#44: Lauren Vaccarello, CMO at Salesloft, former CMO at Talend, VP Marketing at Box, Head of Digital at Salesforce

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All right, Lauren, thank you for being here. It's nice to reconnect with you. You're in a new role, new context, so people can hear your voice and get a sense of who you are. Give everybody the full rundown on who you are, what you do, and maybe the abbreviated career story just to set context for our discussion.

Awesome. It's really, really good to see you again, Dave. I am going to do my best at abbreviated, so cut me off on this. So I'm Lauren Baccarello. I am chief marketing officer at Salesloft. I've been at Salesloft about six months. It is absolutely incredible. For people who aren't familiar with SalesLoft, we're the leading sales engagement platform. So I'm going to try to do my background in 90 seconds. So I've been in the marketing space for the better side of forever. I actually started off in the early days as the equivalent of an SDR and can go into more details on that. I got started in digital marketing also before digital marketing was a socially acceptable profession and rose up through that, running my own company for about a hot second. I ran digital at Salesforce, ran marketing at several startups, eventually went to Box, where I led the majority of marketing. I was CMO at a company called Talend, which is a data integration company. I'm on the board of two different companies. I invest, I advise. I am obsessed with marketing, obsessed with startups. So really, really excited to be here.

Love that. That was like, take notes, listeners at home. That's how you do it. Love it. I mean, your. Your resume is obviously super impressive. I've been following your journey for a while. You've been at Sales Loft, so I think a lot of people will know your name and they will know Sales Loft, but, like, putting those two things together. Like, I remember when we got reconnected for this, I was like, oh, yeah, she is at Sales Loft now. So tell me about you were CMO at to Lend until like the fall of 2021.

Ish.

You joined Sales Loft as CMO. Just take me into taking that job because a lot of people listening to this podcast are in a. In similar situations where, you know, they want to be either they're they're a marketing exec now or want to be. And so I'm just interested in kind of like story and what led you to sales loft?

Great question. So I left talend end of October last year. Great company, great run. Company got acquired and I loved where they were going. But I also decided I wanted a break. It's funny, I talk more about now than I ever used to, which is the importance of taking care of yourself and self care and taking time off. And I was in this incredible position that I could actually take six months off and recharge and think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Which I say with this incredible privilege being able to say I'm going to think about my life and really focus on me. And then Salesloft reached out and I have to tell you, I have been obsessed with this space since I first sort of discovered the idea of sales engagement. So Kyle, who's the CEO of salesloft reached out, said, hey, you know, it would be great to talk. And I got familiar with sales engagement back when I was, you know, running marketing and marketing operations and had the SDR organization. And I remember from like the dark ages when I was in SDR what it was like, here's your list of leads, call down, send emails and how many you could like go through every day. And I remember when I was looking at a sales engagement solution in a past life, my head of marketing operations and I were chatting about it and I was like, I don't know, what did they get? Like 100 leads, that's the most they can do. And she looked at me and laughed and she's like, Lauren, it's been a long time since you've been sdr. That's not how this works anymore. They can actually go through 300 leads. And by the way, the conversion rates that we have using sales engagement, it's not what you think. And it was one of those I'm officially old now that I don't have the right information. And I saw us go from basically getting the same amount of pipeline from 50 SDRs to what we could do with 15 just by adding like automation, embedded personalization and better technology and became this like massive believer in the space. Then I meet Kyle, who is just freaking amazing and love the guy and got to meet the team and I think about what gets me excited about any company. And this is my advice for everyone of like, when you're picking a job, here's the things that have to be table stakes is It a market you believe in and is the market growing? If the market is not growing, it doesn't matter how good you are. It's going to be a really hard road. Do you believe in the product? If you believe in the product and you've got a good market, this is gold for you. If you have a bad product in a bad market, it's really hard job. And then what do you think of the team? Do you want to spend every day with these people? Do you want to go into battle with these people? Do you want to celebrate with these people? And for me those are the like minimum table stakes. Check those boxes and then start the process and see if like is this the right skill set? Is this something I'm passionate about? And for me, Salesloft just nailed all of those.

I love that. So just this week I got a question. There was an anonymous question in my Exit 5 community and it was somebody being like hey, I'm interviewing, I'm interviewing for this head of marketing role. Red flag, red flag, red flag, red flag, red flag. And it's like look, every, not every job is gonna be perfect. But it goes back to what you said, which is like at the end of the day like you're going to be more likely to want to solve those problems if you like, if you have an understanding of the market. And so it's cool to hear you talk about like how your, your experience in sales and marketing and just being in this space drives like a desire to have that job. And just those factors, those are the things that are so important outside of the day to day marketing things. I think when evaluating a new job. Because work is hard, right? Like if it wasn't hard it wouldn't be called work. But are you more likely to like are you going to want to dig in with something that you, that you believe in? And so I think your point about the believing in the product and believing in the market is so important for everybody listening. Joining Sales Loft like they're roughly like I don't know where it is now and what you're saying publicly but like I think most people know that like you know well over 100 million in ARR what was the mission? And I know they I came from Drift who also had a did a deal with with Vista Sales Loft is in that umbrella. Like I'm just curious of like the mission, right? Like bring you in May 2022 well over 100 million RR. Like what was the playbook? Or like what do you focus on doing? Growing faster obviously but what was the mission?

That's a great question. I mean, obviously growing faster because we all want that. But I came in and I looked at it from this angle. Like, I've seen what the world looks like before sales engagement, and I've seen what the world looks like now. I don't want to go back to that world. I've seen the world of like where marketing technology was 15 years ago and how much better we are now. The sales industry, the sales function has been underserved by technology where marketers, we have everything. Sales function has been underserved. And I think there's so much opportunity to better serve a sales organization to provide better technology. I think about why does salesloft exist? Where do we want to go? There is no reason that sales engagement should not be day one technology for every single company. Every single business with a sales organization should be using this type of technology. The impact that it will have on productivity, on pipeline, on revenue is so material that I just, I feel like part of my personal mission and the company's mission is to get us to a point where sales engagement is as ubiquitous as CRM is.

How do you see that in the world of, of marketing? Because like, as, as I'm hearing you say sales engagement, like, I am just kind of like my brain is translating that to revenue. And I see it as two pieces to the revenue puzzle is sales and marketing. But I know because of a lot of people listening and how their org is set up today, they're like, well, sales engagement is something that the sales leader is going to buy and marketing's over here and we're generating, we're. We're bringing, we're bringing things in that, that's separate. But I know you don't see it that way. So let's talk about where like sales engagement fits in the, in the marketing puzzle, right? 90% of the people that listen to this are, are in the marketing world. Like I'm a cmo. Sales engagement that comes. That's going to come on the sales budget, right? They'll worry about that. We're going to. We have our own goals to hit. How does, how, how do you feel about that?

I love that question. And then there's like the sales budget and the marketing budget. I'm going to say something that is my. Gets me into trouble sometimes and also makes people chuckle. I've been on the same soapbox about B2B marketing. I kid you not. For what year is. For 17 years. I have been saying the same thing for 17 years and 17 years ago I was like cool and innovative. Now the fact that this isn't with everybody makes me nuts for B2B marketers should not care about like I care about leads in as much as leads drive opportunities, pipeline and close 1 revenue. If a B2B marketer only cares about leads, that B2B marketer is lazy. That is not what we should be thinking about. We should be measured on something you can buy a beer with. It's funny, I think I stole that from Craig Rosenberg like 10 years ago and I'm still taking credit for it. It was Craig Rosenberg or Matt Heinz that I stole this from 10 years ago. So we should be metrics on something you can buy a beer with. On pipeline, on revenue, on close one deals. The reason marketers need to care about sales engagement is our job is not to generate some leads, kick it over the fence to the sales organization. Our job is to help close business. We're building the brand, we're setting us up for demand. We're giving sales at best, we're helping them win. So we need to care about sales engagement for number one. It's going to make the money we spend on demand gen a lot more effective. And then you have that on the pipeline side and then when you move it throughout the revenue motion and you work with the sales team on how to better move pipeline to close. Like it's fun and it's interesting. And as marketing and sales, we need to go in completely lockstep of look, I don't care where the lead came in, I don't care who gets credit. We want to win and we want to win this together.

Yeah. That was like the hardest lesson that I learned as a first time marketing leader, which is like my sales. So I was like 28 and my sales counterpart was probably a decade older than me and he had already had two successful exits. And so he's like, hey, you're good at marketing, you're creative. But like I don't think you really understand how, how the business works. And he's like, I don't care. You keep telling me about this and that source. I don't care. He's like, I need my reps, need, we need X meetings every single month of this quality and they need to convert this rate. He goes, you could tell me that we're going to do a road show all across the world and we're going to do field events and direct mail and that's how we're gonna hit the number.

Don't care.

I want those meetings. And I think in doing this podcast and talking to you and others like, you know, Bill Macedas, who, who I know, you know, you work with back in the day, like, it's liberating to hear that. It's like, no, it's about revenue. And so you see it as, it sounds like you see it as, it's just you have this one big toolbox. Salespeople. Sales as a function is, is one lever that you have. Why not make that like a shared role between sales and marketing and we're going to work on this things together.

Absolutely. And I look at this, it's so easy to look at things by function. And it's like, well, your brand team is going to do your brand ads and then your demand person is going to do demand and then your SDRs are going to take the lead and then your A is going to follow up and then your solutions engineer is going to do this and then it goes to your csm. But if you look at it as well, what's the entire revenue motion? We need to get the most out of the entire revenue motion. And that starts with brand awareness and ends with they're a happy, successful customer. And if you approach this as how do we maximize the entire revenue motion? And we don't think about, well, technically this is an AES role and technically this is my brand marketer's role. And you're like, it's the same person, it's the same revenue motion.

Yeah, it just gets hard inside of a company because like that AE has a quota and they report to Jane and Jane has a team of six people and they're competing against Peter's team who has six. Who has six other people. And it's like one of the many reasons why I'm not in a company right now is. And I don't mean to talk down about anybody who is at a company, you're obviously doing amazing things. But what drives me nuts about the B2B marketing stuff is it does seem like so often we are battling more about internal issues than we are like, creative problem solving.

Totally. It's funny. I'll give you an example. I had a. I just joined Salesloft and I was new. And the good thing is when you're new, you don't realize what you're doing. And we're going through pipeline and you know, we ended up winning this amazing deal. We win this amazing, really big deal. It's awesome. So this is the information that I have. And I remember sitting in this room and is it, you know, did this person come through inbound? Did this account come through outbound? Is this marketing's credit? Is it sales credit? And it was good sized deal for us. And I remember sitting in this room and it's halfway through the quarter. So basically one team hit their number already halfway through the quarter because of this one big deal. And I sat in the room and I just went, everyone, I don't really care because that deal is an anomaly. Nobody gets credit for it because whoever gets credit, looks like you don't have any more work to do. So right now nobody gets. We will comp people and we'll make sure people get paid. But in terms of performance, nobody gets this deal. It's going to skew the data. And I had no idea that it was this sort of point of contention and that going, no, nobody gets it. Sort of diffused all of it. And let us say, well, okay, now we are the same team. What are we doing?

Yeah, it's interesting how that drives your thinking. It's like, you know, it is an interesting thought experiment I think to think about like for the marketers listening, like how would you operate differently if it wasn't sales on one team, marketing on another? You were just this revenue leader and you had 20 people whose job was to do sales. How would you use them and what would you do in that scenario? You mentioned your background coming up as an sdr. How much of that drives your. I think very clear point of view. Like it's very clear to me like why you believe this way. Because like you're a CMO now but you came up through sales. Talk about that a little bit.

So this is my back in the day. Lauren was a bit of a hustler story.

A bit of a hustler. I think you still are, for the record.

I think I am. I try to be very proper in corporate and a source of wisdom now.

Oh, that makes one of us.

But for those who know me, still a bit of a hustler. So this was about a thousand years ago. Salesforce was like newer, CRM was newer. And I have this job and I, I get a list of names that I have to go and pick up the phone and call and sell trading accounts to. So I've got this. But I also was in this really weird position because like I said, I got into digital marketing before digital marketing was a thing. So my first week at this job where I get hired to sell trading accounts and retail trading accounts, I walk over the marketing team and I Was like, hey, I heard you do paid search. I've done this before. You need help. Who would do that? And walk over to the marketing team and say, like, hey, I know how to do this better. But a young person with lots of hubris. And of course they were like, sure, jump in. So at the time, I was doing their paid search, and this was back in, I don't know, 2004, when nobody was doing this. Maybe 2000. I think it was 2004. So I'm seeing their Google adwords and I'm running paid search, and I do that for maybe four hours a day, and then eight hours a day. I'm a salesperson, so I'm getting lead lists. And I had this realization that some of the leads that I get are better than other leads. I wonder why this happens. And because I was controlling the advertising and where money and where. How we get leads and what's coming in, I had this totally different viewpoint because I knew what keywords we were advertising on. I knew what the messaging said. I knew what the landing page said. So as a salesperson, I knew how to mimic whatever was in the ad. And because I knew how to use Salesforce, and I set up campaigns and I set up tracking. So then I did a Google search, found Keaton, which became Salesforce for Google adwords, which allowed me to integrate Google adwords with Salesforce and pump in my AdWords data into Salesforce so I could see which keywords were driving which better deals. And I was like, this is magic. I'm now going to optimize what keywords to advertise on. But because Lauren was a hustler and had a number to hit, I also built my own lead lists. So I prioritized the leads for myself that were on the keywords that had the highest conversion rate. And this was before lead routing and before lead scoring. So I figured out the system, and I learned firsthand this is better quality. This is how to tie together what they see, what they believe, what my pitch is, and this is how I can close my deal. So I just had this very different point of view. And now as a marketing leader, I push so much, making sure what you say in the market is the same thing as what the salesperson says, because this is how you drive better deals. Also, it's probably why I push my team so hard on. I don't care about leads. Leads don't matter. What matters is what's going to close. Because I had to carry a bag once upon a time.

I love that I also think it probably gave you, I don't know if empathy is the right word, but like, if you're eating from the things that you were hunting for yourself, you're gonna like. It's like the example of like, if you, if marketing just does a bunch of webinars and just tosses a bunch of webinars over a sales team and they're like, why are you not closing these? And it's like, hold on. You get on this phone call and try to call this person and actually.

Talk about this thing completely.

Can you talk through just kind of where Salesloft is today and already being like a bigger revenue company in the space. What is the go to market approach? Obviously, and I'm asking you to like give away, you know, company secrets. But I think like, how do you think about the marketing strategy? Clearly you have a good grasp on the market today. You've already closed a bunch of business, like, what is your approach to marketing? And if you could talk about the, you know, where sales fit, just kind of the whole go to market strategy that you're. That you see now.

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I will tell you a little bit about how I think about marketing and how I look at marketing. So I obviously came up as a very revenue oriented, revenue driven, like our job is to make money. And I, I spent a bunch of years at Salesforce building app digital there. And that's where I learned this idea of the importance of brand. And it really taught me brand doesn't mean you're a billboard on the side of the freeway. Brand is who you are in the market. Brand is what lets you make the pie bigger and lets you change the perception. So when I came into Salesloft, I really am thinking about a couple of things. One is who are we in how big is this market and who are we in this market? So what does our brand mean? Who are we? And it's not a billboard on the side of the freeway. It is the category. It's how people perceive us. And then that for me sets us up for demand in the long term. And if we do this right, our demand strategy three years from now is so much easier because we have been making the pie a lot bigger. So part of us are focused on this whole brand concept. The second piece is really focus on how do we drive demand. What are our from enterprise to commercial? For someone who grew up in digital, I love field marketing. I just love the convergence of sort of online and offline together. I think there's so much goodness that can happen there. And so much goodness that happens with really closely aligning with the seller. And not just about how do I drive a lead, but how do I progress a deal all the way through the funnel. There's such an interesting psychology to that and partnering with the sales team. And then I think for my entire career I've been working on marketing infrastructure. There's just always different stages of different companies. And I think a lot about like what's process, what's scalable and how do I make sure we have the right people. Process systems technology for three years from now.

Why do you obsess over infrastructure?

It is the thing that when done well, nobody pays attention to when is not done well will grind your entire department to a halt. It's the unsexy part of marketing is like the backend technology that is one of the most important things because it will speed up everything else you do.

Can you give me an example about like the grinding to a halt? Is it like not having insight or data and to know what to do or what, what's working? Like, what is the insight and data?

So I've seen at different companies I've been at over my career. How long do you think it should take you to get a webpage live?

My personal opinion is it's seven minutes.

You're like, I have the copy. Can I go in here for real? I have worked at places where it's two weeks and it's not even because while we're waiting on copy, it's, well, this is how long it takes. I have worked at places where thankfully none of these places are sales loft where they had a multilingual site with lots of languages. The way the code base was set up was not done well. So if they would update the French website, some modules might revert to English. So you have a French web page that is partially in French and partially in English just because, well, this bit of code wasn't written properly and it's the death by a thousand cuts. And I've seen those things happen so many times that it is a thankless job to fix. But at some point someone has to. And I happen to be a little bit more technical than most CMOs, so I will pick up on that sooner and I'll usually want to invest in fixing it before it is a hair on fire problem.

Also, I mean, that's one example of like a website technical thing slowing you down. But to your point about infrastructure, when you have a motion like, I don't know, the right way to phrase it so maybe easier is not better. But I feel like when you have like a hundred percent inbound driven motion model, it's pretty easy because it's. Everything is digital and so it's going to be much easier to measure. It's like it gets harder as you do what, what you're doing at Salesloft, which is like you're selling bigger deals. You have. It's more of becoming more of an enterprise motion and it's like you're trying to match up all these things that don't all equate. Like someone may have read a blog post, but they also attended an event that you did in Chicago and then they also got a message from Kyle Porter. It's like is it, is it having to do with stitching all those things together in some measurable way?

There's a big piece of that and it is the. I hate to use the word easy. If you have a, like US English direct only commercial business that you know is more velocity. Great.

Like if you and me, if you and me right now, we started as we started a SaaS app. It's 100% self serve. It's only one language in the US we could easily measure full funnel attribution, no problem. Right.

But now let's throw in, let's throw in channel. Let's throw an enterprise with like some multi touch. Okay. Let's have a, let's have a buying committee.

Yeah.

And now all of a sudden it's. Everything gets complicated.

Yeah.

What's the right system? Who's doing what? And what you don't want to do is look at things the wrong way and cut off say a source that's driving all of your leads or cut off the thing that's closing it and it's. The evolution of a company just means the systems, your how you think about things needs to evolve as well.

So do you have a philosophy like how do you measure that stuff today? Like with a marketing and sales mix that, that varies along processes, you know, tech and people and events and this and that. Do you have a philosophy on like how you, how you wrangle the measurement of all that?

Pick one and stick with it.

Is that developed? Like is that just a philosophy that like you all need to get on the same page with internally? Like it's not like a cookie cutter playbook, but it's like cmo, CEO, CRO, product, whoever. We need to come into agreement on how we're going to define this.

We need to come to agreement and we need to Sort of stick with that agreement. There are some core principles that I try to always have. One of them is having a finite look back period. For marketing, it's really easy to say if marketing has ever touched this lead marketing gets credit. I mean it makes us look great, but it's also not always intellectually honest. So is there some sort of a look back period if your average deal cycle is six months? If marketing touched that lead 18 months ago, I'm where it's not us. It was, you know, say an outbound salesperson. So we'll, we'll look at that to give us a finite look back period. The thing that's always interesting is like what's the difference between partner and channel? And really defining that. I always like to have a, whether that's how you really measure things from an attribution perspective. I like to really understand like what source the lead because I want to make sure we never kill the thing that sourced the lead. It might not have been the most important tactic, but I need to know what are the things that sourced it and what's the last thing that happened before it converted to an opportunity. So I like to look at that from a visibility standpoint and then your attribution model that none of them are perfect. Nothing is perfect. You don't know what people did that you can't track. The good thing about digital is you can track everything. The bad thing about digital is you can track everything. So you just need to pick the best and perfect option and have everybody agree with it and have consistency.

Do you have a philosophy on like you mentioned marketing getting credit? Do you have a philosophy on like is it marketing source? Like how do you look at how marketing gets credit at sales loft, commercial influence?

Yes. I hate influence. Tell me why for a while know that.

I'm like, fine, let's, let's educate people. Tell us why.

Well, so for commercial business, so velocity side of business marketing tends to be able to drive more. So for that I do like to look at marketing source. We can usually take a bigger piece of the pie on sort of velocity. Commercial enterprise is harder partially because there's fewer enterprises in this world and they may not come in as much through say digital. So it's going to be maybe more field events, marketing does more air cover and more pipe maturation.

Or there's like six people. Like a lead doesn't have the same value because there's six people in the account that you're trying to talk to. Yeah.

And it's like, well, Dave was Charged was tagged as the primary contact. But really I was talking to Allie and it just, it gets really, really kludgy when you have an enterprise deal where commercial, it's a lot more straightforward. Why I don't love influence in a lot of ways, influence is going to sort of double credit and double count things. And I think influence is a great way to make you feel really good of like this email influence $10 million and you're like, did it really? Or did you email every single open account?

Or like marketing owns the website and of course because it's 2022, someone is going to go to sales Loft's website. Exactly right. Like so does marketing get credit for that?

And the thing I do like looking at for events, I like to look at Pipeline in the room, which is I this is something we used to do at Salesforce back in the day was if you have an owned event, I want to know how much open pipeline is sitting in that room. So I want to know how many open deals, how much money do I have sitting in this room? And so we'll set a target on that and then after that I want to know what happens. Because Pipeline sitting in the room, sort of like an influence, great input metric. I had however many million dollars sitting in that room. Now what I want to know is the pipeline sitting in that room, how much of that closed did we close at a higher rate than similar deals who weren't in that room. Was our deal size bigger? Was our velocity bigger? And that's why, like that's really what I want to look at. Or what are those sort of pipe.

Movement metrics even just working backwards from that, that having that mindset is going to frame what type of event you need to do if you do a very fluffy, inspirational type of. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but if you do that then you're not going to close more deals because people went to that versus if you're teaching them how to do something better at work or how to, you know, improve their, their sales motion because they went to your event. I think it just has so much impact on like the offer, which is the. That what was the event about Completely.

And that's why when I think about events and we work the team on it, it's sometimes you want the fluffy, you want the big thought leadership event and sometimes it's about closing. So before we host an event, before we show up at an event, it is. Why do we have this if this is a event about closing Great. How many big deals are in this room? I want percentage of deal of large deals. I want pipeline in the room and those are going to be the metrics we track. But if this is about brand awareness, then pipeline in the room maybe matters less. It's going to be leads in our total addressable market. It's how many people with a certain title, in a certain industry or from our target list are in there. So the way you think about it starts to be different and then also influences the content that you have.

Let's talk to the future CMOs listening to this podcast. What would 10 years ago, maybe 17 years ago or whatever the number is. What are the lessons that you wish that you knew? Or to frame it another way, like to the person who is managing maybe a team or two or three people wants to be cmo. What types of ways does your mind have to change and how you think about marketing and the role of marketing as a company to progress from marketing manager or director to like CMO at a very successful company like you.

One of the things is get to know the business as much as you can. It is not just about your function and your piece of the pie. It is about the whole pie. So like I'll give you an example. When I was at first started at Salesforce, I don't know, it was like 2008 or 2008 ish. I was running paid search and then I was running paid acquisition and eventually all of digital. But the reason my career grew so quickly was I wanted to know everything about how the company worked. I'd listen to earnings calls, I try to understand the rest of the business. And then I'd say, how does my job help business goals and business outcomes? So my job isn't to drive leads and pipeline from paid search. My job is to okay, what are our clear goals? We're growing in these territories. We need to hire more AES. How can my function support that? Know that, know the business. And the I'm going to say the other thing I wish I knew, it's the good and bad is I never knew what I couldn't do. I didn't realize. I mean the job where I was in SDR and then I was eventually running paid search and online marketing for them. I was in my early 20s and I was running online advertising for the 8th largest online advertiser. I was grossly unqualified for this, but I had no idea that I was unqualified. And my hubris was like, I can do this. I got this. I love That I had that and that sort of lack of self realization. I just never knew I couldn't do something so I kept pushing. So keep that. The flip side of that is I didn't realize where I was wrong in the things I didn't know. Everything was so black and white. This is what makes money. This is what's good. This is how you should do it. It wasn't until I was forced, I was asked to take over Salesforce's first brand campaign. Like I thought brand was dumb and why would you do this? It doesn't make any money. This is silly. I wish I saw the bigger picture of why it's so important before it had to like get dropped on my plate and now I'm the person that is like, no, this is why when brand does well, it will change the trajectory of your company.

I love that. I love, I love both sides of this and I think a mix of, I'm just seeing this as somebody like observing your career and we've had conversations in the past. I think it seems also like you have a, just a constantly growing curiosity for like maybe that's the way you're doing it in Salesloft today, but you're talking to other marketing leaders and you're kind of just like always trying to see, you know, how other people are doing it, what are better ways to do it. Like, I think you have to have that ability to stay curious. But also, you know, you've seen 15 plus years of technology changes in marketing but you seem to still have this like philosophy that's rooted in these timeless principles. And it's like, you know, throw whatever AI, new tech, new tools at you. I think you'd still be able to effectively run marketing because you're, you're rooted in the principles of like. Well, marketing is ultimately a business function where the goal is driving revenue. So like operate from there. I meant to ask you this earlier and you resang it not to like throw us back on top, but just I'd love to hear you talk about brand for a little bit because it seems like brand is not just some fluffy word. Do you have a way of measuring brand and quantifying this and like just the way that brand and demand work together?

Yes. I'm going to give you my as quickly as possible sort of why Lauren was wrong about brand story because I like to admit and own up to the times that I was wrong. So I alluded to it. I ended up inheriting and when I was running advertising at Salesforce, I inherited their Wall Street Journal campaign. So we had, at the time they had a two year deal with the Wall Street Journal.

Wait, hold on, hold on. Wasn't that just. Isn't just the same little Marc Benioff runs that same graphic every week? How hard is that?

It was so long time ago and maybe soon. So it was front page of the Wall Street Journal Monday edition. We get a print ad. It's the only one. I am like, I don't want to have this. Someone else buys this. Now I'm running this thing and going, oh my gosh, what I could do with $7 million, I could drive $70 million in pipeline and revenue for this company and I should have this money. But fine, I've got to run this. And I pick it up begrudgingly and I have to run this for two years. Over the course of two years, what I realized is this is how we're going to tell our story. And what if every single week it's a different ad that starts to tell this broader narrative? And the reason we're doing this front page thing is we believe that CEOs are looking at the Wall Street Journal and we believe that we. Well, at the time, Salesforce was a, you know, it's a thing for your sales leader. And it's like, no, it's a CRM. Every CEO needs to know about this. This needs to be strategic. So what we're doing with the front page ad is now lined up to the message we have in market for advertising. It's what we're doing from. We have sellers going in, painting this bigger vision. And it's this whole, I think at the time it was the social enterprise concept. But we use this to like, how do we reshape people's perception of Salesforce? And it wasn't just the Wall Street Journal, but it was that in combination with everything else that over the course of the two years, I saw the perception of Salesforce change from you're just a CRM to this is now something every CEO knows about and cares about. And I was like, this is why I'm wrong. Because yes, I could have made $70 million. That was the wrong choice. The right choice was changing the perception and sort of changing what the category is around Salesforce and how this relates even to Salesloft and to sort of how we measure brand. I would love to wait two years for the impact of what I'm doing and crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. How I like to measure success of is this working with brand. You can do the big brand awareness study. Those are great. You do it twice a year. There is a time and place for that. I also like to look at things like branded search volume just to give me some leading indicators. If you're running a brand campaign. If like say we're running a brand campaign for Salesloft, I assume more people are searching for Salesloft because if more people know, volume starts to go up.

So you're just looking at straight up, like organic. Increase in organic and direct traffic.

Increase in organic and direct traffic are great, great proxies for this. Also, if you can run a couple of test markets so like Minneapolis and Phoenix look similar. Run a brand campaign in Minneapolis and Phoenix. Check the brand studies and the brand metrics. But the other thing I like to look at is what's happening with our win rates in those two cities and how can I compare win rates trending over time? How can I compare connect rates and get some anecdotal feedback from your salespeople to say, no, People actually know who we are and are paying more attention. People know what our message is. So there's a really good ways to start to see what the impact of brand is. Because it's like I said, it's not just the billboard on the freeway. It is. And brand is done well. It makes the sales process easier.

So, like, if you wanted to do the billboard on the freeway, you would pick a market and actually go and measure that and test that and have a philosophy. Because I think that the Salesforce story is fantastic. I didn't know that was. That was you. I've always seen those ads. But I do think, like, clearly that was, that wasn't like junior marketing managers, like, let's do the Wall Street Journal. Like, I'm sure Marc Benioff and others were like, we're going to do this regardless. You better figure out how to make it work. I think it's easier to execute in that when like that you have a CEO who like believes in that and is like, hey, we want to do this. But I think like you're the much more tactical advice for like just the regular listener of this podcast is like, take a bet with some brand campaign stuff and you can measure that by lifting organic indirect or do what you mentioned, which is pick a particular market. But that seems to be like after you have some set, like you have to have some type of scale to be able to do that, right?

You should have some type of scale. And don't just pick one test city, one control. Because there could Be some sort of anomaly. So if you can do three cities, three tests, three controls, you can actually do it for a reasonable amount of money once you have the test cities. And what I like about doing test cities is I never pick a New York or a San Francisco. I never. It's just there's too much noise.

Yeah. And probably so expensive right out of the gate too, right?

Completely. And you want to see is this going to work? Is this not going to work? So if you do like a Minneapolis and Phoenix, go big in those cities and see what it looks like. The other way to think about brand awareness. As much as I love my mother, she's not a buyer of sales loft. She doesn't necessarily need to see my brand campaign. So if you know exactly who your target audience is, if you were selling to revenue leaders, you know who your sales, who your target audience is. Go big with just your target audience. What's been great in the last, you know, decade or two, there's really good targeting options out there. Again, as much as I love my mom, there is not a reason for her to see an ad for sales.

Are you talking about like for out.

Of home type stuff for even for digital. Go heavy for digital. Just advertising for out of home. If so, back in the day I was running campaigns towards ad agencies and it was trying to get ad agencies to use a product. Ad agencies all most of their offices are in the same location. So for out of home we knew exactly who our target audience is, literally show up where they are. So we did all of our out of home around where ad agencies are. We did in person guerrilla marketing physically where the ad agencies were. Because we're like it's our awareness campaign but we don't need everybody, we need these people.

Got it. And then even in your like Minneapolis and Phoenix example, you're talking about targeting specifically like digital properties in those GEOs.

Do digital properties in those GEOs. And this is also where you are going to test the out of home. Give out of home a try. There's a company that I advise that actually you can buy media and TV spots now that have better targeting options for obviously specific location also specific Personas. Depending on the services you're using.

Is there a timeframe that you feel like that has to run for for it to be effective? Because I, you know, like you put up a billboard for a week, is that going to do.

Minimum 30 days. If you can get away with doing it for 90, do it for 90 to see the bigger impact because you also want to See the impact on the sales process. So 90 days will give you a much better test run to do this. The thing that is always a little disappointing with brand campaigns is you'll see everything go up when the campaign runs and then you stop it and it goes back to barely above where it was before. Not always, but often. Especially when you're only doing like a 90 day blitz.

Is it a short term solution to drive pipeline or like how do you.

Just live with that if you're actually starting to see the positive impact? If you're running a brand campaign and you are seeing an increase in organic traffic, you're seeing an increase in win rates, it could end up being even though brand, you should not be measuring directly on revenue. It could end up having a really positive direct revenue impact. And what you want to see is does this work? If so, what works? And then that shouldn't be a three month blitz. Once you have that data, that should then fuel a. Okay, are we going specific cities? Are we going specific Personas? And now let's turn this into an always on.

Got it, Got it. So the ultimate outcome, the most success would be like it turns into an always on thing and maybe after two years it stops working, but at least for that time. Okay. This was fantastic. Obviously we could talk for hours and hours and hours. Lauren, thank you so much for doing this. Just let's wrap up and just a quick plug for you and sales loft where people can just say hi to you if they want to do that after.

Sure, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's just Lauren Vaccarello. Come find us for Salesloft. We are all over the Internet and you can see us on salesloft.com awesome.

Lauren, thank you so much. It was great to reconnect with you and we'll stay in touch and I'll make sure you get a. Get a link to this in a couple weeks when, when we're back up.

Okay, thanks for having me. This was so much fun.

All right, bye. Thanks Ali. See you later. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got video, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want A place to go where you can see what people are talking about. Get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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