Keara Cho

The key to a successful marketing campaign is segmenting your target audience correctly and being customer-obsessed. But your job is not just to drive people to websites and have them fill out a form to become a lead; it’s to be responsible for the entire customer journey. In fact, 56% of high-performing marketers actively map the customer journey across their company. To successfully join this effort, you need to properly nurture customers. THE TOP-OF-MIND NURTURE B2C companies are experts at the top-of-mind nurture. My local wine shop sends me a weekly update of their tasting events and featured recipes on food and wine pairing. Nordstrom sends me daily reminders about exclusive sales “just for me.” These brands know it’s possible to stay in touch with a prospect who may be a good fit, but is not yet sales-ready. To create a top-of-mind nurture campaign, your small business should use educational and research-based content that establishes your company as a trusted advisor. You can include offers like webinars that explore trending topics in your industry, or content that shows how others are using your product. Don’t have the time or talent to make a webinar or demo? No worries — any free resource, whether an ebook, blog post, or how-to guide, can work. All you have to do is think of what free content your audience will find valuable. At Salesforce, we sometimes share thought-leadership content to help our audience become better at their jobs or in their industry. Once you feed your customers content that’s helpful and not salesy, create this drip nurture and sprinkle in secondary or tertiary call-to-actions (CTAs) like demos or trials to entice them to want more. Then, send an email every 7-9 days — an email every week is too frequent and every two weeks might not be enough. THE IN-TRIAL NURTURE, TRIGGERED BY PRODUCT ACTIONS Most B2B companies have a trial period so users can take a test drive before making their customers buy their actual “car.” For example, at Salesforce, we have a 14-day free trial for small businesses to use our CRM, Salesforce Essentials. Before our team creates content for an in-trial nurture, we did a ton of research. As a marketer, you want your product’s action triggers to connect to your marketing automation. This will help you send triggered emails based on users’ actions versus a time-based email journey. Here’s how we ensured we had a successful in-trial nurture campaign: 1. Consulted our data science team: * We learned that by performing an X action, the user will have an X% higher probability to buy * We learned our users are more likely to convert if they login more than once in their first two days of the trial 2. Collaborated with our support team: * We found what blockers prevent users from taking a specific action These learnings helped us adjust our email cadence, our content, and hone in on creating videos, how-to articles, and content to feed our in-trial nurture. If you don’t have a data science team or a customer support team, don’t fret! You can easily gather customer feedback by setting up focus groups with customers. Talk to your trialists. Talk to people who have never bought from you. Get on live chat. You get the point — talk to your customers! In addition to finding high “propensity to convert” actions, make sure you’re looking for features that create habit loops for your customers. Which features will make users want to login more frequently? How do you use emails or even in-app messaging to encourage those actions? Asking yourself these questions will help you craft a successful in-trial nurture triggered by product actions. THE UPSELL OR CROSS-SELL NURTURE Want to improve your customer’s lifetime value? Upsell and cross-sell nurtures can help. All you have to do is create a nurture campaign targeted to existing customers, then provide them with information and incentives to expand the list of products they currently use. With upsell and cross-sell nurtures, your goal should be to inspire and show (not tell!) customers how to reach maximum potential with your company’s products and services. The best part about this type of nurture? You’re already at an advantage because you’re talking to your biggest fans — not cold leads. Make sure you’re intentional with your content, send relevant information on specific products or services that would be beneficial to a specific segment of clients. Personalized recommendations within this nurture type are the key to success — use variable tags or dynamic content to ensure the right customers receive the right content. Also, make sure you explain the value of a new or existing unused product without being overly aggressive. Since your target list will include current customers, the timing for this program can be less aggressive — you can space emails out between 10-15 days.

Have a beginner's mind. What worked in the past might not work in your new position (or it may? But you have to test it first before implementing something full blown). The challenges you have faced leading other teams are not going to be the same set of challenges you will face in your new role. I will think about my conversion path and buyer's journey before I even think about what go-to-market channels I need to build or optimize. Step 1: I would start off by listening to all the functional leads in your new company (sales, product, support, ops). I will then sit down with the data science team or someone from ops to help you draw out the exact conversion, purchasing and upsell funnel for your prospects and customers. Step 2: Identify from a marketing perspective when the key events happen (ie. web conversion, sales opp win/loss, what causes someone to convert, when upsells happen, what causes attrition...you get the point). Then figure out where the bottlenecks are that are preventing your users from taking the action you want them to take. Step 3: Once you have a good grasp on your bottlenecks and conversion point then you can start thinking about (in priority order) how these channels can be used to drive conversions and sales: 1) website/SEO, 2) email/marketing automation, 3) paid digital strategy, 4) sales alignment/training, 5) content buildout 6) webinars/events. 

Everything starts with a great organic strategy and an SEO friendly website. When I ran demand gen at a very small company, the sales team was just starting to ramp up and I didn’t have a budget so website/content was where I focused on first. In parallel, if you have a direct sales team outside of a product led selling motion, I would align with your sales leader and all the regional managers and individual AEs. Demand generation is an extension of your sales team and tight alignment between sales and marketing is a key ingrediant to your and your company's revenue goal success. More tactically speaking, this is how I think about the foundation of my demand gen strategy in priority order: * Organic & Paid Channels: Organic is your website. It's a place where your prospects and customers learn about your brand, servces and offerings. It is also a place where you already have existing traffic. SEO is your friend. Often times we get stuck on talking about our products and we fail to do research on the terms our users use to search to get to our website. Keyword research is important because it allows you to do more with less. Make content for high search volume topics. If you have budget, that’s great! Paid digital tactics and SEM, where you can bid on competitors and keywords. Get reviews from customers on G2 Crowd and Capterra, and of course relevant content is always essential. Partnerships can also expand your reach. * Website optimization: An easy way to optimize your website is to start running A/B tests. Here at Salesforce we run a lot of A/B test on form pages, campaign pages, and different types of ads (message and copy) — to ensure we are using the best message and on-page functionality that is the most optimal for the conversion path. * Email: If you are just starting out, think of your demand gen strategy as these 3 lifecycles: pre-purchase (prospecting), in-trial/evaluation (purchase), and post sales (retention, loyalty, cross-sell, upsell, upgrades). You can start of with building 1 nurture for each of these stages and get more sophisticated once you understand your target audience and their buying behavior more. I would also consider having a different nurture for different selling motion, for example, a nurture for self-service/product led and a separate one for direct sales. * Outbound Campaigns & prospecting - One way to get help your sales team with outbound motion is to target top prospect accounts, use data science & lead scoring to pinpoint high quality leads. Send direct mailers to high propensity prospects and personalized 1:1 direct mailers. Keeping tabs on the competition is important, set up Competitive plays and review sites for compete signals. * A personalized experience - create this with real time customer interactions across all touchpoints. Connect digital interactions to online/office channels and functions. Design personalized journey’s based on prospects and industries. Use data science and give sales a recommendation action (i.e talk track, assets, data sheets, webinars, etc) to help with their selling cycle. 

This question is very similar to the one titled: Are there specific channels you think are a foundation to a Demand Generation strategy? Short answer is focus on your website and email channel first. In addition to what I discussed in that section, I would highlight recommend aligning with your product leaders and support/customer service leaders the same way a demand gen leader would if they had a sales leaders they align with. Your job is to convert users and help them adopt the product. Use data science to drive your marketing activities. Once you identify where the gaps are in your conversion process you can start to build marketing adoption programs based on the unique challenges your business is facing. Here's an example of a problem statement that was one of our biggest challenge when I led demand gen for our self-service/product led product: * “Which in-app activities help SMBs convert being a free trial user to paying customers of salesforce”. What we learned from data science is that the biggest driver of conversion is getting someone to log back into the app on the 2nd day. If they don’t, we lose them. And on the flip side, If we can just increase Day 1 to Day 2 retention by +X% that will get us +XX% more conversions. So it’s absolutely critical to drive return logins early. And based on that, we have these 3 programs in market to encourage trialist to log in: 1. Launched a 90 day email nurture that includes a series of 15 emails to encourage feature adoption. 2. Best Practice webinars that will feature customers to talk about how they are using the features in our product to drive business value. 3. Our adoption team has an in going hands-on workshop to teach trialist how to do things like adding additional users and editing accounts & contacts - these are all features that these trialists must adopt in order to see the value in our product. Underneath all this we have a Propensity to Convert (PTC) score designed by our data intelligence/data science team where we graded each cohort's propensity to convert by the end of the 14 day trial period. This score not only helps you segment and customize your marketing journeys but it can also help you forecast to see how many conversions or revenue amount you will expect at any given month/quarter. 

Here's a quick laundry list of things to consider without diving into your business model and marketing plans. 1. Partnerships: Do you have partners you can work with to integrate a call-to-action? For example, in one of our small business campaigns where we were targeting small business owners we were able to partner with local banks to include our offering in their small business loan welcome package. I know integrations are tough and it requires more than marketing to champion so I would also think about co-marketing. Are there any partners that have a database of people you are currently not getting in front of? Cross-promoting in partnership channels is a great user acqusition tool. 2. Direct Mail: you're probably thinking this is old school but the campaigns my teams have run are showing positive ROI from direct mail. The reason? It's cheap and you can get a broad reach. We typically pair direct mail pieces with a call to action (ie, register to attend our event, download this ebook, get in touch with sales, etc). This creates a multi-touch journey to your campaigns. 3. Lastly you can run some fun guerilla marketing to drive foot traffic to your storefront. 

Get the metrics for these following measures so you can share with your internal stakeholder how ABM is impacting the business on 1 page. * Marketing's contribution to revenue including YoY compares (as a percentage against the business overall revenue & dollar amount) * Marketing's contribution to pipe generation including YoY compares (as a percentage against the business overall pipe gen & dollar amount) * Marketing's contribution to pipeline maturation including YoY compares * not sure how your organization measures this but typically this is measured between stages 2-closing and marketing's effort in trying to accelerate and speed up the deal cycle * X number of VP+ responses including YoY compares * Average deal size * X number of net new contacts added Then you can deep dive into 1 account example and show how your ABM program/journey and touchpoints are hitting a specific objective you set out to solve in partnership with sales.

I will keep this answer short and sweet. If a strategy drives quality pipe generation I would immediate duplicate and continue to refine.

The way I think about ABM metrics are 3 folds: 1. What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation. 2. How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance or executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+). 3. How are we strengthen our account data with contact acquisition & contact enrichment/cleaning? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing doing to 1) ensure data is the most up-to-date (trash data in = trash data out!) and 2) identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal. To answer your question directly there are many early indications that you can address as a marketer before you assess how you are impacting the bottomline (revenue). The first thing you need to do is ensure you are aligned with your sales team - are there specific plays they are running this quarter? Are there specific products that have the highest probability to cross when you cross-sell to a certain LOB? Is your company launching new SKUs? You have to understand the business and products and align your ABM initiatives to your sale’s priorities. In parallel, I would typically look at YoY and QoQ compares for marketing responses and event attendance; this will allow you to get a sense of how engaged your customers are. I will also look at the compares for contact acquisition to ensure we are always keeping the key players in each account up to date. When flat or negative compares show up, that's when you dig deeper and create an action plan.

What a great question. I never thought about data in this way. Thanks for forcing me to think through the differences as it relate to KPIs vs. data to help inform vs. pure noise. Metrics: These are the key performance indications that, you as a marketer, should evaluate your programs and your teams against. At the end of the day our job as marketers is to drive revenue alongside our go-to-market partners. Key metrics I've outlined in another AMA question that is worth mentioning here: * What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation * How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance and executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+) * How are we aiding in contact acquisition by account? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal. I'm going to group Analytics and Insights together because analytics to me is the data that backs up (or inform) the insights. Analytics: What problem are you trying to solve for? You have to have succinct questions before you (or submit a request to your analytics team) dig into the data to pull analytics. Analysis paralysis is the cause of unnecessary cycles and it will lead to dead ends. Insights: These are an individual or a group's point of views or someone's analysis based on the analytics being pulled. It is a hypothesis backed by data to gain understand of your business. Here's my thinking process when solving for a specific hotspot for the business and how I would go about looking for the analytics and surfacing insights. Problem/hotspot: Account X is not hitting the ACV target. Why? Logic: "Analytics is showing us that the pipe gen is flat YoY and we are behind target attainment by X percentage points - the trend was surfaced up last week as well." The hypothesis here is that we are behind on pipe gen, an early indicator that we'll miss our revenue target. This requires an action/get back to health plan right away. In search of insights these are the questions I would answer and gather the analytics for: * Are we simply not piping enough? * What's the close rate/win rate this quarter compare to last quarter and last year (is the hypothesis we're losing to a competitor or is this an enablement problem?) * Is the pipe stuck in a certain stage? What's the average days/weeks it's been stuck in that stage for? The action plan is to figure out how to leverage marketing touchpoints to progress the pipe. * Is there deal compression happening because Account X is putting projects on hold or swapping licenses in an effort to drive vendor cost down? These questions then become guidance to help us surface up the right analytics so we are not lost in analysis paralysis.

Go to market as ONE team with your sales counterpart. Ensure the accounts you are targeting is 100% aligned with sales strategy. Your sales team is going to change courses during the quarter/mid-year; pivot with them and ensure you are always aligning to their top priority accounts. Educate your organization by highlighting the impact that ABM will have to the business. 1. What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation. 2. How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance or executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+). 3. How are we strengthen our account data with contact acquisition & contact enrichment/cleaning? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing doing to 1) ensure data is the most up-to-date (trash data in = trash data out!) and 2) identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal. Then, come up with a framework on how ABM is going to drive engagement, pipe generation and revenue together with your sales leadership. Here’s a sample framework to help you think through your ABM strategy: 1. 1 to 1 account journeys: Account planning should be done for each account. This includes leveraging third party data (think Bombora, Leadspace, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, etc) and/or research around each buyer within the account, key opportunities and objectives for your account within the fiscal year (i.e. is your account looking into adopting generative AI into their business processes this year, are they looking to modernize their customer service/call center technology, etc). Equip your sellers and account teams with the right homework so you can help them strengthen their account planning. 2. Be a trusted partner with your accounts team: Partner with your accounts team and ensure you understand their goals and objectives for the quarter/year. Your job is to complement your programs to their strategy. This goes without saying, but ensure every program you launch ties back to business outcomes: (in reference to my measurement framework above) 1) what is your pipe generation and revenue impact? 2) How many marketing responses have you generated with key decisions makers (i.e VP+) in the account and lastly, 3) how has your new contact strategy translate to more sales activities and ultimately, pipe generation and revenue. 3. Quarterbacking with the rest of the marketing team: you can’t create all the marketing CTAs on your own and you need to rely on your marketing counterparts to drive focus for your ABM accounts as well. Partner with your field marketers to ensure your ABM accounts are getting priority at executive events. Work with product marketers and ensure you have the right sales enablement and product demos that you can include in your journeys. Collaborate with the campaigns team and leverage content and assets so you can easily customize and make it work for your ABM journeys. Marketing is a team sport and you cannot scale and win alone.