Does it make sense to keep these two disciplines separated?

With this development, the gap between marketing and sales became even bigger. Today both are serious disciplines with lots of technology and data involved. When a company was able to adopt marketing automation to its full extent this gave them a competitive advantage. Today most companies are on par once you talk about digital marketing. Times are over when there is a hard cut between marketing and sales and a lead is handed over from one to the other. In many cases, we experience that this way of driving the sales pipeline is over and better collaboration between marketing and sales is needed in order to be successful. Does it make sense to keep these two disciplines separated? Or are we at a moment in time where it makes sense to go back to where it started: marketing & sales. I think in the next couple of years a new role will emerge: the Chief Revenue Officer covering what we used to call marketing and sales including maybe also customer success.

Should we consider sales as a media channel?

In the last decade, we have seen that buyers in general are far better informed when reaching the stage of buying something than ever before. Whether you talk about consumers or business buyers, both have the ability to spend hours on the web to explore and find a solution for a problem that they have or something that fulfills their needs. Especially within the business-to-business arena, we have seen that once you are able to influence potential buyers in the exploring phases of their buying journey this can have a positive impact on the number of deals closed by sales.

The gap between marketing and sales has become bigger but the need for better collaboration between both of them has increased

But I think we are facing a problem. The gap between marketing and sales has become bigger as described in my intro but the need for better collaboration between both of them has increased. Why? Because nowadays more than 50% of the buying journey is covered by marketing trying to engage with the market and specific audiences until a lead has been generated. A business or sales development representative (SDR/BDR) picks up this lead trying to convert this contact into an opportunity and finally a deal. In order to achieve high conversion rates it is all about creating higher quality leads and developing the skill sets of these SDRs and BDRs to the next level. And in my experience I see many things going wrong.

The volume but also the quality of leads is decreasing. Best practice lead nurture programs have had their best times, everybody is doing it, there is an overload of content and people are simply not willing to share their contact details anymore to get access to this content. Marketing is under pressure and wants to keep up with the lead volumes and therefore qualification conditions are applied less strictly. Sales are demanding more and better leads but at the same time, I see less interest from sales to genuinely understand the variety of storylines that are plugged into the market by the marketing programs run by their marketing colleagues. Sales have become something at the very end of the funnel which is about closing deals and reaching their commission plans. I think we can do a far better job than that.

Sales have become something at the very end of the funnel which is about closing deals and reaching their commission plans

At what other moments in time should we make use of the unique skill sets of our sales colleagues? Why shouldn’t marketers expose sales professionals at an early stage in the buying journey making themselves known just to offer help? Why do we hand over the responsibility of treating the lead from marketing to sales? How do we make sure the sales colleagues truly understand the marketing spend that has been done to create this lead? Why shouldn’t both marketing and sales carry this responsibility of the lead until the end? As marketers, we have many means and media channels to reach out to our audiences, touch them and have interactions. We try to orchestrate the buying journey, recognize certain behavior, and identify interests and intent. Shouldn’t these orchestraters be able to identify that specific moment to decide if marketing programs or salespeople is the next best action?

Revenue streams and multidisciplinary teams

In my personal experience tactics like Account Based Marketing (ABM) also demonstrated the gap between marketing and sales. Many initiatives which started with great enthusiasm ended up in teams looking and finger-pointing at each other. The reason why? Bottom line there was a conflict of interest because both sides had completely different KPIs. Defocus came into play and people were distracted due to changing circumstances. The lack of that common goal or at least super-aligned goals created room for noise.

Many initiatives which started with great enthusiasm ended up in teams looking and finger-pointing at each other

I also noticed there are many ‘inside-out reasons’ why teams are organized the way they are. Company history and lack of skill sets or capabilities are in many cases used as arguments to leave things as they are. I prefer to organize teams from an ‘outside-in perspective’ in order to make sure that the people are one-on-one connected with their audiences. All these other stuff are things to work on and to solve but are in my humble opinion no reasons to not change. I like to talk about revenue streams. Implicitly it tells us that such a stream generates revenue. For me generating revenue is key in order to create a sustainable business to live the values of your company and contribute to society. The other way around you fool yourself and the market, this is how business works. Money makes the world go round.

Your value propositions, ideal customer profiles (ICP), and personas need to meet each other in a natural and authentic way to deliver revenue for the company. I very much like to take a multidisciplinary approach here. In the last 12 years of my career, I gained a lot of experience building such teams within marketing. Adopting the scrum framework made teams extremely agile and made every single professional excel. I am working towards that moment in time where we hook up our sales and later on customer success colleagues. A self-sufficient team that has everything on board in terms of resources like skill sets, capabilities, and funding to cover the entire life cycle of a customer. Going from acquiring, onboarding, and expanding the relationship with your customers in a meaningful way to add value for both sides.

For me generating revenue is key in order to create a sustainable business to live the values of your company and contribute to society

The brand marketer and deal closer are no-go areas

What does it take to lead such revenue streams? A blend of marketing and sales skills in a person that has an eye for the customer, their journeys and behavior, processes, technology, and data with a performance-driven mindset. The ultimate orchestrator, the conductor. I think these types of persons can come from both sides although I think that a brand marketer pur sang or a typical deal closer is not the first preferred candidates in line. There should be a good balance between both marketing and sales capabilities in a good marriage. The Chief Revenue Officer is born! Let’s see how things will work out in the upcoming years. This kind of change goes slowly and needs a lot of effort from some of the front runners amongst us who believe in this and make it happen. In my own professional life, I will endeavor to build teams based on this concept. Hopefully, 5 years from now, I can again share some experiences about this journey!

Homepage not so important at all

Many people assume the homepage of your website is THE place to be once you want to pay attention to a message that you want to bring across. What I often ask people to do is to do a quick analysis about their searching behavior when looking for something new in private life. A new smartphone, a new insurance, a new chair etc. and pay attention to how many times you end up on the homepage of the suppliers homepage. That is not that often huh? This is where the key word battle starts from a supplier point of view to get your attention as the person who is looking for something. It starts with the paid results at the top and right underneath it the organic search results of the ones who according to Google are the most relevant websites for the thing you are looking for.

If people visit our homepage we did a bad job…

Do you think that once you click on a paid search ad at the top this will lead you to the homepage of a website? The answer is ‘no’. In order to be relevant and as engaging as possible this click will lead you to specific page about this keyword with call-to-actions on it to do something so the publisher gets to know you better, not the homepage. The same applies to the organic results. By far Exacts’ product pages are attracting more traffic than our homepage. I would rather have someone on our product page than on our homepage because than we did our nurturing activities in the right way guiding prospects into the right directions with our ‘off-site’ campaigns.

Imagine you are looking for a new insurance. Big chance you will even end up on a comparison side knowing upfront there are many different options to choose from. The insurancers website may even not be in scope at all! Off course depends on how far as a supplier you are away from the buyer and if people can buy stuff on your website. In our situation, Exact, you can only sign up for our software service on our website so there is no other place to go to however comparison sites also in our domain play an important role. After such a short analysis people start to understand the essence of marketing. Trying to be hyper relevant for each and every visitor which depends on many things: who they are, where they are in their buying journey, what behavior they’ve shown in the past etc etc. Something that we try to capture in what we call the ‘Exact Engagement Score’. A score that tells something about the visitor on our website which allows us to serve a message or show a webpage that exactly fits their needs in terms of what they are looking for. Hyper personalization.

The Exact Engagement Score helps us to be hyper relevant

Hyper personalization

Now this is where it becomes interesting, at least from a marketers point of view. It sounds logical and even explaining it might be an easy job to do. But to get it right as a marketing organization its a hell of a job. Lots of clean data and technology is needed in order to build such an engine. An engine that is serving messages to the right audiences at the right time. And being a potential buyer you might know by your own experiences that someone who wants to get your attention is all about relevancy. I have many discussions with colleagues about the effectiveness of email. Many tend to say this mean has had its time because they are spammed with many emails which they didn’t know they signed up for. Those are being deleted immediately which I understand. But still, if it is something of my interest and than I mean genuine interest, it will get my attention. Marketing, technology and sports will always get my attention, even emails! And for many people email is still guiding them throughout the working day.

Our technology stack is build around the Google Marketing Cloud and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Here we gather data about how people interact with our messages on our paid and owned media channels. For us the most important are search, Google display, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Our most important owned media channel is the website. In order t understand what the visitor is looking for and serve the right messages we combine campaign data gathered from the paid networks with the Exact Engagement Score which we gathered on our own website. This tells us something about where people are most likely in their buying journey. Are they a first time visitor and just exploring or did they show a high level of engagement in specific areas? The seamless integration between the Google and Salesforce marketing cloud enables us to combine this data, interpreted in the right way and serve messages not only on our website but also on the paid networks like Google and Facebook once we see them again.

Targeted promotions

So having such a technology stack in house and knowing its capabilities and the thinking behind it you start to understand why putting a promotion on our homepage doesn’t make any sense. For sure it is relevant for some people so once we see them on our website or off-site in one of the paid media channels we make sure we serve that message. For others we won’t disrupt their buying journey by offering disruptive content like the email you didn’t ask for.

We don’t want to disrupt buying journeys with irrelevant promotions…

And especially with the bigger consumer brands this is constantly happening all the time. Sometimes you notice but in many cases it is unnoticed. Looking at specific products in a webshop and being retargeted with those products in a display ad is an obvious one and although relevant is sometimes really annoying. The real good stuff is happening without you noticing it. You are influences by the things you see and experience. And in my opinion that is what marketing is about, influencing people’s behavior in a natural way in their daily routines.

As mentioned in my previous blog post we are in the middle of our budget 2019 exercise which means analysing lots of sales, marketing and market data in order to come up with an ambitious plan for next year. One topic I would like to pay attention to in this post is about the hand over process of leads from marketing to sales. As of the beginning of this year we started with something new: lead development.

What I can tell you upfront is that this process remains a human process. 

Business Development Reps (BDR) nurturing leads against certain criteria in order to increase the quality of leads we as marketing deliver and to increase the changes for sales to close the deal. What I can tell you upfront is that this process remains a human process. Although we try to capture in descriptions, definitions and models, at the end it is all about trust and the willingness to see the bigger picture and help each other.

The theory

Looking at our customer buying journey model below I am now specifically looking at the process between MQL (marketing qualified lead) and SAL (sales accepted lead). In the Sirius Decisions demand waterfall it is defined as the step from TQL (teleprospecting qualified lead) towards a SAL. For a selection of MQLs we can afford to pay extra attention to these leads to further qualify.

Leads Development takes care of this and nurtures these leads until a SQL (sales qualified lead). Once a BDR reaches that stage he offers the lead to a sales rep. This sales rep checks if it has been qualified against the agreed criteria and can either accept or reject.

By nature sales are eager to sell and close deals.

If the sales accepts it enters into its sales pipeline which means it’s worth the effort to further qualify and work the opportunity. Criteria the BDR is qualifying against are also known as P-BANT:

• P – Identified pain and/or compelling event
• B – Budget available
• A – Stakeholders known
• N – Identified need
• T – Time frame known

By nature the BDR wants to do the job as good as possible since the more leads accepted, the better the BDR is doing the job. The same applies to the sales rep, by nature they are eager to sell and close deals. This creates a kind of natural balance between these two disciplines.

So far so good. After 10 months now we gathered quite some data and experiences by marketing and sales. If we are looking into the conversion data we see the following:

1. Conversion % from MQL to SAL for the different types of solutions we offer varies from 25% to 90%, 82% is seen by Sirius Decisions as the industry benchmark for our type of companies
2. Conversion % from MQL to SQL varies from 70% to 89% whereas benchmark is about 30%
3. Conversion % from MQi to MQL is about 40% whereas benchmark is 46%

Conclusions and insights with regards to the 1st bullet point I will discuss in the next block. The MQL>SQL % seems to be extremely high. I need to dive into this number. Looks like something is not aligned in terms of definitions. Conversion from MQi>MQL are quite in line.

This mainly has to do with automate as much as possible the validation of the data entered by the prospect. We are in the middle of updating all our web- and subscription wizard forms with real time connected Dun & Bradstreet databases in the backend. So once someone is entering data we enrich and clean-up this data automatically in real time. This will have a further positive impact in this conversion %.

The real world

There is quite a big variance looking into the MQL to SAL conversion mentioned under bullet 1 above. Differences are related to the type of solutions and type of sales cycles this is about. The question is what conclusion can you derive out of these numbers and what kind of discussion do you need to have between sales and marketing to further optimize? Coming from sales you could say the quality of the leads are not sufficient enough, coming from marketing you could say that sales is qualifying the leads too rigid. This is where an open conversation is needed to further optimize the collaboration between the two.

Although the criteria seem to be crystal clear there is a lot of room for interpretation

A 25% conversion against the benchmark of 82% seems to be far off. This means that for some reason sales is accepting a too limited number of SQLs. What could be the reason behind this? Is it the quality of the leads? But the criteria are clear so how comes? Or is sales waiting until the lead is nurtured in such a way they have a high chance of scoring the deal?

And here the extremely interesting discussion starts about definitions. Although the criteria seem to be crystal clear there is a lot of room for interpretation which leads to noise and can lead to playing the game in a completely different way. This raises questions so what are the key questions we need to answer and agree upon on both sides?

1. What is considered as an opportunity?
   • When is it worthwhile for a sales to start putting effort in an identified opportunity?
2. With whom the prospect better of talking about the desired solution for it’s problems?
   • Face to face contact with the prospect at a certain moment in time is required to make some further steps in the buying process

Take the first question. When we talk to a prospect in a very early stage, how big is the chance that the contact will be open and transparent about the budget? So if all other criteria are met and the BDR is not 100% sure about budget being available, what to do? According to the theory we can not offer this MQL as a SQL to sales. But at the other hand, knowing it is very early stage, an eager sales rep could also accept since he understands and sees it as part of the challenge and sales job to take it on. On our side of marketing we can further specify what we mean by this criteria. 

Isn’t it more about the prospect being price aware? So that at least when the monthly subscription starts at € 500,00 the contact doesn’t expect it to be € 50,00. Or that if sales expects license deals of € 50,000.00 plus we don’t come up with opportunities of € 5,000.00. So here we have the ability to be more clear about what is meant and what the intention is of a specific criteria. This leads to better describing for some criteria the intention that we have like:

• Budget: which price range are we talking about from a sales perspective? Where do they want to spend time on and which ones not?
• Timeframe: within which specific period of time we expect to close the deal?
• Need: what company size is sales expecting to work on?

At the same time the sales rep also knows when the lead is accepted it appears in it’s pipeline and management will start to track and monitor. And off course accepting wrong leads can have major impact on the scoring % to a deal. 

There are also examples where conversion % from MQL to SAL are around 90%. There you could say sales accepts leads too quickly. There we might have room on the marketing side to tighten the criteria slightly more to have more balance between what needs to be done by marketing and sales. Having a benchmark number helps to at least have a guidance which direction to work towards. And this is where you need some common sense between marketing ans sales. Because how can a sales accept leads too quickly? Well that means that with it’s specific skill set it could be a waste of time for a sales rep to spend time on. In other words this part of the qualification could also have been done by a BDR. And this is a fine line both marketing and sales management need to look into.

Path of return

It is utmost important that once the sales rep does his discovery call to check whether the SQL criteria are met there is open communication with the BDR. First of all this continuous feedback loop makes the BDR better understand how to qualify and how to interpreted the criteria.

And if it seems that one of the criteria hasn’t been met the sales should be able to give the lead back to the BDR with the assurance once further qualified, the lead returns to the same sales rep again. Trust and having confidence in each other is key!

Human factor

Marketing and sales management need to be highly engaged in the process of further refining and optimizing this hand over process. Off course definitions, criteria and interpretations can be defined and written down. At the end it is very much about common sense, trust and confidence between the two departments. Both should be aware and conscious about the fact that marketing isn’t sales and sales isn’t marketing. In other words we marketeers are lacking skills that sales have and vice versa.

It is about putting the right skills and resources in front of the prospect in order to guide and help them in the best possible way. For the prospect to find the best value against the best price and for us to start a sustainable relationship with a potential ambassador for the solutions that we offer.

Having insights on both sides how the incentive structure is build up is even worthwhile to spend time on. Behavior of both marketing and sales people in performance based roles are also driven by their incentives.

Both should be aware and conscious about the fact that marketing isn’t sales and sales isn’t marketing.

E.g. making sales conversion % a big part of the sales incentive has the risk it works contradictory to what marketing stands for. It makes sales reluctant to accept leads. Having an incentive which is about the sales conversion from MQL to deal could be a solution for this. Everything in between like SQL to SAL conversion is in the hands of marketing AND sales having both the same interest in smoothening this step as much as possible.

Alignment 

Having said this shows that after all it remains a process highly dependent on the human interactions between marketing and sales. Off course we try to capture in definitions, descriptions and rules of engagement but finally it is about having common sense, trust and confidence in each other. A professional approach looking in an objective way to all data that has been gathered. The challenging but nice triangle between the content, the process and the human interaction that leads to excellence. 

Customer buying journey

As mentioned we are in the middle of refining the model but I can already tell in which areas we adjusted given the latest insights we gained. The good thing is that thousands of leads during the year flow through this model so we are building a sound database of customer buying journey data that helps us to further improve.

Let me explain the model illustrated above. No rocket science but there is a lot in it. Most important is that all marketeers within our team know this model and practice it. Whether we are allocating costs to certain campaigns aimed at audiences through paid online channels or creating content for specific programs and campaigns, we always know within which part of the buying journey we are working on. Utmost important to remove white spots and noise during conversations.

Most important is that all marketeers within our team know this model and practice it.

Utmost left the media channels we publish our campaigns. Paid online, paid offline and our owned channels. In every stage of the buying journey these media channels can be used to target an audience and serve a relevant message. We split the journey into 3 different parts. Top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel (from left to right). To keep it simple:

1. Brand Awareness is about building a reputation around your brand according to the values we live as a company. Top of the funnel.
2. Product Awareness for us is about identifying interest in the value propositions we offer. Extremely targeted and ultra relevant however still a softer message. Challenge is to connect the Brand and Product Awareness layers with each other in terms of media channels, content and measures.
3. Leadgen for us is about ‘asking for the order’, identify buying intention. With this I mean make people download, attend a webinar or sign up for a trial. A Marketing Qualified Lead that we can follow up and further qualify. Our bottom of the funnel. Challenge here to connect the Product Awareness and Leadgen layer with each other.

Brand Awareness video

Product Awareness

This part of the buying journey is managed by our Demand Generation teams. An interesting part of the journey where we try to identify within audiences if there is an interest in our offerings. Making use of the retargeting pools generated by our Brand Awareness campaigns but also prospecting on look-a-like audiences based on CRM data. Basically we start to register behavior and engagement towards the different messages we publish across multiple media channels. Right now within the Google networks with tools like Google Analytics 360 and DoubleClick we are able to get very close to the truth.A challenging job but also extremely interesting for all members within the Demand Generation scrum teams. How to create a video which identifies interest and whether the contact is within the Wholesale or Professional Services branche? And once determined how to convert into a visit on our website, recognize this contact and based on behavior only show Wholesale or either Professional Services content. Just a simple example but give the broad scope of the team and line of thinking we are building our campaigns. Measures for these type of campaigns are:

• reach and impressions in relevant audiences
• size of retargeting pools generated
• conversion % to website visits
• contribution towards our leadgen campaigns in the bottom of the funnel

Especially the last one is an interesting one. Running campaigns across different online and offline media channels makes this extremely difficult. Having a solid attribution model in place is key. Right now within the Google networks with tools like Google Analytics 360 and DoubleClick we are able to get very close to the truth.

Product Awareness video

Leadgen

Also this part is managed by the Demand Generation scrum teams. This is where we go for the order and try to convert as much as possible into Marketing Qualified Leads. Example are videos, banners etc. with for instance a call to action ‘sign up for a 30 day trial’. If visitors fill in the trial form a Marketing Qualified inquiry is automatically generated. With intelligent forms and pre-populating the company name field in real time with Dun & Bradstreet data we try to limit wrong or invalid data as much as possible. However still manual handling by either marketing or sales is required to convert the MQi into a MQL. An MQL means that mostly within marketing our Lead Development team with Business Development Representatives will start to nurture and qualify these leads into a SQL. Measures for these type of campaigns are:

• Cost per Lead
• Cost per Acquisition
• Conversion %

In total we generate more than 37.000 MQLs a year. You can imagine that Marketing Automation to it’s full extend for us is utmost important to have a scalable and flexible marketing engine.

Leadgen video

SQL criteria

MQLs are qualified by our Lead Development team. For some type of MQLs for certain products we directly forward to the sales team. For instance bookkeeping trials are directly forwarded to our inside sales teams. Many others we start to nurture against criteria we agreed with the sales organization. These are criteria like:

1. Available budget
2. In contact with the DMU
3. Determined the time frame
4. Needs based solution fit

Once the team has qualified the MQL according to the criteria above it becomes a SQL and will be forwarded to the sales organization. They will start to run a check whether the lead indeed meets all criteria and if this is the case, they accept and it becomes a Sales Accepted Lead. This is probably the most difficult part of the journey. Having a system in place with different levers so we can jump into specific needs from sales or changing market circumstances. This part for me now gets the most attention since I see lots of room for improvements here. Measures in this phase:

• leadtime
• conversion % MQL to SQL
• conversion  % SQL to SAL
• % rejected SQLs
• % lost SQLs

The MQL and SAL part of our journey we have some great benchmark data from Sirius Decisions which shows us where it makes sense to further improve and pay attention to. In my next blog I will further dive into this topic.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation for us is crucial. Basically we try to recognize behavior of people how they engage with our campaigns. Than based on this data try to create meaningful ultra relevant touch points across the different phases in the buying journey. We fully adopted the Google Marketing Cloud and try to hook up paid platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook as much as possible into this ecosystem. The level of personalization we can apply is really amazing. Also will spend a specific blog on this topic. It is the ability to create many many segments automatically and push personalized messages to these contacts with a ultra relevant experience on our website once they visit us. We are not there but with the teams are striving to this ultimate goal every day.

Advise

It took us more than 5 years to get here. In other words it is not a walk in the park. Many peers ask me where to start. Well about the customer journey definitions you have a great starting point now. Having online expertise on board I would start with immediately. Hiring external agencies in many cases you can not avoid but I have learned that you can’t outsources your challenge or problem unless you understand it yourself and you know which way you want to go. Make small steps and try to create an atmosphere of fail often and fail fast. In today’s world you need to act fast. Adopting scrum to become agile would be my other recommendation.

We are still far away from getting the right answer.

Uber

I felt I had to defend myself explaining that I fully understand getting the right answer is difficult. I even had to explain that I truly believe that building a brand is important. With a sponsorship of Max Verstappen and experiencing the impact of this every day I also see that is has value. But the question is: how much value? Preferably in Euro’s. In the last couple of years we ran many many tests on how to maximize the impact of Max for building reach and getting engagement. But the question is: how much value? Preferably in Euro’s. We see and feel that is has an impact but still I have difficulties to directly relate it to an uptake for instance in engagement and conversion uptake in our leadgen campaigns. ‘Keep on believing in it’ was the message within the group but I am not satisfied with that. I will keep on working to find the answer how to measure and how to maximize the impact.

Until now the person who was perfectly able to explain the necessity for having a strong brand and an audience who is associating your brand with your values was Patrick Stal, head of EMEA marketing at Uber. I met him at a dinner a couple of months ago where he gave a short talk about the things he is working on. Until recently there was no necessity for running marketing and branding campaigns. Their services delivered via their well known app apparently was answering such a huge need that organically they grew to a multi billion company. A dream for every marketer where the product or service itself is the marketing. But last year a series of scandals popped up and as a result the CEO has to step down. This had a huge impact on the perception of Uber as a trustworthy company and brand. The only thing they could rely on was their extremely easy to use app with lower than normal fares. But having these kind of challenges, scandals, privacy issues and legal disappointments such an app is not sufficient enough anymore. The people didn’t have anything to fall back on. Who was Uber anyway? Where did they stand for? What is where they believe in? What is their bigger purpose in life? All questions Uber itself but especially the market was not able to answer. Uber was a well known logo, no so much a strong brand build upon some strong values.

Attribution

I think we have sufficient media channels where we can start building our brand. It is more about the content you create and the way you execute your campaigns across these variety of media channels. LinkedIn for sure can play a role in this just like Google, Facebook, Instagram and other offline means. Every day my teams are looking for wasy how to further optimize their campaigns. Once we run our brand campaigns they are utmost eager to see how and where they can measure impact. Within certain networks we can see first signs of success where Google still gives us the best tools and measures to get it right with its attribution model. Last year we invested a lot in the Google Marketing Platform. The good thing is that lots of data is connected with each other. Google still gives us the best tools and measures to get it right. Campaign data coming from multiple paid networks and website visitor data. Building segments and serving the most relevant messages offsite and onsite becomes daily practice. Google DoubleClick still needs further optimizations from our side to broaden our reach of measures to non-Google networks. A great challenge we work on every day. I expect that in a year from now I can give you a better answer on how to measure and execute brand campaigns in such a way so it has maximum impact in your leadgen. Until than I will keep you posted about the progress that we make.

Digital transformation

At the end of the dinner, hosted by spotONvision, there was an interactive discussion about challenges we are facing as marketing professionals within our organizations. CMOs and marketing directors of VodafoneZiggo, FedEx, NCOI, ING bank, Staples, Schiphol Airport and many others we actively engaged in this discussion. It was about the digital transformation we are all going through and the requirements like skillsets, data and supporting tooling. Having those discussions I realized that more than 6 years ago when I joined Exact, we started with our digitization. I can say that we transformed and at least in the B2B marketing landscape we have one of the most sophisticated digital marketing demand engines. in the B2B marketing landscape we have one of the most sophisticated digital marketing demand enginesI dare to say this since others like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are telling us the same. E.g. last year we invested heavily in implementing the Google 360 Suite and other Google systems like DoubleClick, Optimise and Data Studio. The way we run our campaigns, recognize behavior and serve relevant messaging is quite advanced. We own this data, not an external agency. In my opinion a key requirement in order to run relevant demand generation programs.

Google tools supporting personalization

My starting point 6 years ago was quite different than others I realized. It was my assignment, as the new marketing director, to change and that makes life much more easier. Because change starts in my opinion at the top to really make things happen. Otherwise you get stuck in the middle of the organization not being able to really execute the change. I still hear lots of internal fights that marketing professionals have to overcome and to convince their executives about the necessity to adopt and transform into digital. And it is not that simple, because what is digital about? It is a mindset, it is an attitude where you could even ask yourself if some of your team members are able to adopt such fundamental changes. It is about data and not even data driven but data infomed. Having the ability to interpret data in the right way coming to a next best action. It is about data and not even data driven but data infomed. Having the ability to interpret data in the right way coming to a next best actionI got ‘card blanche’ 6 years ago. At that moment and still, I was and am pretty much into digital although I already see differences between the 25-ish boys and girls in my team and myself (48). From the start we worked digital, invested a lot in hiring the right people and implementing the system at that moment were required. We started implementing Eloqua when it was still a autonomous company not being part of Oracle. People with Eloqua skills were rare, extremely difficult to hire. Even resources that could help us getting the system up and running, but we managed to.

Personalization

One of the key reasons being able to execute at such a fast pace was the fact I had ‘card blanche’ and full trust and confidence from my peers in the management team and the board. Of course you need to deliver results but driving the business from 10 to almost 80 million in that period of time is not a bad thing. Today our sales organization is heavily dependant on the leads which are generated by marketing, even maybe a bit too much. But for sure, if something is broken in our digital marketing demand engine there is panic on the sales floor.

But for sure, if something is broken in our digital marketing demand engine there is panic on the sales floor

Many projects and optimizations led us to the organization and set-up we are currently in. Having our own Google licenses made a huge impact although I think we are just at the beginning. Off course as a marketing professional you want to be able to target as specific as you can and serve ultra relevant, engaging messages. With our platform we are very close. My dot on the horizon is that we recognize each and visitors/contacts onsite and offsite based on behavior so I can determine what kind of persona I am looking at. For offsite that means serving ultra relevant messaging, for onsite and our website it means ultra personalization. Only show that what is relevant for the visitor whether it is a prospect or a customer. Asking a question is in my opinion a weakness, with all technology and expertise have in-house we should be able to leave that question behind and instantly publish what is relevant for that specific visitor. You won’t notice as a visitor but we are running such programs already

Agile marketing

Scrum supporting digital transformation

One of the things that helped us adopting digital even more fast was the way we as a marketing team were collaborating with each other. We started with a functional set-up, content creation, marketing automation, demand generation but two years ago started to adopt scrum. We are expected to generate thousands of leads each and every months through a variety of media channels. And I am not talking about general inquiries, I am talking about qualified leads. Our addressable market consist of millions of contacts since we serve entrepreneurs and small companies. The programs we run became more and more complex in all areas, content, automation and publishing. At a certain moment the marketeers were involved in so many projects that they didn’t know what they were doing it for. Also lots of ‘throw over the fence’ issues came up so change was needed. For that reason we started to adopt scrum to become more agile. The scrum teams we have today are divided into market segment teams. Each and every team is as much as self sufficient as possible. They know their goals, their objectives and key results and have the autonomy to make their own decisions and act on it towards their goals.

CMO for CEO

In the discussion we had at the B2B marketing forum I hear my colleagues having lots of challenges not only selling the need for digital transformation internally but also implementing new ways of working like scrum. It feels like the willingness to change and to innovate is there with the marketeers but unfortunately limited by the internal circumstances. This push back has many reasons and at the end doesn’t help organizations to change and make steps forward. Traditional way of developing the market, approaching the market remain which gives room to competitors who are able to change. In this group I think that ING bank is the only company that is adopting scrum all the way. It feels like the willingness to change and to innovate is there with the marketeers but unfortunately limited by the internal circumstancesAnd why? Because it starts at the top. Their CEO is the supporter and driver and with him off course all executives, senior managers and teams underneath it. So digital transformation requires more than only marketing, it is a starting point. Today it is about cross functional, the inception of a product or service can’t be done by technical people only, all professionals across the customer lifecycle should be involved. From marketing, to sales, to technology, to customer success. And who has the mandate to change such a structure: the end boss, the CEO. So marketing professionals, directors, CMOs who started their digital transformation journey and get stuck, go for president, get the mandate and become the CEO!

Marketing metrics

There are some public sources that give you quite some interesting metrics specifically for Saas companies like Bessemer Venture Partners, David Skok and KISS metrics. What I have learned over the past 5 years at Exact is that it is a hell of a job to get everything right from theory, to a blueprint, a working model, execution and a dashboard. One of the key things is to stick to the definitions that you have once created in collaboration with Sales and Business Control. This is the only way to create one truth that everybody is looking at. I my previous blog posts I already shared our customer buying journey blueprint with all definitions in there:

All what is stated in the model above is measured across 7 countries for 5 different target audiences in one consistent way. Some of the main marketing metrics and KPIs we measure:

• MQi = #visitors on a landing page
• MQL = #contacts who did a content download
• SAL = sales accepted leads in 7 different types
• SQL = sales qualified leads
• Sales Conversion % = conversion % from SQL to a customer
• Cost Per SQL = marketing spend/#SQLs
• Cost Per Acquisition = (#SQLs required to generate one customer) x CPL
• ROI = payback time in months

We have many more but these you can consider as our main metrics. In the systems that we use to run our marketing programs all this data is stored. At the same time this is our main challenge: get the data out of these systems in order to create one consistent view. Our data is stored in our financial system Exact Synergy, our CRM system Exact Online, our marketing automation system Oracle Eloqua, Google Analytics and Google DoubleClick. Recently we started to use Microsoft PowerBI to gather all data and create some valuable marketing dashboards. This really accelerated the quality of discussion we have within marketing but also with sales. In 2016 we passed the magical number of 300.000 companies who are on our digital business platformEasy accessible insights do make the data more actionable. E.g. one of the key topics for 2017 is improving the quality of the SQLs. This we can do by analyzing all SQL data and see which lead types convert te best. Signing up for a trial is one of our lead types and converts way better than for instance our ‘online demo‘. What we also see is that once contacts have seen a message (e.g. video, display advert) to generate MQLs are retargetted with a SQL message and than convert into a trial, have in some cases double the sales conversion % of a ‘normal’ trial SQL. That all sounds logical but to get the proof based on data is a major job.

Example of a so-called MQL message for the wholesale target audience

Specific marketing KPIs

Ok, now I have showed you some of our key marketing metrics lets get more specific. All given numbers are across all 7 countries across all 5 target audiences in 2016. Off course I have even more specifics along those 2 dimensions but I think this is ok for a start.

• 58.000 =  #SALs we generated
• 29% = our average sales conversion %
• € 208 = our average Cost Per Lead
• SQL = sales qualified leads
• 5 months = our average payback time for every marketing Euro we invest

There are substantial variances between the different countries and the different products. The number of SALs we are generating is based on the growth in add MRR we want to achieve. In order to calculate the marketing SAL target we take the actual sales conversion % of the previous year and add a certain optimization %. Combined with am actual CPL we know exactly what to spend in order to generate the required growth.

In 2016 we were able to grow our revenue with almost 40% compared with 2015. In our international countries we were even able to grow more than 90%!

Different countries, different numbers

Once we dive further into our SQL data we gain some interesting insights. As mentioned earlier we consider 7 different lead types and each and every type in combination with a country and a product has their own dynamics. Our programs aimed at manufacturers show better traction traditional lead types e.g. telemarketing whereas the more tech savvy professional services industry shows better traction on our trial lead types.

• About 38% of all our SQLs are trials
• Only 8% of our SQLs are generated through telemarketing
• 15% of all the SQLs generated are for the professional services industry

In orde to improve the quality of the SQLs we closely monitor the mix of lead types that we generate. We would rather go for high converting trials than for low converting online demo’s.

• Our inbound lead type converts more than twice as good than trials
• Online demo’s and webinars are the SQLs with the lowest sales conversion %  
• Accountants show the highest % of event lead types, about 15%

We also see big differences between the countries in all metrics. Cloud adoption is a key driver for this but also cultural aspects come into play. Companies in Germany by nature are more risk averse than for instance the UK. Generate SQLs in the UK costs us the most whereas in Belgium we see the lowest CPL values. UK is a highly competitive market that is still seen as a step-up towards mainland Europe. Many US competitors start in the UK and that drives cost-per-clicks within Google upwards. We also see that the % of UK website visitors that apply an online form with invalid data is almost double than for instance Spanish website visitors.

Hereby I challenge my peers to also share some specific marketing metrics to reflect with each other

All in all many many metrics that we can look into in order to further improve our demand generation engine. In 2016 we passed the magical number of 300.000 companies who are on our digital business platform. We add new companies each and every week and that number increased with about 40%. Right now we add 1.400 new companies to our platform each week! And this is how Saas in an upcoming market is being monitored and measured by the growth of the growth. Time to get exponential

Marketing functions

Back at the beginning of 2012 when it all started for me within Exact I started to build the team around the customer buying journey. This model is still what we apply each and every day and is a true blueprint for all that we do. However the number of countries, target audiences, assets, marketing people etc. increased dramatically. The model is still relevant but the way how to optimize, expand and maintain with the marketing team changed every year.

The first major change was making a distinction between the Central and the Field marketing organization. Central building a foundation of demand generation programs which were rolled out and deployed in all countries. Field marketing creating additional programs on top of this foundation to add local relevance where required. Within the Central team different disciplines were required to build our so called marketing Playbooks. For each target audience a blueprint with everything required to run a demand generation program.

In order to deliver a complete Playbook with a demand generation program a variety of marketing disciplines are required. Marketing automation taking care of all data, connectivity and automation of the programs. Content creation developing content for the different personas and different stages of the buying journey. Content in many many formats like ebooks, infographics, videos, animations, white papers, blogs etc. All content and Playbooks are developed in UK-English. Once ready Central Program management takes care of roll-out and deployment within all other countries. Content creation developing content for the different personas and different stages of the buying journey.This is not only about translation but entire deployment of all technologies covering all technologies involved e.g. website CMS, marketing automation tool, databases and CRM. All online marketing we centralized in the Online Demand Generation team. This is such an expertise which needs to be bundled to leverage all knowledge. We just started with the implementation of Google Analytics Premium and our own Google DoubleClick license which shows that this team is becoming a true media agency.

At that time there was no real pain and we felt it was too early to start adopting this new way of work.

Increasing complexity of marketing

With a growing marketing team and our marketing strategy and tactics becoming more advanced every day we experienced that our programs became very complex. Mainly in 2015 we felt the pain of becoming a large marketing team with different disciplines in there. People were not able anymore to relate their daily work to the overall goals we had as a marketing team. Each and every team was working on its own island and during roll out and deployment we encountered more and more faults. The teams were not fully aligned anymore and there was a lack of mutual trust and joined feeling of responsibility.

As a marketing MT we came to realize that we needed to change things mainly in the way the people and teams were collaborating with each other. Already a few years ago we had discussions about scrum agile and how this would apply to our marketing team. At that time there was no real pain and we felt it was too early to start adopting this new way of work. During 2015 we felt pain and thus revisited new ways of collaborating like scrum agile. Within our development department there were colleagues with lots of experience in this area so they were able to explain us the basic principles and the do’s and dont’s. Also made us realize that if we decided to move on with this, this would be a bumpy road.

Scratching the surface

Developing and setting the guidance for 2016 with my marketing MT during November and December 2015 was a tough job. We had to overcome many intense discussions and the team was constantly switching from one side of the room to the other side of the room. A lot of effort and energy I had to put in convincing the team that this was the way how to move forward. I didn’t have to convince people really, it was more about the way how to. How to make our first steps in scrum agile and which guidance to provide the teams to facilitate them and create an inspiring environment. We ended up with making people, not teams, responsible for a specific phase in the customer lifecycle consisting of:

• Top of the funnel (product awareness)
• Bottom of the funnel (leadgen)
• Activation
• Retention

In hindside a way too much model that at the end nobody really understood but it was a first step. We also decided that for each and every project or optimization a multi-disciplinary team was formed.

These teams were end-to-end responsible delivering the optimizations. We selected a lightweight tool called Trello to support this new way of working. Backlog boards were created and new entries were discussed in the marketing MT. Monthly sprints were introduced in order to make sure we didn’t blow up optimizations into large and complex projects. It was about short monthly cycles to keep up the pace. In hindside a way too much model that at the end nobody really understood but it was a first step.We even asked all team members to register their hours so we were able to have better control of the available resources and make well-thought decisions giving certain projects lower or higher priority. At the same time, we realized that registering hours is a kind of the opposite of what you want to achieve with scrum agile. Giving true responsibility to the teams, make sure for them that it is ultimately clear what the value is they are expected to deliver in a continuous improving team velocity.

However, we also believe in doing things, start with the journey and experience ourselves what it is to work in multi-disciplinary teams so everybody feels what that really is about. It has an impact on team members and the leaders themselves who are also expected to manage and facilitate in a different kind of way.

Hot summer of 2016 

During the summer we build quite some experience with working in small teams coming from different disciplines within marketing. People felt that walls between the teams disappeared and the working ethics between all the people in the various teams really got a positive boost. At the same time, the number of small projects exploded and people started to have difficulties to keep overview and control of the things they did. Sometimes things are so big that people don’t notice.Although there was a bigger guidance people didn’t seem to own it, especially the value that was expected to be created. Sometimes things are so big that people don’t notice. I think that this was the case. Furthermore, people felt that registering their hours gave them better insights what they were working on but also the leaders were not really able to work with those insights.

Trying to capture the biggest challenge or shift we wanted to make with the way we practice marketing we also questioned whether all these small teams were contributing to this. Main challenges we have:

• Expand our reach towards the target audience by put more emphasize on the top of the funnel
• Increase the impact of our owned media channels e.g. website, blog and social

Trying to enter the lives of our target audience in an earlier stage of their buying journey allows us to better nurture these contacts into high-quality leads. Research done in the past demonstrated that if we were able to bring our story over a longer period of time telling about our why, how and what this resulted in a better quality of leads. However, it takes some time to nurture contacts and makes the playfield more complex. Trying to enter the lives of our target audience in an earlier stage of their buying journey…In order to play this game right you need to register all touchpoints in a profound way for understanding where people are in their buying journey to determine the next best action. This next best action had impact on which media channel to reach out to such a contact and which content and format to use for that. With the enormous number of different media channels and devices available today a hell of  a job!

We all try to understand the algorithms of Google but at a certain moment in time you just need to accept

Gaining traffic through the organic media channels is the best quality traffic that you can get. This is a longtail game but can have huge impact on the results coming out of it. If people find you organically means by default that the content on that page or the story that you have to offer on that page is of high quality. We all try to understand the algorithms of Google but at a certain moment in time you just need to accept but also believe that their intention is to remain relevant for their users. Therefore they will improve their algorithms only if it contributes to more relevance. Better quality traffic leads to better quality leads and higher sales conversion.

Creating value

With our 6 months of experience scratching the surface we felt that we had to step up embracing scrum agile within the marketing teams. We ran a workshop for the marketing MT for a better understanding of the scrum agile principle. Self-steering multi-disciplinary teams carrying an end-to-end responsibility. Having full clarity of the value they need to deliver as a team. Self-steering multi-disciplinary teams carrying an end-to-end responsibility.A product owner driving the product vision and the sprint goals and the scrum master monitoring the process and roadblocks if there are any. As a marketing MT we had to define very clear expectations of what we expected from the teams in terms of value. In order to make a step-up we took the following actions:

• Created 4 scrum teams and appointed product owners to each scrum team
• Appointed 4 scrum masters being members from the marketing MT
• Set very clear guidance about the rules of engagement
• Introduced daily stand-ups and bi-weekly sprint reviews
• Created a model to measure the value the teams were expected to deliver
• abrogate registering hours
• Specific training courses for product owners and team members
• Set very specific goals for each and every team
• Formed a DevOps team for roll-out and deployment of provn optimizations

For the scrum teams themselves it had to be very clear what was expected from them and how they were able to measure their results. The fail fast and fail often principle was introduced and the teams were forced to test small improvements focussed on one company and specific target audience. Once a certain optimization was proven together with the DevOps team it was replcated and rolled out to the other countries and target audiences. In the most ideal situation we wanted to have no distinction between the scrum teams and the DevOps team for deployment but todaty we are simply not mature enough to take that step. We further need to share knowledge between people and train them to have true T-shaped profiles in all teams.

Heading for 2017

So in the summer we kicked off our step-up towards further adopting scrum agile within marketing and started to work on it. All team members entered the cadence of daily stand-ups and bi-weekly sprint reviews and this was experienced as a positive thing. Goals were more clear and the fact that data gave the teams insights with regards to their performance of delivering value really helped all individuals feel they were contributing to the overall goals. Now that we are several months further we already see room for improvement so for 2017 we make some further adjustments.

As a marketing MT it is extremely important to monitor the progress of the teams on a weekly basis. Making sure the improvements that they try to proof remain small and stay within the guidelines of the value that they need to deliver. Other working ethics comes into play like the ability to collaborate, communicate, feel responsible and take responsibility. These are the soft factors which are highly important to manage and monitor. We learned that the product visions of the scrum teams can’t be specific enough. Other working ethics comes into play like the ability to collaborate, communicate, feel responsible and take responsibility.For 2017 we will make these even more explicit. In order to have the scrum teams fully responsible not only for optimizations but also roll-out and deployment to other countries and target audiences, we created a skillset map for all teams. All marketing people are now divided over the various scrum teams, there is a clear understanding about the expertises required in order to the job but also a GAP analysis is available. This shows the teams which team members are willing and should be trained in certain areas.

Stakeholders and scrum team members

As of 2017 we also will start to involve colleagues from other non-marketing departments within the scrum teams. Up to now they were involved as stakeholders meaning they were involved, informed but not actively part of the scrum team. Being actively part of the scrum team means having influence on the way how value is being created but also means active engagement in daily standups and sprint reviews. In such a way product marketing, sales, brand communications, other business units and development are being actively engaged.

Looking back it was and is still a bumpy road.

Looking back it was and is still a bumpy road. Although for the atmosphere and working ethics I highly recommend to make these steps, at the other side it is hard hard work for all team members and management. Adopting scrum agile is highly demanding for people for certain skill sets most of us didn’t grow up with. At the end it is a mindset, it is a culture and change of behavior that you try to accomplish in order to further optimize what you have in a more effective way. It even should bring us optimizations and improvements of unexplored new areas that previously we didn’t think of. But we have to and I will continue to drive this change and transformation into the most modern, flexible and impactful marketing team.

Every time I publish a blog I copy the blog in the native LinkedIn publishing environment.

Paid promotion

After finishing my most recent blog last week I decided to support its exposure with some paid campaigns. It was already in the back of my mind for a while to run campaigns through my three most used social networks Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Every time I publish a blog I copy the blog in the native LinkedIn publishing environment. Experience has shown that by doing that the LinkedIn algorithm can create quite some traction without doing anything other than having good content. Normally my blogs reach hundreds of readers but sometimes thousands. It seems that if the blog within a certain period of time is actively engaged the platforms rewards it with even more exposure.

I decided to spend about USD50 per network on paid promotion. It is already quite an experience to create ads in all three different platforms. Each social network has its own way to create an ad and to determine the target audience. Here you can see the differences between the platforms where I consider Facebook as the most advanced. Automatically ads for my blog were also published in the Instagram network although I was not expecting that much from it. Here you can see the differences between the platforms where I consider Facebook as the most advanced.I decided to promote the blog item published in the native LinkedIn environment rather than my own blog URL. Thinking behind it was that maybe the LinkedIn algorithm would reward additional visitors with increased exposure. Trade off is that quality of traffic I was not able to measure since my Google Analytics is measuring my own WordPress blog.

Twitter ads, Facebook ads and LinkedIn campaign results

In all three networks I was able to set a daily budget based on a cost per mille to reach a certain number of eyeballs. I was mainly focussing on audiences in the profession of sales and marketing. The level of detail you are able to configure is amazing in all three networks. All useful tools to determine the size of the audience including tips and tricks how to generate the highest traction. By doing all of this you again realize the complexity of running online campaigns.By doing all of this you again realize the complexity of running multiple campaigns, on multiple networks, in multiple countries for the different phases in our customer buying journey having a variety of assets available from text ads to videos. Each and every network has its own management console and specifications of all networks slightly differ and thus creates additional work. That online marketing became an art is once again confirmed.

I ran the campaigns for about 4-5 days and tried to configure the campaigns specifics pretty general without too much customization. Overall conclusion: Facebook outperforms both networks. LinkedIn didn’t generate even one click! The CTR results are listed below:

• Facebook: click through rate of 1.3%
• Twitter: click through rate of 0,5%
• LinkedIn: click through rate of 0%

Off course, there are many elements that determine the CTR performance where I also challenge our own online marketing teams on. What is the quality of the audience that you are able to reach? What is the quality of the message or title that you put into the advert? Even if you have a high CTR, what is the quality of the traffic that has been generated? I would rather have a low CTR with a low bounce % than the other way around. So keep in mind that this measurement is not so much advanced.

Reach results:

• Facebook: reach of 13,896 (persons who have seen the ad at least once)
• Twitter: reach of 27,987
• LinkedIn: reach of 19,010

In total the number of views on LinkedIn today is at 660. I don’t know whether generating traffic from other platforms has a negative impact on the LinkedIn algorithm. It might result into negative scores, I don’t know. The number of views on my own WordPress blog today are at 189.

CPC are as follows:

• Facebook: cost per click of USD 0.23 
• Twitter: cost per click of USD 0.39
• LinkedIn: no clicks…

In a next test I might redirect to my own blog in order to measure the quality of traffic that has been generated. At the end that’s what counts at the end delivering engaged readers who might come back and start to follow. Will keep you posted!

Exponential organizations

About a year ago our CEO Erik van der Meijden started the discussion by distributing the book ‘Exponential Organizations’ within the management teams. There were plenty of ideas and thoughts of making next steps within the Exact organization but something tangible is needed to really create a movement. Looking back that was the starting point of the movement we are just making in becoming an exponential organization (ExO). There won’t be any marketing in 5 years from now.At the end,  I think that many of us have such an ambition, want to become the disrupter of their industry. But it is a huge step from that thinking towards a true movement. It takes time, doesn’t happen overnight but it is pretty exciting I can tell you. Everybody within the company is thinking of how to contribute to this ambition so am I coming from a marketing perspective. In a couple of blog posts, I will provide you with some insights how we started the ExO movement, the challenges and the proof points we already achieved.

The book

Massive transformative purpose

The book ‘Exponential Organizations‘  is talking about a so-called MTP: massive transformative purpose. Your reason why, why do you as a company exist, what is your ultimate dream. Exact defined her MTP which is: We empower SMEs to be the driving force of the global economy. That’s how it started 30 years ago empowering small companies to run complex financial applications on simple personal computers. PC’s at that time were upcoming and not common sense. We empower SMEs to be the driving force of the global economy.The road towards this MTP included lots of discussions but also many decisions which are underneath it. We make a firm statement saying we want to become and remain relevant for SMEs and especially the small business owners themselves. This means quite a lot looking tot our customer base of 300.000 companies right now. Many (public) accountants and bookkeepers and less small business owners. So in order to live our MTP we need to enable accountants and bookkeepers to support those small business owners and we need to become relevant for those small business owners.

System of engagement

That last point is a big one, it means that we want to become a system of engagement rather than a system of record. So we don’t want to end up as a back-end system, we truly want to play a valuable role in the daily life of a small business owner. That is a major step looking at where we are today. The main question for myself: how is marketing going to contribute to this ambition and have an impact? There are three areas where I think we can and will contribute:

1. further optimize our demand generation engine
2. integrate with other ecosystems and platforms
3. develop new products and services

I wrote many blog items about our demand generation engine. How we build of this engine driving our growth with thousands of leads this engine is generating each and every month. Ongoing optimizations leads to lower Cost per Leads and Customer Acquisition Costs. As of January 1st this year we started to fully adopt scrum/agile within marketing as a new way of working. I will write a separate blog about this interesting journey. Soon I will expand from 4 to 6 scrum teams working on a specific product vision with product owners and scrum masters doing daily stand-ups and sprint reviews. Supported by our own Google Analytics 360 and Google DoubleClick suite we will make some huge steps in terms of optimization.

I see lots of opportunities taking the next step in integrating with other ecosystems. Today we have our own AppCenter with more than 300 software vendors integrating with the Exact Online business software platform. Most of these vendors add certain functionality to our solutions. Functionality is the starting point rather than the value for the customer. Here we will step up thinking about the value a combination of our platforms and another can provide to the customer. These Uber taxi drivers, how can we make their lives much more easier?There are many platforms where large volumes of our target audiences are active on. Take Uber as an example. These taxi drivers are in fact all small companies running their business. How can we make their lives much more easier? What if we would integrate with their platform, can we optimize their experience in terms of them running their business by automating stuff or providing them with additional insights? New go-to-market models will emerge exploring these opportunities.

Our first adventure: Sparks

Supporting small business owners in their daily lives requires new products and services on top of what we offer today. The one that comes close is the Exact Online mobile app very closely related and integrated with our accounting, CRM and industry solutions. But maybe this is already too much and we should challenge ourselves whether this app truly supports small business owners in their daily lives. Or is it a nice top have app that they check once a while. Our MTP is very clear, we WANT to play a valuable role in their daily lives which means we had to search for new ways to enter these people’s lives rather than the solutions we deliver today. Today there are multiple initiatives covering this challenge and I will pick out one that actually started 3 years ago under the code name Sparks.

Sparks was born coming from the believe that with all the data customers are storing in the cloud we should be able to come up with smart suggestions helping them to grow their business. Out of the box thinking regardless the limitations from a legal perspective if we are allowed to access this data and how to use it. At that time with a small group of people coming from multiple departments we were introduced to methodologies like lean startup, design thinking and customer development. That project ended up with a first concept and powerpoint based mock-up. After a year we decided to pivot the idea and work on it in a second round.Many customer interviews and validations were part of the process. Sparks was a truly out of the box concept which also required lots of explanation and attention within Exact to gain support and traction. After a year we decided to pivot the idea and work on it in a second round. This ended up in a more specific concept with a clickable mock-up on a mobile device. Quite abstract and high level but with a business case and model behind it. After it fell off the budget for 2015 we decided that in 2016 we had to start with it. The urge to start exploring new products and services was there.

But before even getting there the Sparks concept and project was already under high pressure.

A Sparks team was founded which was about to go live in March 2016. But before even getting there the Sparks concept and project was already under high pressure. Many questions, unclarity and at the end not having the broad support to make it happen. Which made us decide to pivot the concept again because the believe that it had huge potential was broadly supported. Also with the movement that was started around becoming an exponential organization gave the project new energy and traction. So a new multidisciplinary team was formed with discovery and delivery skills. New research was conducted and many ideation and customer validation sessions followed. Finally this pivoting 3rd round ended up with three concepts around the main challenges experienced by small business owners in the context of growing their business:

1. find new customers
2. find funding
3. find knowledge

With this Sparks was divided into three new concepts: Connect, Finance and Share. This 3rd round accelerated the project. Connect was picked up immediately and resulted in the official announcement in front of an audience of 5.000 customers and partners at ExactLive last week. On 3 booths Exact Connect was being demoed as a digital platform that helps small business owners find new customers. We expect to officially release Exact Connect in Q1 2017.

Digital business platform

While Connect is being further developed full speed ahead we are preparing Finance and Share to get into the next phase. All these new concepts are falling together in our Digital Business Platform strategy where we want to become of value for the small business owner supporting them to cope with the challenges mentioned earlier related to finding customers, financing their business and having access to knowledge. This will help Exact to become a system of engagement rather than a system of record. But what does that mean with regards to our positioning? We want to empower small business owners with our Digital Business Platform. This means supporting and facilitating them in their daily lives of doing business by equipping or supply them with an ability to cope the challenges they are facing.

In terms of positioning what we deliver today and what Exact delivers tomorrow you can break that down into the following parts:

1. Share: have access and find knowledge from people or business that might be of interest for you based on who you are, what you do and your behavior
2. Connect: find new customers and create valuable connections between supply and demand
3. Single purpose apps: once people and businesses found each other facilitate them in completing a transaction e.g. create a quote, approve, register activities, invoice and collect
4. Filing the transaction what is basically what we currently do with Exact Online business software
5. Finance: pro-actively come up with smart suggestions across webapp and mobile apps towards small business owners to finance their business with services like short-term lending, accelerated payments or factoring.

The total package as described above should be considered as the Digital Business Platform that empowers small business owners to grow their business.

Exact Connect: find new customers

Exact Connect as described is still pretty broad facilitating matching between demand and supply. You can make further distinction between goods, white collar and blue collar services. In order to make it concrete and keep it close to our current knitting, we decided to focus first on small business owners who are looking for accountancy and bookkeeping services.

Exact Connect mobile app

With a multi-disciplinary team, new ideation and customer validation sessions were initiated. What became pretty obvious during these interviews is that a mutual personal click between the small business owner and accountant is crucial to create a successful match. With this is some more insights the team started to work on both a web platform and a mobile app. With a multi-disciplinary team, new ideation and customer validation sessions were initiated.Through the web platform, we capture traffic of small business owners who are searching for these services with paid and organic campaigns.

Once redirected to the Exact Connect website based on some data and some questions answered the algorithm creates a match with an accountant. The small business owner instantly sees if this accountant is online and can set-up a chat session asking some questions. Within the Exact Connect app the accountant is notified with a pop-up message and can engage with this contact immediately. The start of a valuable relationship has just been incepted.

First of all what all these new initiatives have in common is that multi disciplinary teams are working on it.

Today we start with accountancy and bookkeeping services but later on we will expand towards marketing services, legal services, HR services etc. By delivering these kind of services we enter the lives of many entrepreneurs in a completely different way compared what we do today. But what is the role of marketing in these initiatives? First of all what all these new initiatives have in common is that multi disciplinary teams are working on it. Both discovery and delivery skills are represented where marketing, UX and technical people are working as from the start in a joined effort on the concept. Before even one single line of code has been created, the team makes sure they are 100% aligned from a customer experience perspective.

Exact Connect web app

On a very detailed level from the very first touchpoint until a fully engaged user of a web app or mobile app things are described, validated and tested. Engagement with the customer is leading which is achieved by being utmost relevant in every single touch point created. This is a combination of design, technology, marketing and UX that creates a unique experience.

Marketing, the next step

I strongly belief that the product and services delivered by a company will include marketing in itself. Marketing needs to become integral part of it. This means that we marketing people need to get actively involved in a number of new initiatives that will lead into new products and services. As from the very start it is about engagement and that game we are currently playing on a daily basis. Big difference is that looking at the Exact Online products we deliver today our content (a white paper, infographic, video, ebook etc.) is the main mean to get into the lives of our target audiences as early as possible. You could consider our new services like Exact Connect in a mobile app format as our new means going beyond marketing as we know it today.But the nature of these means is volatile. We deliver value with such a piece of content but the attention span is quite short. The exchange of contact details allows us to nurture this contact into a lead with new content. You could consider our new services like Exact Connect in a mobile app format as our new means going beyond marketing as we know it today. It is about creating value as from the start, continuously in a joined effort with other disciplines. Exact Connect is the very first example and result of this new approach and many will follow in the course of next year. I believe this is THE way how marketing can contribute to become an exponential organization.