Integrated B2B Campaigns: Where Every Message Connects

   

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th in Palo Alto. We're excited to have five flocking awesome founding sponsors: HG Insights, Boomerang, Webless, Firebrick, and Webflow, and an amazing VIP dinner sponsor with Vidoso. Last year, we brought together over 100 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and this year we're doing it again. Same venue, same energy, and same ambition to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. Tickets are now available at CMOHuddles.com. Do yourself a favor—check out some of the speakers and experts we have. It will blow you away. You can also watch a video that I am confident will get you pumped up, and it also shows what Gen AI video can do right now. Grab your ticket before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's gonna be flocking awesomer!

You're about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddle Studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. In this episode, Scott Morris, CMO of Sprout Social, Kelly Hopping, CMO of Demandbase, and Marni Carmichael, CMO of Imagesource, share how they build integrated campaigns that connect brand and demand, keep teams aligned across channels, and create a through line that buyers recognize and that drives momentum into pipeline. It's a lot and by the way, if you're a B2B CMO, you can meet Scott at the CMO Super Huddle in Palo Alto, California on November 6th and 7th. Be sure to check out CMOHuddles.com for more on that. And if you like what you hear on this show, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddle Studio, the live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I'm your host Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. There are a lot of worries in B2B land right now, like AI taking jobs and an uncertain economy driving budget cuts, the demise of SEO. But you know what should be on top of this list? Disconnected campaigns. They're the silent killer of B2B budgets. But here's the thing, when campaigns are truly integrated with every touchpoint singing the same strategic song, the results aren't just additive. They're exponential. Today we're diving into how the savviest CMOs are orchestrating campaigns that don't just reach their audience. They surround them with irresistible messaging that turns prospects into believers and believers into buyers. Sounds like a big promise, but we've got some amazing guests to get us through this. So with that, let's bring on Kelly Hopping, CMO of Demandbase and a returning guest who previously appeared on the show to discuss building the new marketing team. So hello, Kelly, how are you and where are you today?

Kelly: Hi Drew, great to see you. I'm in Austin, Texas today.

Drew: Let's move to integrated marketing and how you build integrated campaigns at Demandbase. Where do you start?

Kelly: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great question. You know, we start with the OKRs. So we run, you know, on an annual and quarterly cadence of sort of setting corporate goals, marketing goals, team goals, all the way down, and working through, what are those key outcomes we're driving? So we start with that, which is, what are our revenue goals, what are our booking goals? We have to back that into, what are our pipeline goals? And then, you know, back that into what do we, how much do we need to drive from marketing campaigns? So we start there, and then from there, we really ladder our programs to solve those goals.

Those programs are typically based on some sort of problem that we're trying to solve. So understanding what our ICP wants, understanding what they're struggling with, what are their pain points, and it may be different. We may have multiple personas that we're going after, and they may have slightly different pain points. So we use that from Demandbase, because we are, you know, we drive signals out of our data, and we're able to understand sort of where people are struggling, what they want. Then we innovate. So then we kind of say, okay, this is the hook, this is the anchor for this campaign. And from there, then we build out kind of segmentations. We build out an omnichannel approach that kind of says, if we're going to solve with this hook, what's the content we need? What's the press coverage we need? What's the paid we need? Where can we optimize through organic or through digital? What do we need to do with enablement, internally so that our sellers are pushing it out? Are there events we should host? Field events, webinars, whatever, all around this theme. And then how do we go from a one-day big launch of that concept to a full drip so that it continues to live and pulse for weeks and months to come. That's how we start.

Drew: And it's a lot, and I know we're going to get to an example of a recent campaign that does it and that will help folks. But one of the things that I hear a lot is, well, we can't really have a consistent campaign, because we have all these ICPs and they're, you know, the message needs to be customized, and so let's just do micro campaigns. And one of the things that we've observed is there's no additive value there. And it's particularly true if you have a buying committee and you have a different story to each of those. So I'm just curious how, before we get to an actual one, how do you sort of fight pushback on that? Well, when we're talking to CFOs, we really need a different story.

Kelly: Well, I think that's where really clear brand messaging and positioning is so important. Everything should ladder down. So if you kind of know who you are as a company, know what your value proposition is, what space you're playing in, what your differentiation is, then when you build out your messaging hierarchy, which you know applies certainly on the product side, it also applies on the campaign side, you want to think, what is your overarching one thing that you want this campaign to solve, and then how does it come to life for different audiences. I think it all still ladders up to a similar theme. The care about just might be different. So the proof point for a CFO may be about ROI or might be about, you know, revenue growth, whereas the proof point for a demand gen marketer may be about pipe create or customer engagement. So based on the audience, I think you get a different set of proof points to pay it off, but the overarching campaign should ladder and hold together seamlessly.

Drew: You know, I love talking to marketers, to marketers, because you got to be good. I mean, you have to really, because they'll see the smoke from a mile away. You really. So let's walk, walk through a recent campaign and talk a little bit about how you connected the dots across channels and teams.

Kelly: Yeah. I mean, one of the ones we're running right now, we're about to launch a multi-partner community, which is a demand generation community, but it's about taking the best of different audiences. And what it is is it's called ABM LA, and maybe you've heard of it years ago. We killed it a few years ago. We're bringing it back. The idea is that it's a mix of top-level thought leadership, ecosystem partner partnerships and some of that connectedness that goes across the ecosystem. And there's an education component to it, there's a demand gen component to it, there's an event component to it, there's a press component to it, that actually media cares, because you start to see it represents the future. So we started looking at this campaign. It started out as, like, oh, let's launch this community, turned into like, no, this is actually a platinum level campaign, because it solves so many of our things, like you said, across different personas, different audiences. So what we did with that was we said, hey, again, we started with, what are our goals? Pipeline was a big goal. We said, how do we get to pipeline? One of the largest drivers of pipeline is when we work with our partners. You know, when the plumber recommends an electrician, you just accept them, you don't go question. And so we like partnerships because they have such a high conversion rate, because people trust the partners they work with, and they trust their recommendations. So it was a great multi-partner play. And then we got to level set on, okay, how much of this can we drive? What can our partners drive? What does that financial model look like? What do our go-to-market tactics look like? And then we had to do buy-in, right? Because partnership involves our partner team, our product team, our customer team, certainly our SDRs team. And so we had to work cross-functionally to get everybody's buy-in and then on the messaging, and on the go-to-market strategy and how we were going out. And then there was some roadmap components to it that we needed to make sure our product could support integrations with all these partners. So there are a lot of different pieces. That's just an example. And like I said, we launched this one in a couple weeks. It hasn't come out yet, but we are well on our way. We've built the website, built all the content, built the strategy, built the timing and the financial model. So ready to go. We'll see.

Drew: Yeah, and we'll certainly find out. And it takes a while for something like this, because what I think is really important in the observation I'd make on that, is this isn't a message. This is a thing. This is a program that has real, meaningful components for the various constituencies in your ecosystem. And I think that's just bigger thinking than, let's get the words right.

Kelly: Oh, it's more than that, right? Yeah. And bringing those to life. And sometimes the words are one thing internally, and then getting the words external right, and by audience right and by channel, right? And so, yeah, the words are a big part of it, but the tactics, the alignment, the connectedness, the customer experience of if they engage in this thing, how do we continue to nurture them through? Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts. And again, the omnichannel component is so important.

Drew: But you have a uniform thing, if you will. We used to call this years ago, we called it marketing as service, where you develop a program that is actually at its core a service, and as it builds out, you have various opportunities to engage the folks. All right. Great example. Excited. We'll come back to you, Kelly, but now let's bring on Scott Morris, CMO of Sprout Social, and an industry expert who's graced the stage before to discuss landing a CMO job. Hello, Scott. Great to see you again.

Drew: But you have a uniform thing, if you will. We used to call this years ago, we called it marketing as service, where you develop a program that is actually at its core a service, and as it builds out, you have various opportunities to engage the folks. All right, great example. Excited. We'll come back to you, Kelly, but now let's bring on Scott Morris, CMO of Sprout Social, and an industry expert who's graced the stage before to discuss landing a CMO job. Hello, Scott. Great to see you again.

Scott: Hey, Drew, it's really great to see you again as well. Thanks for having me on.

Drew: And so just to ground us, where are you this fine day?

Scott: I am in Sonoma County, California, right now.

Drew: Nice, nice. All right, so you heard what Kelly said about integrated campaign. I'm curious how you've approached that, and you know how maybe you could sort of go into the balance of brand building and demand gen in all of this.

Scott: Yeah. So it was great hearing Kelly talk about how she thinks about campaigns, because we actually have, I have a very similar approach. And by the way, I love this, one my favorite topics. It's pretty much how I started my career. It's how I sort of capped my career at Adobe when I moved on to Zendesk. It's actually what I was brought into Zendesk to do was to build the integrated campaign team, integrated marketing team, and it's the first thing I focused on at Sprout, building up this function when I got here. So I'm very, very excited about this topic. And as I mentioned, I mean, a lot of things that Kelly said, I take into consideration as well. Like a lot of companies, I think oftentimes, when you think about integrated campaigns, you always start from a demand perspective. And sort of the number one focus is on pipeline. And I think that's probably the right thing to do, and that's a natural thing to do. It's the way that I've done it in the past. And once you really get the motion right, then you can expand your thinking and your campaign structure to also incorporate brand as well. That's how I did it at Zendesk, and it's how I've been doing it at Sprout. But the reality is that a really great campaign delivers on both, and Kelly had some good examples there of the community campaign where it's not just the traditional demand levers that you use of emails and events and things like that. It's also PR and social and thought leadership. And I feel like if campaigns are all about putting this big idea, these big stories in market, then amplifying them across all of your marketing channels, then by their very nature, they're sort of serving both the brand and the demand side. And I think it all comes down to KPIs, which Kelly also talked about, right? Every marketer's driven by their KPIs. So as a CMO, you have an opportunity to create that brand and demand balance based on the KPIs that you give the team for the campaigns. If all of your KPIs are focused on pipeline, it will be a very demand-centric campaign, but you have an opportunity to really strike that balance based on the objectives.

Drew: So I want to go back to something you said that we didn't really cover with Kelly, which is, you actually have an integrated team, and you build that function as it. What does that look like, and what kind of, you know, how does that work? Because we've talked about what it looks like, but you functionally need a group of people who have that expertise. Is that, is that what you're saying?

Scott: That is the way that I do it. I'm a big believer in sort of the hub-and-spoke model as it relates to a campaign function. And so you can build out a dedicated campaign team that can really own the campaigns, both strategically and in terms of how you execute and operate. So that's a, it's a unique skill set you have to find there. You have to find strategic marketers who are really good. I find oftentimes, hiring people from an agency background is a good, is a good fit here, people who can get really, really crisp around what the campaign objectives are, what the key messages are, target audience. Kelly talked about that as well. That's really, really important to nail that. Oftentimes things fall down when you're not really, really crisp and clear about that. And then they can really build the key messages. And most importantly, in this hub-and-spoke model, they can bring all of the marketers together so that everyone is kind of rowing in the right direction. Couple of companies that I've worked at before, when I got there, and either there wasn't a dedicated campaigns team, or they were just doing like emails and webinars. They were focused on just purely the demand gen element. What I found is that all the other marketing teams were doing really great work, but it tended to be pretty siloed. They were kind of all running their own programs against their own objectives. And when you have that integrated campaign team, integrated campaign motion, you make that the hub and the hub-and-spoke model gets all of those other teams delivering against those campaigns and those goals, which just gives you much, much greater impact in market, and all the KPIs that follow pipeline and everything else.

Drew: Interesting. And it makes total sense. And I was sort of, for the listeners, as we think about this, if you don't have an integrated, a team that is actually focused on integration, there is a really good chance you'll have disintegration, right?

Scott: That is true, and it's hard for the CMO to always be the one to step in and pull all of those teams together. So my experience doing this at three companies now has just shown me that the best way to do it is to have a dedicated team that can drive the strategy and be accountable for execution.

Drew: And so bring this to life a little bit. Give us an example, perhaps, of a campaign that that hits all of these checkmarks that you described, and you've now been at Sprout almost a year?

Scott: It's been 18 months. It feels like yesterday.

Drew: All right, well, so let's talk about something that you've brought to market, and in terms of an integrated campaign.

Scott: Yeah, I think a good, standout integrated campaign that I would want to highlight specifically from Sprout is basically that we moved from doing a bunch of sort of one-off marketing of individual features, because the product team is delivering a lot of stuff all the time, and so every time some new capabilities were released, we would do, like, a little bit of marketing around it. And as a result, it was a lot of little things. And I heard a lot as I was doing my listening tour when I joined Sprout, both from our own employees, our CEO, our product team, and customers that they weren't aware. Customers were not aware of so many of the capabilities, the basically the problem Sprout could help them solve that actually they had access to that they just didn't even know it, because there's just so much stuff coming at them at once. So one of the first things that I did is I introduced a quarterly launch program, right, where we had a branded quarterly launch program. It became a major global campaign. It's probably our largest single or one of our largest single expansion campaigns or motions of the year and of each quarter, and we really built a whole integrated motion around that, and it's shown really, really great results, like quarter over quarter. It's a blockbuster campaign from a pipe gen perspective. And then, most recently, we actually centered the focus of that around a bunch of updates we made to one of our product lines, our integrated marketing product, and by really, really pulling that team together, being super, super crisp about the message, being hyper-targeting, in terms of making sure that we are targeting high-fit customers with really clear positioning around value prop and around the capabilities, great enablement of sales and having a great follow-up plan for the leads and the hand-raisers from whether that was the event or all of the associated programs that go with it. It's huge. It's integrated. There's PR, there's social, there's everything. It has been a really successful motion for us. And in particular, we've started layering in customer and partner voices, and that has been really critical. The last one, we had Kroger and YouTube and a bunch of either big brands who are customers or brands who are partners. We also had a featured creator as well to really bring the story to life. And I feel like that combination of really, really strong targeting, compelling creative, of course, and aligned follow-up, aligned with the revenue team, is exactly what drives not only engagement, but really, really qualified pipeline.

Drew: It's great. And what I love is it, so customer marketing, particularly if you're a software company where you have lots and lots of features. I love the fact that you sort of took away the drip, death by 1,000 paper cuts. I can't keep up with the email and said, all right, we're going to do one big thing every quarter and really bring customers up to date. And what it enables you to do is, I think, I suspect, repackage those to either reinforce the current value proposition or expand it. And so you just, the whole notion of integrated marketing is to create one plus one equals three, and not create smallness, but to create bigness. And it feels like that. And another thing, I'm just going to make a point of, a lot of times, CMOs don't own customer marketing, and yet, right now, in a slow economy, that is how growth is happening. So you've really got to figure out how to do integrated campaigns. All right, Scott, that was amazing. Thank you. Now we're going to welcome Marni Carmichael, VP of Marketing at ImageSource, who has previously joined us on the show many times to shed light on sales enablement and coaching and developing talent. Hello, Marni. Welcome back.

Marni: Hey Drew!

Drew: So you heard what Kelly and Scott had to say. What did that make you think of and keep us going? And then we'll come back to specifically, what ImageSource is?

Marni: Yeah. Well, I felt like I just attended a master class in campaign marketing and integrated campaigns. So a lot of head nodding going on. The one thing I could add that I think we're doing as well, and maybe they are too, is we're integrating the sales enablement piece and the BDR teams or the SDRs in the campaign strategy. And so that means, from the beginning, like there's lots of tactics, like we talked about in terms of PR or webinars or events or email marketing, but because, you know, marketing analytics and the tech stacks are so powerful now we can see who's interacting with any of those touchpoints, and then we have some trigger points at which we roll that to an SDR to contact, and we have some really tight SLAs on that where we're asking them to do it within two hours of the touch. So I think that that's a powerful addition to the campaign strategy, as you know. And both Kelly and Scott talked about making sure the right stakeholders are informed of what the campaign is and are participating in the messaging and the launch initiatives. And then we have an execution phase for those players too, so they stay invested in the campaign. We have done similar things with quarterly launches. This is actually the first time we're doing a much longer tail demand generation campaign around one of our specialties, an area of expertise for us. It requires a lot of ongoing momentum building from marketing like it, because it's, oh yeah, we're doing that thing. No, here's the next touch, and here's the next element of the campaign, and here are the results of the campaign and of your participation in the campaign. So that's an area where we also layer in some of our other assets.

Drew: I think it's interesting. And we didn't get to that with Kelly and Scott, so I'm so glad you brought it up, the strategic part of this and how that creates an opportunity for the marketing leader to bring sort of clarity around the idea and the story that we're going to tell, but bring involvement and buy-in early. And it's funny, you know, we're talking in CMO Huddles this month about sales enablement, and you know, sales going rogue and not using the same messaging. And part of the reason is that they weren't part of it to begin with.

Marni: Yeah, and I think you have to have a lot of patience and maybe build in a cycle for that feedback too, because we had that experience with the campaign right now, where, you know, even our CEO participated in the messaging. It's an area that he's passionate about, and then you get that message to even the marketing team to create the artwork and the assets and there's some friction there, or, you know, there's some room for new ideas there. Like Scott had said, it wasn't quite crisp enough. Like we are experts, so we think we're communicating the value really clearly, but we're not to somebody who may not have the background, and obviously the buyer isn't going to have decades of background in how we solve that business problem. So yeah, it's definitely—you have to make sure to build in those cycles and stay really positive about those contributions. And you know, personally, I get really excited about the execution, and I know I can appear impatient about the collaboration part. So I really have to, you know, challenge myself to stay open and, you know, stay excited about what the new ideas would bring and this time around, I mean, really tactically, we kind of reinvented what our landing pages looked like, and made sure, you know, a lot of them today look really the same, like image, copy, CTA and, you know, just an effort to flip it, put the customer testimonial up as soon as you can, put the CTA up as soon as you can. And just think through that journey of somebody's already taken an action. How can we now, you know, make that path as seamless as possible?

Drew: So many insights to unpack. You know, one of the things is, heads of marketing have been doing this for so long. You can easily see how the dots are connecting. You know that you're going to go from strategy to execution, you can see it in your head. And I think for a lot of people who might only have one aspect of it, they can't. And so helping them there, and the other part of it—

Marni: Yeah, it's like the spokes that Scott was talking about, like the spokes have to be connected to the wheel.

Drew: But when there's—everybody who does a rebranding immediately goes out to all of the communities and constituents, right? And you get the CEO, you get everybody involved. But when you think about campaign development, you're sort of like, we got to get this campaign out the door. So you're really talking about involvement early on. I think that's so important. Maybe you could give one example of a campaign and how it came together for you?

Marni: Yeah, so we are in the midst of a long tail campaign now that we call FreeMove, and we help organizations migrate their content to, you know, either a cloud or a web-enabled workflow system. And in the past, you know, those efforts for customers like ours take a long time. They're risky, they're expensive. And so the way we're approaching this campaign now is—luckily, there's a lot of market intelligence on who these people are, what platforms they have, where they are, and so we're really, you know, breaking it into quarters in terms of creative, in terms of vertical targets, and then in terms of execution, with that SDR and sales enablement phase. But you know, some background on why this campaign and why now—it is something that we have seen historically when we do blog content or webinars or other forms of sales engagement like RFP response or RFI participation. That's where we really can succeed. It's not our favorite thing to do anymore. It's not cutting edge, it's not category creation, which is where I would climb, but it is directly related to demand generation. At the end of that demand generation is revenue, and it's directly related to customer testimonials that we can continue to access and build from. So those are data points that we talk about as an executive team, like what content is working, what more expertise do we have on that? How can we continue to bring that forward to our ideal customer profiles or our potential buyers? And so that's how the conversation about the campaign was really born, and some of that creative, that first pass at creative was then like nearly a full scrap after we started to bring in other players, you know, other spokes in the marketing wheel, other creatives. And then we also took a lot of time this time to run this through our SEO/SEM partners and execution partners to make sure the way we were messaging, the words we chose, were going to be effective. And it's a bit of a conquesting campaign, which can have some price implications out there in ads and in SEO/SEM. So we then started integrating that feedback into the creative because we knew it was long tail, we knew we'd have another pass at it. And, you know, we would start to iterate on some of that. You know, that's how the integration worked at the front end. And then you start sharing that out to, you know, through scripts, through emails, through execution, with SDRs. And then you get the feedback from the account executives who are face to face with those leads and saying, "Hey, this is what's working and this is what isn't. How can we continue to sharpen up?"

Drew: Amazing. Okay, lot to digest, and we are going to come back to this with lots more. It's time to talk about CMO Huddles. Launched in 2020, CMO Huddles is the only community of flocking us B2B marketing leaders that has a logo featuring penguins. Wait, what? Yeah, well, a group of these curious, adaptable and problem-solving birds is called a huddle. And the leaders in CMO Huddles are all that and more. Huddling together to conquer the toughest job in the C-suite. So Kelly, Scott, Marni, you're all incredibly busy marketing leaders. I'm wondering if you could share a specific example, if you feel like it. How CMO Huddles has helped you.

Marni: I'll go first, just in this last huddle that I attended. And I'm sorry I don't remember the topic, but we got to really talking about AI tools and the marketing stack that was out there, and I took such furious notes on how and what people were using. And within, I'd say, less than 10 days, I implemented SalesSpeak AI on the website. And I love it, and I love the results, and I love the way it's teaching me about my content too, and helping me focus. So that's what I love. Like, even today, taking notes when Kelly and Scott were talking about, like, okay, now let me make sure that that's how my strategy is aligned. And let me make sure that's how I'm talking up to, you know, managing up to the rest of the executive team on the value that my team is bringing.

Drew: I love it. And by the way, we're using SalesSpeak.ai on CMOHuddles.com and they're a partner of ours.

Marni: Not a commercial, just an example.

Drew: But no, it's great. The whole month, we talked about nothing but how CMOs are implementing and using AI. And it was, not surprisingly, our best-attended Huddles of the months by far. So Kelly, any thoughts?

Kelly: Yeah, yeah, I have a couple. One is, I love the—I guess it's the newsletter, whatever it is that comes—and it's all the bullets. I literally read every single word in every single bullet because there are data points I use in speaking. Sometimes there are frameworks that I use. I pass along to my team. There are great moments when I just go, "Oh sweet, like, I'm not alone in this. Other people are struggling with these same things." So it's great kind of validation and feels like, okay, we're all going through this. We're all going through this. We're all in this together. We're all struggling with pipeline or organic traffic or whatever it is. So I appreciate that. The other one was very specific. I had reached out—and I think Drew, you remember this—I had reached out to the CMO Huddle community asking for examples or guidance on how CMOs were framing their board decks. I wanted to know kind of what level of detail because, you know, different boards care about different things, but I wanted to hear how people were talking about pipeline versus brand versus events versus any of the other programming that goes on in marketing. And so I was able to connect with two or three different CMOs who all gave me their take on what they show to the board. And between all of that, I was able to cobble together a really solid template now that I've been using for the last couple board meetings. So I appreciate that.

Drew: That is amazing, and I appreciate that the recaps—isn't getting anybody's wondering. So I write these every week. I put two hours on my calendar, and it makes me very happy to know that you open those and read them, so that's awesome. And yeah, the board decks is amazing. Scott, any thoughts?

Scott: Yeah. So everything they just said, absolutely agree with that. I mean, I think also kind of a theme, at least from my perspective, is that CMO Huddles really gives you actionable insights that are based on real-world experiences, right? Marketing leader to marketing leader. Marni mentioned, you know, scribbling notes. I find I'm doing that all the time when I'm in a Huddle or talking to other Huddles or in the Slack channel. For example, you just get very practical, field-tested ideas along with tips for putting them into action. And so specifically, I would say I do also like the recaps. Can't attend every Huddle, right? So that is very helpful to me. But the session that you did—the AI of how to build a marketing team with Lisa Adams—and by the way, of course, AI, we can't, you know, we're all talking about AI all the time, and there's lots of sessions on AI. But like, it was so good because it was about sharing practical insights on how to structure your team, how to select the right tools, and then how to drive better results with AI. It wasn't like this really, really broad "what are you doing with AI" topic. It was very specific, very actionable, and stuff that I use all the time with my team.

Drew: I love it. All right, thank you for those wonderful comments. If you're a B2B marketing leader who wants to build a stronger peer network, gain recognition as a thought leader, and get your very own stress penguin, please join us at cmohuddles.com. Okay, so let's get back to all of us. Discuss, if you were—we're giving advice now to other CMOs out there listening to this. When integrated campaigns break down, how do you one, bring it back together? And two, how do you anticipate it so they don't? You're shaking your head, Kelly.

Kelly: Yeah, I can jump in. I think there's probably three things that—well, maybe two main things that cause a breakdown for me. One is when there is misalignment across the team cross-functionally, and that usually comes from either not being mapped to the right OKRs or a lack of communication transparency across the organizations. I'm kind of a big believer in over-communicate often, that things often don't slow down, but also make sure that you're bringing people along for the ride. So misalignment cross-functionally is one. I think the other one is lack of enablement. Sometimes we get in our little marketing bubble, heads down, and kind of build our campaign and build all our assets and build all our programming and timelines and hit go and expect them to work. But if we have not properly enabled the SDRs to catch what we're throwing, we haven't properly enabled the AEs to outbound with the content that we've been driving or developing. If we don't have a great inbound conversion strategy, if we don't have great calls or email scripts to do follow-ups, then we break down. And so to me, enablement isn't just about sales enablement for products. It's also enablement of campaigns, enablement of events, enablement of go-to-market, communities, all of it, so that they can play catch on the other end of our pitching.

Drew: Yeah, I love that. And I'm thinking about it again. When you launch a new brand campaign, you automatically—a lot of companies do—is you create a sort of mini training program where they have to go through it and pass a test. If they don't, they have to keep doing it. But I suspect you don't do that for campaigns, and it's interesting, right? You don't bother because it's, well, it's a campaign, and it's a thing. It'll have a shorter shelf life. And it feels like that enablement part is so huge. Scott, anything else on that topic of either keeping integrated campaigns from breaking down?

Scott: Yeah, so plus one to the enablement comments there absolutely, because if you don't do that well, like, what's the point of doing the campaign, frankly? And I would say even if you were to take it up a level, really, a lot of that is around alignment. I think I'll even use that word alignment, and specifically alignment around the why behind a campaign. What are we trying to move? How will you measure success? Because then everything needs to be oriented around that, and that includes your product partners, the other marketing partners, sales, of course. So aligning on the value prop, the targeting, the timing, the handoff, the enablement, the actions that take place after the marketing activities take place. If you don't nail that, everything falls apart.

Drew: And so, so Marni, as I'm hearing all of this, I'm thinking, oh my God, there could be 30 meetings, you know? And it's like, you know, this is a problem for y'all is that you have a lot of meetings to begin with. So how do you sort of orchestrate this coordination?

Marni: Well, I liked what was shared earlier too about making sure each of your—you know, every player on the marketing team knows their responsibilities and alignment to the campaign. You know, how are they involved in the campaign? For us, also, those marketing team members have relationships within sales and BDRs, and so they need to hear their feedback, and they need to be responsible for bringing that back to me or, you know, other leadership on the campaign to adjust and adapt or fill those gaps of the tools that they need. So I think for me, that's remembering it's not all me that has to manage down to that. You know, over a longer period of time, I should be enabling my direct reports to manage that up to me or to solve those problems from their seat and from their areas of responsibility. And honestly, that feels empowering and better to those players as well. We have a lot of in-office work here, you know, where several of us still are in an office together. So, you know, one of my team members sits nearly embedded in the BDRs team, and she can come back and say, "This script works. This one doesn't. This is how they feel about the leads," you know, and that then allows us to adjust and adapt. So you can do that remotely too, right? You can pick up those team leads on other—on those other teams. You can also probably track the way your materials are being used, opened, shared, and those are some of the ways you can, kind of, you know, red crime yourself back into to alignment.

Drew: I'm curious, and if there's a come-to-Jesus moment where you all have—where you maybe have to do this with your own team, but also with sales—where you say, "Okay, we've got all the input. Everybody's added the value that they can. We are now locked and loaded. This is what we're doing." And because I do think there's lots of folks out there—could be on your team—say, "I could add some value to this still," and it starts to turn into something different. And so I guess, is there a moment like, "Okay, guys, it's full luck. This is what we're doing. This is what we're saying. This is who we're targeting. This is how we're met." How do you make sure that that—is there an actual moment, or does that just sort of flow in?

Marni: There's a deadline for me.

Drew: There's a deadline, right? Yeah, I mean, but okay, we could launch, right? But you still know there's salespeople who are not going to use the messaging.

Scott: Does that ever happen?

Drew: No, it's funny. That's what we're talking about this month in Huddles. And it's like, you know, the salesperson who goes rogue? And one might argue if that salesperson hits their numbers, it doesn't matter. But it's interesting, when you start to dig into it, it does matter a lot.

Kelly: Yeah, it seems to be with, like with some of your seasoned sellers. They've seen success in some of the programs they've been running, or the way that they've been pitching the story, or the way that they've always been selling. And I think it does have some benefit, right? They're highly successful, they've got a track record, they have confidence in the way they deliver it. I think the risk sometimes comes in the fact that they're maybe not keeping up with the most relevant modern positioning of the company of the portfolio. They're not keeping up maybe with the latest features and upgrades and things that you're driving. They're not on message with your campaigns. And I think that's the risk. I do love the kind of bullish nature when sellers run, but it can come back and hurt on some of those. Now, there are learnings too, right? I often ask the sellers, pitch to me. Pitch me the way that you sell, so that I can hear what works and what doesn't, so that we can also, you know, thinking about flexibility in the messaging, how can we—are there parts of our campaign we need to go back and pivot a little bit, because you've tapped into something that really works, and maybe we need to pull that through into the marketing. So I do think it's a give and take, but there is something to being on message that holds.

Drew: So let's step back and talk about measurement for a second. I remember distinctly a presentation. I think it was years ago, watching CMO of Kimberly Clark at the time, talked about the integrated story. And I think it was Angel Soft, and it was this storytelling thing, and it was about strong and soft and how they did some testing and they could get better click rates if they changed the story. And if they were just looking at click rates, that would change the story. But if they looked at the overall numbers of things, it made less sense to change the story. So I'm wondering how you, as you're looking at these programs, make sure that the micro data that you have is not necessarily driving a decision, say, away from the integration. Maybe that doesn't happen in your world because you're so perfectly aligned. I mean, you started with measurement as your goal, but how do you sort of make the case that integrated is actually more effective than disintegrated?

Kelly: Well, I mean, well, one thing, I'll start at least the beginning of it. So you know, our primary measurement vehicle is pipeline, certainly attributed pipeline from marketing campaigns. So we look at overall campaign pipeline, and then we look at the attributed by campaign, and then we look at attributed by sub-campaign. So you're talking about sort of the granularity of the data. We may find out that, hey, this big campaign really, really worked. These three elements of it really did. These couple didn't, and so it may drive some adjustment. We may double down on some of the parts that are working, let our foot off on some of the ones that aren't, but we also recognize that the combination of them is what's so powerful. So I don't know that the individual components all kind of add up to the impact of the total. And I think that's some value, right there. And so, yeah, I mean, I think you can look at pieces and say, well, our web conversion is down. I think you have to go back to what your original objectives were. Was it to drive web conversion? Was it to drive overall pipe growth? If our pipe is growing, do we care about the conversion being down? Maybe that's an optimization point, but not something to throw the whole campaign out. So I think it's just constantly like, if you don't have good measurement on both the overarching as well as the sub-components, it's hard to know where to optimize.

Drew: Scott, how do you look at this from a measurement standpoint, and like, I mean, do you actually have ability to do good multi-touch attribution? Because Kelly is so right. I mean, it takes a lot of touches, often to get someone there.

Scott: Yeah, yeah, everything Kelly just said. I mean, absolutely, I think, you know, actually, one of my campaign leaders said something the other day that I really liked, which was, measurement is the thread that connects creativity to execution in our campaign. So we're really, really big believers in measuring everything. And as Kelly talked about a little bit there, it's the leading indicators and the lagging indicators and the top-level metrics. You have to look at all of those things, right? Don't get too overly concerned about individual metrics not being hit, especially when we're in some of those, you know, some of those smaller leading or lagging, you know, bounce rate or whatever, things like that. You've really got to keep the big picture in mind. And so that's what we try to keep people oriented around. That being said, you want to look at all of those metrics and how those come together. Look at those leading indicators to let you know whether you think that you're on track. And lots and lots of testing and learning is a great formula for success.

Drew: So maybe you could give us a sense of a leading indicator versus a lagging indicator. My guess is that pipeline, like, you know, booked revenue is a lagging indicator.

Scott: Yeah, lagging indicator would be, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So you're going to have your pipeline, actually, how that pipeline translates and its attributed pipeline, and how that translates to closed-won revenue, at least in B2B scenarios. We have ARR, those are all important, even conversion rates, I would actually put in the lagging indicator category. And then for leading indicators, it's engagement rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, all of those other things that help you understand whether the components of your campaign are hitting the mark. Because if they're not, you're not going to get those lagging indicators right.

Drew: Interesting. Well, and what's so hard in this. And I just—you mentioned you have a multi-touch model. I'm really curious about that, because there are so many different times where an email will go out and enable a response to happen on LinkedIn. They won't respond to the email, but they did respond to the LinkedIn or a text, but it was in conjunction with an overall campaign. And I'm just curious how you again, separate those so when you go to do your next one, you say, well, this worked a little bit better than that. And from a combo standpoint,

Scott: I'm not even sure how to answer that question. It's complicated, right? And it's imperfect, by the way. You brought up some great examples of where it's imperfect. Someone gets an email, then they go and they do something else. I remember when I was at Adobe working on the Document Cloud business, which is like Acrobat and Adobe Sign, which is like a DocuSign type solution for e-signatures. It was really interesting, because like the number two product that would sometimes get attribution from our campaigns was like Photoshop, and you're like, but wait a minute, someone bought Photoshop when they got an email about Acrobat—that doesn't make any sense at all. So it's all really imperfect, right? But still important to look at all those things together. And I think having a strong multi-touch attribution model, and there's many ways you can do that. There's first touch, last touch, there's a W, or a custom W, which is what we use over time. I think that gives you a better understanding of the efficacy of each of those channels in terms of driving towards your goals. If you look at it over too short of a period of time, it's going to be all over the place. But if you look at it over a longer time horizon, you start getting a much more accurate view.

Drew: Longer horizon. What's custom W?

Scott: Oh, that's just defining the different touchpoints that you have. Like, what are the different triggers that will actually feed into attribution? So it might be contact creation, it might be opportunity creation, things like that. And so you can start to get a better sense of the marketing tactics that are actually driving the biggest contribution to ultimately getting those deals. Okay, we can probably do a whole session on attribution, which I know we can actually probably in, because I'm not a total expert in it, and it's an important area to get actually in your conversations with sales, like, what marketing drives for us, right? It's important that you can understand that.

Drew: It's true, yeah, we need to get some marketing ops and rev ops people here in some MMM or, you know, marketing model mix, mix model people who really do this for a living that help us out. Marni, any more thoughts on when you look at measurement?

Marni: Yeah, the only thing I would add based on, you know, a lot of what Scott and Kelly have said is, and your question reinforces the need for really all of those multi-touches, right? So somebody clicked on the email, but then responded on LinkedIn or responded by text, but you can see that they've interacted with your web page. That just, you know, reinforces to me that we need all of those touch types, because it's very difficult to predict across even an ideal customer profile or buying vertical how individuals are going to respond at any moment in time, you know, and we have a kind of like opposing verticals where we focus on state and local government and financial services. One of those groups is very inactive on LinkedIn for the most part, and one of them is, you know, more generally, you know, more general participant. Well, if you get that state and local government person who happens to be active on LinkedIn, you need to be seen there too. So for me, you know, I absolutely suffer from like, what's working and how can we reduce our resources to focus on just those touches? But what I hear and see consistently is we're going to have to cover—

Scott: Customer journey is not as linear as we like to think it is, right? So those are great examples of that.

Drew: Well, and it's so funny. I think I saw something from Forrester just this morning looking on LinkedIn feed. Just is, don't confuse customer journey and pipeline. They're not the same. The pipeline is what you want it to be, but customer journey is actual real-life behavior, and they can be very, very different, particularly now, as we see with LLM. All right, so we got covered a lot of ground. I'm wondering if each of you could provide some final words of wisdom for other CMOs when it comes to integrated campaigns and the strategies behind them. So we'll start in reverse order. Marni, you're up first.

Marni: Okay, so I would say a couple of things about making sure your marketing team members are integrated to their counterparts in sales execution and in to collect and collaborate on that feedback and iteratively improve your campaign. And I also want to just point out that there's a softer benefit to integrated campaigns as well, where every single member of the contributing team understands how they're aligned to that revenue goal or that attribution goal. So without an integrated campaign, you get these siloed performers who don't understand their attachment back to, you know, pipeline and revenue ultimately. So that's another benefit to integrated campaigns.

Drew: So it's really an integrated teams on an integrated thing, awesome. Scott?

Scott: I would just reinforce what I had said earlier, which is, I'm a big believer in making having a dedicated campaign team and making them sort of the center of your marketing org. I just think that that hub-and-spoke model that I talked about really, really works with the campaign team driving the key messages in market, and then all the other teams doing their part to support that message in that campaign, in the overall effort, rather than doing their own thing, or worst-case scenario, competing with it. We actually had that problem at Zendesk, where we had a campaign team and we had Field Marketing team and they were like competing for the same pipeline, just didn't make any sense at all. So we brought those things together as one campaign. We mushed together all of their KPIs and said, you all own the bigger pipeline number and decide together how you're the best way to get to it.

Drew: Yeah, it just so makes a difference. If, again, I'd love this notion of you probably aren't going to get to integrated campaign without having people whose responsibility—and this is true with almost anything that you do. If there's someone that lives and dies and their job description is integrated campaigns, they're going to make sure it happens. And if you don't have that person, it's you, and that can be a real problem. Okay, Kelly, bring us home.

Kelly: Yeah, I would say my last one would be along Scott's lines of kind of planning and structure is, I would say, plan quarterly, plan a quarter in advance. So we set quarterly themes for the whole year, and then we plan out a quarter in advance. So while we're running one, we're planning the next, and it helps those be cohesive. And the pieces that influence what that quarter is, is product roadmap, industry events, your own events, your own pipeline targets, anything else that you can match—partner news. And then the main thing I would say is, when you kick off, I'd start with a small group. I know Scott said campaign team, which I think is a big one, but to us, it's typically a product marketing lead, a campaign leader, and a comms leader, or content leader, and the three together can align and use their best expertise in their areas of their capabilities to come up with a recommended strategy, and then bring in the larger team, and then I think you drive alignment from there.

Drew: It's so interesting. Yeah, I think we didn't—we talked a little bit about importance of aligning with product and having them part of this. And Scott spoke about that as well, as that if you're just pushing product out there all the time, you're not going to get to integrated campaigns. Well, thank you. Kelly, Scott, Marni, you're all amazing sports and thank you for our audience for staying with us.

 

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we're live, join us on the next CMO Huddle Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile. That's Drew Neisser, every other week.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!