Another day of convening with fellow Dark Jedi marketers, and discussing how to work well with the bounty hunters in sales. You Light Side engineers are already bored, right? Just remember the basic premise of this blog–namely, engineering and marketing are not as different as you’d think. Both involve very similar problem solving skills, even if the weapons are a bit different.
Amusingly enough, Tony Jaros of SiriusDecisions opened up his discussion of “pipeline acceleration” by calling us all scientists and then showing a slide littered with calculus equations demonstrating the physics of acceleration. My engineering brain started rattling the bars on its cage. ”Hey! HEY! I recognize those! Are we really going to talk about mv² and second derivatives? Can I make a Force pun?” The next few slides on demand waterfalls sent it grumbling back to the corner of my brain. Too bad, really; today definitely involved yet more problem solving and application of scientific principles.
Measure, measure, measure. Bad marketing often relies on guts and instinct. Good marketing involves gathering data and testing. Many of the sessions provided great frameworks for understanding how to classify and take action on the problems that face marketers. For example, the nebulous concept of inbound marketing, and the squishy what’s-the-point topic of social media. There ARE ways to measure these things beyond your own activity.
Marketing Operations is our QA. Any true development shop has a QA role. Only the smallest shops would require engineers to do their own QA, and that path is Fraught With Peril™. Many people on Day One and Day Two talked about Marketing Operations. Huh? Whazzat? Turns out it’s similar to the QA role for marketing. How is demand gen performing? Are our automated measurements working correctly? Right now, most organizations (including ours) have the demand gen teams “QA-ing their own code” by spending cycles to report on their performance. It’s the fox watching the hen house. Not to mention a dedicated marketing ops team can make sure the right infrastructure is in place to get these metrics, and can spend the cycles analyzing trends and giving guidance back to the demand gen team.
A bazillion ideas… from vendors? I have a new addition to the cast of characters. Call them Jawas. Every trade show has them–the annoying vendors trying to push half-functioning merchandise on you. Heralded by signage and tchotchkes, they represent a necessary evil since their sponsorship dollars make these events happen. Except… at this event, every vendor I talked to had something interesting to talk about. I walked away with ideas for tools, process changes, data discovery, and automation capabilities that I had never even thought of. You don’t know what you need until you see it. And most of it we don’t have, but could afford, and makes a tangible improvement to our marketing.
Improving our ability to influence. When it comes down to it, most of marketing is about learning how to influence others. We talked about the Buy Cycle so much I thought I was at the Tour de France. (Get it? Buy Cycle… bicycle… oh never mind.) Right now it’s too easy to just throw our marketing resources at whatever problem sales mentions, without any thought to whether we’re trying to move people through the early education stages, or the later selection stages.
Laying down the gauntlet. Finally, we learned more than one way to say, “I have altered the deal… pray I do not alter it further” when it comes to working with the sales team. The Dark Side needs to get the Bounty Hunters to agree on what’s agreed: we will pay this, you will give us that. Service Level Agreements. Formal alignment programs. Joint operations reviews. That way we don’t produce a bunch of low quality leads that sales is not interested in and has no bandwidth to follow up on. Which, you know, happens way too often.
More than a few people have mentioned to me that their brains are full too. There’s quite a lot to digest!
