Attendees
Luben Solev – Sr. Marketing Ops Manager at Cloudinary
Chintan Doshi – Head of Email & CRM, at Mavlers
Transcript
[00:00:00] Luben: What’s your approach to building a CRM foundation that aligns both sales and marketing goals? The companies that have been most successful, they’re worked in is where really sales and marketing work together as, as a one organization,
[00:00:12] Chintan: what sort of some best practices for official leader routing?
[00:00:16] Luben: There needs to be a clearly agreed routing logic, but then also we needed to put in place a order of operations.
[00:00:23] Chintan: What strategies would you recommend for better lead to account matching?
[00:00:26] Luben: You do need high data quality. You need to try and get kind of real time enrichment so that you can leverage that within your lead routing. ’cause usually it’s the lead routing solution that will also do your lead to account matching.
[00:00:42] Chintan: Would it be possible for you to walk us through your approach in order to identify and manage duplicates
[00:00:48] Luben: if you have. A huge number of duplicates to deal with. You may wanna kind of prioritize them, you know, the ones that are, would be causing the most issue.
[00:00:56] Chintan: Clear them first. How should teams set up demand generation [00:01:00] campaigns, which can scale effectively?
[00:01:01] Luben: Generally, as companies grow, they tend to go for the center of excellence model.
[00:01:10] Chintan: So today we are thrilled to welcome, Luben, senior Marketing Operations Manager at Cloudinary, where he has led, groundbreaking initiatives in CRM, lead routing and marketing automation with over, I believe, 18 years of experience, right? 18 years of experience in, high growth B2B environment and deep expertise in platforms like Market or Salesforce.
[00:01:32] Chintan: Luben has a proven track record of optimizing, data quality campaign execution. And here we have him to share insights on streamlining the marketing ops, which is a ma major concern on majority of the brands and, and agencies and how to get a scalable growth. So welcome, welcome, Luben,
[00:01:48] Luben: having me Chintan.
[00:01:49] Luben: Really appreciate it.
[00:01:50] Chintan: Great, great, great. Same here. So let, let’s start with the first concern or a challenge, right, which we have seen, and which we also experienced into virtual as agency on how they [00:02:00] can build or how agencies or, or brands can build a strong CRM foundation, right? There is a core, so you at diverse carrier in marketing operations, managing multiple complex CRM systems at Cloudinary, right.
[00:02:12] Chintan: Would love to understand, right. What, what sort of, approach or what’s your approach to building a CRM foundation that aligns. Both sales and marketing
[00:02:20] Luben: goals. That’s a very poignant question and very important question because in all the years that I’ve worked together, the companies that have been most successful that I worked in is where really sales and marketing work together as as a one organization.
[00:02:35] Luben: So, you know, they, they even have that, phrase marketing by combining, combining the two together. So whether the two are part of one team, structurally or not, there needs to be a unif set of unified goals and metrics and both need to have signed up to them. Both need to understand exactly what those are.
[00:02:55] Luben: Without that, it’s gonna be very difficult to get CRM to work properly. [00:03:00] And not only does it need to be agreed and understood. At a point in time, but as the organization kind of develops as new salespeople and new marketing people come on board. Others leave. there needs to be, as part of onboarding, there needs to be a good amount of training and initially change management, but then also when people are coming in training to make sure that those goals and metrics are really well understood.
[00:03:28] Luben: And then, the two teams need to get together as part of the design of the lead management process. So that’s the life cycle. With what stages are the handover stages between, between the various teams, the marketing team, the s. DR team or the AE team. so at what stages does a handover happen? What are the SLAs for, you know, let’s say for a, you know, what is the minimum level that a lead needs to be qualified before they can be passed from marketing to the [00:04:00] SDRs?
[00:04:00] Luben: Once a lead is passed over to the SDRs. What is the maximum amount of time that they will have in order to try and work it before they’re either disqualify it or send it back to nurture, or qualified and send it onto the following stage. And there needs to be some feedback loops that will tell marketing.
[00:04:21] Luben: If people are disqualifying, why is it being disqualified? What does marketing need to change in this approach in order to get better quality leads or, you know, or, you know, VAEs, you know, if they’re disqualifying the opportunity at a later stage, you know, what are the reasons, so, so that people earlier can, can try and work on getting.
[00:04:42] Luben: Those conversion rates are becoming better and better.
[00:04:45] Chintan: Great. Great. So you, you pointed out a few good areas, right? If, just to rehash, like collaboration is a key, right? Thinking, make sure that marketing and sales are, are working in sync and, and the other area which is important for. The marketing and sales people [00:05:00] is making sure that that constant feedback loop is there, right?
[00:05:02] Chintan: So that you optimize, you optimize, optimize, and then work in a, in a, in a direction for the better output. Great. Perfect. Yeah, and
[00:05:11] Luben: there’s, there’s just one or two other things. Um, obviously data quality and consistency, enrichment, making sure that there’s real time sync between the various systems that feed into the CRM, accurate lead to account matching and routing, but.
[00:05:26] Luben: All of these play a part in making sure that the CRM process works, works well.
[00:05:33] Chintan: Pretty well safe, pretty well safe. Once the marketing is, is set up, they start. Getting or generating leads, right? The next phase is more about how to route that leads right in, in a better and efficient way. So in, in one of your blog, which we were reviewing, right, CRM 1, 1 0 1, you have described the difference between leads and context, right?
[00:05:52] Chintan: Because measure of team, majority of the CRM managers might not be aware that okay, how, how to ate and differentiate lead and context. Could you explain this [00:06:00] differences between lead and context and, and why I understand them is crucial for effective lead routing and reporting.
[00:06:06] Luben: So. CRMs have been around for a very long time.
[00:06:10] Luben: Mm-hmm. Now it’s not a new technology yet. The way that CRMs are structured are still, misunderstood quite often by, salespeople and also by, marketers. So we, in marketing operations and sales operations, we have a role to educate people in. Little subtle things such as this that actually have a profound difference.
[00:06:34] Luben: So I am mainly being a Salesforce CRM user. Um, so I, I am doing this from that lens, but you know, this will apply to quite a lot of other CRMs as well. The fact is, leads and contacts are. Are very different. both are spoken of as people, but that is not strictly the case. So in CRM, there’s two different parts of the system.
[00:06:59] Luben: One [00:07:00] is very hierarchical or structured a little bit like an army. That is the account contact opportunity part of the system. So there the account is like the general, everybody reports up to the account and then underneath you have opportunities and contacts and there’s links. There’s hardwired links within the CRM against each one of those, and the contact there represents a person.
[00:07:24] Luben: On the other hand, a lead is more like an island because they’re not connected. By default in a CRM to anything else, they need to have special kind of, um, matching done in order to match them to a specific account. And that’s where lead to account matching comes in in order to make sure that they are connected to a specific account, but leads they have within them, they have the information on the individual things like first name, last name.
[00:07:55] Luben: Email address, job title, they will have information [00:08:00] against the organization. It could be as little as the company name, but there could be more information there. And finally, they may have, depending on the level of lead, they may have information on the opportunity. So if the person submitted a contact form on the website, they may have stated within the free text field.
[00:08:19] Luben: What is it that, that thereafter and, and that can form part of what will eventually become the opportunity. And so some businesses decide to work mainly well initially to work with leads. Some actually prefer to convert the leads to accounts, contacts and opportunities, whether. It’d be mapping to existing account and just creating a new contact or creating a whole, whole new account if that account doesn’t exist in the system yet.
[00:08:50] Luben: And then working the mis contact. So it really depends on a, on a company by company basis how that is done. But some of the issues around the fact that [00:09:00] people are split between leads and contacts include. Segmenting them, routing them, reporting on them. because CRMs, unfortunately, the vast majority of reports, they don’t, they don’t contain, they’re, they’re either based on contacts or they’re based on leads, not on both.
[00:09:17] Luben: And so making a decision as to what point to convert leads to contacts, making sure that whilst people were leads, that they do match up to accounts. And if communications is sent out, communications. Take care of both. All of those are very important things to, to keep in mind.
[00:09:35] Chintan: Great, great. So the leads, context, opportunities, right?
[00:09:39] Chintan: All these terminologies might vary. As you mentioned that CRM is not a new space, right? It’s been there in the market from quite a long. So from CRM to CRM, this terminologist might vary. But then the objective of, the lead context opportunities is still the same. Right? Yeah. It might, someone might call it deals, someone might call it, customers, right?
[00:09:58] Chintan: Someone might call it leads [00:10:00] companies, right. That terminologies might vary. Right. But then ultimately, yeah, and it’s very
[00:10:04] Luben: important that, that within the company, the terminologies terminology is understood. And we stick to one terminology because it’s when people mean different things. So for example. I know this is a bit of an aside, but you know what is an MQL Marketing qualified lead?
[00:10:25] Luben: But what is it? Is it actually a stage in the lifecycle? Is it actually a piece of activity? Because you could be, I. Later in the lifecycle, but perform the same activity as, as somebody who is becoming an MQL. Does that mean is, is it an MQL? Is it gonna count towards reporting? Is it gonna be part of the same process in terms of making sure that an SDR or an AE or a cs, individual follows up on it?
[00:10:57] Luben: All of these things are very important and when [00:11:00] people. Across the organization are not aligned on what something means. That’s, that’s when, issues, take place.
[00:11:07] Chintan: Yep. When, when things are not aligned. And everyone is talking differently, then definitely there are, there would be concerns and challenges, which will definitely help the CRM operational process.
[00:11:18] Chintan: So, so we, we talked about, lead, lead routing, right? But the important phase now, which we’ll need to discuss is managing those leads, right? And, there would be some challenges. There would be some best practices in lead routing. And I believe at Cloudinary, you have restructured the lead routing process, a showing up to, I believe.
[00:11:36] Chintan: 80% reduction in time to deploy. Right. So for organizations scaling quickly, what sort of, some best practices for efficient lead routing and what are the, the common challenges that can slow down that process if, if you would allow to recommend?
[00:11:50] Luben: Yes. So, lead routing is hugely important. Marketing has spent quite a lot of money.
[00:11:56] Luben: In generating leads and also [00:12:00] through whether it be, you know, through paid or organic, through the website, and, you want to strike while the iron is hot, especially when it comes to kind of hand raises. So-called, you know, contact demo, price request submitters. We need to get those leads as quickly as we can to the correct people within the organization.
[00:12:22] Luben: And those people need to follow up as quickly as possible because, the, the brand can be impacted by not replying to people. so, as a result, there needs to be a clearly agreed routing logic. When I took over, I ensured that, um. Now I started from scratch and I spoke to all the internal stakeholders about, you know, what, what rooting, what kind of leads should be rooted to them and what is the logic within their teams.
[00:12:53] Luben: But then also we needed to put in place a order of operations. So what is the priority? [00:13:00] Our customers a priority? If yes, then we first check whether this. Person is part of a customer account, and if yes, they go to the customer team, then the business development, for example, or then strategic accounts.
[00:13:15] Luben: Then once with open opportunities and maybe everything else apart from that will then go to the SDR team. Obviously, it’s important to differentiate between different rootings, so every single. Lead and contact that gets created in our system gets rooted, but only those that are MQL will. Trigger, things like Slack notifications and email notifications.
[00:13:41] Luben: So you, you do need to have already a good lead scoring, whether it be behavioral demographic, A BM, in order to determine, you know, what is an MQL, and then you route it as search with all the notifications to make sure that people are followed up quickly. Using a [00:14:00] dedicated lead routing tool is also a plus.
[00:14:03] Luben: You can do pretty much everything just. Using, your CRM, but it is going to be very difficult to manage, while a dedicated lead routing tool and, and there’s plenty of them out there. But, using those, they’ll give you a really lovely graphical interface that will make it easy for you to see the logic and also very quick to make changes when you need to.
[00:14:25] Luben: You can’t do lead routing. Certainly if you are in B2B, like I’m, you can’t do lead routing. Accurately and well without good lead to account matching. And that is very difficult. You do need, you do need very good data quality for that and, and a good system, and you need to have those agreed SLAs that, we spoke about in one of the previous questions, you know, without SLAs and without, e even getting to the point where you have some automation that either.
[00:14:54] Luben: Send alerts if the SSLA has been breached or reroutes to a different person. You know, [00:15:00] those kinds of things, help you improve the performance of your, of your lead conversion. And, finally. You are going to be asked a lot of questions about your routing. Yeah. And so, having an ability to kind of get the rest of the organization to understand what the routing rules are, is going to save you a lot of time.
[00:15:23] Luben: when, when dealing with why did this come to me or. Why didn’t this come to me? Why did it go to somebody else? Got it, got it. So
[00:15:31] Chintan: interesting. You, you mentioned a, a good, set of pointers starting from the lead scoring mechanism, right. Having a a, a a routing logic. Right. And Nick, you sure that logic is visible to the wider team so that they are aware which lead would be assigned, which won’t be assigned.
[00:15:47] Chintan: Having that visibility also making sure that that. SL is grid, SL is are in place, right. Because without that, things are not going to move in a, in a proper direction. Perfect. The other other area which I feel [00:16:00] would be helpful for us to discuss is around, this strategies, right? What sort of strategies would you recommend for accurate lead to account match?
[00:16:07] Chintan: Because you discuss that point in the prior question, right? In order to get a better personalization, what status would you recommend, for better lead to account matching?
[00:16:16] Luben: Lead to account matching is. Quite crucial in B2B, especially if you are wanting to do a BM, account-based marketing, which is, is very important to look at, accounts holistically and it is not an easy thing to do.
[00:16:32] Luben: you do need, high data quality. You need to try and get kinda real time enrichment upon creation. So when an individual is created in your system, you use third party tools to try and get as much. Geodemographic information on that individual is possible and kind of standardize, fields so that you can leverage that within your lead routing [00:17:00] in order to do the ’cause.
[00:17:01] Luben: Usually it’s the lead routing solution that will also do your lead to account matching. Not always, but, quite often. And so as a result, by having that. High quality data and enrichment, that will lead to, more accurately to account matching. what else on that point? Um, so some of the things that you may want to leverage is email domain matching, where you’re doing, but you do have to look out for free domains.
[00:17:27] Luben: So for example, if they come in with a Yahoo or a Gmail address. Doesn’t mean they belong to Google, or, or Yahoo as organizations. and that is one of the challenges. So if you are doing product-led growth, and so you are getting lots of people to sign up for accounts with, with Gmail, you know, to make it easier for them, you have the one click sign up.
[00:17:51] Luben: With your Gmail account or with your Facebook account, that does then make it harder for you to try and get information on [00:18:00] these, people. And honestly, I, I have to be honest, I haven’t found a silver bullet for that yet. There is quite a lot of people with free addresses in our database, and I can’t say that we’re able to.
[00:18:12] Luben: Properly match each one of those to, to an organization. But you know, we can only, we can only do our best. Then there’s other things. Obviously, whilst you’re enriching, you can use DUNS numbers or the, the IDs of your enrichment system, the account IDs of your enrichment system to also make sure that those matches are really, really well.
[00:18:37] Luben: It gives you a unique identifier, which then is very, very easy to, to match without any errors because fuzzy matching will always, always give you some level of error, and that’s, that’s where you need to get feedback from your team on any false matches that happen so that you can gradually improve the algorithms that you’re using.[00:19:00]
[00:19:00] Chintan: Got it. So you, you talked about, an important aspect, in this answer. Around data quality, right? Because ultimately, CRM is all about data, right? Yeah. So, and we have, we have seen many a times that having a poor data quality is impacting the or CRM performance. And there are issues like data deduplication, right?
[00:19:19] Chintan: And we also seen many times that if you’re having a deduplication, right, making sure that you, you optimize it, you, you make it better, right? So. Would, would it be possible for you to walk us through your approach right. In order to identify and manage duplicates and, and, and making sure. Manage or maintain the CRM data quality?
[00:19:39] Luben: Yes. Duplicates are, are a real pain. they’re, they’re actually very difficult to deal with, properly. Um, I guess the first thing to start is to define what a duplicate is, because depending on organizations, sometimes you may need to have people that are in there twice because they’re, they’re in different roles or [00:20:00] they’re, they’re consultants that work for more than one organization.
[00:20:03] Luben: so, you know, define what is a duplicate lead contact account opportunity. Order the database to define, to, to find existing duplicates. You know, based on that criteria, if you have a huge number of duplicates to deal with, you may wanna kind of prioritize them. You know, the ones that are. Would be causing the most issue.
[00:20:26] Luben: So maybe the ones that are, either paying accounts or have existing open opportunities and try and clear them first. You do need to be careful to ensure that there’s no false positives. So in other words, you know, people, people or accounts that are not duplicates, but they, they get, they get, tagged as duplicates because after merging only one remains.
[00:20:50] Luben: That means you can have a really. A large amount of data lost good quality data, which can then be quite difficult to get back depending on your [00:21:00] CRM and and, and, other things. So you, you do have to be very careful about when you’re deduplicating and, you want to, after you do your kind of batch cleanup, you do want to have.
[00:21:15] Luben: real time duping. So as soon as a contact or lead is created, or an account is created, the system will check again, against, existing duplicates. And if one is found, then the merger will happen. doing it instantly upon creation is actually going to lead to a lot less data loss, but you still probably need to go easy.
[00:21:41] Luben: So, so be quite strict in your criteria. stricter than you would for kind of the batch one, because the batch one, you can manually check, especially if the volumes are not too big. While the real time one has to be, you have to fully rely on the machine to do it for you. And so I [00:22:00] would, I would have a stricter criteria on the real time du.
[00:22:04] Luben: Knowing that that will leave some ddus in the system. but then you would do a quarterly, for example, batch in order to catch those, manually check them. so I’d say that that would probably be the one, but also be mindful of the fact duplication. Well, deduplication, so the act of merging. Can have an impact on other processes such as somebody MQL or somebody getting rooted.
[00:22:35] Luben: Um, that is why it’s always worthwhile having these kind of daily QA checks where you see has everybody who has completed a contact form become an MQL, have a Slack notification, sent, things of that sort. And I do find that this manual check does bring up. per week, one or two examples [00:23:00] where because of the timing of the various systems doing things and the merge is happening, sometimes somebody does not NQL, and then.
[00:23:10] Luben: I’m able to manually push them, due to that daily check. I think, it is become quite popular in corporate circles to do these kinds of, corporate activities where you’re trying to build a, a machine that takes a ball from one place to another through lots of obstacles. and we as a company did that, a while ago and, we had this idea of the magic finger.
[00:23:36] Luben: So if, if a part of the system didn’t work properly, you know, there’d be a human to kind of reset the ball and, and get it going. So finally we did get the ball all the way from one end to the other. But the, the idea of that magic finger is just as important in marketing operations because there’s so much complexity in so many systems.
[00:23:57] Luben: you do have to do a [00:24:00] bit of qa. On an ongoing basis in order to ensure that the very few people that fall down the cracks are caught.
[00:24:07] Chintan: Definitely a good, good example you, you mentioned here, but, but we also love to get further insights from you around the data standardization because data quality and data standard, right?
[00:24:19] Chintan: Both will work in sync, right? You one is about deduplication, making sure that you have the right set of logics and, and, uh. Duplication, real time and automation have set up, but it’s also about making sure that you have standard inputs in terms of the data. So would love to get more insights around the data standardization and, what, what we’ve seen so far.
[00:24:40] Chintan: Right. There. Are there organizations, who are just starting the CRM process? Right? So any organizations who is just starting this process, which fields would you recommend to standardize first and, and why it is it essential for a long-term CRM success?
[00:24:54] Luben: Standardizing data is, very important because it’s only through data standardization [00:25:00] that you enable segmentation and you enable proper reporting.
[00:25:04] Luben: Um, and you know, to give one example, there, there’s, many, fields it can benefit from standardization. But let’s take one example, and that’s the job title Now. Most people have different job titles, so if you’re gonna try and base, you know, segmentation or reporting based on job title, you’re going to struggle to get any kind of insight out of it.
[00:25:29] Luben: But splitting job title into two fields your job function. And, your job seniority with, with few, different values that are gonna be relevant to your specific organization is gonna substantially help you do that. Now does that mean you stop asking people for job title, on forms and replace it with two dropdowns?
[00:25:55] Luben: Maybe. Or maybe you don’t want to do that because that is replacing [00:26:00] one field with two. And obviously the more fields people have to complete, even though a dropdown field is easier to complete than a free tax field may put people off. So you may find other ways of doing it, such as, for example, using AI to convert that job title to, to job seniority and, job function.
[00:26:22] Luben: But you would want to prioritize a standardization, you know, maybe starting with the personal data. Then moving on to geographical firmographic data. So industries, country, country names. It, it’s one of the issues that I’ve had in several organizations I’ve worked in is that different systems have got different country name values.
[00:26:46] Luben: And what that does is it actually stops people sinking properly in between various systems. And it’s, actually surprisingly big undertaking. To align all country values [00:27:00] within older co older systems that integrated with each other within, within one company. Because you can have multiple stakeholders.
[00:27:07] Luben: They all have their priorities and yeah, just getting that kind of set up is, is hard. But once it is set up, the data flows much easier and you have a lot, less issues to deal with. And, you know, in, in terms of standardizing existing data, you’d want to do a field audit. You would want to map old values onto new ones, and then you’d want to figure out ways to handle UNM mappable data.
[00:27:34] Luben: But then once you’ve done the existing data cleanup, you do need to also concentrate on making sure that any new data that comes into the system. Is also clean. And some kind of ways of doing that would be to try and leverage API as much as possible. because unlike kind of, human, human data import through lists or through manual typing, APIs [00:28:00] are kind of very clearly defined at the beginning.
[00:28:02] Luben: And, they will continue working in exact same way. So you have less of a chance of human error. As I said, introducing dropdowns on forms. I, I have. Seeing companies that have a free text field for country. And me being in the United Kingdom, I can imagine, you know, people typing England or u UK or, you know, great Britain, or, or misspelled versions of all of those, it’d be a nightmare.
[00:28:30] Luben: So having dropdowns is, is also very important. Leveraging Excel and Google Sheets with, again, dropdowns and limitations for listing import templates is also important. And finally, obviously. Training users on how to use, um, you know, how, how to deal with data and restricting access only to people that are trained.
[00:28:54] Luben: That is also vital.
[00:28:56] Chintan: Got it. Got it. And, and you mentioned a good pointer here, like [00:29:00] if there are brands who are using multiple text texts, multiple systems, if, if you are not having a, a standardization, you are syncing. Right? The data syncing across the platforms would always be in, in a critical situation.
[00:29:13] Chintan: Right. You won’t get the right data. Right. The example you mentioned about the country, someone might have mentioned, mentioned it, let’s say a United Kingdom. in the other system it would be uk, right? Yeah. So that thinking would always be a concern when you’re integrating or having a multiple. Systems synced.
[00:29:28] Chintan: along so great, great insight. Ruben, we talked about lead routing, lead management, data quality, data deduplication, right? The other aspect of CRM is also, connected with marketing automation and campaigns, right? Because that is also a critical part of CRM. So we would love to understand because you, you were a critical, you already played out.
[00:29:50] Chintan: Critical part in implementation of market and similar, platforms that cloudinary, right. What, what can a campaign operations or a campaign manager [00:30:00] professional, do to drive a better campaign efficiency from a marketing automation standpoint?
[00:30:05] Luben: Campaigns need to work like a sausage factory. However, you know, and that may sound wrong to marketers who you know, who feel that campaigns need to be highly targeted and, you know, there’s a lot of creative input in there and, and those things are also true.
[00:30:24] Luben: but in essence, the implementation of campaigns does need to be highly efficient. So just like a sausage factory and the way sausage factory works, is it. Standardizes on a few specific designs. So trying to recreate the wheel every time you, you’re doing a campaign is not going to be effective. It’s not going to scale.
[00:30:49] Luben: so standardizing the campaign designs. So this is what a, this is what a gated asset campaign looks like. This is what a [00:31:00] webinar campaign looks like. From, from that, standardizing the campaign request process or how campaigns are requested, from creation by marketing operations, that’s vital.
[00:31:14] Luben: Whether you are using, uh. Something like Jira, so basically a ticketing system or whether you’re using something like monday.com, which is more of a planning project management platform. Either way, you need to make sure that, you know, there is a standard design for each campaign type. With the necessary fields.
[00:31:36] Luben: Just getting those in place and getting everybody from the marketing operations and, and marketing side and any other parts of the company that, that may need to, occasionally run campaigns, that is gonna be a huge plus, is gonna, enable you to. To create them quicker and thus create more campaigns with the [00:32:00] same number of people.
[00:32:01] Luben: If you are using Marketo as your marketing automation platform, Marketo has some key advantages over its competitors in the fact it has. the, the program, which is equivalent to a campaign if you like, but the program within Marketo is, um, is a like a box within which everything else lives. So everything else that is required, whether that be the logic or, or whether that be lists.
[00:32:30] Luben: Or emails, landing pages, everything, can live within a program, which means that you can create a program template with everything in there and just clone the whole lot. that doesn’t work in the same way in other systems where all the landing pages live together, all the emails live together, but you can take that step forward with another Marketo feature, which is called tokens.
[00:32:53] Luben: tokens are little snippets of code that you can put. In landing [00:33:00] pages, in emails, even in the logic, and then you can assign, you can assign. Content such as text or images or links to those tokens. and that means that, um, if you create a program that is fully tokenized, it means you don’t need to go and edit every single email.
[00:33:21] Luben: If you have the token for webinar title, for example, you can put it on all the landing pages, all the emails, and you just change it in one place and it changes everywhere else. The combination of tokenization and. the idea of the program within Marketo allows you to create a fully. Full webinar program with multiple landing pages, you know, multiple emails in a fraction of the time, it will take you one to two days to create it from scratch.
[00:33:52] Luben: It will, it will take you less than a couple of hours to create it using this method. Um, but then you can take it a step further [00:34:00] still, you know, and there have been organizations that have been doing that for a while now, for a number of years, where they are completely automating the creation of some campaign types.
[00:34:11] Luben: By having a, ingest form that asks for every single thing that you would need, every single piece of content, whether it be text, whether it be image, and. Though, and it asks it in specific sizes, if it’s an image and specific lens in terms of the text. And after that is the, the person click submit, then a piece of automation will, you know, clone the program in Marketo, you know.
[00:34:39] Luben: in, push in all the text and all the images and set them up and just get everything ready. Create the URLs with the correct ur l naming convention. get everything absolutely ready. And then even send a Slack notification to the marketing operations professional to ask them to do QA on it. [00:35:00] So that is kind of the ultimate state that can allow, you know, a team of less than 10 people to create thousands literally of, of marketing campaigns a year.
[00:35:12] Luben: There are obviously limitations. So for example, let’s say you created like that and then you say, oh, but. Well, one, you can’t create it until you have all the content ’cause you can’t submit the form if you’re missing an image. But two, it also means that if you then have to make some changes, then marketing operations does need to go in there manually and do it.
[00:35:32] Luben: But still the, the amount of time saved can be. Absolutely substantial.
[00:35:37] Chintan: Great, great. So it’s about using the platform in a right way, as you talked about Marketo, right? Having tokens for personal and having everything at one place and in a program template, starting from landing pages to emails, to list to logic, everything at, at one place, which makes it easier for the, the campaign managers to manage.
[00:35:57] Chintan: Let’s, let’s also talk about, how we can [00:36:00] scale, and, and implement the demand generation campaigns. Effectively, right. So you, you have already have extensive experience right. In, in integrating demand gen tools like Marketo, sales for sales versus A CRM, obviously in Marketo as a marketing automation platform.
[00:36:16] Chintan: would love to get your insights around, how, how should teams set up demand generation campaigns, which can scale effectively?
[00:36:23] Luben: There’s two different ways to. Scale the creation of campaigns. On one hand you can get more people to do it. Um, marketing operations teams. Certainly within the sizes of companies that I work for are, always less than 10 people, mostly less than five people.
[00:36:45] Luben: So scaling, you, you can’t really just keep hiring more marketing operations people in order to, to do this work. So the one way of doing it is to let the whole of marketing do it. So every marketer [00:37:00] will have edit access to Marketo and they will have. Certain amount of training and there’ll be templates put in place that will allow them to clone the template and create the program That will work for kind of 80% of the simple everyday programs.
[00:37:16] Luben: If in the 20% where something really complex is needed, then the marketing operation person can get, involved and create that for them. So I have leveraged this so-called distributed method in small organizations where sometimes I’ve been the only marketing operations person and as being the only one, it’s not feasible for you to be doing the campaign creation yourself.
[00:37:42] Luben: There are issues with that though. one, not every marketer is a systems person, and they’re not really. You know, some will take to it like ducks to water. Some will keep making, making a lot of mistakes, which will then, involve you having [00:38:00] to get in there and actually spend an enormous amount of time in fixing those errors and issues.
[00:38:06] Luben: And it’s just difficult to keep. The quality because the amount of training you have to put in is, is, is difficult to keep the quality consistent. not only that, but as people leave organizations and come in, there’s a whole lot of training to do because some of them will not know how to use Marketo at all.
[00:38:24] Luben: Uh or, or the marketing automation platform that you have in place. And, you know, every time you have to kind of start from scratch, possibly whilst on the other end of the scale, is a so-called, you know, excellence, center of excellence, where you have a specialist set of campaign operations people.
[00:38:47] Luben: That is all they do. You hire them knowing that they know how to do that, and ideally they know your, platform already, marketing automation platform already. And then that means that [00:39:00] marketing doesn’t have either, doesn’t have any access or has read only access to the marketing automation platform.
[00:39:06] Luben: And there’s hybrid kind of in-between cases, where you may have, if you like a marketing operations outpost, you may have a person who. Lives within demand generation and reports up to the demand generation leadership and not the marketing operation leadership, but has a dotted line to you and has been trained by you and they take on all the campaign creation for that particular team.
[00:39:31] Luben: So, so there, there’s, it’s like a rainbow and you could be anywhere on that rainbow, I guess, generally, as. companies grow, they tend to go for the center of excellence model, because it, it just scales a lot better. But when taken in tandem with some of the things that we discussed in the previous question around, you know, automating campaign creation and standardizing it, having the center of excellence model can really help [00:40:00] you create thousands in compa thousands of campaigns with not a lot of, people.
[00:40:04] Chintan: Perfect. One other area, which I would love to. Or talk about is, is, is the compliance, right? And. With your years of experience in, in this industry so far, right? What, what should multinational B2B organizations know about consent management? Because it’s, it’s an important piece, right? It’s not about only lasting emails, right?
[00:40:24] Chintan: It’s about also making sure that you have the right consent of the right audience, and you also respect the data, right? You also trust the input which the subscribers are, are providing. So what, what multi multinational B two organizations, should know about, consent management?
[00:40:40] Luben: Yeah, consent management is very important and organizations as they start growing out of their country do need to be aware that the one size doesn’t fiddle.
[00:40:50] Luben: That what is necessary in one country is not necess, is, you know, it doesn’t. It doesn’t do it for another country. First of [00:41:00] all, actually, it’s worthwhile understanding why the company needs to get this right. It’s, it’s not one of the most exciting things. It’s not, in itself generative of revenue. So, you know, companies could think, oh, you know, we don’t need to worry about that.
[00:41:16] Luben: Let’s concentrate on the bottom line. But the problem is that if you don’t get this right, then there is, legal. Impacts on the company then, and, you know, they, they will turn into financial impacts on the company. There’s also reputational, you know, impact and that will also lead to financial impact in the longer term.
[00:41:36] Luben: So it, it is very important that the company gets this right. And the way to get this right is for marketing operations to work with, the legal team within the company or an external hired legal team if the company’s too small to have its own legal team in order to make sure. That there’s a really good understanding of the legal landscape in all the countries that you’re doing business, and you know, if [00:42:00] you are.
[00:42:00] Luben: Dealing with Europe, there’s GDPR. If you are dealing with Canada, there’s castle. If you are, selling in California, there’s the CCPA. And all of these will have their own, needs and requirements. And as I said, one size doesn’t fit all. So you also need to have a good understanding of the differences between opt in, opt out or unsubscribe.
[00:42:25] Luben: And also legitimate interest. What is legitimate interest? Only your lawyers will be able to tell you what that means for your company and within the, the, the jurisdictions that you’re working within. But having a good understanding of all of that is, is important. And then once you have the understanding, then you have to, then you put your mops hat on and you create a really robust process that that will match that.
[00:42:51] Luben: So form fields. Date and detail stamp fields, full automation, sharing that between various systems, [00:43:00] auditing it on a regular basis. All of that is, is important as is the right to actually add in there. Other things not relating to, well, it is relating to consent, so consent. It needs to be looked at broadly, not just, can I email this person or not?
[00:43:17] Luben: It is, can I store their data or not? Can I process their data or not? Can I have their data and, and when I’m storing their data, how long can I store that data from? Can I give them the right to delete their data when, when they choose? Because there are times when you can’t allow for the data to be deleted if, if the data is needed for other more overriding reasons, such as financial auditing or things of that sort.
[00:43:44] Luben: But generally speaking, giving people the right to unsubscribe, giving people the right to delete their data from your database makes sense, both from a data cleanliness point of view, also from a moral point of view and reputational point of view.
[00:43:57] Chintan: So it’s about respecting, respecting your [00:44:00] subscribers and, and making sure that yeah.
[00:44:01] Chintan: You, you follow whatever they’re asking for, right? Whether it is opting it out or the consent to be part of your ecosystem. Perfect. The last thing, which I would love to get inside, and it’s, it’s definitely a buzz word in current world is, is ai. I. Right, which everyone of is aware, artificial intelligence, how, how you see ai, first of all, and, and where do you see AI is going to add value in in overall marketing operations in the coming year?
[00:44:28] Luben: Yeah, so AI is, still in its early days, within marketing operations, but definitely a lot more people are starting to use it. And the main use cases that I’m seeing or using myself has been, one text and. Image creation, you know, generative ai, that, that’s very well known. text and image creation.
[00:44:50] Luben: And that is starting to be leveraged more within marketing operations, but there’s much more to what AI can bring to. [00:45:00] Marketing operations than, than just that, you know, there is, data cleaning and enriching. There is, help with, scoring identification of ICP. So ideal customer profile and kind of predictive analytics.
[00:45:14] Luben: there is segmentation itself, um, you know, standardizing, summarizing content coming in and. Other automating of other repetitive tasks. There is challenges around ai, and there is a lot of reasons why AI isn’t as widely used in, in business as it could be. one is that, you know, companies and, and the legal eagles within companies and not trusting AI with the company’s data.
[00:45:45] Luben: and, and that’s because honestly, AI companies haven’t shown. Haven’t shown that they’re fully responsible with how they train their models, certainly in the early days of AI development. And, then there’s [00:46:00] the worry that from, from people that AI will take, over our jobs. You know, I myself was worried about that, probably a year ago because of some of the early hype around ai.
[00:46:12] Luben: And very quickly by using ai, you actually understand that, you know, this is unlikely to take your job. It, it is just another tool that if you use it, you are much more likely to keep your job if you are able to use ai. Well, it is, it, it is still a young sector. There’s a nascent. SaaS kind of sector offering some AI capabilities, but a, a lot of it you still have to build yourselves and that means the need for developers.
[00:46:40] Luben: I think some of the marketing automation platforms focus on some aspects of AI and not others. And, and you know, for example, let’s talk about Marketo, which I leverage that is owned by Adobe. And Adobe is big on generative AI for, for images. Also for text, [00:47:00] but companies like Adobe should also look at the other use cases for ai or if, if they’re not gonna deal with it themselves, they should make it easier for us to integrate with, with other AI systems to help us, do this.
[00:47:14] Luben: And I’d say for the people that are worried about, you know, trusting it with things, you know, just start off with small projects, potentially just internal projects instead of external. So one of the things that we did is, we had, uh. We leverage the Jira ticketing systems for people within our organizations to send requests for help to not just to marketing operations, because in our company, marketing operations is part of the bigger business operations team where you have sales ops, marketing ops, CS ops, Salesforce administration and and all the others in one team.
[00:47:51] Luben: And so we would get a wide variety of tickets and we had. So many different ticket types that people could fill that people just didn’t [00:48:00] know what to do. They, you know, half the time they would fill the wrong type of ticket. And so what we did is, we simplified things. There’s just a single form where you can select a specific solution, part of the tech stack that you may be having an issue with, but you also have just a free text box where you just tell us.
[00:48:20] Luben: In plain English, what is it that your problem is that we can help with? And then we feed that to, to an ai. LLM, which together with a very detailed prompt is to all the different types of, things that people could be asking for, decides who needs to own it. And, and so tags it appropriately and decides which, organization needs to own it.
[00:48:45] Luben: And then it gets rooted by, by the ticketing system accordingly. So it’s kind of starting small, starting with something very specific and concrete, maybe starting. Just for internal use, and once you get comfortable, [00:49:00] then, you know, going onto projects.
[00:49:02] Chintan: Great. Perfect. So yeah, you, you mentioned right about ai.
[00:49:06] Chintan: AI is not here to. To replace, humans, right? Or not to eat up your job. It’s about helping you to ease out the work, right? And, and, and come out of that mundane hard work, and then do the smart work, right, as a human. So that thing we are afraid of, right? But, how, how you leverage the AI is something each and every individual needs to focus on.
[00:49:27] Chintan: So yes. Great. Great. Thanks, Luben for the, the lovely insights, knowledge. And, and the suggestions you have provided around CRM leads, routing, also making sure that how to manage, the data quality, looking into the data standardization, and also go through the, the compliance part and marketing operation, which is go to the business.
[00:49:48] Chintan: So thanks a lot for. Sharing all the insights and, and it was really great, learning from you.
[00:49:53] Luben: My pleasure, Chintan. Thank you very much for your time.
[00:49:56] Chintan: Thank you.