"Strategic Alliances: Bridging the Gap Between Marketers and Data Teams" with Census | SaaStr Annual

Please welcome to the stage Julie Baynon, Head of Data at Census, and Matt Edmondson, Chief Marketing Officer at Census. Thank you. Hi, everyone.

Hey, everyone. How are you? Thanks for skipping lunch and hanging out with us.

Yeah, appreciate it.

Well, Julie.

Yeah.

What's going on here?

This is an example of identity resolution gone wrong in real time, because that's actually not a picture of me. That's another Julie Baynan based in New York City. But delightful photo all the same.

What a way to get started. So today we want to talk about bringing data and marketing teams together. And a little bit of background about myself. You know, I started my career in technology working for a company called Marketo, who I'm sure you guys are mostly familiar with, although I know it's been a while. Uh, and the whole point there was we wanted to bring sales and marketing teams together. And over the course of the last 10 years, there's been a lot of technology that's been built to bring sales and marketing together, whether that's marketing automation, sales engagement platforms, or anything that sort of orbits the sun there around CRM. But it's our supposition that over the course of the next 10 years, we're going to spend as much, if not more, effort bringing data teams closer to our marketing departments. We want to talk about why and how to best do that within your own organization. So the divide between data and marketing leads to a lot of problems. And the reality is most modern marketing automation systems aren't equipped to give marketers all the insights that they need. So by and large, I would assume most of you in this audience and most of the people in this building are already leveraging your data teams for some assistance with what you're pushing into your downstream systems for your go-to-market strategies. So what ends up happening, and we all hear this, we don't have a good handle on our ICP. We pass leads to our sales team that aren't really qualified. Or we just run a campaign to the wrong audience and it doesn't land very well.

Yeah. And on the data team side, I'm sure— are there any data professionals here right now?

Show of hands? No. I mean, okay. Marketers.

Marketers. Awesome. So from the data team side, usually we get brought in at the last minute. It's just another report. No context, not really aligned with any of our goals. And we're just kind of We're doing work to do work for another dashboard that's going to basically go to what I call the dashboard graveyard. No one's ever gonna look at it again. And one of the reasons why, you know, I started as a marketer, marketing option, ultimately moved into data because I couldn't get the data I needed to do my job correctly. And the things I was missing was, you know, I'd be running campaigns, with bad data. We've all got that hi first name. We've all got that email from a company that you're paying says, hey, do you wanna upgrade? And you've been a customer for 6 years. So we've all got that and hopefully not a ton of us have been the one delivering that, but I definitely have been. And I think one of the other things that's super important is when you align marketing and data, The data team actually gets to come in early and help define your processes, meaning you're capturing better data. You are actually setting up your systems so you can measure success at the end. And that ultimately means less cycles, less errors, and less time to report.

So a couple of months ago, Gartner held their annual event in Orlando. and they had kind of a revolutionary for Gartner talk track on the future of marketing. They talked about catalytic marketing or the concept of catalytic marketing events. And these are— this is the concept that there is something that happens over the course of your customer's journey that actually drives them to becoming a customer far more than everything else that you line up in front of them. Maybe it's an ROI calculator. Maybe it's a Forrester Total Economic Impact report. Maybe it's a customer case study. But the systems that we have as marketers are not really set up to tell us this moment is actually the moment that drives someone from being a casual observer to an actual paying customer. We assign those values in systems like HubSpot or Marketo, and we try to determine what we think is most meaningful. But oftentimes as marketers, we assign the most value to the most expensive assets that we create, right? Because we say, oh man, I spent $80,000 on this awesome report. It's got to be the moment that transitions a casual prospect into a customer. But actually, when you blend data and marketing together, you get a much better understanding of which one of those elements are actually most beneficial to your customer. And it shifts your perspective from, from this is what I think our customers want to this is what our customers actually want.

Yeah, that's a great segue. And I think one thing that I've seen— previously I was working at Clearbit, and we were able to tie together our marketing and our data team. And the conversations went from what can we do with this limited data set that we have to what should we do for our customers? And to me, that's the biggest benefit of aligning marketing and sales— marketing and data, my goodness— is that you actually start to look for solutions that will help your customers, not just what you can do. And, you know, an example of the way we've done it, I did it previously at my company, was we did attribution. And that used to take 80% of all of my time. Our team couldn't move forward on any projects because they didn't know what was working, what wasn't. And so we were able to work together, build the processes. We were able to build the reporting. And I was able to get that data to where they were. So they didn't need me at the beginning, at the end. They could do it themselves because I knew what they needed, and I got it to them in the tools that they needed them in.

So another great example of this is we all became marketers— and I know there's many of us in the audience who are marketers— because we wanted to be creative. We wanted to run cool campaigns. We didn't do it because we wanted to build nurtures and marketing automation systems or scoring by numbers. We wanted to be creative. Unfortunately, what can often happen is we dream up this incredible campaign, we go deploy that campaign, and it falls flat. And then we've got a CEO who says, "Man, you just spent a fortune on this campaign. It didn't work. What happened?" And you're like, "Ah, I don't know. Maybe you were too far out of the box." And it starts to narrow where your creativity lives, and you start saying, oh, well, I guess all I can do is run this really enterprisey, very specific type of campaign. But we want to be creative. And so working with a data team enables us to understand which audiences we should be running that campaign towards, because maybe it's not the campaign, maybe it's the people who received it, right? That's really important. And again, it's not something that a marketing automation system can tell you. A marketing automation system cannot tell you, hey, based upon this type of campaign, this is the segment that you should drive it towards. So I want to talk to you about a real-world example of data and marketing teams working together. Is anybody familiar with ClickUp? I'm sure you are. They ran an ad on Saturday Night Live once. That was pretty cool. So ClickUp implemented a data warehouse-first approach. And as we all know, third-party cookies are going away, so that makes a lot of ad spend and ad strategy very challenging, especially if you're a PLG business. Maybe you have people that come in, sign up for your product, but they don't transition into a paying customer for weeks or months. And if you're trying to feed that information back into, into Google or into LinkedIn to have an understanding of which ads were actually converting, you don't have the data. So you get a lot of misinformation around how successful your ads are actually performing. So what they did was they built a model using Hex, if you guys are familiar with Hex, that said, based upon past performance, these are the free trials that are most likely to convert into paying customers. And rather than waiting for them to convert into paying customers, they just fed that data right back into Google and said, we assume that these customers will convert. And they were able to target the right types of people and reduce the cost of their ad spend and the ultimate cost of their customer acquisition by 50%. So this stuff isn't just, hey, we want these teams to work together because it's the right thing to do. It actually has real business value as well.

And nothing I'm going to say next is going to surprise anybody. It's usually the things that we all know. It's getting in early, collaborating early, communicating often, and just a clear understanding of each other's goals. And what has worked for me in the past is when I have the same goals as the teams I'm working with. So with marketing, I'm as responsible for the lead count, for the opportunity count as marketing is. And once it's in my critical path, you best believe I'm going to do what I can to make sure they have the right data, they have the right tools, they have everything they need to get to that goal because it's also my goal.

All right, so 40 seconds left. Key takeaways for you. When marketing and data teams work together, that your business is working on the right problems, right? You can ensure that you're focused on the right problems. You can ensure that you're driving campaigns to the right segments of your audience. The process of solving problems also gets significantly shorter, and when you're asked by your CEO, by your board, by your head of sales, or whomever is questioning what you're doing, you'll have all the data in the world to back it up. Hey, our data team actually built this model. Look what it says. I made my decision. As marketers, we know sometimes we have a very short shelf life, so it's always good to back up our decisions with data. Organizations as a whole over the course of the next 10 years are going to be sprinting to bring marketing and data together. Okay. It's critical for your entire go-to-market. Signs in the market that are driving this alliance is we've all been told, hey, you got to do more with less. You got to do more with less. And organizations are investing more and more into data and less and less into marketing. So let's work together in order to drive better business results. If you're curious and you want to ask Julie any questions, we're at Booth 225. We'd love to chat with you guys. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, everyone.