Ep 433: Is your marketing team struggling to deliver the right kind of prospects and accounts that actually convert into revenue for your company? In this episode of the SaaStr Podcast, Latané Conant, CMO at 6Sense shared her 6 steps for building marketing campaigns that deliver pipeline and revenue.
This episode is an excerpt of Latané’s session from SaaStr University: Spring Semester conference. Watch the full video here.
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Jason Lemkin
SaaStr
Latané Conant
Podcast transcript:
Announcer:
This is SaaStr’s Founder’s Favorite series, where you can hear some of the best of the best from SaaStr speakers. This is where the cloud meets. Up today, what it really takes to have your marketing team deliver pipeline and revenue with Latané Conant, CMO at 6sense.
Latané Conant:
So I am the chief market officer here at 6sense. And what I’m going to do is actually just share my own experience as well as ask you guys six questions along the way. So we’ll keep it kind of interactive and fun and believe me, we’ll get to the pipeline and revenue part, but it’s going to be a little bit of a roundabout way. So bear with me.
Latané Conant:
So I have been at 6sense about two and a half years now, but it’s been quite a journey and I’ve learned a lot and I’m hoping I can impart some of that knowledge onto you. And when I first got here, I got to say, I felt like a total fish out of water. Everyone’s running around talking about all these different MarTech tools. What’s in your stack, intent data, CDP, this, that the other. And I was like, I, why did I take this job? I have no idea what’s going on. And so I had this huge inferiority complex, and I remember sobbing to my husband, like, what am I doing? I shouldn’t take this job. I need, I’m not going to do a good job. And he said, babe, you got to play to your strengths. And so I’m like, oh I have no, strengths but I realized I actually do have a couple of strengths.
Latané Conant:
And one of my strengths, I think is a strength because I spent seven, some years working on customer experience. So before 6sense, I was at a company called Appirio and this was the opening slide to our pitch. It was this Forrester study, welcome to the age of the customer, and time and time and time again, it proved out. I still love this study. Even those little old, it proved out that companies that really, really invest in customer experience over time, exceed their peers that don’t.
Latané Conant:
And there are lots of different stats on that. And so I, at my core, I believe this, and this was one of the things that we did at Appirio was help people really transform their customer experiences. And so that’s in my blood. And so, I guess question number one for all of you guys out there is, you know, do you believe that? And if you want to talk customer experience, who’s the guru? Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs says, you start with the customer experience and work your way backwards to the technology, not the other way around. And so I guess in the chat, you know, who believes that? Who believes that true and true? I know I do.
Latané Conant:
So there’s that. The other strength that I have is I actually, while I love marketing and I love being a chief market officer here at 6sense, I actually come from sales. I was a GM and I’m all about making money. I like to make, I like to make money for companies. And so, you know, that’s a strength of mine is really understanding the whole revenue cycle and model. And so I want to ask you guys, what is the most efficient way to double revenue? And I’ve got two answers, answer A is work more leads. Answer B is really, really dive in and look at your conversions, look at your cycle times, look at your ASP’s and start to just improve those.
Latané Conant:
What is the right answer? And this is not Peewee soccer where everyone gets a trophy. There’s one right answer. The right answer is B.
Latané Conant:
Okay. So with that context, I look at MarTech. So I re–I went back to my experience and I said, let me, let me, let me put this other lens. Let me play to my strengths and look at MarTech. And then I had this other kind of wild realization.
Latané Conant:
We kind of treat prospects who were actually future customers, right? Prospect is a future customer. We actually treat them like dirt. Why? Why do we treat them like dirt? Why and what do I mean by that?
Latané Conant:
Well, let’s talk, let’s think about when you go to buy, either in your personal life or in your business life, because in, in business we buy, you know, technology, services, all kinds of things. What do you want to do? The first thing you want to do? Either B2B or B2C, what do you want to do? You want to research, right?
Latané Conant:
I don’t want to rock into my CFO’s office and not have done my homework and not really understand, why I’m buying and what I’m buying.
Latané Conant:
And, and so what do we do? We prevent that research with a form.
Latané Conant:
Let’s talk about email. I don’t know whether it’s my personal email or my work email. I’ve had to declare email bankruptcy twice because it’s just so much, it’s so overwhelming. We actually send 300 billion emails a day. There’s only 7.7 billion people on the planet. So a lot of these emails are spam.
Latané Conant:
And then let’s talk about a cold call. I hate it when they spoof the area code of my kids’ school. Does that make your heart sink? Because you think, Oh my God, something’s happening with your kids? And then it’s somebody trying to sell me something I’m not even interested in. Yeah.
Latané Conant:
That sucks. That sucks, but that’s kind of our game. That’s kind of what we do. And so, no wonder the more we do that as marketers and sellers, the more buyers are retreating. And they’re saying, I want to be more anonymous. I’m not filling out that form because I know. I know what you’re going to do.
Latané Conant:
And there’s so much conflicting information. I’m going to have to get all these people involved to make a good decision. So it’s a buying team.
Latané Conant:
And then it’s, there’s so much noise that they, you know, they’re resistant. They don’t want to take the call. They don’t, they don’t want to respond.
Latané Conant:
So this is the way buyers buy. They’re anonymous, they’re fragmented and they’re resistant. And some of that is just because we treat them like dirt. And so what happens is all of these calls, emails, and effort start to get lost in what we at 6sense called the dark funnel, because it’s all just this noise. But within that dark funnel, there’s gold, right? Guys, there’s gold in there. There’s signal. There’s people that want to buy, but we can’t see any of that. To us they’re anonymous, they’re fragmented, and they’re resistant.
Latané Conant:
And so as marketers and sellers, we have to work so hard. When I first started, when we talked about an integrated campaign, it was eight to 10 touches, right? Now, just the BDR cadence, just that sales, outbound motion. A typical cadence is 15 to 22 touches. So more hours, more content, more tech, more calls. We’re working so hard. Why for MQLs?
Latané Conant:
So we can get that form fill. We can get that email. We can deem it an MQL. And while as a recovering software salesperson, I love club and I love nice shoes. And I’m telling you guys those MQLs, they’re not getting us to club and they’re not buying the shoes that we would all love to buy.
Latané Conant:
So why are we working so hard for MQLs when we know they’re fraught with issues? Now, What do I mean, why do I think they’re so fraught with issues?
Latané Conant:
They’re either too early or too late. So too early. I just wanted the ebook. I, I really, I’m not ready for your call. I just want the darn ebook, right. Or they’re too late. We’re so excited about that hot inbound, right? If they’re hot inbounding and requesting a demo with you, they’re requesting a demo with everybody else and you’re probably too late. So that’s a prop. The scoring tends to be arbitrary. How many of you guys have sat in the rooms with the post-it notes? And said, oh, pricing page 20 points, baby. Let’s give some points for that. There’s this. There’s that. The only people that won on those sessions was 3M because they sold a lot of post-it notes. And the other problem with the lead is it’s a contact. And we know that buyers buy in teams, are a buying group.
Latané Conant:
And so they’re fraught with issues. So had this weird epiphany. I said, okay, I’m going to apply, you know, my lens, my sales lens. And I’m going to apply this customer experience lens. There has to be a better way. And there is, actually, because the reality is if you uncover your dark funnel and you start to look at a qualified account, all of a sudden, a lot of interesting things open up because a qualified account looks at engagement across the buying team. A qualified account, what we call the 6QA looks at anonymous behavior and known behavior, a qualified account, or a 6QA actually uses AI, not arbitrary scoring to look for patterns and say, this account is in this buying stage or this account is in that buying stage.
Latané Conant:
So let’s assume I give you the 6QA. Okay. And let me show you how this works.
Latané Conant:
You have a limited engagement, that dark funnel that I talked about before. There’s gold in the dark funnel. There are accounts that are under a rock. That means that they’re not doing anything. You might not want to waste a ton of money on them.
Latané Conant:
There’s accounts that are starting to show signs of life. Gosh, if you’re a marketer, wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly which accounts are ideal for you and are starting to show signs of life? Cause that’s who you want to show your thought leadership to and get them to know your brand. And consideration. These accounts are gobbling up content that they want to learn. Wouldn’t you want your content to be what they learned from and make sure it got served up? There’re accounts in decision. Decision means they’re open to engaging, not with every vendor, but maybe a few.
Latané Conant:
And then there’s accounts that are actually taking meetings. Well, in our typical mojo, which I talked about, we’re either too early or too late when this sweet spot is when they’re between learning and engaging. And I want my team and I want your team to know and be able to timestamp exactly when that happens. When accounts go from learning to wanting to engage and have you, your company, your sellers be the first people that they engage with. That’s the sweet spot. That’s the pocket. And so I love this. I’m all over this. This makes me so happy. And one of the reasons it makes me so happy is because I, I worked for this guy, Chris Heineken, and he used to always show me the picture of these dogs. And he’d say, Latané, here’s the deal. If you’re not that first dog, then the view is all the same.
Latané Conant:
And so that’s what we want to do with the 6QA, is be able to make sure that our sellers are that lead dog. And again, it’s anonymous and known. It’s a buying team. It’s no emotion. It’s AI, just math, but assume you’re free from MQL. So I’m going to give you on break the chains. I’m going to give you all the 6QA. You’re going to know exactly where buyers are, the best buyers for you are in your buying cycle. And I’m going to do that a little bit one up. Not only are going to tell you where they are. I’m going to tell you all the activity they’re doing. I’m going to tell you exactly who on the buying team is the best persona for you and who is engaged and who’s not engaged. I’m going to tell you the keywords that those personas care about and have researched.
Latané Conant:
I’m going to give you all that. And remember our lens is experience, right? We believe–everyone raised their hand and said, we believe that a great experience wins. So if you have that, what prospect or future customer experience do you create? Do you create one with forms? Do you create one with spam or do you create one with cold calls? Well, I think, and two years ago I had this crazy epiphany and I said, I don’t think we need to do this. I think we can freaking break the mold. And I think that it’s possible for us to create an experience with no forms, no spam, and no cold calls. And I marched in–we were in person at this point and I was having a team meeting with my little marketing team. And I said, guys this is going to be great.
Latané Conant:
We are going to break the mold. We were going to use this 6QA, we’re going to use all these insights that we have from our technology.
Latané Conant:
And we’re going to totally reimagine our prospect experience. And luckily everyone on my team was so hungover that I think they just said, okay, fine, crazy lady, we’ll do it. And that is what we spent about two years. It took less time to put in place, but that that’s really what we’ve been working on to optimize our revenue and our pipeline. And so I’m going to walk you through what that looks like and how that plays out for us here at 6sense, our process with no forms, no spam, and no cold calls.
Latané Conant:
So first of all, I have to define what a form means, because if you are going to come to one of our events, especially if it was in-person, if you’re going to come to the dinner, we need to know you’re going to come.
Latané Conant:
We needed to know if you have food allergies. So every now and then, yes, we use a form. I sent a survey out for a CMO community that I run and they said, oh I thought you were no forms. Well, I’m trying to get some information. You know what I mean? So, but what it means to us, no forms. Is all of our educational content, all of our product-related content, our demos, it’s all what we want you to learn from us.
Latané Conant:
And, and that is our philosophy. And the way that we put that in into play is, to really zone in on this experience is again, because we know exactly where accounts are. Remember I uncovered the dark funnel, and I know there’s these accounts and awareness, 652, there’s these in consideration, there’s these in decision, there’s these in purchase. And then I know when they 6QA, I can actually use my content and serve my content up at the right time to progress an account through this journey.
Latané Conant:
And we’ve always, as marketers thought this way, right? We’ve always thought in terms of, oh, this is top of funnel content. This is bottom of funnel. But what we do before is we just barfed it all out and sort of hoped that the prospect would know where they are in the funnel, right? Because I know I can serve that up at the right time to our prospects without forms. I also, because I know with account identity, I know who’s on my website and I know where they are in the journey. As soon as they come to the website, I’m going to welcome them. I’m going to know where they are in the journey. I’m going to know the content they’re most interested in. I’m not going to need a form and I’m going to be able to dynamically, really move them through and engage them based on the keywords they care about, based on their persona, based on where they are in their journey.
Latané Conant:
So it’s going from a form to really this customer-led digital engagement. That’s what we’ve been able to do. Now, let’s talk a little bit about spam. Does that mean, did I go around and tell everybody they couldn’t send email? No, we see people still have email addresses. We still send email, but we’re not trying to personalize. We’re trying to be relevant. And to me, spam is when it’s not relevant. And so we’re not going to send an email unless we know the keyword that that prospect cares about. We know the key persona and why that keyword matters to their persona. And we know where they are in that buying journey so we can be highly relevant. We also are going to, of course, use a mix of engagement tactics to really, again, focus on them and their buying jobs and the things that they need to do.
Latané Conant:
And so how does this kind of play out in real life is, our BDRs, you know, when they, when they rock in every single day, they used to come into an office. Now they don’t get to, unfortunately, but when they come into the proverbial office, they’re not guessing who should I send a ton of emails to, or who should I shoot cadences off to? They know exactly which accounts are in market and how long they’ve been in market. So that sweet spot they know, okay, it’s go time. There’s something going on with this account. It is the ideal time for me to reach out. Just knowing the timing again, that’s not enough. I said that I, they also know the keywords that the account cares about. They know what the account is researching. We do these things called value cards that help actually connect.
Latané Conant:
If you’re a sales leader and you’re researching predictive analytics, you probably care about forecasting accuracy. If you’re in marketing ops, you might care about like lead scoring or account scoring. So we connect the dots for them so they can be highly relevant. And then what happens? Do they email about anything? No, they put right in the subject line predictive that this account cared about predictive analytics. We’re going to put that in the subject line. That’s what we’re going to talk about. And boom, that’s when you’re going to get the engagement, that’s when you’re going to land on that relevance. And of course, again, multi-channel using the keywords refreshed multi persona. So it truly is looking at an account, not a lead or contact. Awesome. So from spam to customer lead engagement. Last but not least, honestly, this one was the most controversial for us to put into place because you know, the head of sales with, he was like, I think that the BDRs and the salespeople, we should be doing call blitzes.
Latané Conant:
It’s not that we don’t do call blitzes. I didn’t take away anyone’s phones. Like to me, no cold calls and which 6sense, the way we’ve really evolved this definition is, is to be, I don’t want my account executives to have cold territories. I want to make sure that every single seller here is put in. And so does Mark, our head of sales, put in the best position to win. And again, this is about this class is about optimizing pipeline and revenue. And your sales team is one of your most expensive resources. And so what we want to make sure is that we understand accounts in market and they’re warm. Those accounts are warm, and that’s when our AEs engage and get involved, and so what we’ve been able to do is accounts get alerted, AEs, get alerted when their account, when the account is ready, when an account is ready to engage.
Latané Conant:
But we found this really wasn’t enough because what we found, what was happening was we were taking this experience. You know, prospect-driven approach, marketing was engaging them. We were warming them up. We were getting accounts in market, but think about a sales team. A sales team has a list of accounts, and, you know, it’s just the way sales, gals and girls are, are wired. They’re not going to go and work an account unless it’s on their list and they know they’re going to get paid. It’s just how it is. So what was happening was we were getting all these great accounts in market because we knew they were, we had our ICP fit and 50%. So all of these accounts in orange, weren’t getting worked and they were getting left on the floor and our AEs were working cold accounts. And so he said, well, this is crazy.
Latané Conant:
And we set up dynamic territories. So we set up dynamic territories to make sure that yes, our AEs have some fixed territories, but for the most part, we want to be able to rotate in the warmest accounts for them to work. So they never have to make a cold call. So from cold calls to this inmarket accounts and AE selling with insights was a huge part of our journey, bringing us back to the original kind of subject line of the class, which was okay, let’s talk about pipeline and revenue. And I saw this quote on LinkedIn, I don’t know, a couple months ago, direct source revenue is the only metric that matters. This was directed at CMOs. Anonymous LinkedIn Broetry. I think that if you are measuring your impact as a marketer, only based on direct sourced revenue, you are really selling yourself, your team and your CEO, and really the company, very short, because I, when I think about the impact of this, what I’ve described, which is putting prospects and their experience first, warming accounts up for sales, the impact is yes, direct source revenue.
Latané Conant:
So here at 6sense, we source 70 to 80% of the revenue for the business. So yes, we’ve also been able to double every single year with an industry-leading CAC. So it’s easy to double if you’ve plenty of money, you know, we’re doubling responsively, managing our CAC, which is our customer acquisition cost. We have industry-leading churn. And over this last year with this approach, we’ve had a 50% increase in win rates and a 50% increase in our meeting to pipeline conversion. So going back to that original question of, you know, do you just double leads or do you optimize? And so that’s what I think about when I think about as, as marketers, really how, how we build pipeline and ultimately revenue. It’s experience first, focusing on the experience, updating our experience to really mirror the way buyers buy and buyers want to buy. And then it’s about measuring ourselves based on that true full funnel of impact and really, really locking in on conversion.
Latané Conant:
So I am maniacal about conversions, my dashboard, which I refresh, I don’t know, 20 times a day, is always telling me, how are we doing with things like win rates, every single little ASP cycle time, because I think that’s ultimately what is most impactful for our business. And so my last question is, oh, here we go. So, and, and you know, more than anything, what gets me like, so wound up is probably at least once a quarter, we get an email from someone who went through this cycle with us and they say, and they, you know, this one’s was to our CEO and I love it. And they say, Hey, one of the reasons we bought, yes, you got a great product, but we were so impressed with how focused on us we were, how engaging you were, how well your BDRs, we get people thanking our BDRs.
Latané Conant:
Does that ever happen, you guys? Usually you’re getting restraining orders and complaints. We literally get people thanking us and saying how impressed they were with our process, the fun factor on the team. I measure every, every other week we ask our team, how many days, how many–look at 10 working days. Out of the last 10 working days? How many are you having fun? Eight, eight out of 10. That’s important to me is that our team is out there making customers successful, living our brand. And when I get emails like this, it’s, it’s pretty freaking cool. So pipeline revenue. Yes. But culture fun. Getting to really connect in a meaningful way with our audience. I think this is like the way of the future. And so I originally called this project when I kicked it off with my team and I said, we’re going to do this no forms, no spam, no cold calls experiment.
Latané Conant:
I called it project bold moves. And so, you know, let’s get bold. I’d love to have you in. And if you’re in, we actually wrote kind of a, how to guide on this. So we’ve published a book in July with really our playbook, a lot more detail than I shared here. And you can get a copy. We’ve got a certification coming out on it, and we’ve got a book club in a box. If you want to run a book club with your, with your company. So who’s in, that’s the final question here.
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