Attendees
Martin Salisbury – Marketing Consultant at Chameleon Collective
Chintan Doshi – Head of Email & CRM, at Mavlers
Transcript
[00:00:00] Chintan: What would be simple and yet powerful tip that you would like to share with the audience so that they can leverage ERM and close deals faster?
[00:00:06] Martin: I probably get 15 a day. They’re like, Hey, I’m a video service company. Okay, great. Good for you. What can you give me right now,
[00:00:15] Chintan: In your opinion, what is the smartest way to align both sales and marketing team to get the best out of the automation and deliver the output?
[00:00:22] Martin: In my experience, you need a translator between these two groups. Marketing speaks, marketing sales, speaks sales and they can often be miscommunications between them. A lot of the mistakes that I see across B2B companies is they look at sales communications as, Hey I’m Bob or Susie, or whatever it is, and I’m your, regional manager for whatever.
[00:00:44] Martin: People don’t care.
[00:00:49] Chintan: So today we are excited to have Martin with us. He is a seasoned consultant in lifecycle marketing, CRM and marketing automation. He has worked with multiple brands like Varizon, Bausch, and [00:01:00] Lomb, help them build multi-channel strategies that engage customers at every stage of their journey. With his unique blend of marketing and technical expertise Martin knows how to translate complex goals into tangible, scalable systems so that brands he works with able to deliver right message, right time, and on right channel.
[00:01:19] Chintan: So for all those who are watching this video today, we’ll be having insights around how you can fix. The biggest CRM and marketing automation mistakes, but that either slow down your sales, waste, your marketing budget, right? You won’t, people to get insights or output on your lead nurturing. So we’ll cover all those areas where the brands and business are struggling with messy data, low conversion, getting sales and marketing on the same page, just to make sure that you get the best out of your CRM and marketing automation.
[00:01:47] Chintan: Welcome Martin.
[00:01:48] Martin: Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you for the intro and always a pleasure working with the Mavlers team, so thank you.
[00:01:54] Chintan: Thanks for the mention, Marion. So let’s Start with the first area which we also feel is a burning or a [00:02:00] concern, right? People or businesses normally try to go ahead and let’s say subscribe A CRM or marketing or platform, right?
[00:02:08] Chintan: To increase their revenue. To grow their revenue, right? But. Normally they are not able to see the ROI, right? Or what they were expecting when they started using that platform. Either the sales team is not fully using their CRM platform, right? Or the marketing automation is not set up with a clear objective or strategy, which gives them the better return.
[00:02:27] Chintan: So what would be your advisor? What are the two or three mistakes, right? Which companies normally make right when they’re trying to scale these tools and what would be the ways to fix them? And if you can share some insights there.
[00:02:39] Martin: No that, that’s a very fair question and one that comes up every single day.
[00:02:44] Martin: I do like to focus on what’s, the problem points as first, so I’ll try to avoid like best practices. ’cause you can get those anywhere. I think consistency as I looked at this question, to me it’s consistency to existing customers and not having a rotation of [00:03:00] messaging that you’re focused on, that you’ve got some plans around for the most part.
[00:03:05] Martin: All, like most companies are just looking for new, how do we get the newest person? How do we get somebody kind of engaged and starting to deal with our product? The new customers are going to be valuable, but if you’re a product that has a chance to resell, that’s your biggest opportunity with your existing customers.
[00:03:21] Martin: And I think too much focus is put on new customers. The other thing that I’ll say is. Not reading the comments. So you mentioned the sales team and the marketing team. So that relationship between sale marketing and sales and marketing and customer service. In many cases, marketing teams are not reading the comments.
[00:03:42] Martin: I’m doing a project right now where I’m reading through 30,000 opt out. Comments from SMS where somebody has said, stop, but they don’t just say stop. They say, stop. You’re really annoying me. Or Stop this location is terrible. Or, stop this product. [00:04:00] Product feature is terrible. I’m out. That kind of thing.
[00:04:03] Martin: I think for the marketing team. Reading the comments allows you to have a conversation. Hearing those comments, the negatives you’re gonna get some positives as well. I don’t wanna paint a completely terrible picture here, but those comments are gold for your programs. Those are the ones and passing ’em off to customer service.
[00:04:21] Martin: They’re, they might pay attention to them, but they’re not, they’re going to, put them in the appropriate bucket for them. But for marketers. Like those comments, those replies. So critical for learning how your customers feel. You’re gonna get some positives. Don’t ignore the positives, don’t ignore the, but those negative ones are really gonna fuel, fuel you to understand, okay, long term we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta modifier messaging.
[00:04:46] Martin: And then going back to the first point again, I’ll make the first point twice. The other one is your existing customers, especially if they up upsell. Are gonna be the ones that are gonna pass you along, show that you have a good relationship and you’re gonna show them a lot of love in what you [00:05:00] do.
[00:05:00] Martin: Having a brand relationship is really key there.
[00:05:03] Chintan: We also agree, Ben, when we are working with our customers and who are managing the marketer or automation on the CRM side, but the point, one point, which I feel should definitely be emphasized on is understanding the sentiment of your audience.
[00:05:14] Chintan: You should make sure that you review their comments, you review their replies, because that will give you a clear picture of where your marketing stance. So great to hear those feedback. Yeah.
[00:05:25] Martin: Yeah. And your existing customers are your best source of knowledge for your new customers as well.
[00:05:29] Martin: So
[00:05:30] Chintan: yeah definitely something businesses should focus on rather than just moving towards bringing new customers and new. People on their ecosystem or the tech stack. It’s better to always focus on where your customer’s, existing customer stands. Great. Let’s move to the other part of the CRM, right?
[00:05:46] Chintan: I’m not sure this sounds like a easy one or like a question which we might have found again and again, but we have come across this scenario multiple times, right? And. Many businesses, right? Normally relies on generic [00:06:00] email drips, right? Which is not customized for their brand, their offering, and their processes, right?
[00:06:05] Chintan: They try to just copy, which is already there in the market, set up that drip right move so that leads can be moved from one area of the funnel to the other, but that normally tends towards poor engagement or long sales cycle. And then there is a conflict between marketing and sales because of the lower conversion rates.
[00:06:21] Chintan: We want, would love to hear from you, right? If you, if someone wants, or for a brand or a business wants to build an advanced lead nurturing system, right? What one strategy that has consistently worked on turning coal leads into a sales ready opportunities?
[00:06:36] Martin: Yeah. I think the biggest thing is identifying your gaps and your blind spots In many cases.
[00:06:42] Martin: This is for lead nurturing. You’re starting off by mass communication or not having a good idea of where you’re, you’ll have a bulk audience that you’re communicating with. And in many cases, those audience members are in [00:07:00] multiple stages development. And I think for the marketing team, it is very good to have a great relationship with your data team.
[00:07:11] Martin: Analyzing your data’s team, your data team’s audience, right? So the little independent fields that tell you, okay, this customer’s in this stage, but you’re really missing a few stages. Or the data analyst or someone like that. In many cases, I would say the marketing team needs to hire their own.
[00:07:29] Martin: Data expert for customer audiences if you can, or get a consultant or whatever you can do, because the data team’s off doing a lot of different projects that are not marketing related. They’re fixing the plumbing and trying to get all the internal systems working so they don’t have a ton of time for marketing.
[00:07:46] Martin: So many times marketing kind of sits as an island and we can outreach for data and for feedback, but we’ve gotta double check everything. So having that data person on your team to identify those gaps. ’cause nurturing leads [00:08:00] is, it’s going from. You start off in these batch communication, and then the more you break those audiences up the smarter you can get with the communication.
[00:08:08] Martin: Did somebody come in through social? Did somebody come in through, just a refer a friend, which is an ideal situation? So for lead nurturing, the mo, the most common thing that I see is bad data. Audiences that haven’t been segmented enough in the lead nurturing stage in order. So you can see, okay, this, the engagement level and what do we know about them?
[00:08:29] Martin: Splitting that bigger audience up into smaller groups is going to give you the biggest benefit in my opinion. ’cause you can now say, oh hey, you saw us on, this platform, or you came in through this channel and you can make that. We’ll, I’m sure we’ll talk about personalization at some point and I’ll bring this back up, but knowing that audience, having great data, team relationships or having somebody on the data team or behavioral, behavioral scientists or someone on your team that can double check all that data, I.
[00:08:57] Martin: Get into the weeds of each [00:09:00] customer, especially in that first initial interaction. I think too much focus is put on the creative for lead nurturing and it’s a big batch that goes out. Splitting that group up to me in terms of stages is, tends to have the biggest payout.
[00:09:15] Chintan: So you mentioned about bad data, right?
[00:09:18] Chintan: And when we are talking about that, it is common to hear that businesses normally treat C RM as a data dump, right? You have, you use CM as a database, right? Which always is not structured right? It is an unstructured data. You struggle with cluttered pipelines, lack of real insights and signals, right?
[00:09:35] Chintan: Which is required for salespeople to, to go ahead and close the deal. You have worked with a RP right? When you Yeah. Manage managing the, or working with them in implementing CRM strategies, right? Which were helping the sales team to become more efficient. So what would be your advice or simple and yet powerful tip that you would like to share with the audience so that they can leverage or optimize the CRM and get?
[00:09:58] Chintan: And close deals [00:10:00] faster.
[00:10:00] Martin: Yeah. And that sounds like a very B2B question. Yeah. Which is totally fine. B2B is about relationship and a lot of the, a lot of the mistakes that I see across, my B2B companies is they look at sales communications as hey I’m Bob or Susie, or whatever it is, and I’m your, regional manager for whatever.
[00:10:22] Martin: People don’t care. They don’t have that much time. Most of your communication CRM, is still a heavy email communication platform and people want value right up front. What can you do? For me, this is a, for email, it’s a two to three second platform, especially for sales. You might have two to three seconds with them.
[00:10:41] Martin: The days of newsletters and having, recapping everything that you’ve done. And they’re out, at this point and a bunch of. Bunch of different companies have that, still have that expectation. That email is the location. And I think for the most part, what you’re doing is you’re trying to move [00:11:00] someone off of the communication, move them quickly, especially for sales, make, give them something valuable that they can use right now.
[00:11:08] Martin: You’re, having a, having, a role in the company and being responsible for a company, from a sales perspective, especially B2B, they, I’ll pass right over those emails and those communications instantly. Respecting their time and giving them value to me are the key points here.
[00:11:25] Martin: Keep it simple. Get to the point, get to the point quickly. Show something that they need right now. So you said write, write message right time, especially for lead nurturing for B2B, it is. Here’s what I have for you right now that you can instantly use, avoid white papers, keep it simple. It does not have to be long form communication.
[00:11:44] Martin: It’s little touch points that show you care. It’s a one-to-one relationship and you’re giving them something value instantly, they’ll follow up if they want to. There’s no amount of email communication that can get somebody to like your product. I probably get 15 a day. They’re like, Hey, I’m a video [00:12:00] service company.
[00:12:01] Martin: Okay, great. Good for you. What can you give me right now? Is it what you’ve learned from, it’s much like this call. What have you learned? What’s important to you? It doesn’t have to be, you can send me to a blog if you want to, but I want some quick, quick valuable and then I’ll investigate on my own.
[00:12:17] Martin: As we know, B2C is a much quicker platform for, purchase behavior and they’re either in or out. B2B. You’re definitely thinking about a year’s worth of communications when you get a lead, whether it comes from an expo or whatever it may be.
[00:12:32] Chintan: Yeah, so definitely B2B is more of a longer sales cycle, but, one should not forget that it’s always about adding value to your customer or giving solution to them, rather than doing that hard sales sale because that is not going to work. For sure. So let’s talk about the. The terminology, which everyone says they’re aware of, but they hardly know how to implement national, many companies and brands always say that they are aware of per session. Their marketing automation [00:13:00] strategies are following extensively around the per part. But it is nothing more than per first team, right? The basic first national. It’s not more than that. In our opinion and our learning so far in, in the CRM industry.
[00:13:12] Chintan: First National is more than. First name, right? You need to go deep into the data. You need to understand the journeys, the touch point of your customer, right? What all areas they’re going to go through and then try to focus more around on where you can have those right first. Messaging, which helps you to deliver the maximum.
[00:13:30] Chintan: You have been working with multiple brands, right? And providing them CRM strategies and you also help them build personal strategies which actually drive engagement, right? So we’d love to know what’s one technical way businesses can personalize that marketing without overcomplicating things.
[00:13:47] Martin: Yeah, it’s a great question and yes, personalizations in the old world was first name or we know who you are.
[00:13:53] Martin: I think the creepy factor. It comes into play, and so you’ve gotta balance personalization with creepy. But for the [00:14:00] most part, most comp, most people are looking for something, I purchased this, or I’m a client, or I have this service. What else is a compliment to that service? And having a model of products, also having a model of your audiences.
[00:14:15] Martin: So if you’re more likely to purchase or you purchased recently. Understanding those breakouts of customers. It’s like what we just talked about with the data team. Your data team is your best buddy. And I encourage every marketing team to have a data person on their team that reports to them. There’s too often, there’s a break between that marketing team and that data person or the data team.
[00:14:37] Martin: So you’re waiting for feedback, et cetera, waiting for those pieces. Yeah, the personalization suggesting next product, you purchase this, you have this service, we hope you like it. Here’s one more thing that would, here’s, gonna solve the next problem that you have, we can see into the future.
[00:14:54] Martin: That’s why we built our product range. Here’s what you need next. Same thing with retail customers. Don’t overwhelm [00:15:00] them. You bought a sweater, great. You bought a, with, with Verizon, you bought a small business plan for your construction team. Here’s the next thing. Not, here’s 15 things, but here’s the next thing that would be best for you.
[00:15:14] Martin: And that I think tells the story of personalization. You know me. You’re thinking about me and you’re giving me my next best solution. The automation side of that can get complex, especially when we talk about CRM systems. And so having a good model for ensuring that the right people go into the right channels, as we all know.
[00:15:32] Martin: I know I’m preaching to a to acquire here if you’re. If anybody’s watching this, it’s it’s understood that you’ve gotta have that breakout, but having a consistent visualized process, and that’s gonna give you the chance to find the gaps in between those, oh, we’re not talking to this group at this time.
[00:15:49] Martin: So understanding, like visualizing your visuali, visualizing your audiences, what messages they’re getting, and also for the fact of making sure that, you don’t have any overlap there. But [00:16:00] personalization for me is great. You know my first name. What’s the most valuable thing based on what I’ve done with your company and what I should do next?
[00:16:08] Chintan: Got it. So in terms of making sure that you stand out against these subscribers, right? So towards your subscriber, you want to stand out against the competitors who are sending the emails to, right? If you just know them by name and don’t know anything apart from that, then you’re not standing out, right?
[00:16:23] Chintan: You want to make sure that you stand out and. Add some value with your communications, be it email or any other channel, which helps them to feel that, okay, this brand do care about the audience, which is connected with them. So it’s a good way to pitch that, but many brands don’t actually go beyond that first impact.
[00:16:40] Chintan: But yeah, great insights on that part. Martin. The next point is more connected towards the channels, right? Initially marketing automation was around only email. Email, right? But now things are moving and changing, right? There are multiple channels, right? You can utilize those channels. You can modify your strategy to club multiple channels along with [00:17:00] email.
[00:17:00] Chintan: So we would love to understand on, on, on your experience on multi-channel strategy, right? Many brands are having that options of utilizing channels and having customers across multiple platforms, right? And they can customize their messaging to make or add value at each and every touch point. We’d love to know what’s one example of a multichannel approach that might have worked exceptionally well and why it worked well and what can our audience learn from it.
[00:17:28] Martin: I see this a lot with companies is email is the most important to them. They branch into SMS. After that, sometimes their SMS, and they branch into email. Of course, you’ve got in-app and you’ve got push notifications. The model to me is one where. Especially if someone’s downloaded the app, you are respecting your their time.
[00:17:50] Martin: I’ll give you a bad example that I never worked on, but I think would be Duolingo. They spend a lot of time sending communications that almost make [00:18:00] you feel bad, Hey, you didn’t complete your day’s session, and I understand the intent for it. But that intent. Although, can push somebody to say, oh geez, I, it’s like a fear of missing out or, a terrible, I’m going to miss one day of my German lessons.
[00:18:15] Martin: At that point, you’re pushing them away and you’re not focusing on the immediate benefit and the relationship between you and your brand. So the question originally about. What channels and how do you respect all those channels? I’ll give you another bad example. I’ll just give you tons of bad examples, and then we’ll go into good ones.
[00:18:32] Martin: Another bad example can be a focus on email preference centers or expecting your customers to spend time thinking about, oh, I want newsletters, but I don’t want this. I want sales updates, but I don’t want notifications. They’re really not gonna do that. They don’t have that much time. So understanding each channels.
[00:18:53] Martin: Unsubscribes and being able to look across multiple groups and see the groups that have [00:19:00] email and SMS and in-app notifications and push notifications, all of them on and respecting that audience is your prized audience and being careful with their time. Same thing if they’re email only, et cetera.
[00:19:13] Martin: Emails get, can get very ignored and that keeps it safe because you get the chance to speak with them more often. SMS push in-app, if you’re sending those, if you’re sending those direct response communications on a daily basis, chances are especially to that audience that is, is keyed into all of them.
[00:19:33] Martin: You’re gonna start, you’re gonna start turning them away. So being able to break out your audiences by, they’re subscribed to everything that’s your prize group. It might be a person that just came in. They’re the first ones to opt out. If we’re not careful with that audience and breaking out those communications are gonna really help.
[00:19:51] Martin: That way you don’t have, for somebody who initially subscribes and has everything, they saw your marketing message and they downloaded the app and they didn’t [00:20:00] realize that they just opted into everything. So the breakout of everybody who’s opted in. Loyalty long term. And then those first new customers respecting their time and being careful not to hit them with too many things all at the beginning if they’re not immediately valuable for what they need to do.
[00:20:18] Chintan: Got it. Yeah. It’s always about utilizing the channels in the right way. And not do overdo things because you also want to make sure that you respect the privacy of your audience. ’cause if you go and bombard at each and every channel they’re always going to get frustrated and leave you.
[00:20:33] Chintan: Marketing system. The connected point with personal action, which always come to a mind is segmentation, right? Because if you don’t have the right segmentation you won’t be able to leverage the personal action in the right way. I would love to understand from you because marketing teams always try to focus on building right segments so that they can curate the right message and make sure that they get the better engagement because.
[00:20:55] Chintan: No, most of the marketing team wants to focus on better engagement and don’t want to have those [00:21:00] lower engagement campaigns. And where is the marketing budget? How can business use segmentation to improve marketing performance? ‘Cause segmentation is the key. It’s not about just bombarding it to your complete audience list now.
[00:21:12] Martin: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you, you’ve already answered the question is it’s having. Having a respect for those audiences and a full division of them. For many of my clients, I’m pulling, 10 to 15 audiences a day and seeing how they break out. One build for one audience is not gonna work.
[00:21:30] Martin: And going back to if your data’s bad your groups are gonna be bad, you’re not gonna be. Finding somebody in the weeds that is that great opportunity that you don’t know about. So yeah, segmentation. I think it’s nothing new for anybody. We know segmentation’s important. I think it’s that mapping and once again, that relationship with your data teams and breaking out each audience.
[00:21:55] Martin: Have you broken it out this way? Have you broken it out that way? And often when [00:22:00] you. Audience building is one of those things that kind of, you might get, build a list one time, one way. Great. Build it five ways in the testing process because so much of what we rely on is the consistency of data and having a lot of audiences, especially when you’re negotiating with your CRM platform, make sure you’ve got plenty of room.
[00:22:24] Martin: To build out audiences because building it five ways is gonna teach you a lot more about your audience size, et cetera. Are they opted in? Are they opted out? Same thing we talked about when it comes to, who’s opted in for how much? The more segments you can get, it will be overwhelming at first, but the more you divide that audience up, the more you get a picture of.
[00:22:48] Martin: Okay, there’s only, there’s only five people in this list and there’s a million in this list and we just changed one or two things and starting off with a good plan for that. But it’s a lot of test expectations. [00:23:00] Test your data, trial and error, and it’s gonna be irritating. But the best part is that once you get those key segments in place.
[00:23:08] Martin: You’ve questioned all the individual fields of data that have come in on an individual group, you understand them a lot better, and they become your more consistent audiences.
[00:23:18] Chintan: Yeah, definitely. So it’s always about making sure that you don’t overdo the segmentation, right? Because you want to make sure that your audience is not highly overlapping across multiple segments, because then it’s always difficult to remember that, okay, you are not targeting the same audience again and again via multiple segments.
[00:23:33] Chintan: Yep. Whoever is planning that segmentation needs to make sure that they have the clear visibility, they plan it out in the right way with right conditions and right factors, which helps you in better segmentation. One key area I would love to also discuss more around is data, right? And you already mentioned a good amalga mission of both marketing and data team, right?
[00:23:53] Chintan: You need a data buddy or a data team, which helps you in leveraging the data in the right way in your marketing system. [00:24:00] So businesses normally focus on. And you mentioned it, right? Business normally focus on getting new customers. Acquire, and neglect their existing customer. And when we talk about neglecting existing customer, it’s more about retention, right?
[00:24:12] Chintan: Because retention is the key. If you don’t rate any, your existing customers, you won’t be growing. And since you know the ins and out of the customer retention, right? What’s one data driven strategy which you would recommend or which you would focus on to improve customer LTV and also help in getting better retention?
[00:24:29] Martin: Yeah, I would say. We’ve talked about data team as the initial resource for helping understand the data fields that are being fed into the CRM, which is always critical. Your data lake is going to have a massive data, but the data team also as your attribution, direct attribution. And when I say that because with marketing also comes the challenge of did.
[00:24:56] Martin: This communication make so many sales. And I [00:25:00] think having we’ve talked about data is coming in. Data is, as is really important, but having the recourse of data to be able to see this individual person, and I think you’ve gotta have the success that I’ve seen, or the best models that I’ve seen so far have been ones where you have two to three levels of attribution and.
[00:25:19] Martin: Your C-suite or your team, your upper level teams that are watching marketing, have expectations for what you’ll be providing back to them. The first thing is going to be, oh, did this communicate? Did this specific communication drive this many sales? You do have to have a data person on the front and the back.
[00:25:38] Martin: There are the bookends for that reporting. From the marketing side is very much attribution. Hey, over this, we can see that purchase was made during the seven day window when we were communicating with this customer, with this group of customers, seven day window, direct attribution and purchase attribution.
[00:25:56] Martin: Having two to three of those and your upper [00:26:00] management is aware, okay, I, there is value in attribution. I might see. Three or four emails I might see, I might go to the website, et cetera. But they’ll often look at that and be like how many direct sales? So building those models very early and building the expectation of what marketing is doing.
[00:26:20] Martin: ’cause all those little touch points add up to a final purchase or to an upsell. And if you don’t have that expectation and that model early on. That’s where they’re, most teams are gonna get frustrated with the marketing team because, oh, what did you do for me lately? What did you do for me today?
[00:26:39] Martin: And each one of those communications, so setting the model of those attribution lanes and multiple attributions. In addition to direct purchase are gonna really help you show the value of what you’re doing for your market, from your marketing automation CRM. Yeah, so I, I think for the most part, setting expectations, that data person not only being on the front end, [00:27:00] but also being there on the back end to see how that audience played within the data lake.
[00:27:04] Martin: You’re only gonna, it’s like CRMs, you’re gonna get a portion of the data, but you’re not gonna get all of it. And you’ve gotta either have. One, a data resource, but it’s feeding you the, you talk about the garden hose or the fire hose. Most CRMs are not gonna be able to handle the fire hose of data that comes from a data lake.
[00:27:21] Martin: So kicking, picking out those key pieces, but also a lot of that reporting’s gonna have to come from your internal data lake ’cause it’s just modeling so much. We have, we didn’t really get into website and web hooks. But that’s another great one, keeping very tight with your web teams. Once again, marketing, we’re here to get you to from point A to point B, or I should say CRM systems, social systems.
[00:27:44] Martin: We’re here to get you from point A to B and we’re not the destination in understanding that as a group can often help everyone understand the attribute like. What’s the value that’s coming from each one of these little pieces or what’s lacking value?
[00:27:58] Chintan: Definitely. So that sync [00:28:00] between data marketing and web team would definitely be helping in the crafting the better strategy and get a better lifetime value from your customers, right?
[00:28:08] Chintan: Because as you mentioned, when you’re getting tons of data from a data lake, it’s always difficult to prioritize and what to focus and what to not. So it’s always about picking and choosing the right one, which is going to get you better insights and output going further. If you talk about. The current buzzword.
[00:28:23] Chintan: P ai, right? Yeah. Yeah. It’s a no. Discussion would be done without ai, right? Because AI is the current buzzword and things are moving towards. Automation automated, right? More not from marketing automation, but more towards process automation. With the help of AI now with being ai, getting adapted, predict predictive analytics coming into the platforms, right?
[00:28:47] Chintan: New marketing automation tools, talking about that. They drive things via ai, leverage AI to adapt and learn things based on historical data, right? It’s always hard to identify. Which are trying to pick or [00:29:00] which platform to pick. Many businesses normally go towards ai ai, word and try to go and go towards that platform, but then they invest in wrong tech and miss out on real opportunities.
[00:29:12] Chintan: So as per your. Understanding and with the AI getting this buzz, what’s the biggest marketing automation trend companies should pay attention to and how to make sure that you go ahead with this flow of AI and also be aware of to not overuse it.
[00:29:28] Martin: Yes. Yeah, great point. Yes, AI is everywhere. I am not the most skilled person across all these systems ’cause they’re just coming out so fast.
[00:29:36] Martin: The one thing I will say is be careful on how much you’re buying early on. Especially if you’re, even if you’re seasoned in it, be careful with how much of a relationship you’re building with whatever AI product. Many cases you can hear a lot of promises from a lot of AI companies.
[00:29:54] Martin: Right now, the AI that I’m seeing inside of CRMs are is generally just helpful. It is. It [00:30:00] is Hey, can I can make this more friendly? And it’s a language model. The challenges that I see are. Our AI companies, CRM systems that are incorporating AI systems and overselling them. I would not trust the salesperson.
[00:30:16] Martin: Love them to death. I have great relationships with a lot of different sales teams, you, you gotta have a fair amount of skepticism, especially those per p people in the position of purchasing, purchasing technology for your marketing team or your. Your data team, whatever it may be. AI is great right now as a resource for creating initial model.
[00:30:35] Martin: We all know that. Just be careful with. How many promises you expect from the AI software that you’re purchasing, or even the free ones. A lot of them have a lot of great features, but they are, in my opinion, a lot of them are overpromising at this point. Or they’ve had one customer with one experience and they might not be spending, you still have to have a personal touch.
[00:30:57] Martin: From the technology [00:31:00] team, if they’re a team of two, you are not, you’re not gonna hear back from them on, okay, this is not working the way I expected it. It’s not. We don’t have resources in that, so just be careful with your, with the promises Currently being made is about the best, I would say, and a lot of it is, it’s a test and so just don’t sign any long contracts initially.
[00:31:20] Martin: If you can get a month contract, get, get six months. I think six months is about the time period where you can. Purchase a purchase, an AI product, or start to use an AI system inside and get some learnings from that because it takes time for your customers to interact and respond. So I just say don’t purchase too much too fast and keep your, keep yourself in a safe place.
[00:31:42] Martin: From that standpoint, I think most of them are in a good place, but I think the promises are the thing that. But you’ve just gotta be careful with now.
[00:31:49] Chintan: Got it. So your point is more towards don’t get sold to over promising features, right? Because you never know whether those are actually giving those outputs or not.
[00:31:57] Chintan: And more about keeping, having [00:32:00] an eye that, okay, let’s wait and watch how the AI is getting that impact on the marketing automation side. ’cause it’s too early. Yeah. Not many people have tried and tested it, so it’s wait and watch and then make sure that you take your steps carefully.
[00:32:14] Martin: Give your team time, give them time on their calendar to. To dig in because a lot of the times the person purchasing the product is not the person using it. And that’s not gonna be any new revelation, but it is one that’s worth restating. Give your people time to play with it. And if you’re expecting a turnkey situation, ’cause you were promised it by the sales rep or by the website that you purchased it on, there’s going to be, just the other day.
[00:32:41] Martin: Like user interfaces break all the time, especially with young. With younger software companies and your larger companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever you want to, customer io, whatever, you may want to use a lot of those, a lot of those systems are still take time for, the email [00:33:00] manager or the junior.
[00:33:02] Martin: The junior email person to figure out how to make them work right for you. So give it a little bit of time, but also don’t expect the over promises that you’ll see.
[00:33:10] Chintan: Correct. Got it. So yeah, that’s more about giving the time to the team also to adapt and leverage the platform in the right way. This brings me to one of the most important question, which I feel I would be also getting learning from your end on this particular part.
[00:33:23] Chintan: So the current question I would like to go ahead with and would love to learn from you because this is the most important part which. Many of the businesses would look forward to hear from you is if a company who has a CRM and automation setup which is already there. Normally the companies don’t focus on reviewing those accounts on a quarterly or half year yearly basis and optimize it.
[00:33:45] Chintan: Instead, they let the inefficiencies pile up. And what, according to you, should be those critical areas or one area that a business should fix or just. As a part of this CI marketing automation strategy today to get better output or [00:34:00] deliver a better from a marketing strategy point of view?
[00:34:04] Martin: Yeah, I’d probably say we talked a lot about data scientists having great data, relationship team removing consistency, and I would not be afraid to turn things off. And that’s probably the one crutch that. Most of us deal with is we’re afraid to turn off something because it’s giving us a 0.1% over here, but in the meantime, it’s not progressing, it’s not improving it.
[00:34:30] Martin: It takes a little bit and every company is gonna be comfortable with this, and especially because each company is so specific. I wish I could pick point just to one thing, but each company that I deal with it’s they, if they’re starting from scratch. They need a plan to revise, set time to revise in the future, we’re gonna come back to this, right?
[00:34:50] Martin: To your point, consistency is can be a great thing, but it also can be something that kind of burns you turning off a system. And especially having [00:35:00] the idea of let’s turn this off for a little bit and see if it actually impacts numbers, because you’re giving a little bit of a break to the, with a plan to come back to it.
[00:35:12] Martin: But you’re giving a little bit of a break to see was it actually having the impact that it was. But as marketers, we love turning things on and letting it set and go. ’cause it makes us feel good and we see the, we can show clicks and engagement and app opens and purchases that we can attribute.
[00:35:30] Martin: Turning it off for a while is gonna give you a chance, one thing at a time to analyze it. The other thing that I would say is bring in a specialist on one particular thing. You and I are both specialists in, in our world giving, and it doesn’t have to be a long period of time. I wouldn’t say anything less.
[00:35:48] Martin: Within six months for somebody that you bring in. But giving a chance for your customers to breathe, I think helps a lot if I see the same communication over and over again. There’s fatigue in that. And I think, the initial [00:36:00] thought is, oh let’s revise it. Take, turn it off for a second.
[00:36:04] Martin: Let’s see the impact to the business. Before we turn it back on again, then you can make a little bit more of an educated guess because it’s been running for two years, three years, whatever it is. Then you’ve got some data that you can work with. Same thing with holdout groups. Have a group of customers that you can, you’re not communicating with and that aren’t on that track.
[00:36:22] Martin: So you can see the impact when you turn it back on again, now you’ve got a chance to see, oh, hey, we did some revisions. We have some plans, and we can launch a new series, especially for. I work with financial companies and a lot of companies that have just the one product over and over again, and they’re so afraid to turn something off, let it sit, then turn it back on again, give some resting time.
[00:36:46] Martin: And also these workflows and these communi communication series where you have, let’s say 10, 15 communications over two months. All of those deteriorate over time. Like a customer in a [00:37:00] flow. If they didn’t, if they don’t wanna buy it right now, hitting them up next week or the following week might get them.
[00:37:07] Martin: But really you’ve got a brief window of time when they’re engaged. So feel free to turn things off, rebuild, just see what happens when it’s turned off before you relaunch, and to give you time to look at that data. I think that really helps shows the value of what marketing and CRM systems do. And the team members that work so hard to put them together.
[00:37:28] Chintan: Got it. Yeah. So as a marketer, I definitely, I’m able to connect that as a we normally are intended, that’s in our DNA to turn on things because let’s start this workflow. Let’s keep this workflow on. We are having this dependencies, right? But then we don’t, normally don’t focus on turning it on.
[00:37:44] Chintan: Turning it off, right? And think on how we can do it in a better way. Let’s pause it for a while, understand the data, let’s review it, and then go ahead and revise it or rephrase it from a new angle, right? A new point of view. So that’s definitely a good insight. The next one is the most [00:38:00] important one in my opinion, because it’s more around the alignment within marketing and sales, and you would’ve heard it multiple times that marketing teams are focusing on and are able to generate leads.
[00:38:10] Chintan: But sales team either often ignore them or not able to find value in those leads which ultimately leads into marketing budget getting wasted. Or missed opportunities or revenue leakage. And without automation, most commonly struggle to get synced between both of this team. So in, in your opinion, what is the smartest way to align both sales and marketing team to get the best out of the automation and deliver the output?
[00:38:34] Martin: Yeah. Yeah, great question. In my experience, so we talked about having a data person on the marketing team. I’ve seen that being so successful because data teams are working in the data lake, and marketing team doesn’t know what the doesn’t know everything that’s happening on the data side. Having a data person on the marketing team gives you a lot of strength and a lot of information.
[00:38:58] Martin: I think the same thing for sales and [00:39:00] marketing. Having a marketing person on the sales team, a specific role, you’re not turning them into a salesperson. Their one role on the sales team is to keep up with what’s happening in marketing, to be a part of those conversations, and translate that so that the sales team understands.
[00:39:18] Martin: You need a translator between these two groups. Marketing speaks, marketing sales seats, speaks sales, and they can often be miscommunications between them or sales is going off and doing their own thing without somebody that’s in that role. It doesn’t have to be like a completely senior marketing person, but somebody in a mid-level range gives you the advantage They have the, you can, the sales team can have somebody right there that can explain what’s happening on the marketing side and also translate that to sales, the value that’s being brought.
[00:39:51] Martin: And, understanding, okay, marketing is doing this. The next best thing for us is to follow up with this type of message. It’s not a message [00:40:00] of, Hey, I’m, Hey I’m Chandler, I’m your rep for this, for this group, because that automatically gets sent out. That marketing person on a sales team, often called lead nurturing person, is gonna give you that advantage on the sales team of understanding.
[00:40:15] Martin: Oh, okay, now I understand the translation. Or they’ll help you understand the language of marketing. What they’re trying to do. So you better, you get better information across the board. So I think having cross specialists on each team is gonna give you so much, so much better information and you can make some fixes and some translation between those groups.
[00:40:36] Chintan: Okay. Yeah, it’s having always across specialist the way you recommend it, having a marketer. Into a sales team. So a salesperson in the marketing side, right? Who can understand and make those connect with the marketing message and also with the sales message, what needs to be followed. So yeah, great insights Martin and thanks for spending this time to give us those I.
[00:40:57] Chintan: Good, insightful pointers around [00:41:00] segmentation, be it lead nurturing, be it having a data team which you are emphasizing a lot on the marketing side, and also making sure that how we can be aware of this ai, ai buzzword and take some cautious and smaller steps before highly getting involved into those AI driven marketing automation platform.
[00:41:18] Chintan: Great to have you here and great to get those insights and thanks for this time here.
[00:41:24] Martin: Yeah. Thanks Chintan. Always great working with your team and appreciate it.
[00:41:28] Chintan: Thank you, Martin.
[00:41:29] Martin: All right.