This week on the Demand Gen Visionaries podcast, we sat down with the one and only Tracy Eiler, CMO of InsideView and one of the Top 15 Most Influential Women in B2B Marketing.

InsideView is the leading B2B data providers that allows demand gen marketers and sales professionals to build target accounts, enrich data, and keep their CRM clean and accurate. Like Qualified, InsideView is also part of the Salesforce family, helping sales and marketing teams succeed by having their Salesforce CRM database full of clean and accurate Account and Contact data.

On this episode of Demand Gen Visionaries, Tracy emphasizes the importance of human interaction with customers to turn buyers into company advocates, the organization strategy that InsideView brings to a CRM that keeps all departments productive, and the importance of quality vs. quantity leads when it comes to prospective buyers.

Tune in to Tracy's episode and hear how Tracy got started in demand gen, and more!

• How Tracy views structuring the go-to-market strategy at InsideView
• InsideView's Account-Based Marketing and engagement plan
• The process of customer acquisition including her "secret shopper" tactics
• Tracy's playbook including her uncuttable budget items
• Content marketing, SEO, and the new school way of un-gating content
• The evolving role and the importance of sales development (SDRs)
• Team diversity, hiring, and the Women in Revenue community

Want to skip ahead to the highlights? Check out these can’t-miss moments.

Episode Highlights

1:50 Tracy's First Job in Demand Gen

• First job was was a BDR rep doing lead follow up over the summer part time
• Very early exposure to understanding lead gen and what it looked like
• Tracy would answer the 1-800 Hotline as “Hello this is Chris Kelley, how can I help you?”
  

3:30 Your Role as CMO of InsideView

• InsideView is a B2B Data provider that provides tools that allow demand marketers to build target account lists, enrich data, and keep their CRM clean and complete
• The InsideView overall demand gen strategy is segmented into 2 components
• The first is small business, companies with less than 1000 employees, and it’s almost always inbound.
• Conversational marketing is the new way that Tracy is handling inbound
• The Enterprise segment is greater than 1000 employees, and the strategy is 100% account based for new logo pursuit and expansion
• As a CMO the org structure includes the traditional functions, including product marketing, customer advocacy, demand generation (digital, virtual events, email etc), operations, sales development, pr and communications
• Tracy is super passionate about sales development report into marketing, or even if it doesn't think of these folks as part of the marketing org
  

7:00 InsideView’s Account-Based Strategy

• InsideView tries to target folks in marketing (CMOs and demand gen), operations, and sales leadership
• The buying committee includes these folks and increasingly procurement is in the mix, which means we need to have great value-based messaging
• The process between marketing, sales and customer success is collaborative
• We’re trying to develop engaging content that speaks to the value of InsideView
• Market research is key to this content strategy
• Every group ranked CRM data quality as extremely important, but more than 60% were doing manual data entry or nothing at all
  

11:00 The Process of Customer Acquisition

• Typically an inbound lead has an interest in data quality, we talk to them about quantifying the impact, and the conversation starts with ROI including sales efficiency, planning, target account strategy, and more
• On the target account side, we think of our content as the “bait” that gets in front of this audience.  Then we do a data assessment as a health check to show them where things are at
• Then we might get into a proof of concept, or just start the work which includes a professional services cleanup.  Over time we must show them the value that earns us the right to expand inside the account, a key role of marketing post sale.
• With an ASP of $50,000 or even higher, you have to leverage every opportunity to get in front of your existing customers
• One key tactic I use is a pre-sales and post-sales “secret shopper” to get your eyes on marketers on every communication with a buyer and a customer.  Does the messaging all along the customer journey match up?
  

18:00 Account Engagement Measures

• With Salesforce Pardot, we measure account-based engagement
• This shows the key signals about propensity to buy
• But this is also key because we can see the absence of these signals as a sign of propensity to churn

19:00 The Playbook, Uncuttable Budget Items

• The first is the website, totally uncuttable, it is the front door to the company and it is, especially during covid, more important than every
• The second is our Account-based tactics, which are orchestration of email, phone, social, and ads.  All between marketing, sales and customer experience
  

21:00 On Conversational Marketing

• On the website, the 3 options are talk to a live person, discuss pricing, and show me a demo, this is the front door to our sales team.
• For so many years we debated gating content, and we’ve been fighting this tide and hiding our best content behind forms, and then they fill out our form with “Mickey Mouse”
• Conversational Marketing, most of our conversations are happening human to human, and we’re in the process of un-gating content
• Being able to meet that person in the moment, and have the conversation the buyer wants to have, that’s the key
• Many people are now having conversations anonymously, and then the SDR determines the level of qualification in the moment, without even a lead being created
• This is a brave new world, and trying to harness everything going on
  

26:00 How SEO Plays into the Website

• Table stakes are understanding the keywords that are involved, drawing people in
• When we write content, we have an outside partner that makes sure all of the content is optimized
• We look at content consumption, and marry that with intent data
• We took all of our content that was stuck in slides, downloadable PDFs, and more...and we brought that directly to our site, in a way that is indexable by Google
• Our SDRs can now see the website visitors with our conversational marketing tool, and use the Google search terms to open conversations relevant to the content that the buyer is reading
  

28:00 Let’s Un-Gate the Content

• Let’s encourage every marketing team to un-gate content and meet they buyer in real-time with conversational marketing
• Even when traffic is anonymous, we de-anonymize the account record and match it with the Salesforce CRM account data, and route it to the right sales person, in a highly personalized way
• You have to share with the sales team the vision of what could be by showing them the data.  Many leads actually waste your sales team’s time, so let’s make sure they are spending their time on the things that are qualified.
• You should experiment with your target account list first and track this
• The tenure of a CMO is lower than ever, so sales has to be bought into this strategy
• Aligning around pipeline (opportunity quality) and not leads (quantity) is key
• The best CMOs are like the offensive coordinator of a football team
  

34:45 Why SDRs are So Critical

• If you believe sales and marketing should align around pipeline, then marketing needs accountability for everything that leads up to the opportunity
• When I first came to InsideView, sales development reported to sales
• I embraced the sales leader and she agreed that it made sense in marketing
• Sometimes, with sales development being the training ground for future sales reps, it might make sense for the role to report into sales
• Our SDR leader Kelsey, her mantra is “Speed to Lead” and all of that, the process and the message, are critical for the sales development team.
• I provide “demand gen as a service” to my sales team
• The best way to align with sales and the SDR team is to act as if we are all part of the same team.
• We really need to view SDRs as an extension of the demand gen function
• The data shows that 54% of the time sales development is part of the marketing team, but it’s an even higher percentage in high performing companies
  

39:00 Diversity of Team and Thought

• We use SV Academy, with a goal of putting 1,000,000 people from non-traditional tech background to work in tech sales
• SV Academy creates job ready SDRs, they put folks through 12 week SDR bootcamp
• When they come to you as candidates they already have an SDR foundation and then all you have to do is train them on your company
• SV Academy can send us 5 new SDRs with ease and ramp within a couple of months
• Some folks are college graduates, but some are folks in an adjacent world.  Our top SDR came from the Apple genius bar, who wants to get into enterprise tech sales
• With so many of us wanting to diversify our workforces, partnering with SV Academy has been key, go check ‘em out at https://sv.academy/
  

43:00 The Most Memorable Dust Up

• I had taken my first CMO job more than a decade ago.  The company was $15M in revenue, and I had known that the CEO has chewed up multiple CMOs before me
• The mistake I made was that I didn't meet the sales lieutenants
• Those folks really hated marketing, and they didn’t trust marketing or CMOs
• The second day on the job, we sat around the table and they wouldn't acknowledge my presence!
• I “got all big sister on them” and they agreed to give me a chance
• We developed a great relationship because I listened to them.  One of their biggest challenges was around reference selling, so that’s what I focused on first
• I have high empathy for sales leadership, probably because I was an SDR, and I have known so many sales leaders and understand the pressure of owning a number
• One of those “evil sales lieutenants” is now my husband!
  

48:00 Quick Hits, Getting to Know Tracy

• Shelter in place habit? I have become the master at baking lemon cakes
• If I wasn't a CMO I would want to be a journalist, studying politics and social issues and bring those back to a community
• I’ve been binge watching the perry mason redo on HBO, great show!
• Do you have a favorite quote or phrase that gets you going?  I have a specific piece of music that is part of my anthem.  The music that you love as a teenager is the music you’ll love for the rest of your life.  For me it’s Prince “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Baby I’m a Star”
  

52:00 Women in Revenue

• Women in Revenue started as a small but mighty organization in 2018
• There are more than 2,600 members all over North America
• Women in Revenue is a community with a magazine and events
• We have a community and a mentor program for women in revenue
• What a great way to give back and a great way to recruit
• Help develop the next generation of great marketers at https://www.womeninrevenue.org/

Episode Quotes:

"I don't use the term ABM any anymore. I really think that it’s account-based engagement or account-based pursuit, because we’re so integrated between sales, marketing, and customer experience. We go account-based not only for new logo pursuit, but also for customer expansion.”

"I really think demand marketers should think about, org structure wise, having sales development report into marketing."

"CRM data quality is something that the ops folks typically own, but it’s at the root of the impact to sales and marketing effectiveness.”

“Cold calling. I just don't think that exists anymore, right? If marketers are doing their job, we’re warming up an audience and reaching out to them and getting in front of them in a variety of ways.”

"Really make sure that sales understands and has buy-in into your strategy. It’s really important—we have to educate them. Wean them off of lead quantity and wean them onto opportunity quality.”

"We want more folks who are not white, and we also want diversity of thought, right? Take first-generation college graduates as an example. We don't want everybody to look and sound and come with the same background.”‍

Ready to hear from more Demand Gen Visionaries? You can find all episodes here.