Marketing Operations - Marketing Rockstar Guides

Discussing the SiriusDecisions Funnel 2017

June 14, 2017 By Josh Hill

Enthusiasm without thought.

That sums up the reactions to SiriusDecisions’ unveiling of their 2017 waterfall. The reality is nothing has changed regarding the funnel. Whether you track progress of people, leads, accounts, or buying centers, the funnel is still an arbitrary tool to measure impact of effort in revenue development. It’s helpful. Misleading? Somewhat…since purchase sequences aren’t linear…but that sort of tracking isn’t quite here yet.

I like the people at SiriusDecisions and they take time to carefully consider issues in B2B marketing. The latest version of their Funnel Framework seems like a step backward in helping marketers understand their results. And I am surprised more people aren’t calling them out.

The Demand Unit=Department=Buying Center=Buying Group

The Demand Unit (DU) is just another name for Team, Department, Buying Center, Buying Group, etc… There are a lot of sales books on buying groups and how to build them. This is a well known concept (especially in Sales). The Challenger Customer is one of the more recent incarnations of this concept, providing rigor and methodology for understanding the personalities within a Buying Group I wrote about operationalizing this methodology a few months ago. And MartechToday also linked the Demand Unit back to CEB’s work.

The Buying Center concept is useful and closer to reality than Account Based Marketing. Thus, SiriusDecisions is working toward bringing Marketing into the daily reality of Salespeople, who seek to build Buying Groups. Of course, marketing operations and Marketers must further understand how to operationalize such a concept beyond the Buyer Persona.

Implications of the Buying Center for Marketing Operations

Now in marketing ops, buying centers haven’t been discussed as much because it creates a lot of work to build out this level of organizational detail. It’s nice to see that the conversation is already moving toward a Buying Center Custom Object that may expand the utility of the Account Object. Normally, I would tend to build various Accounts on Location, HQ, Region, Business Unit. Sales may or may not consider these Buying Groups. The recommendation is to consider building out a hierarchy:

Ultimate Parent
- Account Location
  - Account Business Unit
    - Buying Center
      - People [Marketo already shifting to this]

Doing so is not easy at all and I doubt most firms even need to go this far. The Demand Unit/Buying Center, demands such a structure to enable tracking as well as improved delivery of data to Sales.

Now it’s possible one person could be part of multiple Buying Centers or Accounts in this model, so spend a bit of time on how the new data structure will work. I know of a few firms already down this path, but fully operationalizing Buying Center as a distinct unit will be more challenging. I question if this is worth it for all but the Largest sellers. Sales people are clever folk and will figure out the buying center because that’s their job. I almost fear this talk will put further pressure on Marketing Ops to deliver vacuum packed, accurate Buying Centers on a silver platter, when we all know Sales still has to build relationships to get the lay of the land.

Remember, the Map is not the Territory – our fancy marketing data doesn’t reflect the internal dynamic or reality of a Buying Center or Account. Salespeople still need to build relationships and understand their client’s internal dynamics. Marketing cannot, and should not, replace this with automation.

Selling Cake and Cookies to the Right Teams

SiriusDecisions also discussed how the Demand Unit works within the matrix of Solutions Offered against each Buying Unit. The grid explains how to match Solutions against Buying Centers is helpful to new marketers. I would be surprised if a Marketer or Salesperson isn’t familiar with their firm’s grid already. None of this is new.

Integrate’s David Crane wrote about the new funnel, providing a helpful graphic, which I borrow here.

Buying Centers, Needs, and Productions — via Integrate’s Blog

Grant Grigorian of PathToScale described this matrix as you can sell Cake to Team 1 and then branch out into Cookies, which are desired by Team 1 and Team 2. Both teams may have the same executive sponsor, or not. I know some firms like to have separate funnels for each Solution area, which makes sense when the Business Units or products tend to be mutually exclusive. Yet, many solutions overlap as do Buying Centers, so I personally avoid separate funnel tracking, instead relying on data slicing at the end to look at product interest.

SiriusDecisions seems to be suggesting that Marketing Ops isn’t doing enough to segment the database along the Buying Center-Solution mapping matrix. It’s possible, as many firms aren’t always able to collect enough targeting data. If this is a call to action for MOPS to do better segmentation, great, let’s do it. On the other hand, SiriusDecisions seems to be stating the obvious.

Will there be Better Marketing-Sales Alignment?

The idea some people are floating that Marketing and Sales will be amazingly aligned because of the new funnel stages is entirely wrong. Matt Heinz of HeinzMarketing wrote that he loves “the current nomenclature specifically and intentionally does not call out where sales is involved vs marketing involved.” While the new model does avoid those assignments, I do not see this language changing B2B organizations at all. There will always be relationship builders and mass communicators.

The only time Marketing and Sales are merged in this way is at a startup. The “marketers” and “sales” people are always together, in the same rooms, calls, and discussions. They craft the messaging together until it’s scalable. The reality is the skills required to build personal relationships versus mass scale interest are different and should be separate. Should the efforts be aligned? Yes.

Alignment comes from a lot of work to build trust and to operationalize and fine tune the agreements made. It’s irrelevant what the Stage names are as long as the ICP and process are well defined and there is continuous communication and data-based discussions on the results. Any time I’ve seen the two teams misaligned is when communication has stopped. The Stages here do nothing to improve communication.

New Stages or Old Stages?

The new SiriusDecisions stage names are confusing. Since most firms already built out the earlier SiriusDecisions model and customized it according to their situation, then how do these new, vaguer stages add value to analysis?

I am not convinced the stages do anything other than to conflate earlier Stages and reduce visibility of what’s happening, whether you look at People, Leads, Accounts, or Buying Centers. In my earlier discussions on ABM, I had suggestions on how to think about Stage names and Prioritization once the coverage on the Account (or buying center) reached the threshold.

A new emphasis on TOFU? Not really.

Quite a few industry commenters said that the new funnel framework re-emphasized top of the funnel (TOFU) efforts. I don’t see this at all. What I do see at many organizations is the Target Account selection was often muddled with Buying Persona. Thus, the idea of Target Demand is helpful because it is outside of the Marketing Automation database constraint, allowing Marketing to more clearly show the ratio between the Target Market/Estimated Demand and the actual data available.

Here’s my take on the New Stages vs. The Old Stages

New 2017 Stage	Older Stages	Thoughts
Target Demand	[not used]	Target Account List Buying Center List (more at territory level though). How would I estimate the number of Buying Centers? Is that appropriate for my firm at this point in time?
Active Demand	Anonymous on site Anonymous off-site Known	Requires more Anonymous tracking and third party data.
Engaged Demand	Known Engaged Pre-MQL	New version is less nuanced. All open to arbitrary decision.
Prioritized Demand	MQL/MQA/MQDU TAL	At it’s core, we want to flag higher potential people and firms to Sales at the right moment. Predictive tools and lead scoring do all of this already.
Qualified Demand	Opportunity or SQL TQL	Same. Older names may be more nuanced.
Pipeline	Opportunity	Same. There are always gradations of Opportunities and Pipeline definitions must be the same in Sales and Marketing.
Close	Closed-Won	Same

How Should You Operationalize the Buying Center Concept?

As I mentioned, the big contribution of the new Model is to push forward the MOPS work on construction of new objects to capture more of the data relationships. Only you can decide if your organization is ready to move down this path.

The Missing Objects for Reporting Success

Integrating ABM and the Buying Center into the martech stack requires new objects. While I’ve written a bit about the Touch object in the past with Channel-Offer Attribution, there are 4 objects that are often missing from the MOPS toolkit, especially at the SMB level.

These objects can be custom built or, sometimes, created from add-on tools to your CRM.

Company Object
- Ties together related accounts to an Ultimate Parent
- Identify whitespace faster.
- DUNS linkages between Accounts
- May improve compliance with Finance.
- [Product Opportunity – roll out entire Account Hierarchies before entering data]
Demand Unit/Buying Center Object
- Departmental or Buying Center
- Associate multiple people to a Team or Sub Account
- Is it necessary if we use SFDC Account Hierarchies effectively?
- Requires some additional thought regarding Thresholds and Coverage.
- May reduce some burden on Sales which traditionally has taken People and associated them to Accounts/Teams according to reality. It also may make their lives confusing if mis-match rate is high and they have to manage the data relationships as much.
Funnel Object
- Tracking people, Accounts, Buying Center through the Stages. PathToScale and Full Circle Insights do this well.
Touch Object
- Using the Channel Offer Method. Can be a custom system if you keep it simple. Or you can just call Bizible.
- Can be merged with Funnel Object, but this may cause issues with FT/LT at each Stage, which doesn’t really help you.

New objects are a lot of work!

Identifying Active Demand

Whether you do this with Third Party data or First Party and by Person or Account, is up to your team. It still comes down to what John Hurley of Radius suggested as a starting point:

Fit: How much we like you?
Intent: Are you in an active buying cycle?
Behavior: How much you like us?

Which underlines my point – the SiriusDecisions model doesn’t change much or suggest a new, radical path for the B2B Marketing or Sales teams. Whether you look at Fit, Intent, and Behavior at the Person, Buying Unit, or Account levels, you still have to look at it and decide what thresholds matter to get a human involved.

To further Operationalize the Buying Center, we must look at the three levels:

Person
Buying Center
Account

And go back the basics that TOPO and Engagio suggest for ABM reporting:

Engagement in Minutes by Person and Account
Fit – Target Account, ICP
Coverage – % of buying team we know about and % of Account Team we know about. Can we find more data to fill in the gaps?
Intent – can we find more about the people we know or don’t know.

Then your team needs to decide how to best handle the flagging of people and teams who are ready to speak with a Salesperson. And yes, this can, and should, involve humans at predetermined times. For example:

Record Type	Possible Threshold	MOPS Action	Sales Action
Person	Match ICP and Intent+Behavior = X Match Decision Maker ICP only	MQL to SDR	Build relationship; set meeting
Buying Center	50% of target ICPs if Decision Maker missing Intent =>X on 50% of team	MQBC to SDR	Develop understanding of Account; obtain more coverage.
Account	50% of target ICPs Decision Maker as MQL	MQA to SDR or AE	Develop understanding of Account; obtain more coverage. Set meeting

What the Detractors Say

I came across only a few marketing operations leaders willing to say SiriusDecisions fell short of the mark with the new Demand Unit.

Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of VisumCX said “there is a lot lacking in this 3.0 version of the Waterfall.” Pointing out that the definition of Active Demand might mean the “buyer is well down their purchase path, meaning late to the game.” And Mr. Hidalgo points out the key question when using Buying Centers – “not all members of a buying group…will equally participate in the buying process.” This is critical to deciding how to operationalize a Buying Center and ABM approach – do you send MQLs over or do you send MQAs? When is a Buying Group complete enough to have an SDR or AE involved? I personally would setup a system where certain Buyer Personas are sent to MQL based on Predictive Scoring, regardless of Completeness of Account (or Coverage). But if a Buying Group had 3 out of 5 personas and the 2 top personas were absent, then I’d flag the entire Buying Group to the SDR to get things started.

Jeff Pedowitz, founder of The Pedowitz Group seems to agree with me that the Stage names do “not work for every company…rather, they customize it to their unique needs…Second, the names chose for the new Demand Unit waterfall are very confusing.” Mr. Pedowitz also believes “the concept of the funnel should be retired anyway” in favor of an “infinity loop.”

Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD said “This outdated graphic is a symbol of yore.” Mr. Gray also wrote later, in a blog post, that “funnels drastically oversimplify the buying process into a linear progression, that, in reality, doesn’t behave as the buyer does.” Instead of solving the fundamental issue with funnels, SiriusDecisions compounds it.

Conclusions

My recommendation is to study the reactions across the industry as well as the roadmap SiriusDecisions put out. If you are the midst of a Lifecycle Build or Rebuild, it is a good idea to consider the use of Buying Centers or Account records and not just Leads/People as the unit of measure. You can still use Leads as well as Accounts. If you are happy with your existing systems, then I would consider a plan to better use Lead-to-Account matching going forward, as well as possible expansion of data into Buying Centers, preferably identifying Buying Groups in The Challenger Customer way.

What I do not suggest is the use of the Sirius Decisions Stage names or the new framework.

Have you built a system based on Account or Buying Centers? Tell us about it below.

[Updated: June 20, 2017 with link to Grant Grigorian and podcast]

Account Based Marketing – What it is and what it is not

May 1, 2017 By Josh Hill

Nearly everything I’ve seen is about sending direct mail/email/ads to people at a Target Account or a specific person with a funny or unique catch. To me, that’s an end point of the ABM work.

It’s interesting to see the amount of “ABM” content out there that turns out to be a unique tactic to catch someone’s attention and get them to respond. There are times to engage in such tactics, but please understand that these are tactics to catch the attention of key buyer personas at an Account where reaching that person (or finding them) is difficult.

An experienced salesperson understands that the B2B sale requires several individuals. Databases like Hoover’s, DNB, DiscoverOrg, etc…simply help salespeople identify and reach some of those personas at a Company (Account). When I was in Sales, I would go through the following process:

I’d look up Companies in my Territory, over $100MM in revenue, and look for the titles most likely to buy, based on experience.
Then I’d try to find their direct dials, or at least their main location.
Then I’d create a call down list for each major metro region.
On paper, I’d call at least 3 times to get a meeting.
I found that many would respond after the second voicemail. But if they did not, it was unlikely to ever hear back this time around.

Through this method, I was the Number 1 meeting maker at my firm for 2 years. With the advent of marketing automation, content marketing, and ABM&S, perhaps now I would be able to scale my process. Or have better conversations at the firms I really wanted to get into. Why? Because I might now be able to better identify the buying team and surround them online with my messaging. Perhaps I’d be able to discover previously anonymous people at each Account and encourage them to sign up for a newsletter.

Tip: Marketo’s Company Web and Web Activity Reports are still great tools for Territory work like this.

And I’m sure if Marketing were focused on Accounts back then, instead of leads, our efforts would have been at a higher ROI.

And if I had some of the fun tools like PFL, I could have sent unique direct mail pieces at a reasonable cost to attract attention better than just a cold call.

But that’s the tip of the spear.

The work of ABM is well before this type of targeted outreach. I’ve written about this earlier, and the real practitioners will talk about it. Anyone who has a presentation that only discusses fun campaigns for ABM isn’t doing real ABM. At a minimum, they confuse Strategy and Tactics, or they forgot the hard database work before the campaign.

Here are a few key tips for running Account Based Marketing Operations.

Named or Target Accounts
Ranking Accounts in some way, such as fit for product or propensity to buy
Knowing the Buying Team Personas (see Challenger Customer) and being able to identify them in a database.
Understanding the Coverage within each Account
Marketing must source those missing names
Marketing must focus effort on the Account Buying teams (people)
Marketing/Sales Ops must help attach those People to the Accounts (Lead to Account Matching)
Define MQLs vs. MQAs – when should a rep get involved with a Person or Account?
Which systems and people nurture at which Stage? [Slides]
How should offline and online efforts work? Account swarming online with Ads, emails, etc…and what messaging?
STOP SPAMMING people with “From Rep” – whether it’s from Marketo or another tool, STOP IT. SDR cold emails = Cold Calls. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s a good idea, most of the time it’s annoying.
Named Account Cold Calling Lists are not ABM, and not Account Based Sales. No prep work, no marketing is involved and you’re results will be poor compared to a coordinated effort.
Direct Mail’s intention in this is to get the attention differently if Email/Phone isn’t working or cannot be found. Stop using it as a bribe for a meeting. Recent examples include Bobble Heads (Engagio), and Vidyard custom video messages. Yet, this reminds me of the old fashioned gumption and hustle of salespeople. That’s cool. You should do that sometimes. Know how and when to do that.

Notice how the tactics are at the end of this list, when all of the other hard database work is done.

Happy marketing!

Account Based Marketing Means Sales-Marketing Realignment

November 22, 2016 By Josh Hill

Marketing Operations faces a unique challenge in accommodating the latest shift in marketing frameworks: Account Based Everything (or ABM or ABS). As a marketing technologist, I’ve struggled with the conceptual shift because everything marketers (and sales) does is related to People (read: Leads). The deeper I work on an Account view, the more flaws I see in the how we market; flaws in the lead only approach; and flaws in how sales teams are leveraging sales automation tools. Ultimately, there is a lack of understanding in businesses on what Account Based means. In speaking with the CEO of one vendor, I learned quite a few people out there agree there is no single consensus on how to do ABM yet.

That may be a good thing because it’s time to shake up marketing again.

Here are some of the steps I see firms should take to begin their journey in an Account Based World. It’s 2007 again and we’re back to Sales-Marketing Alignment.

Marketing Strategy Must Embrace ABM

First and foremost, an Account Based strategy, must be that – a Strategy. Please stop trying to build “pilots” or think that purchasing an “ABM tool” will mean you are doing Account Based Anything. An Account Based approach to business means not just an entire shift in thinking, but entirely new business processes, language, and new alignment between Sales and Marketing.

Target Account selection is only one aspect of an Account Based organization. If one team is deciding on Target Accounts without the others, then this is not really an ABM or Account plan. There’s nothing wrong with a target account team or target account choices, but it’s not the same as a unified Account Based Strategy. Do not confuse Target Accounts as a strategy; it is a tactic.

Enough people have written about the Strategy behind ABM, so let’s discuss the next steps.

Sales and Marketing Must Re-Align

And I do mean start over. The next step is to ensure that Sales and Marketing achieve a new level of alignment on what each does in an Account Based world. I wrote about this a year ago, but now refined my thinking as I’ve spoken to teams around the country about their work. At a minimum, embracing the Account based world, means a re-division of labor and expectations between our two friends: Marketing and Sales. This re-alignment can mean a lot of different things. Today, we’ll explore two key areas: the Relationship Team and the Overall Division of Labor.

Account Based Sales: the Relationship Team

One solution that some firms take is to build a “Tiger Team” that picks up Tier 1 (Fortune 500) Accounts and figures out how to swarm them with the right people and messaging. I personally prefer the idea of a “Relationship Team” that is just as focused, but works to build the relationships necessary to close a deal. Of course, if your leaders don’t get how to organize this team or demand quarterly results from 12+ month sales cycles, maybe it’s time to find a different team.

For our “new” Account Based approach, here’s what I see happening in your organization. There is a shift from a lead flow to a Relationship Team. Yes, you can still have a lead flow, but your focus is on building Coverage and then having Relationship Builders (sales) work the people in those Accounts. I strongly advise against aggressive outbound, cold calling of every person at every Account. Please stop that. Please stop doing that by email only. It’s not helpful. Sure, it works some percent of the time, but it also annoys 99% of the time, ruining chances for cold calls or creating a hidden hurdle. eg:

“Hey Bob, I’m going to have a call with Company X tomorrow, would you join us?

“Cathy, there’s no way I’m going to be in a call with those jackasses. Did you see how they sent 22 year old BDRs after the rest of the team? I don’t trust them.”

I can tell you that a certain martech vendor sent several cold emails until I relented. They did a better job on the intro than some, but once on the call, I was waiting for the pitch and all they could do was tell me how great they were. Sound familiar?

This Relationship Team structure is about changing the workflow. A true ABM program will combine a marketer or “Message Master” with an Appointment Getter, Relationship Builder, Technical Sales, and Onboarder. I even added a special Playmaker or Content Creator if one is affordable.

This entire team should work on assigned accounts for at least nine months before marking them for deferral. The Coach or Leader should work with the Message Master to craft plays from Anonymous to Customer. I added Customer Success here because it’s a mistake to fumble the handoff. Customers who’ve learned to trust you and your team are loath to be handed to an unknown “Customer Success” person who knows little about them. The last thing a client wants is to have to repeat their story 20 times to the same firm. And even if the Closer isn’t involved much after the Close, I would strongly urge firms to keep them involved. I know not every person can be both hunter and farmer, however, if you want to close super large deals, you can’t walk away after the signing. You know your success depends upon milestones and the ability of the rest of the team to keep working for the client.

Relationship Leader/Coach – builds plays with Messaging Master; helps shepherd deals.
Messaging Master/ABM Marketer – keeps team on message, breaks up content and tests play cadences. This role interfaces with the larger marketing organization as well as field marketing.
Account Executive/Relationship Builder – Tier 1 deal closer; skilled at building relationships and bringing together problems and solutions.
Technical Expert – understands the solution and how to help the details.
Customer Success – solution builder, consultant, relationship builder.
Content Creator – this person helps the Messaging Master craft new or refine content for the Accounts.

Account Based Marketing Means Redrawing the Division of Labor

Now you have seen how the Relationship Team can be built. With or without such a team, Marketing Ops needs to lead the adjustment of the boundaries of lead handoff and technology ownership. The challenge I’ve seen is that with the new sales automation tools like Salesloft, Outreach, and Yesware, is that Sales takes back some of the pre-MQL and post-MQL nurturing Marketing has done since 2008. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with more personalization, there is conflict in which team “owns” the relationship.

If Marketing Operations takes a backseat at this point, there are risks that the demand generation machine you built will begin to crumble. Sales is under pressure to use these new tools and take control of their part of the process. That’s ok! Marketing Ops, though, should lead the realignment to ensure technical and regulatory compliance. Here are a few steps on how to approach this:

View the funnel from the customer perspective.
Each Stage has a Goal – one for you, one for Sales, and one for the customer.
The Owner of the Stage is one group: Marketing, BDR/SDR, AEs, etc…each team is assigned the Goal
Cadence or Plays – each Stage can have various “plays” designed by and for that Goal and Customer level.

Now, marketing can, and should, help build all plays, but Marketing’s influence will wane as the relationship between your firm and their firm deepens. In essence, the key re-alignment is ownership.

In this example grid, we can see that the redefined funnel stages are from the Lead’s point of view. This instantly changes how you think of content and the funnel. Now you say “We have 10,000 records learning about us, how can we get them to better define their needs using our materials?”

Each stage has a Goal – to get to the next stage! Each Stage has an Owner responsible for helping leads and Accounts reach that next step. And within that stage, the Owner can build a nurture track or set of plays designed to that. From a marketing ops perspective, this helps ensure clear definitions for reporting as well as workflows within the marketing automation platform. This grid also helps define the rules of engagement for Sales and Marketing as you re-align on Accounts and the latest tool for each team. Marketing ops and content creators may only need to tweak MQL nurturing, rather than rebuilding.

The New SLA: Account Based Marketing Metrics

In last week’s post, I wrote about not overdoing it on the metrics, because you’ll create a lot of useless reports that will never guide useful decisions. As part of your ABM realignment with Sales, you will require new service level agreements. Your goal now is less about the conversion rate of Leads or Accounts (still useful), but about Coverage and Engagement of those Accounts. At some firms, I see Sales pressuring marketing and data vendors on the number of matching titles to Personas. I agree this is a key metric as long as Sales understands that:

You will never have 100% coverage. Ever.
Failure to achieve 100% coverage does not mean Sales or SalesOps should take back this work.
Coverage is not necessarily intended to help BDRs do ever more outbound calls.
You may need to supply better Sales tools like LinkedIn or new data sources that provide more context to Sales.

As a marketer, your goals shift a bit because you are looking at things like:

Coverage Percent of Buyer Personas by Account
Percent of Accounts with at least 50% Coverage
Percent of Accounts with at least 30% Engagement

Engagio’s Charlie Liang and I spoke about some of these metrics at the Marketo Summit in 2016. What I want impress upon you is that this is a real thing now. If you are in a TOFU role, you should be measured on these new ABM metrics. There’s no point bringing in 500 net new leads and 50 MQLs if it barely moves your Coverage or Engagement rates. The leaders in ABM are now looking at campaigns designed to increase both Coverage and Engagement for their chosen Accounts. What types of campaigns should you do?

If you want to learn more, here is a deck describing many of these topics. Much, much more is coming, so be sure to subscribe to get updates on how marketing operations works in an Account based world.

Marketing Reports – Strategy, Tactics, and Operations

November 15, 2016 By Josh Hill

When marketers discuss reports, I often see confusion instead of clarity. It is too easy to build reports and those reports are often tactical or worse, misused. Let’s discuss the differences between Strategy, Tactics, and Operations. From a marketing operations perspective, the tools should always be chosen to support the overall strategy.

Here is my understanding, notwithstanding the dictionary definition:

Strategy: the larger plan and goal. The set of tactics to achieve a larger scale goal. (where the spear is aimed and how often).
Tactics: individual actions or small team efforts to achieve a goal that is part of a larger plan. (Tip of the spear)
Logistics: the science of movement; management of materials; detailed planning and organization of a complex operation. (Delivering the spear to the right place).

And while I do like to have marketers forget war metaphors in our jobs, it is interesting to note that many of the top military commanders of the past 300 years boil down their work to logistics:

“Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.” – Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC 1980 (attributed)

More and more I see marketing’s challenges resolved through logistical – that is, Operational – methods, for our workflow and deployment of messaging. You can create the perfect messaging for an audience, but if you cannot deploy it to the places that audience will be receptive to it, then what’s the point? Constant, rapid testing is the key to knowing if the message and the medium are right. But if you’ve been around the block a few times, you know that few firms actively test their message or medium. (See: channel-offer method).

The other challenge when looking at Strategy vs. Tactics is that many marketers are so focused on “Which webinar had the most registrants” that teams lose sight of driving pipeline or revenue. Yes, it’s helpful to know that webinars related to a narrow topic tend to have lower attendance than webinars with a more general topic. But are those webinars helping attendees decide your team are experts at Solution X and should receive deeper consideration? Is it driving pipeline? Is there a perception in Sales that this helps?

What should you focus on? What should you build for when you run a martech stack?

Let’s take a look at how different tactical marketing, strategic marketing, and logistical marketing really are.

Tactical Marketing and ROI – are we in the right places?

Tactical marketing is composed of campaigns, emails, and specific assets or offers. This is the email designed to bring in 50 registrants to a webinar. This is the email you want 10% CTR on. This is the advertising campaign on LinkedIn that drives in 20 leads a day.

Most marketers are familiar with the metrics that drive such tactical programs.

Delivery Percent
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Page Visits
Form Fill Conversion Rate
Ad CTR
Ad Impressions
Number of Net New Leads

and so on. There is nothing inherently wrong with tracking these metrics at the tactical level. You should do so and you should seek to improve these metrics with AB testing methods and segmentation by behavior.

Tactics might be thought of as finding the right fishing holes, the right bait, and then offering the fish a better place to swim. If you are looking for statistical significance though, you do need to run data over time and enough of it. The difficulty, of course, is did you structure your data analysis to look across Channels and Offers in a clear way? One firm I worked with tested Live Demo invitations. The original invitation list was pulled separately from a list of pretty much anyone who may have engaged (or not) in the past year. The CTR and registrations were trailing after several months. Then we tested adding the same emails to nurturing streams; that didn’t work so well either. But how would we know where to go after that? Is the email written poorly? Is the Offer and Audience not matched? Do people just not want to do a Live Demo, and which people? I can make guesses and keep testing…

What if my Strategy is just wrong? Will I know when to stop a tactic or reconsider the strategy?

Strategic Marketing and ROI – Revenue Improvement

We can spend all day discussing just what “strategy” is in marketing. The strategy should be set with the goal in mind, and the goal is revenue improvement. A different firm I worked with used Marketo’s Revenue Cycle Explorer to prove that when marketing touched an Opportunity, on average, the deal size was 50% larger than if sales went alone. WOW. If that’s not enough to get marketing to the revenue table, what is?

I consider marketing strategy as answers to a series of questions:

Who are we as a company?
Why do we do this thing we do?
What kind of people would be interested in us?
How can we attract more of those people and identify them faster?
How can we help those people choose us?

Attracting more people who tend to buy means describing the story of the company, the solution statement, and then finding the right tactical mix to attract the leads. The leaders should design the marketing department workflow to deliver that strategy down to the operational level. The story you want to present higher up is about driving Opportunities and Revenue, not driving a higher percentage of clicks.

And before creating anything, one must ask the right questions, leading to metrics like:

Opportunities Created
Opportunities Influenced by Marketing
Opps Won
Opps Won %
Revenue Won

Then look back at the program mix involved to achieve Revenue Won. Does a particular combination lead to Opp Won? Can you say certain Programs brought in a high number of net new leads that became opps? Certain types of Programs? How consistent is this?

Remember that marketing automation platforms do not spit out these numbers out magically. It requires a lot of work at the marketing operations level to ensure the reports are right.

Marketing Operations – Creating the Delivery and Reporting Chain

This is where most companies seem to have the challenge: how to track and attribute pipeline and revenue to the set of tactics and strategy chosen. Marketers often get the tactic or strategy correct, but find it hard to execute effectively. Execution is the logistical end, creating the delivery mechanism for the message as much as knowing if the message was effective. I’ve written about how firms should consider the Martech Maturity Model™ as a roadmap. To go further though, the marketing operations team has to consider the above metrics as their goal. Which tools and data collection points help us understand the Strategic Questions. It isn’t enough to automate a few things like CTR and registrations vs. attendance.

When considering how to implement a strategy, I work to answer questions about the possible reports. It’s easy to generate hundreds of reports, but very few are helpful at a strategic level or even at a Channel level. Questions to ask about reports include:

Is this answering a Strategic or Tactical Question?
What is the Question we want an answer to?
Over what time period will we ask the question?
What decision will be made based on this data?
Is there a known time-series average or variance whose boundaries we should use as part of the decision?
Is there a known (or suspected) seasonal variance we should consider in the decision?

The decision part is where most of us fail. We create reports that look like great reports or charts, but never really make a call. Now, it’s hard to make a call if we don’t have a historical average or sense of what we want. At the same time, someone needs to say, “We’re not generating enough pipeline from this Channel-Offer set, let’s test other Offers, or other Channels.”

Here’s an example of how to craft and use the right report:

Question: Are we generating enough pipeline influence from LinkedIn with Offers ABC?
Goal or Threshold: We will know this because our goal is 10% of pipeline should be influenced this way.
What we will decide based on the data:
- If we are under 10%, then we should test Offers DEF vs. ABC for 2 months.
- If we are over 10%, then we should keep the best Offers and test D vs. the worst Offer.

Let’s be honest, most of us in B2B rarely do this consistently.

Ultimately, as Marketing Ops professionals, we should ensure our work is addressing the Strategic choices of the organization and push back when the martech stack is not supporting the Strategy just as much as we should push back if there isn’t much of a strategy in the first place. It’s easy for executives to blame the delivery mechanism instead of muddled thinking.