Luque Wang from GE Digital and Zak Pines from Bedrock Data took the stage on May 11 at MarTech Conference 2017 in San Francisco, to share the story of how Bit Stew Systems (acquired by GE Digital) established its integrated marketing operations.
Luque Wang (Senior Manager, Marketing Operations at GE Digital): Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My name is Luque Wang, Sr Manager, Marketing Operations at GE Digital. I am pleased to be here to share my story. I worked at Bit Stew Systems, a startup company that was acquired by GE Digital last November. This story is about how Bit Stew built its marketing operations from the ground and aligned it with sales through technologies.
But before I start, I like to take this opportunity to thank some special people are who are not in this room, because without them, we would not have this story. So thank you Karen, Franco, Justin, Sandy, and of course, Zak.
Zak Pines (VP, Marketing at Bedrock Data): Luque, thank you. I’m Zak Pines, VP of Marketing of Bedrock Data. Bedrock Data, we are the integration partner for Luque throughout this story and so happy that there's a happy ending based on what Luque was able to build and the growth trajectory of Bit Stew. It led to that acquisition by GE Digital last November. We're here to tell you that story.
Luque: Thank you, Zak.When I started at Bit Stew, the company has already found its secret sauce to developing world-class products and had built a strong brand in the market. But we were facing two big challenges:
1. We were not able to leverage technologies and marketing intelligence to expand our install base, at least not at the level we anticipated
2. There was a loose connection between marketing and sales
I started to tackle the first problem. When looking closer, I found that we were using quite a few tools for different marketing initiatives. For example:
- MailChimp for email campaigns
- Hootsuite for social media
- Google Analytics for web stats
- Zoho CRM for customer and pipeline management
Although each tool works well within its own domain, we were lacking a holistic view of our entire marketing operations. As many of you probably share the pain, it’s very difficult to aggregate data from different tools, which makes it nearly impossible to have an integrated reporting of marketing metrics.
Also, we did not have an effective way of managing contacts. We did not have an effective system to capture leads, no actionable segmentation, no lead-scoring, no progressive profiling. In addition, our processes were not scalable because everything required manual operation.
Because of the systems challenges, there was a missing connection between sales and marketing.
Zak, over to you.
Zak: As Luque set to address this with his management team, one thing that he did from the start was set the expectation of a revenue operations team. Overall team revenue, sales and marketing, and supported by revenue operations. We've all heard that term probably, but where this set apart was from the get-go as Luque looked to define the marketing process, it wasn't in a vacuum, it wasn't siloed, it wasn't “Marketing has so much to deal with that we can't take a full-picture view.” It was looking at systems, data, and process from that initial marketing interaction straight through to when that person would become a customer and beyond. An integrated view, a single operations viewpoint for the company, that was the context or the tone that Luque set as he embarked on defining systems, data, and process.
As he set the expectation and the objectives for his executive team, he presented that to sales and marketing management and got buy-in from both leadership teams that this was going to be something that there'd be agreement on the metrics, there'd be agreement on reporting, and it would be something that would have buy-in from both groups. What were those objectives? Generate more demand - and not leads for the sake of leads - demand that would result in the pipeline, and ultimately, business growth. Providing value to both sales and marketing together, with agreement on where those insights would come from. Being efficient and effective, and setting the foundation where in some businesses, the technology or the operations could be an inhibitor to alignment. Luque's viewpoint was revenue operations, sales & marketing operations, is going to be an enabler for our sales and marketing, or SMarketing, alignment.
As he and I reflected back on the process, these were the steps that he took. Looking at those existing systems, letting out a blueprint for what was in place today, mapping data, and getting to something that Luque calls hidden process. It's an interesting concept, but what a lot of that amounted to was keeping in mind that as looking at the overall flow of data throughout operations, guess what? There's a huge X-factor and it's the sales team. Understanding how's the sales team interacting with these systems? What are they actually doing when they get a lead? How are they updating a lead to be nurtured? How are they qualifying opportunities? Guess what? Sales generate leads too. What are they doing when they get a phone call? What are they doing when they get a new name on an account?
Looking at all these things and ensuring that the end-to-end process took that into account, not marketing theory, but the real world of how marketing data would flow all the way through to that deal and provide a trusted set of reports to sales and marketing. That was the objective, that was the agreed to outcomes that they were driving.
Luque: Thank you, Zak.
Yes, through these 7 steps, we developed integrated SMarketing operations to solve our challenges. As the name suggested, SMarketing is an alignment between Sales and Marketing. This model has been used by many companies across industries.
We used a closed-loop funnel as the framework and set the goal of each layer from bottom to top. Starting with the target annual sales, we estimated the number of closed deals we would need, and a number of opportunities in the pipeline based on the closing ratio. Then we estimated how many Sales qualified contacts are required to fill the pipeline, and how many Marketing qualified contacts are required to generate these sales-ready leads, Eventually, how many individual raw leads we would need at the top funnel to drive the required MQCs.
Then we execute from top to bottom with a primary goal for each layer. But as you can imagine, it’s easier said than done. At the end of the day, here are some takeaways:
Sales and marketing need to
- Have integrated business goals and approaches
- Agree on common terminologies and KPIs
- Have measurable targets and mutual accountability
Here is how we operationalize SMarketing at Bit Stew:
Marketing captures mass contacts, as you all know, which could contain a lot of noise. Through personalized air cover marketing campaigns, we nurture and score each contact, and identify marketing qualified ones.
To better leverage SMarketing, we introduced inside sales that provide “personal touch” to further screen Marketing qualified contacts, and hand the sales-ready ones to sales.
Sales then can focus on these highly engaged leads and have a timeline view of everyone’s touch points.
Now, let Zak show how everything is connected to everything else.
Zak: As Luque worked on the systems to support that vision, these were some of the key principals. From a marketing perspective, it was looking at the various touch points and ensuring that all marketing touch points flowed into a common marketing database, a marketing automation platform. Then, on the sales side, it was similarly ensuring that there was a sales system of record through the CRM and that there was a multi-directional sync between the marketing automation and the CRM. The reason I make that point a multi-directional is there's a constant back and forth between sales and marketing in engaging with a prospect or a customer, and that can often become an issue without the right architecture for the systems.
It's not marketing qualifies this lead, hands-off to sales, never to speak to again, the constant back and forth. There's still marketing programs, there's still progressive profiling, that inside sales team is involved, so there's data being updated, there are different points of interaction, and it's critical that there's back and forth between those tools. In summary, it's marketing system of record, sales system of record, and a robust integration to ensure that the teams have the right consistent set of data to both drive their day-to-day interaction as well as reporting.
Luque: As you see, when everything is connected to everything else, beautiful things happen. The time when we were buried in siloed data and siloed reports have gone.
We re-built our tech stack by merging functional tools into an All-in-One marketing automation tool, synchronized marketing data with the CRM, and provided all sorts of metrics through a single pane of glass.
With a few clicks, we can easily get the answers to many strategic questions. For example, which source provides the most qualified contacts, the percentage of marketing leads to the contribution of pipeline growth. We can adjust our marketing strategies based on content conversion and allocate budget to the most effective channels.
Zak: That's one thing to have the theory, but then operationally, how do you make it happen? Where this kind of goals often falls is the trust in the data, the trust in the data. Now, where are we reporting? Are we reporting out of CRM or are we reporting on the marketing automation? The viewpoint that Luque set up is that both systems have merit and value. CRM is out trusted resource for the pipeline, for sales reporting. The marketing automation goes much more in-depth into all the interactions. That's going to be the day-to-day optimization tool of the marketing team. It's not either/or, but it's ensuring that we have collective trust that the data in both systems can be relied upon. The way to do that is to get all the way down to the individual data object level, the contacts, the accounts, the opportunities, and ensure that there's bi-directional communication between your trusted sales CRM and your trusted marketing system.
Such that, as we talked about earlier, as different interactions are updating, they're kept in sync. For opportunities, that that opportunity data downstream comes back into the marketing system to allow for the types of optimizations that Luque is looking for. This is, in practicality, that's how it happened. It was taking HubSpot as the marketing automation, Zoho as the CRM, and using Bedrock Data to connect that deep integration between the objects to give the management team confidence that whether they were going to marketing or sales, it was a consistency and a confidence in the data.
Reflecting back, a few best practices, a few takeaways that you can bring back to your shops. CRM and marketing automation - it's not either/or. Sales is going to be very pro-CRM, don't push back on that, embrace that, ensure that the marketing system is flowing the right set of data into the CRM to allow to create value through CRM reporting for things like lead sources and lead source details and whole bunch of other things that you can tag through the CRM. But also builds sales confidence that the marketing database is bi-directionally in sync with the CRM so that the marketing reporting has a level of value and the marketing team can be enabled to do their day-to-day optimization.
One takeaway I want to leave you guys with, that kind of deep object mapping, if you will, is something of personal interest to me. I've always been fascinated by the different terminology of systems. some systems call it a lead, some systems call it a person, some systems call it a prospect, some systems call it a contact. In fact, Marketo made a pretty big deal earlier this year to stop calling things leads and now calling them people. It's part of their ABM approach. The system that Luque uses, funny enough, calls opportunities potential.
Luque: Thank you, Zak, for sharing the best practices.
As we all know, setting up the right KPIs and collecting the right data are not easy, but getting actionable insights from the enormous data and applying them to the business operations across different teams are much harder. I truly hope this presentation can give you some inspiration, and help you continue to drive the marketing excellence.
