Why would sales care about a marketing metric? And when marketing people say “marketing measurements,” what do they even mean?
The good news is that alignment, efficiency, and profitability is not only desirable, it's achievable.
In this episode of #ThoughtLeaderConversations, V2's Head of Strategy Roger Courville joined by Veronica Puailoa, Founder of ProfitEngineGroup to just have a conversation about what she's seen work from three perspectives -- as a marketing leader, a sales leader, AND as a Vice President in Private Equity.
***
Series: #ThoughtLeaderConversations Sponsor: V2, LLC, expert virtual and hybrid event production, www.VirtualVenues.com Host: Roger Courville, CSP, https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerc/
Keywords: #SalesAndMarketingAlignment #SalesMarketingSynergy #RevenueGrowth #MarketingStrategy #SalesStrategy #B2BMarketing #B2BSales
***
Unedited transcript
[00:00:00] Roger Courville, CSP: Why would sales care about marketing metrics? And when marketing people say marketing measurements. What the heck do they even mean? Well, I'm glad you asked. Hello and welcome to Accelerate Bookings with Marketing Engine Visibility. I love those words. Marketing Engine Visibility. My name is Roger Courville and welcome to another episode of Thought Leader Conversations sponsored by the crew at Virtual Venues where you can give yourself a promotion.
instantly scaling your virtual and hybrid event production team so that you can nail your goals and strategy. And our guest today is somebody that can help you do that in spades. And I cannot tell you how excited I am to hear to have, um, Veronica Puello with me, um, go to market consultant, founder of Profit Engine Group, but I'm just going to get personal for a second.
I don't know if it was 15 or 20 years ago that, uh, I worked with Veronica when she was at Citrix and the journey that she's been on since is one of those mind blowing things that brings together sales and marketing and even, uh, experience with private equity, right? More than two decades of experience in B2B software companies in sales and marketing leadership.
Again, private equity leadership and uses this unique vantage point from multiple sides of the business spectrum to help you develop and implement methodologies, reduce cost, enhance ROI, provide a roadmap to consistently achieve organizational goals, all that, and more today. Veronica, great to see you again.
Tell us a little more about who you are and what you do. Yeah, you as
[00:01:43] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: well. It has been too long. Um, not, not 15 years next time, but yeah, no, I mean, I mean, along the lines of your introduction, I, I have spent my career building go to market teams and strategies that are really data driven. Um, and they act as a company's engine, right?
Like driving profitability and bookings. And, and, and to your point, I'm very lucky in that I've been on both sides of the, of the table, the board table. You know, I, I show up there as an executive focused on the metrics that I think matter, and they do, but then from a private equity point of view, you're really looking at it holistically, you know, as a whole organization and how it fits together.
Um, and I will tell you, one of the common denominators I've seen on most organizations that are growing. and that are growing profitably, they have those marketing metrics in place that are inextricably linked with sales. And sales and marketing, they work together. They're, you know, the two different sides of the same coin.
Um, and when that happens, yeah, you, you do have this efficiency in how you drive bookings and how you drive pipeline. And, um, it is shocking to me, you know, the, sometimes the lack of data that is, that is looked at, or maybe it's, you know, the wrong types of data, and so they're all kind of linked together, um, and how a company and an engine is run,
[00:03:03] Roger Courville, CSP: basically.
Yeah, I love the way you even just put that, because I know you're typically working with, uh, senior executives or those who have visibility. across channels, right? I mean, cause if, if a sales leader is listening to this, one question they might ask could be, why should I care about marketing metrics and, and, or vice versa.
And I think one of the things that I'm excited to chat with you about is really putting on that value creation hat and when we up level that conversation, thinking about how these things work together, we create value in a whole new way, particularly in the engine context. In fact, maybe let's start there.
When you talk about an efficient go to market engine.
[00:03:47] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: Yeah. So when I say efficient, I mean, you know, maybe it's year over year, you're booking more or year over year. You're, you know, you're developing and sending over more leads, but are those leads. And those bookings accelerating at the same rate as you're spent.
So a lot of times you're throwing money at things, but, and you might see a little bit of an increase, but unless you're actually looking at it strategically and seeing how those dollars are being spent, um, you're not going to get the same bang for your buck, right? And so a lot of times, too, when you have siloed...
sales and marketing, and you don't have that visibility, you guys are working against each other. And so one of the things I, I have a good example of is, is that we, uh, you know, we're, we're, we're thinking of marketing as like, okay, just send over leads, send over leads, send over leads. Well, that's great.
But if those leads aren't translating to bookings. Um, or pipeline, your sales reps are going to start to ignore you. And so you might be putting this money in, but unless they know how that's, you know, translating what the conversion rates are, they're not going to trust that when you send them, you know, the Joe from ABC company, they're not going to trust to follow up on them.
So unless you have that connection, you're going to lose that efficiency.
[00:05:10] Roger Courville, CSP: I'm smiling and now chuckling out loud because I've been on both sides as well because I've carried a bag. I carried a bag at Microsoft eons ago, and I've been a CMO and, uh, one of my own personal kind of internal jokes, and I'm just going to put it out there in front of everybody is that sales only ever has one of two complaints about marketing.
There aren't enough leads or your leads suck. And, and, you know, it might be an oversimplification, but really at the end of the day, to your point about alignment, it's, it's important to go, Hey, we're one, we're on the same team. And two, uh, we need each other in a, in a rather dramatic way. Just out of curiosity, when you think about.
the highest impact KPIs for driving sales efficiency. What, what do you, what do you have?
[00:06:04] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: So every organization can kind of define this differently and it depends on how nascent or complex your, your, your engine is. Right. But I think that when you have. A lead that marketing has said is qualified, and then sales can come in there and also validate that you get a conversion rate, uh, whether it's sales accepted or sales qualified, however you want to look at that, but that conversion rate is gold, um, because like you said, you can send over a thousand leads, but if you don't have bookings or pipeline, it doesn't matter.
Um, so it, comes down to quality. Um, and one of the things that I think that that is most evident in, and I've seen, I've, I've, at this, actually an example just popped in my mind when you were talking about that, but, um, events. So there's, I was working at a company and, um, it was a couple of years ago, and I decided to look at our event spend.
And we had been spending, I think, like 80 percent of our, of our budget on these events, right? And so I'm like, well, let's look at what's actually translating to pipeline, because that's really where we need to be attending. And so I ended up slashing the number of events by almost half. And, um, I had some sales reps that were less than thrilled, right?
Because to them, in their mind, they were thinking, Oh my gosh, I'm not going to have leads. We're going to crash and burn. It's going to be awful. Um, and what I did was I pulled them aside and I showed them the events and I showed them over the past five years how opportunities that had come from those, if there had even been one, how they had translated and, and the ones that they were saying that we should go to.
didn't really have much in the way of a conversion rate, right? And so, some of the more key ones that we did that had a high conversion rate, we continue to have the, you know, 50, 000 booth, and we saw that, right? But some of the lower ones too, we, we reassessed how even our presence there should be, right?
So maybe we don't have a 50k booth, maybe what we do is if the sales rep thinks that they can get opportunities, because we've seen one or two, we want to increase that conversion rate. Right? Let's think about it differently. Maybe we should just send reps there in person and have
Um, I've even done things where we've shifted from a booth to where we do a speaking slot and you get those names and you have those conversations and you connect on a deeper level and those conversion rates will go up. And so we saw a huge increase in not just opportunity creation, but conversion of those opportunities, which is key.
And that's kind of along the lines of where you start to build trust. You have that visibility between the two and you can explain. Listen, I'm not just cutting your events just to cut the events. There's, there's a strategy behind this. And at the end of the day, what I want as a marketer is I want you to close bookings.
I want to say that, you know, 90 plus percent of your bookings were either originated or contributed by, you know, or influenced by marketing. Um, because that's going to help us kind of, I'm going to get feedback from you, you're going to get feedback from me, and we're going to, we're going to get efficient in how we drive leads and how we drive opportunities.
[00:09:06] Roger Courville, CSP: Just out of curiosity, how do virtual events or hybrid events fit into, or the virtual element, how does that fit into how you think about metrics?
[00:09:17] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: Yeah, there's, um, webinars or virtual events, however you want to define them. They are, um, an animal unto themselves and they are a very, um, impactful one. Uh, so another, um, actually a different company, um, that I was working with, they spend a lot of money on videos.
And the videos weren't live, though, and they were more kind of one off little, um, like social media things, which is great, but they had, I think like 60 percent of their budget going towards kind of ads like that and 20 percent of their budget going to webinars. But when you looked at the data, webinars drove like 80 percent of the pipeline creation.
So we ended up switching. And so while both were important, they had different angles. So the videos and the advertising was more awareness. Right? But the webinars were actually the ones that were taking those leads that were further down the funnel and moving them from awareness to evaluation, consideration, and ultimately a customer.
And so webinars are, I think, a resource that not everyone utilizes to the fullest extent. Because they're usually, as opposed to going to, you know, a conference where you're spending a hundred grand with the booth and the people and the attendees and all the collateral, You go and do a virtual event and you have almost higher, like, higher quality conversations because you're really targeting people that want to, want to be there specifically to talk to you.
Um, but the cost is much lower, so the cost per lead goes down and that's where the efficiency starts to go up. Um, so, yes, and there's metrics all along the spectrum when it comes to webinars with attendance rate, registration rate, you know, questions that get asked, and one of the other things that I love about virtual events is I think of it almost like a hub and spoke model.
When it comes to lead engagement and working with sales to get those leads nurtured. It's not just one event. You have the archive that sales reps can then utilize as part of the sales enablement process. Hey, you know, I saw you didn't attend this webinar, but check out the archive here. I think it's really beneficial to what you're trying to achieve.
And so that now moves enablement tool. Um, and we've done it too, where, you know, maybe the archive is one spoke, another spoke, and you turn it into a blog post. And now you have additional content. You take snippets out, and you can put it on social media, and it can continue to capture those leads and drive them to sales.
So yeah, there's, there are multi... multiple benefits to doing online, online events, for sure.
[00:11:54] Roger Courville, CSP: Well, preaching to the choir on that one, uh, given that I've been in this space for 24 years. But I'll say this, you know, to me, one of the things that I started doing long ago was going, okay, what, what is the pivot?
You know, because one of the, to me, there's a couple. One is that an event and particularly a virtual event has a life cycle that other forms of content may not have, right? If I have put up a video or a, um, a white paper, if I put a gate in front of that white paper, I collect a lead and begin my nurturing process.
But, uh, an event that is live has a, has this life cycle, right? Knowing that somebody registered but did not attend. Is different data point than registered, but did attend and then let alone did they ask a question or answer a poll. And one of the things that I think is often overlooked by sales teams are some of those metadata points that are possible along the way.
And frankly, honestly, marketers. Screw that up too, right? Meaning, uh, meaning that integration that you were talking about and how are we helping each other sometimes is, is just a function of, uh, at least in the way we've implemented it sometimes helping. Marketing know how to communicate to sales about what's going to show up in Salesforce or Marketo so that sales knows what to do so that their follow up is, say, a warm call going, Hey, Veronica, I see that you attended our thing and you asked a question.
Did you did your question get answered? It looks like you asked. Should I do this on Tuesdays? And now it looks like I, I, you and I are personal as opposed to something, you know, completely utterly out of the cold. I'll share with you want to kind of, and this is, this is your show, not mine. But one extreme example worked with a client who, who had a kind of a parody product release.
They were kind of behind in the market and they had this release. It was really nothing to talk about. It was just Catching up on some features that all their competitors had, and they really wanted to make hay with it. Well, what they ended up doing, instead of just doing one webinar going, okay, version 8.
0 is out and here's, here's what we, what we changed. Um, we actually worked with them to take that and parse it into eight. Separate little chunks. And we took every tiny little thing, turned it into a 10 or 15 minute presentation that was a webinar unto itself. And then one of the sales engineers came around and just hung out and asked questions and answered questions.
So it was like, ask anything. So they learn really literally actually learns two things coming out of that. One was, um, from the live events and the archives, then of those events. They figured out just by traffic, which of those little nuggets of, of this new release, um, had more or less interest. And then second, because of the integration of the sales and the marketing, um, they took all those sales questions that were coming into the sales engineer.
And he was a brilliant talker and could, could really represent the company well. But they took all that, fed it into Salesforce, and... and worked with the sales team to say, Hey, here's how we're going to follow up. Of course, it helps to have the, um, you know, the, the chief revenue officer, um, sponsor this and say, this is what we're going to do.
But then it became a warm conversation. That was an extension of this thing that happened. But to me, I boil it all down between two words conversation. versus publication and and whether it's whether it's webinars or anything else to me one of the power of the live webinars is conversation it's not just another form of publication because frankly the world has a lot of noise and and publication should be Thought about strategically.
So now I'll get off my soap box.
[00:15:51] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: No, I, there's so many nuggets in that, that I can dive into. Um, but yeah, no, I think there's a, there's a, depending on what you're trying to achieve, there's a different strategy on how you want to approach webinars from a topic perspective. Like you said, you know, small little bits here and there on, on different key kind of elements of the product.
Uh, there's a big, massive thought leaderships, but I think. The two points I want to hit on is the kind of the follow up, the segmentation, um, but also, yeah, that live piece. And so, yeah, some of the best webinars with some of the highest pipeline creation have been those that interact with the audience. So you have, you know, polls halfway through, and it's not just this static, like, Okay, 50 percent of y'all chose this.
Well, what does that mean, right? And changing how you're talking based on who you're talking to. Um, and then having that live Q& A, it makes it real. And it really engages people and it makes it so that it's about them, their pain. Because at the end of the day, we're trying to solve their pain. And so, we're being able to focus on that, especially during those live events.
Um, yeah, the, the other piece to that is, is, you hit it right on the nail on the head. I mean, it's that segmentation. And so, um, part of what I try and focus on with my... With my customers. It's like understanding how lead scoring works too, because it will help you figure out how you follow up. So not, you know.
Okay, so someone registers for a webinar. It's not like every single person just gets. 20 points and that's it, you know, towards your kind of lead threshold to become an MQL. They might get, you know, 5 points for registering, but they get 10 more points for attending. And depending on how they interact, maybe they get, they get, you know, scored differently there as well.
And so you're able to identify the ones that have been, you know, repeat viewers and attendees, people who are actually engaging. And those are the ones where, you know, a lot of times we'll send a very customized. Um, to a sales rep saying, Hey, you need to follow up with this person immediately. Here's what they asked about.
Here's their attendance rate. And you can automate all of that too as well through, through certain, you know, marketing automation tools. Marketo is one of my favorites, but, um, yeah, no, it's great. And then a lot of times too, it's an opportunity if you have a BDR or SDR team to take those lukewarm ones that you don't necessarily, and this is part of the trust thing, right?
Giving the high quality ones to an account executive. But the ones that are kind of lukewarm, maybe they've attended to, but they haven't spoken up yet or, um, you know, something along how you want, however you want to define that. You can have a subset of those go to an SDR, SDR, BDR team to attempt that outreach.
And then once they have that conversation, that's at that point where they can qualify it further and move it on to an account executive. So again, you start to increase the quality and the conversion of the leads you're giving to an AE, um, to help build that trust. And yeah, webinars are fantastic.
fantastic way to nurturing and, and, and gaining leads.
[00:18:50] Roger Courville, CSP: I just thought of this too, but let me actually be really clear to me. I'm, I'm not a, I, I, It makes me sick to my stomach when somebody says our tactic is the cat's meow, right? So I've been in the virtual events business since 1999, but it's not the only tactic.
It's a tactic, right? To be, to be clear. One advantage of the tactic could be, to your point, use kind of like, okay, do we spend a hundred grand going to this particular event or do we parse that, uh, in terms of how, uh, other ways to tackle it? One of the ways that I think you can, you can get creative with virtual events and still have that conversation is to, is to, have more frequent, but more targeted, right?
So like if you, like I've worked with clients to build out, say, a sales cycle that, you know, call it a three or four point sales cycle, but then targeted in kind of a, into call it three boxes times, three boxes, right? Business decision maker, technical decision maker, economic decision maker, or whatever you want to, the language you want to use, but then you can get really specific.
So instead of this one webinar having to be. a topic that tries to spray and pray and cover everybody. You can get really specific in terms of the language. And I've got a chart I can send you. I'm happy to send you if you want some, some examples. Question for you though, I think a lot of this comes down to trust in trying something different than what we may have just seen in the past.
Talk about trust when it comes to sales and marketing.
[00:20:37] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: Yeah, I think, I think it boils down to it's, it's, it's this, um, I'll say, you know, age old kind of rivalry between the two. Um, but a lot of times they do act almost as competitors. Like a sales rep doesn't want to say a lead came from marketing or they don't want to, um, spend time on things that they don't think it's going to translate, um, to which to them.
And I feel like I can say this cause I was in sales. But sales reps, I mean, to a sense, they're, they're quite operative, right? It's like you, they're, they're going to do what they think needs to get done for them to close a deal. And so, one of the other things too that, that I think builds trust is when you can show them how marketing can actually Um, which a lot of, you know, if you're just starting out, that can take some time to build, but when you have that going, it is so impactful.
Um, you can actually pull up, you know, closed one opportunities and compare them to ones that haven't been touched by marketing. Um, and, and there is, I guarantee there will be a difference. Um, and part of that comes with marketing doesn't just end when you create a lead and so. You know, it's kind of the chicken before the egg or, you know, however you want to phrase that, but...
Um, you need to be able to have the sales reps trust you to continue talking to their opportunities. Um, continue inviting them to webinars, and actually I've seen cases where we will have a pipeline that we target specifically with, um, a webinar that is focused on things that are relevant to people that are making those phone calls.
final decisions. And so something I've seen topics that translate really well to that are when you have customers come on almost like a case study, which if you think about the marketing funnel and the content you create is much lower on the end, it's kind of that end stage before they become opportunity.
And you have people that are currently talking to sales reps as part of their sales process now get exposed to existing customers that can talk about how our solution helps solve their problem, help them achieve, you know, their goals. Um, and it creates that validation and then you start to have the sales reps proactively reach out and make sure that you are you sure that, you know, my, my opportunity is on this webinar.
Yes, yes, they are definitely, you know, and then, and then you can have that trust that we're a team, right? It's not my leads versus yours. We want the ball to go. We want the company to succeed. And we're only going to do that if we're working together and we have that efficient communication going on which starts from beginning to end.
[00:23:26] Roger Courville, CSP: I love that. So let me, in fact, I'm going to have you rephrase some of that because I'm going to ask you in a same, in a sense, the same question in a different way. Okay. What are some best practices for building trust between sales and marketing?
[00:23:45] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: Yeah. Um, I think, so the first one is, I, you know, most marketers that they're marketing, they're marketers because that's what they love.
And so I know from my perspective. I am a, uh, data geek, and I can wax poetic on every single little KPI that I think is important to my own department. But if you start to overload people with every single tiny little detail that might be interesting to you, you know, it may not actually impact someone else.
So I think the first step in trust is understanding each other and understanding what, and then making sure that they have that information and so for a sales rep I think the first The first goal is to have that relationship and have that communication that goes on. What do you, you know, what's important to you?
And like you said, most reps are going to say leads. Well, you can follow that up with, okay, I'll let you know that. But let's also talk about how your leads are converting, because I think that's going to be important to you. And then the second follow up piece to that is you can't just end there. If you just say, Hey, all right, cool.
Here's, here's some stats. Um, you know, ask me next time you want them. You build trust by being accountable to what you're doing and continuing a steady cadence of communication. So if you maybe have a bad quarter, sales needs to know about that and you shouldn't be afraid to communicate that because at the end of the day too, it may not affect them immediately, but sales cycles, you know, can take.
can take nine months, more than that sometimes. And so if you're telling them, Hey, guess what? I, um, I missed my mark by 20 percent of what we were going to deliver in terms of leads. And I know, and you know, that our leads are going to convert at a 40 percent rate into quality pipeline. I'm just throwing these numbers out there.
That means sales that you need to plan ahead and maybe pick up your own outreach to help compensate for that because your pipeline is going to get affected in three months. Or six months or nine months, and having that conversation and having sales trust you, that you're gonna tell them when you're not hitting your goal necessarily, so that they can plan ahead.
And again, it's that, it's that it, it builds that accountability and that trust. And you start to work together and you start to break through. Okay. What can we do to maybe over exceed our goal next, you know, next quarter? How can we work together? Um, I, I think that though, those two key pieces interlock and they are essential to, to, to building that trust.
[00:26:18] Roger Courville, CSP: Put on your private equity hat. You're sitting in front of senior leadership, including the senior sales and marketing people. In the conference room, what are you telling them about the essentials of creating value?
[00:26:40] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: Creating value from a customer standpoint? Elaborate
[00:26:44] Roger Courville, CSP: on that one. That's a fair question. In fact, to me, I think it's a fair question and it's purposefully open ended. Because we realize, in a way, that that we're serving multiple interests, right? We have to serve the client or nobody buys something. And if nobody buys something, we don't have anything for our stakeholders, our shareholders, whoever, whoever up the, up the food chain is interested in now the performance of the company.
I'm probably think about that in terms of as a senior executive, um, top line, bottom line. Time to result and risk reduction would be kind of like the categories that I think about
[00:27:24] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: yeah You know, I think if you're sitting on that side of the table, which again, I've done both You are looking at it from a larger picture And so I use the trees versus the forest analogy and so the marketing or the sales guy the CMO the CRO sitting there They're focusing on okay.
Hey, I did this for this company Um, you know, as a CMO saying, Hey look, we hit our goal, you know, every single quarter, we're awesome. Well, from the other side of the table, that might be nice, but it's not the meat of what they're looking for, what we're looking for. We're looking for departments and people that are able to think strategically and actually drive towards a company goal.
So when you're creating value from a department level, you need to understand what the goals of the company are and work towards that. Um, not doing things that you think are bright and shiny, fun objects to hit on and, and focus on. You're, you're, you're essentially, you're making sure that what you're doing, you're doing the most.
Efficiently that you can do to drive towards that goal. And whether it's, you know, maybe the company's goal is, is to get to, you know, a certain level of ebitda or it's there to get, you know, to profitability, whatev, whatever that is, what you are doing should be driving towards that. And I think from the metrics perspective.
What you report on and how you drive value is that you show how you're contributing to that goal. So, from a, I'll just focus on marketing because that's, that's my, uh, that's my favorite child, I would say, um, just given my background, but, um, from a marketing perspective, yeah, you're You're actually, one of the things that I would look for is something called Marketing Contributed Booking.
Um, and essentially what that means is that you can show that you're not only affecting bookings from an origination standpoint, but also from an influence standpoint. And if you can show that what you're doing is helping achieve that bookings number, and you're doing it through efficient campaigns, Webinars being one of them, um, through efficient and targeted content that focus on the pain to the customer and not just like, look what we do, it's what are you, what are you trying to solve and how can we help you do that?
I think that's the biggest, I think that's the biggest point there. Um, and from a sales perspective, yeah, the quicker you can achieve something, the better, so it's not just hitting the goal. Are we reducing our sales cycle because we're having, you know, better conversations. We're having those asking the right questions.
We are able to cross sell more, right? That's another big thing. If you're a larger organization, marketing and sales, if you can actually show cross sale between How you're talking about the products and how you're working together to maybe potentially bundle things. That's a whole other topic, um, that I can again speak to for hours, um, but that's another thing I think that depending on what the organization is trying to do is speak to.
It's very helpful, , and very, very much value driven. .
[00:30:30] Roger Courville, CSP: Just outta curiosity, um, let's pretend that conversation is getting casual in that same boardroom. What, what would you say if somebody said, you know, I don't need to measure everything and here's, here's, and I'm, I'm purposefully. Asking a provocative question, but here was my personal experience.
I was working with a client once I was working with the VP of sales and I said, Hey, how are we going to measure the success of the program I'm put in? And, and she's like, you know what, if they come back and do X, and I don't even remember what X was, you know, if they, if they book a few more demos or whatever it was, we're good.
Meaning she had this instinct about what the result. Needed to be. Mm-Hmm. . But she didn't care if we measured it per se. You know? Uh, I've had a similar conversation with somebody once where they had a long sales cycle, you know, I forget if it was nine months or something like that, and, and thought that based on the nature of what was coming together.
That they could drive a month out of that equation. And I'm like, okay, so how are we gonna measure that? And they're like, well, we're not now. Anything can be, you can isolate, measure and monetize anything. But they realized within their organization the amount of time and coordination it would take to figure out.
Exactly how to A B test, whether and whether the sales cycle was nine months or how they had actually dropped it to eight months or something, they were just happy with doing a gut check going, okay, we're moving in the right direction as opposed to the amount of effort that it would take to actually measure that data point.
I'm just curious. Um, if that conversation came up in that same boardroom, well,
[00:32:23] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: it actually, so, so one of the things That I mentioned earlier is that you don't wanna do like a data overload to people because it's not gonna matter at the end of the day. It might matter to you because you're a data geek like me, right?
But no one else is really caress, like you said, they care about the end goal. And so one of the things that I talk about with my executives when it comes to budget planning. Time, which is, uh, actually, that should start probably in September, so we're a little behind there, but, um, it is figuring out not just what the end goal is, and it should be simple, it should be something easy that people can articulate and understand, but understanding what the leading indicators are.
So, you might say, okay, Next year, we need to hit, you know, a million dollars in net new bookings. Okay, well from a marketing perspective, what does that mean? So you can work backwards and you can tell them, Okay, we, you know, maybe the metric that you need to measure is not necessarily bookings, but what you need to report on is one thing.
And that's pipeline creation. So, you know, if you have a six month sales cycle that by June, you better have, you know, X amount in the pipeline generated, because then, you know, if you don't very difficult to hit that goal. And you're going to know that ahead of time. None of the other stuff, like, what's your email open rate month over month.
No one cares about that. You may, but no one else does. Um, so yeah, I think, I think you do measure, but it's a matter of what you measure. Um, and part of that budget planning process too is, is you can get overwhelmed with how many metrics there are out there. And so, um, back to kind of the, that kind of trust thing is, When you are thinking about, okay, what do we need to spend next year to drive towards that million dollar bookings number from a marketing perspective, you need to make sure that sales is on board and you guys understand what metrics you're going to look at.
And the other thing is retroactively, I don't know if this is something that you. Kind of meant by this too, but a lot of times it's, it's understanding what's happened previously and the metrics to look at from that perspective to understand how to pivot going forward. Um, so I don't know if that answers your question.
I can, I can dive into that, but yeah.
[00:34:52] Roger Courville, CSP: I was just making conversation because I've had those conversations where they're like, they didn't, they didn't care specifically about, um, doing what it, took to get to that result. They just realized that was an influence. Hey, if we can shorten the sales cycle or something like that, we're moving in the right direction.
That's one of the things actually that I loved though about, uh, something I think I saw it on your website, ProfitEngineGroup. com that spoke to marketing engine visibility, which if I'm understanding correctly, the way you're using that term, that's about us coming to consensus about what metrics. Are those that we're, we know move the, move the ball down the field.
And how do we come together around those metrics? Any other thoughts on that? Those, that word combination, marketing engine visibility.
[00:35:44] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: Yeah. Yeah. And it's, and it's really, I mean, you do have the marketing engine and that is important. I think the full go to market engine and that's marketing that sales that's post sales, that's, you know, bringing them all the way back around.
Yeah. I think making sure that everyone is on the. Same page as to what, um, because you, you, you go in there and you're able to define those KPIs that are going to drive that engine forward, you're going to start to have this, everyone starts to work together, right? And so, yeah, I think, I think that's important.
I think it's different for every organization. While there are some gold standards of what you should look at, right? Um, you know, not necessarily going into the MCLN, you know, that may not necessarily... Um, I think from a marketing engine perspective, however, though, as a VP of marketing, um, even within your own, let's pretend you, you know, you, you're in charge of the webinar program, you're still going to have those same kind of metrics at your level, and I think that those are extremely important to understand how it, how they all play together and how you are influencing those conversion rates down and how that engine, how you play into the full engine.
Thank you. Um, webinars, like you said, they're, they're a piece of that engine. They are, they're both a piece of content, but they're also a channel. Um, and so that engine, it, it's a, it's a big cog in that. And so understanding how you play into that and how you will influence that engine will help to, you know, improve the outcome.
[00:37:19] Roger Courville, CSP: You just said something in passing that I want you to elaborate on. Webinars are both a piece of content. And a channel. Describe what you mean.
[00:37:29] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: Yeah, I mean, the content is, is easy, right? It's this, it's this conversation that we're having. It's the five other spokes in that wheel of what you're going to create after it.
The archive, the blog post, um, the Q& A, follow, you know, whatever that is. Um, but it's also a means to communicate with, and I think that that is what makes it special. Um, a white paper is a piece of content on a channel. You can post it on different channels, um, but webinars are, are, are unique in that they can do both.
You, they are a channel, you can post it on other channels as well. You can post your archive on your website or your social media. But they are an outlet for communication. for connecting to people. And so, yes, they're, they're a little, they're a little bit like me. I mean, I'm like the operator in the private equity, a little bit of both, so.
[00:38:19] Roger Courville, CSP: Veronica, what, what would a go to market consultant like yourself wish the CRO or CMO would ask when they first hop on the phone with you? What, what, what should they ask? That they may not be asking.
[00:38:38] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: Oh gosh. You know, I, I think a lot of times when you get on the phone with someone who's, who's looking for help, they have an idea in mind of what they want, and that's great.
But I think what they need to, to ask themselves and to ask me is, how can I improve on what I'm currently doing? How can I be more efficien? I probably overused that term too much, but efficiency in anything that you do is so critical. And so you might come to me and say, okay, um, I need to create, um, a database of graded prospects so that my sales teams know who to target, you know, and so I need help identifying an ICP, figuring out a grading methodology, how to capture that information.
That is all perfect, and I, I would love to do that, um, but they should also be thinking about how can I do that efficiently, how can I do this better, like, like, okay, so we're gonna, we're gonna create a, a, Customer and prospect database that aligns to our target customer. Well, how do we actually outreach to those efficiently?
How do we do that, um, in a manner that will be able to drive the biggest impact of bookings and pipelines? So, yeah, and there's a multi answer response to that. But yeah, I think it's the efficiency metric. People overlook that a lot. To them, it's sometimes it's, you know, let's, let's just drive bookings, but it's the efficient piece that makes you, and I think growth, while not easy, growth can be achieved, um, without profitability, but when you're efficient, you become a profitable growth.
Company and that is where the real success comes from
[00:40:21] Roger Courville, CSP: Veronica. Thank you for spending a little time with us today Hey, tell us a little more about how to get in touch with you.
[00:40:27] Veronica Puailoa, GTM consultant: Yeah, you can reach me on the website So it's profit engine group calm or directly Veronica at
[00:40:36] Roger Courville, CSP: That is awesome. And you know what? Uh, I, I'm just, I'm going to be merciful and we'll, we'll get you on with your day.
I have a hunch we could talk for another five hours if nothing else, just trading stories and, uh, and maybe doing a little catch up along the way again. Thank you to Veronica for spending a little time with us and thank you from the crew here at Virtual Venues just in case you need a little help with your virtual and hybrid event production we're at virtualvenues.
com. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thought Leader Conversations.
Comments