By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing
Late in 2015 we started producing a radio program called Sales Pipeline Radio, which currently runs every Thursday at 11:30 a.m. Pacific. It’s just 30 minutes long, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales & marketing professionals.
We’ve already featured some great guests and have a line up of awesome content and special guests coming up. Our very first guest was Funnelholic author and Topo co-founder Craig Rosenberg. Next we had Mike Weinberg, incredible writer, speaker, author, followed by Conrad Bayer, CEO & Founder of Tellwise. Recent Guests: Jim Keenan; Joanne Black; Aaron Ross; Josiane Feigon, Meagen Eisenberg, and Trish Bertuzzi.
We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities heading into and throughout the year. We’ll publish similar highlights here for upcoming episodes. You can listen to full recordings of past shows at SalesPipelineRadio.com and subscribe on iTunes.
A sneak peak at this week’s conversation, Discover fundamental metrics to understand pipeline health.
Attribution, analytics and analyzing data is today’s topic. What does the report say? Does it accurately display the past and does it accurately help us predict the future
Marketers are in a world of big data. We’ve gone from nothing to overload. So there is a lot to help marketers in high tech and not in high tech of how to best use the data available to them.
“How do I interpret the data?” Perhaps a better question is, “What answers and knowledge am I seeking to move forward?”
You need to organize the metrics to interpret the metrics. The questions of what you seek are critical.
Do we have the fundamental metrics that the business needs to understand the health of the business?
Within the channels of my function, how do I use metrics to ensure that my efforts are working?
Do we have the capabilities to answer the adhoc questions that come up in business?
Listen to this show to get a more organized list of what you need to know first before you even pull the data.
About our guest, Jeff Day:
Jeff is a Marketing and Product Management executive with a focus on startup and high-growth technology companies. Jeff excels at applying the right mix of marketing for the right stage of company in order to maximize growth. With 20 years of proven success with companies such as Highspot, DomainTools, Apptio, Enodo Software, HP, PolyServe and Intel, he has run all aspects of marketing and delivered industry-leading software and hardware products. He is passionate about working with high growth product companies to help drive marketing and product strategy, build happy and productive teams and maximize company success.
Matt: Today we are going to be talking a lot about data, about analytics, about attribution as part of sales and marketing pipelines with a great guest today. Thanks very much everyone for joining us on Sales Pipeline Radio I am really glad you are here. You can join us every Thursday live at 2:30 Eastern, 11:30 Pacific. You can always catch us on the podcast, you can find us on the iTunes Store, you can find us at Google play; anywhere fine podcasts are sold or given away for free so make sure you join us there subscribe, give us a favorable review, we appreciate that and appreciate everyone who is listening live on the recorded version here today.
We cover all things related to the sales pipeline. Marketing, sales, we blur those lines on a regular basis and feature great guests, great hosts – great guests, great authors and people that are thinking and talking about new ways and new trends going on the Sales Pipeline Radio.
Paul: You do have great hosts too, I have to interject there.
Matt: Oh, I appreciate that. It wasn’t meant to be a pat on the back but very excited today to have with us Jeff Day and I have known Jeff up here in Seattle for a long time. He has been a senior marketing executive at numerous companies in and around Seattle for a long time and has put a particular focus and has a particular passion around the ideas of I think of analytics and attribution. So I wanted to talk today a little about with the increasing amount of information we have available with the increasing level of data that’s impacting and sort of interpreting different parts of the sales pipeline, how do we operationalize that and make sense of it so we are making better decisions moving forward.
First and foremost, Jeff thanks for joining us on Sales Pipeline Radio today.
Jeff: Thank you Matt, glad to be here. I thought you were going to make some segue into the Armageddon predictions that we had a couple of months back about a wind storm that was going to completely take out Seattle and it became sort of nothing. I think you can parlay that into your predictions in how to become a rainmaker for Sales Pipeline Radio.
Matt: Well that’s even a better segue than I had; figuring out not only… That we can always look in hindsight to say well that was bad and how did we miss it? But that doesn’t make us any more likely necessarily to miss it again. I guess again when we think about sort of the data we have available, how to put that into some type of report, I mean that’s almost the easy part but are we looking at the right report? What does that report say? Does it accurately reflect the past and maybe more importantly, does it help us make sense of the future and help us better guide what the future should look like? How do we think about this? How do we describe this? Like what problem are we talking about here? I think even just the language we use seems like it’s still very much in flux.
Jeff: Yeah, totally. And you know upon reflecting how we got here, right? Marketers are in a world of big data right now. We can get data from everything, so many data sources. And when I started marketing we had no data or we were just on the verge of data and things like marketing automation and I don’t even think Google Ad words was on the scene yet. And so in a fairly short period of time we’ve gone from nothing to being absolutely overloaded with data and the systems and the processes and just the general understanding I don’t think is caught up yet. And certainly I generally operate in the technology world and talking to people, talking to marketers not in that industry. They are further behind.
And so I think there is a lot we can do to help marketers in the high-tech and non-high-tech industry do a lot better by making decisions with data, understanding the performance of marketing and marketing channels through the data they have available. But it is kind of a complex problem to solve in this marketing world.
Matt: I think a lot of people are starting with the data and saying how do you interpret the data? And I wonder if instead we should be starting with what answers are we seeking? Like what questions do we need answered? What do we need to move forward? And so is there something we can give folks that helps them narrow in on like what questions and therefore what answers do we need to be better moving forward?
Jeff: Yeah, you’re absolutely right, you have to start with the question because that determines what data and how you manipulate but how you organize the metrics in order to look at the data in the right way. And I really approach this problem, come looking at it at a few ways. There is a lot of things I like to measure, lot of metrics, a lot of analysis I like to do. But I have a framework that I break it into a few different columns to make it easier to think about.
At one level I think about do we have the fundamental metrics that the business needs to understand the health of the business? That’s things like, and again it’s going to be different for different types of businesses and different industries but it’s like what is our pipeline health? How what do we have? Do we have enough based on historical conversion rates we will be able to hit or forecasted numbers in the coming quarters, right? What’s our cost per customer acquisition if that’s a concern, that’s a primary concern for consumer-based, more transactional businesses because if your cost of customer acquisition is greater than your customer value, your customer lifetime value then you’re not going to be a profitable business, right? That’s something that they look at very closely.
So there are a number of very fundamental metrics like that. I think the next category is within my function or within the different channels of my function, how do I use metrics to ensure that my efforts are either working or they are working optimally, right? So it’s a great example for me in marketing is and look at all my different channels on my advertising, other online marketing, events, customer advocacy programs and say hey, I now want metrics, core metrics, KPIs that need to be there to see if they are performing optimally and then I can use those to say okay well we are now performing better than we did last quarter or worse and you can use those to sort of pull the lever and tweak the dials to make sure that you are always improving.
And then the final category that I think about is do we have the capabilities to answer the ad hoc questions that always come in business? Which customer segment is most valuable to our organization? What programs are working more effectively than other programs? Can we use the data that we have to look at where new growth markets are? And those are all sort of ad hoc questions that you need both the right data and the right instruments to be able to go in and get the right answers.
Matt: Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Jeff Day. You can find him on Twitter @JeffWDay. And talking about analytics today and what’s important and what questions to ask, what answers we are seeking. Is there data that’s required as part of this? I mean I am assuming that people that are interested in pursuing this don’t need to wait until they have access to all the data but is there certain data that I need to have versus are nice to have and is there other data that you would prioritize as sort of the top-tier optional sources of information or does it depend on who you are, what you are doing, how you are measuring it?
Jeff: Yeah. Again it totally depends. But again, it’s a little bit of a layered or a peel the onion type of approach. I am a strong advocate for what you very quickly mentioned which is to say don’t wait until you have all perfect data.
Take the data that you have, figure out; one – If the data is good because it’s not always good, you can have bad data there. But if it’s good you know what? What can we learn from this and then what can we improve and what other data sets do we need to really get to the answers to the questions that we want to answer.
But again, if you’re looking at things, this is Sales Pipeline Radio, one of the fundamental things, the first things that I always want the implement very cleanly and very accurately is what is the health of my pipeline, right? From tip to tail, from the first marketing touch all the way down to close and hopefully beyond, what is the volume both in dollars and the number of deals I am doing? What’s the conversion rate and what’s the velocity of that pipeline.
And so to answer your question, what is data required? You need to know that and most CRM or SSA solutions will help you, will give you that data for the sales pipeline. Most automated solutions will give you data for the marketing side or the lead side of that pipeline. So those are a few just sort of fundamentals for a very fundamental metric that is relevant to sales pipeline.
Matt: So what’s the best way to think about this? I think a lot of companies just, when they think about their data they just like okay, I just got my reports and dashboards and they don’t give a lot of thought to it. It strikes me just thinking of this as analytics and even attribution is not really sufficient. How do you describe this in a way that better reflects the value of the business? It seems like something like performance management is moving in the right direction because it looks at our past performance and uses that to impact or predict or improve future performance. How do we describe this in a way that organizations can start to rally around?
Jeff: Yeah, it’s a great question. Kind of shooting from the hip a little bit, right? So I started a company called Enodo Software that was really focused on making analytics and a solution that was more turnkey for marketers so they can answer some of these tougher questions you brought up. Attribution is a very difficult problem to solve but yet so important to understanding the value of the programs and the channel you are working in and just how are our customers using the marketing tools and the marketing efforts that we are doing to come to us, right?
Most interactions, particularly if it’s a complex sale, you are hitting that prospect seven, ten times with various marketing efforts, websites, events, whatever it is, social media before they actually engage a salesperson it’s really nice to be able to track these things. I used the term of the time called marketing performance management. I think it’s a very powerful term to hit, it is not just “analytics” which kind of as you alluded sounds like something without the benefit. But we are really focusing on is how we manage the performance of marketing through data, to performance metrics, through analytics for better performance for the organization so I love that term, I think it’s very appropriate.
Matt: Awesome, we’ve got to take a quick break. We will be back with a lot more from Jeff Day talking about performance management, how to make sense of data and make it actionable and help it tell a story to improve your business. Give us a couple of minutes, we will be right back. This is Sales Pipeline Radio!
[Break]
Matt: Well if you are liking what you are hearing from Jeff and you want to be able to share this with some other forks at your organization, we will have a recording of this great episode today up on www.salespipelineradio.com. You can also find all of our past episodes up there. We have been doing this for little over a year now so we’ve got, oh boy I think it’s including break I think it’s close to 50 episodes of some great sales and marketing thought leaders and speakers covering a variety of elements in the pipeline so you can find that there. You can subscribe obviously to the podcast on iTunes store and Google play.
Coming up next we we’ve got Shari Johnston who is the CMO, chief marketing officer at Radius. We are going to be talking about what she is doing to manage her pipeline heading into 2017 and best practices for working in the crucible which I know our guest today Jeff Day knows a lot about as well, helping to drive marketing and the drive pipeline in a fast-growing high pressure high expectation business.
Last week of the month, last Thursday of the month we are going to have Jon Miller who is the cofounder of Marketo and who is the CEO of Engagio. We are going to be talking about what it means to have an account orientation to your sales and marketing, going after the entire buying committee not just one lead at a time so Jon Miller there at the end of the month, very excited to have him.
But today we’ve got a few minutes here thankfully with Jeff Day who has been a marketing leader in Seattle for a number of years founded Endomo software a number of years ago as well is the founder of the Technology Marketing Leadership Council and has really become, through his work, an expert on analytics, how do you leverage big data to interpret what’s working in your business and where to take that forward.
Jeff, as companies start to invest more or start to think more about investing, do you need a computer scientist now on your marketing team? Do you need an engineer that they can leverage this data or what are the limits of some of the native reporting and access you get from like a salesforce.com or a marketing automation platform?
Jeff: Yeah, you know I would love to have a data scientist on my team. I think there is so much you can do and someone is really good at both getting into the data and using the tools to answer these questions, it’s just really powerful.
That said there is some maturity models to this and don’t get the cart ahead of the horse by hiring a data scientist right out of the gate when you don’t have the fundamental to cover it. And what I mean by the fundamentals is you can start with the tools that you have and the reporting capabilities that you have and really make those work to the top of their limits, right? Go in and make sure that you are getting the answers that you want, that you have the dashboards and the reporting. And I think about the Salesforce automation, the marketing automation platforms. If you are heavily in mail, the mail has the reporting capabilities, social media has their reporting capabilities, use all those tools to get the reports and the reporting capabilities that you want first.
And then think about what you really want to do next because a data scientist is going to have the most value when they are able to set up data warehouses and they have B-I tools like our hometown Tableau or Click or a Microsoft power BI or something like that at their disposal which is a greater investment. A data scientist is a greater investment in personal resources database, all that. I think it’s a wonderful thing to do and it’s very powerful and will have a lot of value but it’s part of the maturity curve so make sure that you’ve taken those first steps first.
Matt: Yeah, speaking of first things first, where is the point of diminishing returns either getting started on this or just overall? How much is too much? Is there value in focusing on fewer questions, fewer answers? And where is the value in sort of going beyond and sort of trying to get more complete transparency and comprehension in what you are seeing?
Jeff: Yeah, you know from what I’ve seen with my colleagues and at the various businesses that I’ve been a part of, the too much doesn’t come from necessarily having too much data or too much analytical capability, it comes from what I call a few different scenarios. One is getting wrapped around the axle and just looking at the same metrics or getting so deep in the data that you sort of forgotten why you are doing it or what the question is that you are trying to answer, right? And that’s really the second one that I was going to bring up is you brought it up right out of the gate is make sure that you are actually answering questions, right?
The too much can come from say well I’ve got all of these different reporting capabilities but I’ve forgotten what questions are really important to me right now and why we are looking at these. And in that way what I would do and have done at many of the business is where I have been running marketing is I set up a framework that says hey, here is tier of dashboards or core metrics, the KPIs that I want to share with my executive team. This is mostly about business health, right? And then there is another layer of metrics that I the marketing leader want to look at, again it’s just a small number, 3 to 5 for each of the main functional areas of marketing, right? So that’s different channels, maybe it’s analyst relations, press relations, social media as well as the classic demand generation.
And then within each of those functions I expect my leaders of those functions to be going deep into the metrics for online advertising. They can look at click through rates, cost and volume and you can go way, way, way deep into the metrics. But once you break it down it helps you think hey, what are the three key things that I want to be measuring that are really critical to understanding the performance of my business or my marketing or my marketing functions? And I think in having that framework it gets you out of the “what is the too much” mode or am I not looking at the right things?
Matt: Well what is beautiful to me about those questions is it really challenges the status quo of what many people think of as marketing. I think marketers, even good math marketers, good marketers that embrace revenue responsibility are still facing the stereotype of the arts and crafts marketer, right? That is doing a lot of activity and not necessarily even focusing on revenue results let alone measuring anything.
So this is clearly a better way to sort of getting at better answers and sort of following this path, get you sort of makes you far more accountable and far more valuable to the business. But ideally, I think it’s not just marketing campaign performance management ideally this is for funnel management. So is there any obstacle or any challenge in getting sales on board with this as well to make sure that you are reporting on the entire funnel and not just the top half?
Jeff: I would say there was probably… There is two types of people in this world to quote Clint Eastwood, right? There is two types of sales leaders and there are sales leaders that understand data and want to look at the data and want to answer questions on the data and there is the sales leaders that don’t. And you are going to get a lot of friction and pushback from the sales leader that don’t want to look at it. You should absolutely be looking at conversion rate, performance of the sales pipeline. You should be looking at how different segments in the sales pipeline work and how well they perform. You should be going and doing postmortems on individual deals as a qualitative way of looking at it and then trying to build up a quantitative approach to that as well.
I find resistance kind of blanket resistance to looking at the data and having that sort of transparency the just performance of the sales leader and the sales organization or not, right? So I think it’s a very binary thing, I don’t know. You’ve got a lot of experience in this as well. Is that what you find Matt?
Matt: Yeah, you know what’s nice about the data though is I think it’s a lot harder if you’ve got a system that is reluctance to get them to embrace a sales enablement program, to get them to embrace and leverage new content that you’re putting in front of them. If you have data coming out of the sales organization, the sales team is always the gate. I mean you can get access to that information on the back end, you can start to report. The challenge comes in shining light on things that a sales team might not want light shone on. And so as much as it would be fun to be able to say this is just about the data and seeing what it tells you, there is still a cultural impact to making sure the organization is ready for what the data is going to say.
There is responsibility and accountability based on the answers you are getting at some of those organizations including parts of marketing that aren’t used to seeing. So that’s the part that I might, I am not worried about but I think it’s worth people being cognizant of. Not everyone is comfortable with that full level of accountability and transparency.
Jeff: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. You are saying what I was trying to say in probably a better way. And you know, it’s very true for marketing as well, right? There has definitely been times where I’ve gone into things whole hog saying this is going to solve the world’s problems, the data showed that it didn’t and yet we swallowed hard and said great, we are not doing that anymore, I was wrong, let’s go try something else.
But there is also, for us marketers you can step into this discussion by saying hey, let’s make a small team. We are not questioning your leadership ability or anything like that but let’s look at the data to see that we are making the right decisions for the business and there is an element of how do we present this introspection into performance that would help sales leaders that are potentially resistant to it to accept this new culture more willingly.
Matt: Absolutely. Well I want to thank our guest today Jeff Day. This has been a fun conversation and these always go by way too fast but if you want to learn more about Jeff you can catch him on Twitter @JeffWDay. If you want to learn more about attribution performance management, definitely check out more of our episodes on Sales Pipeline Radio. You get replays of just conversations on www.salespipelineradio.com, subscribe you can get access there as well. And on behalf of Jeff, on behalf of Paul I want to appreciate everyone for joining us.
Please join us again next week at 2:30 Eastern, 11:30 Pacific. Look forward to catching you there, catch you on the podcast. This is Matt Heinz, this has been Sales Pipeline Radio.
Paul: You’ve been listening to Sales Pipeline Radio brought to you by Matt Heinz at Heinz Marketing right here on the Funnel Radio Network.
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