Nicolette Konkol

The MarTech stack is only as good as the strategy, people, and process it supports. Invest in the strategy, people, and process to set the foundation, and then select MarTech that will amplify and accelerate that. The MarTech stack at Morningstar includes 6sense, Asana, Bizible, Contentstack, Eloqua, SFDC, BrightTalk, ZoomInfo, and BigMarker

This question is specific to scaling a business. No one size fits all answer, what you choose to centralize or decentralize has a lot to do with what growth stage you are in and your priorities. In the case of Morningstar, we have central marketing functions (like brand, PR, demand, and customer marketing) and marketing functions like product marketing that live in a decentral business unit. Decentral models allow for agility and focus and the central functions play a role in consistency and amplification. I do find it particularly useful to centralize a function if the discipline does not exist to drive consistent KPIs and processes. For more on this topic check out the great blog post from First Round Review on “Give away your Legos and other commandments for scaling startups.”

* Make sure reporting is set up to measure what’s important and is agreed upon across sales & marketing * You can’t wait till the martech stack is built or the website is perfect or your strategy is complete to start generating demand. You’re going to have to build the race car while you are racing. You need to capture/generate demand while you are standing up new process, getting new martech in place, etc. * Set up a regular cadence of communication with your stakeholders- actively setting and managing expectations with your stakeholders is key to building trust.

Depends on how you’ve defined the scope and priorities of the customer marketing organization but some to consider are: * Monthly active users or utilization rate * Engagement in onboarding/education programs * Percentage of customers that use “sticky features” * Number of customer advocates * referrals * Net Promoter Score * Retention rate * Avg. Customer Contract size * Account spend * Growth in customer communities * Influenced new deal/upsell/renewal Pipeline & Revenue from customer references, case studies, etc.

Campaign operations and demand generation are part of the same value chain of campaign creation, so it depends on the size and scale of your teams as well as the specialization you chose to prioritize. Often in startups, you have demand gen and ops in one person, as the org scales, you begin to introduce specialization. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve seen roles and responsibilities of ops, in particular, go as far as to be divided into 6 different specializations. For our team at Morningstar and consistent with my experience at other organizations we have the campaign architecture and channel selection live in demand generation and the actual build and measurement lives in operations.

Perfection should never be the priority. "Don’t let 'perfect' be the enemy of 'good.” Formulate some hypotheses, strive for your best, and then always plan to iterate. The more data you collect from how your customer interacts with a campaign the better your campaign can become with optimization over time.

First one would be a sound campaign planning process that starts with the outcome you are trying to achieve, who your target audience is, and an understanding of where they "live" i.e. where they spend time with their peers learning about new solutions. Second would be an airtight Q/A process that includes more than one set of eyes. The campaign planning process, if done well, should include time for the Q/A process.

There’s plenty of tech out there to enable any number of strategies and subsequent tactics but the place I’d start is with customer data. Do you have the data you need to inform your customer marketing strategy? This can be as simple as the CRM & Marketing automation data or as advanced as a customer data platform that drives a personalization strategy. Reference program tech, investments in review sites like G2, Trust Radius, or Gartner Peer Reviews, Gifting platforms, PLG, and in-product coms like Pendo. Tech is only as good as the strategy it supports.

Most answers to this question focus on the buying journey and tend to sum up the post-sale experience in one bullet point but there's definitely more to it than that. Indeed the customer experience starts with the buying experience where you come to understand the problems your potential client is trying to solve and the outcomes they'd like to achieve and continues through the handoff to customer success or account management. The post-sale stages of the customer lifecycle generally include: a. Activation, Onboarding, Adoption b. Renewal & Expansion c. Advocacy

Build a simple waterfall model that starts with the revenue target for the year. Assign a percentage of that target to marketing. Use some conversion benchmarks (either historical for your company or industry avg) to work up a funnel for how many opportunities, demos, MQLs you need to hit that target. Plannuh has a free funnel-building tool to guide you through this exercise. https://funnel-builder.plannuh.com/