B2B Marketing Archives - Act-On

Marketing Automation for B2B: Building Effective Strategies

Act-On — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 22:09:20 +0000

Marketing automation is a tool that promises to help streamline workflows, scale with ease, and get better results. But as with any tool, it’s only as good as the strategies behind it, right?

Yet creating better strategies requires better data, and this is where many marketers get stuck. According to our State of Marketing Automation report conducted in partnership with London Research, 49% of marketers cite being unable to measure ROI as a key barrier, and 36% note that a lack of internal knowledge is also a challenge.

Without this intelligence, knowing whether your strategies have foundational cracks is hard. That’s why we’ve pulled together our favorite B2B marketing automation strategies to set you on the path to success.

Marketing automation B2B: Focus on personalization

Customers are impatient, and their attention is now more fragmented than ever. With only seconds to capture their attention, missing the mark is far too easy. And that’s why you need a secret weapon: personalization.

The more personalized your content, the more likely prospects will engage and move further along the buyer’s journey.

Thankfully, marketing automation removes much of the work involved by allowing marketers to set up rules indicating which behaviors and characteristics qualify contacts to be automatically entered into a certain group.

It’s up to you, however, to work with your team to determine the best way to segment your audience (industry, product interests, stage in the sales funnel, pain points, size, etc.) and which content and tactics you need to engage them. Building your marketing automation strategy should involve identifying your target segments, mapping your content based on those groups, and creating targeted nurture campaigns to keep them moving through the customer journey. And, of course, you’ll want to measure those results (which we’ll discuss shortly).

Marketing automation for B2B: Account-based management and lead scoring

Buyer personas … have you created them yet? It’s common for B2C and B2B companies to create personas to more effectively target various audiences and capture their attention. However, because you’re a B2B marketer, the personas you create are very different from B2C personas. How?

B2B companies have complex buying processes (hello, long sales cycles!). Oftentimes, multiple buyer personas are involved in a single decision, which isn’t nearly as common with B2C companies.

Without the right tools, it’s hard to nurture various stakeholders within a business and even more difficult to measure where the group is as a whole when making a final decision. This challenge can lead to missed opportunities and negatively impact your organization’s ROI.

Fortunately, developing an account-based management and lead scoring system as part of your b2b marketing automation strategy can prepare your marketing and sales teams to strike while the iron is hot. This approach allows you to gain an aggregated view of how a company’s stakeholders interact with your marketing content and assign scores to each of their actions to determine whether they are ready to talk to sales.

Marketing automation strategies: Alignment of marketing and sales

Marketing and sales alignment … it’s gotten a lot of attention, right? And for good reason, considering that aligned companies experience 19% faster revenue growth and 15% greater profits compared to their nonaligned counterparts.

As you work to get aligned, connect with your sales team and consider asking the following questions.

What kinds of insights do your salespeople need in order to have more-targeted conversations that help close deals?
How will you score leads? And what makes a lead qualified to talk to sales?
How can your sales team leverage B2B marketing automation? What features are available to help them improve their outreach efforts?
What is the best process for handing off leads to sales? What are the next steps once that is done?

As sales and marketing become more aligned, your results and customer experiences will improve. And marketing automation is an important tool to support that alignment.

For example, Hitachi High-Tech Analytical Science wanted to automate lead creation and drive tighter sales and marketing alignment. “We wished to drive closer alignment with our sales, marketing, and service teams to provide a smoother, richer customer experience,” says Global Digital Marketing Communications Manager Kerry West. “We wanted a deeper integration to precisely target and nurture customers at all stages in the buying journey and improve our ROI.”

Using marketing automation, they automated 40% of all new marketing leads, dramatically cut down on manual tasks, and achieved significant gains for marketing and sales.

Define how you’ll measure B2B marketing success

You’ve heard it a million times: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” And yes, most marketers know you need to measure results. But what are you measuring those results against?

A successful B2B marketing automation strategy should include KPIs that define what success looks like. With those KPIs in hand and a tool that helps you pull relevant data, you can easily show results to your key stakeholders.For example, Avery Dennison lowered software costs by 37% and tripled email open rates after enhancing its Act-On implementation. Achieving similar results starts with goals, defining KPIs, measuring them, and iterating to replicate and improve success.

Find marketing automation B2B partners that provide strategic and implementation support

B2B marketing automation has the potential to amplify your marketing success, but it’s about more than just the tools. How easy is it to use the marketing automation tool? Is it intuitive for your team? And does it have the right capabilities to measure results and scale performance? And even more important: will your partner provide strategic and implementation support?

With the right partner, you’ll have a competitive advantage because of their expertise and knowledge guiding you on the path to success. And when you’re ready to level up your marketing automation strategy, you can move on to more advanced strategies to further multiply results.

B2B Marketing Team Structure: Finding the Right Approach

Act-On — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 21:43:34 +0000

Your ideal B2B marketing team structure is likely different from others, and that’s ok. Every company has its own history, values, strategies, and quirks that impact how marketing happens on a day-to-day basis.

And the hallmark of a good marketing department is simply that it works. When your marketing team structure is optimized, everyone knows who’s accountable for what responsibilities and which roles. But if you’re dealing with misaligned priorities or chronic miscommunication, it might be worth taking a second look at your org chart.

Three Common B2B marketing team structures

Today’s B2B marketing teams are usually structured into three major buckets:

Growth Marketing
Product Marketing
Brand Marketing

Some organizations have a fourth bucket: Content Marketing. It can be separated into its own function, but if not, it usually falls under Brand Marketing.

This is just a big-picture overview. You might have experienced something different in your career, or hear hot takes from podcast hosts and LinkedIn marketing groups on how they’ve discovered a better way.

But by and large, these are the high-level, functional areas that most B2B marketing departments use when structuring their teams. So let’s break them down into key responsibilities, as well as the sub-teams and specialists who manage them.

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Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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1. Growth Marketing Team Structure

Growth Marketing handles “how you sell” — they develop and execute the programs and campaigns that move prospects along their buying journey.

Responsibilities:

Inbound marketing
Supporting outbound sales
Account-based marketing
Website
Distribution channels
Paid ads
Events/field marketing
Marketing operations and analytics

Sub-teams and roles:

Demand generation
Inbound marketing
Lifecycle marketing
Operations and analytics
Social media (sometimes)

2. Product Marketing Team Structure

Product Marketing handles “what you sell” — they define and communicate information about your product and value proposition.

Responsibilities:

Product launches
Partner marketing
Messaging and positioning
Pricing (with Revenue or Finance)
Competitive analysis
Sales enablement

Sub-teams and roles:

Partner marketing
Sales enablement

3. Brand Marketing Team Structure

Brand Marketing handles “who you are” — they use storytelling to engage prospects, customers, and partners.

Responsibilities:

Brand standards and guidelines
Creative production of assets (outside of Product)
Web and print design
Company swag
Content calendar
Case studies (with Product Marketing)

Sub-teams and roles:

Content Marketing
Copywriting
Design
Communications/PR

Note: we’ve included Content Marketing as a sub-team here, but as we said above, it can also operate as a standalone function. And sometimes it lives under Growth. This all depends on the size of your content budget and team, the volume of content you produce, and the business goals content marketing is meant to achieve.

^{Ironing out your b2b marketing department structure is crucial for your overall strategy.}

Key Considerations and Common Exceptions

Again, there’s no right or wrong way to structure a marketing team. Here are some of the most common exceptions and a few key considerations to keep in mind.

Consider your GTM motion

Before you start sketching out your B2B Marketing department structure, stop to think about your go-to-market (GTM) or sales motion. Do you rely on a sales team to handhold prospects through a lengthy buying process? Or do you have an easy-to-onboard product that relies on self-serve signups?

These different go-to-market motions require radically different approaches to marketing strategies, and you’ll want to structure your team accordingly.

For example, at a company with a traditional, sales-led model, lifecycle marketers will usually fall under the Growth Marketing team. But if you have a self-serve motion with a freemium product that relies on upselling to drive revenue, lifecycle marketing may make more sense as part of the Product Marketing team.

Think beyond full-time employees

Don’t stop at full-time employees on your B2B Marketing department charts. Consider how your team will use agencies, consultants, and freelancers to support marketing programs. Contractors can be especially useful when:

You’re experimenting with a new channel or tactic
You need deep channel expertise, but not enough to warrant a full-time hire
You need to scale production quickly to support a time-sensitive initiative
You’re early in a growth phase, or experiencing some economic uncertainty, and not able to hire a full-time specialist

Including contractors in your department charts and team structure planning helps ensure there’s visibility into who’s responsible for managing budgets and workflows. And clearly documenting these roles can also help identify opportunities for sharing resources between teams.

For example, rather than Growth and Product Marketing contracting separate content writers, you could onboard one shared resource who becomes more familiar with your audience and product — and creates higher-quality content for both teams.

Don’t neglect the dotted lines

Your B2B Marketing team structure is based on teamwork. Beyond direct reporting structures, consider including dotted-line relationships on your org charts to formalize collaborative relationships and build alignment among teams and across departments.

For instance, you may want to represent that a designer will report to a creative director, but have a dotted-line relationship with the demand generation team. And any shared resources, like operations or analytics, should be clearly defined.

Common exceptions

Here are some of the most common gray areas to b2b marketing team structures:

Social media can live under Growth or Brand (or Content!)
PR and Comms may be its own department separate from Marketing altogether (but that dotted-line relationship needs to be strong to avoid misaligned storytelling)
Sales enablement may fall under Content rather than Product Marketing
Customer Marketing can live basically anywhere, depending on the goals of your program
Designers may live under Brand, or even report up to Product, if your organization aligns all graphic designers and experience designers into one team
Same goes for copywriters — they may report into the marketing function they support, or all be aligned under a central creative team or in-house “agency” with its own management structure (and there may be separate UX writers or content designers that report up through Product)
Product Marketing occasionally reports into Product (but that can lead to silos, so proceed with caution)
Business Development Representatives (BDRs) occasionally report into Marketing (proponents say this creates greater accountability and messaging alignment, while others believe these reps should live under sales to foster their career growth)

Choosing the Right Structure for Your Company

The big takeaway here: there’s no one right way to create your B2B marketing team structure. But, there are some principles and proven approaches that can help you pinpoint the right strategy for your team’s specific needs.

Once you have the big-picture layout in place, you may want to focus on one area of specialization: your marketing automation team. The marketers who oversee the personalization, segmentation, and automation of your campaigns play a vital role in your overall performance, so check out our guide to building your marketing automation team structure to learn more.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 16: Esther Flammer

Galen Ettlin — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 12:42:00 +0000

^{Esther Flammer heads up marketing at Wrike, a multibillion dollar tech company. She shares perspective about changes in martech, advice to marketers to adapt and prove value, and what needs to change in the industry.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
Welcome to the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody. I am your host, Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software, and our guest today is Esther Flammer, CMO for Wrike, which is a work management platform. Esther is an award-winning marketer with 20 years of experience spanning B2B tech and nonprofits alike. And I know it’s not everything Esther, but I got to welcome and applaud the fellow summa cum laudes in the building. Thank you so much for being here.

Esther Flammer:
Thank you. Happy to be here and happy to be on the podcast.

Galen Ettlin:
Yes. I have so much I want to talk to you about, so I’m just going to jump right into it. I want to start with where you are right now. I know Wrike is pretty big. It’s a really cool platform. Act-On is actually a client. We use it for our project management. Tell me a little bit about your journey to heading up the marketing efforts there. Probably an exciting rollercoaster the last couple of years.

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been in marketing for about 20 years. Most of my experience has been in high growth SaaS companies. I love to build foundations and revenue generating programs that can scale basically. And so the last few companies really built out kind of a lot of the, I would say the infrastructure, the frameworks, the campaigns, the programs, building revenue, generating engines and customer lifecycle programs that allowed for high growth within those companies and eventually acquisitions. And then when I joined Wrike, you’re right, it has been quite a roller coaster. I joined shortly after the acquisition by Citrix, so Wrike became part of the Citrix family, and then last year Citrix actually was acquired and was taken private and we spun off essentially and became a separate entity at the end of last year. So it’s been quite the rollercoaster, but we’ve been really focused on driving, again, high growth, taking market share within a really competitive industry. So it’s been a fun but wild ride.

Galen Ettlin:
So yeah, like you said, lots of transition and a lot of companies, especially in tech are experiencing those transitions because of the economy, job changes, the acquisitions as you have gone through, as someone in leadership working through and navigating some of that right now, what is one of your big takeaways for success when trying to get that high growth?

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, good question. It’s not really been new. I know it’s kind of a crazy market right now, but especially at high growth companies, change is inevitable and there’s acquisitions and there’s mergers and there’s spinoffs and there’s just constant pivots on business strategy. So I guess a couple of my secrets that have allowed for me to navigate a lot of change and just varying environments, for me it’s about very quickly establishing a reputation and building value within your organization. And so for me, I have built out my career by focusing on looking at building solutions for major gaps in the organization. What are those core problems that are holding the business back that are not allowing the business to move forward that maybe have never been built? And then how do you tie all of your work to those business drivers and then at the same time grow in the breadth and depth of your experience and skillset? It allows for you to be able to prove value to the organization to make an impact and to honestly have a level of marketability and job security because you’ve shown a lot of, you’ve proven a lot of that value, but also you’re able to adapt in very quickly changing environments. And so that’s how I’ve really built out a lot of my career and that would be, I guess a top tip on how to navigate this specific crazy market that we’re in.

Galen Ettlin:
Connecting to that a little bit, company tech stacks are also pretty tall these days. A lot of competition out there on the market for any various service, and I know marketing budgets are often slashed in tough times like these. How do you and your teams work to stand out to both win new business and maintain existing customer loyalty so that you stay on the roster through this?

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, this is top of mind. I would say tech consolidation for sure is top of mind for literally every business leader out there who’s trying to potentially look at how do we save some budget and put it elsewhere, which then makes it top of mind for every marketer in tech. In a down market, you typically tend to see companies that shift their focus from new customer acquisition, which is really, really costly, sometimes hard to scale, and obviously that cost of acquisition continues to go up and they start to shift more towards our customer base, which is how do you get better net retention? How do you retain and expand the customers that you already have that are happy that are adopting and that could potentially buy more? And that’s absolutely a trend that we’re seeing in the industry. I would say that a couple of things that as I think through kind of customer loyalty, as I think through how to balance new business acquisition with customer expansion, there’s a couple of things that we’ve been doing at Wrike.
So number one, we focus a lot on positioning and differentiation. So that messaging strategy, which is as a work management platform, we’re actually very well positioned when budgets are slashed because when you have less budget and resources, you want to maximize every single dollar. You want to maximize every single person on your team. And so focused alignment and execution is absolutely critical to be able to do more with less. And so we’re focusing a lot on really driving home the value of not only our platform for new customers, but also existing customers and really focusing on how is our platform helping deliver business outcomes, helping your business stay stable in an unstable environment or continue to grow even in a down market. And then that differentiation piece and a really competitive market is important because we’re the only platform that can help you scale and align those teams.

When ROI is key, so that’s one thing is really that messaging, the positioning, the differentiation. A second key piece for us is just being smarter about company or customer acquisition. And so when you think about who you have limited dollars, limited resources, you have to be very selective about who are you trying to target and what are the types of customers and prospects that are most important for the business. And so for us, it’s not necessarily about volume, even though that’s that’s important, but for us, we actually can do a level of predictive expected lifetime value of these are the types of customers, these are the types of companies, the types of buyers where we know not only will they buy, but they will potentially expand. And so that’s where we target a lot of our advertising dollars and a lot of our new business acquisitions, just being smarter with the acquisition dollars that you have.

Then the third is really around, again, the customer loyalty piece. I would say the companies that have always invested in really great customer experience and customer lifecycle obviously have a leg up in a downmarket when everyone started starting to turn their attention over to their existing base, but really thinking again strategically about where are they in the customer lifecycle, how do we get them to see value as quickly as possible within the platform? How do we get them adopting, integrating, and really loving the product? And then how do you start to build out really, really explicit paths for them on here’s kind of your upgrade path, here’s your upsell path, here’s your cross-sell path of here’s kind of the next best thing that you should be doing to actually get more value out of the product that you have. And so those are just some of the things that we’re doing to make sure that we can continue to grow even when times are hard and budgets are being slashed.

Galen Ettlin:
You’ve been talking about how marketers are really trying to prove and demonstrate value right now. How do you feel marketers can strategically steer organizations toward revenue based on those industry insights?

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, absolutely. I think one reason why I love being in marketing is because to me, marketing is at the center of business strategy. Companies cannot thrive and survive and grow unless they understand the market that they’re in, understand how do they shape the market, where should they be going after, what are the markets that they can dominate that they can be differentiated in? And then how do you actually then go and deliver on a go-to-market strategy? So I think marketing is huge and should be part of pretty much every discussion in every functional group and every core, I would say overall strategy for the business, whether it’s what does product development look like, where should we be innovating next? What’s the next market we should be going after? Is there a new market that we should maybe be disrupting or maybe there’s a level of product innovation that we could start to build out that would disrupt our current market.

There’s obviously the go-to-market with sales, which is how do we better deliver the right buyers? How do we go after the right buyers and what’s the right approach? The messaging strategy, the channel mix, sales enablement and what we should put in the sales toolkit, it should all be aligned. Customer strategy is another one where, again, marketing should be at the core of a lot of what’s happening within those customer cohorts. Where are they in their customer lifecycle? What’s the next best product or next thing that they should be doing? How do we showcase value? There’s hr, how do we continue to market ourselves as an employee brand to capture the best talent out there? So there’s so many aspects. I think that marketing can help drive strategically of an organization, and it’s, again, it’s what I love about being marketing, that it’s not just like, here’s the leads, here’s the brand, but it’s actually everything that really moves the business forward.

Galen Ettlin:
And what you’re saying, I’m hearing a lot of sales driven, results driven marketing campaigns, and I think that brings us to a good question of how sales and marketing get along and can really collaborate to bring those deals across the finish line. And I know in a lot of companies that’s the age old give and take. It’s hard to get sales and marketing often on the same page and delivering that same message and getting the results that ultimately you both need and want to achieve to prove that value in your job. What is your approach to cross-functionality and how those two separate teams can better do that business together?

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, I think it starts with being aligned to the same targets and goals. You have to incentivize people in the same way. And sales is a department that is very used to incentives. I mean, pretty much most of their comp is based off of quota, and if marketing is not aligned to the same targets, that’s where the misalignment starts. If marketing is like, well, we just care about leads, we’re always in green, we’ve delivered the leads, we’re good, we’re getting paid, our jobs are safe, we’re celebrating, and meanwhile sales targets are not being hit or overall company bookings are not being hit. That’s a huge misalignment. So I think a lot of it honestly starts with making sure that you have the same goals as a company. Actually marketing being tied to bookings, essentially bookings and revenue, but also pipeline. I care way more about pipeline of what’s actually happening from the leads that we’re generating.

Are we actually creating predictable pipeline and making sure that that can close into revenue? Those are a lot of the conversations I have both with marketing and with sales and just aligning goals. We’ll get sales very much aligned to what marketing is doing. I think the other piece that we always talk about is kind of taking it back to ROI and being able to, again, showcase that we’re driving bookings and driving pipeline from the campaigns that we’re doing. And then you get better alignment with sales of if you want us to invest more in these field events, if you want us to invest more in a b m or in the advertising that’s driving a lot of these leads that you love and that is essentially filling your book of business, then you need to work with us and here’s the ask. So those are just some of the things that I think are really critical to sales and marketing alignment.

Galen Ettlin:
Taking a step back and looking at your success personally, you’ve accomplished a lot heading up marketing for a multi-billion dollar tech company. That’s no small feat, and I think a lot of people are really trying to figure out how can I align myself to reach that peak, that level, not a peak. I’m sure you’re going to do even more, but for those marketers out there listening, they want to know the secret sauce. What was maybe a defining moment in your journey toward these marketing leadership positions?

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, it’s a good question and it was absolutely a journey. It’s been a journey and I’m still on that journey because I’m still growing and learning. But I think as I think through back at my journey, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, where finding your sweet spot, finding specifically some of those core competencies and those unique skills that you bring to the table and that is your unique perspective and the solutions that you drive from them, and then actually the output of delivering on results, the more that you can hone that and own it and build that brand, not just for yourself of this is my sweet spot and this is where I really thrive, is building these foundations and really connecting the dots to larger business strategy, but then starting to build, I would say a reputation or your own brand within your organization with your team of being that person that can go in and fill in a gap and be able to build solutions that can drive business growth.

Those are things that really make you valuable and it also gives you that ability to be able to add on more experience and that breadth of experience that is really critical as you continue to drive forward in your career. So for example, we didn’t have customer marketing at one of my early companies and it was a gap that the company just hadn’t really thought through it. And so me thinking through what is the customer lifecycle? How can we build out a longer standing kind of the longevity program that can essentially onboard everyone but get to, again, showcasing value, showcasing tips and tricks to get better adoption, but also showing those customers where they can start to drive the value from that product and potentially uplevel themselves or uplevel themselves in their career and starting to build out those types of programs. It allowed for me to expand my skillset and it allowed for me to think more in a customer’s shoes of what would they care about and how do I help them in their careers or in their day-to-day responsibility.

And then being able to apply that, whether that’s partner marketing and thinking through from a partner standpoint of how do we engage our partners or grow or acquire more partners or grow and acquire more business through our partners, or whether that’s demand gen of I’m trying to get in front of new prospects or whether that’s product marketing, just really thinking through some of that approach to how do I drive value for them? What would they care about and how do I start to bring a message of what we can do for them and help them better understand the product better, understand how they can do better in their roles. So those are things that I think are really critical that have been critical for me in terms of expanding my breadth and depth of just general marketing that I’ve also utilized as I’ve gone up in my career as well.

Galen Ettlin:
This may be along those lines, but we always like to ask this question of people on the Rebel Instinct podcast. What would you say is one of the most out of the box projects that you worked on or something that you are really proud of and how did it perform?

Esther Flammer:
I mean, again, that’s one reason why I think we’re in marketing is because the art and the science of it, and I guess some of the innovations and fun campaign ideas that have happened over the years, there’s plenty, but at one of my last companies, we supported basically our target audience was essentially Salesforce users. And so one of our biggest events of the whole year was around Dreamforce, and it was actually in 2020 when everything went virtual, and instead of doing our multimillion dollar headquarters outside of Moscone and doing a silent disco that we were very well-known for, because we had done it for the three or four years that I’d been there, it was the party of the year, we actually did the virtual element of it, and we did a virtual 5K as part of our Dreamforce road to Dreamforce and driving a lot of the buzz around our event alongside Dreamforce, and that was just super fun.

I feel like the pandemic and having to switch everything to virtual made everyone actually a little bit more creative and really, I feel like it was kind of a shining moment for marketers on what can we do when we don’t have an in-person experience? And it was actually super cool. We went from driving a big party in person to doing actually a 5K event that people could do wherever they were. They could go on a walk outside and still be essentially six feet apart from other people, but we made it super fun where people could win awards and they could kind of cheer each other on During that. We had dance parties in between, and so it was very out of the box where I feel like a B2B tech marketer

Galen Ettlin:
Way to flex those creative muscles when you really needed to in a way that was safe as well. So that’s really fun. Well, for you, Esther, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?

Esther Flammer:
I feel like people, when they hear what we do with our family, people are like, I feel like people probably think it’s pretty rebellious, but we’ve been traveling with our kids internationally since they were babies. So when my first son was one, we did a one month trip to Asia, so we spent a month in Asia, in Korea, Japan, with a stop in Hawaii and took him on that 14 hour flight, which was pretty crazy. But we really love traveling and we love to take our kids. When our kids were, gosh, I’m thinking I think four, two and four, no, sorry, four and six, we rented a camper van and went all around New Zealand. We love to explore the world with our kids even when they’re two young to travel according to probably most standards, but they’ve grown up going to really, really cool places and having really fun experiences. So I guess that’s a way that I rebel.

Galen Ettlin:
That’s great. And it’s what a cool opportunity for them too, to grow up feeling like that’s normal. I get to see the world and learn about everything outside my bubble.

Esther Flammer:
Yeah.

Galen Ettlin:
Well, speaking of other places, other cultures, our culture, whatever you want, what rebel do you feel needs to be celebrated and why?

Esther Flammer:
Where we are as a world and a society today is there is more of a push for work-life balance for people where people want to, I think especially with remote work, hybrid work, being able to work from everywhere, there’s absolutely a push for work is not everything I say a lot of times to my team, we’re not saving lives here. It’s important. And you had mentioned a give and take earlier with sales and marketing. I think everything is a give and take. I think work-life balances is a give and take, and I think the relationship with your company is very much a give and a take where again, I’ve built out a lot of value for my company and I give a lot to my company and I’m an asset, and a lot of our people are our employees. They’re assets to the company and they give a lot.

And so I think that it’s fair to take some as well, but again, it needs to be a balance. You can’t be all about taking of like, I’m just going to work whenever I want and not really sign in and not be available or let my team down. You can’t just take, because then you probably won’t have a job anymore. But if you are really producing and you are a business critical person and you’re really showcasing the value, and again, driving and tying to business outcomes, I think it’s fair for you to set boundaries around. I’m going to take PTO and I’m going to try and be off the grid here, right? So I’m going to set things up. I’m not going to leave my team hanging. I’m going to deliver on everything that I need to before I go, but I am, I’m going to go unplug. So I do love that rebellious, and it’s sad that that’s rebellious.

Galen Ettlin:
I hear ya.

Esther Flammer:
But I think, again, when there’s that give and take, I think that that can absolutely work for both the company and for the employee.

Galen Ettlin:
We, I think could all take a leaf from your ‘put more stamps on the passport’ advice.

Esther Flammer:
Take your kids. Take your kids.

Galen Ettlin:
There you go. Yeah, don’t hold back. Just do it.

Esther Flammer:
Yes.

Galen Ettlin:
It’s time for a fun segment we like to call ‘Honey, I don’t think so.’ I’m going to give you 60 seconds for you to tell me something that’s annoying you lately that needs to stop in the marketing or MarTech space. So whenever you’re ready, let me know.

Esther Flammer:
And I was thinking about this. I get way too many emails and I can never find the unsubscribe button, or I feel like it doesn’t work half the time, or I never know if I’m unsubscribed, but I just think email is a channel. There needs to be a strategy and it needs to be utilized in a really thoughtful and intentional way. I think especially now, it’s hugely overused, especially because budgets are tight and it’s a free channel, but the pressure is on. People are starting to try and I think prioritize activity over strategy, and email is just one of those where it’s too much. And I get that you have goals to hit, but if you’re not being thoughtful and intentional and really showcasing the value of why am I reaching out? What does this look like? It’s just going to be a one-sided conversation. You’re going to get unsubscribed. You’re not going to engage with your audience. So that’s my thing. That’s annoying me. I think I get too many and I just ignore email now. So that’s I think my soapbox.

Galen Ettlin:
Amen. I’m there with you, and we’re a marketing automation company that specializes in email, but it really comes down to deliverability and making sure it’s something that’s worth someone’s time and what they actually need or want. Right? Otherwise, it’s just clutter.

Esther Flammer:
Agreed.

Galen Ettlin:
We’re there with you.

Esther Flammer:
More to delete.

Galen Ettlin:
Exactly. Well, Esther, thank you so much for joining us here today on the Rebel Instinct Podcast. It has been a joy. Where can people find you?

Esther Flammer:
So they can find me on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best. And our company is wrike.com.

Galen Ettlin:
Excellent. Well, thanks again.

Esther Flammer:
Yeah, thanks, Galen.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes, and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

Check out the next episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast, featuring Tejas Manohar, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 15: Justin Keller

Galen Ettlin — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 21:16:18 +0000

^{Justin Keller says many marketers are bogged down by metrics, losing sight of compelling and creative storytelling. He shares how marketers can better deliver and grab attention for their brands in this episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
Welcome to the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody. I’m your host, Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software, and today I’m joined by a special co-host Suzy Balk, who is Act-On Software’s Senior Marketing Campaigns Manager. Suzy, So looking forward to having some innovative marketing conversations with you. Thanks for joining.

Suzy Balk:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Galen Ettlin:
And as our YouTube viewers can see, our guest today is Justin Keller, Vice President of Revenue Marketing at Drift. Justin is an award-winning B2B marketer who prides himself in disrupting the B2B marketing status quo. So we’re going to get all of his hot takes on branding, digital marketing, account based marketing, and hopefully if we’ve got time, a little glimpse into his music producer experience and at home chef aspirations. Thank you so much for being here, Justin.

Justin Keller:
Thank you guys so much for letting me hang out with you. I’m really excited to have this conversation with you.

Suzy Balk:
So Justin, I know you’re passionate about storytelling. Same for me. I love that creative piece of marketing. How are you seeing styles change with evolving marketing strategies and what are marketers missing out on?

Justin Keller:
That’s a good question. I think there was maybe a bit of a heyday during COVID where people – it was like one of those things where once the dust settled – we were all at home, but once marketers had adjusted to the new reality, they felt a little bit of creative latitude. They’re starting a little edgy and do some bold things. And then coming back out of COVID where we’re now across the board, everyone I talked to, their budgets are getting pinched. Their goals and expectations aren’t changing, but the resources they have to get there are. And so now I’m seeing a lot of trends away from storytelling and being creative and going back to a place of safety where it’s like, let’s just invest things that are in things that are highly measurable that we can defend our jobs with saying, ‘Hey, look, we’re being very smart, pragmatic spreadsheet marketers,’ and I’m not so sure that’s the thing to do. I think when everyone’s zigging, you’ve gotta zag, and I think now more than ever, it’s the time to start telling really big stories because if we’re all in the same position, we all have limited resources. The only advantage we have is our ability to be creative and to tell really good stories and to get people thinking differently and paying attention to whatever’s going on when we all implemented resources to get people to pay attention with.

Suzy Balk:
Yeah, I love that ‘spreadsheet marketers.’ That’s definitely something it’s hard to get away from, but it’s really important that you do.

Galen Ettlin:
And especially, as you’re mentioning, if you move that direction for fear of your job, you’re really also devaluing what you’re contributing as a part of your job anyway, so it’s kind of a counterintuitive thing, but yeah.

Justin Keller:
It’s really true, and it’s one of those things where I get it. When people operate out of a place of fear, you do things that you think are safe, and I think that is not what the point of a marketer is. I mean, sure there’s times and places to be safe, but marketers are there at the end of the day to get people to pay attention, and you can’t do that by running a really smart performance marketing program. You can make your dollar go a little further, but that’s not going to deliver outsize results that your board and your CEO want to see from you.

Galen Ettlin:
Now, Justin, looking at some of your experience personally, you’ve worked across a bunch of B2B and tech companies. What was a defining moment for you would you say, on your journey toward these VP of marketing roles?

Justin Keller:
Quick obligatory shoutout to all the marketing leaders I’ve had in the past. I’ve been so lucky to have bosses who were willing to let me push the envelope. I think I’ve always naturally been one of those. When I got into marketing, when I got into B2B marketing, I should say, I had no idea that that was different from marketing – “Capital M marketing,” where it’s more like B2C, where you’re out there running really audacious campaigns and getting people to raise an eyebrow – didn’t realize a B2B was completely different. And it’s all about putting a lot of navy blue on your website, making sure you have stock photos of multicultural people shaking hands. And I’ve been really fortunate to have bosses that felt the same way, that that’s not B2B doesn’t need to be like that. You can be a marketer and do outrageous things. And so really grateful to the leaders I’ve had that set the tone for me there.

I think one specific example I had was I had a CEO, one of my first jobs in San Francisco who would every day at the office wear a bow tie. That was his, just his trademark thing for himself. And it became such an inside joke that it became part of our marketing campaigns. We’d go to a trade show and we’d hand out bow ties to people. We’d have him come to our booth, we tie a bow tie on them, and what ended up happening was we’d go into marketing meetings and we do campaign planning or think about what are we going to do with this webinar that’s going to be different. And we’ve started to say to each other, ‘how do we put a bow tie on this?’ And it didn’t mean literally put a bow tie on it, but what’s that weird different thing that can become synonymous with our brand that definitely has our stamp on it? And that is something that I’ve carried with me. So it’s like, what’s the one thing, we only have so many different activities that we marketers can do, but we have different ways of expressing ourselves in them. And so what is that one thing that we can do that is distinctly ours that makes people pay attention and think that’s a little left of center and stress to build a little brand equity that’s consistent across all the programs we run.

Suzy Balk:
That bow tie thing is so cool. We actually just ran a webinar where our presenters wore capes because we were doing a superhero themed webinar. So I was like, what a great way to just have a stand out a little bit and put a little fun behind our brand, and I think hopefully it becomes a thing going forward. We’re not just people with corporate backdrops. We add some more personality to our campaigns.

Justin Keller:
I think that’s so important. People want that. People don’t identify with a B2B brand and be like, yeah, that’s cool. That’s who I am. People identify with a weird little quirk or people that are unafraid to be themselves, and that’s what builds the affinity.

Suzy Balk:
MarTech is a really saturated space tech stacks running pretty deep. What does it take for a company to stand out and win that business, especially now in a tough economy?

Justin Keller:
This is what’s really hard for a marketer. We can be creative all day, but we can’t tell stories that are orthogonal to our product promise. We have to root everything back to the company’s value propositions, to what the product offering is. And so being able to have really good big, bold ideas is one thing, but having big old ideas that align to a company’s promise is really tough. And so that’s where it’s as a marketer becomes a little tough because then you start having to work. You need to work with your product leaders and your product marketing leaders and say, okay, what are the things that are coming up? How can I align the message to that? You need to start aligning to your sales team because at some point the campaign you’re running is going to end up in a salesperson’s lap, making sure that they feel okay about talking about how this person ended up on the phone with them.

And that can be really, really challenging. Earning that trust and buy-in across the board is difficult. And so I think to answer the question, you have to be a zealot for yourself and your own ideas, finding a big bold idea that does mesh with those things I just mentioned, and then just owning outright and not letting go. That can be so hard to do. It’s so easy to do doubt yourself, especially like you said, it’s a tough economy and people are looking at marketing. It’s a huge cost center, making sure that everything they do is going to help the bottom line. And marketing budgets are big and you’re effectively playing with lots of people’s salaries at that point. And so it’s so easy to get frightened, and every time you get frightened of what you’re doing, you are losing the potential impact of the story you’re trying to tell. And you need to just believe as hard as you can that what you’re saying is the right thing for the company and other people will start to fall in line.

Suzy Balk:
I think that’s why it’s so important to find leaders in your work that support you. Part of your value to your company is your creativity and your ideas. So there should be a certain level of trust that if you have a big bold idea that you’re going to deliver on it.

Galen Ettlin:
Speaking to that creativity, you mentioned putting the bow tie on it as an example. Justin, what was maybe another out of the box or a big project that stuck out for you that you’ve contributed to and how did it perform?

Justin Keller:
I was at B2B MX a few weeks ago, and this campaign I ran, showed up on stage that I had nothing to do with. It was just like someone was like, this is such an outrageous thing that it’s still carrying weight.

I was at a company called Terminus and we were running, this was right towards the end of Covid, right? So people had lost all of their attention span. Webinars were performing like garbage because people were sick of sitting in their computer, and we still have to do it though. And so I wanted to do something that was highly consumable, that was highly provocative, that was ultimately something that people would be willing to suffer staring at the screen for another few hours for. So we ran an event that was all about just breaking up with the way that traditional B2B marketing should be done.

Just stop doing, I mean, almost what we’re talking about here. And so we didn’t want to have it. We went all the way. We were like, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it big. So we called the event break. Shit, we had a bad word in the name of the program. We formatted it in a way where we got, I think it was 10 very influential marketers, and we got them to speak for five minutes a piece, or maybe it was 10 minutes a piece, very short. So it’s kind of micro content. And we got these big name influencers to participate. We didn’t pay them. We just said, you guys are competing. We will donate $10,000 to a charity of your choice. So they got bought in on that, but we didn’t stop there. Really provocative name, really great speakers talking about how do we break the status quo of marketing. We also hired, again, I think he’s actually from your neck of the woods, we found a guy called Sax Scotch. He’s a saxophone playing Sasquatch. We hired him to do musical interludes between every presenter, so he would be out in the woods playing saxophone. We got him to play Careless Whisper by George Michael, a bunch of stuff that was really awesome.

Galen Ettlin:
Very Pacific Northwest.

Justin Keller:
Exactly, exactly. And was I think to this day, still the highest performing pipeline campaign that the company had ever run because it was way out there. But everyone that was involved with this, we did really crazy promotional videos. So me and the team got together in a field somewhere. We brought a bunch of fruits and baseball bats and just videotaped us blowing stuff up, honestly, and had nothing to do with the campaign except for that we were breaking stuff. And so we just bought into the message so wholeheartedly that we had like 4,500 people register for it, eight figures worth of pipeline driven. And this is just to go to show that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be, like I said, navy blue and people shaking hands on your website. You can do really off the wall stuff. My sales team did not love this at all. They did not having to invite people to an event called Break Shit, but did not let go and push, push, push and ended up being just one of the biggest campaigns I’ve ever been responsible for in my career.

Suzy Balk:
That’s so cool. So many cool elements about that.

Galen Ettlin:
Definitely fits the brief of out the box.

Suzy Balk:
You get that guy’s number, Galen, we’ll have to have it.

Justin Keller:
I can make an intro, Galen, if you need more woodland creatures that play saxophone, I got a line…

Galen Ettlin:
I mean, when do we not need that? Always.

Suzy Balk:
It seems you feel really comfortable being out of the box and doing and executing these ideas. What advice would you give to people listening to this to be more rebellious, to take those risks, whether they pay off in the way that yours did or maybe not?

Justin Keller:
I’ve done really out of the box things. I’ve proven that they can work and still I’m afraid all the time of doing it. It’s not a comfortable place to be when you’re trying to be out on a limb as a marketer. And every time I have doubted myself, bad things have happened. It’s all of a sudden you lose the ability to lead as well as you could. All of a sudden your ideas start to get diluted and watered down and they lose that magic that once existed in them. And it is much easier said than done. I mean, I know how cliche this sounds, honestly, I’m just saying believe in yourself, which is just the dumbest after school message I could possibly be saying here. But if you’re a marketer and you really want to make an impact, especially if you’ve got a smaller budget, especially if you’re in a very noisy, crowded marketplace, there’s no other option than to believe in yourself and believe that your big idea is what will separate you from the pack. So there it is. Believing in yourself is just about the most prosaic thing I could. I want to vomit a little bit, having said this out loud now, but I think it’s true and it’s very easy to not believe in yourself. It’s easy to doubt yourself and catch yourself, stay mindful of it.

Galen Ettlin:
Always an important reminder. In the words of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, there can be miracles when you believe.

So Justin, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?

Justin Keller:
Oh, good question. I am, you guys mentioned a musician. I like to, and I think this kind of bleeds into my work life too. I like to try to do weird stuff that hasn’t been done before. So I’m not a musician that’s trying to get thousands of listens on Spotify. I’m trying to make music that I would want to listen to, which is usually a little bit weird. It’s definitely not top 40 stuff. I am also kind of an avid artist, so I channel a lot of my creativity into other ways that just shows up in awkward places. So I like most of the paintings in my house, not the one that’s behind me, I don’t think. No, none of these are mine. But a lot of the things on the walls of my house are things that I’ve painted just for whatever reason or for my wife. You mentioned I’m a cook. I’ve got a lot of creative energy that just needs to find an outlet. And so I don’t stop it. I kind of just always leave the spigot running and try to just make things happen. It’s nothing that I’m necessarily super proud of that I want to share with the world, but I’m always making it just because I feel like I just need to keep that circulation going of my creativity.

Galen Ettlin:
I know it is kind of a sidebar, but on that music side of things, just because I think it’s an interesting piece that we don’t get to hear from executives a whole lot of “here’s something really creative and different that I do, that’s nothing to do with my work at my company.” How did you get into that and what does it look like for you now?

Justin Keller:
So I have always really just been a fan of music and wanted to make things, and I moved around as a lot, so I never really had a chance to form a garage band with friends or whatever. So what ended up happening is I learned to play a lot of different instruments. I learned how to record myself and how to build tracks on tracks, on tracks and things, and ultimately write songs all by myself in my bedroom. And so that continues to this day. I started when I was 16 and I was recording to a literal cassette tape and skip to today, right here on my desk is work, and then right here is a bunch of music stuff, different monitoring. So I go from work mode, I turn 90 degrees to the right and I can get into fun mode. So yeah, I’m honestly always just trying to… I’ll work on a song for a year before I feel like it’s done, but it’s just a little bit here and there and it’s just, it’s almost like it’s gardening for me. You do a little bit of time. I get to watch it grow and then at some point it’s ready to be picked

Galen Ettlin:
Such a skill. Very cool.

Suzy Balk:
What rebel in our culture do you feel needs to be celebrated and why?

Justin Keller:
get asked a lot, where do you go for ideas for work, for marketing, and I always say I’ve read enough business books. I don’t read business books anymore. I don’t go to the obvious marketing blogs or LinkedIn. I go where everyone else, right? So I try to find a lot of countercultural touchstones, different artists like meme culture even what is just kind of the bleeding edge of culture right now and what are they doing that’s making people resonate with it and trying to figure out how to apply that. So it’s almost like, I don’t know. So the answer is, yeah, all the rebels is who I want to celebrate, but at the same time, if you celebrate a rebel too much, all of a sudden they’re not a rebel anymore. And it’s kind of like, I grew up listening to a lot of punk rock when I was a kid. And the thing is with punk rock, as soon as they’re a popular band anymore, they’re not really punk anymore. They kind of sell out. And so that’s where I, when I think of a rebel, I’m like, who’s doing things that are new and original or they’re unafraid and have not yet broken through into the mainstream?

Galen Ettlin:
Okay, well finally here it is. Time for our “honey, I don’t think so” Segment talking about what’s annoying you lately that needs to stop in the marketing or MarTech space. I’m going to give you 60 seconds to make your case. So whenever you’re ready, go for it.

Justin Keller:
Okay. There’s a thing going on on LinkedIn that’s driving me crazy. And this has been a couple years now. LinkedIn is already, I think, in my opinion, a little bit of a toxic place. The amount of bro tree and just kind of like the hustle culture I just am not on board with. But there’s one thing in particular that drives me absolutely bananas. And that’s this trend where there’s one line space, one line space, one line space on a LinkedIn post where people are just very short sentences and then they do all these hard line breaks and it’s just impossible to read. And I just can’t stand it. But that’s what’s really annoying me right now.

Galen Ettlin:
Well within time, that was about 30 seconds and I know exactly the types of posts you’re talking about. And broach tree is a new term I think. Yeah, we should use that as well. Well, Justin, I want to thank you so much for taking time to join us here today. It has been so much fun catching up with you and learning all about your skills and your music and everything else that you bring to the MarTech table. Thanks again for joining us.

Justin Keller:
Thank you, Galen and Suzy, this was a hoot. I appreciate you guys letting me join here.

Check out the next episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast with Wrike CMO Esther Flammer, sharing how marketers can demonstrate their work’s value, even in a tough economy.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast episode 8: Ben Kiker

Galen Ettlin — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 12:19:00 +0000

^{With years of executive marketing experience, Ben Kiker says it’s time for professionals to be more authentic to themselves to better succeed in life and work. He shares how personal struggles led him to his success today.}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
You are listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast by Act-On Software, for all the marketing innovators living outside the box, breaking molds, taking names. Welcome to the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody. I’m Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software. Here again with my VP of marketing, Casey Munck and our guest today, Ben Kiker, with CMO and VP of Marketing experience across the board at places like DocuSign, Jive, Interwoven Siebel, and many more, and he’s now a performance coach helping teams crush their defining moments. He’s a rebel for a living, Casey.

Casey Munck:
Excellent. Well thanks for being here, Ben.

Ben Kiker:
You bet. Happy to be here.

Casey Munck:
Awesome. Well, after all that corporate experience that Galen just rattled off about your amazing resume, you decided to start your own coaching business. So what inspired that shift?

Ben Kiker:
The best way to describe it, Casey, is it was just a calling that I had. It was about eight years ago, and I was in transition from leaving a company in a CMO gig and I’d been interviewing for other CMO gigs and nothing was just grabbing my soul. Nothing was just going, oh, I got to go do that. And I’m from Texas, I was in Texas with my family over the holidays and I felt this internal tug to go coach. It’s one of the things that I always love to do. I have a great background, love, good experience in building and leading high performance teams and folks have always sought me out, both professionally and personally for feedback. And so I came back on January the first of 2015 and literally had a blank sheet of paper and said, I’m going to start my coaching practice. And that’s how it began eight years ago.

Galen Ettlin:
Now you talk about pushing people through those defining moments as I mentioned. What sort of things does that entail? What do you help them with? Just

Ben Kiker:
Helping people and teams enter 2023 with intention. And I’m sure that y’all have spent time thinking about that, both a business perspective, personal perspective, but what are those, I don’t know, three or four, maybe five big rocks that are the big things to go tackle and do in 2023. So definitely that’s a big defining moment. A lot of defining moments during the pandemic around transitions. People were wondering, is it time for me to go? And if I go, what does that look like and where do I go? Other defining moments could be stepping into a big new role and wanting to really maximize your opportunity for success of that role. It also could be, Hey, I’m in a big role and I’m struggling and I need help. Right? Otherwise I’m going to be looking for another role if I don’t get help. And then finally, just strategic decisions that any team faces. I just did a two day offsite with a marketing team, and you all appreciate this. They’re in the middle of their fiscal year. So doing a very quick look back to the first half of the year, but then more importantly going, what do we need to do? What are the adjustments that we need to make going into the back half of the year to really make sure that we crush it?

Casey Munck:
And what about you personally, Ben? What have been some of the defining moments that you said like, this is just not for me. Something has got to change in my life and how I’m doing things, what have you? Can any come to mind for you?

Ben Kiker:
For sure. I think probably one of the big ones for me was realizing that I had a pretty growing and serious substance abuse problem and that it was really getting in the way, in the way of my life on all levels that work at home relationships. And that definitely was a defining moment and being able to take action at that defining moment. So that’s probably the big one that comes to mind as front and center for sure. And look, we all have those, right? I mean, I call them these ‘hitting the wall’ moments and you don’t get to this point here in ‘Earth School’ without having hit the wall at some point over something, whatever that thing is.

Casey Munck:
That’s great. No, it always gets better after you’ve hit the wall, fell down and started to pick yourself back up, things start to make sense so many ways.

Ben Kiker:
And that’s where the work starts, right, is the picking back up. And I always approach it and I encourage other people to approach it as how do you learn and grow, right? Because if I can figure out a way to learn and grow from this experience, then I have an opportunity to help other people learn and go as well. Galen, you were going to jump in?

Galen Ettlin:
No, no, that’s fine. I was just going to say that is a really big one too that you mentioned and one that takes a lot of strength and vulnerability to tackle. And so I just appreciate you sharing that. I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there that can relate even if they’re not at that same step yet.

Ben Kiker:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure.

Galen Ettlin:
Now, we do have some general questions that we’d like to ask our guests on the Rebel Instinct podcast. And so some of them may apply to what you’ve talked about. We can expand upon it as well. What’s the most rebellious thing you’d say or out of the box thing that you’ve tried and how did it perform?

Ben Kiker:
I did hear this question on a couple of other podcasts that y’all recorded that I went and listened to before. Today I’m actually going to go back to something fairly rebellious that I did as a young marketer. So my very first marketing gig, and I didn’t plan, by the way, for going into marketing. It just sort of happened and here I am, but I thought I want to figure out a way to make a career out it. And so I remember talking to my then marketing director saying, Hey, I’d really like to know what do I need to do so that I can get to the role that you have right now? And the answer I got was, it’s going to be really tough. It’s going to be really tough. All of our marketing directors here have an MBA from Stanford or Harvard, and you don’t have an MBA from one of those two schools. And in that moment I thought, screw the marketing director role. I’m going to figure out a way how to become A CMO, and that set me on my path. So I consider that to be fairly rebellious and not taking the answer of, you just need to stay in your swim lane and stay in your box,

Galen Ettlin:
Or you have to go to this school, otherwise you won’t be successful.

Ben Kiker:
Or you have to leave and go to school and then come back and then try again, right? Exit the game, go try to do that and then come back and no, I’m not going to take that path.

Casey Munck:
Yeah, I had a similar background as well coming up with the Harvard kids and the Stanford kids, and I went to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, but you can get there if you have hustle and heart for sure.

Ben Kiker:
My brother-in-law would love you because he is a big Razorback fan.

Casey Munck:
So nice.

Ben Kiker:
There you go.

Casey Munck:
Excellent. Yeah, we got to call the hogs a couple times a year. So what advice would you give to marketers on being more rebellious in their jobs, Ben?

Ben Kiker:
Whatever amount of time that you’re spending with customers and prospective customers today, take that and multiply that by 10. I’m always surprised at how little, say it a different way, how easy it is for marketers, for all the reasons that you all know, and many of the folks that are listening to this podcast know to get pulled away from the revenue line, to get pulled away from the frontline and just to rebel against all that pulls you away and get close to customers, get close to the market. That’s an incredibly rebellious thing to do. The other thing that I also recommend, and I really wish I would’ve done this early on in my career is find the one hour for yourself every day. That is that magic golden hour for you. When it just flows all of the ideas and the creativity and the magic and all of your strengths come to life in a big way, block that time out in your schedule. And do not let anyone take that time. Do not let anyone take that time. Keep that time and decline more meetings. Five people are all in the same meeting from marketing. At least two or three of them can exit.

Casey Munck:
I completely agree. And yes, so many of us today let other people control our schedules. And so I’m a big proponent of blocking out that time, several chunks throughout the day to do your work to think.

Ben Kiker:
And lemme just add back real quick on that kissing. I love you do that. And that is a practice. I want to be clear. That is absolutely a practice that takes a while to do it, but this is what I remind clients, listen, if you block it out five times a week every day of the week, and you only do it three times a week, that’s still three more times than you were doing it before you blocked it out. So I just want to recognize that the practice of blocking that out, how important it is because it sets the intention for you to actually get it done.

Casey Munck:
How are you rebel in your non-work life?

Ben Kiker:
I’ve always been pretty open and just authentically me. I mean, just talking about, for example, my journey with addiction and then recovery. I came out super early in my career back during the era of don’t ask, don’t tell when a lot of people didn’t do that. And I was very open about my life and who I loved and what I did. And then I also talk a lot about my insane thought generator, that crazy voice in my head that comes up with all kinds of unhelpful stories, none of which are true by the way, and how it really works to keep me out of fluent off my game. So I think just trying to come from a place of just being super open and authentic.

Casey Munck:
Thank you for doing that honestly, because it’s been really awesome to see the trend of the full battle shield come down from leaders and how inspiring that can be to staff to be like, you can have a bad mental health day. You can be open about being in recovery or who you love or what have you. And that’s what makes us all stronger together. I think we tell those stories to one another.

Ben Kiker:
I completely agree. And Brene Brown has this awesome quote about vulnerability. She’s like, it’s the first thing that I want to see in you, and it’s the last thing that I want you to see in me. So when we model that for each other, then it melts that. It makes that a little bit easier.

Galen Ettlin:
And I think living authentically too is really a difficult thing to achieve in your own authentic self because a lot of society discourages that. When we ask, how are you, the answer we want to hear is good. And I think that’s kind of how we’re programmed. It’s not so much like, I’m having a really tough time because of this, or let me tell you about what I’m going through. I think a lot of people will kind of be taken aback by that, but we really do have to retrain ourselves to have the other mindset of let’s step in and be supportive, or let’s give this person that space

Ben Kiker:
Again. I would really challenge you to when somebody goes, how are you doing? Don’t say fine or good. I mean, just really say, you know what? I’m, the dial is set to negative right now. I’m working to turn it to positive, but it’s set to negative. Just really let people know kind of where you are and what’s going on. Because I find when I do that, it generally elicits a more authentic, real response from the other person on what’s going on in their world today.
I love this conversation. God, this is so good!

Galen Ettlin:
That’s the goal!

Ben Kiker:
There you go. Hold on, wait a minute. [DING] There we go!

Galen Ettlin:
We get a dinging from you. [laughs]

Ben Kiker:
My desk bell for good, positive moments.

Casey Munck:
I need one of those. I’m steal that.

Galen Ettlin:
I’m honored that we get to be a part of that moment.

Casey Munck:
Yes same.

Galen Ettlin:
Well, apart from us, what rebel in our culture do you think needs to be celebrated and why?

Ben Kiker:
This is, I think a little people crazy when they listen to this. I am going to acknowledge a Franciscan priest by the name of Richard Rohr, who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation and Albuquerque, New Mexico. And I went to a conference in Albuquerque and heard him speak and he said, and I love this line among many lines. I can’t think of a single Christian religion that has a human view, that has a healthy view on human sexuality. It’s either fear-based, shame-based, or both. And this is from a 70 something person inside of an institution saying, we just don’t do this well, we just don’t do this well. So I’m a huge fan of him and his work around developing one’s spirituality, internal center self, and really enjoy listening to what he does and love to highlight him when I can.

Casey Munck:
He sounds really interesting. I’ll have to look him up after that. He sounds like a true rebel in his space for sure.

Ben Kiker:
He is absolutely rebel long before all of us were around and little rebels in training.

Casey Munck:
Okay, so now Ben, it’s time for our ‘honey, I don’t think so’ segment, talking about what’s annoying you in marketing or MarTech lately, that needs to stop right now. You’ve got 60 seconds to plead your case. Galen will be counting you down. We hold this very firm to the time limits. Are you ready, Ben, for your ‘honey, I don’t think so.’

Ben Kiker:
I am ready.

Casey Munck:
Okay, take it away.

Ben Kiker:
Alright, let me start with three words, Elon Musk, Twitter.

Now that we’ve moved beyond that, emails that begin with, ‘Hey, I’m just putting this back to the top of your email in case you may have overlooked it or seen it before.’ I’m done with those emails. Just resend the email to me. I saw it the first time. I ignored it the first time. I’m going to ignore it the second time. I’m done.

Casey Munck:
Honey, I don’t think so with the passive aggressive bubble ups.

Ben Kiker:
I love that passive aggressive. Can we make that a little acronym? PABOs.

Casey Munck:
PABO. Yes, we can. It starts now.

Ben Kiker:
By the way, if you lead the Twitter Elon Musk thing in, I mean, we can end up getting really, there could be a lot of Twitter bots that come after your podcast, so you’ve got that going for

Galen Ettlin:
You. Oh, that’s my dream. I live for this.

Ben Kiker:
That’s what I’m wanting. I’m wanting the people to come after us.

Casey Munck:
I dare you. I dare you. Twitter bots.

Ben Kiker:
If you’re a marketer, it’s got to make you crazy right now because he just is sucking up all of the oxygen in the room, right? So if you’re a marketer, you’re coming up with incredible creative campaigns and ideas and stories and messages, and then Elon goes, I want to do a poll today. And then there goes the world. Okay. I think I’m way beyond 60 seconds with that. But you got me started. You got me started. You asked the question,

Galen Ettlin:
You finished the main thought in the 30 seconds, actually, so I just stopped counting at that point. This is all extra.

Casey Munck:
It is. Well, thank you so much, Ben. You’re such an inspiring person to me, especially with how authentic that you are. I think that’s really, really beautiful. So I just, thanks again for being on the podcast. Thank you. Ben.

Ben Kiker:
Yeah, thank you both.

Casey Munck:
Yeah, if you need some coaching, reach out to Ben. His information will be in the description on this. So yeah, keep on rocking Ben. Thanks so much.

Ben Kiker:
Have a great, great kick ass 2023.

Casey Munck:
Yeah, you too.

Galen Ettlin:
You too. Bye. Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow act on software for updates in upcoming episodes, and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

Check out the next episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast with Marc Liu, chief revenue officer of e-bike company Civilized Cycle.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 1: Jon Miller

Galen Ettlin — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 15:00:00 +0000

^{Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo and Engagio and current CMO of DemandBase, shares his MarTech journey with Act-On Software. Miller is known for helping innovate tools for account-based marketing (ABM).}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
You are listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast by Acton Software for all the marketing innovators living outside the box.

Hey everybody, good to have you here. We are excited to elevate our rebel instincts today. I’m Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software, joined by my VP of Marketing, Casey Munck and our very special guest, Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo and Engagio and current CMO of Demand Base and an OG Marketing Rebel in the House. Jon, thank you so much for being here.

Jon Miller:
Yeah, thanks very much. It’s great to be friends and hanging out with Act-On.

Galen Ettlin:
Excellent. Well, we appreciate hearing it. Now, you came up with a completely new marketing tech category with Engagio for account-based marketing or ABM. What led you to create that? Tell us about that journey.

Jon Miller:
Sure. Well, I will say I don’t feel like I came up with account-based marketing. The term had been around for a little while, but I certainly helped I think pour a lot of fuel on the fire from some sparks that were already there. So I was at Marketo, I was doing drinking our own champagne, we were doing demand generation and to drive up to 80% of all of our pipeline and as Act-On listeners will know, marketing automation’s really useful for this stuff. We were generating leads and then we would nurture the ones that weren’t ready for sales and score them and only pass them to sales when they were really ready. And it was nice because salespeople weren’t talking to buyers who weren’t interested and buyers didn’t have to talk to salespeople before they were ready. But it wasn’t sufficient for driving our growth engine.
As we got bigger and we were trying to move up market, we needed new engines of growth. And so we started at Marketo doing more of an outbound strategy to identify some accounts and try to really reach out to them proactively, kind of what became known as account-based marketing. But what inspired me to start Engagio was the fact that this strategy worked, but it was really hard to do with this tech stack that I had of a sort of person-based marketing automation plus a CRM. We sort of needed a third pillar of that stool, which is something that would be more account-based. So that that’s what led to Engagio. And I used an analogy at the time that traditional demand gens like fishing with a net, you run your campaign, you don’t care which fish you catch, you just care did you catch enough fish? Whereas account-based marketing is fishing with a spear where you identify those big fish and kind of go after them.

Galen Ettlin:
Now taking kind of a step back here for both of you, my marketing experts here, I know it’s a pretty technical skill, lots of numbers, lots of critical thinking. It’s complicated enough probably in some people’s view. What about MarTech speaks to you? Why approach that space?

Jon Miller:
Well, so I graduated with a degree in physics in 1994 and I think there’s two relevant pieces of that. The first is that a book came out in 1992 called The One-to-One Future by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers that described a vision of a future world. That’s where we could be as personalized as a corner store, an 1800s corner store that really knows you. But we could do that at industrial era scale. And the way that would happen was through better use of data and analytics to really understand the customer. And that really was pretty inspiring to me back the very beginning of my career. And the physics component was it turns out that the more that that’s it drive towards the one future is a drive that makes marketing more analytical and more quantitative. And I found that it was just really kind of cool that I was able to use my quantitative skills in the practice of marketing.

Casey Munck:
So Jon, ABM has moved from a buzz term to core philosophy of really just good prospecting. What do we need to know about how ABM has evolved over the years, where we are today and where we’re headed?

Jon Miller:
Yeah, I mean ABM has definitely evolved and I think the biggest thing that’s driven that change is a recognition that the way the early practitioners were doing, it was also flawed. And the flaw is really built in the analogy I talked about a couple minutes ago, which is it doesn’t feel very good to get poked by a spear. And the problem with early ABM was that we were reaching out to accounts regardless of whether they were actually interested in hearing from us

Casey Munck:
Or that they were warm, right?

Jon Miller:
And so we sort of had lost that respect for the buyer that demand generation had. And so I actually started using a new term called account based experience or ABX, which tries to take the precision and targeting of traditional ABM, but combine it with that respect for the buyer experience that kind of demand generation had. And the unlock that makes that possible is the rise of things like intent data that lets us really start to see when an account might be in a buying cycle or showing interest that was otherwise previously hidden. With tools like Act-On, we can score when people based behaviors based on what people are doing on our own website, but we’re losing what’s happening or we don’t see what’s happening out on the open web. And when we can start having access to that kind of data, it lets us understand which account is in its journey and then adjust our go-to-market accordingly. So I think that’s really kind of the biggest evolution of this move from ABM to ABX. And by the way, it’s also just a better name because it takes marketing out of the name.

Casey Munck:
That’s so true. I like that a lot. Well, ABM software definitely more than ever before I think is emerging as the necessary go between the marketing automation and the CRM platforms. What are you seeing? What are you thinking are the latest elements of ABM software that are bridging that gap between the those two core systems that are really helping make sales and marketing’s lives easier and more effective?

Jon Miller:
I’d sort of like to answer that by talking about the use cases or the things that you do with this technology. So the first one is building just an account based foundation, and that starts with that challenge I was having back at Marketo. If all your other systems are primarily lead based, you need things like lead to account matching to take all those disparate signals, what’s happening with your website and your marketing automation and your Salesforce, even your Gmail or your exchange servers where the emails are sitting. You know, got to combine all that together, match it, clean it, keep it up to date, and then ideally augment it with quality third party data. So that’s the step one is just getting that account foundation data foundation in place. The second one is then finding the accounts that matter. How do you use your account intelligence to identify which accounts you should be focusing on?
Who’s in your ICP? How do you help tier them into tier one, tier two, tier threes based on their potential value? How do you know where are they in their journey? So you know, this one is just aware of you but not really engaging, but this one is hot and ready to go now and use all that intelligence to prioritize your time and efforts once you have that in place. Now the third main use case is engage, and now you want to engage with the accounts and the people at those accounts in a really coordinated orchestrated way. So that can mean things like pushing those insights into your marketing automation. So your nurture tracks dynamically adjust based on where that account is in the journey, but it can also mean things like advertising to those accounts or personalizing the website when people from those accounts visit to you or launching outreach or sales loft cadences when accounts hit kind of that magic and market moment.
It’s all about orchestration, and I love the word orchestration because it implies you have these different instruments, these different channels, but you want to make them all kind of work in harmony. The fourth use case is all about closing these accounts or aligning and aligning with sales. So it’s taking all this information you have about what’s going on and making sure that the sales team has acts to that inside their CRM when they’re working with the accounts. And then the last use case is measurement. As you move into an ABM world, your metrics are going to be a little bit more, or definitely going to be focused more on quality and less on quantity. It’s not about how many MQLs anymore, it’s about either did you get MQLs at the right accounts? Did you get MQAs marketing qualified accounts? And so there’s new metrics that you’re going to want to use to measure this world also.

Galen Ettlin:
I think it’s easy for a lot of us to get kind of stuck in a rut. So what advice do you have for those marketers out there to be a little bit more, say, rebellious or innovative in their jobs?

Jon Miller:
Yeah, there’s an acronym that I really like here, which is that I would encourage marketers to be NICE marketers. So this acronym NICE. The N stands for you should be numerical numeric. And this goes back to what we said earlier, marketing is getting pretty technical. So you know, should have a proficiency with numbers, with an spreadsheets at a minimum. You don’t have to be a physics major, but you know, shouldn’t be scared of a spreadsheet. At the same time, I think you should be intuitive. Marketing is art, not just science. Both, you know, need to be able to understand what is your target audience care about, what’s going to resonate with them, how are you going to create marketing that has a little bit of a wow factor for your target audience? C stands for being a content creator. I think marketers, everybody in marketing should be a content creator, not just the content team. So whether that’s writing blog posts or putting your opinions out on LinkedIn and building your own personal brand accordingly or hosting a podcast or you name it, just producing content is so core to what marketing is doing. Every marketer should be a content creator and then the E is execution. And what a execution of A grade B plan will pretty much always beat the grade B execution of the grade A plan. So just big part of being a rebellious market or just getting out there and just getting stuff done.

Casey Munck:
That I’d never heard the NICE. That’s awesome. I’m going to be using that. Thanks Jon. What does it feel like to take a chance in not knowing the outcomes? How do you make a rebellious move at work knowing there may be consequences?

Jon Miller:
I think every time I’ve taken a risk, there’s always been some mitigation, if you will, or something that kind of protected my downside. And so put another way, it’s smart risks.

Casey Munck:
Right.

Jon Miller:
For example, not career oriented. When I graduated from college, I set out to ride my bike across the country along with a friend of mine and we camping the whole way, bringing our own gear. This is road bicycling, not a motorcycle.

Casey Munck:
A big trip.

Jon Miller:
Yeah, so we made it to somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert, at which point we kind of had a crash and my friends fell down and actually cracked his helmet, at which point he was obviously a little injured and we were both shaken up. And so fortunately we were able to get some help to take us to the closest airport. So rather than giving up from on this whole bike trip, we were just able to change directions and we ended up biking down the Pacific coast instead from Canada to Mexico and had a great trip. So risky thing, but backup plan. Similarly, when I started Marketo, at the time my wife was pregnant with our first kid, we had just bought a house and we had our first mortgage. It wasn’t exactly when you think, hey, it’s time to go start a company and be super entrepreneurial, but I was able to do it with Phil Fernandez as my co-founder. And so, cause I wasn’t the CEO of Marketo and so the fact I could hook up with somebody else who frankly was going to be the lead and be the driver more than anything else who had experience and also was going to help be the one raising the money dramatically reduce the risk there as well. So maybe I’m just fortunate, but I think smart risks where you have some downside protection is what works for me.

Casey Munck:
I like it.

Galen Ettlin:
And being flexible and knowing how to pivot.

Jon Miller:
Yeah, good point.

Casey Munck:
Absolutely, Galen.
I’m curious, do you often seek a lot of counsel when you’re going to make a risky decision or do you keep your cards close to your vest and only run it by a couple of trusted folks? How much opinion do you get when you’re about to make a possibly risky move or decision?

Jon Miller:
Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, as analytical as I am and as quantitative as I am, I think most of the major decisions in my life I’ve sort of made by gut or intuitively. I think talking about it sometimes is useful, not because I am so much getting–I’m interested in hearing what other people say, but sometimes just the act of talking about it ultimately is what generates the final conviction in my gut for what the right answer is.

Casey Munck:
So what marketing revel in our culture today needs to be celebrated now and why?

Jon Miller:
Yeah, I was thinking that. I mean in terms of who I admire is Ferris Bueller. I think imagine if we all could be Ferris Bueller in our marketing who has both some charisma, has some smarts in terms of how he kind of tricks the family and just everything works out for him. That would be awesome if our marketing could be like that.

Casey Munck:
That’s a great answer.

Galen Ettlin:
So we just need more days off is what you’re saying.

Jon Miller:
Make your own days off

Casey Munck:
Need to watch that movie again.

Galen Ettlin:
Kind of on the other side of that, instead of what inspires you or what you think we should all be inspired by, it’s time. Now for our ‘honey, I don’t think so’ segment talking about what’s annoying you lately that needs to stop in the marketing or MarTech space. You have 60 seconds to make your case, Jon.

Jon Miller:
We need to stop focusing on marketing source or marketing the influence pipeline and instead focus on the total pipeline number. Marketing is not, and sales, it’s not like a baton handoff anymore where marketing just generates a lead in hands to the sales because that linear process doesn’t match how buying is happening today. Buying is on linear mark and sales teams need to work together in a more non-linear way rather than a relay race. The better analogy is like a soccer team who has players in different positions, but they pass the ball back and forth. Now, can you imagine a soccer team that puts on the scoreboard, here’s the number of points scored by the writing or the fullbacks versus the number of points scored by the forwards. Doesn’t make any sense. What you care about is the total number. Did we have enough points to beat the other team? And sure, the coach that might be tracking the underlying statistics for improvement, but the headline, the thing that you focus on is the total, because at the end of the day, you scored the goal as a team, and that’s how marketing and sales teams need to be working.

Casey Munck:
Amen. Jon, I’m with you on that.

Galen Ettlin:
I think that’s a perfect note to end our podcast here. Thank you so much, Jon, for being a part of this episode.

Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

Check out the next episode:

https://act-on.com/learn/blog//rebel-instinct-podcast-episode-2-jorie-green-mark/

B2B Demand Generation Trends: The Newest Data

Thu, 19 May 2022 16:10:00 +0000

Our recent Using Data to Drive Demand report finds two important areas where B2B marketers are struggling. The first is measuring results (41%), and the second is making data actionable (39%). What that tells us is the name of the game in B2B demand generation is data.

When calculating the effectiveness of data-driven demand generation programs. 73% of B2B marketers feel they are only somewhat successful in implementing strategies for these data-driven demand programs, highlighting the need for an improved automation platform that can streamline strategies and efforts for more successful outcomes.

Benefits of an Effective Data-Driven Demand Generation Strategy

Get ready for more accurate campaigns, a streamlined qualification process and a way better customer experience.

When you use data to generate demand for your B2B services or products, your programs are more accurate. And that matters, because when your marketing programs are more accurate, you tend to spend less for better quality leads in the long run. Relying on data for demand generation can certainly have big impacts on your business goals, but it’s also an important way to help your customer feel seen, cared for, and excited about your company.

Improves Lead Quality for Your Teammates in Sales

Nearly half of the B2B marketers we surveyed called out lead quality specifically as their number one benefit after implementing more data-driven demand generation programs. That’s because using data to drive decision making helps to streamline the qualification process. The more you know about your audience, and then tailor your messaging to that audience, the more successful demand gen efforts can be. When you offer products and services to people who need them and are close to making a decision, that close is a lot closer.

Improves Customer Experience

Another important benefit called out by our survey respondents was the impact to customer experience. When you’re using data responsibly in your B2B marketing automation programs, there’s an opportunity to provide such a different experience for the people visiting your website or interacting with your content anywhere. Tailoring your message with segmented email or dynamic page content is a great way to connect with the right leads and get them excited about your CTA.

This adds up a stronger sales pipeline, better conversion rates and more qualified customers. Using data-driven demand generation as part of your marketing automation efforts lets you connect with your target customers when and where they are ready to buy.

Does utilizing data significantly improve B2B demand generation strategies?

The vast majority of B2B marketers say yes. 95% of those surveyed agree to some extent with the statement, “Demand generation is significantly improved when a data-driven strategy is used.” Despite varying degrees of success, utilizing data will continue to improve B2B demand generation strategies.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Access to Data Continues to Be a Major Hurdle

If you agree that data would help your strategy, you’re right. The challenge is that many are unable to access the data needed to help solidify their strategies. 32% of the B2B marketing professionals we surveyed said having the right data to make effective decisions is a struggle.

Luckily, using a marketing automation platform can help B2B marketers find success. Your automation tools should be collecting all the data you need. It’s all a matter of the correct set-up.

Here are a few ideas to configure your system for the best possible use of data:

Use tracking pixels on your website to collect information about how people behave when visiting your site.
Track email engagement to see what’s connecting
Integrate your tech stack so you can track event attendance and interactions with your team

This data can give you a look into what is working and what isn’t, allowing you to adjust your strategy for demand generation gains.

Data Quality is Key

If the data behind decision-making is irrelevant or of poor quality, it is incredibly difficult for a B2B demand generation strategy to be effective. Only one-third (34%) of B2B marketing professionals report feeling certain that the quality of their data allows them to make effective decisions on where to spend marketing and sales resources.

Feeling certain about your data is critical to your demand generation strategy. Using a marketing automation platform helps improve data quality and provides a complete picture of your customers by consolidating and storing all the data in one place so that it becomes a single source of truth.

The Importance of Customer Journey Mapping

Understanding when, where, and why customers enter and exit the buying journey is key to creating a more effective strategy that results in growth. The smartest B2B marketers use customer journey mapping as a key part of their demand generation efforts.

Here are a few reasons why customer journey mapping is so effective:

Reveals the big picture of the buying process
Uncovers points of friction in the buying process, include content or product gaps
Provides a basis for predicting customer behavior
Improves the customer experience

Creating a customer journey map is a great way to gain a better understanding of your customers and their experience with your brand. Follow these steps to get started with creating a customer journey map.

Once you have a better understanding of your customer journey, marketing automation can help you push out the best-fitting touchpoints for customers at each stage of their journey.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

Data Impacts More Than Just the Numbers

Marketing involves understanding your customers and why they should want your product or service. Data insights help give you a glimpse into who they are, their buying behavior, and how to communicate with them. But data isn’t just for baselines and benchmarking. Data impacts many different facets of marketing, from demand generation to email nurturing, to customer experience.

Demand generation strategies rely on quality data, because to serve the right ads or create the right webinar topics, you’ve got to know the audience. To serve them in the right places with the right budget is a whole ‘nother level.

Coupling your data-backed demand gen strategy with marketing automation allows you start with more targeted programs and then take the guesswork out of nurturing. Streamlining your touchpoints for a more customized experience is more appealing to leads and creates a more efficient process for your company.

People appreciate personalization. An effective way to ensure you get personalization right is by effectively using segmentation to reach a variety of different audiences. Try using segmentation strategies when analyzing your data, giving you a more in-depth look into your leads and who is attracted to your brand. Using data with a more segmented approach helps you create high-value, relevant content for potential customers, which also helps drive demand generation and get more qualified leads into the pipeline.

The Beat B2B Marketing Demand Generation Programs Begin & End With Data

Effective demand generation strategies help drive growth for B2B companies by delivering highly targeted and engaging content. Whether that’s organically through good content, or paid for with ads, syndication or events, successful demand generation is crucial for a healthy business.

In order for these strategies to be effective, they need to be driven by data. Gaining this data through marketing automation gives you the insights you need and helps you streamline your approach and keep winning new business.
Data-backed demand generation is just one of the many trends in B2B marketing that can help inspire your decisions moving forward, as you find different ways to connect with and convert new customers.