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Using Customer Journeys to Supercharge RevOps
- December 4th, 2019
- MarTech Advisor
- 0 Comments
Revenue Operations or RevOps as it is more commonly referred to is, at its core, a business strategy on how to operationalize customer alignment. RevOps combines analytics, marketing and sales operations data and functions into one group (formal and not) to plan, manage and measure go-to-market activities. It’s about understanding, codifying and consistently aligning people, processes and technologies to meet customer needs and wants. Not just net new revenue but renewals, account expansion, and up-and cross-sales as well.
What Success Looks Like?
As with anything new it helps to understand what results can be for your organization before starting down the road. RevOps is as much about process change as it is about technology and culture. Guideposts help determine if your implementation is heading in the right direction:- Meet revenue growth and customer retention goals.
- Grow faster and more profitably than your direct competitors.
- Maintain a single, complete and accurate account view that all teams use.
- Align Marketing, Sales, Customer Success and all Ops teams with each other and to customers.
How Journey Maps Supercharge RevOps?
According to Forrester Research, “one of the biggest challenges for Ops teams is to identify, interpret and respond effectively to buyer signals.” Imagine if you knew ahead of time what buying teams do with your competitors? What influencers they trust? Why and when they turn to their peer networks for advice? Journey maps deliver these insights. If RevOps is the backbone enabling organizations to meet their revenue targets; journey maps are the “Google Maps” to buyer signals with turn-by-turn directions. A journey map is a way to uncover and act on how a buying team goes about addressing a business issue or opportunity – and what they expect from the brands they engage with. What touchpoints have (or not) they engaged with you on and what your next best action should be. The most accurate journey maps – and predictors of buyer behavior - are developed through qualitative interviews. It’s not just about what buying teams do but also how they feel at each step along the way. Including emotions is what turns your journey maps into the decoder ring that supercharge RevOps. By having a detailed understanding of customer journeys you gain the visibility needed to assess where each account is in their journey. The maps also provide a blueprint for your sales and marketing strategy and how to align all customer touching teams so you can deliver a consistent, seamless experience; next best actions; and accurately measure weighted attribution. Learn More: Driving Faster B2B Purchases through Sales and Customer AlignmentFour Steps to Supercharge your RevOps
There are four steps that any organization can take to supercharge their RevOps:- Focus on key micro-moments and decisions
- Align internal workflows to journey steps
- Anchor campaigns, content and CTAs to journey maps
- Implement journey-based lead scoring and prioritization
The ROI of Supercharging RevOps
According to Sirius Decisions, less than 20 percent of organizations report they have a RevOps function. Organizations with RevOps grow revenue three times faster than peers that do not. The ROI we’ve helped clients realize is, on average:- 100 percent increase in campaign results
- 40 percent increase in marketing ROI
- 30 percent increase in pipeline opportunities
- 20 increase in revenue
RevOps Is the Life Jacket If You’re Drowning in MarTech
- April 26th, 2019
- MarTech Advisor
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Marketing and Sales have spent the past two decades investing in mountains of technology to drive more revenue, faster. This has fueled the MarTech category explosion and financial bonanzas for vendor unicorns and those acquired at heady valuations. Yet Marketing and Sales remains grossly inefficient. There are several reasons for this including that technology has reinforced, not torn down, organizational and data silos. MarTech categories overlap resulting in redundant functionality yet leave significant gaps. The result is a complex patchwork of capabilities leaving the core objective – faster, sticker, more predictable revenue – elusive. Add to that the pervasive mismatch between positioning and actual capabilities, especially in the name of ‘customer experience’. And then there is the persistent data integrity problem that plagues just about every company. Also Read: What’s Going to Keep CMOs Awake at Night in 2019 We’re in this situation because we’ve been approaching efficiency gains from the bottom-up. Things will not change until we start addressing the problem from the top-down. No amount of feature/process level fiddling and hyper-automation will yield what we seek. The missing link is the codification of context setting strategic plans that guide investment, business process design, automation, and metrics. The good news is a handful of vendors are introducing solutions that capture the bigger picture in a framework that provides context for the rest of the Martech stack. One of the most critical strategies in an organization is the annual go-to-market plan. It is the agreed upon growth plan of how, where, when and who is accountable for what. Every organization develops one. Go-to-Market plans are defined at a high-level and supported by functional plans including sales compensation, marketing plans, etc. The challenge is sticking to the plan and reporting against it. Too often teams forget the details of the plan. Countless cycles are spent on figuring what was agreed to and who didn’t do what instead of evolving the plan based on insights gained from cross-functional metrics and analyses. Also Read: Make Your Marketing Great One company, LeanData, is actively addressing this need and created a new market category – RevOps. SiriusDecisions defines Revenue Operations as an emerging go-to-market paradigm ‘bringing the operational work of sales, marketing and customer success together under one roof’. “Companies have all these tools to achieve revenue and coordinate activities but aren’t orchestrating all the touches,” said Karen Steele, CMO of LeanData. “RevOps unites finance, business operations, sales and marketing ops functions through one platform to plan, execute and measure revenue activities, specifically Go To Market.” As a serial CMO, it always made sense to combine Marketing and Sales Ops. The insights were more meaningful and I want happy to give that function to Finance. Having it report into Sales or Marketing tainted the analyses’ credibility; Finance’s neutrality and comprehensive view of the organization’s performance strengthened the Ops team’s impact. It made my day to hear from Steele that customer RevOps teams are starting to report into COO or CROs and, in LeanData’s case, to the CFO. Revenue Ops solution sits within an organization’s CRM and fixes a key weakness preventing greater unity between sales and marketing ops – inaccurate and fragmented silos of data across the Martech stack enabling customer touch points to be rationalized, optimized and personalized. RevOps won’t magically fix poorly designed processes. It will, however, put sunshine on them so they are addressed. Efficiencies are gained from actionable insights into revenue cycles ‘line of sight’, customer journey alignment, organizational productivity, and ROI analysis based on organization-wide data. LeanData’s approach underpins and aligns the Go-To-Market strategy. The fact they already have mastered consolidating, enhancing and maintaining data from multiple disparate source makes RevOps a logical next step. Welcome to the ‘Needle Move Club’, LeanData, and redefining Martech’s future. First published in MarTech Advisors
What’s Going to Keep CMOs Awake at Night in 2019
- January 27th, 2019
- MarTech Advisor
- 0 Comments
The CMO in 2019
A lot is expected of CMO’s and their teams; for a continued rise in their average tenure, they’ll need to drive the strategy and execution to meet the business goals set forth by their CEO’s and Boards. To gain insights on what’s in store for CMO’s in 2019, I reached out to CMO influencers with this question: “What do you predict will be the biggest challenge for CMOs in 2019?” Here are their answers.Marketing Attribution
Tamara McCleary is CEO of Thulium.co, a social media analytics and consulting agency. For Tamara, it’s not enough for CMO’s to help the organization achieve its goals. CMO’s need to demonstrate, via data, the direct contribution (to those goals) from their specific marketing campaigns and expenditures. Here is Tamara’s prediction: “The greatest challenge for Chief Marketing Officers in 2019 is attribution. Top CMOs realize that to elevate marketing’s seat at the executive table, the CMO must own attribution of marketing spend and prove ROI through data and analytics. The CMO must bring marketing closer to the business, positioning marketing as a business asset versus liability. With artificial intelligence and sophisticated MarTech tools at our disposal, 2019’s challenge is also 2019’s promise to marketers. In a nutshell, the challenge is the c-suite and board’s expectation of the CMO to prove spend and directly correlate marketing’s spend to business revenue generation.”Elevating Your Social Media Marketing
Lilach Bullock is a content marketing and social media marketing expert. Your competition is on the same social networks as you. For Lilach, a challenge for 2019 is how to stand apart on social media and gain an unfair share of voice in your industry. Here is Lilach’s prediction: “I think that one of the biggest challenges that marketers and CMOs will have will be to get results from social media and even more so, grow their results from previous years. Just like with content, social media is getting incredibly saturated and the competition is absolutely fierce amongst brands trying to get their audience's attention. Not to mention, some social networks are making it more and more difficult for brands to be seen and reach their audience. I think that the biggest question CMOs need to ask themselves this year is, how do we stand out? How do we create unique, interesting and engaging campaigns that stand out from our competitors?”From Mediocrity to Growth
Brian Solis is Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group. According to Brian, the right strategy, combined with emerging technologies like AI and machine learning, positions marketing as an “enabler for total CX.” Here is Brian’s prediction: “If I could offer any advice to CMOs, it would be to swap out the ‘M’ for a ‘G.’ Legacy marketing is an endeavor toward building relationships upon a foundation of mediocrity. Instead, the ‘G’ represents an opportunity toward growth. In an era of AI and machine learning, in combination with an open mind and a focus on the entire customer journey, the role of marketing can finally deliver customer experiences that meet or exceed modern customer expectations. Doing so moves the purview of marketing beyond the top of the funnel and positions it as an enabler for total CX. And that makes marketing a partner in business growth and a partner to CEOs, boards and shareholders.”Customer Experience
Karen Steele is CMO of LeanData, Inc. Research firm Gartner, in their CMO Spend Survey 2018-19, note that Customer Experience is “one of the top three capabilities in this year’s survey and one they consider to be vital to their marketing strategies in the coming 18 months.” In fact, Gartner reports that 18% of CMO budgets will be allocated to CX initiatives. Karen has a similar sentiment in her prediction: “The greatest challenge for CMOs in 2019 is the Customer Experience. CMOs must be Customer-centric and focus on the outcomes and experiences Customers achieve with their products and services. We as Marketers have spent a lot of time building relationships with Customers, but often understand little about the Customer’s unique journey and the path to success. Building a network and community with Customers and committing time to listen and learn and document success patterns will help every CMO achieve greater Customer-centricity in 2019.”The CMO in 2019: Your Thoughts?
It was interesting that our experts chose distinct challenges for CMO’s to address in 2019: attribution, social media marketing, growth and customer experience. It’s clear that CMO’s have a lot on their plates. What are your thoughts about the CMO in 2019? I’d love to hear from you. Share your insights in the comments area below. Thanks!5 Influencers Predict AI’s Impact on Business in 2019
- December 20th, 2018
- MarTech Advisor
- 0 Comments
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) already proving its worth to adopters, it’s not surprising that an increasing number of companies will implement and leverage AI in 2019. Now, it’s no longer a question of whether AI will take off. Instead, it’s a question of which companies will keep up. Here are five predictions from five influencers on the impact AI will have on businesses in 2019. From retail giants to Silicon Valley startups, a rapidly growing number of companies are embedding AI into their businesses. Even the public has begun to welcome AI into their homes. With 2018 soon coming to a close, it’s time to start asking what the future holds for AI and how its reach will continue to expand in 2019. We surveyed a diverse group of industry leaders for answers. Here, we’ll take a look at their insights and learn what AI has to offer in the coming year.
# Prediction 1: Improved Cyber Threat Detection, Will Lassalle
“My prediction for artificial intelligence in 2019 is specific to the 3 million employee shortfall in cybersecurity, where the opportunity exists for artificial intelligence to help automate threat detection and response,” said Will Lassalle, CIO of Lynx Technology Partners and JLS Technology USA. “This can ease the burden on employees, and potentially help identify threats more efficiently than other software-driven approaches, shrinking the attack surface instead of constantly chasing after malicious activity.” The numbers support Lassalle’s sentiment — according to Cisco’s 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report, 32 percent of organizations are “completely reliant” on AI in terms of their security infrastructure.
# Prediction 2: Machine Learning at Scale, Sam Charrington
“Over the past few years, early-adopter enterprises have launched their initial machine learning and AI projects, with many of those efforts recently coming to fruition,” said Sam Charrington, founder of CloudPulse Strategies. “In 2019 and 2020, these companies start to understand that scaling machine learning in the enterprise requires a different set of skills and technology than successfully delivering individual machine learning models and projects. As a result, we’ll start to see enterprises establish specialist machine learning infrastructure teams and platforms to help reduce the barriers to delivering machine learning at scale.” Charrington’s predictions are in line with a recent report from Indeed, which discovered that employer demand for AI-related jobs more than doubled between 2016 and 2018.
# Prediction 3: Next-Gen Virtual Assistants, Evan Kirstel
“An AI-based personal assistant — aka Siri on steroids — will hit the market in 2019,” said Evan Kirstel, chief digital evangelist at EviraHealth. “It will be the true human-like, natural language-based personal executive assistant that we have been dreaming of (and that Siri, Cortana, Alexa and others have yet to achieve). It may come from Google, Microsoft, IBM Watson or a dozen other startups that are working in this space.” Kirstel’s forecast isn’t hard to believe: According to Adobe’s 2018 State of Voice Assistants report, an astonishing 48 percent of consumers will own a smart speaker after the 2018 holiday season, illustrating the demand for this technology already.
# Prediction 4: Adoption Across the Board, Isaac Sacolick
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning will increase adoption in 2019 in several ways,” said Isaac Sacolick, president and CIO of StarCIO. “Companies leading the adoption curve will invest more in reinforcement learning, address bias gaps in their data sets, and look to make their AI algorithms more explainable.” He added, “Mainstream organizations will take advantage of AI embedded in their strategic platforms such as AI-driven sales forecasting, marketing automation and AIOps. Lastly, public cloud vendors will make their AI offerings easier to use and more scalable for IoT applications.” Sacolick’s forecast seems to agree with a survey from McKinsey & Company found that nearly half of respondents’ organizations have integrated at least one form of AI into their standard business processes. The same report also found that companies across a wide array of industries are seeing value in AI, from manufacturing to human resources.
# Prediction 5: AI Solutions Put to the Test, Marshall Choy
“With a multitude of new AI products and services becoming available in 2019, the complex and large requirements of early adopters will truly test and challenge these new technologies,” said Marshall Choy, vice president of product at SambaNova Systems. “AI is not a product to be bought and sold, but a core enabling technology for driving innovation. Therefore, an AI-driven approach to tackling data management requirements will necessitate a focus on not only individual layers of the technology stack but also in how those layers interact and integrate with each other.” This prediction’s veracity is reflected in data from McKinsey & Company. Findings revealed that of those companies that have adopted AI, only 15 percent believe they have the right technological infrastructure and architecture in place to support AI systems.
Assess How Great Your Marketing is
- November 23rd, 2018
- MarTech Advisor
- 0 Comments
It’s said that self-reflection is a good thing. It helps us to understand ourselves more clearly. How we go about that self-reflection, however, determines the value of the effort. Do we give it cursory attention afraid to know the real truth or do we look at all the evidence revealing a great many things we’ve forgotten we do very well and the areas that need some attention? In times of market velocity and economic volatility, it’s essential that every organization routinely evaluate its effectiveness. Is it doing the right things in the best possible way to deliver the results needed today and tomorrow? Nowhere is that more crucial than in marketing. Not only because the discipline is undergoing rapid transformation but also because what defines marketing differs dramatically based on the company’s and its industry growth stage. Unfortunately, for most marketing organizations what should be an annual exercise typically happens only when a new leader arrives. There are many approaches you can use to conduct a marketing assessment; the one we have used with clients for years is evidence-based. It works because over the years we’ve built a comprehensive master template that is easy to customize and quick to complete. The assessment process evaluates strategies, plans, activities, investments and their results as evidenced by artifacts. Documents, files, information, and/or tools are artifacts specifically developed to accomplish an activity; they either exist or they don’t. Each assessment area has between 20 and 100 specific evidence artifacts that we look for, evaluate and then score. An artifact is objectively assessed based on completeness, adherence to modern marketing and industry best practices including:
- Appropriateness for the company and market maturity.
- Soundness and completeness.
- Resource allocation rationale.
- Use of metrics to manage and measure ROI.
- Identification of data integrity, process integration, and skill/competency gaps.
A partial list of artifacts sought:
- “Ideal” lead profiles
- Documented and agreed upon definitions and criteria for each lead stage/type
- Lead scoring, nurture and retargeting definitions and algorithms
- Consistent use of lead definitions by sales, marketing, ops and in reports
- Weighting of each tollgate CTA – in aggregate or by persona/role
- Lead journey stage calculation based on % engagement alignment with journey maps