Interview with Bonnie Crater, President and CEO, Full Circle Insights

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be a part of a MarTech innovation company?
As a 5-time VP of Marketing in Silicon Valley, I always wanted to measure my marketing programs and their impact on revenue. I figured that if I could get great, detailed information on marketing performance I could be a better VP of Marketing. The trouble was I couldn’t get the data I wanted.  When I got a call from a former colleague, Roan Bear, and she told me that she had a solution to this issue, I jumped on the chance to start Full Circle Insights.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of online engagement with B2B customers, how do you see campaign attribution and funnel metrics transforming the Lead to Revenue management?
Campaign attribution and funnel metrics are used to improve our ability and effectiveness in Lead to Revenue Management. Funnel metrics can be diagnostic of problems and opportunities in the Lead to Revenue cycle and campaign attribution can help us figure out what campaign mix is optimal to drive more revenue. The technology in our products connects dots in the data so we get a full picture of what actions drive what revenue outcomes, whether the outcome is between the funnel stages or the actual closed, won deal.

MTS: How does Full Circle Matchmaker enable the sales teams to connect individual leads to the right account for account-based everything?)
Being domain experts in B2B sales, we know that it’s important for sales teams (and marketing) to engage leads with the context of what accounts they represent. Matchmaker uses smart logic, fuzzy matching, and a customizable rules engine to match leads to the right accounts in your Salesforce database. We built Matchmaker knowing that salespeople take too much time manually matching leads within Salesforce. So, we tailored the product to address their problem, with the capability to run it continuously in the background as well as one-off in bulk batches, customize the rules to tweak the matching logic for your needs, and route or assign the leads to the right sales reps who own the specific account.

MTS: Would you tell us about the unique features of Customizable Attribution Models used for B2B marketing mix optimization?
Our Campaign Attribution product (also made available as part of our flagship Response Management product), is unique for a few key reasons. Firstly, the attribution runs natively inside Salesforce, enabling a marketing person to capture the impact of every campaign in Salesforce to revenue from each deal. Having this in Salesforce makes the numbers match and enable cross-organizational trust in the attribution figures. Second, with the application native in Salesforce, a marketer can run granular reports that slice and dice the data into any segmentation that exists in the fields they have already in Salesforce.

Finally, we built Campaign Attribution to support highly customizable models. Out-of-the-box, you can run the standard single-touch models and multi-touch models. Our product goes a couple steps further with multi-touch: you can self-customize the weighting as well as introduce variables into the weighting outside of just touch. For example, you might track the type of engagement or touch, such as online vs. offline, duration of engagement, etc. Our customizable weighting configuration allows you to customize attribution weightings along those variables as well.

MTS: How do you see predictive analytics driving the “Quick Dash” for Response Management? Is it possible for account-based marketers to customize their funnels with an accelerated deal velocity?
Quick Dash is a set of out-of-the-box dashboards that are designed to be action-driven. Too often we don’t have enough insights, we just have data. Our flagship product Response Management is meant to address the need for marketers to get granular with data to gain context and drive actionable insights. Most businesses require methods of measuring a lead and account funnel that automates the tracking of progression down the funnel and matches how they define their funnel stages. That is why easy customizability of funnels inside of Response Management turbocharges the marketing and sales data being created inside Salesforce and enables marketers to make decisions that accelerate deals, improve conversion rates, and drive higher revenue.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Docusign, Slack, Splitwise

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
Salesforce, Pardot, Full Circle Insights, WordPress, HootSuite, Google Analytics, AdRoll, and Google Adwords

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a business leader in MarTech?
It’s very important to focus on acquiring the most complete and accurate marketing data you can.  After all, if it’s a human interpreting a chart or an AI algorithm drawing a conclusion around a large data set, if the data is incomplete or inaccurate, neither the human nor the machine will draw the correct conclusion.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Relaxed (mostly)

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Docusign is my favorite (of course I can’t live without email, Powerpoint, Excel or Chrome)

MTS: What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
Get exercise.  Exercise has been proven to make the brain work better.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
Sapiens, The Washington Post, CNN and Fox News.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
From Gary Kennedy, former VP of Sales at Oracle in the 80s.  Follow these 3 work rules in a fast growing company:

1. Be responsive — respond to every email in 24 hours (now the time is shorter);
2. Do what you say you’re going to do — we’re all depending on each other to deliver
3. At the end of the day, when you leave the office, be sure you’ve done the most important things that day

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
Taking a very complex subject and making it easy for anyone to understand

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would like to read:
Marc Benioff

MTS: Thank you Bonnie! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.