Marketing’s role in shaping overall corporate strategy  — Jon Miller // Demandbase

Quotes

• “I studied Physics for my undergrad. I did my summer work doing fusion research and I got into MIT for a PhD program but I wanted to get into this whole business world so deferred MIT for a year and got a job doing management consulting. But I think because of my tech background or quant background, I ended up working on those types of projects which lead me to a boutique consulting firm called Exchange Partner. This firm realized they have great consulting but people couldn’t implement the strategies without technology. They acquired an old mainframe campaign management system that eventually spun out and launched. This was the mid-90s, and they were successful in IPO and ultimately they became the leading MarTech company in the mid-90s.” - Jon“When I left I got my MBA from Stanford and when I was graduating I managed to convince a company called Epiphany to give me a job as one of their first product managers. Even though I had no experience, they saw Exchange as their biggest competitor and the fact that I had loose connection to that company was enough to get me the job. Epiphany then became the biggest marketing technology provider of the internet bubble. Huge IPO and at one point had $8 billion dollar valuation.” - Jon“After Epiphany was sold, that’s when Phil Fernandez and I started talking about Marketo. He had been the President and COO of Epiphany and we realized that we share a common mission of what was needed. We wanted to deliver a powerful functionality Epiphany had but we wanted it to be more accessible to marketers who didn’t have $500,000 dollar budgets to buy enterprise software.” - Jon“In 2005, SaaS was just becoming mainstream enough that we realized we could use SaaS and it can allow us to deliver powerful marketing software that marketers could buy out of their operating budgets. That was the idea behind Marketo.” - Jon“The thing about ABM that’s really interesting is it takes the promise of being more relevant and more personalized to the next level. It basically says you’re going to focus your efforts on smaller accounts and therefore truly get to the goal of one to one.” - Jon“I think a good definition of ABM is that it’s a go-to-market strategy that coordinates personalized marketing and sales efforts to land and expand on high-value accounts. The important words on that are strategy, it’s not a campaign. It’s a way of doing business, it’s about marketing and sales efforts so that’s another nuance from the traditional marketing, and it’s about landing and expanding.” - Jon“It’s better to think of it as the spectrum than it is a black and white. At one end of the spectrum, we might have true, classic strategic ABM. This is your one-to-one marketing where each touch with that account is completely bespoke and completely customized. CSC, not sure if they’ve rebranded themselves but they do $30 million dollar deals. They would literally hire a branding agency that came up with the creatives for each account, that’s how bespoke they were.” - Jon“The key thing that sticks out to me is the merger of sales and marketing and that kind of dovetails nicely into how marketing is influencing corporate strategy.” - Ben “Stale ABM is appropriate for a $250,000 to $2 million dollar deal. It’s one to few approach that tends to be very targeted within a microcluster. Classically, that’s industry-specific but you’re not doing financial services, you’re doing a credit card payment process.” - Jon“With programmatic ABM this is your $50,000 to $150,000 deal. It’s actually a lot of where the ABM program actually lives and where we see a lot more technology at play to scale up into hundreds of accounts. The median there turns out to be 725. What distinguishes the programmatic stage from the bottom tier which I’m gonna call targeted demand gen, that’s 50K and down deals.” - Jon“What marketing can do first of all is to help define the entitlements. What does it mean for us to have sane accounts for Tier 1 and in Tier 2, and getting sales and marketing to agree on those definitions, those SLAs. Once you have those, that tells you the number of accounts that you can support at each tier and that ultimately takes you into an account selection process.” - Jon“Ultimately, I think it’s best if the sales team actually does the account selection. But marketing should guide the process with data and insights on how, hey here’s what makes a good account.” - Jon“I’ve seen research that says, there is no one price point that makes for better or more successful SaaS companies in particular and other price points. There are very successful, profitable SaaS companies that sell million-dollar deals, hundred thousand deals, etc. You can see success at every price point. What distinguishes the successful ones is the re-aligning of the business and the go-to-market end to end to support that strategy.” - Jon“As we move towards the second version of the Marketo which is the marketing automation product, we raised the minimum to the point where it was a thousand dollars a month and we didn’t let a self-service trial, marketing automation was new enough that people didn’t know what to do. With Marketo we realized, this is something we needed to be sold and we needed to have an implementation person help you get you up and running and all those things implied a certain price point and a certain minimum.” - Jon“Over time as we added more functionality, we enabled the ability to start and kind of move the top of that pyramid.” - Jon“The question is what role does marketing play on that First Team. I believe that CMO is a first-team level position, that he should be directly reporting to the CEO and be part of that company leadership.” - Jon“I think technology, in every case, should be an enabler of a strategy and not be a strategy in itself. By definition you should say, this is how I want to go to the market and what I want to do, what is going to enable me to do that better and more efficiently.” - Jon“The one nuance and this is where the best salespeople come into the equation is if you’re coming up with a strategy, it’s important to know what’s possible and a really good salesperson and a good marketing team is out in the marketplace helping their customers understand what’s possible.” - Jon