Misunderstandings in Enterprise Marketing and What it Takes to Scale with Google Dir of Marketing

All right, welcome! Thank you all for joining us at SaaStr Scale today. We're so excited to have you. I am Lindsay Leggett, part of the SaaStr team, um, and it's a pleasure for me to be here today. I wanted to kick off today's session, um, just with a few housekeeping notes, and then I will pass it over to our host for today's roundtable session. So a few items. As a reminder, today is a roundtable session. The goal is for this to be interactive, for people to engage with each other and with the speaker. It is a 20 to 30 minute session, so you have that time blocked on your calendar and we thank you for joining us. As you can see, many of you are on camera, which is really the goal here. It's trying to facilitate a roundtable conversation that we used to have around tables and in meetings in person. Your audio is often muted, but if you'd like to speak up, please do just unmute your line or raise your hand or drop a note into the chat. There's a lot of different ways to kind of engage with MK and others in this session. So I really do encourage you to utilize any of those features. Everything works. Lastly, these sessions are going to be recorded. So if you want to listen again or share it with a peer of yours, please do so. Those links will be shared with you after the event. And last but not least, don't forget that we have an amazing networking opportunity throughout this week. What I'll do is I'll drop in the chat a link to our Brella site where we are facilitating one-to-one networking throughout the week. So if you have a topic that you're hearing today during today's sessions, reach out to the person that mentioned it. Connect. It's a really wonderful way to network in this virtual setting. So without further ado, it is a pleasure to announce and introduce MK, Director of Global Marketing from Google, who will be leading today's session. Thanks for joining us today, MK.

Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining today, and I'm very honored to host all of you and joining If you're joining from the West Coast, good morning. And if you're joining from other parts of the country, good afternoon, or hopefully still good morning. And then good evening if you're from other parts of the world. So appreciate everyone joining. You can call me MK for the rest of the session. That will make it easier for you. I wanted to also open it up by saying that we, you know, we have about 25 minutes or so together, so let's make this interactive. Please ask questions for yourself and for others as well, so we can have a good discussion and hopefully you take something meaningful out of this. So appreciate knowing everybody. So what I thought I'll kick off with are a few misunderstanding and insights that I've learned over the course of being CMOs at startups and also at being at a big company and sort of running a portfolio of products. That I wanted to share with all of you. These are obviously my personal opinions. They don't, you know, they don't reflect my company, but these are experiences as a marketer that I've sort of accrued as part of my career. So the first part that I wanted to share was one of the things that I have recognized as being in a company that actually markets to consumers as well as B2B is that B2B buyers tend to be rational and committee buyers. And so, you know, they don't tend to respond to an emotional need. They tend to be very much a, you know, logical reinforcement-driven type of purchase decision. So often this means that you need your checklist or you need your, you know, you need your how-to videos. These are things that do matter for a B2B buyer. And most of you already know this, that a lot of discovery happens before they even hit your site, right? So that's why that like cross-influential marketing becomes a pretty critical part of any B2B marketing. And often one of the things that a lot of marketers tend to spend on is brand messages that have emotional appeal. And it's necessary to, like, it's not necessary to have that because Often, you know, buyers, they may respond to it, but that's not needed. And it's very difficult to nail that in a B2B marketing motion. I would say it's not just a top-down sale, and this is especially true for the freemium or the SMB products or team sales products. You know, sometimes having a top-down initiative is really good, but sometimes the CIO might actually just defer it back to, their head of IT or the SMB owner might like let the team, functional lead at the team make a decision. So it's sort of important to have a good idea of what that buyer journey looks like. It may not be top-down. There's a lot of vendors out there right now targeting the CXO audience. So that mindshare is pretty tapped. So sometimes you might, you're better off trying, you can try that, but you should also try some organic bottoms-up style innovation, because that actually sometimes ends up becoming a good way to influence and build your influence, especially in a committee type sale. So just think about how your buyer journey is not always gonna be, I need to target CIO. Also from a marketing point of view, CIO plus or CXO marketing tends to be pretty expensive. And so, you know, you sort of need to think about ROI of your programs. I would say multi-touch is a lot of work. Sometimes with multi-touch, each touchpoint has a whole list of bill of materials or marketing action or thinking through the mechanics of a multi-touch. These are important, but they can also cause a lot of budget items and sometimes very hard to justify ROI. So be very deliberate in how you're thinking about multi-touch, have a good sense of what your multi-touch looks like, But you know, multi-touch is very hard to actually prove ROI. And sometimes you get questioned by your finance peers as to like, ooh, I don't know about all these multi-touch points. And you know, what is the event ROI or what is the ROI of a demand gen campaign that's media? And you know, trying to prove out a multi-touch model requires a good sense of research that goes into it. So just be very deliberate about your programming of your multi-touch. Because it does become very resource intensive. Need to land, launching is not enough. So often product marketers do this where, or product managers where, you know, there is an innovation and you launch it and woohoo, great like coverage or, you know, customers liked it on first day, but then not a lot of thought is spent on landing your product. So whether it's thinking about how do we get someone to actually use it or, what is the lifecycle marketing of that actual announcement is often not baked into plans. So really critical to stop thinking about launches and thinking more around landings and having metrics associated with landings and trying to drive towards that. 'Cause behaviors will change, actions will change, but often product marketers are very like interested in launching and sort of moving on to the next thing. And while that's okay, it often doesn't actually generate a ton of action and a ton of, you know, a ton of product utilization. And for most SaaS companies, especially when you're thinking about, when you're thinking about, you know, monthly active users or daily active users, landing becomes very critical. Data is never perfect. Benchmarking is key. So I can't imagine, I don't know how many marketers I've talked to have said, ooh, our analytics is broken. Or, you know, we use multi-touch, but it's hard to track. We have this ingrown analytics stack or a tech stack that supports analytics. And then over the course of years, it's had all this tech debt or analytics debt. Those are the kind of things we want to avoid in the long run, right? So as if you're starting a company and you're like early on, invest in a really good tech stack that can last a very long time because it does tend to become one of those things that you can't really uproot and like switch out. It becomes a big project eventually. A lot of marketers will have it where their Series A or C rounds tech stack stack doesn't actually hold up when they have a scaled product and like later stage product because it just scales so quickly. And now we're ballooned into this like analytical platform that doesn't support the kind of marketing you wanna do. So be very thoughtful about your initial tech stack if you can, but eventually recognize that no data is going to be perfect. There's all of these nuances in how it was set up and how things were tagged. And so The key is to have a good sense of what your data is telling you, benchmarking that, and then eventually working towards optimizing that because that's your platform of what you have and what you know, and aligning with your cross-teams to make sure they agree with that mindset because sometimes they don't. Sometimes they'll say, "Well, I don't believe your data. My data says something else." Then it's like your data versus my data and becomes a really difficult conversation. Very critical to have alignment on what the measurements are, not having too many of them, and then sort of sticking to them as a way to benchmark. And I'm happy to take questions on this too, because I know this is a hot topic for a lot of people. I will say marketing is a partnership, it's not a service, especially because marketers are so— in B2B organizations are so wanting that alignment with their sales team. Sometimes we like go over the edge into doing things that marketers know are not even right for the business, but they'll do it to drive alignment. And so saying no builds trust. And if you're worried about things like shadow marketing or things like sales teams, you know, trying to do things that like can be the marketing spectrum, that's okay. Because often what happens is, you know what your strengths are and if you're really good at it, your sales teams and your cross-functional teams will rely on you driving that. So it's sort of important to like sort of stick to what you think is right for business. Optimize for business in the long run, that's always what's going to matter. You know, don't agree to things like, uh, coordinating meetings and stuff like that because yes, like that's great that you can align your field teams and align with your sales teams, but then eventually if I had to think about marketing ROI, it's not going to be those things. It's going to be things that drive impact from the dollars spent that you're given, and you wanna like kind of focus on that. So stay close to impact as much as possible. Understand when to say no, be very clear about what you're saying no, be upfront about that. That sort of builds a healthy relationship between the two teams and a healthy relationship is critical for the business that you're trying to optimize for the business. A stakeholder that I did mention is finance. Again, that's another stakeholder that you have to actually get up to speed and evangelize too, because often finance teams are very like, I spend so much media and so therefore what's the ROI? And you have to think hard about what does multi-touch mean and does my finance team understand that? And so tons and tons and tons of, you know, encouragement around like evangelizing to your internal stakeholders as to how like new marketing works will be pretty critical. I see some comments here, so I'm gonna just quickly pull up. Yeah, agree with Adam, by the way, solid sales enablement absolutely helps. I mean, I think if you have a solid sales enablement team and you're thinking about the scaling from the get-go, you actually don't need to be in this like service organization because you are thinking about enablement, you're thinking about scaling, and you're not thinking about, you know, holding the team in a way that like they are like not easy to fend for themselves. So it's really important, I think you will bring that up. And the last one I'll mention is just sign up for the right goals. Not always is it important to sign up for lead targets. In fact, I think unless you're an SMB or a mid-market, type of a company, I would say lead targets are probably a dangerous direction to go because you're essentially insinuating that this is a scale SMB business and I'm, therefore I'm taking lead targets on. Those actually work maybe for the first year, but eventually if you are selling to an enterprise company, often your sales teams already have accounts, right? So they may Maybe account-based marketing is what you need to engage on. And I'm sure there's gonna be really good content at SAS talking about account-based marketing. So definitely tune into all of those sessions. But, you know, if you're thinking about account-based marketing, then as a marketer, your job is to not really get them leads. I think it is to get them either ABM contacts that are warm, and that requires a whole set of different types of activities, Or it's to generate pipeline velocity, which is in some ways to create urgency that might come from your pricing strategy or your yield management strategy or promotions or partnerships. Those are things that might drive pipeline velocity. So take those goals on. Don't get in the rut of always thinking about leads because then it's, then there's a whole discussion around, oh well, you know, is this a good quality lead? I don't know. And it's an enterprise sales, therefore I already knew the CIO and I don't know what marketing is doing to contribute. All of those discussions I think can be avoided if you, you know, are tend to, if you do tend to take on goals that are more appropriate and again, make sure you align on these goals upfront. Don't wait on taking these goals on, don't take a lead goal on because like someone in the company has a mindset that lead is what I want, quantity often is not going to yield you the best results. So be again, very deliberate upfront. And if you're not sure about what sort of goals to set, I think that might be more symptomatic of not knowing what the go-to-market is. It's sometimes companies want to drive business, but they're like spread in so many different directions. Uh, for instance, very early on, I will hear companies that are not vertical solutions going to vertical marketing. If you're not, if you're not a vertical product, you're a fairly horizontal product, and going into something like a vertical marketing early on, I think can be like a very interesting experiment, but often that means you're just experimenting with a go-to-market motion. You actually don't really know what drives that sale. So Jason M. Lemkin always talks about like the first 10 customers who give you really good insight into where, uh, there's a repeatable opportunity in trying to trying to drive demand, I think like sort of spend some time with your first 10 to 30 customers and really understanding that before you like plunge into a vertical marketing or a very functional marketing motion without having that insight. And definitely don't take those goals on because then you're just setting yourself up to be accountable for those. So these were my 7 or so insights. Would love to hear from the group if you have any Do these resonate with you, or what has worked, what hasn't worked? It sounds like Andy has some thoughts on sales enablement framework that if he's open to sharing, would love to hear. Um, we'd love to hear from the group as well. Let's, let's have some dialogue going.

Hi, it's Andy here. Uh, I was just curious what people have been using for their, uh, sales enablement methodologies, tools, homegrown, off the shelf, so to speak, over the years. I've come across a few here and there. One that's still on my shelf, I picked it up a little while ago, it's, uh, Customer-Centric Selling. That's pretty old. Wondering what's new and what others are using. Thanks.

Thank you for asking. Does anybody want to share what sales enablement tools or frameworks they're using these days?

Yeah, so I'm Bill. I'm the CMO at a company called Aerospike, and my CRO peer adopted the Challenger program a while ago, but I've run sales as well as marketing, so I've been through probably all of them. You know, that's only as good as you reinforce it, you know. And you know, we've also invested around that in a firm— happy to make referrals by the way if anybody wants to just reach out to me— in mapping the buyer's journey. And what was really interesting about that project is we actually engaged them to reach out and interview customers and our top sales reps on what does it really look like from the buyer's perspective. Perspective. So not the sales journey, but the buyer's journey. Like, what do they need from a vendor to be able to make a decision about a product in our category? Very interesting. And then what we did is created a sales navigator tool that sort of at each step described what the customer needs and what we need, and, and to guide our sales reps through that journey. Then we loaded all that into a tool called Highspot. Highly recommend that for anybody who hasn't used it. Which is a very interesting tool for loading all your content and sales presentations and competitive stuff. Makes it really easy for salespeople to grab it and to send it and to see if people have opened it. But it also integrates into Salesforce, so we actually have in Salesforce at different stages what tools are available to you in Highspot. So it was a heavy lift to do that, but I think Challenger alone is just only part of it. Part of the solution, I think you have to think about a lot of what MK has talked about and how do you instrument that. I'm not going to say it's, you know, all perfect sailing here, but our sales management team is enforcing the Sales Navigator tool, and, you know, so far so good. So just if that's worthwhile, happy to talk offline with anybody.

Thank you for doing that. If you don't mind putting the URL of Highspot, someone was asking for that in in the chat, that'd be fabulous.

Actually, somebody just did for me.

Somebody just posted it.

Thanks, Dane. I owe you one.

Awesome. You're welcome. I asked for it and then posted it. Fantastic. I will say with Challenger messaging, I have seen a lot of companies dabble into it. I think from a messaging point of view, it's strong. It does take a type of a sales muscle or personality to go into a customer conversation and actually go through the Challenger Methodology, because you are challenging effectively in a very respectful, nice way what the customer's net assumption and mindset is. And sometimes, you know, there's a certain type of sales rep who's very confident and graceful and can navigate that very well, but a lot of them actually do need a lot of training because it is a little bit of a different type of a conversation that not everybody's comfortable with. So I 100% agree with you, Bill. Challenger can sort of get you far. You need to get them there and it takes a lot of work. Go ahead.

And I think the other thing is with regards to the Challenger sale, right, I think it's a lot more natural and effective when it is coming from somebody that has a decent knowledge of the customer's landscape. I think it is very relevant for services companies like Accenture, PwC, Infosys, et cetera. You know, people that have been working with a customer for a long time and understand the landscape. I think that brings a lot more credibility to the kind of conversations that are talked about in the Challenger Sale. But otherwise, you know, Joe Schmo from a product company coming in and talking about, hey, I'm going to change things, it's just, it's just really weird. So I think the challenge— and I've, I've, I've spent a lot of time in the enterprise software industry, both at software companies and systems integrators and service providers. So I think I bring a unique perspective to this. But you're absolutely right, the challenger sale You know, teaching or adopting that as a methodology for software companies, for a salesperson who's selling security one day and, you know, marketing the other day is just weird. I think it's a lot more effective for services companies, engagement managers.

Or in, if you're doing upsells, like if you have an existing relationship and now you're like helping them through a journey, you have a trust framework that exists with the customer and you can have that kind of dialogue. I think for someone to like naturally go into it requires a degree of inertia and knowledge that not everybody's quite there. So I think something we'll mention is having that touchpoint training along the way, having enablement tools, I think is probably a better path, vehicle. Christian asked a really good question around key ways you're showing value to sales. Teams, they often are skeptical of marketing. I, I have been in situations where that has happened. How do people feel like they respond? Does anybody want to share how they tackle that? There are some good responses in the chat, but I'd love to hear.

I think VP of sales, VP of marketing alignment is the most important thing. It's important for both of them at the end of the day. Yeah, I don't know, I cannot see a working relationship with both of them don't get along well. Impossible.

Yeah, I think, I think the, the key is a healthy degree of challenging between your marketing and sales peers is critical because If you don't challenge each other, then you're often in this setup where maybe you are either a service org or you are not building their trust and they don't— there's, you know, there's not a challenging happening, so they don't actually trust you and everybody does what they want to do. So I do think having a healthy relationship requires a degree of questioning and collaborating, uh, all at the same time. It's all in the mix. But if anybody else wants to chime in on that, because I do think the sales and marketing relationship, often marketers bring this up more often than sales, believe it or not. So I would love to hear that.

I think one thing that we've seen is I have the same, I'm the CMO of a smaller growing startup called Virtuous, and my CRO and I like basically have the same goals. So it's at least a start. Starting point so that we know we're coming at the same outcome, even if we're looking at it from different perspectives and tackling it differently. And that's been hugely successful over the last 6 to 9 months when we've kind of scaled up. And so that's been really helpful.

Yeah, such a good point. Having alignment around goals and being crystal clear upfront as to how you're both collaborating towards the goals is critical because the how— in how you go about doing it, Noah, is your, like in your control. And you think about that differently than what a sales leader might think marketing should do, because you are very clear about how you're going to get there. So I think that's, I absolutely agree with that 100% on goals. Very, very good point. Anyone think about influencer strategy, how like the old school influencers used to be, which was very much a, Somebody's talking about buyer influencers here. So fantastic, Andy, that you bring this up too, which is, you know, used to have Gartner and Forrester. There's like now new influencers with G2 Crowd and other, you know, new platforms. How are people thinking about the influencer strategy? And is that something that's even in your marketing to do?

Well, more importantly, are people researching whether or not those people are at the buyer's table. The— I call them the invisible buyers, right? In the olden days, a Gartner thing was key at IBM, Microsoft, whatever. Um, are they increasingly relevant? And there's one analyst firm that covers analysts called KCG Group. They're a little biased in that they work for Gartner for years, but they're out there evangelizing and espousing AR sales influence And the answer I'd give back to my clients that are small and emerging SaaS is, well, research it and find out, like, who really is at the table that is not there. Meaning, which of your clients are, you know, have Gartner's subscriptions and call? Because a lot of advisory that Gartner offers, it's allegedly millions of billions per year across 18,000 organizations. I'm curious Is anyone out there getting a pulse on that and how much attribution goes to those players, which are— well, you don't know, uh, you pay to have a relationship with in order to advise?

Great question. Anybody else have thoughts on this? Are they still relying on the Gartners and the Forresters? Are they thinking about new influencers? And how do they get a pulse on what's working influencer-wise?

Yeah, so we, um, We invest heavily in Gartner and Forrester, and we brief them all the time, and I think, you know, frankly, it's been good because prior to me getting here, I think people treated them kind of rudely, so at least we've fended off— if anybody calls them, they'll be up to date, and they will think that we actually— well, they'll understand what it is we have, you know. What I'm struggling with, though, particularly with Gartner, who we've invested more in, is they're not getting many inquiries on us. And they're getting more interest from my competitors. And so I just shot them an email, the Bain guys, last week because they kind of always kind of chide me about low awareness. And I just sent them all the press releases and, you know, all the things we've been doing. So I'm curious. I think they are influential. I think they are important in my category because I tend to believe them. I don't think they're lying to me that my competitors competitors are getting more inquiries. They will say good things. They will bring me up proactively. I know they tell me that, but I'm curious what people are doing to get people to call Gartner these days. I don't— we go after large enterprises. I would assume most of them have a Gartner contract, but I don't know whether or not people are going to Gartner as much these days as I, as I thought. I mean, are they relevant? So it's a good question. I just don't know because, my goodness, the fact that people aren't calling them about