Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Q-State Coffee Break with Pam. I would like to answer three questions this Q-State, and they are, number 1, how to align marketing to business strategies and the rest of the organization. I think that's very important and that you need to know how to do that. Number 2, what strategy should I use to generate more qualified leads and subsequently more sales? That's also a nice question to answer. Number 3, one of my biggest challenges is my tech. What should I start and what can I avoid my tech mess? That's also a very good question. These are the three questions I would like to share with you in terms of my point of view, and we'll take it from there. Number 1, how to align marketing to business strategies and the rest of organization. If you are a marketer, it doesn't matter what you do, you create content, you write blog posts, or you do e-mail campaigns. A lot of time, we tend to be in the weeds and do the stuff we do, and then we have a ritual like on Tuesday, we send out the e-mail, on Thursday, we check on the performance of the e-mail that we sent out. But it's very important to get yourself out of the weed and have an understanding in terms of what you do connect with the overall big objectives of an organization. When I was an individual contributor and working in a big corporation, I always understand what is the annual sales goal that my company wanted to accomplish. I also understand the new market we want to go after. If you have an understanding of the business objective or the business goal, a company that you want to accomplish, then you can try to make the connection between what you do with that bigger goal. Does that make sense? For example, your company wants to target a brand new market, and let's assume that's a healthcare. If you are creating content, then you need to think about, okay, some of the content I created needs to target for the healthcare segments. If you are creating messaging, you need to think through that, okay, my product messagings need to somehow tailor, or maybe need to change a little bit and create a customized messaging framework specifically for healthcare. Understanding that business goal in terms of what the company want to accomplish, is very critical, and then make a connection directly or indirectly to the stuff that you are doing. Does that make sense? When you are creating any kind of marketing plan, even you created just an email marketing plan based on what you do, always start with the business goals. What the company want to accomplish, the revenue, the specific segment they want to go after, or the people they want to talk to. Then you create it in terms of what your strategy or what your plans are to accomplish that. Does that make sense? The best way to do that is write down. Write down the way you understand what the business goals are, and then write down the things that you will do on regular basis, and see if you can make that connection. It's very important, and a lot of time you can, because you are employees of your company. Obviously, everything you do matters. Just try to make that connection, and quantify that, and make sure everybody understand as well. That's what I would do if I were you. Then of course, if you are managing a team, you always have to create a team objective, or a goal that you want to accomplish. Try to do evaluation and check, in terms of the goal that you set up with your teams, also have an impact or can directly or indirectly connect it to the overall company business objective. Do that check, and then make sure they are connected. That is one way that you can quantify in terms of your contribution to your company's overall sales and the business goals. That's question number one. Number two, what strategy should I use to generate more qualified leads, and help close out more sales? All right, everybody is asking that question, and nobody has a solid answer in terms of what needs to be done. That's because it's very situational, and it also depends. If you want to generate more leads, you have to look at in terms of, okay, what is your company doing right now for the lead generation or the main gen? How is that working? If your company is doing a lot of events, is that working pretty well? Are the salespeople pretty happy with the leads that you generate? Do a little bit of overall assessments in terms of the channels you are using and what the results are. Are you happy? Are you not happy? If you are not happy, why? If you don't have anything, well, then start with your sales team first. Understand how they sell and what they do, and try to align what you do with them. The reason is marketing exists to help the sales to close deals or to sell more products. Of course, we want to build a brain awareness, all that stuff. That's very important, but at the end of the day, it's creating actually more customer or the business opportunities for the sales team. So the way I would do, what strategy should you use? That question is kind of like, it really depends on what you do and what kind of marketing channel that you are using within your company. So do an overall assessment of that first. Understand how each channel is performing and why you are not getting leads. Maybe that channel is not working. You should try a different channel or you need to actually have a completely different content to support that. Find out what channel you use, what are the causes that's not performing, and then determine if you want to use that channel or not. If you do want to use it, what are some of the ways that you can test it and optimize it? And then track the results. I don't have a very specific tactic that you can use. It really depends on your roles and your responsibility and what you do in terms of the main gen. And I'm going to use myself as an example. The way I get leads is actually from attending conferences and speaking at the conferences and also doing a workshop. I try email campaigns. I try Facebook pay ads. I try many different things. The most leads I get tend to be, I get myself out there and I start speaking. So then pandemic hit. Nobody can travel. So I started doing my own webinar. So I did like over, I did a monthly webinar in 2020. The results were not that great. The conversion rate is very small. The registration is always very big, but in terms of conversion is not there. So I changed that. I said, okay, after I did that for one and a half years, it's not doing well. So I shut that down, the webinar, right? It's not generating leads. Then I stopped focusing on existing customers to get more opportunity from existing customers. Okay. That actually worked out pretty well, honestly. So you have to somehow look at what you do and you constantly make adjustments, you know, in terms of what you need to dial up and dial down. And there's no set rules in terms of demand gen and how you generate more qualified leads. Does that make sense? Okay. So that's question number two. But if you want to talk about your tactic, your tactics, and you want to brainstorm with someone, reach out to me and let's talk. All right. Number three. One of my biggest challenges is MarTech. That's everybody's challenge. Right there. I answer the questions. Where should I start? And how can I avoid MarTech mess? All right. Here is the reality of truth. You can avoid MarTech mess. Every single company are using more than 20 or 30 in the big enterprises, sometimes over 120 applications. Okay. To do various different function, to have data connected in different way. And we are using MarTech just trying to make our job easy. Everybody's doing a different job. Therefore we use different tools and the platforms. That's just the way it is. MarTech in general is a mess. Okay. So you cannot avoid it. I want to make that very clear to everyone. Okay. And there's no clean cut. The thing about MarTech, it's kind of like dating. Actually. You know, it's like when you're on Tinder or when you're on the, you know, any dating app, you don't know what you're gonna get yourself into. You look at that person, you look at their profile and you're like, oh, that sounds interesting. And you start dating and it was like, oh my God, this is a total mess. And you want to get out. All right. And the MarTech is similar. You know, a lot of tools just look very, very good when the first time you evaluate it. And then once you start implementing, you're like, oh my God, this is not what I'm looking for. Oh my God, this is so hard to use. Right. And then, or you were trying to make an effort to make it work. Right. You build some sort of code to get around it or you work with a vendor to modify it. Whatever you do, you will try to make the MarTech to work. Right. And sometimes he doesn't, then you have to kind of like dump it and then try some other stuff. Right. So how do you start? The two tools that you need on the marketing and sales side is definitely marketing automation and CIM. Okay. So you need to have basically these two tools. You also need to actually have a tool to actually gather customer data. But in general, that by itself, it can be residing these two tools I'm talking about, marketing automation and CIM. Now, many, many of the CIM tools, they actually provide the marketing automation tools and many marketing automation tool are trying to go to CIM territory. So there are a lot of overlapping between the two or sometimes you can use one to actually serve both. Like for example, I use Zoho and I use 100% CIM. Even when I send out the email on marketing campaigns, I'm using the CIM tool to send that. I don't use like a marketing automation tool. But again, my list is not huge. So I can do that. And also I segmented, right? I send out a certain amount of email every single day and I categorize my subscriber to like tier one, two, three, and four based on the engagements with me. And so what I'm trying to say is where should you start? You should actually have two, right? Started with CIM and the marketing automation tool and then determine what kind of channel that you want to use to do your marketing. Then you source a different tools based on the channel that you use, but whatever channel you use, you always have to connect it to CIM and also marketing automation tool. Does that make sense? So there's a backend integration that you have to take into account. So my tag is everybody's challenge and there's no way to get around it. A lot of time, like I said, it's kind of like a dating. You have to try a tool and see how that works and I'll do a pilot run first. Or like you date somebody for like several months and was like, okay, this is not working. Anyway, and then determine if that tool actually works for you. And once you start tangling with tools, it's always messy. There's not much to it, okay? But the bottom line is you need to actually have a sense of a clarity in mind what you want to accomplish. Even though the tools might be messy and the things that moving from one place to another, some of them are automatic and some of them are manual, but you need to have a sense of a clarity what you want to accomplish. If you have that sense of a clarity, then you can deal with the messiness. But if you don't know what you want, then the messiness become incredibly stressful. So a lot of time, I always recommend and share with my clients when they are like, in the middle of like, oh my God, this MOTAG is overwhelming me. I don't know what else to do. Well, the thing is to sit back and think through what do you want to accomplish? What tools are using to actually doing that for the time being? Is it working? Is it not? Let's break down your challenges, your question, and the breakdown to each small question and trying to find the answer and just tackle one piece at a time. All right, don't stress yourself out. It's not life and death. All right, so that's my three questions for you today. I mean, and also my answers. If you have any specific challenges in terms of MOTAG, reach out to me as well. And it's hard. And a lot of time from my perspective, the MOTAG has multiple things, not just it has to be connected. In addition is how you use it. On top of it is what are some of the messaging's copy and the images that you should use to create that seamless customer experience. There's multiple layers and complexity associated with MOTAG and the digital marketing. I know it's hard. We'll hang in there, okay? Or we can talk more. Take care. Bye bye.