Martha Aviles: Prioritizing Demand Gen Performance Metrics That Matter

Sourabh:
I am not going to do much else other than get this kicked off with you, Martha. If you could just start by telling folks what you do at Gigster, and also just real briefly, what does Gigster do? I'm going to comeback because I have a poll after that to ask our audience, and then we'll jump into the heavy part today, which are the metrics. And I don't want to give it away, but there are five key metrics you're going to zoom in on.

‍

Martha:
All right, thanks for having me. Let me figure out how to use Zoom. Kidding, kidding, I've figured it out guys, but we're going to put this in slideshow mode and hopefully everyone can see my screen. We're good? Awesome. Again, thanks for having me and hosting. All right, let's talk a little bit about Gigster. I don't want to spend too much time on this. Gigster is essentially a two-sided platform that on one side has B2B customers. You can see some of our big logos there. And on the other side we've got tech resources. Think AI developers, engineers, if you need a website you can callus, and we can help deploy tech talent to complete projects for your company. But why we're here is marketing and the funnel, and apparently we're breaking it today. I also have a prop that I'm excited to show you guys later. So I'm going to pause here and let you take this slide.

‍

Sourabh:
‍Absolutely. Just real quick, I want to give everyone...because everyone here is a marketer, right? There's some really strong brands represented amongst our attendees and obviously, Martha, Gigster is really well known, right? You've had a phenomenal career. One thing I want to remind everybody is that we're focusing on performance metrics today that matter. You really need to think about performance metrics that matter outside of marketing. And so I'm going to do two things right now, and the first thing I want to explain is remember that most of your C-level executives, your CEO, your COO, your CTO, or your CFO, who is very important right now as budgets are being squeezed, what they see are happy customers. They see deals that came in. They don't see the nine months and hundreds of data points that led up to that. And frankly, as marketers we need to understand that they're not going to. So while we're going to discuss this today, Martha is going to do this in reverse. She's going to show you the metrics starting from sales backwards to leads.

I actually want to kick off by seeing what y'all are doing. I will also give you a little reminder. This webinar will go very quickly because I already have questions from a number of you. If you have questions, please submit them and I'll try to come in and ask her as she goes through the metrics. But before that, let's go ahead and launch our first poll. Okay, which performance metrics are you currently using? If you wouldn't mind, just put in your answers. Be honest. If you're not measuring some of these, that's okay. If you don't know what some of these are, that's totally fine. That's why you're here. And if you're measuring them all, then this is your flex moment like, "Yeah, we got all this." Martha, you don't answer.

‍

Martha:
I can see that. It says, "Panelists can't vote." Thanks a lot.

‍

Sourabh:
‍Exactly. You shouldn't be allowed to answer. Here they come.

‍

Martha:
‍Leading the witness? Come on, sometimes it works.

‍

Sourabh:
One second, I'm going to give them five more seconds and then that's it. We need to move on. I know some people want to vote, more and more people are coming in, but I'm going to end the poll. Okay, one second. Let's see what people are measuring, and share. Does everyone see that?

‍

Martha:
‍MQLs, a lot of meetings booked. That's good.

‍

Sourabh:
That's very good. This is a great start. We're going to go from the bottom up. It's interesting. An equal number of people are looking at bookings as they're looking at leads, whereas there are more that are looking at MQLs and meetings booked. All right, I'm going to stop sharing and give it back to you, Martha. They're all yours.

‍

Martha:
‍Awesome. Yeah, so there are obviously a lot of things that we can measure as you guys see, but it can be overwhelming as a marketer to try to look at all of those metrics and to try to understand, “Okay, what's actually happening with my funnel?” So obviously, bookings and pipeline are super-important and we measure those here at Gigster. And I would argue that the second most important measurement is meetings. Ultimately, whatever you have at the top of the funnel, you can have thousands of contacts, you can have hundreds of content downloads, all of that. It doesn't matter if they're not turning into meetings booked, so we're going to talk a little bit more about that. Sourabh, do you have anything to add? All right. Oh, I like when I get the thumbs up. That means I got an A.

Here we go. Okay, so what's happening in the sales cycle, right? Sometimes you'll have a project lead, a business lead, or an executive champion, but there's also a network of people that might be doing research on your company to try to understand and educate themselves on what you do. And what do we measure? Obviously, revenue per deal and days to close the deal. There are enterprise... If you're talking about Colgate, Harley Davidson, one of these huge logos, it could take you 18 months to close that deal, and so there is going to be an overwhelming amount of data in your Salesforce. When you go to that opportunity, you're going to see that buyer journey and it's going to be multiple contacts, a lot of different decision makers, influencers to that deal. It's a lot. It can be really, really overwhelming. So we want to talk about how we can help you. Anything to add?

‍

Sourabh:
No. I think just one thing there, Martha, is that one really key point, especially for complex enterprise deals is I know that many of us get very attached to our ABM accounts and like, "Oh, this deal came in this way. Did you know? You do this." Remember, when you're reporting bookings, less is more. Talk about the number, talk about the time, flex the result, move on, right? This is not marketing story. This is sales story. That's all I wanted to add.

‍

Martha:
‍That's a fair point. We should have a multi-touch attribution model webinar. That's my next idea for you, but let's move on. All right, so there are a multitude of channels that you're reaching out to your buyers and your contacts, whether it's proactive outreach, phone calls, emails, outbound or inbound. And ultimately, again, we're going back to that meeting, you want to look at both meetings booked by sales directly, "Are they out there hunting? Do they have prospects?" and meetings booked by MQLs. And so we're going to talk a lot more about how we do that, and you want to have an SLA with sales and I'm not going to show my prop yet, but you want to make sure that you have an SLA with sales like, "Hey, an MQL came in." That's really important. But, again, that meeting is booked. It doesn't matter if you have 1,000 MQLs or if you have 10 MQLs. What matters is how many meetings are converting. Do we have any questions or do you have anything to add?

‍

Sourabh:
‍I do. I have a question for the audience. I'm going to throw out, and I'm going to let them answer in chat. So I'm going to let you keep going, Martha, and see what responses we get, but I just threw this out to everybody around meetings, and we'll circle back to this. Who at your company books the meeting? Is it the SDR or are AEs doing it directly? But I'm going to let you keep going.

‍

Martha:
Good question. All right, so here what we want to talk about is MQLs and lead scoring, but there are people that are raising their hand to talk to sales, and typically those, if you have a hand-raiser or an inbound that says, "Hey, I'm ready to book a meeting," you might think, "Well, that's a great lead." And a lot of times it might be, but sometimes it might just be someone doing the research on behalf of the buying committee or the person that's actually going to close the deal. So, we're going to talk a little bit more about that. Here at Gigster, we've got HubSpot and ZoomInfo Marketing OS, and we try to enrich all of our MQLs and our contacts and our leads with the ZoomInfo Marketing OS, but it still doesn't always give us all the information that we need. We also have lead scoring and grading, but I think we have a slide on that later, so I might pause on that.

And we want to look at numbers of MQLs, but one of my famous things that I always say to all exec teams is, "I don't ever want to hear, 'We need more leads.' I don't want to hear that, because I can get you10,000 trash leads and it won't drive revenue or booking. So, let's talk about what we need," and it's always those meetings booked. I'm going to pause there, let you chime in, and it looks like we've got some chat and QA going on, but I can't see it.

‍

Sourabh:
Exactly. So I just wanted to point out that I think I had disabled the chat. I'm sorry about that. All the people who are answering, please answer your answer again. I just enabled it. That's my fault, Martha .Rookie mistake, I've only done 3,000 webinars. I'm really sorry.

‍

Martha:
‍We give each other grace. We give each other grace. No worries.

‍

Sourabh:
Exactly. No, I really do want to get into the next piece here and I think the SLA you're going to talk about with sales, if you could just take another minute or two and really just come in on how that's practically working. I'm going to go there, and then lead scoring I think is where we're going to slow things down and get a little bit more in depth.

‍

Martha:
You got it. All right. So I call MQLs avocados. I bought this avocado on Tuesday. I bought it because it looked delicious and it was bright and green and today I was disappointed in the morning when I realized how... Look at this poor quality, man, and it was great when I bought it on Tuesday. But the reason I'm bringing up this avocado is because MQLs are like avocados. They're not going to stay fresh on the shelf for long. So I've always used this analogy with my sales team. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you'll see that I talk about avocados quite a bit, but it's because, literally, when you buy the avocado, you got to use it. It's very rare that it's just going to be ready for you to use. So SLA with sales, let's talk about that. I think any MQL should be called within 24 hours or less.

And ideally, there are tools out there and systems and SDR teams that sometimes are like, a lead comes in, it needs to round-robin and need to be contacted within five minutes. If someone has raised their hand and wants to talk to someone within your organization, that mind-share, that timespan that you have with them is very, very short. I don't know if you've ever filled out a form? I was recently filling out forms for cars I can't afford, and you don't know how many calls I got so quickly because sales teams are jumping on those leads, and they always should. Otherwise, you end up with this avocado that Sourabh named Wilson. He doesn't have a face though, but the poor guy is not in great shape.

‍

Sourabh:
And, like Wilson, I don't think that one is going to make it because, to your point, it's taking too long for the engagement. I did want to ask two things there Martha, and you can answer this however you like around Gigster. First of all, I think there should absolutely be a website. I think you just launched it in someone's mind, in our audience, calledCarsicantafford.com, just purely for aspirational shopping and eye candy. But the second piece I wanted to ask around this is at Gigster, do you guys use Gong or Drift?

‍

Martha:
‍Yes.

‍

Sourabh:
Okay, so you have some automation and what would be called sales support, sales augmentation, that is also measuring and supporting the sales team beyond just what you're doing in marketing?

‍

Martha:
‍Correct, correct. And that's why I was also... Even if you can't get ahold of the person, right? There's a lot of times where an avocado/MQL comes in and you call them and they don't answer. Hence, I'm not going to take the calls, but I'm immediately getting emails from these dealers as well. And so there are ways where you can automatically sequence and keep the person warm and you want them to continue seeing your brand and having that mind share.

‍

Sourabh:
‍Before we get into some more of the mechanics here around lead scoring, sequencing for follow-up after the initial contact, is that entirely on the sales side? Or does marketing also have sequencing from Gigster for these prospects?

‍

Martha:
That's a great question. There are actually two different workflows. Yes, marketing sometimes also has sequencing, but you want to make sure that you don't seem like an organization that the right hand doesn't talk to the left hand. So, if a sales person has actively sequenced a contact and let's say they have a five-touch outreach, you want to make sure that the marketing team isn't also hitting them at the exact same time, so we coordinate our messages. For example, what's helpful is, if you have an upcoming webinar you can say, "Hey, we have an upcoming webinar, but here's the list of contacts that we're not going to hit. But you guys have these actively sequenced, why don't you invite them?" And that personal touch also drives registrations and ultimately engagement. So, yeah, great question.

‍

Sourabh:
‍Yeah, and, well, thank you. I also just want to throw the compliment back. If you guys haven't read Martha's bio, first of all, shame on you. You should know her before you got here. But if you haven't, you'll know that she's scaled this massively. She's built three teams from scratch. She's been in semiconductors. She's been in energy. She's on the development team with Gigster and Disruptor. She's done it all. One of the things that I think it's important that you're taking away is first of all this: If you are one of those organizations, you came in, everything was already built, and it's just super enterprise, you don't have much influence over existing processes. If nothing else from today's discussion, take the SLA with you and start asking that question, "Hey, what is our documented SLA with sales and with which team in sales is it with?"

I've done this on the enterprise side, Martha, as have you, and I've actually found sometimes the team that we had an SLA with didn't have the authority over large groups of sales teams. So that was important for us to understand that we needed to set up a separate channel for lead engagement or lead delivery to other teams that were not going to get their leads in time. Again, we would've never known this, and maybe that's a separate webinar all of itself, right, sales enablement. We would've never known this if we hadn't done what Martha has done, which is actually looked at our service level agreement in the organization and started to ask some key questions around performance.

‍

Martha:
That's great. I'm going to say one more... Well, I have a lot to say about this, but I'll try to keep it short. I know we don't have that much time, but a couple of things. You always want to over-communicate, not only on the SLA but on the lead delivery. So if it is a Salesforce task, if it's a Slack channel, if there's a Gong notification, whatever all those things are, you want to over-communicate so that the customer... Ultimately, the customer's experience is what drives all of that, right? Yes, you want your sales team to be notified, but everyone should feel like, "Okay, what's the best customer service that we can provide?" and use that as your NorthStar.

‍

Sourabh:
‍Love it. Let's move on. I'm going to launch the next poll on your next slide, Martha.

‍

Martha:
Is it about avocado toast, please?

‍

Sourabh:
‍It is not, though I think that's what I'm buying my wife for lunch today is avocado toast. Here we go. I'm going to launch this out, everybody. I would love your responses on what in your current lead scoring mechanism, for those of you that said you are using lead scoring, which of these are you currently factoring in? And we have put some here that I'm not expecting you to click, so please don't just click them all. I'll know you're cheating. Click in the ones that you're currently using currently towards your lead scoring at your organization. Just give them 10 more seconds, Martha, and then they're right back to you. We'll get your thoughts and sort of the practical implications of what you guys are using. And one thing, I don't want to steal away from it, but I'd love for you to explain the difference between engagement and ICP or ideal customer fit, because Gigster is a disruptor. You guys have truly brought something to the industry that was not scalable or available before, but for some of our larger brands on today's webinar, they are the incumbent. So they may have certain things in place and may not be able to track all of this activity because they just have legacy systems upon legacy systems.

Okay, let me go ahead and throw this... Sorry guys, stop answering. I'm going to end this poll here and share it. We got to move. We got to move. Move fast. All right, so tell me, Martha, when you're looking at these results is there anything surprising to you that people aren't using in their current lead scoring?

‍

Martha:
Well, no. The reviews on third-party sites is interesting, right? It's good to have advocates out there. That one is interesting.

‍

Sourabh:
‍You see the complete empty zero on dark social?

‍

Martha:
‍Yeah.

‍

Sourabh:
‍None of us have it.

‍

Martha:
‍I know, and you asked me this. It was funny, when we were setting up for this webinar, he was like, "How do you track dark social?" I was like, "We don't have it."

‍

Sourabh:
Yeah, out of respect for their privacy, I can't mention some of the brands on today, but if I was to describe them you'd know them. They're huge. They're huge tech players in today's webinar, and I hope you feel better that even they don't currently have dark social automated into their lead scoring. Okay, enough about them, Martha. What are you guys doing? Take it away.

‍

Martha:
‍Sure. To me, we've got a lot of different assets out there, right? It's about building a marketing ecosystem. And I always say it's an ecosystem because there are multiple ways to catch leads in our net, whether it's a client story, an eBook, a webinar, a blog. There are all these channels, and it's great that we do that. I would focus on what does the lead score ultimately add up to? You want to score it based on activity, obviously, and then the higher the level of engagement, the higher the score should be attributed to that activity. So someone clicking on a content download shouldn't really be scored that highly personally because they're educating themselves, which is fine. It's okay. You've got someone in your net, but it's not necessarily ready to send over to sales, and someone that attends a webinar is a high level of engagement. You're giving your time, like you guys are here, thank you so much, and time is valuable. So people that are on webinars, we typically score really, really high, and anyone that's actually attended a webinar usually gets pushed over to sales as a direct follow-up.

But think about what are your different levels of engagement? I love that your poll had videos, and are they watching our videos? Hopefully. I've had platforms in the past, but where I can see how long people have stayed engaged on a video. If someone just clicks on the video, it doesn't mean anything. If someone likes a post, it doesn't really mean anything. Are people commenting and engaging and trying to build a relationship with your brand? So sometimes I throw out stuff on my LinkedIn as my own brand and I'm like, "Man, I didn't get very many likes or clicks," but I get people to engage and they ask me questions and they follow up and that dark social piece comes in. So, just know that that's how it works in B2B as well.

Ideal customer profile, in our heads as marketers we all have our ABM list, our coveted ABM list, and these are the titles that we want and these guys are going to convert for us, and sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes it does, which is great, but just know that it's not always about that ideal customer profile. I would rather look at the buyer behavior or the brand buying behavior from that team because it might be like, “Guys, we've had10 people attend a webinar from this logo”. That logo may have not been on your coveted ABM list but it will be the one that converts because it's like, "OH, 10 people attended that webinar," or, "We've had this many people from this brand look at our website and attend webinars and that sort of thing." So remember the engagement is really, really important. Here, I just want to flag that we're using HubSpot so we don't have... My bad if I don't know this, but we don't have a way to track our dark social at th present moment or video engagement just yet, but we're working on it.

‍

Sourabh:
‍No, you're totally right, Martha. And if you want to take them to the next slide, neither of those are native to the HubSpot platform. That's not where it... It has APIs into other providers. So, perfect. I think you covered most of this, but if there's anything else you want to add on here?

‍

Martha:
‍Yeah, here I was just going to say a grade is assigned by title, but again, sometimes that ICP and grading can be a little bit misleading. In my experience, especially when you have a broad offering like Gigster, it might be more difficult to get the perfect grading on there. So, yeah, any questions about this?

‍

Sourabh:
‍I did want to actually bring one up, and I'm paraphrasing a question that we have here from an audience member. I'm just going to make it a little bit more general. When you are selling a B2B service, and as you know there's massive growth in B2B services just as a category over B2B products, despite the VC backing of everything in SAS. B2B services are some of the largest tech companies now in the world, there are actually like hundreds of thousands people delivering service. When you're delivering a service, you just brought up a great point, is that the engagement, getting over the trust threshold for the prospect that I've actually brought you down to my final three or final two, or we really just want to move forward with you, that still requires the scoping of what the deal and work will actually be. It doesn't come out of the box as one flavor, one size.

If you could explain a little bit more about, does this information around the lead scoring or everything you've collected, does this make it over to sales? Or is this represented in a certain way for the person that's actually taking structuring and building the deal, not only closing it but then actually onboarding the customer?

‍

Martha:
That's a great question. So, yes, all of the data goes into Salesforce, so our engagement managers and our account managers would actually see it. I don't know if they're using it, though, so you just spurred... That's a great question. But the sales team actually does get to see what is the different level of activity, and we get to see why they raise their hand. As you were chatting, I was thinking about this, people might raise their hand for various reasons. One might be, "We're trying to migrate legacy systems and we have a deadline of doing it by the end of October and our pants are on fire." And that deal, even though it might be a very large organization and a large enterprise, is going to close much faster and they're going to be more highly engaged than a deal that's like, "This is a nice-to-have. We want some innovative app. We want to do some creative thinking with you guys."

And so we can't, to your point, always standardize, especially in the services industry, like, "This is our average deal size. This is exactly our ICP. This is how this works." It's more of a learn as we go, and really it's tailored per logo.

‍

Sourabh:
And you're not alone. I just want to say this before we move into the last category, what most people start with, which is leads, right? Why do the top 100 companies use Lead2Pipeline? It's for the 57 million buyers that they have. Okay, they want that, but the whole reason customers work with us or stay with us, to use your point, is because of this, because they don't get leads that aren't showing engagement. What's the point? If they won't talk to us, they'll never talk to you, right? So I think this has really become a cultural shift for demand gen marketers, revenue marketers, SAAS marketers, growth marketers, most people that aren't working solely in brand. They've understood that someone being engaged is just the beginning of marketing. We can't just punt them over. We need to know what it is that the person is dealing with or wants so we've got some context before sales engages. Would you agree?

‍

Martha:
Totally. And it's why my post about this webinar was like, "It can't just be, ‘Let's go download 50,000 ZoomInfo contacts and we're going to get this predictable amount of revenue’.” It doesn't work like that anymore, so the engagement is huge.

‍

Sourabh:
‍Awesome. All right, let's bring them back to the beginning, Martha.

‍

Martha:
All right, the beginning. What's happening? Obviously we've got people on our website, webinars, LinkedIn, all the different channels that we talked about. Leads are important and number of leads are important but, again, if you don't know how those people are engaging with you it's going to be really challenging to market in blind. That's what I'll say. And it's nota perfect funnel anymore. It makes me sad as the marketing leader. What keeps me up at night? My non-unpredictable funnel. But it is what it is, and what's really cool is you get to get innovative and test and learn on how to reach out to people, how to get them engaged, because there are different types of buyers out there. So when I was in talent acquisition, I'll be quick, I noticed that it was definitely an old school industry and making phone calls and emails...Email marketing was our number one conversion channel, which I would've said when I started at Talroo, there's no way that email marketing is our number one conversion channel.

They also loved webinars and thought leadership, but that's what it was because HR tech is a little bit behind. Here at Gigster, we're working on AI, other more innovative technologies, and the channels that are converting are different so I find that really fascinating. Thoughts, questions on this, Sourabh?

‍

Sourabh:
And you're not alone. I'm guilty just like you because most of our marketing at Lead2Pipeline is ABM. They're such large technomancies that we work with that the individual accounts get a lot of attention, so email as a channel is unfairly the winner, right? At some point everything ends up in email. But I will say the one thing... I want to ask a question, and just before I do that I will say the other thing that's surprising for us in the digital world we live in has been events. We have not found anything that compares to the leads that we are generating out of in-person trade shows, or even our own regional or city-based events. Has that been the case at Gigster?

‍

Martha:
At Gigster we actually haven't done in-person events, but I will say in my experience post-pandemic people want that connection, and I lead it back to engagement. It's a high level of engagement. And so, yeah, I've seen that.

‍

Sourabh:
Okay, I have one question to ask you from the audience and then I'm going to come back to the other question I'm holding in my head. This is around the size of buying committees and how you buy. Let's say you're working with us and you're buying a certain number of say, leads, at a certain level of maturity, top, middle or bottom, or you're doing full funnel. Whatever you need in the next three to six months. What do you think about the number of contacts per account? Should there be a limit? Do you limit it to three or five? Or do, once you've identified someone in ABM, just get everyone in that ICP? What are your thoughts?

‍

Martha:
I would say two things. One, the more contacts, the merrier. So I would ask for all of them. But the other thing that I wanted to flag is that what's been super interesting in order to compare, "Hey, we're looking at these accounts, these type of accounts, let's say companies that are five to 50 million in revenue, and we've seen that there are this many buyers," sometimes that kind of data, historical data to bring to companies like Lead2Pipeline to say, "Hey, it's typically a six person buying committee," that is super-helpful. So, it's dependent on what you're doing in your organization.

‍

Sourabh:
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, know your buyer, right? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so my question around leads is somewhat... I'm being a bit flippant, but is everybody that engages a lead, Martha?

‍

Martha:
‍No, it's not.

‍

Sourabh:
Why not?

‍

Martha:
Because anybody can be clicking around. We can go back to Carsicantafford.com. Let's go back to that website. You guys have to decide, what does your lead scoring and grading look like? I will tell you that if you score over 100, you're an MQL in our system. But let's say if you're over 50,you're a lead. Okay, maybe a salesperson wants to start sequencing this person, but someone that has a score of 10, they went to a blog and hit subscribe. Or they could be a job-searcher. They might be trying to figure out how to do AI at their own company. They might be doing all kinds of things that we don't know. So you have to figure out how you define lead. I would say that something that we don't have in here, but for our next webinar, we have a lot of webinars coming up, is having a marketing dictionary of what are those definitions, what does it look like, and then get alignment with your sales team on that.

‍

Sourabh:
Oh, my gosh. You're right. You are our inaugural Break the Funnel speaker. We do have a number of speakers just like yourself, in-the-field practitioners that are coming up. We won't cover all of this, but one of the things that you brought up, I love how you have your difference between what is a lead at 50 and then what's an MQL to the point where we need to start getting their sales readiness for this contact. There's a really, really interesting thing we see in conversations with customers, and it's not just here in North America. We see this, when we're talking to folks in EMEA and especially in Asia-Pac, where sometimes the bar is even higher on what is actually considered a lead or an MQL, right? Is what you said there around engagement, when someone is downloading content, they could be doing research? They could be that junior lackey that's been asked to just go and find out about these solutions, right?

That doesn't indicate a middle or bottom-of-funnel interest. That doesn't indicate a buying window. But you know what it does indicate? A buying committee. Somebody did ask that kid to go do that, right?

‍

Martha:
Right.

‍

Sourabh:
This is what I love is, 0 to 50, you're watching them build that engagement before, you see, "Okay, whoever this person is is on a buying committee. Now let's start paying more attention and see if we can figure out what their buying window is." So I think that's really well done. If you don't mind, as much as you don't like to just have your picture on the screen, I'm going to actually have you move to the last slide here, Martha, because I'd like to just pause, and I think we have time for... We're actually a little bit over, but I'm going to just go till 35 minutes if that's okay with everybody. If you have to jump, just go ahead. But there are two questions that came in that I do want to ask. Is that all right?

‍

Martha:
Go for it.

‍

Sourabh:
One of the things that you had mentioned was around getting this data over to sales. Can you talk for a moment about what your frequency is around sales engagement as a VP of marketing? How often do you meet with what types of sales teams? I'm paraphrasing a slightly sideways question.

‍

Martha:
‍Gotcha. Well, we have a Monday meeting where the entire sales and marketing team get together, and I think that is important. And then it just depends on... For example, I've got a demand gen person that will meet with our SDRs almost daily and it's not required, “Hey, it's a daily meeting”, but if there are leads that are stuck or, “Why hasn't this been followed upon?”, or especially as you're building the plane as you fly it a little bit, you want to do that. But I would say best practice is twice-a-week, a Monday-Thursday type of thing where, "How's it going? We're almost wrapping up to the week." And of course when you get closer to the end of the quarter you might want to meet with them less if they have a lot of deals that they're working, or maybe you want to meet with them more if we're trying to make a number. But, yeah, best practice probably twice a week. And it depends on what level of the organization that you want to meet with, but SDRs and AEs both are very important.

‍

Sourabh:
Perfect. Last question, if you don't mind, you can stop sharing because we're going to wrap up on this one if that's okay, Martha?

‍

Martha:
‍Good. It's just looking at my face on the screen.

‍

Sourabh:
I know it's a bit odd, sorry. But it helps them. It's a face to a name, and then they can look up more about you. I'm sure they want to learn more. Okay, last question, and this could have almost been our first question, and take your time on this. It's really important right now, right? How are your goals set? You've driven this story, right? How is marketing's team goals set? Are you measured? And are your bonuses and your promotions, are they set at those levels of measurement? Or does it really just come down to bookings and your influence on bookings?

‍

Martha:
‍There's only one leading indicator and one lagging indicator, right? We can measure a lot of different things, contact database growth, number of MQLs, all of that, but the leading indicator is number of meetings set from MQLs or marketing leads. Sometimes, as we mentioned, it'll be a lead that marketing brought in but sales kind of grabbed and was able to do outreach to. So meetings set from marketing leads or MQLs, and then ultimately bookings as the lagging indicator, because I think that gives you the best health of what is the marketing business doing, what's working, what's not.

‍

Sourabh:
And I have to say, having done this for almost 30 years at very different teams and in different continents and different companies, I think that might be as close to perfect as you can imagine. And I'm just going to take a minute to explain why. This is a compliment to you and your management. The leading indicator of meetings coming from MQLs is really showing everything what is in marketing's control, how well is marketing executing that for the purpose of driving the company's revenue growth, right? I'm being really harsh here. It's like, shouldn't marketing be doing anything else? You can, but this is the leading indicator we're using is that you are intentionally driving better leads that want to meet with sales, priority number one. The second part, I completely understand. Bookings will always be a lagging indicator, especially as we discussed in B2B enterprise deals and especially services because the time it takes from that initial touch to when or if someone closed, marketing can't be held entirely responsible for that.

Awesome. Martha, anything else you'd like to share with our audience? Most people are still here. We haven't had a huge drop-off. Anything else you want to share before I let them go?

‍

Martha:
Well, yes, actually. Sometimes simple is better. Keep it simple, especially when you're reporting up. If you're working on board slides or slides for executives, it can be overwhelming the amount of data that we have. And gather all that and learn about it, but remember people... You have to advocate and educate for marketing, and the best two things are meetings driven by marketing and then revenue and bookings.

‍

Sourabh:
‍Love it. Thank you so much, Martha. I will be sending you the best avocado I can find.

‍

Martha:
Yeah, you owe me $7.

‍

Sourabh:
‍I can't believe you paid that much for that avocado, but we will send you the best one. This has been tremendously helpful. Thank you everybody for joining us. We'll see you on the next Break the Funnel.

‍

Martha:
Awesome, thanks.