Chris Strom:
Welcome back to another episode of the RevOps Hero Podcast. Today we have our guest is Lauren Sanyal. She runs marketing operations at a company called Glia. So we'll be digging into marketing operations, connected to revenue operations, roles, data set up and all of that. Lauren, thanks for joining us.
Lauren Sanyal:
Thanks for having me.
Chris Strom:
All right, so we'll start off with talking a little bit about the company overall. So can you tell us what does Glia sell and who do you sell it to?
Lauren Sanyal:
Yeah, so Glia is a B2B SaaS company in the financial services space. We work with banks, credit unions, insurance companies to help them improve digital customer service, digital interactions with their customers on their websites. So we engage leaders focused on customer experience, digital experience, contact center, and innovation to help them transform these interactions with their customers.
Chris Strom:
So how do you go about marketing and selling to them? Can you tell us a little bit about your main go-to-market motions?
Lauren Sanyal:
Sure. We have a pretty diverse marketing mix with a great team that is turning out great campaigns. We have field marketing, we do a lot of trade shows and events, because it's so valuable for us to have those in-person conversations with our prospects and learning more about their workflows. We do a lot of events so we can have those meaningful interactions. We also have a strong digital marketing team that's focused on improving organic through SEO, SEM programs as well, content syndication. And we also work with a lot of trade publications to reach this important target market. We also do a lot of webinars, which are really valuable for us because we have a really strong content marketing thought leadership team as well. So we're able to add a lot of value through these webinars by giving our perspective and showing people what the platform can do.
Chris Strom:
So that's how you're going to market overall. From here, we can zoom in on the marketing operations team that you lead specifically. So can you tell us a little bit about the people and roles and structure of marketing ops?
Lauren Sanyal:
Sure. I think marketing operations at Glia is set up really well. It actually was one of the really interesting things to me that I learned when I started about the structure of the company, which is that marketing sits within RevOps. In the RevOps team we have different arms of the team that are focused on our strategic partners and the go-to-market organization. So in marketing ops my strategic partner is a chief marketing officer, head of sales ops, head of sales, head of client success and we also have sales enablement as part of our revenue operations function. And revenue operations and all the go-to-market teams report up to the chief operating officer. So that really fosters a lot of alignment both structurally. And the way that we are structured with our strategic partners, allows for a lot of great collaboration that supports our company goals as a whole.
On my team specifically, we have three marketing operations analysts who are focused on really great collaboration, communication, and support of the BDR team. We also provide data analytics through funnel dashboards we provide that are dynamic, Tableau data and information so that we can allow our marketing partners to make really data-driven decisions about where they're going to invest and where they're going to focus their next campaigns. We're also focused on execution for the marketing team. So we're processing all of these trade shows, we're adding these records to our database and making sure that we have clean information that is standardized and tagged in a really actionable way for our go-to-market teams. And then I'm also building out a campaign operations function to really help us improve execution. And to have someone who's expert in technology so that marketing can focus on building out their marketing plans and planning their next few steps, while campaign operations takes it across the finish line, make sure it's optimized for best practices and then reports the success of the tactics.
Chris Strom:
All right, so that's a little bit about how your team and your people are structured, but now we can go over and talk a little bit about the systems and the data structures and how you run all of that. I believe you all are running Salesforce and Marketo as your foundational systems and then with some other things added in as well, right?
Lauren Sanyal:
Yes. Yeah, Marketo really is the backbone of our go-to-market data engine. We have all of our forms that are embedded on our website are hosted in Marketo. So we're able to use Marketo as a lead management platform to make sure those are all flowing through to Salesforce. And we have that bi-directional sync set up so that that information is in the hands of the end users that need it with our BDR, with our sales teams, with our CSMs, and that we're able to track everything end to end. We also use it of course for our email touch points. For our nurturers, we have some triggered sense as well based on how this entered our system. For example, content syndication, we're making sure we're serving them with relevant content based on how they entered our database. So we use Marketo as that engine to help us get really sophisticated with our marketing. We also use 6sense to leverage intent data and run really sophisticated plays based on where they are in the buyer journey. That integrates with Salesforce and Marketo as well.
And then the other cornerstone is Full Circle Insights, which helps us with campaign attribution and helping us understand what's working well. And giving us good data on ROI and where we need to best invest in our programs.
Chris Strom:
On Marketo specifically, can you tell us a little bit about some of the types of campaigns and triggers and scoring that you're doing in it?
Lauren Sanyal:
Sure. So both drip nurtures and targeted nurtures we're doing there, we have our lead scoring program in Marketo. That's based on how we've defined what a response is. Is it a download of a white paper? And we have a score set for that. Is it did they register for a webinar? Did they attend our trade show and have a meaningful conversation with us? We have a pretty robust behavioral scoring program. We are building up some more foundations around our demographic data and our persona data. So we wanted to really focus our lead scoring on behavioral first so that when our profits are taking actions, we can assign score to that. And do some additional analysis on top of that, on the demographics that are coming into play.
Chris Strom:
You said you have a lot of the demographic scoring set up already, and so now you're focusing more on the behavioral side?
Lauren Sanyal:
It's more that we're still working on fleshing out the demographics just to provide more standards-
Chris Strom:
The other way around.
Lauren Sanyal:
Yeah. So we wanted to focus on behavioral first since those are concrete actions that our prospects and our customers are taking. So it's a really clear signal of where they are in terms of their intent.
Chris Strom:
And within Marketo, you're putting a lot of work and focus on syncing Marketo campaigns over to Salesforce campaigns. Can you tell us a little bit about how you're doing that campaign management and why?
Lauren Sanyal:
Yes. So one of the great things about Marketo is that you can set up every single Marketo program to sync to a Salesforce campaign. And so we make sure we have that across all of our Marketo lead management programs and content syndication integrations and all of the things that we have set up, we make sure everything is connected to a Salesforce campaign. And that's particularly important because of the campaign attribution platform we use, Full Circle Insights, requires everyone to be a campaign member at Salesforce. So by having that set up dynamically in Marketo, it ensures that our campaign member responses that are triggered are tagged and automatically synced over to Salesforce.
Chris Strom:
What's your typical structure and nomenclature for campaigns in terms of, is everything like a standalone campaign? Do you parent-child campaigns? Do you do different taxonomies of campaigns in different standard properties to segment them?
Lauren Sanyal:
Yeah, great question. So we do use parent-child campaigns specifically for our integrated campaign motions. So make sure we're aligned around the campaign theme and we can make sure we're hitting those goals. We also use it with, for example, for events that we have connected tactics that are happening. So maybe we have a whole strategy around a specific trade show where during the trade show we have a happy hour, or we have a breakout session, or we have a session on the main stage. So we want to make sure that we're tracking and tagging all of those tactics as well and rolling them up into the overall campaign for the event itself. We leverage a lot of the attributes on the campaign itself in Salesforce for some of the tracking and tagging, including things like industry segments. We track costs in the campaign as well so we can use it for our ROI calculations. But we also embed some of that information in the naming convention itself. So we know things like year, geography, who's the target audience, and then what is a description of the asset that we're using.
So we have some of the information built in there, so it could be really readable on a Tableau report, for example. But we also do use the attributes on the campaign itself to track the additional attributes that we want to measure without necessarily embedding it in the name itself.
Chris Strom:
Okay, so that's how you like to set up the campaign's object in Salesforce. And can you tell us a little bit about how you organize the rest of your data in Salesforce? Are you doing mostly the other standard objects as well? Are you doing any custom objects? Are you using different record types on the opportunities and contacts and things like that?
Lauren Sanyal:
Sure. We try to stick with the standard objects as much as possible. There are definitely exceptions where we need a custom object to be built for things like referrals is a good example, but we are account contact forward instance so we make sure we are adding as many things as contacts that are aligned to accounts as possible. We have processes, for example, when a form is filled out there's a Marketo form on our website that comes in as a lead. But we have processes with our BDRs and using tools like LeanData for lead to account matching and to help us convert those into known accounts, because we have a very well-defined ICP. And we want to make sure that we understand the people and the interest that's coming through and connecting that up to the accounts and our ICP.
Chris Strom:
What's your process and objectives for your lead to account conversion? Do you use the leads objects and how long do they stay a lead? How do you decide if and when to convert them to a contact and account or merge them into an existing one?
Lauren Sanyal:
So we use LeanData as a first pass to understand, hey, there's LeanData recommending the match account for this lead is X. And then we have some logic in LeanData that when we have high confidence that it matches an account in our ICP, we'll convert that lead to a contact. But if we don't have that high confidence, it's more kind of moderate confidence, it's something that we have an MQL, a marketing qualified lead that's still a lead in Salesforce, the BDR will review that, disposition the lead and convert it to a contact attached to the account if it's something that they're moving forward with. So we're both using LeanData and having kind of BDR review inform if it's someone we want to add into the database as a contact.
Chris Strom:
And then in Marketo, do you sync everyone over into Salesforce or do you only think MQLs and above over into Salesforce?
Lauren Sanyal:
We do think everyone into Salesforce for a couple of reasons, but we will remove from Marketo if we see that there is an invalid email. But we generally have Salesforce as our source of truth so that we store all the no longer at accounts and invalid emails there, while we're not hurting ourselves by emailing people that we already have signal or don't have a valid email address. So by default, we do think everything into Salesforce. Our BDR team also uses tools like Salesloft to prospect, and we have a pretty significant outbound motion as well to prospect into these accounts. So we want to make sure it's not just a MQL and forward approach. We want to make sure that we're also showing folks that are target contacts for these accounts.
Chris Strom:
So you're syncing everyone over into Salesforce and then you're bringing over the life cycle stage as a property on all of those, so like leads and MQLs and SQLs?
Lauren Sanyal:
Exactly. Yeah, we use a Forrester funnel to help us measure where people are in the funnel. We track marketing qualified leads, we track sales accepted leads, just track that followup is occurring. We track our meetings as sales qualified leads and then we track our opportunities. And when those are created, we consider those pipelines as our sales qualified opportunities.
Chris Strom:
Cool. That leads us into our next question actually, which KPIs do you typically track? So you mentioned the Forrester funnel. Can you talk about the different stages within there that you track?
Lauren Sanyal:
Yeah. So I'll just go one click deeper. So for marketing qualified leads, we consider that to be they've achieved a lead score of a 100 and they have an active campaign response. So they responded to one of our marketing campaigns in a significant way, and they've achieved that score of 100. And they can get there by highly qualified interactions like they've chatted with us at a trade show, we had a meaningful conversation, or maybe they attended a webinar and took another medium intent activity that will get them to 100. But then if they're also just browsing for a while, they could view six to eight pieces of content and then they become an MQL. So there are definitely multiple paths to get there. That's how we consider them a marketing qualified lead. And then we track SALs which are sales-accepted leads, and that's telling us, hey, this is being worked by a BDR, by an AE, by a CSM. We have a number of rules that are our assignment rules to make sure that we have thorough follow up happening soon after the MQL is triggered.
And in the mid-funnel, we're also tracking sales qualified leads which for us are meetings, which are generally meetings that the BDRs are setting for the AEs to have that discovery conversation. And then we have sales qualified opportunities to track pipeline that the BDRs and the AEs are really close in contact about. In addition to the different funnel stages, and we also have conversion rates that we're monitoring as well as velocity so we can understand how fast people are moving through the funnel and how that relates to the length of the sales cycle as well. I'll say one of the things that our marketing team really likes that we've set up is we built a funnel dashboard using Looker Data Studio, and it tracks how many MQLs, SALs, SQLs SQOs we received for that period, and then how close we are to being on track to our goal. So it's something that they go and refresh. A member of my team built that and it's awesome. And it's a blended inbound outbound funnel so that we're able to see the marketing efforts driving inbound, but also the BDR efforts driving outbound.
Chris Strom:
So if they go to one webinar or they sign up for a newsletter or something like that, maybe they're just a regular lead but not yet a marketing-qualified lead?
Lauren Sanyal:
Right. They have to have the 100 points. And we want to make sure we have a very strong signal that they're going to convert in order to get them the 100 points. So we look at the intent level of the channel and the content itself.
Chris Strom:
And then once they hit the 100 points, then that marks their life cycle as a marketing qualified lead. And then from there, the BDRs choose which marketing qualified leads they want to follow up with and mark them as sales accepted at that point?
Lauren Sanyal:
Yes, if they reach MQLs they're all reviewed by BDRs, or depending on other attributes they might be followed up with by an account executive. Like for example we have an open opportunity with them and then they engage with us, maybe they attend our webinar and are looking around more on our website, we'll give the AE a heads-up because they're already in conversations with us. But if they're a free opportunity, then the BDR is doing all that follow up and prioritizing fast follow up.
Chris Strom:
And then when they book a meeting, whether it's the BDR booking a meeting or maybe sometimes when they prospect themselves requests a meeting booking, then you mark them as a sales qualified lead.
Lauren Sanyal:
Yes.
Chris Strom:
And then what point do you convert the lead object into an opportunity object in Salesforce?
Lauren Sanyal:
Yeah, so it depends on the outcome of the call that they have with the account executive. We look at things like pain, priority and timing. And if we have those, then we open it up as an opportunity and based on the other notes that we receive during the meeting itself to identify if we have clear next steps and this could be a deal.
Chris Strom:
So you create the opportunity after the first call, you use the first call to qualify them first and then only at that point create the opportunities?
Lauren Sanyal:
Yeah, that's correct.
Chris Strom:
All right, so we talked through some of the key life cycle stages and the triggers for those stages. And then the next step from there is attributing the life cycle stages back to the marketing activities. So can you tell us about how you do your marketing revenue attribution?
Lauren Sanyal:
Sure. And it's not just marketing attribution. We have the tools in place to measure attribution across the whole go-to-market organization. For my role specifically, we're focused on marketing to make sure that we're giving feedback back to the marketing team on how their campaigns are performing. We use Full Circle Insights, which sits natively within Salesforce to measure this attribution. We've been using them about a year and a half now, and we are able to have really good control over what Glia considers a response, what GLIA wants to enter into attribution. And then tweaking our model if something is looking like it's not accurate. So this is something that we've done to make sure we have the right mix. So the way the Full Circle works is by looking at the campaign membership and do you have campaign responses? So if you have a campaign response and a marketing campaign, that is entered into the attribution model.
And so we spend some time with them kind of fine-tuning what we want the model to look like and what accurately represents our organization. There are a number of different models to start with. I'll tell you what we consider, which is there's the last touch model which only tells us what's the last thing they did before they became pipeline, but doesn't tell you kind of the earlier stages of their engagement. And we understand that all of these things have a cumulative effect and they all build upon each other. So we want to understand the full picture so we can understand the true efficacy of these campaigns. So there's also an account even spread model. So we looked at that as well. And what that does is it looks at all the activities across an account and gives them equal weighting no matter what they did or how they engaged.
And that wasn't quite right for us either. And we ended up going with an account weighted model. And so we wanted to look across the life of the account, across all the outreach we've done with them, who is engaging, what types of things are they responding to, and also looking at the time that it's taken to get there. Even with the deals we have closing this year, we saw the first time we engaged with them was in 2017. So it's really helpful to see what that journey looks like for some organizations, especially when there can be a longer cycle in B2B SaaS. So the way we structured our account weighted model is we looked at what are our higher intent channels? So things like webinars and trade shows, those are really high intent campaign responses versus maybe a response to an email nurture which has lower intent. So we went to make sure that we were balancing our point values in the model with the intent of the channel, but also how impactful the campaign is.
And as a thought leadership campaign, are we showing a top of the funnel asset versus the middle of the funnel asset? So we did some tweaking there to make sure that we're giving the right weightings to the right touch points across the life of the account, so that the attributed pipeline for each campaign in each channel makes sense based on what we put in market.
Chris Strom:
Can you talk a little bit more about the difference between account even spread versus account weighted in all of that?
Lauren Sanyal:
Sure. So account even spread would mean you assign the same point value to every single marketing campaign that you do. That wasn't right for us because we looked at it based on our investment, based on the intent that we're seeing that it didn't seem right to us that a lower intent touch point should have the same number of points essentially as a higher intent touch point. And especially looking at the conversion rates to opportunities for some channels where there's a higher conversion of potential than others, we wanted that to have more weighting. So that's why the weighted model made much more sense to us than it even spread based on where we were with our marketing approach. When we set this up and as we continue to evolve, we also continue to look at the model to make sure it's giving us the right feedback loop based on what we're putting out in market and based on how those campaigns are performing towards generating pipeline and closed one deals.
Chris Strom:
So it sounds like it's weighting different touch points differently. When I had heard the term account weighted, I was assuming it meant accounts like the company giving more weight to triggers from a touch point with this company over that company, but that's not the case?
Lauren Sanyal:
No, it's more like the touch points are weighted across the account, so it can be any contact at the account. And no matter what they do, it has the same number of points. That's the account [inaudible 00:23:16] because there's also one option. You can also do it as across the opportunity, so the people that are attached to the opportunity. But we wanted to look at the spread across the whole account. So that's the difference. But the touch points are-
Chris Strom:
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Lauren Sanyal:
Yeah.
Chris Strom:
Okay, when you're talking about account weighted you mean touch points with any contact across the account, not just the contacts directly associated to a particular opportunity. That makes sense to me too because you're not seeing all the conversations that they're having internally. And much as we all like to think we can read everybody's minds, we don't know who at that company read something that then they make a recommendation to someone else that, hey, we should go with this. So that's probably why you're discounting any touch point on any contact at the account as a touch point in your model.
Lauren Sanyal:
Absolutely. As we see from Gartner, there's a lot of interest in activity being generated before you're even aware of it. I know 6sense calls us the dark funnel, and so part of our goal with the step two is what are the activities before a form fill happens that are happening that are generating interest in this account? So by having a multi-touch campaign attribution model, we're able to see this specific Salesforce campaign generated this amount in the pipeline based on the weighted model. We're able to look and see, hey, for this campaign we've pushed this across. We have 30 tactics. Are all those tactics working or can we invest in a smaller number of tactics and remove others because they're not performing? So it's been a very helpful feedback loop for our demand gen team. And make sure the marketing team is able to use that feedback loop in terms of how they're allocating budget.
Chris Strom:
All right, cool. And then the final question we'll talk through here is, when do you think is the best time for a company to start investing in marketing operations specifically versus just investing in more general marketing functions?
Lauren Sanyal:
Sure. I think it's a really interesting question. We've seen the space evolve a lot here in terms of when marketing ops is added to an organization. And even in the last few years we see it really become something more formalized. I would recommend that when you stand up a marketing function, you have a demand gen leader. Maybe you have someone who's also contributing content to drive those demand gen efforts. But I would consider one of your next hires to be marketing operations lead or a manager from two different aspects. One, so you can build up those foundations early. There's been a lot of companies I've been at where we had to do some rip and replace or build things from scratch that weren't existing and figure out how to sort all the data. So I think there's a really good opportunity when you're early on in your journey to set up those foundations at the start and build for scale.
So that's one big benefit. The other one is that when marketers can focus on building strategies, building out plans, building out kind of the tactics, making sure that the messaging and everything's optimized for conversion, getting all those in place, passing it to marketing ops to build out the technology pieces and get them launched in market and give you a feedback loop on if it's performing well or not, can be a great force multiplier. If you don't have a lot of marketing folks to allow them to focus on marketing strategy and allow marketing ops to focus on getting things launched. So I strongly believe that it should be one of your earlier hires when you're starting a marketing team.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, don't put it off too long or you might end up regretting it later on.
Lauren Sanyal:
Yeah.
Chris Strom:
Well, I think this has been a great conversation here, Lauren. I learned a lot from our talk here. I think everyone who listens to this will learn a lot too. So I really appreciate you taking the time to come on here and join me for this episode.
Lauren Sanyal:
Well, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed chatting with you.
