Isabelle Papoulias, CMO at Mediafly talks about the importance of a tighter martech-salestech alignment while taking us through a few top data-driven marketing best practices in this quick chat:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Isabelle, tell us more about your role as CMO at Mediafly?  

As CMO, I oversee all of Mediafly’s marketing efforts and work closely with sales, customer success, and the entire company to develop go-to-market strategies that ensure continuous growth. Beyond awareness and demand generation strategies and tactics, our technology is a key element of our marketing efforts. We’re fortunate enough to have the ability to “drink our own champagne” at Mediafly, using our own sales enablement platform to create and deliver interactive digital content which is personalized for the needs of the audience. The software also gives us actionable content usage insights that help inform our overall content strategy while providing a continuous feedback loop.

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We’d love to hear about Mediafly’s latest self-authoring capabilities for marketers?

Today’s buyers are nearly 70% of the way through their buying journey before they speak to a salesperson. This puts more pressure on marketers to communicate value early in the buyer journey and help set sellers up for success once the buyer does raise their hand and take a meeting. 

ValueStory Tool Builder — which is one of our “DIY” value-selling calculators — allows marketers to quickly and easily build highly interactive demand generation tools on their websites that not only capture buyers’ attention more effectively but also set the stage for future value-based discussions, resulting in more sales-ready leads.

In today’s environment, where measuring the right marketing ROI is becoming integral to business outcomes, how do you feel marketers should evaluate their overall growth and performance? Top metrics to consider? 

Without a doubt, pipeline and revenue are the ultimate KPIs for us. As B2B marketers continue to lean more into the sales funnel, other metrics to monitor for marketing influence include stage conversations, deal velocity, competitive and overall win rates, and customer retention. Additionally, at a higher level, we use the V2MOM business planning approach at Mediafly — or Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures — which was popularized by Salesforce. This approach, and its applicable metrics, allow us to set objectives and define and monitor success. 

Using Mediafly Insights, we’re able to map specific content impact to revenue, allowing us to identify both high-performing and under-performing assets; we have set targets for content impact.

A few thoughts on how marketers can use their martech to adopt tighter alignment with sales to boost quality and quantity of sales-ready leads? 

Increasingly, marketers have to deliver value across the entire funnel and engage buyers consistently throughout their journey. Content plays a big role in that. Any technology that facilitates greater content engagement and creates a better experience for the buyer is worth considering for the martech stack. 

In that context, sales enablement technology can be a huge asset. While it’s typically viewed as technology to enable sales, it can be a critical tool for enabling marketers.  

From serving personalized web content and demand gen calculators to content management and content analytics, the ability to tap into multiple content engagement capabilities within a single platform is extremely helpful. This fosters sales and marketing alignment too, allowing revenue teams to activate content helping reps effectively communicate the business value of their products. Content becomes the centerpiece for alignment across all revenue teams, increasing the likelihood of impacting a prospect’s decision, converting them to a customer and expanding the relationship into the future.

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As the need for deeper intelligence and insights grows, to fuel marketing, in what ways do you feel marketers of the future and martech as a segment will adapt to meet changing needs? 

Deeper content and revenue “‘intelligence” will play a key role in informing content strategy and messaging to specifically address buyers’ needs. Today’s buyers are completely overwhelmed by the amount of content at their disposal. In some respect, so are the sellers. 

To get buyers from a “do nothing” to “yes” decision, content must be relevant, personalized, and challenge-based, and sellers must know what to deploy. 

Organizations need data-driven insights that accurately assess content’s impact on the health of an active sales opportunity and ultimately on the win. Using this data, marketers will not only understand what works and minimize the time and resources spent on what doesn’t but also provide more guidance to sales in what content to use and what steps to take to close the deal.

A few last thoughts and takeaways before we wrap up?

Content is the cornerstone of demand generation. Revenue teams should continue innovating and raising the bar on their content’s visual storytelling abilities using interactivity and animation, as well as their content analytics to assess the impact on revenue.

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