On Friday June, 10 we hosted Aaron Bird, CEO of Bizible, on our #PipelineMarketing Blab Channel to explain how he and his team came to coin the term “Pipeline Marketing”.
Our Moderator, RenderTribe CEO Peter Dean, had some great questions for Aaron, and the discussion offers up some great tips on Pipeline Marketing. Here are the questions and some highlights of the conversation:
Q1: How did you realize you had a problem to solve?
I was working at Bing with my co-founder and we noticed that Bing paid dollars were mostly going to B2C because that is where most of the money went. We saw potential in the B2B world with companies that advertise online but close in person. Most of the sales and marketing process takes place after the lead form is filled out. From here we explored this market.
Q2: What is Pipeline Marketing?
The whole philosophy is about driving the metrics that matter to the business, which are revenue and lifetime value. Starting with lead generation, Pipeline Marketing is not about generating leads or impressions because they focus on getting leads, not adding value to the business.
This also touches on sales and marketing alignment. By taking a holistic approach and aligning the business with revenue, sales and marketing will naturally align and work together. Problems over leads dissolve because all that matters at the end of the day is “did we do business?”
Q3: What do you think about CRM and the technical side to how that fits in?
We believe the key to Pipeline Marketing and marketing and sales alignment is the marketing team needs to meet the sales team on their home turf; in other words use the same software as sales. The CRM software we use is Salesforce. If the marketing team is measuring things in a different system, it causes a lot of discrepancy between sales and marketing.
Q4: What is your most powerful metric for your business?
When you look at the buyer’s journey, what marketing channels are most effective through each of the stages of the buying cycle? Once you identify that, then optimize for velocity. For example, we use a lot of LinkedIn paid. Once we narrowed that down, we looked at what accelerates people through the funnel. This could be a particular type of content, or action that makes people want to get to the bottom of the funnel. You can optimize any marketing channel, even things like conferences or steak dinners.
Q5: What would your advice be to a company that wants to start Pipeline Marketing?
If you are at the beginning of the journey, get your marketing data around attribution into your CRM. Get a single touch into Salesforce, usually a form fill; do not worry about multi-touch yet. Optimize your single touch and eventually move into multi-touch.
We encourage you to watch the Blab recording on meaningful dashboards – it’s only 30 minutes, and it’s a great way to learn something new or hear a different point of view! To stay connected with RenderTribe, sign up to receive notifications about our upcoming Blabs and events. Stay tuned for our next Blab!
