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5 Ways to Help Marketers Do More With Less

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Even in the best of times, B2B marketers are used to hearing they need to do more with less. However, they aren’t always the best at using data and automation – which is where Revenue Operations comes in! RevOps is in the perfect position to serve data up to marketing leaders in a way that fuels creative problem-solving and ends the debate over whether we think a campaign did well or whether it actually did well.

What are the quickest ways to help marketers do more with less?

The panelists, a group of consultants in the B2B technology space (and beyond), had to preface their conversation with the fact that the correct answer to most questions will be “It depends.” However, they carefully provided specific examples in the video to illustrate how to get the most out of each tactic.

We’ll also call out the questions they answer at the top. Because anyone in operations knows that starting with the punchline is the most efficient way to end a meeting quickly. Or get more out of an article. :)

Funnel Optimization

Where is my funnel leaking? Are my teams working together efficiently? Are my systems optimized for peak pipeline production?

Most organizations have some kind of funnel. Usually, they start in your marketing automation platform, and that platform pushes information onto contact and lead records in your CRM. If you have Hubspot, you can easily access person and company life cycles. The rest of us have to get creative with flows or purchase a tool that can act as a shortcut.

The greatest value of funnels is the ability to see trends in conversion rates, volume, and time in stage over time. When conversion rates dip or volume looks odd, it’s time to dig further. Common causes of bad qualified account conversion into opportunities include integration breakages, process design flaws, stage definition disagreement, and cross-functional issues. The panel found that poor conversion rates could often be tied to leads not being appropriately routed to sales or disagreement between sales and marketing on defining a qualified account.

Leaky funnels are incredibly commonplace, even when reporting is in place. The panel recommended taking the time to download the data and cohort it correctly so you’re calculating a valid conversion rate (for example, if marketing-qualified accounts happened in June, you will want to look at opportunities created against those accounts during AND after June to understand your conversion rate).

Pro Tip: While your business will want to capture and report on many stages, focus first on meaningful handoffs between teams. For example, analyzing conversion from marketing qualified account to sales meeting set will help you understand how aligned marketing and inside sales are.

CaliberMind has recently published a guide that details how to use funnels to align marketing and sales better, which you can download here.

Simple Configuration Checks

Is my sales team seeing all of their leads? Are we missing out on opportunities?

Whether you have funnel reporting in place (although if you don’t, that should be priority number one), the panel unanimously recommended double-checking your marketing form routing. They have all seen organizations miss leads because of incorrect website code, a marketing automation error, or a lack of training. Also, make sure you can track examples flowing from the point of the form fill to the assignment to a sales representative.

If your company has made significant organizational changes, like laying off the inside sales team, ensure your routing rules have been updated to reflect the changes. The same applies to chat tools or any other mechanism routing an interested prospect to sales.

Some Kind of Attribution

Which marketing investments have the highest return on investment? Which marketing campaigns work at different points in the buyer journey? Which campaigns generate pipeline and bookings?

Everyone in marketing loves to hate attribution, but it’s the most efficient way to estimate return on investment. We can see which tactics are tied to pipeline and bookings with attribution. When you’re expected to cut budget, marketers can maintain a decent level of productivity if they know which tactics have the highest returns.

Surprise! Most people are using attribution today. You are using attribution if you have a last touch (AKA Opportunity Source or Primary Campaign) or first touch model (AKA Lead Source).

Remember that not all campaigns should or will look good in all models. For example, a first-touch model evaluates whether campaigns are good at name acquisition. A last-touch model helps the team understand prospects' mechanisms to engage with sales. Finally, multi-touch attribution can show what works before opportunity creation and what works after the opportunity is created to help keep in-flight opportunities propelling forward.

The panel recommended that RevOps be very active in serving up insights from marketing reports. Only some people in your business are good at pattern matching or comfortable with numbers. Typically, marketers are thrilled when someone offers to help them interpret what they see working well at different points in the buyer journey.

For more on which model answers each question, check out CaliberMind’s article.

Revisiting Anything Critical Designed More than 3 Months Ago

Should our target market change to fit market conditions? What is my accurate ideal customer profile (ICP)? Have any organization updates broken lead routing? Are we missing out on opportunities?

There are a lot of core configurations in marketing automation and your CRM that are easy to set and forget. But, unfortunately, any process that’s critical to efficiency or productivity shouldn’t be overlooked. 

When your to-do list is long, and your funnel conversions are looking less than stellar, ask when the following were last evaluated and optimized:

  • Lead scoring
  • Lead routing
  • Account scoring
  • Attribution models

As the market’s health fluctuates, so will your ideal customer profile and key personas. For example, if the market is soft, you’ll see the Chief Financial Officer involved in the contracting process far more often than when the market is doing well. Persona and ICP changes impact how you’ll want to route leads and how you need to think about attribution.

Scaling Digital Advertising

How can I generate more demand with less money? What works best with my ICP? How can we attract more buyers faster?

Digital advertising is a hard nut to crack. Part of the conundrum is how difficult it is to tag and track interactions through to pipeline and bookings reliably. Some attribution tools play a role here, but many advertising platforms, like Metadata.io, can help marketers better understand campaign performance if multi-touch attribution isn’t an option.

Another reason why our panelists like Metadata.io is that the platform allows marketers to provide multiple versions of ad copy and creative to run tests concurrently and figure out what works best for the target audience. Any platform that can automate optimization based on early signals is great, but the fact that Metadata.io integrates with your CRM to see final results is a big plus.

More About The Panelists

Andy Caron

Andy is the SVP of Consulting at Revenue Pulse. She has been deeply ingrained in the Marketo community since 2012, and she is passionate about marketing operations, attribution, and system integrations. The Martech ecosystem fascinates her–watching its evolution and getting to learn new tools has been one of her favorite parts of her career.

Camela Thompson

Camela is the Go-To-Market Maven at CaliberMind. What kind of title is that? Well, obviously it’s perfect for a startup but it also reflects the reality of her position, which sits at the intersection of operations, marketing, sales, and customer success. Before becoming a marketing leader, she spent 15 years in revenue operations in B2B tech.

Drew Smith

Drew got his start working with marketing attribution in 2017 when he saw his first demo of Bizible (now Marketo Measure).Since then, he’s learned as much about attribution as possible, which meant picking up knowledge about newer platforms along the way. As the CEO of Attributa, he helps more organizations improve their marketing reporting capabilities, than anyone else.

Jess Hagen

Jess is the CMO and Founder of Some Growth Marketing Agency. ​​Revenue-focused B2B marketer with 10+ years of experience building high-impact programs and high-performing teams in early-stage, VC-backed companies. Passionate about the convergence of Product Led Growth, Growth Marketing, and Demand Generation/Capture to deliver the optimum, data-influenced experience across the entire customer lifecycle -both online and offline - from awareness, trial signup, upsell/cross-sell, retention, and beyond.

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