Jeff Jewett

Buyer personas and segmentation is a crucial part of any demand generation strategy to understand who to market to and what messages to deliver to that person. However, I find that the most difficult part of the strategy isn't defining the persona(s) themselves. Rather, making sure you have the correct data to label personas in your systems ends up being the more difficult part of executing and sustaining your strategy. To answer the question directly, I focus on the following so I can build sets of customers/prospects that either are trying to solve a similar problem, are using a product in a similar way, or are the buyer in purchasing solutions: * What problem the person deals with (use cases) * Whether the person is directly involved with the purchase (end user, influencer, decision maker, etc.) * What the person does (job function and level, job title, team or department, etc.) * Additional insights (industry, revenue potential, current satisfaction level, etc.) As I mentioned, the difficulty usually is with the actual data itself to be able to segment using the above criteria. As part of your overall segmentation and buyer persona strategy, make sure that you have processes, tools, and systems that enable continuous data enrichment and data cleansing to make sure that you not only have the persona data but are constantly making sure it is accurate.

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.

I don't think the customer journey stages change if you're prioritizing existing customer revenue, but the tactics and channels used to reach your customers would definitely focus on continuous education and solution marketing. Specifically, from a "Marketing" perspective, I would make sure that I have mix of the following to highlight use cases and the problems your organization can solve for the customer: * Scaled programs (i.e. paid display, paid social) * High touch ABM marketing programs (lunch and learn, executive roundtables, session breakouts at 1st or 3rd party events) In addition, I would focus on customer outreach tactics to make sure you are always communicating the benefits of your solution and ensuring that you are educating customers on why additional users or solutions benefit their organization. These could include: * In product or email onboarding and activation to encourage high initial adoption and use * User group and user conferences * Scaled and high touch customer success programs with messages similar to the scaled programs above

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.

I think there are additional considerations to understand before determining whether to stop, start, or continue either of these. Specifically, what is the goal of the specific event itself. Live events can provide a great opportunity for awareness building and pipeline acceleration. Virtual events, likewise if you're thinking of a virtual user conference, can be a key driver for content and messaging creation for direct demand generation via the event and for use in other channels. In addition, if you're considering webinar type events as virtual events, they can be a great activity and signal for sales readiness or as a customer success tool (i.e. expansion or retention marketing). In general, I believe all 3 are important tactics in the overall demand generation strategy. Understanding whether you are trying to generate awareness, demand, or accelerate pipeline would be how to determine whether a specific event should be planned.

As marketing and sales funnel definitions and awareness stage names/definitions can be different across different organizations, I'll describe the stage rather than try to label it first. In my experience, when a lead has, either by volume of activity or volume/strength of intent actions, indicated they are ready to purchase a solution (i.e. sales ready) lead to opportunity conversion is highest. This also applies if you're using more of a buying unit or team concept, and you have multiple leads become sales ready, especially if the leads are decision makers or influencers in the unit. Successfully defining what a sales ready lead requires input and agreement across product marketing, demand generation, and sales in order for the conversion to have the highest likelihood of success. Traditionally I've labelled these as MQLs or MQAs but I think it's important to focus on the activities and signals from the lead(s) to identify the stage in awareness that most likely leads to an opportunity. I also believe the actions and activities that indicate an awareness stage should continuously be revisited by your organization to allow for evolving market conditions and customer needs to be accounted for and ensure your conversion remains high.

From a messaging standpoint I don't think there would be too much variation between a net-new vs. expansion/upsell as you're attempting do educate both prospects and customers how your solution can help them solve a problem they are facing. So the determining factor is is the company objective of landing new customers or expanding/upselling existing customers. It seems likely that both are a priority for the company so determining which has the most likely chance of success or will bring in better ROI would determine the priority and resources (budget, channels, etc.) used to focus on each one as part of your overall strategy.

This is a deceptively difficult question to answer. Simply speaking, assuming you have the data to know the answers to the following, I would use the following factors to determine the mix of channels/tactics to include in a campaign strategy: 1. ROI - what is the return on the investment of a specific channel. In my specific case I look at bookings ROI. If you have a more direct conversion funnel it would mean some other form of a purchase ROI. There is a time component to ROI as well as marketing typically doesn't immediately return on the spend. You should need an agreed upon ROI timeframe to set appropriate expectations as part of this calculation. 2. Scale - does the specific channel or tactic reach the right amount of people, teams, or organizations. If you rely on high volume/low ASP sales you would want a channel with very large reach. Conversely if your sales are low volume/high ASP, high touch 1 to 1 or 1 to few tactics would be effective. My mix usually includes both. 3. Reach - highly related to scale, does the channel and tactic reach the right people and teams within an organization. Understanding personas and their buying decision behaviors is key to understanding which channels and tactics will reach the right audience. Ultimately, having ROI data by specific channel and tactic is key. Absent that data using experiments across channels and tactics to test scale and reach and tracking the ROI of the experiment would be the best way to understand what your mix should look like for your demand generation strategy.

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.