Kexin Chen

In terms of defining success, more top line KPIs are aligned to the targets set for pipeline and ACV (annual contract value) and my team's marketing contribution. Since my team focuses on building new C-Suite relationships for a set global list of top accounts, we're able to measure and hold ourselves accountable to the ability to drive new C-Suite relationships and expand our footprint within the top accounts. Qualitatively I also check in with my key stakeholders to ensure my teams are aligned to their top priorities.

The audience I target are primarily Fortune 500 C-Suite. In this case, we take an account first approach and weigh events more heavily than digital in our marketing plans. For integrated marketing plans, bringing in the functional experts to inform the strategy from the start is critical. Generally I recommend having a clearly articulated goal/vision with clearly articulated outcomes of success. Then opening the space for ideation to build the strategy jointly helps create the initial alignment needed for your demand gen strategy.

For historically tense relationships, one of my coaches has given me a fantastic framework: 1. Take a step back and request time to address your relationship. Request the time to discuss this so they aren't blindsided and have time to think about what they'd want to share. 2. In the meeting, both sides share a rating of 1-10 with 10 being an incredible relationship, where they stand. Have a discussion on how to raise the rating and what is needed from both ends. Be vulnerable and share where your challenges have existed and the stories you're telling yourself. 3. Agree on a cadence for check-ins and ensure you're both committed and celebrate the stronger relationship.

As a marketer, knowing your audience is critical. Internal stakeholders are no different. I view them as your internal audience. Generally, I will schedule an initial kick off call to learn their priorities, areas of concern/learnings if it is a run rate program, and their communication preferences. Getting specificity and clarity on the role they'd like to play the expectations they have on how they'll stay up to date on the project are critical to your and the project's success. I tend to over communicate initially and will double check with statements like: "since we're new working together, are these updates at the altitude you'd like? Anything else top of mind?"

I think the best way to gain insights from internal stakeholders is to: 1. Ask them directly. It's easy to jump into transactional work and I like to have an initial meeting where I spend a few minutes to understand their priorities, how they define their personal and team's success, how they see our teams partnering and how they like to be kept up to speed on projects? I like to state my personal communication preferences as a way to get a gauge on what I may need to alter about my style based on their feedback. 2. If I don't have an opportunity ask them directly, I often will see if I can meet with the Executive Assistant or others within their team who can provide some of the insights mentioned above.

For sales and marketing alignment, I find understanding their core KPIs and joining their regular leadership cadence meetings allows you to understand the top of mind challenges/priorities. As you see how pipeline is progressing and the health of the business from the field leadership calls, you're able to then adjust marketing campaigns and programs to deliver on the short term gaps and plan for the long range planning needs.

A successful integrated marketing plan takes a village of marketers across a myriad of functions and specialties. When there are unclear swim lanes, I tend to like to address where the confusion lies and build a slide that defines the RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed). If this doesn't help resolve, then I also request to sit down with the partner and document out the process. Often times, I find the confusion in ownership lays in mis-alignment on definitions of certain commonly used terms and the process itself.

For ROI, it's helpful to know what the outcome of the event is meant to accomplish (IE: generate, progress, and or close pipe).Can impact the content strategy and the audience criteria you target. It can be for both, but having clarity here also helps with aligning your criteria for ROI. We currently look at the spend efficiency of a program so that is looking at our Marketing Pipe divided by the total cost to run the program. To ensure we are efficiently spending, I also keep an eye around Host: customer ratios; Customer: Internal Company (Host+ Support) ratios; and Total Program cost (T&E+Marketing Spend), cost per attendee. For programs where it is targeting an enterprise executive audience and may have longer sales cycles, we look at leading indicators to ensure we're hitting the appropriate quality attendees by ensuring we have coverage of 1) our top accounts list 2) our biggest open deals for the next two quarters 3) specific title floor (IE: VP+), and 4) balance of prospects vs customers. On an annual basis, I also run a cohort analysis to see for the executives who participated in a program against a similar audience that didn't, what was the deal size lift; product penetration (if multiple products); velocity of opportunities, etc. While it's correlation, it is still a helpful one I like to lean on and also a great stat to use on the field to get them to drive further engagement and invites to my team's programs ;-) Last but not least, asking for qualitative feedback from customers and hosts has always been helpful as well.

Despite working at a Fortune 500 company, we're relatively simple. We use a good amount of our own technology (IE: Marketing Cloud for invites at large scale events, Salesforce CRM, Slack, Tableau). For event logistics and project management towards an event, we primarily use Google spreadsheets and Quip. We've also explored Asana to support this as well. We also have our go to agencies and vendors for event production and work with them via Slack. Given how big our event portfolio can be across the company, we have a Tableau dashboard that allows us to see which events are coming up. We also have a self-serve pre-event and post-event Tableau dashboards for our event leads to pull performance. 

The events team funds the overall structure and footprint of our event. However we partner heavily with the field marketing teams who have supplemental budget to fund ancillary events and the content and programming needed. Having clear tracking and reporting put into place to be able to measure each sub event and also qualitative attendee feedback can help over time to see how each sub event is performing within the broader even to make optimizations.