Episode Summary
Michelle Tilton fell in love with B2B marketing while working at a small boutique agency after college. It wasn’t the “glamorous B2C space” everyone else wanted to get into, but something pulled her in and she’s been in the B2B world ever since.
Now, Michelle works as the VP of Marketing at Infutor, a data solutions company that helps its clients better understand their customers through data. Michelle uses a multi-channel, multi-touch marketing approach to drive demand and integrates processes between marketing and sales to ensure a consistent, high-quality lead flow.
On this episode of Tech Qualified, Michelle talks about how Infutor nurtures different MQLs and the seamless handoff between its sales and marketing teams. She also shares about how she properly attributes lead data and the ways each team in her company works toward obtaining highly qualified leads and closing a higher percentage of sales.
Guest Profile
- Name: Michelle Tilton
- What she does: As the VP of Marketing at Infutor, a data solutions company that provides companies with consumer insight, Michelle grows Infutor's brand and creates digital content strategies to generate leads.
- Company: Infutor
- Noteworthy: "Revenue is king. Closing deals is king. How do we support that? … How do we go about supporting the sales organization in a way that helps them close deals? Our whole team is very closely aligned on that concept of success and those deals being closed regardless of who gets credit."
Key Insights
- Implement a multi-touch approach to know exactly where leads are coming from. There's always a question of attribution: does sales or marketing get credit? Michelle's team has invested a lot in marketing operations. "We do a multi-touch approach where percentages of different touchpoints are allocated based purely on data," Michelle says. Everything her team does includes a UTM tracking code so they can take the question of lead attribution out of the equation, ther alleviates tensions between marketing and sales.
- If Michelle could give herself one piece of advice when she started at Infutor eight years ago, it would be "don't wait for permission." Earlier in her career, she was always waiting on approval — she wouldn't take action unless something was approved by her seniors, even if it was a timely marketing piece. Now, she'll give those same seniors 24 hours to approve it and if she doesn't hear from them, she'll put it out anyway. "Be confident in what you're doing. Know that it's the correct move and, if someone is passionate about it, they'll get back to you in the time you've given them," Michelle says.
- Get ahead of market curves. Because the digital marketing industry is changing so quickly, one of its biggest challenges is obsolescence. A product created six months ago could be obsolete in six months from now, "so being able to get ahead of those market curves, understand where market demand is and work with teams to be able to bring that messaging to market quickly" is crucial for success.
Episode Highlights
- Driving demand with a multi-channel, multi-touch approach
“We have a multichannel, multitouch approach to drive demand across the board, so we do thought leadership in the form of public relations and analyst relations. It’s a key part of what we do to just build that brand credibility in a pretty noisy marketplace, but we have a strong focus on search engine optimization becoming more and more important to our organization. We do email nurture, webinars, podcasts, digital advertising … SEM/PPC has become a pretty big superstar for us recently and a little bit on the social media side, and then the big X factor in the room these days, which are trade shows.”
- Aligning the sales team with marketing goals
“[Sales development reps] did originally fall under sales and then sales operations. But, because we collaborated so closely on a regular basis with the SDR teams in terms of messaging and the types of leads coming in, where were they coming from, how warm were they, it made a lot more sense for them to partner with us a little closer on that handoff process. Over the past six or eight months, that change was made and it really has aligned both sales and marketing a lot closer to getting that lead, and that smooth transition through marketing over to the sales team.”
- Ask your clients how they're doing
“Every idea we have that’s coming from other departments, we have to run it through this filter of how will this be received by our clients. One thing we’ve found as a real benefit to that and taking this approach, and having a lot of buy-in to that approach, is we’ve asked our sales team to be even more explicit with our clients and asking them how they’re doing. That runs through our project management team, our production team, our account managers — we’ve asked them multiple times and we continue to do that, kind of like a broken record, and saying, ‘Please continue to let the marketing team know how our clients are doing.’”
- Meet with sales leadership teams on a regular basis
“We have regular meetings with sales leadership. We go over all of the question marks: where things stand, with trade shows being a big question this year, how do we get those leads coming through the door? How do we support sales? And when they’re not getting inbound leads and they’re outbound prospecting. I think it’s a real question of communication and alignment and leadership. So far it’s worked pretty well — I think there’s a very open relationship between our sales and marketing departments.”
- Always analyze lead quality data
“In our company, the way we look at it is: We met our lead goal, but what happened to those leads? Were they good leads? ’Cause you have that question mark. So we always try to get ahead of that question. We may be bringing in the leads, but are they converting? Which leads are converting? Which channels are converting? We want to get down to that granular level so that we know that the efforts we’re making are in total support of the sales organization, and that’s how we view it, through that lens. Not just the buck stops here, we just pass it over and good luck with the leads, and I’ve seen a lot of organizations operate that way.”
- Take marketing plans a month (or a week) at a time
“[Our biggest challenge] for the current environment is the lack of being able to execute on a previous plan, and everything going to the wayside and saying, ‘OK, we’re going to take this a month at a time instead of a year at a time, and we’re going to shift.’ And maybe it’s even two weeks at a time at this point because we’re shifting so quickly. So that pivot and that continual shift, to someone who’s always grown up with a marketing plan in front of her, or created one, or executed on one that is very well mapped out — that’s been a definite hurdle.”
