Webinar Transcript: Small B2B Team? Measure Big

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Bill: Hello, and welcome to Enquiro’s B2B expert series of webinars.  My name is Bill Barnes, and I will be hosting today.  Thank you very much for joining us today.  This is actually our 17th in this series of webinars, and we’re delighted with the response we’ve been getting.  If you’d like to go back and listen to any that are in our archives, I invite you to do that, including the entire Biosphere project series of webinars.  Lots of great information in there, but lots of other webinars as well.  You can download those at w2bexpertseries.com, and feel free to help yourself.  They are free of charge, and I encourage you to do that, because there is so much to talk about when it comes to B2B marketing online, and all aspects of it, from measurement to PPC tactics to…  Everything that you could possibly imagine, we’ve either covered off or we’re going to.
And today’s show is no exception.  I’m really looking forward to this.  We’re taking a little bit different tack this time.  Our expert is actually from one of Enquiro’s clients, and we’re so lucky here at Enquiro – we have a great number of clients, who really get B2B marketing, and they’re experts too.  And it’s a pleasure to work with them, and we’re going to invite Erica St. Angel, the Vice President of Marketing at Sonic Foundry to join us here momentarily, to share her story and her successes with B2B.

The title of this webinar is “Small B2B team?  Measure Big,” and measurement and metrics are such a huge component to B2B marketing, and so I think you’re going to get a lot out of this today.

Our speaker today, as I mentioned, Erica St. Angel, Vice President of Marketing, Sonic Foundry.  She oversees demand generation, branding, social media, PR, and analyst programs.  Her objective, of course, to increase [mine share 2:04] and drive business growth through Sonic Foundry, which is a publicly traded company.  She’s a tech marketer, who’s really pushing the envelope of marketing technology, merging her two obsessions – what gets results, and the latest in B2B marketing measurement, again, something that’s music to my ears.
Her background blends 15 years of corporate, public information and political campaigns, with an emphasis always on measuring the outcomes, building community, and increasing customer engagement.  She has spoken at numerous events and webinars.  Her work has won both industry and marketing awards, including most recently the Forrester Groundswell award for B2B energizing category.

Before we get to Erica, I do want to remind you that during her presentation, if any questions come up, you have any thoughts on the topics that Erica’s talking about, please use one of two methods – either the question and answer box on your Goto Webinar, on the right-hand side there, just open that up and I will ask her questions following her presentation.  Or you can also follow the conversation on Twitter, at Twitter-Enquiro.  You can either ask questions there, or begin your own little community about what’s being discussed – we strongly encourage that. 

So without any further ado, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I introduce Erica St. Angel, from Sonic Foundry.  Erica.

Erica: Hi, thanks Bill, and thanks everyone for joining me today.  It’s a pleasure, and as you said, I’m anxious to have your questions, so please ask those in at any time, and we can also follow up via Twitter or one on one afterwards.  And the topic I’m talking about is something that I’m passionate about, which is, is… being in the B2B world, how do you take… how do you make the most of maybe the small team, the small amount of resources, the small amount of time that you have to measure big and show marketing’s contribution to the bottom line.  And in my company, and perhaps in yours, this is not an actual representation of me or my CEO, but our goal is making money, obviously, and most CEOs see marketing as a cost centre, so the question then becomes how… knowing that you’re sucking money out of the coffers, how do you prove the value that you bring every day? 

And I want to talk a little bit, just 15 seconds, about our company and sort of the unique position that we’re in.  We started out in the CPO’s garage, grew to be 400 people, and then chose, for a variety of reasons, to sell those products to Sony, and split off and basically start from scratch again, with a completely different product line.  So we went from B2B to B2C, from 400 people down to 25 people, all the while being publicly traded.  And this is at the moment, the photo you see right now, is the moment where we re-launched our company in its newest iteration.  And you see all our smiling, happy faces, and it should be at the zenith of the company, this wonderful moment on NASDAQ.  But you see me over there in the corner, going, “How are we really doing?”  And this is something… a nagging concern that I always have, that paranoia of, “Is what we’re doing every day contributing to the bottom line?”

So the thing I wanted to start out with, and I’m honest when I say this, that if you remember what I’m about to tell you, you can hop off the call right now, although I hope you don’t.  But sweat the small stuff at your own risk, and by the small stuff, I mean the click-throughs and the number of fans and the Twitter followers and the open rates and the click through rates and the web visitors… and all that stuff that we get tied up into, and we need to.  But sweat that stuff at your own risk, because measuring big, and in my opinion that’s marketing’s influence on revenue, is really where you’re going to show your true value to the organization.
So you might be saying, you know, that sounds great.  What does it mean?  What does it look like?  This is an actual slide, I’ve changed the numbers out, but I did present this at our board meeting, and we’re publicly traded, so we’re on an October cycle, so this is just a few weeks ago.  And, you know, my… everything we do day to day, as a team, really rolls up to this ultimate result, which is how much influence did marketing have on pipeline creation and on revenue.  And so the language you’ll hear me keep talking about, and I’ll tell you why I’ve chosen this language and what it’s inspired by, is marketing influenced pipeline.  And this year, we could show, for fiscal year ’09, that marketing influenced pipeline was 25 times the marketing budget, and marketing influenced revenue, so what our sales team then went on to close, was 8 times our marketing budget.  So that’s over 600% return on investment, that’s a 22% increase in influence over last year, recognizing a 30% decrease in budget, and we can now show that from 30 to now 44% of all of the opportunities that are created have been influenced at some point by a marketing campaign.

So, I’ll just let that settle in for a second.  Those are numbers I’m pretty proud of, and that’s a benchmark that we’ve set that we continue to aggressively move the needle in the right direction for each year.  But you could say, easily, “I have a small team, and we don’t have the right people or the tools to pull that number.  There’s no way I can press a button and have that magically pop out.”  And also, you might get tied up into consideration about attribution, which campaigns are going to get the credit for moving the needle, for creating the opportunity.  And whenever you start to talk about… I think it’s sometimes scary for people to talk about marketing’s contribution to the bottom line, because of that whole cost-center stigma, and so there are some things that you need to look out for when you start to use this kind of language, and to push for this kind of data to be shared openly in your organization.  So let’s dive into those right now.

The first one is, we don’t have the right people, or the right tools.  And this is definitely how I felt when I started.  When we were much, much smaller, we… I had a team of three people, and, you know, one was a designer, who wasn’t going to be giving us any analytical data on a regular basis, and so, slowly, over time, we’ve added people, but even now, we’re still a group of six.  And this, again, is just a representation of my team, and as you can see, these people are very siloed.  You don’t… you have the designer, the product marketing manager, PR, events, and then there’s this position which… he’s been here the whole time, but we’ve recently renamed, the online marketing manager.

Now while his job is not to come to the rescue, in terms of reporting, he is the glue that holds together all of the activities of the rest of the team, to be able to show the impact to the company’s bottom line.  And to give you an example, we’ve decided as a group that the goal for this year is to double the number of leads that we generate on a flat budget.  That’s the North Star, it’s the scary goal that I’ve thrown out there, the gulp factor moment.  And in talking with the team about how we’re going to do that, one of the conversations came up with, in terms of our press releases, we do a lot of webinars and we do media advisories.  And our PR manager is saying, and our online marketing manager is saying, there has got to be a way to tell that when we put out a press release, we’re generating registrations from that.  And so this is the kind of dialogue that’s begun since we started to look at our incremental value to the company, and then also, across time, quarterly and annually, what we’re contributing to the bottom line.

These weren’t the same… we weren’t having those kinds of conversations three years ago.  And so that’s where I say I don’t necessarily think you have to hire a person or, you know, dedicate somebody half time or full time to just the process of analytics, that really, within our group, each individual team member is in some way responsible for making sure that the data that gets put into the tools that we use will ultimately show their impact.

And so that’s the people side of it.  Up next is the tools.  It’s not easy to sell executives, particularly at this time, on buying… what can be in many… in some cases, expensive… relatively speaking to your organization, enterprise software or hardware to run these types of… to get these types of data.  And so when I started, we had just moved over to salesforce.com, and so that’s what we use for our sales CRM.  I didn’t have to sell anybody on that, we walked into that, but no matter what your sales CRM system is, as a marketer, I think it’s really important to understand it, to understand the language that the sales team is using around it.

Next up for us was marketing automation.  We happen to use Eloqua, but you could be using Marketo or Unica or a combination of e-mail service tools and other web tracking tools.  And then we also have now in the last couple of years triggered this relationship with Enquiro for our search marketing… for search engine marketing, and also search engine optimization.

So how did I get… you know, with six people and a small team, how did I get the money to pull the trigger on what many people would consider our best of breed tools?  And the first thing that we did was start building dash boards in Sales Force.  And regardless of what CRM you use, I’m sure there’s some type of dash board functionality that’s a shared tool between different departments. 
And so the very, very, very first one we did was, when do they buy?  And so we just looked at the verticals that we were selling to higher education, corporate associations, that type of thing, to just see if there was any seasonality to these purchases.  We are in an emerging market – this is a technology that, ten years ago, really didn’t exist.  And so we’re learning as we go about when these people are making these types of decisions.  But what that did was give us a common language to use with sales, and we started to share information in a way that we hadn’t before, because we were contributing to that management view, that management dashboard, you know, our particular take on the market and the selling process.