On this week’s episode, we are delighted to have a very special guest, Shonal Narayan, Sr. Director of Marketing at Everstring.

“Marketing ops is the Scottie Pippen of marketing.” - Shonal Narayan

Well said. Marketing operations won’t get the credit they deserve and seem to be often undervalued. Michael Jordan will get all the praise, but without Pippen, there is no championship.

That’s why it’s critical not to undermine the importance of alignment, especially with demand gen and marketing ops.

Having both teams on the same page moving towards the same goals of the business is so important to drive the results you need.

Some great takeaways from our conversation includes:

• How marketing ops and demand gen can support each other
• Marketing ops as strategic partners for demand gen
• Getting into the details of an ABM Play Everstring is running now
• And much more!

Tune in for a great listen and see how marketing ops can deliver a championship to you.

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Transcription

Crissy:

Hey, so welcome back to fwd:Thinking. We have ... I feel like I say a special guest every time we have a guest, but I'm actually super excited about this one. We have Shonal Narayan, who's the senior director of marketing at EverString. Shonal and I go way back. Like 10 years now, Shonal, I think. We both worked together at Marketo. He worked in demand gen and I worked in marketing ops. Since then, we've stayed close, and EverString's actually a client of CS2 Marketing.

One of the reasons why we wanted to have Shonal on today was because of his background in demand gen, but also being so close to ops and actually doing ops himself in a consulting gig. So, welcome, Shonal. Thanks for joining us on today's episode.

Shonal:

Thank you guys for having me. I'd like to think I'm a special guest,

Crissy:

Very special. Okay. Like I mentioned, today we want to talk about how MOps and demand gen, or basically the marketing team that develops any ABM strategy or marketing strategy, can work closely and be better aligned to drive pipeline. We're actually going to dive deep into an example of an ABM play campaign at EverString, but before we do that, I want to talk about ... Just given your background, you've worked in demand gen, you run marketing right now at EverString, but also, you've done marketing operations consult team at Hylite Marketing.

So we thought it would be great for you to talk about why it's so important for those teams to be aligned. You know, you can see it from both perspectives, which I think is awesome. And also, for people who don't maybe even have a strong ops arm, why it'd be good for them to partner with an operations resource to really get their campaigns operationalized and off the ground. So yeah, maybe if you could talk about why it's so important in your eyes.

Shonal:

Sure, yeah. And fun fact, you and I worked together at Marketo, and I was one of the ones that interviewed you when we didn't really have an ops team, so you came on board and really crushed it there at Marketo, and I got to move over more to the program side. So, early on at Marketo, I was handling the email programs and also the MOPS side of it, scoring and nurturing, so great to have that team.

So yeah, stressing the importance of that. I think we were a well-oiled machine at Marketo because we had such strong alignment from a demand gen perspective and a marketing ops perspective, and also our SDR team and sales team. We all collaborated and understood that there was a shared vision, right? At that point, MQLs mattered, right? I think a lot of people are now talking about getting rid of MQLs, more move into more of a pipeline focus. I think back then, we were really focused on top of funnel, getting them into our database, and then nurturing them. I think just that process, it involves a demand gen team, it involves marketing ops, it involves SDRs, because they're the ones who are going to follow up once an MQL has been created.

Shonal:

We met frequently, as a marketing ops team and a demand gen team. We talked about, hey, here are the programs that we have coming up, here are the nurtures we'd like to get in place, and then from a marketing ops perspective, which is great, you guys always told us, "Well, I think we should A/B test these emails," or, "We should move this email early on, and then here's how we can make this visible to our SDR team," so they could follow up with the hottest prospects right away.

Having that alignment, I think, is definitely important. When I moved on from Marketo and moved into consulting, there were teams ... and I was really surprised when I got into it. I was like, "Wow, there's a lot of teams that are not even aligned on what their business goal is," right? From a demand gen perspective they're like, "Well, we're trying to boost up our MQL numbers, so we're going to create nurture programs, or we're going to do a bunch of content syndication or digital programs," and as they come in, they're just kind of like, “We want to score them and then move them to the SDR team.”

Shonal:

So, there wasn't really a part where the marketing ops came in and discussed the types of programs, and they didn't really think about it from that perspective. It's more like, here's a ticket, it's your ticket, go and create this nurture program for us," and then they're like, "Okay, we're going to do it, and here it is." And then if it doesn't perform, it's like, is it the demand gen person who goes and takes the heat, or is it the marketing ops person that set it up this certain way, or an SDR who didn't follow up?

So, I think you have to bring those groups together and really understand, what are we trying to achieve here? And really treat it as one team, right? It's a marketing team. At EverString, the SDRs are under marketing, and obviously, marketing ops is. But it's like, how do we function as a marketing unit together to drive the same results? Which, for us, it's pipeline, right? Meetings, books, MQLs, is all great to see, but at the end of the day, are we generating pipeline?

Crissy:

Totally. I think that 10 years ago, like you mentioned, you interviewed me to be ... I was our second MOPS person. But because there wasn't that distinguishment between the marketing ops team and the demand gen team, we were all just kind of looked at as the marketing team. Over time, it's been great for marketing ops to get our own visible department. We kind of needed that to establish how we could be strategic, provide guidance. There's a lot we do. But at that same time, I think it's also separated us from the marketing team as a whole, or created a little bit of a silo.

So, I think now it's important to figure out, how do we bring that back? How do we make sure everyone's working together as a marketing team and working closely and having that alignment? You always see those shifts, you know? The same tactics we used to align marketing and sales, we need to figure out how to do that within our own team. I think that we'll talk about it later, but I think you're doing that a bit at EverString right now, and like you said, working as a one team.

Crissy:

Is there any more downfalls that you can talk about, maybe, with when there isn't alignment that you've seen? What are some of the impacts of that? I know you've seen both, right? You've seen great alignment and you've seen poor alignment. What are some of those downfalls or impacts on pipeline generation when there isn't alignment?

Shonal:

Yeah. I mean, as I mentioned, I think if you don't come together before you launch a program and figure out what the business goal is, right? Are we trying to achieve more MQLs? Are we trying to penetrate our install base? What are we trying to do as a unit? If you don't come together, then it's like, well, they're working in a silo, marketing ops are working in a silo, and then SDRs are last to know. Like, oh, that campaign went out? Why is this MQL on my desk? What do I do with this? Right? So, if you don't come together, oftentimes, one or more of those teams are going to get burned.

And really, you're not going to process as a well-oiled machine. The thing that was great at Marketo was, our SDRs knew when a program was coming up. We had a calendar on our whiteboard, we had a Google calendar, at that point, before Marketo had the calendaring functionality. And we would put on there that, hey, this email is going to drop, and it's a promotion for a webinar. Then some people could have problems getting into the webinar, so they would call in and an SDR would answer, and they knew what webinar they were talking about, when it's happening.

Shonal:

Just having that alignment, I think, it definitely matters. If you don't have it, then you're really looking at it from one perspective. And it's oftentimes demand gen's perspective, right? They're like, "Well, I'm going to do this email-driven campaign, and I need marketing ops to set it up." But if that goes out and nobody understands what's going on with it, who it's meant for, and what the follow-up script's going to be ... Because if the SDR is answering emails or answering a phone blindly, your company's going to look stupid, right?

So, I think you have to get the whole team together. That's where I think the collaboration we have with you guys is that we bring you guys on early on in the program, and so you guys can see what we're trying to achieve. We'll vet it through multiple teams, right? We'll look at it from a demand gen perspective. We'll vet it with our SDR leaders to make sure that they're aligned with what we're doing. They can give their input on what messaging they've seen work on their outbound cadences, what call scripts maybe we can generate for them, what does the touchpoints look like, is it going to be seven, is it going to be 14, is it across 10 days, is it across three months?

Shonal:

And then really seeing it from your perspective. Okay, we have the likes of Sendoso, or we have the likes of Outreach or SalesLoft. Here's how we can integrate these pieces so they could all feed back to the foundation, which is Salesforce. Everything plugs through there, so you guys are the ones that tell us how to move these dials and how we can view this as a shared view across the team.

So, it's definitely important. From a marketing ops perspective ... Since I see it from both perspectives, right? My consulting side, most of my engagements are from a marketing ops perspective, and then I head up demand gen at EverString. So I get to see it from both sides. Really, the important skillset to have there ... Obviously, if you're a demand gen person, you don't need to know all the integrations and everything that goes into the ops side, but you need to know enough to be able to help your ops team out. You can't just say, "Hey, I'm going to launch a campaign that needs this SMS component that then feeds into Terminus, that'll then pop a display into this thing, and then it'll automatically trigger a LinkedIn InMail." It's like, wait, that doesn't exist.

Shonal:

So, you got to think about, okay, what's realistic? What does my team look like on the marketing ops side, right? Is it in-house? How many people do we have? Is it a contractor? Do we bring them in so they understand the business value? And then just thinking about it from that perspective. And then from a marketing ops perspective, it's really, oftentimes they're pegged as not being creative, right? They're just the ones pushing the pencil, or they're integrating and mapping things out. But from a creative perspective, thinking about it from, okay, if I were to receive this email ... because marketing teams oftentimes are going to get spammed, or they're going to get sent a bunch of emails, right? They'll just see, oh, they're marketing in the title, I'm going to just tell them about our software. So, a marketing ops person, they oftentimes do receive emails from ... you know, demand gen emails.

So, understanding what works and what doesn't resonate with you, and then working with your demand gen team to be like, "Hey, maybe we should A/B test that subject line," or, "Hey, maybe we should move the offer up in the sequence." So, just seeing it from your perspective, and what would look great from our brand, from our marketing campaigns, kind of working together on that standpoint.

Charlie:

Yeah, I think that's such an important point. We touch on that a lot on this podcast, around marketing operations being the closest people to the data and really understanding the data, and they should be able to give that feedback back to the demand gen team and the other teams on what is working and what's not working, because I think a lot of times, people in marketing operations, they don't feel like they have a stake in the game. They're just like, "Okay, well, I'll just take everything from demand gen. I'll do it, and if it doesn't work, it's on them." But what you're saying is, because you can create a much more collaborative effort, marketing operations does have a stake in that, and should really feel like they need to be able to provide feedback to make those campaigns better for the demand gen team, because they're really involved in them.

Crissy:

Totally. I think we look at startups and we think, oh, well, marketing ops knows what campaigns are going out, they maybe work with demand gen, customer marketing, but if you even look at bigger marketing teams, a marketing ops team is supporting so many teams in that marketing org that they see all the campaigns. They know what's working, they know what's not. But one person in demand gen will only really know what's working on the programs that they are working on. So yeah, they're going to be the best source for that. And they've been looked to, hey, you ran those numbers. Okay, look into why it's performing that well. So, they'll even be forced to think about, like, why do we have that data? What can we improve? And more and more, marketing ops is looked at to provide that guidance even back to the demand gen team. So, I think that is super important.

Charlie:

With marketing operations, even for people in marketing operations, over the last 10 years, since you two worked at Marketo, it's just got exponentially more complicated, right? For a demand gen person who doesn't live in the MOPS world 24/7, it can definitely ... I'm sure it's overwhelming, right? To even really get into things like the data, integrations, APIs, all of this stuff. But then this is why we really were excited to bring you on, because you do have the experience from both of those sides. So I think you can really put your demand gen hat on one minute, then put your marketing ops hat on, and really empathize with both groups.

From the demand gen point of view, what can someone do if they haven't really spent the time to understand marketing operations to this point, but then they listen to this and they realize, okay, actually, I've had a few issues in the past where I've tried to get something done, and then I find out it's not been possible, what's a good next step for them to try and really immerse themselves and understand marketing operations enough to help them with their own job?

Shonal:

Yeah, that's definitely a good question. I think for me it's difficult, because I have that blended view. I have both sides, so I kind of empathize with both, like you said. It's tough for me to distinguish, all right, what is marketing ops and what is demand gen? I kind of think of it in its entirety. But being at EverString, since I'm focused on demand generation and I work with CS2 to do the marketing ops side of it, it's a little easier for me to understand, okay, here's where I can stop, and then here's where I can hand off and CS2 will know better how these integration points work, and how we can flow all this information into CRM so our sales team can see it.

But I think going into it understanding that, okay, what am I trying to achieve, and what would I need marketing ops to do for me? Oftentimes, demand gen teams think about that, right? How can my marketing ops team support me? And marketing ops team thinks about it, how can I support my demand gen team, how can I support my sales team? So, from a demand gen perspective, it's understanding, at what point am I going to hand this off to my marketing ops team, and what are the things that they're going to do? And I should be able to understand it for my next campaign or my next program, what's going to be required of that team, so then I can better come equipped and then say, "Okay, here's what I need from them, and here's what they've provided to me. Going into the next channel or the next program that I'm going to do, I need to be cognizant of that. So, when I make my request, do they have the resources? Do they have the bandwidth? What's the turnaround time, maybe?" because oftentimes, from a demand gen perspective, it's like, I need that program out yesterday, and you send it out to your marketing ops team and they do their magic.

Shonal:

But really understanding, okay, what's involved in that process, often allows you to empathize with the work that goes into it. But I think also just asking the question, right? Like, what went into that program, or what are you going to need from me so I can provide you all that information that you need to get this done? Then, if you have that kind of collaborative relationship already with your marketing ops team, I think just saying, “Hey, here's what I'm thinking. I'd love to get your thoughts on it. Should we A/B test anywhere here? Should we throttle the email? Should we maybe move direct mail further down, or bring in an executive sponsorship piece into this mix?”

So, those types of things, just being able to collaborate with your marketing ops team, because like you said, they are the gatekeepers of the data. They can go look into another region and see, oh, this is working in EMEA, right? You guys may want to try this. Or looking at the data as a whole, like, yeah, these types of emails don't work. You guys might want to think about doing something else. So, I think from that demand gen perspective, it's really just even asking the questions, or begging for the marketing ops team to even be collaborative. And I think the marketing ops team would love that, right?

Shonal:

Just to be more involved in a program, to say, "Hey, I added my two cents in that, and here's how it performed." When I was back at Marketo, Maria Pergolino would often review the programs that were going out, and she would say, "You know, I don't think we should do this, I don't think we should do this," and I would always be like, "Well, let's A/B test it. I think my subject line will do well." Oftentimes, I would show her and she would hate it, but it's just one of those things where you're like, "You know, please prove me wrong," and have it be more of a friendly competition. So, I think just having them be more involved, like getting them involved in the programmatic side of it, I think that it builds a tighter relationship.

Charlie:

Big time. I think a lot of our [inaudible 00:18:21] right now is moving from tactical to strategic for marketing operations, and what better way can you do that than being a strategic partner to your demand gen team and helping them improve their campaigns through all of your knowledge? So if you're a marketing operations person listening to this, don't wait for the demand gen person to ask. It's great if they do, but try and get involved in those conversations early and really be part of that process.

I think we wanted to switch gears and really maybe get down into the details of an ABM play that you've worked on recently, where you've touched on all of these really important points, and you brought that all together with this play. Can you just maybe just kick it off, give us a high-level of that program, how it worked, and then we'll dive into some of the details?

Shonal:

Definitely, yeah. I just want to give you guys a plug. CS2, you guys are great. I think as I was talking about, you need that marketing ops team that collaborates with demand gen. That's where you guys are coming from, right? You guys come from that demand gen and marketing ops background, so you guys can see it from both perspective, and really try to achieve that business case that we're going forward. It's like, all right, what are our goals here? What are we trying to achieve? Here's how we all best think it's going to work.

So yeah, the ABM play. We, I think, got it off the ground late last year, heading into this year. Really, we had all these pieces in place of what we thought from a demand gen perspective, put together a PowerPoint presentation, and said, "Okay, here are all the components that we think should go into it." You know, there's going to be an email nurture part of it, there's going to be a LinkedIn component where we're showing some display ads to those target accounts. Let me take a step back. It boils down to, who are our target accounts, right? And what are we trying to achieve.

Shonal:

We really had difficulties cracking into these tier-one accounts. Internally, obviously, we use EverString to surface what are the account we're going to go after. We leverage intent data over the top to show which ones are actively surging. So, we took that list and said, "Okay, here's our tier-one accounts," divided it across the AEs, and they vetted it, they took a look, they had the SDR teams, we also had our data team, go in and enrich with contacts. So, we had the accounts, we had the contacts in our ideal buyer persona ready to go, and we said, “Okay, that's the foundational part of it.”

Then we started deciding, okay, “What are the touchpoints going to look like? How are we going to effectively crack into these accounts using our marketing team, using our sales team, using our SDR team, and also our executive team?” So we kind of concocted this ABM plan. Really, it involved the email component, as I mentioned, from a Marketo standpoint, and then it also had a Sendoso direct mail component to it. It had a LinkedIn component, as I mentioned, and then also an InMail component from our CEO. Then lastly, it's really once they get to a certain point that our SDRs will put them into an outbound cadence.

Shonal:

So, we crafted that, and we surfaced it across the different teams. We had our SDR leaders look at it, and they gave their input as to what they think the email should look like, the best subject lines that they've seen performing well, the different messaging, and then we allowed for a component in the email where they could personalize it. So, if it's a financial services company, they can maybe put in some of our customers that are in that vertical, versus SaaS. So, really allowing them to personalize the message, but having it set up in this cadence where it's across 25 days, and then we have our Marketo component hits them and kind of warms them up.

So really, what we did was had it vetted across the different teams. That really fed into the collaboration side of it. They got to say, "Hey, we think this will work. Let's test this, let's do this." We had our sales team look at it. They gave their feedback. Then we also had a third-party analyst firm, TOPO. They also had their team look at it. Really, the feedback that they gave us was, move your direct mail component earlier on, which definitely helped us out. We had it later on, but they were like, “I think everything looks good here, just move that forward.”

Shonal:

So, we got that off the ground, and then we had it running for about a couple of months, and then the pandemic hit. Then really the direct mail component rendered itself useless to us. We tried the address verification. There wasn't a lot of success there. So, we removed that component, and we went forward and added some more personalization to it. We really tried to hone in on the messaging that was working, since we didn't have that direct mail component.

That has been the piece that we all worked together, across these multiple teams, also bringing in a third party to vet it. I would recommend that to people out there, that really our thinking about ABM or saying, "Hey, I want to do an ABM pilot ..." which, for me, I think ABM pilot should just be out of your vocabulary. I think if you're going to go in on ABM, you really want to have your team vetted. You really want to have ... really put more eggs in that basket.

Shonal:

I think if you're going to go in and say, "Hey, we're going to pilot it, dip our toes, and then back out," you're pretty much going to back out, because ABM is, for the most part, unless you're lucky ... It's not going to work out right off the bat, right? You're going to make iterations, you're going to make tweaks to it. Again, you're going after these select accounts, so oftentimes they're enterprise companies. So you're going to have to pillar in and figure out who the right contact is. Oftentimes, you're not going to have the right contact to begin with.

So, it's going to take time. Just start simple, start small, but give it some time. And then collaborate with your team. I think that's what made this successful. It's like, we got to collaborate with you guys, setting up infrastructure in Salesforce, in Marketo. Also, you guys being able to pivot, because we made the switch from SalesLoft to Outreach, and you guys helped us move that over. And then enabling our SDR team, right, to set up all the reports that they can look at. Which ones are within weeks one and five, and where is that InMail touch going to happen? And then integrating from LinkedIn into Salesforce so we can see, okay, there was a InMail dropped. Now the outbound cadence can go out. So, just kind of setting up that entire infrastructure. We all collaborated and worked together to come up with that.

Shonal:

So, definitely felt like that ABM ... You know, the process is a team effort. And it's that way for a reason. It needs to be a team effort, or else marketing's going to do it in a vacuum, sales is not going to understand what's going out, going on, or they're going to say, "Hey, this ABM thing's not working out," right? Because they're not really involved. They're not invested in it. And vice versa. Sometimes it works the opposite way.

Crissy:

Yeah, totally. I think this is where the alignment piece, like really focusing on creating those relationships with the ops team, demand gen, sales development or sales, whoever the end user is, this is where it actually becomes really key, is the iteration part, because like you said with ABM, it's always going to evolve. And a lot of projects like this that are super important, in getting them off the ground, even your investment at the beginning might be lower.

But then once you see that you're getting into a rhythm, you've gotten to a certain level of sophistication ... and that's kind of like what we saw with you guys in working with you. Then we said, "Okay, this is going to be our strategy moving forward, and we've learned a lot and we've made some changes, but let's make it even easier. We got feedback from sales, and we want them to be able to just do a few clicks, be able to elect people into this ABM campaign, and get them into it." Then we actually took that advice and operationalized that in Salesforce. But without being able to gather that feedback, without even being able to feel comfortable having everyone in that room talking about the campaign and how it's working, we wouldn't have been able to even do that iteration.

Crissy:

And over time, you're always getting feedback. We had a call today, and we're getting some feedback from sales. So I think that's what could also prevent people from even seeing it through with their ABM strategy, is because there was no iteration done, so it just falls flat, they call it a fail, and then they try something else.

Just touching on the iteration standpoint, from your perspective, what were some of the learning lessons so far with ABM play? Because I think we talk about the positives and all the things that you should do, but since you've gone through it, for our listeners, what are maybe some feedback for them with their devising this plan, or operations is figuring out how they can better align with demand gen? What are some of the things that ops can look out for as learnings that you got throughout the process?

Shonal:

Sure, yeah. I mean, I take it back to just aligning on the business goal, right? If you're launching ABM to add more contacts to certain accounts, or pillar in, or you're doing it to your install base and trying for upsell opportunities, right? So, you just have to come to an agreement. Okay, what are we doing this for? And then just really honing in on those accounts right off the bat, right? So, there's going to be constantly refreshes going on. As we've done this, and it's almost been a year since we launched, we've updated our tiered accounts, right? We've gone through and moved tier-ones down and promoted some up. Now that we have some new ones, it's just constantly, okay, how are we going to refresh this, and how are we going to show this inside of CRM? Working with the data teams.

So, it's unique, because I work at EverString, a data company, so we have our own data team we could just go to and just say, "Hey, can you enrich these accounts with these contacts?" And they're able to do that right away. Some teams who don't have that, or maybe have an outsourced marketing ops team, it may be difficult for them to be that agile, right, and say, “Okay, well, I'm going to now change up our accounts. I've just been using this stale list for a year.”

Shonal:

So, one of the things that they can do just easily is if they have intent information, right? Through Bombora or G2 Crowd, EverString, whoever it may be. You can just constantly refresh that and look at accounts that are surging on particular topics that you care about. That can help you refresh your list and go after new accounts if you haven't had success in other ones. And you know, I don't think there is a point ... because I was asked this before. It was like, when do you realize that this ABM's not going to work, or when you should start changing in or refreshing accounts? For us, we had a 25-day cadence, and then others, when I was in consulting, others have three months, four months, where they were going after the same accounts.

So, it's really, like, how long are your sales cycles? Are they enterprise accounts? What are the personas, right? What's the different messaging? And the tactics are going to be ... So, for us, we knew it was going to take more than 25 days, right? Because that 25 days was just for the SDR outbound cadence. That only started after our Marketo kind of warming them up nurture went out, right? So, that took about four weeks where we were doing that, and then in the fifth week, a direct mail component would land. Then once that delivered, an InMail went out from our executive sponsor, and then the SDRs would start. So you know, five to six weeks have already gone by, and then they start their 21-day cadence.

Shonal:

So, if you're like, "Hey, this program, they ran through all of that and nobody responded. This is a failure." Right? Oftentimes, I think demand gen people want to say that. Like, "Hey, you know, this is not going to work. We just need to move off of it. Maybe the messaging's not working. Maybe just our cadence is not working." I mean, I think having it vetted from others, right? That helped us, when we went to TOPO. We also went to a couple other companies, like friendly brands, and said, "Hey, this is what we're thinking about doing. What have you guys seen that has been successful?" And obviously, they told us what they saw, and it was kind of in line with what we already had set up, but getting that feedback helped us out.

But also, just being patient, right? For marketing ops folks, it's really like, you may want to compare it to something, right, and say, "Okay, this is ... Let's compare this to a content syndication program that we ran. Oh, this generated this many MQLs, here's how much pipeline was created from it. We should just continue to do that." Whereas with ABM, it's more for, I think, for the long haul, right? Whether you're going to go after a set, you know, the named accounts, and maybe you have 10 accounts you're going to go after, or you have 500 accounts you're going to go after, I think just letting it run its course, seeing where you could make some tweaks, maybe operationally, right? Like, oh, this is inefficient.

Shonal:

Which we continue to find, right? We're finding that, hey, we'd like some more automation in some of our triggering things, right? So if an InMail goes out, maybe the outbound cadence is going to be triggered off of that email drop, and so let's set that up. Right now it's manual, and so we have to go through Google Sheets or Salesforce, and we're going all over the place. Let's figure out how we can optimize it, how we can limit the clicks, like you said, Crissy. Ultimately, it's what's going to make it easy for a salesperson to adopt?

Fortunately, for this year that we've had it running, our SDR hasn't had trouble going in and nominating new contacts to drop into it, because if there would've been some friction there, I think they would've easily resisted doing this, and easily resisted scaling it, right? From five contacts per week, if we moved up to 50, they'd be like, “No, I'm not going to do that, because you guys make five clicks here, and I have to go verify it in a Google Sheet.”

Shonal:

So, we moved off of Google Sheets completely early on, which was what we had it set up with, to put everything into CRM. That was one of our things where we kind of changed it in mid-flight, was we were working off of Google Sheets, and then we had all these different tabs, and we moved that into Salesforce, working with you guys. That was painful, because a lot of the SDRs were like, "I don't want to go into Salesforce and click these buttons, add them to campaigns." So we just sat back and said, “No, we're going to train you guys how to do this. We're going to create documentation, and then now you guys are going to use it, and it's going to be a lot easier.” And that's what we did. Instead of stopping it or saying, "Yeah, this is not successful, we've run out of tabs in our Google Sheet," let's just figure out a better way to do this. So we moved it all into Salesforce.

Charlie:

Yeah. And one of the things you touched on before was around getting everyone aligned around the same business objective. Could you take us through what were the KPIs that were the most important throughout your ABM programs? I think you've got an opinion on MQLs that would be interesting to hear as well.

Shonal:

Yeah. Yeah, we completely don't care about MQLs at EverString. I mean, we look at it. We look at our SDR team as one team, one goal, right? We consider that our entire marketing team. If a lead was sourced through SDR outbound, if it was sourced through an InMail that they sent out, if it was sourced through a marketing program, we see that all as marketing-attributed opportunity or meeting booked, right? So, at the end of the day, how many meetings did we get put on the calendar for our sales rep, and then how many of those turned into pipeline? So we kind of bypass the traditional MQL.

It's really like everybody is driving towards that shared vision. Even if we're running one-off marketing programs, it's really, how can we accelerate somebody to see a demo or to be interested in a hand-raiser activity, right? And we consider hand-raiser anything that they're exhibiting that they're evaluating a data provider. So, for us, it's really like, let's fast-track, or how do we fast-track that?

Shonal:

I mean, we still have our general nurture programs, top-of-funnel content, and get people interested. But it's really like, all right, how do we drive them along? Is this the right person that we're going after? Which is why having your account fit and figuring out with intent information, and also their engagement that they're doing, first-party and third-party, what does that account story look like? And then what's the best message to reach out with?

Really, our SDR team, even in a pandemic, we kind of have to pull them back in and say, "Hey, we can't be super aggressive. We have to be empathetic and really understand that this is a difficult time for everybody." But I think we quickly found out that, hey, our messaging is resonating, because I think as people started figuring out, okay, what's my work schedule going to look like, where are my kids going to be, how can I take my meetings and do all this, really, we tried to meet them with a solution.

Shonal:

That was really our messaging across the board, is like, drive that solution for them, and not just pitch, hey, we have this product, look at all these features. It's really like, right now, figuring out who's an essential business, who's not, right? Our data is refreshed once businesses are closing down, unfortunately, and new businesses are popping up. You're going to want to know, you know, where are they headquartered, who are the approval contacts there, and if they're surging on particular topics you care about. So it's really like developing that use case and that solution base that really helped us attract these people, and they were ... remain interested in what we did.

So, from a marketing ops perspective, I think you guys helped us see the data, interpret the data from our ABM campaign. And it's really driving back to the same thing, which is how many meetings were booked, and how much pipeline was created? So looking at that, I think for the last quarter, around 60% of pipeline created for our enterprise unit was influenced by the ABM program.

Crissy:

Yeah, that's awesome. One of the things that becomes this struggle, I think, for marketing teams when they're doing this is, what's the one thing that pushed them over the line? We need to give sales credit, we need to give marketing credit. But like you said, you have like five different touchpoints, right? And actually, marketing is teeing up that person for an SDR to be effective in their outreach, because look at all the things that they've been ... the brand of EverString that's touched them. You have your nurture, you have your ads, you have an InMail. So actually, it just makes the SDR outreach just more effective in getting them to connect.

So, just trying to say, "Oh, the last touch was the sequence. That should get credit," you know, no. That's probably the whole reason why they connected on that sequence to begin with. So I think this is where the attribution and influence, what we talk about, like really think about this as a holistic campaign, and tie the attribution back to that whole effort. And that is tied to marketing and sales, and they can share that success and the win. And looking at opportunities is a way to do that, and the influence on those opportunities. So I think that breaks down those alignment issues as well, this tug-of-war that you see.

Crissy:

So, I think we've gone a little bit over time, but one last thing. Do you have any final advice for marketing operations or demand gen on how they can better align with each other?

Shonal:

Yeah. In this pandemic, I've been binge-watching certain series and TV shows, and one of the ones early on, and I'm sure you guys have heard of it, is The Last Dance, the docuseries about the Chicago Bulls' last championship run. I saw a lot of parallels in watching that, and then thinking about marketing and ops and SDRs as a whole. They talked a lot about the star, which is Michael Jordan, obviously, but the pieces that were involved, right? Like, all the role players that were there, his kind of sidekick in Scottie Pippen, and then you have the wildcard in Dennis Rodman.

So, you have all these different pieces, different personalities, different experiences and expertise, but really coming together for that shared vision and understanding all the differences, but having that one-two punch of, you know, marketing ops, demand gen, SDRs. I mean, I think they all kind of play a role in this larger team, right? So, the team is trying to get a championship, or the team is trying to launch an ABM campaign, and everybody has their part in it, and everybody needs to understand what their part is to make that a well-oiled machine.

Shonal:

I think that just seeing that parallel kind of put things into perspective on how everybody needs to function as a unit. Everybody has their different viewpoints, but to make all this hum, the marketing team needs demand gen, demand gen needs the SDRs, and everybody needs to just figure it all out together.

Charlie:

So who's Michael Jordan out of the team, then? Is it marketing ops?

Shonal:

I mean, since you guys are a marketing ops firm, I'll say, yeah, marketing ops.

Crissy:

It's really hard, because Scottie Pippen, I feel like, never got the credit he deserved as much. Or the pay. So I feel like maybe there's a better alignment about marketing ops.

Charlie:

Oh, that's probably ops, then.

Shonal:

I would say definitely Scottie Pippen is marketing ops. They don't get the credit, but without him, they don't win the championships, right?

Crissy:

Yeah. And then the leadership point. We all need like a Phil Jackson just to bring us all together. Leadership is a good piece, and I think for leaders who maybe are listening to this, if you do see that there's alignment issues, really get everyone on board with each other, because we were just talking ... You know, sometimes it's even that push to make an organizational change, because there's maybe been so deep of a silo, it's hard for those two orgs to even work with each other.

This was great. Thank you so much, Shonal, for being on today. I think a lot of people can take so much from this, just learning about how to align, but also take some of the feedback that you gave around devising an awesome ABM play that spans marketing and sales and operations, and why operations is so important to that. Thank you so much. Everyone, I hope you enjoyed, and we'll see you on the next episode of fwd.

Shonal:

Thank you guys.