AMA: Atlassian Head of Enterprise Demand Generation, Jeff Jewett on Digital Marketing Strategy

Lead scoring is an integral part of my demand gen strategy to help gauge intent and engagement. It should be used along with other programs, like 3rd party intent data, contact and account enrichment, and 1st party data from sales teams to determine when a lead is highly engaged and likely ready to speak to a salesperson about a solution or product. The first step in setting up a lead scoring system is to determine the activities, actions, and demographics/firmographics that make up the scoring and the points associated with those activities. It is imperative that determining the activities, actions, and demographics/firmographics is a collaborative effort between marketing and sales, including any BDR teams, if they exist, and ideally should be based on historical data that indicates what successful activities/actions lead to opportunity creation. Once these have been established you should then determine a threshold to indicate sales readiness and an operational handover point where the lead is handed over to sales.

We use segmentation both at the account and contact level since we are a multi-solution company. Start with what problems your solution(s) solve, then determine which people (using title, seniority, department, or other factors), industries, companies, and available TAM from those companies for a specific solution/product would make up your ICP and group them into segments based on that criteria. If you are a single solution company you would still want to segment based on the people criteria above so you can tailor your messaging to the specific persona.

I believe the simplest solution to misalignment is to make sure that both the sales and marketing teams' OKRs align with the same company objectives and to make sure that front-line managers in both organizations have regular touchpoints to communicate what campaigns and programs are running and how effective they are a generating leads. My team has weekly calls with our EDR teams to give and receive feedback on lead quality and campaign performance, as well as a monthly campaign enablement session to ensure sales understands what programs are in market generating demand.

We track our spend and pipeline influence (multi-touch pipeline attribution by marketing activity) and by marketing channel to determine the pipeline ROI. We can then extrapolate bookings ROI by applying our win rate to understand which marketing channels are most effective in generating pipeline and revenue for the company.