Chris Strom:
Welcome back to the Marketing Hero Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strom. On today's episode, I'm talking with Kristina McConnell. She's currently director of Demand and Marketing Operations at H1, a software and data company in the healthcare industry. Kristina is an expert in demand generation, ABM, and in marketing leadership. And today we're focusing on the details of marketing operations at H1. We'll talk up and down the pipeline, including real examples of how Kristina approaches marketing ops. So let's dive right in.
Kristina, welcome to the show.
Kristina McConnell:
Hi, Chris. It's wonderful to be here.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, glad to have you on here. Can you give us a brief intro of what H1 does specifically, and then after that we'll talk about the customer journey.
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, so H1, it's like a data platform for the life sciences industry. So we help med affairs and clinical operations with the whole drug development life cycle. So from clinical trials all the way to the marketing of that drug to customers, to patients. So just making sure that the right drugs are coming out to help patients and helping with patient outcomes and the future of healthcare.
Chris Strom:
So who are your target customers and what is their customer journey lifecycle look like?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, so we have two major products. One is our clinical operations side of the house and the other is our medical affairs. For this conversation, I'll focus on the medical affairs piece of things to make it a little simpler. So a lot of times the customer journey is initial awareness stage. Something that we really focus on is helping support diversity within clinical trials and for drug development. So what a lot of people are not aware of is a lot of drugs are not being tested on a diverse population, so then the drug comes out, but it hasn't been tested on the right diverse population that might need to use the drug, and now if there's any complication. So part of what we are trying to do is promote diversity within clinical trials and direct development.
So anyway, as that's a subject that we really focus on, part of our marketing and campaigns have been around diversity last year in really helping companies realize the FDA guidelines around creating diversity within their clinical trials. And so a lot of our campaigns at the start of the journey is a lot of awareness of why that's critical and why that's so important for these companies. So we have some leads that we'll get from digital advertising and LinkedIn ads and just hop a funnel, okay, these people are aware and then we need to now take them through a nurture and different campaigns and outreach to help make sure they understand the story to now be able to hand off to a sales rep and lead to conversion and lead to the final sale and them bringing on a platform like H1.
So that's just an example that's really specific on some campaigns we ran last year, but that would be an example of how that journey, the snippet of that awareness to bringing them through different content and different campaigns based on where they are as we continue to touch these contacts and then handing over to sales.
Chris Strom:
So I know with some types of businesses, say you're at a plumbing company business, people, something breaks in their house and they're like, "Oh, I need a plumber. Let me go find a plumber." And so there's types of businesses where you don't need to worry about awareness, you just need to be there when they're looking. But for you all, it sounds like awareness is a huge part of what you're doing because you're introducing awareness of the problem that they didn't know or introducing awareness of what they were overlooking that they didn't realize they were overlooking.
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, no, that's a really good point because in our industry, they're creating clinical trials. Pharma companies are launching drugs, but the speed to market is something that we impact, the way that they go about it and automate some of the way that they sift through data. H1 has a data platform, we call it the LinkedIn for doctors because we're able to put the right information in the hands of medical affairs to be able to go and connect with doctors to educate them on new drugs that come to market. So because of that, like you're saying, they're doing these things, but the way that we can enhance their processes is night and day, but helping them understand that is what we try to train the market on. This is why something like this is so needed for what you do day and day out.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. So awareness building is a big part of it. And then from there, out of that audience of people, is the goal to get a couple of hand raisers from there to talk further about buying from H1 to assist in this?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, it's a longer cycle because it's a software data platform. So there's a lot of different people involved usually. So we might have that initial interest of, "Hey, I want to increase diversity or I want... Now we have AI within our platform that helps with drug development." So man, that's great. Our goal is to get the lead, but then also to get them to want to schedule a demo. A lot of times our technology speaks for itself and you get on the call and they can see the impact and be able to see the data that they could leverage, that starts that conversation with sales to be able to start all the follow-up conversations of bringing in the right people at the table and just accelerates the desire to have a platform like ours. So yeah, it's that initial awareness, getting the lead, nurturing the lead to being ready to get a demo or talk to sales, having that sales conversation, and then continuing to develop that relationship.
Chris Strom:
And so as part of that, when you're executing these campaigns and then you go to measure the effectiveness, what are some of the specific goals and KPIs that you measure for? Are you measuring MQLs or opportunity creation or even just brand awareness and impressions? What sort of things do you measure?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah. So there's kind of buckets. At the end of the day, revenue and generation of opportunities is the most important thing that we measure because at the end of the day, if we have the best conversion rates on our LinkedIn ads and tons of brand awareness but no proven deals coming out of marketing efforts, it's hard to really show the value. So we've done a pretty robust reporting and in depth analysis and backend of just developing reporting that really proves the ROI of the marketing efforts that we've done.
It was an exciting year last year because we were able to show to leadership where the investment was bringing in generated opportunities to sales conversions and pipeline and revenue, which we were able to get more marketing investment from. So I think that's the pinnacle of proving the value from a revenue standpoint. And then of course, we also look at for brand awareness, our website visits, our social media engagement, followers, ad performance. So those are all really important metrics for us and marketing to continue optimizing our channels.
And of course, as brand awareness is super important because like I said, we need to teach the market why they need a service like this or a platform like this, but lead at the end of the day, what brings in the ability for us to talk to someone, leading to an opportunity or two revenues. So leads become another crucial point, so MQLs and the progression. So we'll track not only an MQL coming in, but the different stages that they're in. So like the MQL to SAL marketing qualified leads to sales accepted leads is a really important conversion because marketing can say all day, "We're bringing great leads," but if sales isn't accepting these leads and saying they're quality, then you're going to have a sales team that's not partnered with us and excited about the lead that we're bringing in.
So we really strongly focus on bringing quality over just we have a ton of leads for you and we're just making the sales reps follow up on things that are dead opportunities.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I know. When you have the two different teams working in a handoff like that, having a common definition is so important. So what's the definition of an MQL? So you do MQL to SAL, or sales accepted lead to opportunity creation?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah. So we have MQL, then it goes to sales accepted leads, and then an opportunity from there. The definition, so marketing, so we'll get a lead in, and then marketing needs to qualify that it's a qualified lead. And then sales when we do that handoff. So we have a BDR team, which has been instrumental in the impact of marketing because they really bridge the gap from sales and marketing to help qualify some of these leads and pass them over to sales. So they take the first pass at leads that come in that are ready for that kind of outreach, and they have sequences and BDR outreach, phone, LinkedIn, email, and start to qualify which ones then get passed to our account executives.
So that's really bridge the gap because I've definitely worked places without a BDR team where account executives weren't following up on leads at the same timeliness that a BDR team would. So that's been kind of just huge results from getting a conference, getting back from a conference, getting all the leads and immediately having cadences go out and touching. There's a momentum that happens when you're going to an event or you have a LinkedIn ad that's out there and somebody's responding and they're interested. They want to talk to somebody soon. So the speed to connecting with the lead through BDRs has been really impactful. So they bridge that gap from that MQL to that SAL for us.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, because the accounting executives, I'm sure, hopefully their calendar is already pretty full with demos and proof of concept and working the pipeline. So sounds like that's why having a dedicated BDR team there to do more of the higher velocity first touch is so helpful.
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. How do you define what is or is not an MQL that goes over to them?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, so I'll pass through... A lot of times we'll get a lead in, but based on their title or if it's a company that's not really in our industry or if it's just... So yeah, really looking at our industry viable types of accounts, whether it's our target accounts or an account like that, those are really the ones that we're going to pass on. Anything else that's coming in that's just kind of interest in learning, but not really from a company that we would work with, we're not going to pass on to the BDRs or to AEs.
Chris Strom:
So you're looking at, say you're running an event or a webinar or something and you look at all the attendees and then you're running them through a CRM system and identifying them by company size and industry and job title and things like that?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Strom:
And then do you all have a timeframe you shoot for once someone becomes an MQL, do you have a timeframe you try to get the BDR team to contact them within?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah. So within 24 hours, we're looking to have some type of touch coming from our BDR team. Unless it's the weekend of course.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. 24 hours. One business day?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, but one business day.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, that makes sense. And then the BDR team reaches out to them and if they say no, "Not interested," they move on. And if they say, "Yes, I'd like to learn more," than what happens after that?
Kristina McConnell:
If they're not interested, but they're still a viable account and a viable contact, we'll pull them into some marketing nurture. So I'm really close with the BDRs that were... And our systems are interconnected to where we can pull them back into a different campaign because maybe they're not ready for sales, but maybe we don't want to not speak to them at all. But those that are ready for sales, that's when an AE will come in. The BDR might host the initial call, but then bring the BDR in or the AE in to start connecting with that individual.
Chris Strom:
Does the BDR, can they book directly on the AE's calendar?
Kristina McConnell:
I think so. I'm not as connected with that part of the process, but I think so.
Chris Strom:
Oh, sure. Okay, but in any case, the handoff is there. If they talk to the BDR and they say, "Yes, I'd like to learn more," then the opportunities created and the account executive takes it from there?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Strom:
All right, cool. I think that gives us a good idea of the process that you've set up for all of this. And so moving on from process leads into from there, the systems and the data that you're running the process on, can you tell us about your marketing and tech stack and how you have that all connected?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, absolutely. So Salesforce is our foundation. That's our true north. That's where the data hub is. From there, we do use HubSpot and integrate within Salesforce. And so there's connectors there where if we're running an email from HubSpot or landing pages or any other lead gen efforts, the right lead sources and the lead source details will funnel into Salesforce. So it's really clear all the attribution. I'm getting into that side a little.
But the other piece is... So those are those two. And then SalesLoft are our BDR's team use for all of their outreach efforts. It's really involved to where you can add in LinkedIn touches, the phone call, the email. So they'll build those type of sequences from there. We've used Dealfront, we're actively using it right now, which enables us to see our website visitors and see who's coming to the website. So that's been used from an ABM approach. From an ads perspective, we use everything from Google, LinkedIn, AdRoll to programmatic advertising. We do some third party ads as well. Different platforms there. And then Semrush is a tool we'll use for our SEO side. So our tech stack from an operational standpoint is pretty lean, mainly Salesforce and HubSpot. And then a lot of our other technology is to run all of our campaigns.
Chris Strom:
That sounds pretty manageable. You don't have 12 different programs all plugged into Salesforce. We are looking at one company's data the other week where they had six different phone number fields on their contact records because they had six different data enrichment tools all creating fields in the system.
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah. I forgot about those two because we do have ZoomInfo and Sales Nav that enrich data for us.
Chris Strom:
Okay, cool. And then so when you're running the demand gen campaigns, they're coming to HubSpot landing pages probably. And then HubSpot sends them over to Salesforce and creates leads in Salesforce from them?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, exactly. So it's bidirectional. So we have all the data living in HubSpot as well for the leads, but they're also getting paths over to Salesforce. And that enables us within HubSpot to either create our audiences within HubSpot for ABM, which is a really cool feature of that, or run specific email campaigns from HubSpot. There's different ways that we can then use that data that's also getting linked to Salesforce, but all the data living in Salesforce is really important because our priority is that sales has full exposure into how these contacts are interacting with campaigns and marketing. So if a sales rep is trying to talk to a specific contact and there's already been five campaigns that they've been a part of and they're downloading specific resources, those are all key points for the sales rep to know and be able to use in their messaging knowing what types of information have been relevant to them.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. Yeah, I agree. What sort of data and attributes do you try to pass from HubSpot to Salesforce, especially in terms of attribution examples like web analytics, UTM tags, self-reported attribution or other custom things like that?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah. So every lead that comes in is going to have a lead source and a lead source detail. So that's going to tell us the exact channel that it came from. So for example, if it was LinkedIn, it's going to tell you it was from LinkedIn. And then we'll also explain which campaign it was. So that was from a case study about X, Y, and Z. So those things are always on our MQLs. And then it's also going to get tied back to a specific campaign. So let's say it was a paid social ad for this case study. When you go into the campaign, you can see what the ad looked like, what the details of the campaign are, what the person received. And so that gives you the really granular view of what they actually interacted with.
In terms of web analytics, we have very basic. A lot of that doesn't flow straight into Salesforce. A lot of that we just report out from Google Ads directly. I think the bigger... When it comes to awareness, we're really focused on the target accounts that are engaging with us and building awareness within those. So Dealfront, some of that reporting comes in and Dealfront tells us the website visits from specific target accounts. So that feels a little bit more relevant to us since that's where the team is focused on than just all web analytics. And then again, UTMs are a parameter that we use, especially when it's not built in. So if we want to track something that's not a HubSpot landing page that has all the attribution behind the form, then a UTM really helps to make sure we know where the source came from. So anytime that gets dropped off, then we'll use an UTM to keep it on the source.
Chris Strom:
So you're taking a lot of this data and kind of distilling it into a lead source property and a lead source detail property?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Strom:
I'd love to hear about the process you go through of distilling all of the different properties down into a standardized lead source and lead source detail field. Like in HubSpot, out of the box, there's like original source, latest source, original source drill down 1, drill down 2, latest source drill down 1, drill down 2, and then you can add additional custom fields if you're doing self-reported attribution or if you want to manually tag contacts other ways. So you can have a lot of different fields within HubSpot reporting different aspects of the attribution. And then you mentioned you have a field called lead source?
Kristina McConnell:
So the lead source is a dropdown for specific channels, and that way we can report consistently on all paid social, for example. We can pull and see all MQLs that come from paid social. And it's like you said, a dropdown. The details are completely an open field where you can just write in what the campaign is. And then we also have lead source original and lead source detail original. That enabled us to do that multi-touch attribution where they can see what they originally came from. So maybe it was a lead that came from a conference, but what actually opened the opportunity was when they came through a paid social, we have both the original and what they came through. And then within the account or within the contact, you can see every campaign that they responded to or engaged with.
Chris Strom:
Okay. I see. The lead source and lead source detail field is the most recent trigger that caused them to become an MQL. And then you also have the original lead source as an additional field.
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Strom:
All right. So that does the first touch and the last touch. And then do you try to do any sort of multi-touch attribution as well? Or do you find those two are generally pretty sufficient?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, those two tend to be pretty sufficient. We have some of the abilities to report on it if we wanted to go deeper and really start to see the multi-touch. There's a lot involved. Of course, the average person, it can take eight touches or eight campaigns to really turn into a sales lead. But we find that looking at the first and the last kind of helps us to gauge our channels by what turning into leads and opportunities.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I know. I've seen several cases where people get really excited about, "Oh, let's run a U-shaped model. Let's run a W-shape model." A lot of times the multi-touch models, not all the times, but a lot of times, they just end up reporting almost the same attributions as a single touch model shows.
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah. And at the end of the day, we really want to understand where did it first come through and what led to the conversion. So that kind of first touch and last touch help us to get those two parameters.
Chris Strom:
All right. So that's how you're doing a lot of the online channels. And then do you do much in the offline areas like billboards or print ads and medical journals or events and shows and things like that?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah. At this company, I don't specifically work on those elements at this company, but events is a huge part of our marketing. I do directly work with the events side of things, so we'll support event promotion and connection with our events team. But it is a big part of our campaigns because events is being able to meet in person. It is a big win in our industry and shake hands and build relationships. So from that side, the attribution is very similar for demand gen because we still have leads that come from the conferences. And my team will focus on getting those conference leads, uploading, making sure the right attribution of, did they have a demo at the conference, did they connect with anybody at the conference? Were they just an attendee? Are they an actual lead? Or what to attribute them as their response? And then make sure to get that over to our BDR team as quickly as possible for follow up. And our BDR team will follow up. That's I would say the main offline channel. And again, conferences is a big channel that we all are involved in at some level.
And then from a print and billboard standpoint, not so much. We've done some things in third party advertising and journals, but a lot of those things are also online as well as print. Some of that is we really focus in Salesforce on leads that we have engagement metrics, and we'll look at those for the success of a campaign. But at the end of the day, the leads that are coming through are the ones that we're going to be really focused on to nurture for sales.
Chris Strom:
All right, cool. A sidebar question as we're talking about campaigns and attribution, when you're doing campaign tracking, do you do it generally in Salesforce campaigns or are you doing it in HubSpot campaigns or are you using entirely different campaign measurement altogether?
Kristina McConnell:
For campaigns, a lot of times we'll look at the individual platform. So if it's LinkedIn, if it's Google, and then pull it into Excel or another BI tool, et cetera to analyze it. Some of it will flow into HubSpot, but I just find that some of the reporting, extracting from the individual platforms is a little bit easier to really manipulate the data and look at what we're wanting to analyze.
Chris Strom:
Okay, yeah. So you bring in some business intelligence tools to run reports on that. You all are running quite a bit of stuff in your marketing and sales teams over at H1. I know just keeping up with just the technological changes in digital marketing itself is that's an everyday learning activity. As you've been doing this over time, when you look back, what's one thing you know now that you've learned that you wish you knew when you were first starting out?
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah, I would say that marketing isn't an exact science. It's especially with campaigns and how you build things, you could even build a workflow different ways and it will work, but you learn with time the way that actually is the most optimized and cleaned up and the best for the process. So I think when I was first starting in my career, I was like, "I have to know everything about marketing." And so much of it is just as you go, as you build, as you launch campaigns and measure and analyze and then optimize, you realize, "Oh, this is how to improve this." But I think a lot of it's just jumping in the deep end and doing the work and learning as much as you can and starting to build and run campaigns and apply yourself into marketing. And it really is like that, I feel like learning on the job. The more you do, the more I feel like I learn about marketing every day.
That's the other thing, like you said, it's an evolving industry. It's constantly changing. There's new things with SEO now and Google. I think that's what's challenging, but exciting, is there's so much to keep up with and there's so much to continually know. I guess what I would tell my old self is, don't ever stop learning and don't ever feel like you're going to know it all or feel like you are just completely... You're just constantly learning and it's something that, it's a good, great part of our industry part. You're never bored.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, just know that you'll always be learning as you go, but also as part of that, don't feel like you have to know everything before you start. Just jump in and start doing it and have confidence that you'll figure it out as you go.
Kristina McConnell:
Yeah. And it's been amazing. At H1, our marketing team, we've been at the company, it was more of a startup. When we started, I want to say it's been about a year and a half, maybe two years. So been a lot of legwork to build. We have a lean tech stack. It was a lot of effort at the beginning to build all the infrastructure of our tech, get Salesforce integrated with HubSpot, with the other technology, get everything launched and which KPIs were going after in the metrics and all of it to work together. I'm really proud of our team. I think in the time that we've had, we've done a lot to build a really well-oiled machine and excited for the future and continuing to build upon the tech stack we have today, introducing new technology and automations and advancements, and continuing to see the ways that we can refine our operations and keep building and out.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I can tell from just talking here that you all are running a really well-oiled machine. So I really appreciate you taking the time to share the learnings of your journey and how you think about how to implement all of these different moving parts and how to measure them and how to track it as you go. So yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to join us on the Marketing Hero Podcast today. We appreciate the expertise and insights that you shared here.
Kristina McConnell:
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
