While at Salesforce’s 12th annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco Dan Rogers, VP EMEA marketing at Salesforce, revealed why marketers need to be intimately acquainted with sales targets and where marketing’s focus needs to be to succeed
Who is more important for marketing to develop a great relationship with; IT or sales?
“Can I give a longer answer? Your relationship with sales is constant, every day. For example I look at the pipeline produced for my sales team every hour. My relationship with IT is very much around developing the innovative tools I need to reach my audiences and so in some sense it’s more periodic but more foundational. For sure if you don’t serve the sales teams’ needs you’re not going to be successful as a marketer, similarly if you don’t have the right tools you can’t actually do that task itself.”
What are the top three things B2B marketers need to focus on?
“Customer, customer, customer. As a marketer your single most important task is the translation between the products that you have and the value that brings to the customer. You have to think: ‘do our customers know and understand us? Are we building relationships with new customers to introduce to the sales teams? Do we have a different way of connecting with different customers so we have a one-to-one connection with them?’”
How do you think marketing has changed?
“If I think of what I need to do, I need to plan, personalise and optimise. From a planning perspective it’s about thinking where my customers are going to come from and how they are going to interact with the brand. I need to have a plan for connecting with customers across all those different channels.
“For the personalisation piece, the tools we have now have the ability to give very powerful segmentation and to enable a unique conversation with our customers.
“The third part of modern B2B marketing is about optimisation and testing. Looking at the data and saying ‘this is more productive for us, this is generating better ROI’. You have to have left brain and right brain, you need to be creative in how you engage, you need to be passionate and have a lot of energy, but it also has to be based on data and that means being analytical.”
What do you expect from your marketing team now that maybe they wouldn’t have been doing two years ago?
“I have very specific metrics around awareness and pipeline. In each of the countries we operate I have a specific awareness goal. For my pipeline I have a sales number that as a marketer I am intimately familiar with, so I need to produce the pipeline ahead of the revenue number sales has.”
Big data is important news, but old news, is Salesforce late with its Wave announcement?
“It’s only really now that we have the ability to pull together all these different types of data – structured data, semi structured data – and to natively combine it with our own data sets and present that back to the end user in a gamified style. This analytics cloud is highly disruptive, firstly it’s mobile, secondly it’s like a game. It’s colourful, has a modern user interface and it’s easy to change between graphics. It’s powerful stuff presented simply.”
Is wearable tech valid, or important, in B2B?
“So there’s a company called New England Biolabs (NEB) and those guys produce enzymes for researchers to test and experiment on. What they did was install freezers in the researchers’ departments, those freezers have tablets associated with them that require the scientist to authenticate before they take anything out. When they authenticate they describe what enzymes they are taking out and what sort of work they are doing, for the first time NEB has some data about what the scientists are doing with those enzymes, that’s a connected device.
“The scientists benefit, as when the enzymes are running low it can be automatically replenished; it connects to the inventory system. It suggests combinations of enzymes other scientists are using. NEB benefits because it now has a one-to-one connection with the researcher it never had before. It’s not wearable but it’s a powerful example of a connected device. As the price of silicon chips goes down, there will be more and more connected devices that will be part of a marketers’ repertoire.”
