As we all know, great Marketing is the right balance of art and science. This week let’s take a look at how to use marketing science to free up time for marketing art.
Last week, Leadspace participated in the GDS Summit event along with roughly 200 marketing executives to explore how technology is changing the game in high level Marketing & Sales operations. We met with dozens of companies one-on-one, and were given the opportunity to present a keynote presentation on the final day of the event.
I gave the keynote – entitled Revenue By Design – in which I explored 4 key areas where companies see challenges in implementing their Go-to-Market strategies – profiling, targeting, campaigning, and closing. At the end of it, the audience was polled on where their biggest go-to-market challenges reside. The results showed 29% in profiling, 29% in planning, 21% in campaigning, and 21% in closing – a surprisingly balanced array of answers. What’s the reason for such balanced poll results? Perhaps there should’ve been an option for “all of the above.”
What struck me about the polling results above was the 60/40 split. Sixty percent of the audience’s biggest challenge was aimed at targeting – the right company, buying center and buying profiles along with then setting up the right segments to drive a campaign strategy. Getting this segmentation right drives the intelligence and selection of persona-based content, suitability for higher account based marketing investments and more. The remaining forty percent is in making sure that the execution of that strategy drives list creation, media buys and sales activities – often a disconnect not only between marketing platforms/channels but also between sales and marketing.
Here are a number of questions that were posed as a part of the discussion and my answers:
What step gives marketing efforts the biggest lift in improving the pipeline?
Propensity models. Being able to say here is the likelihood of conversion by company size, geography, industry, who’s in-market, fit scores and intent scores, then being able to sort leads by propensity is an absolute game changer.
Is there a quick way I can get a pulse on the health of my data before moving forward with the next steps?
If you give us a sample of your data, we can quickly produce a Data Health Report to evaluate the completeness of your data, which will indicate fill rates, absent or incomplete data, out-dated data and other indicators of your data’s quality.
What’s on the roadmap – where are you looking to take Leadspace?
We want to help marketing and sales teams to understand what the best strategy is to engage their targets – allowing the system to target by media, intent and propensity so we as marketers can create the very best content, run it in those channels with A/B testing. By using machine learning to automate more and more segmentation and marketing channel decisions, marketing teams can focus more of their efforts on the art of marketing to deliver the very best content in front of the right buyers.
How does the elimination of 3rd party cookies affect companies’ ability to use data in their go-to-market strategy and how can we offset this?
Cookies go away, so yes, there’s a little more work to do now, but we can offset this by getting more precise about who we’re going after. The key is building great content, which you can dedicate much more time to once you’ve automated the mathematical analysis processes within your marketing efforts. With the right technology in place you can spend more time engaging people in a better way to ultimately earn the trust of data from potential buyers and customers. Implementing the right technology, such as a CDP, enables you to unify the public and private data that you have to target the right people with the right campaigns. Rich content is the best way to persuade buyers to share information with you – it’s still all about permission-based marketing.
What stakeholders or members of an executive team should be involved in implementing a CDP?
Sales and (mostly) Marketing Ops, and IT are generally involved, but a CDP is ultimately a business-oriented solution, so typically, it should be the heads of marketing operations and CMOs leading the implementation of a CDP, but if they can align the implementation with Sales Ops and CRO leaders – that’s even better!
What challenges have you personally faced in using a CDP to create closeable revenue and how did you address these?
The first challenge was figuring out what a CDP actually is – which is the most common question people have about CDPs according to Gartner. The biggest challenge I’ve faced though, is how do you actually put it into operations? Where are you going to really use it to sort out what you’re going to focus on? Will I really take the leap to not do any engagement on a lead and just send it straight to sales just because they have a very high propensity or fit? Giving up nurtures that focus on engagement is a great example. What does it take to trust the AI models to say when a lead should be directly sent without further engagement to sales? This is a bit unsettling at first – until the math proves itself with results!
I had a lot of fun presenting this keynote. Freeing up time for marketing and sales people to focus on the art of their profession is important. As always, Leadspace can help deliver this result by focusing on the science. Contact us to learn more.