Beyond MQLs: Conversion Strategies From First Touch Through Close

Editor's Notes

• #6: As the innovation engine for performance marketing we are seeking to drive three key objectives within our business – something we call the 3E’s – Efficiency, Effectiveness and Expansion With predictive we are able to hit on all three of these and address the business needs of our organization – make performance marketing better by growing pipeline, improving win rates, and arming sales with high quality, engaged leads. The three E’s are fairly straightforward, the complexity comes in the execution Efficiency – This is likely the most obvious solution with predictive, we can drive efficiency with predictively informed targeting – ensuring we are focusing our resources and budget on the right customers and properly orchestrate our marketing & sales activity Effectiveness – With stage aware Customer Intelligence, we can also ensure we are aligning with our customer’s displayed needs – resulting in more effective engagements. This means marketing with the right solutions, messages and content Expansion – The end goal is to expand our business. This comes from getting the first two right. It also comes from properly engaging the customer along their journey to create more informed customers and hopefully enter a deal earlier – resulting in larger deal sizes and higher win rates. Finally, there is also the opportunity to identify net new customers or opportunities that would not come to us if we waited for a hand raise or used our normal targeting methods.
• #7: Talk Track: Predictive provides us a new layer of Customer Intelligence – if BI is all about our internal data for sales, and MI is all about our engagement data for marketing, CI is the layer that pulls it all together for a total view of the customer that enables new proactive actions across both marketing AND sales This unlocks a wealth of new innovations in our current marketing & sales processes, allowing us to engage with the customer in new ways and really drive efficiency and effectiveness in our business – we can capture the right customers at the right time because we know where they are in their journey and what they want Knowing this much about our customers and their intent also allows us to orchestrate how we engage with our customers. Understanding who is in market and how strong their intent to buy is means we can align them to the right types of engagements. We can ensure we invest in the right vehicles at each stage, saving the higher value / higher cost engagements for those most likely to generate a return, while using the lighter touch vehicles to push customers into the funnel and drive up intent.
• #8: Things get really exciting when we use customer intelligence in the media space. Working with partners like Forbes, we are able to bring our 6sense customer intelligence to life in the real world and change the way we target, message and engage with our customers. Phase 1 and 2 were really focused on efficiency. With 6sense data we were able to first understand how much of our active buyer universe actually engaged with a broad-targeted media buy on Forbes and were then able to deploy new targeting strategies that guaranteed 100% of our impressions were delivered to customers that showed actual propensity to buy a certain solution in Phase 2. This approach ensured that our budget for a targeted media campaign was focused on the customers that provided the best return and were in a relevant buyer‘s journey for us. The third phase is focused on driving effectiveness with our engagements. We‘re already developing the plans for how our next media blitz will dynamically align to the customer‘s buyer-stage – delivering the right message and content, though the right media vehicle – all at the right time. As this system continues to devleop and we as an organization learn how to properly understand our customer‘s displayed intent and how it translates to the media world, we‘ll begin to develop advanced rules-based systems to incroporate into our programmatic systems that cross media properties The next steps will take us into the world of Dynamic campaigns, where we work to align content, message and media product to the customer based on their intent level and stage. We can show competitive claims to people in the consideration phase, we can push deep engagement, expensive products and promos to later stage customers. This way we ensure our engagements are relevant and effective. One caveat to keep in mind though – it is not enough to just target engaged buyers, our media partners like Forbes understand that this is just one venue for engagement. We still need broad spectrum engagement and messaging to continue to fill the top of the funnel and find the next wave of engaged buyers.
• #9: The partnership with Forbes is really exciting. Forbes provides a great venue for Dell to engage with many of the business and IT executives that are or become our customers. They offer a unique mix of editorial content that is relevant to this customer segment and provide a valuable outlet for Dell content. With predictive we are able to better connect with customers in their journeys and orchestrate their engagement all the way from the initial exposure to the end of the demand funnel. This partnership provides some really special value to Dell: Enables us to work from brand to demand, targeting relevant customers for engagement from the start of their journey all the way through to the end Our predictive models become better, 6sense gets high quality engagement data that then circles back to inform all of our marketing activities It also provides a system to measure and validate our media partnerships, we now know that Forbes can provide access to customers we want to reach The mix of Forbes media products is another important aspect of their service. They provide very powerful brand engagement systems that are designed to engage the customer throughout their journey. When we first started discussing their 6sense partnership, we were quickly excited with the way they were able to align not only content, but whole products to our customer intent data.
• #10: This is in true sense a win-win-win. All of the parties involved in this were able to gain tremendously from our work together – not only in terms of direct benefits, but also from all the learnings we had as we figured this thing out. 6sense ultimately is able to provide better models, develop new partnerships and enhance its offerings to customers like Dell Dell is able to validate its media campaigns, hyper-target and engage by stage, and optimize its marketing to drive results Forbes is able to prove its value to customers, offer innovative new vehicle options and help their customers realize results from their campaigns
• #11: Performed internal validation of our predictive data, time to do in-the-wild tests My core execution team partnered with our NA stakeholders to pilot We landed on testing with telenurture efforts similar to SDR/BDR style engagement Controllable engagements Simple execution Fast path to results – easy validation To execute we considered: Volume and budget – how many targets we’d provide and total program cost Segmentation & Targeting – we opted to target high-intent accounts, not targeted for other sales engagement via plays Timeline – we often run in single quarter cycles, for this pilot we opted for a half quarter given the # targets Content – we provided specific storage selling scripts and unique openers to avoid ‘creepy factor’ Engagement plan – given the target volume, run-time and vendor recommendation we opted for a 6 call max with contact surfing KPI’s – we opted to measure standard campaign waterfall metrics and added engagement count metrics at a weekly cadence Benchmarking – to truly measure the results in an A-B manner, we pitched the 6sense targets against a purchased list from another vendor
• #12: Efficient targeting, more leads from fewer targets - 70% Premium in Target to SQL Conversion Fewer calls – 3x reduction in call volume to achieve superior results Uplift in opportunity open rates – one of the highest open rates of any campaign run in the quarter Higher category fidelity – 1.4x increase in category alignment – a storage target yielded a storage deal Side note – this all came also at one of our lowest costs per SQL across any campaign This is not the end though, far from it, once a pilot is run, it’s time to iterate Scale – small pilot, room to scale in terms of target and lead volume Span – Easy to replicate across Dell’s models Prioritize – Help prioritize engagements / contact focus Dynamic – initial pilot was static list, 6sense data is living, dynamically target accounts as they progress
• #13: Remember to realize your strategy, this is a full-stack system All your tactics can evolve with Customer Intelligence Focus on driving: Efficient targeting Dynamic/adaptive engagement Leverage insights to inform business This approach can span you entire marketing and sales stack and empower your entire organization A few highlights include: Driving targeted, stage-aware lead gen Informing our programmatic DMP systems for media retargeting Providing sales new account insights for priority-list ABM strategies Enabling marketing automation with a predictive logical layer
• #14: Put it all together and connect it to your systems Create a powerful new platform for marketing New levels of holistic engagement and automated activation At Dell we’ve embraced this approach Working to intertwine customer intelligence everywhere. Hopefully this presentation helps you further your vision of what predictive can do And helps you think about how you can realize the promise as well.