On this week’s episode, we are delighted to have a very special guest, Shari Johnston, Account-Based Practice Lead, Winning by Design, previous marketing leader at Demandbase, OpenDNS, & Radius

"Operations folks hold the keys to the kingdom" - Shari Johnston

It's true. Marketing ops and B2B marketing are indistinguishable these days. I mean, how would your company’s marketing work if your marketing ops team didn’t do the work. It would be a disaster.

And this is especially true for ABM.

With ABM, we are getting actionable data to the people who need it, getting it to them quickly, and enabling them to take action on it to help drive revenue.

Sounds like MOps could be pretty important, right?

And it's even more important during "these times" when deal volume could be down. Sales NEEDS to know who is in the market NOW.

This is where operationalizing buyer intent data from platforms like G2 takes your ABM to the next-level.

Tune in for a great listen and see where MOps has a very particular set of skills to make shit happen.

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Transcription

Crissy:

Hey. So today we have Shari Johnston joining us from her lovely house in Truckee. We're very jealous of Shari. We're excited because Shari's actually one of our first supporters at CS2. She was one of our first clients, and Shari has a great background in all of marketing, leading marketing teams, and most specifically on ABM. She's one of the first people to write thought leadership about ABM as it first started to build as a category, and now leads the ABM practice at winning by design.

So Shari's led marking at different companies like Radius and Demand base, and so she has an awesome background of not only working in marketing, but really understanding the minds of marketers, especially marketing operations from marketing to them. And personally, Shari is also one of the founders of Women in Revenue, who I also helped co-found with Shari. And so super excited to finally have you on Shari. Welcome.

Shari:

Thanks for having me, good to be here.

Crissy:

So part of the past few videos that we've talked about is really how marketing operations can elevate themselves. And we're in a unique time right now, because we're entering a new phase of marketing where budgets are being reduced, and we are lacking some of those channels to actually target into account. So anything that's face to face, even direct mail has been impacted, and so as our budgets decline and our channels are going down, I think marketers across the board are trying to figure out how they can really, make use of the resources that they have and figure out this new digital landscape of marketing to their prospects.

And so we thought it'd be great to have you on to talk about how marketing ops can be a partner to the rest of the revenue team and work cross-functionally with them to navigate this new time that we're all trying to figure out. And I think marketing ops does have their place there. So I think to kick it off, maybe set the stage for what you're seeing at your accounts as they build out this new ABM strategy, and how you think marketing ops can really be a part of that and why it's important.

Shari:

Yeah, absolutely. Yep. As you mentioned Crissy, what we're saying is that the ... Formerly selling into the enterprise, a lot of the pipeline channels that were really effective were really in person high touch channels, such as field events, the steak dinners, and even direct me all that are tricky, if not impossible, to do right now. And so field marketing teams, as well as just program teams are looking at digital touch points more than they ever were to really understand how teams are buying, who's in market, and that collaboration being much more important than ever.

The other side of it too, is that the buyers are showing more digital footprint since we're all at home more, executive teams are not traveling, and therefore, where you may not have gotten seen a lot of digital engagement from a C level account, a person in an account before, you are seeing it nowadays. More webinars are being attended, more content is being engaged digitally, and there's a lot more to work with. So what I'm seeing is really smart account-based marketers are taking advantage of, or shifting and being agile to where they might have looked at touch points of, of who was at their events to help understand who was in market today. They're really looking and partnering with their ops team to uncover who is in market from a digital perspective. Who's engaging with content that's high value, who is attending their online events and pulling that data as a way to help them understand and move quality pipeline for their go to market team.

Charlie:

Yeah. And when we were talking about this, before we got on, it seemed like there was three key areas that we wanted to really dive into around how marketing operations can partner with and support the revenue team, that maybe there is that connection now in certain areas, but there definitely is a lot of value and a big step forward, if you could really hone in that working cross-functionally with the teams in these three key areas. So should we dive into the first one now?

Shari:

Sure, sure. Yeah. We talked a bit about, one, the opportunity to draw for that collaboration between the go to market team and operations team to uncover insights. And frankly, I think this is helpful either pre or post COVID, but definitely more and more post COVID where it's almost all digital. And it seems, for the foreseeable future, we are going to have a much more digital world. So this isn't just even a short term investment, but a longer term investment, even as we recover.

But being able to partner, as simple as ... Right now, I think cold prospecting, for instance, is under a lot of heavy difficulty. It's difficult to be cold prospecting into your target accounts because there's just a lot of uncertainty over ... Those accounts could have been a good fit six months ago, but nowadays it's really very granular to understand what each particular account is going through. And so more and more people are looking for not only are those accounts a good fit for my product or solution, but are they in market? So we're being sensitive to the cold prospecting that is going on right now. So for those that are on a cold prospecting team, being able to partner with operations team and looking for account signals that showcase, even if they're not MQL-ing, but these accounts may be in market, can go a long way to helping your poor prospecting team find success in helping build quality pipeline into target accounts where it's, frankly, more challenging than ever to do that.

Charlie:

That's so true. And that's a really good point around every account's going through something very unique. With the pandemic, there's obviously some big winners, in quotations, like Zoom. If you're working from Zoom right now, you're probably super busy and they're probably having to invest in new technologies to help support that. But maybe if you're working for a technology company that supports just airlines or something, then maybe your you're struggling. And there's going to be so many nuances throughout the whole spectrum even within industries. And then that's the challenge of everyone working from home.

So is the business that you're trying to sell to able to support that and are the people able to take those calls? Right. So then it's super ... It's a really, really good point. And so do you have any good examples of what are some of the signals that you're able to pick up on now in this new world, and some of the most high value signals that you can see?

Shari:

Yeah, absolutely. So we've been partnering with customers to really help figure out ... My favorite thing is sitting down with a sales rep and saying, "What kind of signals would you like to see, or what have you experienced being a signal that produces a high quality prospect in your world?" And even that conversation I don't think happens a lot in my experience between ops and the sales team. It sometimes gets ... Maybe happens through an account based marketing programs manager or whatnot, but the ops team has so much granular knowledge around specific signals that they can uncover, how they can operationalize it and bring more quality prospects to the team. So what we see is, first having that conversation into what insights would be really meaningful to your SER or AEs.

In our case, one of them we designed with a partner of ours is companies that are visiting your G2 crowd pages. These tend to be prospects that are a bit farther down the funnel. And nowadays you do not want to be missing out on prospects or account targets who are in market for your solution. And so by monitoring those G2 crowd signals and making sure that you are not left out from an RFP or a buying cycle of someone who's in market is so crucial. We can't afford to be losing insights to our competitors and not having that competitive advantage.

Shari:

So what we've done is operationalize those G2 crowd signals, and orchestrated workflows to make sure that target accounts that are showing those insights are then up-leveled to the appropriate AE, and there's an engagement play to help engage those prospects once they do get there. And I say all that because all of those pieces are so important. Some of my customers have gone as far as, "Hey, we're going to send all the AEs insights signals to Slack," which is a great first step. But what I hear happening on the business side is AEs are just overwhelmed with then, "What do I do with this? How do I operationalize it? How do I get the contact to make sure that even if this is an account signal and I'm prospecting into Dell," that's a pretty overwhelming lift for an AE to then go figure out who's my target persona at Dell, how am I going to engage with them? But the operations team has the opportunity to help do the heavy lifting in that prospect to enrich that account, to do those workflows on the backend, to deliver more quality pipeline using those G2 crowd signals as the source. But does really create ... Really require that back in workflow work to make it useful for the AE.

And then the last point I'll make is that the reason those workflows are also important is just timeliness. Sometimes there's operations teams or programs teams try to do all that a bit manually, and may not seem like super heavy lift, but what happens is just gets ... Weeks go by before that signal makes it back to that AE. And by that time, they might have already gone down the path of looking at your competitors more deeply. So making sure that those pieces can be timely and that you are in market when your customers, I want to say, or are shopping, and when you're really top of mind for them.

Crissy:

Totally. I think we see this a lot too, just even from our own clients. I think they think they're ... Even if they are involved in getting those insights, I think that they think, “My only step is to figure out, okay, I got you those insights. Now I'm going to send them to the sales team.”

Yeah. Kind of wash their hands of it. And then to your point, they're actually not talking to the sales team either. And so I think when you marry the sales person, trying to figure out what insights they're looking for that matter to them, then work with anyone on the ABM marketer side or digital marketer or field marketer who's working closely with that sales person to then figure out, okay, what's going to be our plan? Once we have this insight, what are going to be the next steps? How do I work with you and them, and make sure that it's just seamless for targeting that account afterward? And I think that's what differentiates and separates a good to really great ops person. They're thinking forward. They're thinking, “How do I make this the best process?”

Crissy:

And I think for our marketing ops person, it's something that should be embraced. This is a creative side of marketing ops. You don't often get involved in something like creating some campaign idea, but really this is what you're doing. Okay, we're going to have a cadence, we're going to enrich this account from here, we're going to put them through this flow, they're going to be included in nurture. There's a lot of creative aspects that you can put into creating that flow. And so I think it's an exciting opportunity for operations people to really embrace it. And it can seem like a lot of work, but if that's the focus right now, like you said, this is a new time for marketers. We have less resources, but our one focus is always to drive quality pipeline, like you said. And so there are some things you can kind of put to the side to just make sure that this process is working.

Shari:

Absolutely. I think building that trust and credibility with your AEs and your go to market team in general is so key. So in that G2 crowd example, I think it's the operations person that's going to have that creative juices that you mentioned of let's ... I've heard, to your point, we've had a lot of folks go to that first step of getting the insights to the AE. But the frustration is, let's say in some cases the signals were all in prospect accounts. So of course the AE's like, "Yeah, of course they're going to the website. I'm talking to them daily.

So really understanding those workflows on the backend, that do seem like a little bit of magic and don't necessarily get the attention that they deserve, but making sure that the right signals are coming to AE. The accounts that are target accounts, not in prospect, not current customer signals, and then in our case, what we did was have these signals, once those workflows were in place, show that showcase to the particular AE in a slack bot. And then they were able to either add the account with ... Make sure that they could find the contacts of the target personas and add them to the account record, add them to an account based advertising campaign, or execute an outreach sequence and add them to a specific custom outreach sequence right from the Slack channel. So therefore they can actually take action on them, and it's been packaged up in a way where the contents there are the signals there, and the operations person has weeded through the noise. So they know they built that trust and credibility when the AI gets that signal, they know it's something useful for them to act on.

Charlie:

Yeah. I think one of the really important things to take away from what you're saying here, that I think a lot of people in marketing operations fall into the trap of not doing or they do, or they just don't have the time to, is really thinking about the whole thing holistically. Because a lot of times we talk about ABM and it's like, "Okay, well, I'll get contacts." Okay. Yes, there's that piece. Or it's like, "I'm just going to go ... Maybe I'll go find a signal. But you haven't thought about the whole package. So you haven't gone to interview the salesperson to figure out what signals they want. You haven't then figured out how to operationalize that and do all the work, like you just mentioned, to really make sure their signals are useful.

If you're saying there's someone who's already an opportunity is in market, and you're sending them that information, that's not useful. So you need to make sure you're not just sending them data. You're sending them the right data and it's useful. And then, what's the action for them? They know that there's a signal, but making it easy for them to find those contacts, have that outreach cadence and be able to communicate the right points. It's really ... That's the whole package. It's not just one small thing. So that's why as marketing operations person, you have to really take a step back. And then you look at that from a kind of a high level to be able to figure out exactly how to operationalize that, as opposed to just trying to piece things off in small little nuggets without really having a big strategy behind it. And that's what a lot of our talk track is right now. It's thinking strategically. You can be a marketing automation platform admin in marketing operations, and that's great. And yes, you might be able to integrate a tool to be able to get that signal, but until you really think strategically about how this whole thing is going to work, holistically, it's not going to really get the impact that you're looking for.

Crissy:

Yeah. And I think that the buy-in, like you talked about with the sales people, I think having that plan for them builds their confidence, that is almost just as important as the insights in self and intent data. I was having a conversation with my clients and he rolled out a plan, and it was like this, and there was intent behind it, but he made a joke, "I bet you I could tell them that they these accounts had intent and I still would have better results than if I just did a cold ..." Like you said, a cold prospecting where I said, "These accounts are good fit, go after them." But just the sales person having the confidence knowing that there is intent there, that any outreach that they're doing is going to be effective, that there was a plan after that, makes it so that their ability to just do that prospecting is better for them.

I think also if your teams are a bit junior, just knowing that there's some type of warm signal or opportunity that they could latch on to gives them the confidence to put their time there. And it could even change how they interact with the prospect. And not saying that people should go and say like, "Your accounts have intent," when they don't have any, but it's just thinking psychologically, when you have a plan and there are insights behind it, your sales team is just going to be way more effective and confident and seeing that to fruition.

Shari:

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll add to that, in that to your point around the intent signals, I found it really helpful to just also make it really transparent for the AE. I think intent signals can be this very broad based bucket that has a lot of different meanings. So really getting really specific. What do you mean by intent signals? So I gave a very specific example for a G2 crowd, but there's obviously a lot of more broader based intent signals where we ... That we can help the AE be really specific, like, "This particular account has a high velocity of searches on data storage right now, more than ever." And giving ... That's helpful for them to provide context to how they might reach out to ... Or what cadence they would even put the prospect into, versus just giving a broad based, "These accounts are showing intent signals." And I've seen that, again, back to that conversation of the ops person and the go to market team, just making sure that there is that connectivity back around what these prospects are doing and a feedback loop, frankly.

There's definitely been cases where certain intent signals just are not producing quality leads for whatever. Maybe they're searching for something ancillary to what is in market. So giving that feedback loop and making sure you're bubbling up the signals that are producing that quality pipeline.

Charlie:

So if I find a marketing operations person and I'm listening to this, and there's a ABM project brewing, how would you say they should insert themselves into that conversation if maybe they haven't been included? And they know maybe there's an ABM manager, or maybe sales is leading their account-based strategy. Is there any advice that you would give to a marketing operations person that knows that they should be part of it? Be part of that conversation?

Shari:

Yeah, absolutely. I love Crissy's example of it is this is an opportunity to be creative. And we've kind of outlined the account triggers, ABM steps in four phases. And to your point, Charlie, my advice was to really think through it, end to end. So first of all, there's the trigger order. So what is the signal that we're going to start with? And not trying to boil the ocean, but let's pick one signal of a high quality lead, and I use the G2 crowd example, you can use website engagement, LinkedIn content engagement, etc.

Secondarily, enrichment. Okay, let's make sure that once we have those signals that we give the go to market team the proper information, whether it be persona data, industry data, so that the AI can be effective. And then the operationalizing it, which is the workflows. What workflows need to happen in the backend to make sure that this signal is quality and that you're weeding out any signals that would not be appropriate for the AE. And then adding the enrichment information to the account record. And then lastly is the engagement. So once we deliver this beautiful intent signal, account signal up onto the platter, what tools are we going to give the go to market team to help engage with us? Are we going to build out a four step sequence and outreach? Are we going to at least build an advertising campaign they can add them to? So making sure that we think through those four steps, I can't imagine any go to market team not being excited about having that conversation with an operations person who kind of help them put all those pieces together.

Charlie:

And so what about if they're struggling with the sales part, because I've definitely ... Sometimes ABM or ... You do provide these intent signals, and you kind of touched on it. If it's not the right signal, salespeople lose trust with it. They lose confidence. Once they get a few leads that marketing has told them are good, or if you're a counselor marketing telling them they're good and they haven't been good, sales sometimes then doesn't trust any of the future ones. So what would your advice be to someone who's maybe tried to get on the path, they've maybe lost a bit of trust and trying to bring it back, is it just more of a communication plan then? Is that kind of revisiting and analyzing everything that you've done and relaunching? Do you have any good advice there?

Shari:

Yeah. Yeah. Good question. Definitely have seen that happen. We've all experimented and lost trust, and I think it does create some opportunity to really need to build it back. So I think the first advice would be to just be really transparent around, "Hey, this is what we tried. Here's why it didn't work. Here's how we're going to revise the plan to make it more effective in round two."

And then secondarily, I think it just happens a lot where a user pulled in a lot of different directions, SDRs are pulled in a lot of different directions, so sometimes it requires doing what I call a bit of a pilot. Take an AE who you know understands this stuff, is really into data, and use them as a showcase to show, "Hey, we ran this for a week. They have three opportunities that they're in conversation with now on target accounts for C level." And that will get everyone else on board. And some advice Megan Heuer gave on the last call, which I thought was great too. If you don't have that rockstar AE in mind as an operations person, try to start with a newbie. Newbies have a blank slate. They have no pipeline. They're going to be really excited if anyone's helping provide some signals for their territory. And that can be a great way of showcasing how you're getting a new AE started in the right direction.

Charlie:

I love that. Yeah. The pilot, I felt like we talked about that.

Crissy:

We talked about that on our last interview, and I think as a skill, I think for marketing ops, we don't find champions enough for our projects. We kind of just roll them out. We expect everyone to adopt them and then we kind of leave. And instead, I think what's super important is to find those key champions that you can then prove your results. Because for some of these projects, you're going to have to market them to the sales team, to the whole organization. And so hearing that straight as a third party validation from the sales person and say, "This has been effective for me," is going to make it much more useful. Or the adoption from the rest of the team will definitely go up as they see like, "Wow, Bobby's kicking ass at this? Oh my god. I need that. I want to see those insights.”

And so yeah, I think a newbie is another example where they don't maybe have those practices that they already do or things that they fall back on. It's fresh. And so getting them to adopt a new process is going to be easier. Maybe less friction there.

Shari:

Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing I would ... Advice I would have for operations folks is lots of times, by nature, operations people are a little shy. But raise your hand when you have that story and you have that pilot to share. Most those teams have some sort of go to market alignment meeting that goes on regularly. Say, "Hey we need five, 10 minutes on that agenda to showcase what you're doing and how it provided success." And I'm sure most teams would be happy to put that on board. But definitely need to make that proactive outreach to be sharing your stories and driving that change management.

Charlie:

Definitely. Yeah. That's such an important point. Marketing operations definitely likes to work behind the scenes a lot of times, and getting out there, like you talked about before, interviewing the reps, being in their face, trying to understand what their challenges are, trying to solve them for them. And then if you do solve them, communicating that and marketing your marketing. We believe the marketing operations, we're doing all the work so everyone else can work. And if they do have a gain in their work, or we are providing value, then we need to showcase that and make sure that people know about that. And that will just help us get other projects through a lot easier and a lot better.

Crissy:

Yeah. And I think right now more than ever, and we can probably end on this point, but I think what we're hearing right now too is you're talking about the whole revenue team and how we're all working toward this common goal. And the focus on this call was how we can work cross functionally and really support the revenue team. And in this new way, this ABM strategy that's really not just about fit, but also if they're in market and capitalizing on that, I think you're all working towards that common goal. And before marketing operation, I'm going to be in my swim lane, but we're all in the deep end now.

We're all just trying to figure out this new place that we're in. And so you can go and talk to the sales team directly. You can help provide a strategy. There's the opportunity for that. And I think people are looking for that, and that's what's really going to drive change. Especially for our listeners who are startups. So much opportunity there with lack of resources or maybe people on the team who are no longer there, you all going outside of your normal things that you do is really going to push your career, but also push the company and really support that goal of building the pipeline and closing revenues.

Shari:

This was a great topic, I think more than ever the operations folks hold the keys to the kingdom of this digital link investment, so more important than ever. So if you want to elevate your career, this is a great opportunity to dive in.

Charlie:

Right. And you can't get closer to revenue and what really matters to a business than when you're working with sales. So if you're marketing operations, working through these triggered account players, working with the sales team, that's the quickest way that you can provide impact to revenue. And I think every team needs to demonstrate how they're impacting revenue and marketing operations isn't immune to that. Right. We have to demonstrate how we're impacting that. So do you have any final thoughts now before we for we close this one down?

Shari:

No, other than just give it a try and make sure you're diving into this opportunity right now. I think this is a big sea shift for folks in marketing operations. So excited to see what it looks like six months from now.

Crissy:

Yeah, awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. And for those of you marketing ops who want to learn a little bit more about what Sherry and her team are doing with ABM, checkout winning by design, and they have some great resources there, and you can also check out some of the details they have around the trigger plays and how you can roll that out to your team.

So thank you so much Shari for joining us, and we'll see all of you on the next episode of fwd: Thinking.