The Hidden Gem In Your Database: Re-Engaged Records

Transcript

Thank you so much for the introduction. I’m super excited to be here with all of you and really excited to dive deeper into this topic as well. So as mentioned, we’re really going to be talking about the hidden gems in your database, which are reengaged records. And I’d love to just tell you a little bit about me. So as mentioned earlier, I’m Carmen. I’m the director of demand generation at Alma. And I’ve been running B2B marketing campaigns for the last 10 years of my career. And really one of the things that I pride myself on is finding ways to create synergy between sales and marketing teams. I’ve worked very intimately with sales leaders and even for sales leaders. And in that I’ve learned a lot about their goals, their processes, and what’s important to them. And Veronica has been with me twice in that journey. So Veronica, can you tell everybody a little bit about yourself as well? Thank you, Carmen. Hi everyone. I’m Veronica and I’m dialing in from Spain. While I do speak some Spanish, I speak a lot more Marchetto. I have been working with Marchetto and MarTech on a day to day basis for more than six years. And I love translating business strategy into platform process like you will see in our presentation today. Last year I was lucky enough to be named Marchetto champion and I run two user groups here in Europe. My current role is marketing ops manager at Alma. And this is the second time in my lifetime working with Carmen. And I’m very excited. We are both here today to tell you how we added value to Alma by creating a process for reengage records and answer any questions you might have. Awesome. So I’m going to talk a little bit about some of the topics we’re going to be touching on today. So the first one will be what is exactly a lead or contact who has shown reengagement? What is the business value of this process? What is the reengagement strategy we’ve adopted and what was the Marchetto game plan we came up with? How do we report out on the business impact of this process? And then takeaways that we hope you all walk away with and we’ll open it up for Q&A. So again, as we’re going through this presentation, if you have any questions or any topics that you want to dive deeper into, please use the chat function. And we can’t wait to talk with you all and answer your questions. And with that, I’ll kick it off to Veronica to define for us what is reengagement? Thank you. So one thing we ops people love to do is be specific. So what do we mean by reengage records? To us, it means prospects in the database that went through the sales process, stalled, and after some time, shown interest again via inbound in the same way an MQL would. These can be leads or contacts that fell off the happy path. And we can call these recycled or close, lost or churned. These people come back to your database young engagement programs like nurture programs, or retargeting strategy, and they can request a demo or request to be contacted, or even sign up for your product. When one of these records reengages, nothing happens internally unless you do something, because sales wouldn’t know about it. Or maybe even the salesperson owning this record left the company. So with no reply insight, this potential customer might go to your competition. Have we not built a process to surface these records, we would be missing real opportunity. We call the reengage records hidden gems, because they cost little to our business, and the conversion rate is high. And I will let Carmen tell you more about this. Thank you so much, Veronica. So I’m going to be talking about the business value that this process can drive for you. Really over the last few years, we’ve seen a shift in how marketing operations and demand generation teams are talking about their goals, especially in B2B business. So no longer are we being asked or focused on how many leads we generate or how many MQLs we generate, but really what our contribution to pipeline is. And this reengagement process is a great way to start that shift. So said differently, this is about not focusing so much on an MQL hamster wheel that we’ve seen a lot of folks talking about on social media, especially on LinkedIn. But this is about moving away from the constant need to find net new leads to fill up your sales team’s activity. And through our own reporting over the last six months, we’ve been able to surface that reengage prospects are 15% more likely to convert to a close one deal or an opportunity for our business compared to leads that just come to us and engage with us once. And really this process is foundational to beginning a retargeting or a nurture strategy. And I’ll talk about why in the next slide. This might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but a lot of us are familiar with the traditional marketing funnel. Tofu, mofu, bofu, there are a bunch of different names and it sort of gets a makeover every year. But really what it does is that it makes the customer journey seem linear. And really it’s more of a cyclical approach. As customers are learning about your business, they’re coming in and out of their sales process. And a reengagement process is a great way to be able to surface where people are churning through their process, through their buying process with you. And where people are coming back to your business. And really here is what you can learn. What are those valuable touch points for your ideal customer and use that as a foundation for your nurture and reengagement strategy? Those were some great points, Carmen. So going back to about six months ago, soon after we implemented Marketo, we noticed recycled or close lost leads coming back to our website, filling out a form or engaging with our ad campaigns. And in true mob spirit, we decided to make a project out of this and set up three goals. Okay, so the first goal is for our marketing team to share this information with sales in a timely manner. I emphasize on the last few words here, because if these records are coming back, they are very likely to convert like Carmen just mentioned. So we must act fast. At Alma, we use Marketo sales insights heavily. We also use Marketo program sync to CRM campaigns, and certain fields that I’m going to talk about more. All these data points are valuable for our sales team. The second goal is for our sales team to follow up quickly with the records. For obvious reasons, sale doesn’t need to spend time researching about these folks who reengaged. They have all the data from Marketo and can move fast. The third goal is for us to report on the records that reengage and find those insights. So this comes right back to mobs and demand gen teams to understand the business impact and identify the patterns for hidden gems. We truly believe that this process should be a prerequisite for all your nurture and retargeting strategy. And I think Carmen will speak more about this point. In the next slides, I’m going to walk you through the steps we took to get to where we are. The first step in our strategy is to identify the reengaged prospects. As we all know here, Marketo has great insights. We can pull reports of, for example, web pages, these records visited, form fields, quite a lot of data. What I’m going to do now, I’m going to dive right into Marketo and show you how you can prepare a smart list of all the records that reengaged in the past few weeks. I’m sure everyone here can recognize this screen. We are in Marketo and I will take recycled leads as an example to build our smart list. What I’m looking to do here is check which recycled leads reengaged in the past month. This means I’m looking for recycled leads in the database who have been recycled for more than one month. And I’m using person status to surface those records. And I’m also using data value change to make sure that these records were recycled more than one month ago, which in our case is January 8th. My next step is to define the reengagement. And here I will add what we call the hand raiser forms. So these are forms with a CTA that indicate our prospect wants to get in touch with the sales team. For us, these are the lead gem forms, Facebook, LinkedIn, and also Marketo forms. In this case, I’m going to use one of our demo forms to show you this filter. I am also using a date of activity because I only want to surface records that have done a reengagement activity in the past 30 days. Now because I want to see records that have only done one of these actions, not all of them, I must change my filter logic to advanced. And here you can see I’m doing that. And with a smart list like this, I can quickly look into the database and check who reengaged. Reengagement can mean different things to different businesses. So I encourage you to spend some time at this step. I’m going to move forward with my presentation and go to the second step where we have to get the buy-in from the stakeholders. So once we got this list of prospects, we met with our sales ops and our sales teams to share these reports and then get their buy-in for the project. So this is quite crucial for success of your project because you want these reengaged prospects to get the attention they deserve and get processed through the funnel. Your sales and sales ops team need to be on board. My third step here is defining the action and the SLA for each lifecycle stage. So together with the rest of the teams, we created an internal spreadsheet to indicate what actions are we taking. So this exercise was done cross-functionally to ensure success. Let me show you how to do this and how this document looks like. In a simple worksheet like this, write all the lifecycle stages in the first column. Here I put the most popular ones, but I also know that different businesses have different lifecycle stages. So list all of them because quite frankly, reengagement can happen at each stage. In the second column, I put all the actions that must happen in our systems and our teams step by step. And I’m going to show you an example. We also realized that each lifecycle stage would have different follow-up actions depending on where they are and their previous interactions. For example, anything pre-sale should go to a BDR maybe to go back to an MQL. And everything post-sales should go to an AE to book a meeting. In the third column here, I add responsible. And this can be the teams or systems responsible for the action. A document like this will keep your teams aligned and will also be a source of truth. So let’s look now at an example. Let’s take recycled leads for example. So recycled leads are records that had interacted with our sales teams, but not had a demo. When a recycled lead re-engages, here are the actions we agreed to take to process this prospect. The first step would be to add them to our list, just to keep track of these records, go back and review between teams. The second step is to capture the current lifecycle stage. So because this person will change status as they progress through the sales funnel, I want to record the recycled status. And this is a very great use for PMCF. And I’m going to show you exactly the Marketo setup. My third step here is to change the status to an MQL. So this action is based on agreement with sales. For example, I want to make sure this prospect will be surfaced in sales reports and lists, so sales can act quickly. You also see here a stamp MQL date too. And I’m doing this step because these records have been through part of the funnel and they most likely have an MQL date. So I would like to make sure I capture this data point for reporting. I also add the records to a CRM campaign for visibility and reporting. And in the end, I send an alert to the new lead owner. Since this is not a net new MQL, sales must be informed about it and adjust their talking points. Marketing Ops can provide that information. For all the actions you see here, we identified marketing ops to be the owner and all these actions will be translated in Marketo. Further down the line, we have a few more actions assigned to BDR. These are CRM assignment rules and an action that is owned by SalesOps. Last on our list, we have the sales actions, which are follow ups with the prospect. And now I would like to go back to Marketo and see exactly how we translate the strategy into flows. And now let’s dive back into Marketo and see exactly how we translate the strategy into the flow. We are looking now at the flow steps I’m going to be using to process the reengaged records. My first step here is to add the people as members of the program if they are not already added. This is actually a prerequisite for using PMCF. My second step here is to add people to a list. So I created a static list previous to this session where I place the reengaged records as soon as they enter the smart campaign. I call it reengage records. And the reason why I do it is because this list can be exported, shared with others in general a container for a specific audience. My next step is to capture their current lifecycle stage. So my flow action here is change program member data. This is the PMCF I mentioned. And I captured the recycle to make sure I have that insight. These fields are specific to a program like you can see here my attribute is program entry status and here is where I record the recycled value. I can also I do this because I can build reporting based on this. For example, how many recycled or churn reads reengaged. And once I do so, it is safe to change the lifecycle stage to MQL. So the record can go through the sale cycle once more and appear in the BDR queue. For my next flow step MQL day two, I like to date stamp this. And this is because I use it for reporting. If this person reengage, they already went through part of the funnel and chances are they have already an MQL date. So this is the point where I record an MQL date to. I am also using a score field called MQL count, where I can track how many times someone can become an MQL one, two or more. Again, I’m using this field for reporting purposes. Sync to Salesforce is my next flow step here. And this will trigger the sync and all the updates will arrive into our CRM quickly. From here our CRM rules kick in and assign this record to a BDR according to the new status. I like to place a wait step for two minutes in my flow here just to ensure all these updates arrive to Salesforce our CRM before I move forward. You can also see I’m using an add to Salesforce campaign flow step. And this is quite crucial. If you work in a CRM instance using leads and contacts like most of us do, the campaign is the one object where you can report on leads and contacts combined. So if you want to see an overview of your reengagement pool, the Salesforce campaign is your place to go. My last step here is to create the alert. I want to inform the new sales owner that the record reengaged and what was the last touch point. This arms the sales team to have better conversations and reach out fast to this prospect. And next I’m going to show you how I built my alert. I would love to answer any questions you might have about the flow later in the Q&A. And here is the alert I built for our sales teams. You can see that I have highlighted a series of Marketo tokens I’m using to give sales the most information. First I start by using the lead owner token where I call my sales colleagues by their first name. And I inform them of the previous person’s status which is recycled. I achieve this by using the PMCF custom field token. Further down I use Interesting Moments token to inform about the last touch point and date such as the Interesting Moment description and Interesting Moment date. And last I use a system token that will populate Marketo and Salesforce links to this alert so both sales and marketing have the information at their fingertips. I send this alert to the sales owner and I also send it to me to stay informed. If you want to learn more about personalization I encourage you to join Kiara’s session which is happening later today for the Skills Exchange event. Alright let’s talk about campaign qualification rules. So for the whole process to work you have to set up your campaigns to allow for re-engagement and this means run through the flow every time. So all your web form campaigns, online advertising, inbound actions, you must let people run through the flow to track that re-engagement. And same goes for your MQL campaigns. If you use a decentralized model where you have one MQL campaign being called from different campaigns let people run through the campaign every time meaning that a person can be an MQL more than once. So going back to our strategy we have the last two steps to talk about report and iterate. So we want to make sure that the data we gather on these records doesn’t just sit in Marketo but it’s further shared with Sales and other tools in a meaningful way. And Carmen will tell us more about how we do reporting. And once the workflows went live and we processed a few records we met again with Sales and SalesOps to refine the process. For this to work feedback is needed from all parties. Sales SalesOps MarketingOps so don’t forget to allocate time to that. And now Carmen will share the reporting component and the main takeaways. Awesome, thank you Veronica. So now that you’ve seen all of the steps that are needed to build this process in Marketo I’m going to talk about how to report out on the impact of this process. So if we go to the next slide you’ll see a snapshot of a report from our own CRM. So if you have Marketo connected to any CRM it should be fairly simple to run a report. And really what you’re trying to identify is for those people that reengage through this process and are flagged how can you identify that secondary channel that they’re coming through and then focusing efforts and resources there. So one way to do that is by building first a report that looks at the original source that these folks came through, the ones that have an MQL date to timestamp. Then you’re going to run a secondary report or add a secondary view to your report to look at that secondary source and you can use last touch attribution if you’re using that, anything that you call it in your CRM. And I’m going to take an example here from our own reporting. If you look at outbound the majority of reengage prospects that come back and originally were touched via an outbound sequence come back to us because of our referral program. What this tells us is that there’s an opportunity to build further trust about our product with people that we reach out through outbound by mentioning that we have members that they might know as part of our community. And also it tells us that perhaps we can get creative in terms of limited time offers with our referral program because referrals seem to be a lucrative channel for us as a business. If you have campaign influence reporting as well in your CRM, you can use that to identify even the revenue that this drives, so the dollar value that these contacts who reengage drive. If you have any questions about CRM reporting or the CRM looks familiar to you, I’m happy to answer any questions. You can drop them in the Q&A and we’ll be answering them right after we wrap up the session. Just some main takeaways that I hope you all walk away with. The first one is that you should look into your database and surface what reengagement means for your business. This is going to require you to connect with your sales stakeholders and get buy-in for this process before you begin building it. And the third and probably one of the most important takeaways is that documentation is key. Use the worksheet we provided to begin to think about how you want to document this process and the customer journey. Lastly, build your reengagement framework before nurturing and retargeting. A lot of people do this the opposite way, but as we mentioned before, most of the customer journey is cyclical and not linear, so you want to have this foundation set before you start retargeting or nurturing strategy. I know I said that was last, but really the last one is to invest in the channels where workers are reengaging from. So if you see an opportunity, if you see people reengaging more with your business via one channel over the other, that tells you where to focus your resources and your time. To all the leads who converted due to retargeting and reengagement for us, we salute you. So thank you so much and looking forward to answering any questions you might have. All right. Welcoming Veronica and Carmen to Q&A. Thank you for joining and great presentation. I’m going to start answering all of your questions, folks. So the first question is from Natalie and Natalie is asking, and I think this one’s for Veronica. How are you notifying sales about the reengaged people are using alerts or something else? Thank you, Bacha. This was great. Lots of good things shared today apart from the alerts that I already shared in my presentation. So we’re using personalized alerts. We are also using a few fields to flag to sales how they know this record reengage. So we are using the MQL dates too. We are using the person status MQL, and we are also using Salesforce campaigns specific to reengagement that have a date stamp as well. So many data points sales can pick and choose, but there is absolutely no doubt when a record reengages. Great. Thank you. Carmen, did you want to add anything? Otherwise I’ll continue the next question. Yeah, I think Veronica covered it. Thank you so much. Great. So here’s another question from Tom and he’s asking how many fields do you have for lead source data? What fields do you use for marketing attribution? Who wants to take that question? I can answer that. Thank you, Tom. That’s a good question. For lead source, we work with one field that is the source of truth across our systems. And then we have pick list values that’s been agreed between marketing and sales, which values are for living in the field lead source. The lead source does serve our attribution reporting along with acquisition program and other salesforce campaigns connected to our market of programs. Great. Thank you, Carmen. Did you have anything to add? Yeah, I think similar to what Veronica mentioned there, it ultimately depends on how you’re setting up your CRM as well. The source of truth and how you want to define that. So as Veronica mentioned, we have one which is the person source and that’s a marketal field and we map that back to a field that’s in our CRM system. And we have a few different fields as well that can help us get as granular as we need to, to understand where these folks are coming from. Great. Now here’s another question from Tom. I’m not sure if it’s the same Tom, actually. It might be a different Tom. But Tom is asking, should revenue stage statuses be matching up with lead lifecycle status? Who wants to take that one? I can try and answer Tom. We are not using the revenue stages in our current setup. We are planning to move into that. So I’m already thinking about it. I think that yes, so lifecycle statuses will be living in the revenue stages as well. I know there’s people who expand on it, so it goes beyond the lead status. So you would include maybe your customer lifecycle stages. There’s a lot of good content in the Marketo community around this topic. So I encourage Tom to try and look there as well. Yeah, great. That’s nation.marketo.com, everyone. Carmen, anything to add to that? No, that was great. Thanks so much, Veronica. Okay, wonderful. So next question from Juliana. So Juliana is asking, what values do you use for lead source as an example? Examples of values for lead source. Who wants to answer that one? Yeah, I can take that one. So examples of lead source. So some examples that we have, for example, we try to create hierarchies as well just to make it easier to report at different levels of the business. So an example of a lead source that we have could be paid as an example, or referral, or inbound, and we can get as granular as we need to. So we might have sub sources as well, which could be the channel that the person is engaging with us in. So examples of that could be Facebook, Instagram, Google, a partnership that we’re doing. So it can be as granular as needed. And we try to use different fields as well to try and supplement that data so that not everything is living in one specific field, and we can manipulate the data as best as we can. And so you’re suggesting that you could use even something as specific as a particular social media or ad network as your source value? Yes, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And I think that something that’s really powerful is also using Marketo sales insights as well to get some of that granular information. So there’s some information that you might not necessarily want to put in a field that might be very specific to the ad that someone’s engaging with, and you can supplement that information with Marketo sales insights and train your sales counterparts on how to use that information. Great. Thank you, Veronica. Did you have anything to add to that? Other examples? Yeah, I think this is a great question and the answer, it’s not that easy. But I encourage Juliana to look for a presentation from Summit. I think Brooke Bartos and Andy Caron, they did a really incredible job framing how you should think about your lead source, your sub-sources and acquisition program, where your sources are the big buckets and then you go more granular from there. So please try to find this presentation. It’s really great. I use that to build our current sources together with Carmen. Great. Next question is from Rachel. Sorry, I missed the details on attribution. Do you use Marketo, Salesforce or Bizzable to report on first and last touch campaign attribution? Yeah, so I can take that one. So we use a combination of Marketo and our CRM as well to look at first touch and last touch. And we use the campaign functionality in our CRM as well to look at all the different touch points that Elite has throughout their journey. Yeah, right here we’re a small and mighty team. We are a bit scrappy too, so we are making the most out of Marketo and Salesforce at the moment. Probably as we grow, we will look into attribution tools. Great. And there was a quick question since you mentioned Carmen, Marketo Sales Insight and Juliana was asking, hey, that’s an add on, correct? And that is correct. Marketo Sales Insights or MSI is an add on that’s integrated into your CRM of choice. Then the next question is from Maha. But before I asked Maha’s question, just wanted to relay that Maha is saying that this is a great presentation. Thank you. So it’s a nice comment. Now the question is, what do you do with churned customers that re-engage or do you do this just for leads? I can take this question. Thank you, Maha, for joining us and for your question. We are looking at all lifecycle stages, so we are also looking at churned. If you look at the spreadsheet that was shared during the presentation, I list there all the lifecycle stages, pre-sales, post-sales too, because the re-engagement can happen at any of those stages. When a churn record would re-engage, they would follow the same process. We tweak the process depending on the lifecycle stage. In the case of churned, we want to make sure that that record lands in a conversation with their customer success rep or the person from the company that last was in touch with them. We have mechanisms for that sort of assignment. We want that the conversation is picked up where it was left off. That’s the idea with the churned and that’s very specific to the churn records. That’s a great idea. Carmen, did you have a different take on that or similar? Yeah, no, I have the same perspective as Veronica. Great. Always show your churned customer when they re-engage that you know who they are and you’re putting them in touch with the right people who know them well. Next question is from Tom. Does sales have fields that they use to manage MQLs or marketing qualified leads in CRM that marketing isn’t allowed to touch? For example, lead status. Does marketing have fields? Similar question, which is the inverse, which is does marketing have fields in CRM that sales isn’t allowed to touch? Do you have fields that are dedicated to marketing or sales and or sales that the other isn’t allowed to modify? Yeah, that’s a great question. I can start it off and Veronica can fill in the gaps. We have a really good relationship with our director of sales operations and with her we’ve agreed on what are those fields that marketing owns and what are fields that sales owns and who is allowed to update what. This ensures that our data is as consistent and as accurate as possible. Examples of field that we own on the marketing side and that are updated by Marketo include primary source, sub source, acquisition program name, MQL date and time stamps. Those are all updated by Marketo and owned by the marketing team. From a sales end, they do own their lifecycle stages and that’s up to them to update. That doesn’t mean that we can’t update it from an administrative perspective and we work closely with our director of sales operations to make sure that we’re also informing each other of any updates we make. We actually every month at the end of each month, we have a database cleanup and each month it gets better because we’re ensuring that we’re really aligned in terms of rules of engagement there. So yeah. Great. Great. And now did you say those are process enforced or enforced through the system itself through the UI? Yeah, so that’s a really great question. So it’s a combination of both. So something that we really love doing is creating playbooks for folks here. So we have a marketing operations playbook and a sales operations playbook, which also informs our sales team in terms of the steps that they need to take in order to make sure that their database and their pipeline is clean. At the same time, we do have processes in place that will prevent them from moving leads into certain stages or prospects into certain stages if these steps are not taken. Great. Thank you. Veronica, did you have anything to add to that? Nothing. That was perfectly explained. Okay, great. We are almost out of time. I’m going to ask you one more question and this is actually something that was on my mind as well as you were speaking earlier. Chuck is asking, are you capturing these sources through UTM parameters on forms or other parameters? I’m not sure if you use Google Analytics or something else, but… Yeah, yeah. I’d love to take this question because it’s actually very relevant to a conversation I was having with someone in our department. But yes, currently we capture a lot of these sources through UTM parameters. And I think one of the most important things to do is to make sure that there’s consistency and alignment in how you use UTM parameters and to also be careful in terms of how you set them up because some functionality might try to change how you use UTM parameters and make it difficult for systems like Marketo to pick up vital information. An example of that is Google Click ID, which is encrypted data that Marketo cannot read. And if you’re looking to have robust reporting, you need to be able to use a UTM structure that allows you to ingest that data properly in Marketo to make informed decisions for your organization. Great. How about you, Veronica? And this will be the last one. Yeah, so just to add on to what Carmen said, we are taking the UTMs via our forms. So the UTMs are hidden fields in all our Marketo forms. And then we pass that information to fields that refer to first touch UTMs and last touch UTMs. So we have smart campaigns that will further process that data. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Veronica and Carmen, for joining us today and for your wonderful presentation. This is a lot of information for everyone to digest and we’ll have to say goodbye here. So thank you so much.