7 Common Enterprise Marketing Mistakes from Google's Head of Global Marketing

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 for 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 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 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 they don't tend to respond to an emotional need. They tend to be very much a logical, reinforcement driven type 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 the tap. So sometimes 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 going to 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 touch point 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 multi touch is very hard to actually prove ROI and sometimes you get questioned by your finance peers as to like oh I don't know about all these multi touch points and what is the event ROI or what is the ROI of a demand gen campaign? That's media. Trying to prove out a multi touch model requires a good sense of research that goes into it. 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. Often product marketers do this or product managers where there is an innovation and you launch it and woohoo great coverage or customers like that 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 life cycle, marketing of that actual announcement is often not baked into plans. So really cutting all. Just stop thinking about launches and thinking more around landings and having metrics associated with landings and trying to drive towards that because behaviors will change, actions will change. But often product marketers are very 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 product utilization. And for most SaaS companies especially when you're thinking about. When you're thinking about monthly active users or daily active users, landing becomes very critical. Data is never perfect. Benchmarking is key. So I don't know how many marketers I've talked to have said, ooh, our analytics is broken. Or 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 all this tech debt or analytics debt. And 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 near 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 switch out. It becomes a big project. Eventually a lot of marketers will have it where their series A or seed round stack doesn't actually hold up. Then they have a scale product and later stage product because it just scales so quickly. And now we're ballooned into this analytical platform that doesn't support the kind of marketing you want to do. 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. 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, and aligning with your cross teams. Make sure they agree with that mindset. Cause sometimes they don't. Sometimes they'll say, well, I don't believe your data, my data says something else. And then it's sort of like your data versus my data and becomes a really difficult conversation. So 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. Cause 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 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 in saying no builds trust. And if you're worried about things like shadow marketing or things like Sales teams trying to do things that 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 function teams will rely on you driving that. So it's sort of important to 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 coordinating meetings and stuff like that. Because yes, like that's great that you can align your field teams, can align with your sales teams. But then eventually if I don't 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 want to 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 multitask mean and does my finance team understand that tons and tons and tons of encouragement around evangelizing to your internal stakeholders as to how new marketing works will be pretty critical. I see some comments here, so I'm going to just quickly pull up 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 service organization because you are thinking about enablement, you're thinking about scaling and you're not thinking about holding the team in a way that they are not needing to fend for themselves. So it's really important. I thank you for bringing that up. And the last one I'll mention is to 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 therefore I'm taking lead targets on those actually work maybe for the first year, but eventually if you are selling to a enterprise company, often your sales teams already have accounts, right? So they maybe account based marketing is what you need to engage on. And I'm sure there's going to be really good content at Saster 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 a generic 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 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 there's a whole discussion on 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 going 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 up front. 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 up front. And if you're not sure about what sort of goals is set, I think that might be more symptomatic of not knowing what the go to market is. Sometimes companies want to drive business, but they're like spread in so many directions. For instance, very early on I will hear companies that are not vertical solutions go into vertical marketing. If you're not a vertical product, you're a fairly horizontal product. And going to something like a vertical marketing early on I think can be a very interesting experiment. But often that means they're just experimenting with a go to market motion. You actually don't really know what drives that sale. So Jason, actually Lemkin always talks about like the first 10 customers who give you really good insight into where there's a repeatable opportunity in 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. Definitely don't take those goals on because then you're just setting yourself up to be accountable for those. So these were my seven or so insights. I 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, we'd love to hear. We'd love to hear from the group as well. Let's. Let's have some dialogue going.

Hi, it's Andy here. I was just curious what people have been using for their 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. 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.

But.

That'S only as good as you reinforce it. And 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? 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 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. 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. So it was a heavy lift to do that. But I think Challenger alone is just only 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.

All.

Perfect sailing here, but our sales management team is enforcing the sales Navigator tool and 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 high spot. Someone was asking for that 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 some sometimes 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. 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. Sam.