#37 Lauren Sanborn 5/19/23 Customer Scoring for Expansion

10:50PM May 24, 2023

Speakers:

Mary Green

Ari Hoffman

Ashley Ward

Tiffany Nguyen

Taylor Paige

Rebecca Grossman

Lauren Sanborn

Keywords:

customer

sales

marketing

lauren

work

people

company

revenue

upsell

scoring

qc

score

seller

call

product

mq

expansion

question

abm

team

Hi, Laura. Hi there. How are you doing? Good. How are you? I'm great. Thank you. Let's see. We already have. Okay. Got some people jumping on

excited. It's Friday. Oh, for sure. Hello. Yeah, I got more about you.

I am. I'm very excited. Very happy. It's Friday and the kids will be home soon. And you know, all that fun stuff. Hi, Andrew. Hey, how you doing? Good. How are you?

I'm making lunch. I was afraid the camera and microphone were gonna be on automatically while I'm like in the kitchen making lunch. standing there like, so I'm gonna go off to eat something.

Here comes Rachel. Lauren. Are you Rachel's speaker?

I am.

I thought so. But I didn't want to assume.

Hey, Lauren, Hi. Good to see you. You

too.

So we are going to record is that yes. Is that okay?

You can Yeah, I'm just sensitive to social media posts. My comms team, I think we get a little concerned don't need to do any of that didn't run it past them. That's okay. I thought about last night. I was like,

yeah, now it's just a personal site managed by Mary where she houses the recordings for other customer marketers to look back on and I know there are several people who couldn't make this one that really wanted to hear the content. But obviously, whatever you're comfortable with Lauren, because we don't want to get your team mad at you for just trying to help us out of it. How are you doing?

Now? Good. I'm looking forward to the weekend. Yeah, go to the pool. If it doesn't rain. Let's see. Where are you? I'm a little bit north of Atlanta. in Alpharetta Johns Creek area.

Oh, okay. I was gonna say so the pool and like, Oh, I'm in New York state. So there's no pool right now for us

bill to call. Oh, yeah. Not too much longer.

Yeah, it'll get warmer soon. My son's already asking for a pool but like, No, we've tried pools in the past. It's not it's not a thing for us.

Well, I'm in Decatur, and we have public polls but they're not open yet. Also, with my hip surgery, I'm sonar allowed him to submerge in water. Reach whenever you want to come over to mine. You're welcome. I could bring two people. You have a max. Pool isn't huge. But it's you know? Yes. It's nice. But you're welcome. Anytime. Thank you. Yeah, I have a few people at church that live around the corner that pools in their backyard. So Oh, to invite ourselves over for the summer live pool party at the Santos house. So we've been on a we've been on a waiting list for a pool. I think we're finally number like 400 Something the list is like years long. So our team will definitely have graduated by the time we ever get to be members and my brother, my parents are a member there but they can't transfer the membership because I don't live in their household, which obviously I haven't lived in their household for many, many,

many years.

I'm Mary, you ready to get started?

Rachel, I don't know if that's obvious nowadays. That's obvious.

I know. Right? Well, I'm like my brother and sister in high school. And I'm 20 plus years out of high school. different last name my own kids, I don't know might be a little obvious.

On my blog, I have like multiple homes that are multiple generations.

Really? How very, not American but pretty cool.

It's changing right is

going anywhere. I'm not letting my kids leave you Uh

oh my, my rising ninth grader is already planning his escape from the house. I'm like, Yeah, we let you do anything you want pretty much I don't understand. But he's ready

at that age. But once my 17 and 19 year old and the last year, they've both been like, that would just be dumb. Why would I do that? But we have enough land where I'm like, if you wanted to move out, you could just build your own house right here. So

yeah, um, I definitely appreciate other cultures where it's more normal. I'd love to see my kids close. But I doubt that they're they're ready to bounce. Well, not the five year old. like hanging out with

the bounce, and then they come back.

Yeah, I'm hoping boys. I don't know. I'm, I'm on the fence.

Boys. So

yeah, I always thought I just wanted boys. And now that I have just boys and we're done. I'm like, I really want a girl because when they're 20 something they want to hang out with mom and call mom and my husband loves his mother. But you know, it's like mom calls and there's a cop, a comedian who recently I saw did a skit on this but they're like, I'm so me. He said I'm so mean to my mother. My mother calls I pick he goes and everyone in this audience does this pulls out his imaginary phone and goes mom's calling Oh.

Anyway, um, okay. Well, Mary, let me hijack her, her standing. CMA weekly chat because we didn't have anybody lined up today. And there was a scheduling conflict. Because I snoozed on inviting Lauren to the comp to the meeting. Like ages ago, I blame it on being on pain meds for my surgery and just completely out of commission for a little bit. But I like everyone to meet Lauren Sanborn. I used to work with her call rail. So call rail was an SMB mid market, really SMB target audience, we had a month to month recurring revenue. And then we reported into a CRM marketing did and expansion was a huge initiative there. And Lauren, the reason we've asked you to come on today is a lot of advocacy professionals are now starting to be asked to focus on expansion. And so there's just a lot of questions around what are the right reporting metrics? How do you build scoring models? What's the right attribution measurement for customer side of the business and I asked Lauren to come on because she was very pivotable pivotal on the Reb ops side and important in building our M QC model. And, you know, determining the right criteria along with product marketing on how we would score customers differently, how we would mark different key pages, and I'll stop rambling on and let Lauren take over and introduce herself as well. But she's just one of the most put together people I've ever met. She's very data driven. And she's always really great at working with executives managing up and gaining the buy in needed. So if you have any questions on how to, you know, talk your Reb ops team or your marketing ops team into doing whatever it is you learn today that you want to do or what you've been wanting to do, she's a great resource to ask as well. So thank you for coming on today, Lauren.

Yeah, of course. Such a nice introduction. Thank you, Rachel. I wasn't expecting that. Yes, well, it's all true. Oh, you just want me to jump into it?

Yeah, go ahead. Do you want to work today and what you're focusing on?

Yeah, so my background. So like Rachel mentioned, I used to work at call rail, same place as Rachel. And in that role, I ran revenue operations, which was sales operations, marketing operations, and a little bit of post sales operations as well. Now I work at a different company. And I'm actually not in operations. I'm actually running, customer advocacy marketing. And I have a comms function related to analyst relations. So I've been on kind of both sides of the house in this particular scenario, which I just realized as I was sitting here. Um, but I think what's, what's interesting and something that was really useful at Cargill, and was thinking through how do we want to get customers to upsell or cross sale and what kind of mechanisms do we have in place, as an I'll call them signals for signals to help us identify when a customer is ready or close to getting ready. And what we ended up doing there is we had a couple of different ways to identify those signals. Of course, in your particular organization, it may be different but identifying where are those goals right, what do we want? Gonna try to achieve with our customers revenue wise and then backing into how do we get there. And then, of course, tweaking and testing the model over time, because I'll be the first to say, and Rachel knows this, when we went out of the gate with our scoring model, it wasn't perfect, it had imperfections, we had to make adjustments on a regular basis, and it took time to really figure it out. Because a lot of companies focus a lot on bringing in new business, even the company I'm at right now, there's a lot of heavy focus on new business, but a current state of the market, right, you can make a lot of good revenue from your existing customers and trying to get them to buy more. So what we did is we said, Okay, we have customers that are performing certain kinds of actions within our application. And if they do certain things, we believe that they want to buy, let's say, another product. In our case, I think that one at the time was called LEAD Center, one of our other products. And because they are having certain kind of usage patterns within our application, we know that they're getting close to having a compelling need to buy this thing. So based on those signals that we had identified, then it was from a piping perspective, and this is where you'd have to work with your ops team. How do we actually get that those signals and connect them into things that marketing can use. And what I mean by that is, let's say your marketing automation systems, so you can send emails, something may be in the application so that you can fire off messages and notifications to get people to do certain things. And then once those things were stitched together, then saying, Okay, how are we going to score like Rachel was talking about? How are we going to score these different signals that these people are doing these customers to know when we think they're hot? Versus they're warm? Versus they're just like playing around? And we had different categories? So we had some signals, almost like when you think about new business with a free trial? Those are very clear, right? If there's somebody doing a free trial, they're pretty interested. Oh, sorry. Sue, okay. Great. Um, if they're, if they're doing a free trial with new business, you know, okay, I think they want to try the product. Right? So what is that thing that's happening for a customer that, you know, oh, yeah, they're ready to buy this new thing? I think that should be considered a marketing or a Yeah, marketing qualified customer. That was the term that we used. That is not, I'd say, one at one. At the time, that wasn't like a standard thing. MQL is like very standard, right? And QC was what we used. And that's what we called it. So a marketing qualified customer. So there were certain signals that were automatically in Qc is just like, when you think about new business, a free trial is typically considered an MQL. Right? And then we had other buckets of actions, like, someone has downloaded this piece of content, they have done this thing in our community, they have done this one other thing. And when I add those three things together, that then gets me to an M QC. And we call that an engagement, marketing qualified customer, versus the hand raising marketing qualified customer. So that's how we kind of broke up those two things. And then like I said, we had exactly EA and QC versus H and QC. Right? Like not trying to give you acronym soup, but that that's what we call those things. And then over time, it was okay. Are the hand raiser marketing qualified customers? are they performing as we expected? Are we actually getting revenue from from them? Are the engagement marketing qualified customers, are they actually resulting in revenue and what I'm talking a lot about right now is kind of the the upfront marketing work and the piping. But then on the other side, you have to have that sales component. So the sellers know what to do with these customers when they get them. And without that, you may have all of this movement, right, and all of these good indicators, but no one to catch them on the other side. And it's usually super clear with new business and then with the customer side of the house, it's usually creating like a new function, right? So a new sales team that handles just the these types of customers these types of leads, if you will, right, but they're not the formal sense of or the traditional sense of a lead. And and then those sellers have to then give back feedback to marketing like, hey, these ones were great or you know, these ones were awful. versus just Oh, whatever marketing sends me isn't any good, right? Because sometimes we can can step back kind of like negative talk, right. And then over time, like I said, adjusting, because especially with the engagement, marketing, qualified customers, which is the ones that are based on basically behavior, those kinds of behaviors, they're going to change depending on what content you have what's most meaningful, what's going on outside, in the actual market. So I'm going to stop there, I feel like I talked a lot, and then ask if anyone has questions.

Lauren, I raise my hand. So when you you identify somebody with a what I call a propensity to purchase? Or whatever way? Are they? Is that being handed over to sales immediately? Or are you still nurturing them a little bit? With whatever, so that you can determine, Okay, how serious are they? And then there'll be a follow up based upon their answer.

So that's a good, that's a great question. So that's where we kind of bucketed them into engagement versus hand raisers. So if we identified that this kind of customer behavior was almost like a sure thing, if you will, it was a very strong propensity, then that would be handed over immediately to sales, versus someone else that is slowly moving up that scoring model getting to that what we would call 100, we would continue to nurture them, we would continue to engage with them, until they got to that threshold, and then they would be handed over to sales, but they would fall in a different category, it would be clear to sales, what kind of customer it was, so that they knew to take different actions.

And do you bet that second one, do you bet that lists with sales and say, hey, here are some people that we think have a pulse? We're going to nurture them for a while? And then sales will say, No, no, no, don't talk to this person, because I know why you think they have a pulse. But they really don't, or I know why you think they have a pulse? And I'm talking about very actively, or do you just go with your nurture campaign?

So in our case, we went with our nurture campaign until they hit that threshold. But what you're suggesting, I definitely think it could be a good like, once you're more mature, a place to go? Because that informs how you're scoring, right? Maybe your scoring is not quite right, because these people are ready, and you just don't realize it yet. Thanks. Yeah, um, something I didn't dig into what I think is worth raising is within our sales organization, if we looked at just new business, we had like a BDR role. And then we had sales roles that would evolve over time, right? So you would be a BDR, then you would have these various sales roles. on the customer side for sales. We had really one account executive that was handling everything, I think to really be set up for success, you would have a BDR type of role for these customer leads. And then that person would then funnel them appropriately to the right people. Yeah, and account development,

right? That's right. Didn't we eventually start moving the leads to the SDR team before they went over to the ADR team?

We did eventually. But we didn't do that at first, which was something we learned.

Yeah. And another thing we didn't do at first, we had three additional products of cross sell was our major initiative, not upsell, we scored up to 100 in total across three products and learn pretty quickly we were not passing off qualified leads to sales. So we tweaked the model that each customer had to score to 100 per product before sales engage them. Just another note, but I think Justine had her hand up. She's still here. Yes.

You guys answered. What I was going to ask was like, do you pass it directly to the am team or do you have SGR to vet the lead first before passing it on? Because right now is just tossed over to our am team and they have a million things to do. So they're not really following up on our MQ C's. But we do want to establish a process where it goes to the SDR first and then it gets tossed to the AM's

Yes, we ran into that issue as well and something else even go like a little bit deeper. And every organization is different, but typically within a mature organization and account team would be each account like customer account has an account executive, so like a seller, and then has an account manager like a CSM kind of role. We ran into an issue where if you became a customer, you actually didn't have a seller you only had a CSM and typically that's a different skill set. Right so a CSM doesn't typically know how to get someone to buy more and and really that's not like, that's not what they're there for. Right? If we're relationship building, they have other goals. So we had to make sure that each account had a seller that would try and push the upsell or push the cross sell versus trying to get the CSM to do that. Which wasn't very successful. I think eventually they got rid of the CSM team altogether. But that's a topic for a different day

after our time there, but yeah,

I already left. Alright, Ashley, question. Hello. Hi, I was one of Ashley's customers.

She was my favorite

advocate. And then she left.

So good to talk to you. I wonder how how many of the people that you were working with or reaching out to for these opportunities? were people that were already your main users? Or were you having to look for different stakeholders for different products?

Yes. So we had, surprisingly, I think actually, it was people that we didn't expect that we're like taking these actions. And this is also to I think, where it could get a little bit interesting, if you will. So let's say when I was a customer of, of Lean data, right, and I worked at CallRail. But Rachel worked at CallRail, too. So you and I have great relationship. But Rachel was also using lean, and let's just say in this example, and she was what seemed like ready for upsell, she might not be the decision maker, she might not be the person that you're working with all the time, but it's clear that she's like ready to move forward. So I think that's where kind of these interesting things start to arise where you thought, Oh, well, I haven't been talking to this other person in the account. But actually, they're showing indications that they're ready to move on like to do something more with us. Right? Yeah. You know,

I have an example there, too. So you know, we have Influitive. And then we have posts beyond post beyond is a employee social engagement, employee amplification, right? Platform, those are two completely different buyers. Right? You have HR and social who are BIPV, not customer marketers, right? And so for us, they're just run a straight upsell campaign, our expansion campaign or cross sell campaign already wanted to find what that is. wouldn't wouldn't work in VIP, right. And so what we have is a reference program. That's a that go through these things give us information about what you're already doing here, even though it's outside of your scope. And then once we have enough of that, introduce us to someone over there. It's called Crosby right. And and it was a terrible name, because now everyone's using crossbeam. The tool, but it's really working right and the same vice versa, from PB customers so that out. So that's how we were trying to look at because it trying to do expansion when you have different buyers is a completely different ballgame. Right. Lauren, for you, how much of the existing process did you utilize? Did you recreate the wheel or kind of leverage existing teams people?

Questions. So when I started the business, they really didn't have processes. So it was all Greenfield and creating them from the ground up. But what I will say is once we had that process in place for our new business, because that's where we focused first, we use a lot of those same principles and applied them to customers. So that that was also meaningful when trying to train sales, because the way that we trained sales, they learned new business first, and then the most senior folks will get more of the customer deals. So it was a great way for them to understand, as well as for us to have repeatable processes within the organization across the board, because trying to teach people completely separate things. Even even the term using in QC, like that was just that term was change, change management. So it was good for us to have similar processes across the two. Thank you

have another question. So as you know, customers are probably more engaged than prospects. So for us, we have a lot of customers clicking on emails and driving up that engagement score. But you know, the AM's talk to them, they're like No, I just want to I'm just interested in your materials, but I'm not actually ready to buy. So do you put a pause on that? Like, they can M QC again for another three months or like whatever a timeframe is and then put them back into the nurture and then they can Chicken question.

Yes, yes, that's exactly right. So what we would do is we would push them into nurture at that point, we would zero out their score. I shouldn't say we wouldn't zero out the score, we would move their score back to just their demographics. So take out any of that kind of behavioral scoring out, and then let them score back up. But we also had a gate on how quickly they could do that. Because what what you're saying right is potentially somebody could score back up in three more days. And then the account manager, the CSM would say, what I just talked to you like, I just talked to these people last week, why am I talking to them again, but there was some additional work we had to do on the back end to create a little bit of space.

Yeah, and something else we did too, is we really are model for scoring. mimicked like Lauren said, what we were doing on the net new side of the business, however, what we were scoring for customers was very different than what we were allowing net new to score for. So if it was something with our core product, it wasn't getting, there wasn't a score being applied to our customer base. So it would only be for the upsell opportunity or the cross sell opportunity.

Thank you so much. And thanks for sharing those slides.

All right. Well, if no more questions, I can pivot a little bit.

I have a question mark. Yeah, go ahead. So once a comment, there was a question. So I had a nickel for every time someone used the word upsell and cross sell in the same sentence, I think we collectively had it, we could probably have this meeting in person and with money despair. So I think and each organization is a little bit different. I mean, bars are where I work as a definition of what upselling cross selling works for some, because it worked for others. But I think the important thing is to have everyone on just when they use those words upsell, cross sell on the stock. And this is what we mean by upsell in our organization. Like if you don't have, like in your case, with CSMs, they're not doing upsell, those are account managers, account managers would be doing the upsell. And this is what we mean by your digital

without I think someone came in off me

earlier return really what we mean by upsell versus cross sell. And I think everyone in this room probably going to find it a little a little bit differently. The question is on opt outs from marketing communications, so there's transactional emails where you've got a right to communicate with somebody, or you've got a product update. And it is marketing emails, and we find probably, you know, 10 to 15% of our clients if we're doing any sort of campaign upsell or cross sell, or opted out, and we use in app messaging. And we've made a decision to not use our in app messaging tool for upsell or cross sell. That's sort of the the third rail that people pay to use the tool they've come on it, they shouldn't be marketed to, while they're using the product that they paid for it. And other people could, you could argue it, but that's what I do. So how do you handle a situation where you're doing an upsell or cross sell? And there's 20% of the people you can't communicate with? Do you just not deal with them from a nurturing campaign? Or do you then go to sale and say, Here are people we can't talk to, but you can talk to?

Yeah, so I think that's a really good thing to think about, especially if you have international customers, where they are very serious about who you can and cannot reach out to. And that case, we on the, our, our policy was that if they opted out, we would not reach out to them. And we would also try to be, you know, pretty strict with our marketing team to know like, you can't just willy nilly pick kind of what kind of email we're going to send because some folks would say, well, let's just send a transactional email even what was the marketing month because all that right. Now, I will say, though, what you were sharing around will be then go to sale. So I think then your mechanism is to try something like an outreach cadence, which is a tool for sales outreach, or working with your sellers in order to try and reach that, that target market. And what you could find is that they opted out at one point in time, for whatever reason, but they actually want to opt back in but they can't, because there's no mechanism to do that. And so it could be as simple as sending an email to those folks and saying, hey, you know, you haven't really read any of our marketing communications. We have these great blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Would you like to opt back in? And now are you going to get a septet substantial uptick from that, you know, probably not, but to get some people and then also using that sales lever to try and get in front of them? Yeah. There was a question someone else shared. I was trying to think of what it was, oh, when you said or when at the beginning about using the terms interchangeably. Li and things like that. We did spend a lot of time at Yep, exactly. We spent a lot of time at. I call rail trying to do education and training to try and reinforce like, this is how these things work. This is what these terms mean. Because we had a fairly, I'd say young organization, some folks, it's their first job that they've ever had. And so all this stuff is like, totally, like, just alien to them. So we try to spend a lot of time on training. And I think the thing with the training part is you do it once you think, Oh, I'm done. But then new people get hired. So you have to do it again. So, you know, it's taking the time to do take those extra steps. But I do think it's useful. Some people you know, that need a little extra hand holding, it's just human nature.

Yeah, and no knock on sales. But even my sales managing director would say salespeople need to hear something 10 times before they remember it. So we did. We had a we had a, we were fortunate enough to have a sales trainer that we were able to work with. We didn't have that immediately. But that was very helpful in how we would communicate and keep up with sales. All right, you were gonna

switch? I think, yeah, it was an hour. You have a question? Yeah.

I have one last question for you. If you were to pick out all everything that you learn when it comes to, you know, expansion marketing, what would you say your, your most successful? Two? One, did you kind of tricks up your sleeve word? Yeah.

So there's, there's really two things I think about here. I think one, which may sound pretty basic, but it's a challenge for a lot of companies. It's it's building that relationship between sales and marketing, so that working towards the same thing, that takes time it takes developing trust within the organization, it takes time to like to know each other. But I think having in our case, we had once see we all rolled up into a CRO at some organizations, right, there's going to be someone that runs marketing, and someone that runs sales. And so sometimes things run in silos. But I think when everyone is marching towards the same goal, and working together, we're able to get a lot farther. Whereas before, when we did when I first started, it wasn't organized like that, we were having a lot like a much harder time. So that's more of like a cultural thing. And I think, as marketers, we could encourage those kinds of conversations, right? Having like a lunch and learn or, you know, you want to go out and grab some dinner with me. Because kind of breaking down that, you know, this is marketing. And this is sales, that that just makes it kind of even more difficult to get anyone to listen to each other. So that might sound basic, but I think that was one pretty important thing. The other big thing, which I feel like I kind of already dug into this, but I feel like at first we had set up all these like piping things we had marketing operating well, but then we were passing these leads over to sales, but no are these customers over to sales, but sales wasn't doing anything with them. And then we took the approach that we had someone on the marketing side that was actively monitoring the marketing qualified leads, and paying attention to how they were progressing through the funnel. So it wasn't just hey, sales go and start attacking these marketing qualified customers. It was I'm your marketing counterpart, and I am Hey, did you see that so and so just like scored up to 100 today. So it was a good like constant communication back and forth. And they knew there were checks and balances in place. When we first started, we didn't have that at all. And that made a big difference.

If you don't have budget or headcount for an additional person, what is the time commitment that someone could be successful at this if you added it to someone's existing role?

I'd say 25%. Yeah.

That's too broad of a question because it really depends on your product. It

depends. But like, if you think about, if I spent a quarter of my day, the first part of my day looking through and seeing how we're performing, then I have plenty of time to do other things. But yeah, it depends.

Yeah, as Lauren mentioned, we initially had one ADR, but eventually over time we grew the team Three, I believe I remember correctly.

But that only happens when you show that there's actually revenue being created. Right? You have to prove that the process works, you have to prove that you're actually generating revenue. And then you can't get more headcount. Typically until you do these in our case, that was the reality. We were in. Any other questions? And I'm not sure is this? We have more time. Yeah, we go. Okay.

Sorry. I had a question. I was just curious if y'all were running ABM programs at this time and how you don't tail together expansion, expansion efforts with ABM campaigns?

So that's a good question. We tailor we did not dig a lot into ABM at the organization. We we started to dabble in that a little bit as I was leaving, but we didn't spend a lot of time on that. So I don't have a good answer for that one. Good question.

Yeah, I think my answer would be we've dabbled in it multiple times. But it's never really taken off. And not not at our company together. But

even since then, yeah, we've tried actually my current company and it's not going well. But if you find some success, I'd love to hear how it's going. I've

I've been at companies previously where we had very successful ABM campaigns. I do think and I would love to hear what y'all think my thought process is you have to be dealing with very large enterprise customers in order to really get any value from it where you've got like multiple ello bees across a global company that you can you know, prospect into but yeah, I obviously it is it is timely for me because we are kicking off ABM like nice being literally one pinky toe into the ABM pool. And I'm sort of counting them as expansion campaigns because they're going to existing customers, but I didn't know if that was something other folks have.

have explored. Taylor, we have a session we did. April, I believe on ABM and customer marketing expansion. So if you I can, we can find that recording I can share with you after. And I can definitely say what failed at my last company was typical. I think we've all experiences, our ABM tool was set up for net new but all of the criteria was for prospects. And so the relevant, it wasn't creating relevant engagement scores for our customer base. So, you know, I didn't get to I left before we've tweaked it and to tell you if it was successful to tweak it or not, I don't have that.

Question. All right. Um, one other thing we were going to talk about, I think was best practices with working with marketing and sales to make sure that cycle was successful. I think we have touched on some of those things already. But what I will say is that the when we were doing the the scoring of these marketing qualified customers, we had, we had identify that certain customers were of higher have higher value if we well than our other customers. And they were marketing agencies. So in your case, it might be a different bucket. But there's this, there was a sub segment of customers that were really high value. And for us, it was because they could sell into their customer base. So it would be like a whale, if you will, like he was like a sales term. And so we what we decided in that particular case was to actually create a separate motion for those really large deals, we had separate sellers, we had separate marketers, we had a completely separate process for that. Because what was happening is everything was being bucketed together. And as an example, right, a big company name I don't know pick any one out of a hat, let's say like a Coca Cola would be sitting alongside a local landscaping company, let's just say as an example, and the the revenue and the you know, sales price, the ticket price on that. A coca cola would be much higher than it would be at a landscaping company. So there are certainly nuances into how we were working with marketing and sales across the board and noticing that we can't treat everybody the same and the system can't. The marketers can't, the sellers. We can't treat everybody the same if we want to really, you know, drive growth of the business.

Any other questions? No. Some something I thought that we did well, Lauren, that you spearheaded was our quarterly communication with sales and marketing on the scoring model where people were getting stuck in the funnel some of the reporting that we had created,

I guess you're okay. So one thing we also did is we had reports for every single one of these types of marketing qualified customers, we actually had reports for when they would move to, let's say, opportunity stage, we had reports for when they became closed one and things like that. And then we would need as an organization between sales and marketing, we would meet together every two weeks to go through and see how we were doing, that kind of goes back to those checks and balances, I will say it could have been like, slightly uncomfortable, depending on who was in the hot seat, because there were hot seat moments. But I also felt like it was like a healthy exercise to be able to openly say like, I'm actually kind of behind where I thought it was going to be. And if we're going to hit the school, like, there needs to be some adjustments made. And that required being able to report on all these different aspects, right? How many of these kinds of customers do we have? How many of that type? What products are they interested in? Which ones aren't they interested in, and it was about an hour long meeting, like I said, we had the marketing team, we had the sales team, we had leadership in there, we had revenue operations in there, if in case anything was broken, in terms of the system, something not working, right. And it was all it also created some accountability, to say, okay, like, I'm responsible for my goals, and I have to report out on them. So it wouldn't be like there wouldn't be one person that just spoke to all of the metrics, each individual that own each program would have to speak to the performance of their metrics and, and own them. Which, I don't know, Rachel, I don't know if you ever felt like this is super uncomfortable. I'm sure there were times when it was. But it also help kept everybody very accountable.

Yeah, it definitely was uncomfortable at times. But it'll, it ensured that every team understood that they owned a piece of this, and that it wasn't just on marketing, or just on sales or just on product. That every that we all had to work together and communicate to make sure that we were making the necessary changes that were in, in line with what customer needs. And also were going to get us where we needed to be in our revenue goals.

And then from that, those conversations there would be like, follow on conversations, right? And direct actions like okay, these two teams need to go meet with so and so so that they can follow up on that piece and and make some adjustments. Which I think worked over the long run. Took a bit of time, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Lots of learnings. Yeah. What What advice would you give someone that's having a difficult time? So this is something I experienced in my last company. I was struggling. So expansion was very sales lead. Yet, if you ask the CS team, they were frustrated that sales was digging around in accounts and just randomly reaching out to customers, right? So I'm trying to sell this idea that we can create qualified customers, for upsell Forex, it was cross sell, and passes off to sales yet, I could not get the buy in from all the time on the roadmap for our robots team to build anything that we needed to even begin scoping what we might need to build. So do as a former Reb ops leader, is there anything you would advise somebody having a hard time gaining that buy in and likely from whoever, you know, the other leader is that would influence that whether it be a CRO CMO?

Yeah. I'd say we did have some of these challenges that call rail two. As an example, when we're trying to upsell one product. The what we ended up doing was a joint motion where the CSM and the seller would go into the account together. Because we were running into issues where these two roles were bumping into each other, right? So the CSM was reaching out, saying, I need you to do whatever, right? Like I want you to do a customer story or come to our event or something like that. And then the next day the seller was like, I want you to buy this. And so that experience for the customer was like, oh, like not great. So they had to when they wanted to approach the accountant, they had a copy each other on emails and go into the account together. So that the customer didn't feel like man or just they're not, they're not in communication, they're not working with each other. And I think if you can't get things like built in like a system format, I think it's best to pilot at first and try something and actually think that's a good practice, regardless of whether you have bind to get things like built programmatically or not. Because what you might find is what you thought you like wanted or needed is actually different than what you really need. And to systematically build in some of these things, it can take months, or I know for us, I think it took a year and a half to get there. And in the meantime, you still are being held accountable to certain things. So if you can kind of pile it on your own, just some unfortunate, maybe some manual processes, just some things in spreadsheets, to see how that goes with a small group. Maybe it's one marketer, one seller, and you just say, Okay, we're gonna try this for a few weeks, see how it goes. Because then too, if you have tangible wins, that makes it a much easier ask when you go to the leader and say, Hey, I know you said you don't have time for this, I just want you to know, we've tried it manually. And it works and look at this, like, look what happened, then they're like, Okay, I think I can slot you in versus Yeah, just go away, like, Oh, bother me.

So one of the things to look at is the compensation for all of this. Yes, exactly. Know, if this is an account manager, do they get commissioned on it does it hit their quota, but they don't get commissioned on at the CSM, get, you know, with spiff on every deal, you know. And, and that helps drive all the behavior. So I think at some point, it's important to get to whoever is developing the comp plan for this point next year, and say, Hey, here's what we want to do. Let's make sure we incentivize people properly. Because if an account manager is not incentivized at all, you know, it's marketing money, but we'll hit against my quota, but it's going to be so small, I'd rather go after new deals, and they're not going to touch it. And if the CSM isn't being compensated, and no one's going to touch it. If they're both being compensated to work together, then it's gonna be a beautiful thing.

Yeah. Something else that I've tried it a few companies, times, let's say when it's hard to get budget, because sometimes it can be hard to get, you know, 1000 bucks for a spiff or whatever. I've actually done competitions where say, Okay, we're going to give out, you know, a really nice dinner if people come in the office or, you know, gift cards to blue board or something so people can get prizes, and do a competition say in the next, it makes that window really small. So within the next two weeks, the first person to get me 10, upsell deals is going to get this prize. And what ends up happening, right is if we get if you get 10 People getting to eight, you just got 80, upsell opportunities versus getting the 10 and it didn't cost that much money. You can't do those forever, right? Or when like people are like, Okay, well, this is you know, I can't do this all the time. But I think to get like if you need something quick, and you don't have a ton of budget to do it in it's a good in between. Yeah. I love glueboard got a whole year's worth of flowers, and I was so so wonderful during COVID

Yeah, we do a staycation and the concierge piece was nice. Plus, they gifted us back the additional budget because I picked a cheaper hotel, and I had to via Pay Pal, so we got to put it toward our dinner. Right? Yeah, it was baller. Anyway, that's definitely a little another another conversation for another day. Great platform. Yeah, sure.

Any other any other questions or topics? Anyone wants to talk about

attribution models for customer expansion. I know that that typically comes up. Yeah, I That's a great question.

I we've been talking so primarily what my programs are today around education and adoption. So we have the certification program. We have, you know, webinars about product updates and things like that. And so it's really hard to tie that directly to revenue, we have some cases where we can see, if you have somebody who's certified in the account, the upsell opportunities are more likely to close renewals are more likely to close things like that. And so we have a little bit of information. But we've been talking about this idea of like, influenced versus source. Yeah. And that kind of reminds me of like, your, your em QC versus versus your hm QC. And so I wonder how you think about that?

Yeah. So to do that kind of attribution we put in visible, which is a part of Marketo. And that enabled us to monitor all the different touch points. Now, there is a little bit of a caveat, right? There are places where cookies aren't enabled. So but directionally, you're getting a lot of the touch points. And then from there, identifying what things do you want to track? So actually, in your case, do you want to track your, your webinars, your certifications, things like that? And then being able to say, okay, these are my buckets that I actually I own? Which ones are the most influential? Because there is a lot of discussion around source versus attribution. And can any marketing activity say that was the one reason that this person made a purchase? Probably it's not realistic, right? It's just not. But if you could say, true, it's not. But I notice, I can see in the data that the people, the majority of the people that are certified also do this, if you can make those kinds of correlations, then you're able to say, like, my program actually does generate revenue, it influences revenue. And you can say that with confidence. That's definitely worth wild, worthwhile. We've we've looked at Quora, we looked at attribution a lot, it was very important. Because as a private company reported to a board, they were very concerned about customer acquisition costs, CAC. And that's why we put in attribution. That was realistically a very heavy lift. And it came from the top down that we needed it because the board wanted wanted, so there wasn't any, like, we don't have budget, it was just, you know, gotta agree to. But once it was in place, it provided a lot of visibility into what is my program influencing. And what is working, right. Are these digital ads working really well? Are these webinars working really well? Is this content really making a difference? And then you can really kind of source rank Okay, well, these pieces that I'm these tactics, they're not working, but these other

ones are? Yeah, makes sense. I think what just for us, like so we have all this existing stuff. And now we're building out more marketing upsell campaigns. And so it's like, I don't want to go build out an attribution model for all the new stuff and forget about all the existing things,

you know, is exactly influencing it. So it's a little harder to prove. So, yeah, of course, for sure. You want it to be encompassing of everything? Yeah. Just seeing the gem question.

Yeah. So right now my only OKR is to is marketing influence on customer ops. And, you know, since this is a safe space, I feel like it's kind of wishy washy, because you know, the larger the audience, the more people you blast it out to, of course, it's going to influence more opportunities, right? It's a numbers game. So that's why I really want to implement the like date stamped and stuff where MQ C is good, then we can actually see like what campaign resulted in how many MQ C's. So do you have any other metrics that you look at besides influence?

We have, we have looked at, like I said, the MQ C's. And so marketing qualified customers. We've also what did we call them? I'm trying to remember it was a sales so we had marketing qualified customer, then we had a sales qualified customer because they were moving down the funnel. So we did have Justin to your point, we had stamps they had stamping in our system, where when they, when they scored up, they got a stamp for this for hitting this threshold for the MPC. Then when they moved over to sales, and the opportunity was created, we took a stamp there and then we would count, just like you're saying, the number of stamps, if you will, the number of timestamps we had at that threshold. And then we would also count the number of timestamps, we had an actual revenue, so you could see the progression from coming in To being halfway through to being all the way through to the

end. Yeah, for sure. And then you can see the conversion rates and see what exactly you're driving paid. Is there anything else besides those two metrics?

Yeah. So we would also do touch point analysis, which is a little bit what I was talking to Ashley about. So we will be able to count the number of touch points that happened per channel within a period of time. And the more touch points that you had within a certain month, let's say, for example, or quarter, depending on the channel would let you know how those things are influencing up and down, because you could then compare them to the prior quarter or the future quarter. And then also compare them against your, your closed one revenue and your MQ C's. Because if the system is set up correctly, the record has all of the touch points. It has all of the timestamps, and it has all the movement in between those stages. What do you mean by touch points? So every time a person with a cookie, let's say reads a piece of content, every time they attend a webinar, they go to one of the websites that you're tracking, it counts as a touch point in these marketing attribution tools.

Okay, so it doesn't have to be like do the cert chat status has to be changed to like, success?

So that's a good question. So it's, it's looked at in a bit of a different way. So a touchpoint can happen at any point during their journey. And then what you're doing is taking those touch points and overlaying them with where they are in their journey. So you know, let's say, anybody that becomes close one, they always touch this piece of content. Ah, okay. Got it. Does that make sense? And yeah, there it's called Marketing, attribution and visible I don't even think it has that name anymore. Oh, really? Oh, I don't know if it does. Let's see here. Yeah. Visible multi touch attribution here. I put this in the group chat. So you can look at it. Of course, there are competitors to this product. But this the one that we

Yeah, and talking about attribution to I mean, this would be getting into very tactical how we score, but that's where we mimicked the demand gen model a bit on the score. What would you call it, the threshold of score you could get per day per how many blogs, like if somebody had visited one blog, and then visited another blog and another blog and another blog, we're not going to score them 15 points on every single blog? Yeah, because maybe they're just like going down the rabbit hole doesn't make them sales ready. So let's getting a little bit more into the nitty gritty of how we would score each touchpoint. But something if you're not doing today, you could work with your demand gen team and kind of see how they've designed it and built it. And you can always tweak it later. But it's a good jumping off point. attribution is

very useful if you're trying to justify your your marketing spend, because you can tie it back to the channels and then say these channels are performing and these ones aren't. But not everybody has to do that. It depends on the organization.

And like you said, just being able to connect to it and say, all the people that do XYZ have looked at this piece or something like that is really helpful as well. Go ahead, Tiffany.

Hi, everyone. I learned so much today on this lifecycle, nurturing attribution. What marketing automation tools? Is everyone using for this? And is does everything tie back to Salesforce as a CRM? Or does any of this get passed into Gainsight? Because I know, a lot of the companies I've worked for either have Gainsight and Salesforce, sometimes it's disparate because people have bought different companies. So there might be you know, we bought five companies and now disparate systems. Some information lives in Salesforce, some lives in Gainsight. So inefficient, but no one has the time to kind of get them all talking to each other and start kind of just process of elimination up their tech stack. Right. As we all know.

A good question. I think Justine just shares her company they use Marketo and Salesforce, at the company that later on I worked at together we also use Marketo and Salesforce, the company I currently work at we use all Salesforce, we moved to that we migrated to all Salesforce. know if anyone else has a different tech stack It

seems like HubSpot and Marketo seems to be kind of the more popular marketing automation tools that most people use. Is there. So is there lead scoring within these automation tools?

Yes, then Marketo and Salesforce, they have their own lead scoring. Now, something else to look at or looking at dynamics is, and this is if he wanted to kind of look at lead scoring and a little bit different ways you could use artificial intelligence to actually look at your scoring, and train your scoring model to see what's working, and then make adjustments that would be really sophisticated. And I work in an artificial intelligence company. So of course, it's like, top of mind for me. I've actually never done it myself, but sounds super cool. And I'd love to one day, so

I would love to see that we I've been looking for someone to come in just talk about marketing and AI. So yeah, that's an interesting topic. Yeah,

yeah. We hear about chat GBT all the time now.

Yeah. It's gonna redo all the content.

Exactly. Thanks so much,

Chris. I think we're at time. I hope this was a good use of everyone's time. I thoroughly enjoyed it. So Mary, and Rachel, thank you for having me.

Thank you for coming. Yeah, I didn't have to have anything prepared. It was wonderful.

Very good. Morrow, see everyone next

week.

Thanks, everyone. Have a great weekend. Bye. Thank you. Bye