On Thursday, January 14th, we held a #Pipelinemarketing Blab on a topic very near and dear to our hearts, “Key Pipeline Marketing Metrics that Drive Revenue” with guests Ben Childs, President & Founder, Digital Reach and Sangram Vajre, CMO & Co-Founder, Terminus. The Blab centered on measuring results and the tools to use to get to the real data centered around marketing efforts driving revenue.
Our moderator, RenderTribe’s CEO, Peter Dean, asked some great questions. Below are the questions and some highlights from the conversation:
Q1: What drove you to shift your marketing paradigm to follow pipeline marketing principles?
Ben: For PPC (pay-per-click), it is especially important [to be a pipeline marketer] because people are spending so much money. The example he gave was that he worked with a company CEO, who had a blank spot next to the PPC number on a spreadsheet. He then contacted the head of demand generation who was in trouble – and they were in trouble – so they had to figure out what the problem was right away. Their way to bring value was to find what was pushing MQLs to convert.
Peter talked about the Bizible tool as a means to find where money was leaking.
Ben mentioned he missed the old days when people showed cost per conversion on a spreadsheet and that was it. Ben said, “I love how we can provide MQLs and how and where they turn into SQLs.”
Sangram came from a Pardot background: There are people who are ready to buy that’s where PPC is most effective. So our challenge is how do we proactively get our message in front of them? When you think about executives, they don’t download an eBook. The sales and marketing disconnect is that we often call someone who downloads an eBook a lead when they’re just downloading an interesting piece of content. Sangram said, “Are we spending too much time looking at leads as a way to justify our existence or are we driving the bottom line of the company?” Pipeline marketing is exciting because we can drive down to the bottom line of the company.
Ben said, “A great thing we found out about pipeline marketing is uncovering what a company is not doing (or is doing).” Look at the bottleneck – where is the conversion rate? Can you drill down to see where money is being wasted? How are you delineating the diamond in the rough?
Peter said, “We learned everything that was working and who fit the profile on the back end. If you’re in pipeline marketing if it works it works and if it fails you are going to know it.”
Q2: What tool(s) have you used to discover your buyer’s path?
Ben: We are “gigantic” users of Google Analytics; multi-attribution and analytics. We rely on these every day.
Sangram: “Google Analytics which has matured so much over the years; can optimize content and do crazy things whereas people think it’s just to see traffic.” We are also a big user of our product, Terminus. Bizible can find the real analytics. They are the best content marketing company out there. How do we stop talking about what to do and just do it? Instead of “this looks cool” to “let’s do that.”
Peter: Are you seeing Salesforce as a core center or other stuff? We are primarily SF here.
Ben: We worked with Zoho before, but also Salesforce.
Sangram: 100% Salesforce.
Q3: What are your favorite metrics?
Ben: One of my favorites is MQL to close like Sangram said – You can get that visibility with pipeline marketing. That will also show you how well Marketo/Pardot is doing.
Peter: Ours’ is Content to Pipeline
Ben: The easiest day-to-day is MQL to SQL numbers and ratios. You get some solid, actionable advice looking at it week-to-week and month-to-month.
Sangram: We look at velocity as the number one thing; anything we do. This is the main way to look at it. What is the velocity of leads to sales qualified leads? How do we increase conversion rate? Velocity is the driver for our business; without this, it is very hard to think about anything else.
Next Blab on Thursday, January 28th at 1:00 pm EST on “How To Select The Right Content Marketing Tools,” with guests Scott Abel, “The Content Wrangler,” and Doug Karr, Founder of the MarketingTech Blog.
We encourage you to watch the Blab recording on pipeline marketing – it’s only 30-minutes, and you will be sure to learn something new! You should also sign up to receive notifications about RenderTribe’s upcoming Blabs and events. Don’t miss our next Blab: How To Select The Right Content Marketing Tools.
