My name is Komal Thadani and I am an international marketer. I worked in B2B marketing roles covering a wide geography of Asia Pacific, Japan, China and EMEA markets. My role at ServiceNow is about being able to translate business requirements into short term and long term marketing strategies to help our customers understand how we can partner together in their business transformation journey. Our marketing goal is to drive pipeline generation, accelerate pipeline, customer adoption and renewal.
One of the observations I have about the technology industry, where I've worked for years now, is that marketing has always been focused on supporting the immediate business needs - ‘how do I help the business create leads and get those leads converted into pipeline?’. After that, we evolved to ‘how do I help the pipeline accelerate and close deals and drive revenue?' So we moved from lead generation to revenue generation for a number of years that had been our focus.
But then the technology industry evolved to a cloud based model and the customer lifecycle journey did not just stop at purchase. Post-purchase activities became increasingly important to drive repeat business. One of the key things we've been looking at in the recent years is the end-to-end customer lifecycle. We don’t just look at how we generate pipeline and acceleration, which are traditional metrics, but also how we drive adoption of that technology and then drive renewals with the customer so they become advocates.
Internally, it's about how do we stay relevant to sales at each part of their selling journey? If they need more help with creating pipeline, how do we help with quality leads? If deals are not closing how do we support deal acceleration and if customers aren't renewing their purchase how do we help with adoption and renewal strategy? It's really about being relevant to the business where they need support at any point in time. Externally, its about being relevant to our customers and serving them relevant content at each stage of their buying journey
It's really about being relevant to the business where they need support at any point in time. Externally, its about being relevant to our customers and serving them relevant content at each stage of their buying journey
The renewals and adoptions have been progressively becoming one of marketing’s key missions in recent years. We will see more as we go into subsequent years because it's going to be very important. Especially for a company that focuses on cross sell and upsell and drive significant revenue from existing customers. Building that relationship, driving adoption and renewal is critical.
I'm going to talk about a process strategy rather than the customer messaging we put in the market. This is more about how we make marketing more relevant in the organisation. I realised that the martech stack in the market in the last few years only looked at how leads were converting to opportunities, and typically the conversion rates are between two to three percent, maybe up to five percent depending on how good your lead follow up strategy is.
But one thing the marketing stack did not support was looking at leads at an account level. Why is that important? We know there are multiple buyers in the decision making process. So the lead that we acquire (even though new) could be for the same opportunity already in discussion and would help accelerate the deal. However if you get the lead from the same account but a different business unit, and no opportunity exists for that function, then that is likely to convert to a new deal.
In my previous roles, when we analysed this data of leads conversion, we were seeing a conversion rate of under 5% depending on the campaign. However the minute we started looking at this at an account level and deal type, the conversion rate improved significantly to about 15-20%.We did this manually.
With the evolution of the marketing stack, we can now get more targeted with the leads follow up journey by providing sales with the right intent signals for follow up. If a lead comes in from a new department or function where we don't have existing opportunities, how should that be addressed vs if a lead came from an existing buying centre, how should that be addressed with follow up tactics.
One thing we tend to forget in B2B is that we're selling to individuals, and you need to be able to tell them how you're going to address their pain point and help them be superstars in their career journey. One of the best ways to bring storytelling into marketing is through customer speakers, which we focus on a lot. For example, last year my team wanted to lead with customer stories in our webinar program, so they decided that a minimum 60% of the webinars we run in the year would feature customer stories. The content would focus more on tangible business outcomes rather than features and functionalities of our products. In addition we'd bring in market experts to discuss trends.
It works phenomenally when you're able to bring in a customer who is willing to share their story and humanise it
When we looked at the results of this webinar program, (in B2B traditionally F2F events are more valued due to the in person interaction) we saw a pipeline growth of about 600%, and new leads grew by about 1000%. It works phenomenally when you're able to bring in a customer who is willing to share their story and humanise it - showing how it helped them do their job better and drive specific results for their company overall.
In the technology industry, our KPIs has always been pipeline generation and helping the business close deals. But given that the world is moving to more consumption-based models, we need to ensure that customers are actually consuming the solution after buying it. Because if they don't use it after buying, they're not going to renew with you.
Our role doesn't end after we've helped sales meet their numbers this quarter or next quarter. Our role continues after purchase to help customers consume that solution. For eg. We run practitioner workshops to get customers familiar with how they can use features they might not even be aware of. We've seen that shift happening - where marketing is focused on the post purchase cycle of the buyers journey as well
Think about a simple consumer example: I avoided buying iCloud storage for the longest time because I thought I could manage with what I had. I succumbed one day as I used to keep getting alert that your cloud storage is full and bought a 5gb storage. However, until Apple does something to help me consume the full 5GB, I won't upgrade to 10GB. The same rule applies to everybody in the B2B technology world, especially in the software cloud world.
Change happens when you align three things: individual priorities (what do I want to focus on and where do I want to grow), team/department priorities , and company priorities(how do we get happy customers) If you can get all these three things aligned, that's the ideal momentum for change.
Sometimes we're in roles where we can't influence broader level change because we're sitting in a small department or team. One approach I've taken is: if you change your environment around you, the broader change will happen over time because you've demonstrated best practices. People will come to you asking how they can work with you on these aspects which could cascade to multiple teams.
Evolved.
Because customers are more evolved today. You have to be on your toes to address those customer needs and ensure you are serving them content where they consume it.
What has really helped my career is understanding data and being able to look at that data to make informed decisions. My simple advice is this: use data to understand the direction you need to take the team or company into, and then build an effective story of how you're going to tell that to your customer of why they need to partner with you through human stories. You need to use data to help inform those decisions, but then storytelling needs to come into the picture because people will remember a story and they're not going to remember all the numbers. You need the data to help drive you in the right direction.
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