We’re starting a weekly video series! In this first video, we share key findings from the Salesforce 2018 State of Marketing report. Reagan and John talk about our reactions to the 2018 report and the key takeaways that are most likely to impact your business – the increasing importance that marketing is playing across the customer journey, the disconnect between sales and marketing and the struggles most businesses see having to integrate a high number of data sources.
See Full Transcript Below:
John Keehler: Hi Everyone, you’ve got John Keillor, partner at RUNNER.
Reagan Judd: And I’m Reagan CEO, here at RUNNER.
John Keehler: And today we’re going to be starting off the new year right by talking about Salesforce’s annual 2018 State of Marketing Report. It’s got some really, really great foundational things for you to figure out in your marketing this year.
John Keehler: This year they surveyed about 4,000 marketing leaders, it’s across the globe, so the US as well as around the world. Really great information in it. In fact, they break down a lot of the data by country and industry segments. So really worth the download to get some good insights from. So there were four key takeaways that I want to talk about really quickly. I’m just going to kind of read through them.
John Keehler: So the first one, the executive summary was this idea that marketing has become the cross functional glue of customer experience. We’re going to talk about that a lot today, is what we’re going to focus on. But I think a really, really interesting idea that customer experience, although it’s much bigger than just marketing, the marketers that we work with, marketing departments, marketing leaders, are increasingly being tasked with kind of leading those full customer experience initiatives in companies.
John Keehler: The second is what they call new realities, upping the ante for data unification. So this is really-
John Keehler: Yeah. They really talked about this through the idea of as people are wanting to personalize communications a lot more, data is really important part of that, and they’re trying to figure out ways to unify all. The third point that they have is around AI. So they call it AI and Trust Underpin Customer Experiences. And again, this is just about, again, with all this data driven personalization, the amount of data that’s being used that a lot of companies are trying to AI to do that.
John Keehler: And then finally a piece which I’m sure we’ll talk about in one of these discussions moving forward is the idea of real-time engagement across channels. So conversational marketing, and those kinds of things. But I really want to focus on this first key takeaway.
Reagan Judd: Okay.
John Keehler: And talk about it a little bit more. So quoting from the Salesforce report here in terms of this idea that marketing is the cross functional glue of customer experience. So Salesforce says in the report, “Marketers have a unique perspective of customer needs, behaviors and trends. As such, nearly half or 45% of marketing leaders in the survey say that their organization, the marketing department, is leading customer experience initiatives across the business. And that’s up from only 24% last year.”
Reagan Judd: That’s a big.
John Keehler: Big jump. I think this is something, I mean, I think we see a lot of marketing’s been kind of given this responsibility and to me it makes sense, right? If you have emails that are going out to existing customers trying to up sell them on things, if you have advertising messages that they’re trying to reach prospects, it makes sense to me that marketing really kind of live across all these different touchpoints.
Reagan Judd: Yeah. for sure.
John Keehler: Yeah. So, given that a lot of these marketing clients we work with are given responsibility over customer experience. I also want to talk about one of the big challenges that comes with that. And this to me was one of the more shocking things in the report. Salesforce says the average number of data sources used by marketers is 15-
Reagan Judd: Wow.
John Keehler: … which is pretty crazy.
Reagan Judd: Yeah, it’s getting up there. Talking with and working regularly with a lot of our customers, we see a lot of them have many more than that, but just to know that the average alone is 15. There’s got to be a lot of overwhelmed marketers out there.
John Keehler: Yeah. And you know, my first impression in hearing that was, “15 really?”
Reagan Judd: Yeah.
John Keehler: I think a lot of people listening would probably think, “I don’t have 15 data sources. I may have four.” Right? But I think if you start thinking through just most marketers, right?
Reagan Judd: Sure.
John Keehler: If you’re tracking things pretty well, you might have Google Analytics, you might have email marketing performance if you’re using Salesforce or a CRM, you’re going to have reporting coming out of that. If you’re doing unique phone numbers, you’re going to have-
Reagan Judd: Call tracking.
John Keehler: … call tracking metrics-
Reagan Judd: Yep.
John Keehler: … tracking your net promoter, reputation stuff.
Reagan Judd: If you’re concerned about reviews, you’d be monitoring how quality your reviews are coming off of sites like Yelp or Google Reviews, right?
John Keehler: And, I mean, we haven’t even gotten into all the marketing channels, right? So if you’re running Facebook campaigns-
Reagan Judd: Sure.
John Keehler: … or Ad Words campaigns, display campaigns, all those things, kind of add up.
Reagan Judd: Yeah.
John Keehler: So I think it’s pretty easy actually to get to 15.
Reagan Judd: I would say 15, even for a small company, and this, I would imagine, has a lot to do with how smaller businesses feel a little bit overwhelmed right now, is that you even think of our own marketing, and how many things that we monitor here just for RUNNER in our own marketing efforts. I mean, it’s easily five to seven different platforms.
John Keehler: Yeah.
Reagan Judd: Multiple social channels, our own website. Yeah, there’s a lot of them.
John Keehler: Yeah. This can seem really overwhelming, right? You’ve got 15 data sources. How do you unify them all together to get-
Reagan Judd: Right.
John Keehler: … a single view of the customer? That’s still really the holy grail of marketing. And there are companies that spend millions and millions of dollars that haven’t figured that out.
Reagan Judd: Sure.
John Keehler: Right?
Reagan Judd: Years and years and teams and all that stuff.
John Keehler: Yeah. But I think there’s a very simple thing that a lot of brands can do. Most brands do with us when we first start working with them. And that’s just aligning your messaging around the customer journey. So one really interesting note from last year’s Salesforce State of Marketing Report, was that half of marketers said they use identical messages across channels. So they’re just broadcasting the same thing out everywhere. And so I think taking this kind of journey aligned approach to your messaging is really important. You don’t need to over complicate it.
Reagan Judd: Right.
John Keehler: You don’t need to have some crazy elaborate customer journey. Even if you just start thinking about high funnel,
Reagan Judd: Mid funnel, low funnel.
John Keehler: … mid funnel, low funnel.
Reagan Judd: Right.
John Keehler: What messages you would talk to someone across those channels. Changing your retargeting.
Reagan Judd: Yep.
John Keehler: … message from your prospecting message. That very basic change can have a really big impact on the results.
Reagan Judd: I think people are going through the data from all these different sources, not knowing where to take action and what to do about it. Applying the data as it relates to the customer journey is a, sounds like a great start.
John Keehler: Right.
Reagan Judd: Something we recommend often.
John Keehler: So, the second thing that I’ve found a pretty shocking about the report was about alignment between sales and marketing.
Reagan Judd: Yeah. I love this one.
John Keehler: Yeah. So Salesforce is saying as a part of this report that alignment between sales and marketing is the default, right? That the majority of marketing departments, they say 52% are sharing common goals and metrics with sales.
Reagan Judd: Yeah.
John Keehler: This set my spidey sense a little bit.
Reagan Judd: Yeah. And here’s what I’m saying, I’m not sure how Salesforce is defining the word default these days.
John Keehler: Right.
Reagan Judd: But, I’m here to tell you that’s not what our experience is, right?
John Keehler: Yeah, for sure.
Reagan Judd: I mean, most people are really, really struggling with a true alignment between the marketing department and the sales department. I don’t know what the majority, I mean they said-
John Keehler: 52%.
Reagan Judd: … 52%, right? So I definitely don’t call that default. I barely call that a majority. But it’s a lot of companies really struggling with this for sure.
John Keehler: And this is something I think that we are particularly good at.
Reagan Judd: Yep.
John Keehler: I think we run up against this a lot with our clients.
Reagan Judd: Yeah.
John Keehler: And so what do you feel like are ways that sales and marketing can become more aligned?
Reagan Judd: Man. So I love this topic, right? I’m very passionate about that. And one thing that, I think sets RUNNER apart from a lot of agencies who are just kind of focused on the marketing experience. I would say the number one thing that companies can put into place to take action on alignment is an SLA, Service Level Agreement. And doesn’t have to be a legal document. It sounds like one. It’s just an internal structure for the sales division, and the marketing department to follow together, where they agree on certain things.
John Keehler: Yeah.
Reagan Judd: When does a marketing lead become a sales qualified lead? When does a sales qualified lead, really need to go and get kicked back to the marketing department? Very simple agreements on how to handle those situations, I would say is the very first thing to put into place. And there’s lots and lots of caveats and nuances there for that agreement. Of course, that’s where you really have to study the nuances of a business itself and, decide what those are and how you handle them.
John Keehler: Yeah.
Reagan Judd: So that’s the first thing.
John Keehler: Yeah. I think the other thing that we’ve talked a lot about with our clients is it’s not necessarily fair, I think to put the entire weight of closing a lead on either marketing or sales.
Reagan Judd: Oh, man, yeah.
John Keehler: And I think one of the interesting things that we run into a lot is, you may have a sales team that’s really, really great over the phone.
Reagan Judd: Right.
John Keehler: As soon as they get into email, right, they don’t necessarily know what they’re doing. So there’s this interesting kind of in between world that we run into quite a bit.
Reagan Judd: Yeah.
John Keehler: And I know it’s one of the reasons we created, for some of our clients, a patient engagement center.
Reagan Judd: Absolutely, we saw a need, right? We saw a need, and with our experience in marketing automation, and timely marketing messages that go out to customers at the right time, at the right place, hopefully about the right topic. We developed, and have a build our own sales team which works in conjunction with our marketing team that while they’re in a separate physical location, we are here in our Dallas Office, we still talk to them every day, right. And we have truly a service level agreement for every client that we work on in that capacity.
John Keehler: Yeah.
Reagan Judd: And not all of our clients work with us on both marketing and sales. But for the ones that do we, we have an obvious, much tighter coupling between those two departments. And the one thing I think we’re both big on that, maybe you can talk a little bit more, as well is at the end of the day, these marketers, they want to make more of their marketing dollars.
John Keehler: Yeah.
Reagan Judd: They need to see them go further. And as time goes on, the further we go into data driven marketing. At the end of the day, our customers care about the results.
John Keehler: Yeah.
Reagan Judd: Right? Or what you like to repeat, what’s your word repeat?
John Keehler: Outcome based marketing. Right.
Reagan Judd: Yeah, outcome based marketing. I couldn’t agree more, right? So they’re all interested in what the outcomes will really be.
John Keehler: Yeah.
Reagan Judd: If we do our job with marketing, but also really help either our clients internally manage the sales process, or help them do it using our service, we’re a step closer to guaranteeing those outcomes. Right?
John Keehler: Yeah.
Reagan Judd: Or really proving better outcomes.
John Keehler: Yeah. It’s all about defining those responsibilities really clearly. And I think it’s also about being really honest with what can your sales team actually handle.
Reagan Judd: Yeah, for sure.
John Keehler: And then what kind of support does the marketing team need to maybe get leads in the right place before we deliver them to salespeople.
Reagan Judd: Yes. This is important stuff because, holding your agency accountable, and we love to be accountable, we love to take on the responsibility of marketing, but marketing only, it stops were sales begins.
John Keehler: Yeah.
Reagan Judd: And so it’d be held accountable for revenue increases sales increases when really we’re only in charge of the first part of the process.
John Keehler: Yeah.
Reagan Judd: It’s a big ask for any marketing department or your agency. Right?
John Keehler: Absolutely.
Reagan Judd: So having that SLA in place guarantees that you’re going to just make more of your efforts and more of your dollars.
John Keehler: Yeah. Great. So hopefully everybody enjoyed our first video and we’ll be back with more. We’re going to tackle some specific topics. One of which I know we’re going to come back and talk about a little bit more at some point is the realtime engagement.
Reagan Judd: Awesome.
John Keehler: … stuff as well.
Reagan Judd: Look forward to it.
John Keehler: All right.
Reagan Judd: Thanks John.
John Keehler: Thanks everybody.
