RevOps and Marketing
There's a common misconception that RevOps is just sales ops in disguise. To some it's just window dressing or a nefarious opportunity from cost conscious executives to load up responsibilities on the already drowning ops team. I think there's some truth to this. If you look up and down job boards you’ll see the title RevOps for Sales Ops roles. Or RevOps for Marketing Ops roles. It doesn’t matter what the job title says. What matters is the intentional goal to align all Go To Market functions towards a common objective. You can call it whatever you want.
Today I want to talk about supporting marketing. Or more appropriately helping businesses develop a scalable and repeatable top of the funnel. This isn’t going to include advice on the types of campaigns you should run. Or the channels you should deploy. That’s not my area of expertise. I leave the psychological and creative aspects of marketing to more enlightened professionals. What I break down is a series of spartan disciplinary strategies for you to consistently repeat success.
So let's break down a ton of stuff today. Now let's start with the elephant in the room. I came from a finance and sales ops background. So some might come out and say 'wait a minute! This guy is a sales ops guy. What does he know about marketing ops'
To that I say fair point. But I've had my fair share of running Marketo and Pardot instances, developing dynamic email lists, working on building Persona Value Maps and helping marketing turn those ivory tower ICP docs into tangible useful sales assets. And yes the dreaded exercise of building out attribution models. Whether I know marketing inside and out isn’t as relevant as building the infrastructure and cadences to bring the best out of our marketing efforts.
Today let's break down a few topics.
Aligning Goals
Attribution
Ideal Customer Profile
Persona Value Maps
Handoffs
Aligning Goals is the very first thing RevOps needs to do with any of its stakeholders. Without shared goals we’re not driving to the same destination nor are we going to work together. Many marketers today feel their number one goal is to make the sales’ teams easier in generating pipeline. I agree and I disagree at the same time. While it’s true that developing qualified pipeline is the key input to sales, I’d also like to think marketing does a lot more than that way up the funnel. Positioning the brand, positioning the product, positioning the company relative to other solutions in the space. While pipeline is an eventual byproduct of these efforts, it would be optimizing for the short term in the form of ready-now pipeline over the development of a long term, sustainable funnel of awareness to interest to consideration. A few tools that will help include: defining SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-based), developing shared goals with product and sales, and defining what goes into your data dictionary. The Data Dictionary is a simple tool. Never leave home without it. Much like a Webster’s dictionary it should have a couple of key components.
First, it should have the metric.
Second, it should have the business objective it’s aligned to.
Third, it should have a layman’s definition.
Fourth, it should have a calculation definition.
Fifth, it should have a systems definition in the form of fields relative to each other or a SQL query.
Sixth, it should be signed by all important players.
Seventh, it should only be altered during Planning season.
Next I’d like to talk about attribution. This is always a fun one because it never feels like my reporting is ever that satisfying to my GTM leaders. You start with a first touch attribution model and you might skew heavily towards webinars, white papers, or a gated blog post visitor. In an extreme scenario the business over indexes towards pouring more investment into these channels and offers. Later, sales is left holding a huge bag of low intent leads.
So what to do then? Oh, I got it! Let's switch to a last touch attribution model. Here, the charts show that the top three sources are visits from a G2 comparison page, a partner landing page, and Google Ads Display… and it's the highest CPC ad set to boot. Conversion rates are easily near the high end of the distribution. Boom! We found the answer. Time to double down here. Later the business finds their conversions have remained the same, but the quantity has dropped. At the same time these were the most expensive campaigns. Now the marketing contribution to customer acquisition cost has reached stratospheric heights. Retention would need to reach all time highs with an annual price increase to get back to expected economics.
Well that sucks. Both models that are offered out of the box in my systems lead me down some pretty sketchy alleyways.
Now if you were to talk to your customers you'd find that there were multiple entry points to finding you.
I like to think of the buyer's journey can be broken down into some fairly simple terms.
Problem aware
Solution aware
Product aware
There are some steps in between but let's just say for simplicity this is how buyer's think.
With both the first and last touch attribution we faced the inevitable problem of dark attribution. Now dark attribution means that there are attributes to be discovered with a little bit of light shining.
The easiest way to bust out the floodlights is just to talk to your customers. Listening to call recordings on Chorus and Gong does not count. Please. Just. Pick. Up. The. Phone. Say you're doing a study and it would help companies or people just like them come to the well.
It's an exercise in reverse engineering.
So over the course of this call you're doing a lot of listening and much more note taking. Find out how they first became problem aware. Did they talk to a current customer who ranted and raved about you? Did they search the web with something along the lines of 'how do I do X better'?
Get all the details.
Did they one click purchase or one call close? Probably not. They sat on their hands. They came back around later because the problem was still there. They talked about it with others. They forwarded marketing emails to others. They discussed findings from case studies and whitepapers.
So then they stumbled upon your cold email marketing campaign to sign up for a webinar. One of their heroes in their space was a guest on a webinar you hosted. Fancy that. Tagging industry heroes works!
They signed up for the webinar. And they showed up. But left early. Your SDR hit them up hot and heavy a day later. Surely they must have showed up with the intent to buy. Wrong! They showed up because they're still in research mode.
Had the marketing and sales team truly understood the ins and outs of this they would have a concerted effort to find what are the most common set of combinations. From there, doubling down on what works and cutting out what doesn’t will allow teams to meet buyers where they really are.
In multi-touch attribution, the outputs from these models start to tell a more compelling but still incomplete picture. In an MTA (mult-touch attribution), you’ll have multiple sources with a percentage tied to them. What is lost is the sequence of events and the timing gaps in between. The first touch might be a year or two ago. Is that even relevant? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps for three consecutive weeks they went bonkers on your content and showed up at a tradeshow. Then went dead silent until a cold email campaign a year later. The important thing is to understand what are the highest priority combinations and find ways to shorten the gaps. In short, you’re helping the buyer express interest in the shortest path possible.
Attribution tools alone won’t tell the whole story. This is the part where MTA is my preferred model so long as it’s paired with anecdotes. Data and stories. Data feels so unfulfilling when it comes to attribution. Get the stories.
Now when it comes to Ideal Customer Profiles and Persona Valued Maps it's all important to align marketing and sales on what these tools will do. The ICP is the first stab at nailing what the ideal customer looks like. And not just any customer, the ideal customer. This is not to be confused with target customers. The main difference is that the ICP is your most valuable customer. There are many customers, but not all are ICP. Once an ICP is established the entire sales and marketing engine rally their resources to land as many customers that fit the ICP. All other customers receive much fewer acquisition resources for better or worse.
ICPs combine elements of firmographic and behavioral attributes at the organizational level. The firmographic component such as industry, geography, technocraphic, size, or some other factor that can be gleamed from the outside.
Behavioral elements may include searching for companies without a software solution. Their current solution is the status quo of doing things manually. Not selecting a vendor is a completely viable option. This could be a greenfield customer: companies that have not yet adopted a software solution.
Revenue Operations has the uneviable task of identifying which leads and accounts for the profile of ICP. Working within the marketing database to segment the database into targetable lists for the next set of campaigns.
One of my favorite tools is the Persona Valued Map. Think about it as a realistic artist rendering of the personalities and roles which you'll come across. Now let's say for example you were selling an analytics solution to the talent and acquisition team within the HR department. If someone from outside the company were to look at your PVMs they would see something along the lines of a deck filled with x slides.
The first slide would be labeled CHRO
The second slide labeled CFO
The third slide labeled Head of Talent Acquisition
The fourth slide labeled Recruiter
The fifth slide labeled Coordinator
Now if you're a sales rep you're going to want to gain access to all of the first three. That's because these positions are where decisions are made. The fourth and fifth slides may or may not be end users, but they are unlikely to authorize a successful sale.
On each of these slides there should be a carefully detailed study of the following:
What they care about
What worries them
How will your solution make them look good
How you will win
Where businesses fall short is when their beautiful PVMs are received with a round of applause from the whole sales team, only to find out that most of it went in one ear and out the other. Six months later the sales team asks for it and no one can find the file. What a bummer!
This is where bridging lead titles to built in mechanisms within the CRM can make a huge difference. Enablement teams ideally would have discovery questions banks and challenge questions tied to these PVMs. Customers love it when their vendors can relate to them. I challenge all Revenue Operations team to get out there and bridge those gaps.
The last topic I would like to go through today is the concept of handoffs. These are the junctions where one individual passes off vital information to the next person in the relay. Imagine a 4 x 100 Meter relay with the third runner about to hand off to the fourth runner. With enough practice, the marketing to sales relay can be just as instinctive.
Let's start with setting up expectations on what information should be passed off. Lay the groundwork on what's important between both teams. If you were a sales rep, what is the minimum amount of information you need to do your job. Lowering information hurdles and barriers at a reasonable cost and resource expense is the way to go here. There's a concept of Minimum Viable Record that may be useful. Frame the conversation in the form of an information floor because this will balance the need for speed against having perfect information.
Next is to line up your systems in a way that timely captures information and shared it relevant groups. I've once consulted a company that had over 100 fields in their Salesforce page layout. The intention to capture as much information was a good one, but completely misguided. The SDRs at that company started to cut corners by typing in acronyms and placing everything in long form text fields. This left the sales team in a position of having to read through paragraphs of text for every single lead. The SDR saved time, but the account executive was left with jigsaw puzzles. Not a good look.
Try doing a Marie Kondo-like exercise with your data capture. Does this information spark joy? Or rather, is it sufficient but not necessary? If yes, then it's a nice to have, not a need to have.
For important meetings I suggest a short meeting of the minds. Physical meetings are overkill. But one thing that's worked well is adding in a TL;DR Handoff field. Type in a Tweet length handoff note to the next party. It's short. It's sweet.
There's so much more we can get into but I hope this short guide will give you a few ideas on how operations can work with marketing to scale the business. We'll go over specific cadences such as campaign planning and too of funnel forecasting in another episode. Thanks for reading.
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