuals involved in a buying process and provides a group view of readiness to buy, which will help you understand their overall engagement. If the account score is low across your target accounts, it is an indicator that you should revisit and rethink your program mix and content strategy.

If you are seeing account engagement, you’ll want to look at specific channel metrics to see which channels are performing the best. Some (but, not all) of those channel metrics may include:

• Ad views: Look at impressions and click-through rates to gauge the effectiveness of your ads in drawing key accounts into your funnel.
• Web traffic: See how many people from target accounts visit your website and how well the personalized web experiences drives content engagements, downloads, conversions, and other desired actions. Did you receive multiple visits or visitors from the same organization?

Mid-Stage Metrics

As the prospects within your target accounts engage with your communications, take a look at how they interact with your marketing programs and sales team by tracking the following metrics:

• Marketing campaign and channel metrics: If you are using a marketing platform, this data often lives within in the platform. Analyze it to understand how your various campaigns are performing and whether prospects are converting.
• Web engagement: Interested prospects will be visiting your site in almost every stage of the sales cycle to further educate themselves on your offering. Look for high visit counts to identify potential buyers that are drilling into your content.
• CRM: Look into your CRM platform to see what information the sales team may have logged and determine how that can inform your future activities.
• Sales feedback: Talk to the sales team to discover how close the prospects are to engaging.

Late-Stage Metrics

It may take some time to measure revenue, but it’s essential to determine the success of your efforts. Don’t leave out the bottom-of-the-funnel as revenue is the key measurement that both sales and marketing can influence. These late-stage metrics include:

• Opportunities created: Take a look at the number of qualified leads your campaign generated who fit your criteria. The number of opportunities for each campaign reveals how valuable your leads are in regards to your primary internal customer–the sales team.
• Account penetration: Number of key people (decision makers, influencers. etc.) that are in your database and opted-in.
• Deal sizes: The average selling price (ASP) of closed-won opportunities from target accounts. The average deal size of target account opportunities should be higher than that of other accounts.
• Win rate: The number of closed won opportunities as a percentage of the total number of opportunities closed. Like deal sizes, this should be higher for target accounts vs. default accounts.
• Velocity: The number of days it takes for an account with an open opportunity to become a customer. The average of this should ideally be smaller for target accounts than default accounts

Curious about other mistakes marketers make when it comes to ABM? Register for our webinar, 8 Biggest Mistakes Account-Based Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them on Feb 8, 2017.

 

 

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4 Ways Demand Generation Marketing Is Like Football

Author: Randy Frisch

They say the toughest position on a football field is the quarterback. You’ve got hundreds of plays to learn and optimize. You need to learn how to play in the scorching sun (think Miami) and adjust to the bitter cold a week later (think Green Bay). You get hit with a blow when you least expect it and need to dash to an opening that presents itself. Your team counts on your strategies to win the game and you take the blame for losses. Whether your name is Montana, Favre, or Brady, you are in control. And there’s nothing better than holding the ball and knowing what’s possible when you have control.

Before I lose those of you who are not football fans, I want you to reread the entire opening paragraph with a revised first sentence: “They say the toughest position in a high growth company is the demand generation quarterback.”

Okay, I guess we don’t have to truly adapt to the weather as marketers, but geography plays a factor! With Super Bowl 51 just around the corner, I decided to have some fun and draw some parallels between football and demand generation marketing. Feel free to drop yourself into the quarterback slot here and see if you can relate.

1. It’s a Game of Inches

Has a bad football movie ever been made? My wife, who’s the last person to suggest watching a real-life game, is always up for a football flick. And perhaps the best line ever is the reminder from Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday that “it’s a game of inches.”

After hearing that line, can’t you relate as a marketer? From the subject line tweak on your email campaign to the right CTA beside your latest blog post–the details are what make the difference. Don’t count on the Hail Mary.

2. Control and Optimize

Just as a football team can always prepare a bit more by analyzing videos, you’ll never hear a modern marketer tell you they have nothing to optimize. The field is always changing. One of the tools our team uses to ensure we can optimize and maintain control is Unbounce. Many of our campaigns require landing pages either to gate content or create an event sign up page. With Unbounce, our team is able to control and optimize the little details as the campaign progresses by making changes on the fly.

When we launched our first user conference Uberflip Experience last year, we were constantly adjusting messaging, pricing, and CTAs to entice customers and prospects to take a chance and come check out our first big event. With Unbounce, we were able to adjust these variables within minutes, as often as needed, to drive registrations to the conference.

3. It Takes More Than One Play to Score

In 2016, the Patriots scored 3.6 touchdowns per game but needed 66.3 plays per game to get there. Sometimes in football, we see exciting plays where a kickoff is returned for a touchdown, a first pass of the game is thrown downfield for 6, or an interception is converted without the offense coming on the field. But the reality is that most points in a game are the result of several downs to take a team into the end zone.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing better than having a prospect Google your company and phone in to say, “I just want the best price and need to be up and running today.” Love those days! But let’s be honest. Most businesses create a sequence of experiences and events that they offer in the right place, and at the right time to get a prospect over the line.

Back to our quarterback, our VP of Marketing, Shannon uses a combination of tools, such as Marketo and Bizible, to track the various “plays” needed to get a prospect over the line. Just as the quarterback would like to execute a set number of plays when there’s a minute to go and they’re down by 5, the goal in content marketing, naturally, is to minimize the number of touches needed to get someone through the buyer’s journey. We can’t rush it or skip some steps. We must learn which plays are the most important and impactful.

I’ll give you a quick example. Last year, I was standing with our CEO at an event we sponsored, Sirius Decisions Summit. We were talking about going bigger on that event for the next year and debating whether we could pull out of another industry conference to create the budget. Just as we landed on cutting the event, a prospect walked over and said, “Hey Randy, we met at last year’s conference and this time I’ve got my boss here. Could you give him that demo you gave me last time?” As he walked away more or less ready to buy, I couldn’t help but laugh since that was the same event we were about to cut. I learned last week that this prospect recently became a customer.

Although we wanted to throw our investment all into one play, we realized that winning this prospect’s business happened throughout multiple plays. In fact, this event was probably just getting him into the end zone, with a steady drip of relevant emails and sales touches to add the final nudges.  

4. The Quarterback Can’t Win Alone

I started by giving all the glory to the quarterback. Don’t get me wrong. Shannon has some mad demand gen and marketing skills, but there are only so many quarterback sneaks or runs that can happen in a game. The marketing quarterback needs a strong offensive line and receivers to make each play happen. On our team, Shannon relies on our offensive lineswomen: Kelly (product marketing), Tara (demand generation), Maya (events and community), and Katie (social). She also needs help from the sidelines from people like Quentin, our graphic designer. And of course, no play would start without a solid snapper–luckily we have Jermaine Reyes, our content manager. Bottom line is that every member of her team ensures she gets time to release the ball.

So if you’re into the analogy, you’re probably trying to figure out who the receivers and running backs are. Well, sales of course! Assuming the ball is the prospect (and unless you’re running an online sale), most of us rely on salespeople to get the deal over the line. On our team, we have a sales team of just over 30 members, all ready to take an MQL and work through the plays to get the deal done. Our salespeople actually need to wear a marketing hat too, because some prospects require a bit of guidance to progress.

One way our sales team coordinates with the marketing quarterback is by choosing which content to share with their audience. This is easier said than done. In many companies, salespeople search a dated wiki article, bulky excel file of links, or actually search Google for their company’s own content. Fortunately, our team has full access to our marketing content hub so they can quickly send off successful content passes to their prospects.

This ensures that the entire sequence from first-touch to last follows our brand guidelines and overall core messaging. The last thing you want is a wide receiver celebrating too quickly while heading downfield.

At the end of the day, as marketers, we need to always be dialed in to keep the leads and customers coming. Just look back to about a year ago from this time today, where neither of the 2016 Super Bowl teams even made the 2017 playoffs! What worked last year may not work tomorrow. There is no such thing as auto-pilot for marketers. Those who purchase an engagement platform and assume it’s cruise control are destined to early elimination. So whether you’re cheering for the Pats or Falcons, let’s hope the coach and quarterback have rallied their team with a few trick plays to win the customer (I mean game).

What other similarities have you seen between football teams and demand generation teams? Share your observations in the comments below!

 

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4 Ways Demand Generation Marketing Is Like Football was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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