Melton Littlepage, Chief Marketing Officer at Outreach shares a few thoughts on what technologies should feature in every CMO’s must-have martech stack in this mid-week chat with MarTech Series:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Melton, you’ve had quite an interesting marketing journey through the years…we’d love to hear the key highlights and more about your role as CM​​O at Outreach.

I was a superfan of Outreach long before joining, and a strong advocate for sales engagement and intelligence solutions born from experiences in prior roles.

CMOs often face a vexxing issue: they can’t achieve their pipeline generation targets when sales development reps (SDRs) aren’t effectively converting marketing qualified leads (MQLs). CMOs in that situation have two choices: spend even more on demand generation programs to send even more MQLs into an already inefficient SDR team, or partner with sales leadership to bring in sales engagement and intelligence technology to improve the efficiency of their SDRs’ execution.

Having taken the latter path twice, I can tell you the improvements to marketing-sourced pipeline generation are substantial and immediate. Engagement and Intelligence should be a part of every CMO’s tech stack, but the reality is that a large number of businesses aren’t yet fully aware of their power and potential. I am excited to join the Outreach team and play a role in helping the market learn how to up-level their marketing and sales performance with our modern sales tech stack.

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In your view, how is the face of B2B marketing evolving, and what are some top trends you feel will dominate the market in 2022 and beyond?

Marketing went through a significant digital transformation a decade ago with the introduction of marketing automation platforms like Eloqua and Marketo, and is now experiencing a second wave of transformation with AI-powered account-based marketing (ABM) strategies and platforms like 6sense and Demandbase. In 2022, many marketing organizations will embrace Intent Signals as the new MQL. The problem is the ubiquous marketing automation platforms can’t nurture, score, route, or drive the rigorous follow-up of Intent Signals. That’s where Outreach comes in…we can bring automation and optimization to modern B2B marketing teams’ intent-driven ABM programs.

Moreover, The Great Resignation is creating a hidden but significant impact on the performance of marketing teams. In most companies, Marketing passes MQLs to SDRs who work hard to convert them into new sales meetings. In this period of unusually high sales rep attrition, the marketing teams find themselves passing leads to SDR teams that are under staffed and full of new, ramping reps. We will see that for Marketing teams to hit their pipeline generation targets in 2022, they will need to work alongside their sales counterparts to accelerate the ramp up of new hires. To ramp new reps to full productivity faster and more consistently, Sales and Marketing leaders will turn to AI-drive conversation intelligence (CI) solutions to deliver real-time guidance and coaching during sales calls. With real-time CI, reps aren’t forced to memorize and master every detail about the company’s products, competitors and pricing before they start selling — and marketing does not need to continually pull existing reps from the field for additional training.

What are some of the fundamental marketing processes that you feel new incoming CMOs need to focus on when taking over a new brand and marketing team?

New CMOs can get off track fast if their first moves are to start new programs from scratch. That takes time, and has an unknowable degree of risk. Its smarter for CMOs to start with a simple list of the individual marketing assets, programs, and events that currently deliver their pipeline. For some marketing teams there will be 10 items on the list; for others it could be hundreds. Start from the top producing items and assess what can be done to double their output. For instance, for web lead capture calls to action (CTAs), the CMO could double down on search engine optimization (SEO) investments to increase website traffic, use A/B testing to optimization form fill conversions, or make web design improvements to make it more simple for buyers to reach the CTA. In any case, CMOs always get more  near-term bang for the buck in making the best performing programs better that starting new programs from scratch.

As someone who has spent a significant amount of time in marketing roles, we’d love to dive into a few top marketing technologies that have always helped achieve end goals?

First and foremost, marketers need a Sales Engagement and Intelligence Platform. An SDR team armed with hyperautomated prospecting and lead followup workflows with proven messaging will see improved lead-to-opportunity conversions and stronger pipeline generation from prospecting.

Secondly, an ABM Platform is needed to deliver actionable buyer intent signals. Intent signals surfaced by ABM vendors are the earliest alerts of new project formation in target accounts. By taking action on intent signals with proven prospecting sequences, sales reps are able to get into new deals early,  influence the prospects’ vision, set the required capabilities and evaluation criteria, and blanket the opportunities with competitive landmines.

Since Marketing Automation Platforms are no help in pursuing these vital intent signals, Engagement and Intelligence solutions like Outreach are the tool of choice for activing ABM programs. I continue to be surprised by the high number of B2B marketing teams that relentlessly work to squeeze the last drop of value out of their marketing automation platform but aren’t paying attention to intent signals or linking them into sales engagement sequences to take advantage of them.

Can you talk about a few top challenges that you still see CMOs of today struggle with in the B2B market and what tips / best practices would you share here?

Most CMOs don’t know which of their marketing messages and programs actually work best to build pipeline. Flying blind and making decisions based on anecdotes and incomplete data is an occupational hazard. To discover what actually works, marketing and sales need to craft repeatable, automated prospecting sequences that are in line with marketing’s messaging and executed by sales’ reps.

When sales teams use automated sequences for prospecting and lead follow-up, the messaging sequences that deliver the best results rise to the top, and those that don’t deliver fall to the bottom. Those sequences capture buyer engagement and sentiment signals and provide visibility all the way through the sales cycle to outcomes, completely removing the guesswork and making it simple for marketing and sales to understand what combination of messaging, content, offers, and outreach are proven to deliver the strongest results. Then those sequences can be propagated to every rep, with the ultimate outcome being the entire team performing close to the level of the strongest rep.

Some last thoughts and marketing / martech takeaways and predictions for 2022 before we wrap up?

Today, marketing and sales leaders use different apps for prospecting, meeting recording and coaching, enablement, and forecasting, which silos visibility into deals and forces revenue operations data scientists to piece together a full picture of what is happening in their pipeline. Armed with dozens of manually created dashboards, they feel like they are data-driven, but in reality, they’re swamped with disconnected sales data.

No one is hired to be the Chief GTM Data Science Officer, but that is the role many marketing and sales leaders end up playing.

In 2022, Marketing and Sales leaders will shift from implementing point solutions (and being their own systems integrator) to implementing engagement and intelligence platforms that deliver complete visibility into pipeline generation and deals across the sales cycle.

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