Strategy Over Software: Customer-First Growth

The leaders, the marketers making a technology investment need to have a handle on the business objective. The definitions about success have already had conversations with finance sales stakeholders and align on what they’re trying to achieve before going and purchasing a tool and not just expect that a vendor is going to solve their attribution problems for them. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Six Cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Adam. Yes? Have you bought any software lately? I bought this really cool nine dollar screenshot tool. Is that what you mean? Sure. But let me guess. Was there any strategy or forethought ahead of time or no? No. There’s no if you’re buying software, there’s no strategy. You can’t have strategy. Yeah. That’s what I’m hearing on the on the Internet. That’s what it says. But I think we might have a way to disprove that. Well, what who do we have on today? Well, we have Maxwell Maurier, who is the VP of growth marketing, vice president growth marketing. So near and dear to my heart, of course, at Trellix. And he is going to talk about strategy in place and software, right? Because again, how do you go about accomplishing business goals, defining your goals before you actually go out and buy a tool and make it happen, which obviously, obviously is important. Obviously, if you’re buying software, you probably have some kind of strategy, especially you’re buying expensive software. And he had some really, really great insights. He really does. And, you know, full disclosure, he recently purchased Six Cents, actually came back to Six Cents after trying out a competitor. And it’s a master class in putting the right pieces in place before making a software decision and then really shepherding through that process through to then actual deployment and then proving out value. Really well done. And if every company approach their software purchases with this level of care And rigor. Yeah. And if you’re a software vendor, you’re gonna wanna listen too because he’s got a really good view about how to work with customer. So let’s do it. Let’s do it. Max, thanks so much. Really excited to have you here, and, we’re gonna talk strategy and software. But I think But, Adam, I thought that if you buy software, you’re typically doing that because you don’t have a strategy. That’s what the Internet said. Yeah. Software, you don’t need strategy when you buy software. Right? That’s what Max’s whole point is. There’s nothing strategic at all. If you buy software, you have no strategy. If you don’t have a strategy, you can’t buy software. So why does anyone have any software? I think it’s the Exactly. Question. So let’s debunk it. Max, tell us about what keeps you up at night and why this is so important. Sounds good, and thanks y’all for having me. Just for a little background on on my role and where I’m at, I’m the VP of growth marketing at Trellix. We’re about a thirty five hundred, four thousand person cybersecurity company, the product of McAfee and Fire emerging several years ago. It’s a really exciting space. We’re a large enterprise org with a lot of history. And with that comes questions about technology investments, how that aligns to our customer first strategy. And, you know, I thought that the the point that you, kinda touched on at the beginning there was relevant to us. If we propose software, does that try to fill a strategic gap that we haven’t thought through enough? Are we just trying to kind of band aid over strategic gaps of software, Or are we really clear that we have a strategic objective as a business when we go into a software decision? And there are, you know, myriad considerations to take in as you evaluate software, especially larger investments as opposed to point solutions. When we assess platforms, there are many more kind of variables and outcomes we need to work toward. But I think the shiny object syndrome that we see in a lot of leader level conversations is something that we need to mitigate with alignment cross functionally within marketing and outside of marketing about what our core objectives are for the business. But by no means does purchasing software equate to no strategy. We just need to make sure that as a business, when we invest potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing software, that we understand what the outcome is supposed to be and that we have the resources in place to support that outcome. Absolutely. And you have a a really nice process that you’re gonna talk about. But going back to, again, even the shiny object syndrome, I think maybe a couple years ago, sure, I could get behind it, but the b two b buyer’s journey is becoming ever more complex. Right? Taking an average of eleven months, taking an average of, you know, eleven to twelve people in the buying group. So it’s really hard to kind of go out and just buy the thing because it’s shiny and new and looks good. Good companies out there and most companies out there are really putting a strategic plan behind the why and then really going about getting alignment internally. And so talk to us about your process. Austin, a technology decision is sparked by either someone within the org attending some sort of educational program or accessing some material that kind of sparks the idea about, should we consider this technology? Or it often will come from your c level talking to their peers and seeing something interesting that they think could apply to your business. We’re a customer first organization. We always prioritize the existing customer relationship, renewal and growth first. We need to make sure that we protect and grow as we add new business to the mix. And that means that our strategic objectives may be a little bit different than a startup that’s focused entirely on that new logo growth. That means that the technology we choose to invest in may be very different, both from a scale perspective, us being a larger organization, but also from a business and revenue objective perspective. And so making sure that when those ideas surface, they’re aligned to your actual business objectives, not just trying to copy and paste something that another organization’s done is really critical. And that takes a lot of communication with whoever surfaces that idea to help them understand. You often have to educate why that may be a very exciting idea, but it may not be applicable to your current business objectives and maybe something you wanna keep on the table for the future. Requires typically pretty excellent presentation skills, but also a fundamental understanding of how your funnel works, marketing and sales, what revenue means to your organization. Are you looking at ARR typically? Are you looking at just TCV based single deal closure as success? Are you looking at new logo growth over customer retention and growth? All of those things inform what kind of technology you invest in up and down the funnel. So let’s think about a recent purchase. Right? So and again, it’s a little bit self serving, right? We’re in the, you know, sixth sense sells to marketers like yourself and have sold into your company. So an account based marketing or revenue kind of performance platform, what were some of the drivers once you sort of get beyond if it was a C level sort of like, oh, this or that, or versus like in your seat performance where we’re at, where we need to get to taking an account based approach, which I’m sure there were various different versions of that. You’ve gone through different iterations. Can you just kinda talk us through, like, it’s especially relevant because we have so many listeners who might be early, early just in saying, okay, we’re trying to change our go to market strategy to be more account based. So they’re thinking strategic. They’re not thinking software, but would love to kinda hear how you got to that place. And I’m sure the ABM story goes back a number of years. And then actually how that became a purchase initiative. Our journey has been long and winding. I think that to understand the journey and in order to kinda navigate that journey within your own organization, there is a fundamental operational understanding required either within a marketing automation or revenue operations team or at the leader level with folks who understand kind of the operational intricacies of the funnel and in particular measurement. And I know that marketers and especially the folks that have to talk to marketers every day are exhausted about attribution or exhausted by attribution. It’s a just a never ending conversation, but it absolutely informs the kinds of investments that I make as a leader, including our account targeting investments. We recently made some significant improvements to how we gauge success of our marketing organization that much better aligned to an account based approach. And, you know, when you look at single touch attribution models, whether it’s first or last, and in some cases, complicated multi touch models, not all of those serve the account based approach. And so we had to work and explain and educate for several years to get to a place where we could justify account based technology. It doesn’t mean that our strategy wasn’t focused on our key customer accounts, but in order to make the technological case for investment, it required a more obvious shift in our measurement. And so we were able to achieve that over the last six months, And that led us to reevaluate our technology stack, some key components to it, and allow us to reformat that stack to better align to account based strategies. But it was years of beating our head against the wall, working really closely with finance and our sales counterparts to make sure that not just marketing understood what our objective was and how we were measured and why it was problematic. It required cross alignment. And I feel that whenever marketing tries to kind of go out on their own and just purchase technology without that alignment, technology of any kind is likely gonna flop, unless it’s a very specific internal point solution. So when you’re going out and buying a platform, especially one that’s going to help inform a long tail business objectives and improve performance over years, you have to make sure that your measurements supports that objective in that investment. And that always requires these difficult conversations with financial stakeholders that manage budgets, who have to represent your revenue outcomes, not just as an organization, but as a marketing team to potentially boards to the rest of the c level and also your sales stakeholders, which may see shifts in your tactical mix as you shift from one type of technology mix to another or one type of account targeting strategy to another. You start with the strategy, then you go into the measurement, and then you use that to really drive the alignment. So beautiful. Now as kind of, you know, responsible marketers and holders of, you know, the resources of the company, obviously, you’re working to really be responsible with that. And even the best software out there on its own will not solve your problems. It really is about the program that you build around it. So once you’ve gone through the process of the strategy, you have your measurement in place, you’ve got alignment, and you’re now going and actually executing on this tool that you’ve purchased. How do you even start to roll out a program around that and start to drive the change that you were looking to obviously drive with this investment? So coming into that purchase, again, we understand our objective to the business. We understand marketing’s role in that. We understand how this tool supports that objective, and we should ideally go into the purchase with some goals. We shouldn’t be waiting until we’re getting to deployment to map out where we expect to see that over time. We have to assign responsibility within our teams to certain components of especially if the platform deployment or rollout and make individuals responsible within the org for particular outcomes, whether it’s a functional outcome or whether it’s a metric based outcome that places and disperses the responsibility amongst the org and doesn’t make one person the choke point for success of the entire platform. It allows us to essentially diversify our opportunity for success within a platform rollout, whether it’s the, you know, the operational or automation side, the, paid digital side potentially, a direct mail side, a website optimization. All these teams need to be provided particular responsibilities within the rollout and then provide very regular updates to not just their management, but up the chain. Because, again, we want to show our leaders at the c level and our financial stakeholders on the finance and sales teams that we didn’t just make an investment to say that we did it. We made an investment to drive business outcomes, and and that can be tough. We get really excited about the tool itself, but we need to translate that, you know, excitement into tangible success through metrics or at minimum timelines that help explain the progress that we’re making as a team and how that has helped optimize the rest of our funnel impact. When you talk about those stakeholders, right? So you have this deployment going on, you’ve got your teams in place. What is the reporting back look like? I mean, there’s probably some very clear, especially somebody who’s sitting in sales and finance, they’re looking at a pipeline dashboard and over a period of time, maybe they’re seeing improvements there, but how are you providing and maybe what are some of the key metrics leading indicators to say, okay, this product’s in place, we’re on schedule in terms of deployment, but here are some of the KPIs and measurements that are gonna show it’s going well or, okay, we have some course corrections to make. We always wanna start with our key attribution metrics. So, you know, whether that’s your influenced pipeline is a super broad metric that most executives are kinda raising eyebrow at because it’s typically more broad than they want it to be or another kind of point in time along the funnel. Our approach is always to provide several lenses through which to view success. Even if the business, has one set in stone attribution methodology, we wanna make sure that we support that with some other lenses just like we’re at the eye doctor and they’re flipping through. I wanna give us some options and say, like, okay, you can see the impact here. We don’t want to assume that the only metric that shows success is the success metric, if that makes sense. So we can see you know, our paid digital teams, okay, they may want to highlight the initial conversion success they see from ads to click. But that obviously is not the end goal. That’s a step on the journey, but it’s not the end goal. And so we need to, myself as a manager, make sure that our team stays course corrected whenever we start to lean too heavily into metrics that are leading indicators or lagging indicators, but not the indicator that we agreed on as we make technology purchases. So it’s typically a pipeline and or revenue indicator, however your organization chooses to craft the definition. We also show, you know, those leading lagging indicators, but we also try to show a holistic view of account engagement over time. We wanna show the types of touches that an account experiences with us over the course of their buying or renewal cycle. We wanna show the variance in those kinds of touches because, you know, we don’t wanna go down the route of becoming an organization that gets so caught up in attribution that we end up optimizing down to just one channel, which I’ve seen happen before where it’s like, well, this is the old this is the most efficient channel, so we should get rid of everything else. And we need to show and remind our stakeholders that as buyers ourselves, we enjoy and we appreciate an experience that includes multiple types of touchpoints along our buyer renewal journey. And so we need to make sure that that’s represented even if some of those touches are not factored in as critically into our attribution methodology. So multiple lenses side by side to show this indicates success in this way. This indicates success in this way, and those maybe support indirectly the success that we’re really shooting for in pipeline or revenue from a dollar perspective. We love a holistic measurement strategy. A hundred percent. Max, what is the role of a vendor throughout this journey? Right? The best vendors would ideally be partnering with you presales on surfacing up the use cases, highlighting, you know, even one through the deployment kind of mutual success plan so that there is a shared vision of what good looks like. But talk to me about what the best vendors do to help with that journey. What vendors need to do is when it comes to the core dollar based business objective, pipeline or revenue, and however a company measures that, I think a vendor needs to somewhat get out of the way of that conversation. I see a lot of vendors try to come out the gate supplying a pipeline dashboard. It could be a chat vendor. It could be an account based vendor. It could be, direct mail vendor. And then I’ll wanna provide some sort of pipeline metric out the gate, but that often confuses marketers, especially those that aren’t operationally inclined and are more maybe demand centric or product marketing centric because they wanna take that, screenshot it, put it in a deck, bring it to a meeting and say, look at the success that we’re showing, and then a finance person will immediately double click and be like, how is that calculated? Where is that coming from? It’s not from any of our proof systems. And I think that that creates way more confusion than it helps. So I think that when it comes to dollar ROI, sometimes that’s a place where a vendor needs to step out of the way and focus more on the supporting cast lenses around engagement in other ways, whether that’s that holistic view of engagement over time without dollars associated or whether it’s looking at all that conversion data up and down the funnel points in your sales cycle between opportunity stages and how certain touches may help or not be as effective at certain points in that funnel. So there’s something that vendors can do and also something that I think vendors need to kind of not do. And that comes from understanding how flexible a company is going to be in their measurements criteria and what kind of supporting lenses are gonna be most effective for leaders, having those conversations with their key stakeholders. And in particular, I always come back to finance stakeholders because they hold our per strings and sales stakeholders because they are incredibly vocal, incredibly connected to the customer, and also most likely to be able to either support or negatively impact marketing’s ability to invest in certain tactics in the future, just as much as finance may be. So when you talk about that holistic journey, so the vendor can make it very clear, this is where we are helping to impact that journey. But leave it to you and the team say, okay, that’s great. Now we know where you’re plugging in. We’re going to help to go understand what does that ROI mean to us because every org is different. Every step on that journey is going to have a different impact for this company versus that. Is that a fair, fair summation? Totally fair. Most businesses are not very flexible in their dollar based ROI methodology and it’s highly unlikely that a vendor is going to be able to make that change happen. The vendor can try to support their marketing customers, but supporting data is effective in an immediate sense showing the impact of a platform. The marketers though, this is where I think, again, bringing it back to aligning on business objectives, the leaders, the marketers making a technology investment need to have a handle on the business objective. The definitions about success have already had conversations with finance sales stakeholders and align on what they’re trying to achieve before going and purchasing a tool and not just expect that a vendor is going to not just expect that a vendor is going to solve their attribution problems for them. It’s something that we need to own as marketers internally, and we need to use these resources that vendors can help provide to support our case, not just try to hand it over because typically our internal stakeholders will not respond well to that. We got really serious on this episode, by the way. I know. We’re like I know. It’s like we’re like, no smiles. I feel like it’s someone I don’t need to, like, go and, like, you know, make a fart noise or something. No. I’m kidding. Sorry. Oh, okay. You were gonna go. I was gonna continue the classy. You know? Well, it’s my job to class it down. You class it up. It’s what we do. Listen, Max. This is, again, fantastic insight and I think just a really strategic approach to the software acquisition piece. We love to end our program with the same question every single time. Just to get a little bit further under the covers here, tell us about the most ridiculous thing that you’ve been asked to do in your career, good or bad? We’ve heard things from smuggling swag cross border that was on the not so good side, working with NASA on campaigns on the good side. One thing that I won’t get into but ended with, but I think the statute of limitations are up. So a lot of, you know, varying things along the way. Doesn’t necessarily have to be dramatic, but what we would consider ridiculous is kind of the typical urgency type of ridiculousness. I think that the most ridiculous things are typically technology related. So, you know, day to day turning around programs, campaigns, assets, etcetera. Like, you expect that that’s gonna have to happen really quickly on a whim as, you know, interest changes. But, I think deployment of technology is is often where I hear ridiculous requests. So there was an instance where we were deploying Marketo, and a vendor had gotten it started. And we joined and took over the deployment maybe a third of the way through. And, you know, Marketo is a central automation platform, massive undertaking, especially for, you know, midsize to larger companies. And, you know, the request was it’s kind of twofold. A, to turn around the implementation in two weeks, which was never gonna happen. It was just immediate eyebrow up from me and my teams. But then also to make sure that our database was one hundred percent responsive to email. It was a misunderstanding about about the time it takes to deploy such critical technology, as well as a misunderstanding about benchmarks, realistic data and responsiveness across, you know, inherited customer and prospects databases. And, you know, this is not a recent experience, thankfully, but is, kind of indicative of some of the mismatched expectations that marketers deal with with especially c levels that maybe aren’t as familiar with the marketing work when, you know, their marketing leaders swap in and out and they’re left kind of trying to figure out what do we do next. So that was kind of the most ridiculous. Just insane turnaround time, big technology, and just ridiculous expectations about how responsive a database is, you know, especially one that’s existed for over a decade. That’s a pretty good one. I’m guessing the Marketo deployment didn’t happen in two weeks. It did not. And, again, I know that’s not crazy, I think, in the context of what a lot of folks have experienced. So I’m thankful for that. But, yes, just had to kind of be a stick in the mud and explain it was never gonna happen, let some people down gently, and then get on with work. It’s good advice too about how to deal with it. Right? Just, you know, let them down gently. So No one would have been able to do it. So it’s, you know, so sweet. We’ll do what we can. Thank you for asking. Let’s explain it to you. Keep educating. Move on. Well, this was great. I think really good insights on the vendor side, how to deal with how the vendors should be working with you. Just really, again, prove that the Internet’s wrong, that you can be strategic with software. That’s software does not say no to strategy and vice versa. So you heard it here first, folks. You heard it here first. Really appreciate you joining us. Appreciate you guys having me. Thank you so much. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.