Tips from Eloqua Experience: Focusing on the 20% Who Buy

Yesterday at Eloqua Experience, Megan Heuer, “The Marketing Therapist” at SiriusDecisions delivered a presentation, “The Rise of Account-Based Marketing and How It’s Saving the Sales and Marketing Relationship.” Megan is smart, engaging, and a beacon of knowledge about sales and marketing alignment – hence her “Therapist” moniker..

Her premise was that if you believe that 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your customers, you need to think differently about how to manage your marketing spend. Despite what they know about how revenue breaks down, marketers are spending the majority of their budgets driving demand from accounts that will never buy. Ultimately, this creates friction between sales and marketing.

She shared some signs that indicate an organization is misaligned:

1. Sales is asking marketing to stop delivering leads because they are not qualified.
2. There are low response rates at the top of the funnel (which means the message is not resonating)
3. It’s hard to get the right people on the phone
4. Sales’ acceptance rate of leads is dropping due to poor quality
5. Deals are stalled in early stages of sales funnel because they are either non-qualified or not ready to buy
6. Deals take a long time to close.

Megan has a six-step program that helps marketers evaluate their current strategy and move to Account Based Marketing. She shared a case study featuring Demandbase client Nick Panayi, Director of Global Brand and Digital Marketing at CSC. As part of her presentation, she mapped out how these six steps were applied by Nick’s team:

1. Identify. CSC has identified key accounts to engage during their customer lifecycle.
2. Inform. CSC holds Town halls with marketing and sales to align the teams.
3. Align. They have aligned Marketing Automation, Target Advertising, Digital Analytics, Social Listening, Focused Nurture, and sales buy-in.
4. Plan. They created a multi-stage process map from top of funnel through customer lifecycle and multiple channels.
5. Execute. They quickly identified the content that was successful, and developed new content tailored to multiple channels.
6. Evaluate. They piloted new programs, were agile and measured everything.

Speaking of measurement, Megan shared early stage results for Nick’s team. CSC saw a 40% increase in digital interaction and 30% lift from their target accounts. Their results are strong evidence in favor of Megan’s Account-Based Marketing premise and prove the value of sales and marketing alignment.

At Demandbase, like Megan, we’re committed to building great tools for Target Account Marketing and sharing insight on implementing account-based best practices. We love sharing content from thought leaders like Megan who are guiding marketers to the next level. You can follow Megan on Twitter – @megheuer – to learn more.

Marketing and sales – ready to make your next move?