Speaker 1: I think most B2B manufacturers don't know how to define marketing success. I think for the most part you have organizations that traditionally have been very sales-centric. Marketing to them has meant trade shows and print ads and brochures and making the website look nice. For them, the concept of marketing producing any kind of meaningful business result isn't even on their mind. Those that do measure marketing success or attempt to, I think are looking at things that I would consider to be leading indicators of success, not business outcomes that are impacting the bottom line. The first conversations I have with a lot of companies, it's them coming to us looking for something tactical. We need to improve our Google rankings. Our SEO is bad. We need more website traffic. When you keep digging deeper, eventually you wind up at, we need more pipeline to be sourced for marketing. Ultimately, that is the metric that we stand behind. We need to help our clients get to marketing-sourced pipeline revenue. I believe that marketing success should be measured based on business outcomes that a company is trying to achieve. When I'm talking about business outcomes, I'm talking about things like revenue generated, how profitable that business actually is, new customers acquired. I think that marketing's responsibility inside of all of that is to be able to produce pipeline that can be attributed to marketing. It's hard to put the whole responsibility on marketing, and it shouldn't be, after an opportunity has been generated. At that point, it's largely going to be the sales team's job, but marketing absolutely has a role in supporting that. Some of the things that I would consider to be part of what we would call sales enablement are going to be things like producing content that will support the sales team in their efforts with a given prospect, arming the sales team with content, rather than a follow-up where it's, hey, just checking in. Can your sales team send along a case study? Hey, I was just thinking about our conversation the other day, and we have a success story from a company that actually looks a lot like you guys and your situation. I thought I'd pass this along if this might help you in your evaluation process. Marketing can understand what these things are that matter to the buyer, because they've heard them directly from those people's mouths through interviews and research or through the secondhand, through the sales team. Then marketing can be responsible for crafting a content strategy to address all that stuff and arming the sales team with it and showing them how to make use of it to just do their jobs more effectively. So marketing KPIs are still super important. Just because we're saying the source of truth is marketing-sourced pipeline, there are leading indicators that will help you understand if you're on the path to that business outcome that you're trying to achieve. We can't throw those things away. The mistake that I see companies making is when they lean on something like traffic or new contacts generated or rankings or something like that, and they consider that to be the metric for success. That's something for people to be wary of, I think, is SEO people who use rankings and traffic as the end-all, be-all. Those rankings don't matter. That traffic does not matter unless it's going to contribute to the business outcome you are trying to achieve. Even lead generation, generating leads or physical contacts through your site, through form submissions or white paper downloads or newsletter subscribes or RFQ submissions or whatever. If those form submissions and those contacts that are being created are not the right type of people, they don't match your ideal customer profile, they're not profitable types of businesses or maybe they're non-customers, then why are we looking at that and using that as a success metric? It doesn't really make any sense if you really sit down and think about it. You need to look a lot more closely at what the strategy is behind all of those KPIs and whether they're actually going to be contributing and do contribute to that ultimate North Star metric which is Marketing Source Pipeline. Some of the marketing KPIs that we talk about, I think, become more and more important the longer the sales cycle is. Imagine going into a year-long marketing engagement and you've got a 14-month typical sales cycle. You're not going to produce $1 in revenue in that first year because you don't close business in 14 months. So I think you really need to look back further than the length of your sales cycle and there needs to be a runway to build up the foundation for your marketing program, especially if you're starting from scratch. There are foundational elements you need to get in place, but once the foundation is in place and now you're starting to run campaigns of a variety of types, there's going to be a ramp period that is probably not going to be faster than your typical sales cycle. Maybe in some cases it'll be. So once you're far enough along, in the case of a business that has a longer sales cycle and you're at a point where you're able to see Marketing Source Pipeline and you're able to see actual revenue that's closing from that pipeline, now you've got your real metric you want to hang your hat on, the KPIs absolutely stay relevant. These are the things that the person running your marketing program should be constantly looking at to make sure you're staying on course. If they're the right metrics, if this batch of traffic is producing this type of lead that is qualified and that's resulting in actual quoted opportunities that are closing, now you say, okay, well, what's the difference between these leads and then these ones that look good on paper but aren't closing? I think it's a constant process of looking at the data and the outcomes that are being produced in the associated KPIs. So I think the KPIs always remain relevant. So just because we can measure, doesn't mean we should measure everything. And that's by no means an excuse to say we shouldn't be looking at results. Of course, we need to look at results, but I think that the ability to measure everything and all the data that's at our fingertips is leading to sort of a nearsightedness with marketing where we're not looking at the bigger picture. We're not giving things long enough to play out because things take time to develop. And most importantly, it requires a consistent effort of producing amazing content, you know, getting visibility for that content. And people think that they're going to get to, there's like some magic button they can push and they're going to win that game overnight. I think you need a combination of marketing activities where some are focused on where demand already exists and people who are actually in the buying process and looking for something. Because you want to capture the attention of these people and you want your product in front of them. But then on the flip side, you have people who fit your ideal customer profile, but they're not buying right now. Because the majority of your total addressable market probably isn't buying right now. So you need to be in front of them and you need to be delivering content that matters to them and addresses things that they care about, but be doing that with the expectation that you're not about to close their business because they're not buying. So that's where I think people get in trouble when they're measuring results purely based on pipeline being generated in a short period of time versus looking at the bigger picture. Okay, so we've talked about how marketing sourced pipeline is kind of the North Star metric we're looking at here. But I think that a mistake that a lot of companies make these days, now that we can measure so much, is they interpret that as every dollar in should mean X amount of dollars out. And this should not be the case, especially in the short term. I see a lack of patience from a lot of manufacturing organizations. It's sad to see we've had some clients, and some recently, who were on a great path and they pulled the plug before they got to actual revenue generated because their expectations were we're going to do this for three months and we're going to see a return. And the reality is there are activities that you are going to do that should produce short term results. And I think those things fall into the bucket of where does demand already exist out there? Who is out there actually buying and looking for something? And if you think about it, Google's the best place to have visibility in front of these types of people because they're looking for a specific product or solution or answer to a question that will lead them to a product. And so if you can be in front of them, whether organically or through paid ads, you're in a good position to capture that existing demand. The problem is when your entire mindset is focused on generating short term revenue, you're going to neglect the activities that are going to be in the best interest of your bigger picture business development for the long term. So if you want to have a sustainable program in place, like everybody's got their sales quotas to meet and I get that and I'm not trying to brush that aside, but if you want to build a sustainable marketing machine for the long term, you need to be doing the things that are going to build thought leadership for your brand, they're going to build trust over the long term, they're going to generate awareness for you among people who fit your ideal customer profile but are not currently in a buy cycle. Because when they enter the buy cycle, you want to be the first one they think of and you want to have already earned their trust and attention so that they pick up the phone and they call you. I've had a few instances of clients just in the last year who have said almost verbatim, you know, hey Joe, we have been reading your newsletter for two years, we've been following your content on LinkedIn and we're ready for an agency right now and we know that you're going to be the right agency for us because you've been teaching us for all this time before we've even spoken. That is the program working exactly how it should. Okay, so let's talk about the path to generating marketing source pipeline. Here are the things that should be happening. The first few months should be focused on building foundation and for every company it's going to be a little bit different. We've started working with businesses that are building a marketing program from scratch, we've worked with others that have some good foundational pieces in place and some great staff that has a variety of skills. So everybody's got a different starting place of course but there should be positioning work. There needs to be, it's got to start with focus. There are very few manufacturers I have ever consulted that have said, you know, this is exactly who our audience is and that's it. It's usually, well, we serve eight different industry verticals and we've got customers who buy this big stuff and then customers who buy all these little things and that's fine. I'm not necessarily discouraging that, that's more of an operational decision in a lot of ways but what I do believe is that from a marketing standpoint there needs to be focus. So you've got to zero in on who is the, where is there room for growth here, who is an ideal customer that is profitable, who are the buying process influencers. Let's deeply understand them through customer interviews and through talking to our sales team that interacts with them and then let's position ourselves accordingly, let's develop a value proposition that speaks to them. Along with positioning there's going to be developing a content strategy. How do we create a bank of content that is going to speak to the things that those people care about. Getting foundational pieces of your website in place. It's getting a technology stack in place. Let's get the CRM in place and configured the right way and make sure it's useful. Let's get a marketing automation system in place, let's get the right analytics systems in place. So your first few months are going to be foundational in nature and you're probably not going to produce any results frankly because unless you've got something running in the background that you've already been doing but you've got to take the time to get these pieces right or else nothing is going to work right down the road. So that's a tough stage to get through a lot of times. Once some of that stuff is good enough, I'm a huge fan of continuous improvement, nothing has to be absolutely perfect because you can always be making it better but once those core foundational pieces are in place and they're good enough, now we can start moving into the things that are going to start producing, generating those or moving those KPIs upward that are going to lead to the business outcomes you're looking for. So you might be four months into a program and now all of a sudden you're starting to really focus on the creation of content and then the distribution of that content. But now you're maybe six months in and as you get into that second half of your first year of a new program, you should start to see what I would refer to as meaningful business outcomes starting to take shape. And then as you move into the second year, now you're probably under the assumption that you're doing things right. You're constantly just improving this machine. You're looking at the data, you're interpreting that data, you're making decisions about how to make changes to your program at a macro and micro level and you're feeding all that back into the system. So it just becomes, at that point, it becomes sort of cyclical and you're just learning and improving at all times. So I think it's time that the manufacturing sector starts to shift its mindset around A, the role that marketing should play in business development. It's not just about creating materials to support sales and building a nice brand image. We got to get to the point where manufacturers are thinking about marketing as an engine to produce pipeline for the sales team. And then we've got to measure if that's actually happening. We can't just be focused on traffic or leads generated or rankings in search engines as the results on which we are going to measure the impact of marketing. These are things that will ultimately contribute to business being generated and so we can't stop there. We got to connect the dots and marketing needs to be held accountable for producing these business outcomes.