Maia Morgan Wells:
Welcome to The Marketing Hero podcast. I'm your co-host, Maia Morgan Wells.
Chris Strom:
And I'm your co-host, Chris Strom.
Maia Morgan Wells:
We are excited to start bringing guests back to The Marketing Hero, and this time we're talking with Travis Johnson, who looks after marketing operations at Velo3D. It's a metal 3D printing solution. Really cool. They do mission-critical parts that are used for space exploration, to enhance transportation efficiency, and to produce cleaner energy.
Chris Strom:
For their marketing operations, on the technical side, they're running Salesforce and Marketo, and probably a couple other things plugged in there as well. And so we're going to get into all the details of the tech stack and the data flows and how they connect with each other and how they manage them altogether.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Yes, we can't wait to get into some of those real-world marketing operations examples. And hey, Travis, welcome to the show.
Travis Johnson:
Thank you so much. Great to be here. Great to be talking to you both.
Maia Morgan Wells:
So I'm going to put you in the hot seat with our very first question because we ask this of all of our guests here on The Marketing Hero. What's your favorite part of what you do?
Travis Johnson:
Yeah, and it's a great hot-seat question because I've been doing marketing ops for almost eight years, and I've also got previous military experience, sales experience. So there's a lot of different threads to pull on when I think about the best parts of my current job. I think for me it's always centered around being able to set other people up for success. So that kind of lends itself to marketing operations really well and that I just love being able to work through our infrastructure, make sure our data's reliable, using that data to mold a story depending on who we're talking to, and using that story and working with, whether it's individual contributors, department heads, company leadership, being able to work with them to make sure they're set up for success and do their job well.
At my core, I am not an attention seeker. I don't go out and seek attention or awards or anything. So being able to work with other people who might be more so inclined fits my skillset and personality better. I also think being able to mentor newer marketing ops people, training people in marketing automation, CRM, even the philosophy of marketing ops has always been really rewarding to me.
Maia Morgan Wells:
And so on our show, Travis, we talk a lot about software marketing. And so this is a little bit of a different field for us. Can you tell us just a little bit more about the company and what it does before we dive deeper into the tech?
Travis Johnson:
Basically, we're an additive manufacturing company. So yeah, very different from the traditional B2B SaaS stuff that I've been working on and probably a lot of listeners have been involved with. So we derive a lot of revenue from the sale of our 3D metal printers, which we call our Sapphire line of products. So basically what we're setting out to do is reducing lead time.
You think about traditionally manufactured parts for the space industry, for energy sector, for oil and gas. In some cases, we try to reduce that lead time up to upwards of 75%, give people who acquire these machines kind of the flexibility to be able to respond to demands, be able to test and print their own part. So if you look on our website, some of the companies we've worked with are a startup named Launcher in the space industry, Upwinging Energy in the energy sector, Aerojet Rocketdyne. So a few different industries. But yeah, our sweet spot's kind of like space and energy, oil and gas, that kind of thing. So we IPO'd late in 2021, so we've been public now for a couple years.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I've heard people talking about additive printing or, I guess, 3D printing for space in particular just because there's no traditional manufacturing assembly line in space. Someone on the space station needs a new wrench. Getting a new wrench to them from a plant in Ohio takes an entire rocket launch to get there.
Travis Johnson:
There's a lot of unique use cases and yeah, it's stuff like that. You think of the most specialized part or application that somebody could need. So trying to solve that problem of scalability, deliverability, and being able to allow these OEMs that kind of freedom.
Chris Strom:
Cool. Thanks for sharing a little bit about what Velo3D does as a company. Can you give us a rundown of the main elements of basically the platforms and the tech stack that you're running it all on?
Travis Johnson:
So definitely Marketo and Salesforce kind of being the backbone of everything. So we also leverage LeanData. We use their lead routing capability and also Lead-to- Account Matching. We also employ Drift on our website, ZoomInfo for database enrichment and prospecting, researching, outreach for sales enablement. Monday.com for marketing project management. There's a couple of other teams here that also use Monday, but mainly a tool for marketing to be able to manage projects and campaigns and keep people accountable to timelines.
Harmonic's a point solution we use for video editing, content editing. And then also on the digital side, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen. So it's one of the smaller, I think more consolidated tech stacks I've worked with. And we're a smaller organization too, we're under 300 people. So I've definitely been in much more complicated environments, but I think here we've got a pretty good consolidation of the problems that we were trying to solve and the technology to do that.
Chris Strom:
I am assuming that Salesforce is the foundational platform or the primary source of truth and everything else connects in from there.
Travis Johnson:
Salesforce is the primary source of truth. Yeah, definitely foundational for us. They've used that as the CRM, I think from the beginning pretty much, at least from the beginning of the sales team being built out. Everything connects in through there. And us being additive manufacturing, we don't have necessarily product data warehouse, that kind of stuff. So everything is kind of like Salesforce centric, even customer information. We do have some print data reporting that happens in our Assure platform, but yeah, we use Salesforce for all of that kind of reporting.
Chris Strom:
Are you talking about in terms of the manufacturing process? Are you managing that through Salesforce as well?
Travis Johnson:
A little bit. So when we talk about Assure and Flow, we kind of try to combine the hardware element of it. So the 3D printers that we sell, the metal printers, but Assure and Flow, Flow being our printer preparation software that basically prescribes the manufacturing process and then Assure kind of gives the calibration results. So if you're thinking about geometric accuracy, surface finish, probably other things that are on the product side that are way over my head, but those kinds of things get reported in Assure. And so there are some things that happen in that platform that we report on that don't happen in Salesforce. But if we're talking about assets in the field, number of printers, types of printers, people are asking, current customer list, things like that, that's all in Salesforce.
Chris Strom:
So you're running a lot of stuff in your Salesforce org. Can you tell us about basically the data architecture of it, what sort of objects you're running in it and what relationships between the objects you're running to manage all that?
Travis Johnson:
Yeah. When we think about on the customer side, so we've got the accounts and then that's going to be linked to the opportunities. So I talk a lot about system opportunities because that's our revenue, that's our pipeline. That's what we're really looking at to drive those numbers.
But we also have this other side of it, so the part opportunities as well. So again, in cases where there's one part, if we're maybe developing a proof of concept that's going to turn into a system later down the line, one or two or three years down the line, sometimes that'll open up with a singular part. Like say a company wants to just make a heat exchanger. That's all we want to do right now. We don't want to buy a printer. We don't want to do any of this. So okay, part opportunity, heat exchanger, link to account A.
We also, again, we're a smaller organization, so I think the oversight is a little easier in that we work directly with our sales team to do the best we can to connect leads, convert to contacts, convert to opportunities, and be able to understand what marketing events, what content engagement is influencing those opportunities.
We have a sales ops director who runs a lot of that on the sales side, but I work with her very closely and she's been here longer than I have. But all of those on the Salesforce side are kind of interconnected and we really divide it out into regions. So we've got our European five or six regions there. We've got our North America five sales regions there. And ideally a sales director is one-to-one with each region. And so we can kind of list out here's the customer accounts, here's the prospect accounts and the assets, opportunities, contacts, marketing campaigns, everything that's kind of associated to those.
Chris Strom:
Okay. So you have your opportunities and then you have an assets object and each record, asset record is one of the parts or systems that you've sold.
Travis Johnson:
Yep. Yep. Each asset will be aligned to that, and then within that asset it'll be, say we've got four or five different product lines of printers. So asset will be Sapphire or XC or Sapphire XC 1MZ, just the different names we ascribe to those. And of course tasks and events as well. So being able to track sales communications, meetings, all those kinds of things as well.
Chris Strom:
So you associate the assets with the opportunity objects, and then after the sale you associate the assets to the account objects so you know which customers have which products?
Travis Johnson:
Yep, 100%.
Chris Strom:
Do you run any sort of warranty or maintenance programs through Salesforce as well?
Travis Johnson:
Our customer success team and our field service engineers, those notes are made in Salesforce. There's the sentiment system that they run. So yeah, here's everybody who's green. And then depending on the service level agreement, all the other information pertaining to who the field service engineers assigned, what kind of program response times, things like that.
Chris Strom:
Can you tell us about the marketing processes and the marketing-to-sales handoff part that you're overseeing?
Travis Johnson:
We're not a B2B SaaS company, but we're trying to build the type of demand generation engine that's emulated in a lot of those companies. When I joined, it was let's get for us, Marketo set up, let's get everything integrated with Salesforce, but we're also trying to build out our SDR team at the same time. As the marketing team, we're trying to understand how we can best build our process, and we're bringing along our growing SDR team and bringing that in-house to understand how we can best work with sales to get the most qualified leads and accounts over to them.
So at the ground level, it was really a discussion around, okay, here's all the different kind of acquisition channels on the marketing side that we're investing in. Based on past results, we know that the trade shows we're going to are going to be a majority of the sales interactions and things like that. But we also have digital advertisements that we're running, kind of ABM events, specific prospects, accounts, roadshow type things that we're doing. We have content and white papers and case studies.
It was really kind of building out an experimental lead model and getting to a version 1.0 of a lead scoring model. I joined in June of 2022, and we've already been through a couple iterations of what we think the lead scoring model should look like. And now we're going through it again. We just recently hired an EVP of sales and we're trying to restructure things a bit.
So I think that kind of lead flow was at the center of everything. Let's make sure we can all see what's happening there and why it's happening. Give the organization transparency into that, and also give the organization transparency into what's converting and what isn't. I think from a marketing perspective, I've always tried to build that trust on that and work to make that better. Now we're at a point where we've got our lead scoring model pretty locked in. We're being able to get specific to regions and tinker with it. So we've been able to get, I think as sophisticated with it as budget and time allows and we're just trying to build that trust with sales.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Are there any roadblocks that you've encountered? I'd love to know more about that interpersonal aspect of it.
Travis Johnson:
One advantage that we have is our CEO and our CMO are very aligned, and our CEO is very supportive and bought into what marketing does, and he also understands there are some things that are more measurable than others. So we kind of have an advantage off the bat in that we've got a very progressive CEO in that manner. So in addition to that kind of cultural trust coming from our CEO, we'll work directly with sales. We just had a big trade show last week, so we'll have a debrief and say, "What do you guys think went well? Let's look through all the lead scans and understand. If there's 500 leads, we don't want to send everything. Let's have marketing nurture 85 to 90% of it because it's going to be longer tail stuff anyway. And then you guys can kind of pick out what you're most excited about."
As we built the SDR team, we were very prescriptive and specific about what we potentially wanted the SDR team to have visibility on, and consequently what kind of meetings the SDR was setting up with sales.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Travis, I want to know a little bit more about attribution and how that affects your relationship with sales and probably helps you to determine which 85% you're going to put back to marketing and who are you going to put through to sales at that time?
Travis Johnson:
Yes, 100%. We've looked at a couple of different types of models. In terms of pipeline-specific, we've looked at multi-touch, first touch, last touch. We've gone through a couple of different iterations. I think it's really trying to ask as many high-level questions as we can and get those kind of answers.
So when I think about our sales cycle, even from opportunity create, our best case scenario is that's going to close within 12 months. So if you kind of zoom out from there, if you just look at first touch, first lead created in the database, whether it's from marketing, whether it's from sales, whatever, I mean we could be looking at a three-year cycle from start to finish to opportunity wins. So I think the multi-touch just evenly weigh everything out.
We produce certain types of white papers, certain types of technical papers, material data sheets. So there's very, very specific types of use cases that certain industries and companies might want to work with. We know going in different types of content are going to resonate. As we get closer to the end game, these material data sheets and product briefs really resonate, whereas at the very beginning it's like, "Okay, well, this case study, this white paper, let's map this to the funnel."
If I think about the lead scoring question, we take that data and back it out to where we know these things have won before. So trade shows are heavily weighted, and those kind of get fast-tracked to sales a lot in some cases. Certain content engagements. We have our accounts tiered out, like here's our tier one accounts. Somebody gets matched to one of those. There's the demographic thing. You're going to get plus X amount of points if you're matched to a tier one account, if you have a certain job title, if you're in a certain industry, if you're in our kind of ideal customer profile. That's 50% of it. Then the other 50% being, well, okay, they downloaded this piece of content, they downloaded this case study, they interacted with this white paper. So there's the behavioral side of it too.
So it's rough. But we try to kind of match that lead scoring model to where we know pipeline's been produced in the past and just get as close to that as possible. It's definitely not anywhere near perfect.
Maia Morgan Wells:
That's the name of the game in marketing. Get it as close as you can and try to measure as much as you can, but it's never going to be perfect.
Travis Johnson:
Yes.
Chris Strom:
I'd love to hear more about your specific process for how you define the attribution touchpoint and then see how it contributes or influences closed-won opportunities.
Travis Johnson:
Compared to places I've worked at before, it's definitely a lot more trade show-centric than I've been experienced with. So our marketing budget heavily weighted toward trade show investments and finding the right events to get to. What we look at in our systems, the lead process, okay, everything's got an MQL reason, so MQL reason being the campaign, MQL reason channel being a trade show. So usually it overlaps with acquisition, but sometimes somebody will download something off our website. So acquisition will be content, MQL reason will be trade show. So there can be some differences there like that.
But anything with that MQL reason after a trade show, as we're going through with sales and they point to the top tier things that they want to follow up with, I'll disposition those into our sales review stage based on our lead flow. So we'll skip by the SDRs, they'll directly get those, and then that'll have that MQL reason stamped.
So once that converts to an opportunity, ideally convert that to an opportunity. Primary campaign source is going to be that specific trade show. We can go in at the end of the year, look at all of our system opportunities and say, "Here are the ones that we know came from trade shows that sales directly converted, and additionally here's the dollar amounts associated to those," and compare that to our total pipeline. So we can say a trade show contributed X number of opportunities and Y dollar amount to pipeline generated.
And then to your point about closed won, we have to go back into the archives a bit because, again, our sales cycle tends to be very lengthy. But we at this point can go back and look at our 2022 trade shows. They're like, "Okay, by this point, most everything in our systems probably won or closed lost." So we can say these ones contributed the most directly to closed-won revenue. So that's kind of the tier one. Using that primary campaign source, using that MQL reason.
So it's associated the opportunity record in terms of the primary campaign source and the MQL data that we bring in that stamps to the opportunity. But there's also the campaign list that we can look at too. So if we're looking at the multi-touch attribution, then we can see the multiples. For trade shows, we generally are looking at just the primary campaign source on the ops. So we're saying like, "Okay, this op was created seven days after the trade show. If it wasn't for the trade show, this probably wouldn't have been created." So in that case, we are looking at just that one last touch data point.
We don't have a ton of data points, so there's not a million companies looking to buy a $5 million printer. So here for us, it's like, "Okay, well, if you're creating a reasonable number of opportunities, let's go through appropriate contact roles, and then we can see all of the campaign attribution." So we have an unfair advantage there. And I know it's not always going to be the case where the contact role discussion goes that smoothly, but since we do have a limited number of opportunities that we're working with and a reasonable data set, we are able to work with sales to make sure those contact roles are on there, and generally we can see everything they engaged with at the campaign level.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Do you have any advice for people that might want to do more of the operation side of things in marketing?
Travis Johnson:
I feel very lucky to have kind of gotten into this seven, eight years ago because it's all over LinkedIn now. Revenue operations especially has become such a valued thing. But as far as advice, what worked for me, I got into it from the campaign execution perspective. So if you think about the pillars of marketing operations, you can kind of divide it out into you're doing campaigns or you're doing the technologist side of it, the data science side of it, and then the strategy side of it.
So for me, it was all campaign. I was living in Marketo, I was living in Salesforce, building out campaigns, building emails, building landing pages, all those kinds of things. So it really helped me understand how marketing automation and CRM talked to each other. If you're more of a builder, maybe a little more on the introverted side, for me I really appreciated just being able to go in and explore all that kind of stuff.
But I do think too, there's so many other opportunities. I mean, even the technology side. Scott Brinker does his Martech. So it's Martech 11,000 now. There's basically 11,000-plus Martech platforms out there. So kind of find a way to get familiar with something, let's say here's all your ABM platforms. I don't know anywhere close to all of them, but I know one or two of them pretty well. Same thing with marketing automation. I think I started out like, "Oh, I just want to learn Marketo and do that." But once I got into HubSpot, it's like, "Oh, well actually, I kind of want to get good at multiple of these. If you can get really good at a couple of pieces of software within each major category, you can carry that over.
One of the things I've been noticing for marketing ops jobs is that people are asking a lot more for the data science side of it, like SQL. Do you know SQL? Do you know R? Do you know Python? I've been resisting that for as long as I can. I don't think I can anymore. So I'm like, "Okay, I'll take a SQL course. I'll try to apply some of this. I'll try to get familiar with this database coding language." So for me, that's been an upskilling thing that I've committed to. But again, there's so many different kind of threads you can pull on.
The marketing ops communities and the revenue ops community at large is very supportive. I learned the most from my first boss and him having the patience of a saint as I asked him a million questions every day. So I try to pay that forward.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Well, Travis, thank you for joining us on The Marketing Hero podcast. We appreciate hearing all about how things are set up at Velo3D. And we hope to see you on LinkedIn someday.
Travis Johnson:
Appreciate you both. Thank you.
