SaaStr - Meagen Eisenberg | CMO @ MongoDB | Tips For Getting More Leads

All right, so I have the pleasure to introduce our second CMO speaker of the day, Megan Eisenberg. Many of you know Megan already. She was the, she's currently the CMO at MongoDB, so another open source company. She has 20 years in high tech marketing. She was named the top 50 most retweeted person by Ad Week and she is a huge influencer for many brands. She's won lots of awards as well in the Bay Area. She was also recently vice president of Marketing at DocuSign and she is from the California area. So what Megan's going to talk about is a thing that we all want to know is how the hell do you get more leads? So I'd like to welcome Meghan to the stage. Be careful because this.

Yes, very nice. Well, thank you. I am excited to be here. Thank you for the nice introduction. I definitely think this is near and dear to everyone. As you're trying to grow your business, as you're working with your sales team, a lot of people fixate on leads and certainly what we care about are the quality leads. And when I look back, even at DocuSign and where we went when I joined, we had about a million in our marketing database, which was Eloqua and I left, we had about 23 million over three and a half years. And now I've joined MongoDB in the open source world as well. And I've been there about 11 months. And I came in, we had about a million leads and we've doubled that. We're a little over 1.8 million in our database. And there's, I think fundamentally these areas that I'm going to cover can apply at any stage of your company. And I do advise for small about half a dozen startups that are trying to figure this out as well. So this is what I'm going to cover in the next few minutes. And before I jump into the people process technology, I think for those of you who are marketers and for those of you who are not, there is definitely a mix that you need at a company as you grow, that you're going to be building out with your marketing team in order to cover the entire funnel. There are a mix of things that you're running at the front of the funnel which are giving you air cover and people are first being introduced to you. And then as leads come in, you've got several inbound things that you're doing to educate them and to accelerate the funnel so they eventually become customers. And then once they're customers, you need those customers advocating for you to get more leads in the funnel. Influitive certainly is one of the tools we use at MongoDB, but it's true. It's that social proof that everyone needs. The number one thing over and over again is people talking to other people. And so how do you get more of that out there? So you get more people in. And so I always, when talking to the marketing team, realize that there are many different things we need to do. A lot of it's online now, but people digest information and learn about things in different channels. And so understanding all of those channels, if I dive right into people, I always get asked, who should I hire first? Who did you hire first? What do you need on your team to be successful? And for me, the last three companies, I think the three key hires are one product marketing. You need someone who gets the customer, gets the content they need to digest and can write. You need a web developer, marketing technologist. Because so much of this is online, people are digesting before they even talk to sales. You need someone that can help you get it out there online. And then the third is really creative. And if I look at DocuSign and MongoDB, I was lucky enough, I had great product marketers. I hired a technologist web developer right away. Actually I started day one at MongoDB with that person starting with me. And then quickly after that I hired a creative person. Because if you need to get anything out the door, the worst thing is to have to go to an agency or not have the talent in house. It just slows you down. So I'm a big advocate for having someone who can create the assets you need to go online. And then certainly part of getting leads is understanding who your sales team actually wants to talk to. When I joined Mongod, we had tons of developers and we love developers and we want more and more of them. But sales wants to talk to people who have budgets and are making and taking our product into production. So they actually want to talk to ops and DB admins. And so we had to really think about how do we pillar up from the developer. And we had to understand that in marketing who they wanted to talk to. Otherwise we would keep delivering developers and they would keep saying the these aren't the leads that we want. So it's crucial that you're partnering with your sales team and you truly understand who they want to talk to to make them successful. And then of course we know content's important. Back to first hire of product marketing is that there's also others that can help you create content thought leaders in the space. Analysts of course. If you have analysts or Magic quadrant, what are you doing to brief those analysts? Make sure you're part of those creators conversations they're having that they know your product depending on what space you're in. And having just come from an all day SaaS meeting with Gartner that started at 6am I definitely know the importance of our analyst and then certainly partners who may help get the word out there as well that you go to market with. So make sure you have the right people involved at your company and then I will quickly jump to technology because I think the largest lift you're going to see is is through your website. A majority of leads are coming in through your web properties. Certainly if you know I've heard 67% I think it's over 90% for us at MongoDB and was similar at DocuSign. You can go to many events but there's way more people online and I think people fail to set their web properties up often they outsource who develops and does their website so they can't move very fast. They don't have a very prominent call to action when you hit the home page and you know people want to know who you are but then you need to quickly get them into your funnel. So how are you optimizing how you capture people is really important on this. And I can tell you with not having a lot of budget joining, we had about 30,000 leads my first quarter and we quickly jumped to 60,000 the second quarter, 80,000 the third. Just by focusing on our web property and making sure we had content on there people wanted to fill a form out for. So make sure you're gating content appropriately. Don't be gating customer case studies because you want those in front of everyone. Social proof back to that one. But you also don't want to gate product briefs or anything like that. It's hard to get people to read that stuff. But things of value like thought leadership, how to guides, architectural guides, analyst papers, those are all great things of value. Of course people realize they have to register for webinars so that's certainly part of your mix and then serving that up forms, I think this is your most important asset actually on your website because that's how you get people into the funnel and find out who they are. And I think people I've seen only ask for one thing, email address all the way to asking for 13 things. I think 5 is about right and why I say that is that if you want to do the appropriate follow up and really tailor your message to the the Persona that's coming, you need to know a few things. And it's mostly personal information you need to have. One, you want to be able to address them. So a name, two, a title. I would argue most companies have different Persona coming in. If I talk to someone that's an architect, like they're a developer, I'm not going to get that personal message to them. Or someone that's a C level audience needs very different content than someone who is not. And so if I don't have title, my follow up is not as effective, my sales team is not as effective. And then of course you need an email or phone number, a way to contact them. And usually sales doesn't want to follow up if they only have email address. So phone number becomes important. So I say five or six fields and then you should be using technology on the back end to get the rest of the information. If you are asking for location information, you need to stop. You can get that with Java code IP address. So if you're asking for location information, take that off because the more questions you ask, the less people are going to fill it out. So optimize your forms and buy the technologies that will append that information later or on the back end or pull the code and that other technologies like industry, company size, location, all of that you can get on the back end. So you will see immediately jump if you do this. And for those of you only asking for email address, I would say you're rendering your sales team. First of all, it's not as useful for them as marketers. You can't tailor or nurture them as well. Yes, you have progressive profiling and you can try to get them back but they may not come back. And then now you have a bunch of email addresses that you've got to do a lot more with. And I do think people, if the asset's compelling enough, will give you just enough information for that. And I've seen this on trial forms too. So a little more on technology. Certainly you need a marketing database to play with. Salesforce is not a marketing database. That is a place you only want to send those that sales should be talking to and working with. You need a marketing database where you can warm up folks. You don't want to be buying lists and putting them into Salesforce. That is when your sales team is going to say, you're giving me junk. These people are cold and they're right and that information's inaccurate and you're just creating a bunch of noise and junk in Salesforce. So you need a marketing database. Sure, you can buy list buys, but you're not syncing them over to Salesforce unless they engage with you, unless they click through, fill out something, do something that says it's a live body and there's some interest. Then you can sync them over and score them. And then the targeting and personalization, if you have the right information. We use Eloquo and we use Demandbase and Inside View actually for appending information and personalization. But it just gives a much better experience when they're on our website and when we follow up and we do use Demandbase to change our content, we sell an offering. We have an E commerce cloud product where you can sign up without ever talking to sales to monitor MongoDB and, and we have enterprise products where multi year multiple servers. You're buying this license that's giving you security and all the other things with it that you do talk to a sales rep for. And depending on the size of your business, those offerings are very different. If you're a smaller business, you tend to go to cloud manager. If you're a larger one, you're talking to our enterprise team. So when you hit our website, if I know immediately that you're a small business, I'm going to serve you the offer of cloud manager. And if I know your enterprise, I serve you our enterprise offering. And so we do use these technologies to change our call to action in real time. Other things is we can load our customer list and offer them different things to expand the footprint with them. And even our competitors, we shift them to our careers page, we can load them up and invite them to come work for us if they're interested. So there's these cool technologies out there that are certainly helping us capture the traffic that's on your site. That's the biggest lift you're going to get. And I would challenge you to go look how many people do you capture now that hit your site that if you had optimized it, how many more leads you would get from that? And then of course making sure you have some sort of CRM system. Most of us do have one of these. But if you've got Salesforce, which I'm most familiar with, you should be setting up as marketers campaign the campaigns module and, and you should be tracking everything that comes in because you want to know what's working with your budget. So when you analyze that and you go to spend the next quarter you spend on what's actually driving leads that convert. So not just volume, but is actually getting things that convert to the opportunity for your sales team and campaigns tracking and Salesforce is what lets you do that. But if you only mark things as marketing generated, but not, this was a very specific webinar, very specific content, paid search, you're not going to know how to shift your budget around that you're testing. And then the other thing I do when I first joined a company is I really, you know, right out of college I joined Cisco Systems as an IT engineer and I focused on manufacturing IT in that division and I took, I got Apex certified and it was all about, you know, the manufacturing floor and bottlenecks and things going through and not going through. And it really applies to lead flow and the handoff between marketing and sales. And you will be amazed when you start to look at your system where it's broken. And if you can't map it out, this is just a sample, but if you can't map it out, you're going to be in trouble. You want to have that conversation with your sales ops person, your marketing ops person, and do simple checks. We pass 10,000 leads over Salesforce actually captured 10,000. 10, 10,000 was assigned to sales if they were supposed to be or the 3,000 that were qualified. And how does the sales team receive it? What's the Apex logic that assigns and routes these leads? Most people do it by territory and then round robin within the territory. What rules do you have set up? Then sit down with your sales rep, your str, what's the reports you're running to look at your leads. I will tell you at mongodb what I learned is what when they sat down, they were using a filter that we no longer use and they were only seeing 10% of the leads we were signing, sending over like, oh, I only get 50 leads. And when I look at the report it was like, oh, but you're not including your area and you're excluding X, Y and Z. As soon as we rewrote the reports for them, all of a sudden they have 1,000. And so you'll be surprised. These Salesforce instances have evolved and you've had turnover and the knowledge that was there, that originally set up is gone and nobody even knows how they're set up in the past or why. And so when you're at a company or a startup, make sure you're setting this up and understand it because you will see an increase in your leads just by fixing this process. Also it's the feedback loop. It's how sales tells you if your leads are qualified or not, how they mark the leads or even if they're working the leads. And so this is just a very important process I found for my success and my partnering with sales is mapping this out and having a very clear understanding of the flow. And then of course I'm a fan of serious decisions and their waterfall. I think most companies when you talk to sales, what they care about is pipeline and what pipeline means to them is do I have opportunities in Salesforce with dollars against it and is it 4 or 5x what I need to close? And they don't think about any of the other stages in the funnel and, and why you care about those other stages is usually there's marketing, there's a qualification team and then there's a sales rep and there's problems throughout that funnel and those handoffs that you want to smooth out and uncover. And if you're not looking at the different stages, we actually have one more stage called SQO that sits after the SQL@mongodb. But if you're not looking at these, it's really hard to make that demand gen engine and make sure the leads you do get are, are converting into business. And so I would not just focus on what ops dollars are there, but all the process before that because I think a lot of it sits in the qualification team, whether your sales team's getting anything or not. And then also lead scoring, this is another tool to make sure the leads you're sending over are actually the quality your reps need. And it's important that sales and marketing build this together and that you agree and you really sit down. What's, you know, is it a specific industry, is it a specific size of business, Is it a specific form that they filled out? Do you care more about people who sign up for a trial over someone who stopped by the event booth? Probably someone who downloaded enterprise worksheet over someone who was crawling around the careers page like it matters what they look at, it matters what they digest and it matters who they are. If it says student or consultant and that's not who you sell to, that's probably a very low scoring lead. If it says VP of IT or IT director and that's who you target, then you're going to score those higher. And if you have large volumes of leads, you need this to make your sales team more efficient so they work the best. Even if you have low volume of leads. This is going to help you truly get who your sales team wants to talk to and better score them and understand what converts and then improve this. So campaigns, I talked about this a little bit before. If you're not using this, you need to set it up and it needs to have a taxonomy. I have been with companies where everything that comes in marketing source is just marketing that's not useful when you're trying to figure out what actually converts. Do I need to do more webinars around NoSQL and what it is or do I need to do more webinars around security? You know there's certain ones that do better than others and you need to not only mark them as that type, but then the individual campaign and then track all the way through. And then of course there's always the discussion of who sourced it. And if you don't have campaign information on it, it's hard to answer that question in your instance, who actually is sourcing the deals that sales are closing. And so this will help you get to that answer. And then having a naming convention will definitely help you do better reporting and classify things and find things. So I'm a big fan of nurturing and why there's several reasons here, but I do think it aligns the buyer as they come in with your sales team. And I've, I've talked with some companies that are afraid to nurture the lead once it gets handed off to sales. And I would say you nurture everyone and you continue because the sales follow up process is inconsistent and often they're not getting all the content. That person needs to make that decision and you're helping them. And it's very obvious when the marketing team sends nurture emails out and it's coming from a company versus a sales rep sending a personal email. And we have seen acceleration of deals because at DocuSign you want to know if it was secure. All my IPs there. So we make sure they get the security information. It was important to know that it was legal. Yes, electronic signature is legal. So make sure that at some point in the nurture process they have that information and then who else is using it, giving them case studies. And so by automating that nurture. At DocuSign we had over 100 different nurture programs based on your Persona, based on your industry. If you were in a trial, what type of trial, what type of customer and then in different languages. At MongoDB we're a little over 20 nurture programs based on Persona right now based on trial and then region and what type of customer you are. And we definitely see it accelerating our deals and having an influence on our deals. So that's educating people as they come in. The worst thing is someone fills out a form and then you sort of batch them an email to a webinar. So six weeks later sales sends them an email or calls three times and just stops. Well, they didn't pick up and they go on to the next lead. This is a crap lead. Well, everyone comes in also at different stages of when they're ready to buy. So you're getting them all on the same page by making sure they have the right information. So I would build this out and what you're seeing across the top is the buyer's journey and then the drip of content. And there's other things you can set up web triggered content. So let's say they go to your trial page. You know who they are because they filled a form out somewhere else, but they don't sign up for the trial. It's just, just like Pottery Barn. I go look at a table and the next like four hours I go, hey, I saw you looking at our table. Are you sure you don't want to buy? And I may go back and buy and it's the same thing. Oh, I was looking at the trial but I got someone walk by my desk, I didn't sign up and I go back and do it. Or we have someone go into our docs, there's a topic they're interested in, we send them information, maybe they're looking at some architecture stuff. We send them a guide. So it's understanding what they're looking at and then delivering that content to make sure you're top of mind. And then one more point on this. If you've lost a deal, if your sales rep marks lost a competitor and you're one of those renewal type businesses, you definitely want to nurture those people. 5 months later 11 months later hey, are you happy with the decision you made? People select MongoDB because of these three areas of differentiation. We're happy to talk with you if that other vendor you went with didn't solve your need or you're not happy. So that's not something your reps going to Remember to do five months out and 11 months out they're just going to move on to the next deal. So you can increase your pipeline that way and then measuring success. How do you do that? Well, it's, you know, in the world of email marketing, it's not just open you know, quantity is great, are they engaging? Great. But more importantly, is it actually influencing deals? Is that white paper? Was that something someone at that company digested or not? And so you want to make sure that one. You start to see your deal cycle shrink, but the stuff is actually influencing the deal through the campaign. You can run campaign influence reports to see everything that touched that particular deal after it was created and then closed. The other thing you can do is you can do blind form submits. If people go to your blog and they filled out a form before, you can tie that person to the campaign for the blog. If they've downloaded content or if you send them an email. If you're emailing them, you already know who they are. You, you don't have to have them fill out a form, but you should still track if they click through and digest that information. And so I do always get with startups, what if I only have 10k? I don't have a lot of money, I can't afford to buy all that technology. What can I do? What should I. A lot of it is testing. You've got a small amount test get results and do more of it. Content is a big thing. If you can write relevant content and create some sort of digital watering hole or where it draws people in, that's time, clearly, but that's content. And people are still searching and they're looking for information. And Google's still crawling. So getting good content out there is certainly going to help. I think social media and influencers earlier, talking about having advisors or people that are in your particular space that everyone else looks to, getting them to tweet, having them educated on your product, having them speak on a webinar draws people in. You know, at DocuSign, most of our large webinars were because we had someone who was a major influencer in that space talking. And so or we partnered with someone who was bigger than us, that had a better name brand and their logo brought people in because we both invited folks to that webinar. So partnering with folks doing webinars, it's time consuming, but you can get a draw and people that attend webinars, that's a high level of interest. Certainly blogs, of course are great. I mentioned webinars, you know, there's always email marketing. I think people still, you know, they do, if you're targeted enough, they do open that. Accuracy of lists is tough, but you know, that is still there. Certainly any type of referral program, you know, Box, Dropbox, these companies did a great job of getting you know, finding a way where they were incented you, you got more gigabytes of storage or whatever the incentive is for your company. Can you make it where people are referring you social proof all of that is valuable. And then horse trading, if you don't have money but you have something of value can offer to someone else, you know, trade. I traded, you know, technology at DocuSign to get someone to write a white paper or to be on a webinar. And if you can trade your technology with someone who will, you know, trade something back, I think that's all goodwill and just get your budget to go up a lot further. And I think when you look at all these things, if you one, you hire the right people, you know how to work within a company as one team. You work with your sales team, you're working and educating the analyst. You have the right technology in place so you can make better decisions off the data you're collecting. And then you put the right processes in place, you're going to be a lot more successful at getting leads and capturing those leads and, and then getting them to actually buy because it's not really, who really cares how many leads you have if they're not buying? So figuring out how to get them to convert and having marketing efficiencies, even if you have a small team. So can you automate, can you use these platforms to automate the nurturing and the email batches? Can you get your website to work for you? Make sure you're capturing that traffic that's there, make sure you're improving those conversion rates and AB testing, anything you can do to a B test to get it through. And then, you know, my success I think is really aligned with being aligned with the sales organization, being aligned with your CRO, your head of sales, truly listening to your sales team, partnering with them, seeing them as an internal customer because you don't want to fight with them if they're not going to work. The leads you're sending, there's no point. So hear what they need and then deliver that and show them you're delivering it and then agree on how you're going to measure that. And then of course, if you want to be valued at executive level, know your numbers, know what's working, you know, small or large budget, be able to show what's working and be transparent when it's not so they trust you and what you're telling them. Marketers tend to market internally and say, everything's great, everything's great, we're doing great, but if you're not balanced in how you talk about your business, people aren't going to believe you when you are doing great. So share, share the failures as well. Well, and that's my talk for today and I'm happy to answer any questions.

That was great. That was amazing, Megan.

Thank you.

I have a feeling there's.

I have.

A feeling there's going to be a ton of questions out there. I'm going to ask one to get it kicked off and then I'm going to. I see two right here in the front. So if we can get the mics to go to these folks in the front. So do you have an sla? You talked about the partnership with sales and marketing given SLA with sales, is that a pipeline number, A dollar number? Is it an MQL number? What is your SLA with sales and how do you figure out what it is that you both agree on?

Yeah. So at DocuSign or SLA it depended on the score. If it was an A and it was a business day, it was within eight hours and if it was a B, it was within 16 hours. And we were less concerned about the lower scored ones. At MongoDB, we're not quite there yet on SLA, I do recommend having that agreement on follow up. While we don't have the SLA in place, we have a dashboard that goes out every week to all of the sales leaders showing all the MQLs being the qualified leads that have never been opened by the sales team. And then we rank each of the reps that are supposed to be working them and show who's working the leads and who's not. And that tends to, you know, people love to compete. People don't like to be on the bottom of that. And the sales leaders have a hard time complaining about not getting leads if they see a dashboard that shows a bunch that haven't been worked yet. So, so having the dashboards I think helps a lot.

And is there an SLA the other way? So is there a commitment from marketing to deliver a certain.

There is. So at the beginning of every year I did this about 11 months ago. I look at the revenue targets, I look at our average deal size across the different businesses. So by looking at the targets, average deal size, and I used industry benchmark conversion rates on that funnel I showed to back all the way into how many leads MQLs, SALs, SQLs and deals marketing needed to deliver and source to make it. We just did this exercise this year, but I was able to use our actual conversion rates based on last year. And I spent about an hour and a half with our CRO explaining the model, how it's set up, how we're going to agree to source 50% of the business based on these conversion rates by these definitions. And that's our targets. Now what's changed from last year I was measured on MQLs. This year I got suckered into SALS, which is further along. But I think you, if it's a partnership, you know, if you don't hit your revenue targets, the CMO goes first, the head of sales goes next and then the CEO. So I'm incented to make sure we make our target all the way across.

I think I disagree. I think VP of sales goes first. Okay, so there was some questions here. Where is the mic?

Right here.

There's another one.

Hi.

Right in front of you.

Look straight ahead. I'm right here.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead.

Can't see the lights. Very blinding.

Thanks so much. Super comprehensive session. I have so many questions now that you just said those last few things, but what in your opinion, how much qualification should SDRs or account reps be doing at the SAL stage? This is something that we're always working on with our MQLs. It's exceptionally challenging.

So if you've got really good scoring models, the ones that score higher, they should, if they truly are ones that you should be talking to, you should do multiple, you should do more than three. Typically there'll be a rule. I called three times, I emailed three times, I moved on. But if it's truly an A or if you're using the predictive modeling out there, you should call 8, 9, 10 times until you get a hold of that particular lead. If they're truly a target you want to buy into and I've seen stats, I think it's insidesales.com, on average it takes seven attempts to get a hold of someone. So I would say if they're low scoring, lead once, twice and let marketing keep warming them up until they get a higher score. But if they're truly high scoring and predicted to convert, you should be calling them more.

Yep, right there.

How would you suggest marrying together the idea of account based marketing and account based sales and those types of metrics and processes into the traditional kind of demand gen waterfall model that you've been exploring?

Yeah. So as far as marrying them, I mean it's usually account based marketing I have seen is more for your enterprise sales. And so we have an enterprise, a corporate team and E commerce and so with Enterprise, we do take their named accounts and it tends not to be sourcing as much as filling out engagement within that particular account. And I use very different mix of tactics. So it's more pipeline acceleration, webinars or dinners, it's direct mail or door openers where you're actually getting front of it. It's sitting down and agreeing who they want to talk to and then go targeting. It's social selling into those accounts. It's certainly using technologies like Demandbase that will allow you to as those accounts come to your site, charter or personalize a certain way. Sometimes it's creating microsites for those. There's a lot of engagios just out there launching. There's a ton of products that are tackling ABM right now. But as far as measuring, I tend to say the funnel is still the same. You may not be sourcing, but you're certainly influencing or adding more to that particular account. Might not be the first lead, but you're adding five, ten different people from the same account and you're monitoring them through and you're still scoring them and making sure they get routed to the right sales team for follow up.

We have time for one more question.

And also sourcing for enterprise is usually a lower percentage versus if you're supporting corporate, you're going to source more of their business. A lot of times the enterprise folks should be elephant hunters. Have a good Rolodex and you're helping them have a better relationship with that account.

All right, one last question.

All right.

All right, thank you, Megan. That was amazing. Really appreciate it.