Creating Sales Enablement That Wins Deals

Tying Impact to Revenue: Simplifying the Metrics 📈

One of the key challenges for marketers today is demonstrating the impact of their efforts on revenue.

Heather emphasized the importance of keeping it simple and understanding the customer journey.

She highlighted the need to look beyond quantitative data and focus on the narrative:

"Ordinarily, I think it's about eleven touches before someone actually becomes a sales qualified opportunity. So really understanding that pattern and I think more simply looking at first touch, how people are coming in and last touch, but acknowledging the fact that it's a whole team effort."

Heather also stressed the need for collaboration between marketing, sales, and SDRs to support the ultimate goal of driving revenue:

"If someone is not hitting their numbers, you have to get in there and help to support them. So if the SDRs are a little bit under, it's talking with them to say, okay, how can we improve this? What kind of content do you need? Can we help you with some cadences? Same thing for sales. So it's really kind of getting everyone together to support the ultimate goal as one team."

The Role of Marketing in Revenue Generation 🔧

When it comes to the percentage of revenue that marketing should be responsible for, Heather highlighted that it varies from company to company.

At Allego, marketing is responsible for about 30% of revenue.

However, she emphasized that the focus should be on supporting the entire team rather than just hitting a specific number:

"You can look at anything, but you have to agree, okay, these are the set things that we are going to focus on and be consistent about measuring them so you can actually benchmark and see improvement overall."

Expanding Customer Relationships: The Power of Customer Marketing 💡

In the current economic climate, many companies are turning to their existing customers for expansion and cross-selling opportunities.

Heather shared her perspective on the importance of focusing on customer marketing initiatives:

"If you were trying to upsell to a customer, you're going to have a 60% success rate versus if you're bringing in net new, it's about five to 20%. So going back to the well is to the people that you've built that relationship and that trust with, I think is always an amazing thing to do."

She highlighted the value of face-to-face interactions and building affinity with customers:

"As much as I love digital, I think there's no replacement for face to face. So getting that time with your customers and really understanding what they're trying to do and helping them is really critical."

Heather also mentioned the success of Allego's customer conference, S3, as a key driver of new revenue growth:

"S3 is really the opportunity to get all of our sales enablement professionals up on stage and really talking about their challenges and their problems and networking and helping each other. And to me, from that conference in the past that I've done, that's usually the biggest draw from a customer perspective in terms of new revenue growth."

The Controversy Surrounding ABM 😨

In the world of marketing, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has gained significant attention. However, Heather shared her perspective on the term and its framing in the market:

"I just think the term ABM, to me, is just in marketing. If you're not reaching out in a targeted way and doing marketing and making sure that you're giving content that's personalized and in context, then you're not doing marketing."

She emphasized the need for targeted and personalized marketing as a core function, rather than a separate approach:

"Calling it out as a separate name, to me, just seems a little crazy."