Humans of Martech - 12: Lifecycle: A Martech Saga part 1: Future-proof your Martech with lifecycle

12: Lifecycle: A Martech Saga part 1: Future-proof your Martech with lifecycle

12/15/20 • 25 min

Main takeaway:

Set yourself up for long term success with a solid Lifecycle program. Not only does it help you exert control and mastery over your reporting, it provides a framework for having tough discussions between sales & marketing.

It opens up career opportunities - average salary according to glassdoor and others for lifecycle marketing manager is $80-$120K - yeah, you unlock big value for your own career.

This topic is too big for a single post, so here’s what’s in store:

This episode, episode 1: the what & why of lifecycle
Episode 2: How to avoid overthinking implementing a lifecycle
Episode 3: How to design a basic lifecycle that actually works
Episode 4: Picking the right MQL & scoring model for lifecycle
Episode 5: No sales people were harmed in the making of lifecycle

Traditionally, a lot of companies refer to leads as if you’re taking their temperature. Hot medium and cold leads.

The system isn’t really based off of metrics and is not an effective way to sort leads for sales. There’s no consideration for a lead’s progression from first visit to conversion then to customer.

In this scenario, marketing and sales often clash because there’s no system in place to create alignment. Sales isn’t tackling leads in the most optimal way. Marketing is generating leads that sales might not care about.

What is lifecycle, JT? How do you define it?

Lifecycle is the journey contacts in your database take to become a customer. It mirrors your typical funnel journey and operates in much the same way. Unlike funnel, lifecycle is a bit more specific to conditions in your database. Your funnel has basic stages that describe the buyer’s journey: awareness through interest, evaluation, purchase, etc. They are totally compatible! But lifecycle requires data properties or fields in your marketing automation platform to track.

Everyone gets lost in acronym land. Enterprise teams largely follow the standards from the SiriusDecisions waterfall model. What are the standard stages as you see it, and do you think they have to be customized/adapted for each company?

Let’s run through them quick:

Lead - Yeah, someone in your database
MQL - a marketing qualified lead -- literally exactly as it sounds -- marketing qualifies leads
SAL - sales accepted lead - leads that sales agrees to work with
SQL - sales qualified - leads that sales qualifies - common in team where front-line sales reps qualify leads to send to account executives
Opportunity - it’s got an open opportunity
Customer - they’ve purchased!

Of course, you can do whatever you want! I’m not your mother!

This is a cross section of the database. To me, this is table stakes for any MAP.

Benefits are huge but can be summed up in two points:

Mastery over your contact DB
A common language for sales & marketing

So I’m putting my startup hat on, maybe the ops person on that team is wearing many other hats and doesn’t have time to build all these fields and time stamps and create all this alignment. If you don’t have the cycle, at lest start with master lifecycle lists. Some kind of way to get a sense of what stage people are in your db. Because this is a big project, there’s no getting around that.

Multiple teams agreeing on definitions and standard operating procedures. So like every problem, there’s a systems and tech side, how to implement what's possible, but there’s the human side, if we build this, will it be used, is this helping people? Do people even want this?

What makes this project so hard?

Lots of stakeholders, the people side is so much harder. Lots of things that need to be agreed upon. Can be sprawling and daunting if your DB is a mess. Needs long term follow up after deployment to be successful.

Traditional sales folks who have a process that works well enough often see this as as theoretical or not as important as revenue driving activities. One thing I’ll say here is that this can never be pitch as a marketing idea, it can never be pitched as a top down initiative. This has to be something that is built through the alignment of sales and marketing. Dual buy-in, common languages.

JT, I know you’ve done this in Marketo and HubSpot for clients and in-house -- it’s potentially a huge project... Why on earth should anyone take on this project?

It’s 101 for anyone looking to go deep into marketing operations and opens up a super cool avenue for your career. It will allow you to attain mastery over your database. It opens up career opportunities - average salary according to glassdoor and others for lifecycle marketing manager is $120K - yeah, you unlock big value for your own career.

Stay tuned for part 2/5 next week.

If you absolutely can't wait 7 days for...

Main takeaway:

It opens up career opportunities - average salary according to glassdoor and others for lifecycle marketing manager is $80-$120K - yeah, you unlock big value for your own career.

This topic is too big for a single post, so here’s what’s in store:

This episode, episode 1: the what & why of lifecycle
Episode 2: How to avoid overthinking implementing a lifecycle
Episode 3: How to design a basic lifecycle that actually works
Episode 4: Picking the right MQL & scoring model for lifecycle
Episode 5: No sales people were harmed in the making of lifecycle

Traditionally, a lot of companies refer to leads as if you’re taking their temperature. Hot medium and cold leads.

What is lifecycle, JT? How do you define it?

Let’s run through them quick:

Lead - Yeah, someone in your database
MQL - a marketing qualified lead -- literally exactly as it sounds -- marketing qualifies leads
SAL - sales accepted lead - leads that sales agrees to work with
SQL - sales qualified - leads that sales qualifies - common in team where front-line sales reps qualify leads to send to account executives
Opportunity - it’s got an open opportunity
Customer - they’ve purchased!

Of course, you can do whatever you want! I’m not your mother!

This is a cross section of the database. To me, this is table stakes for any MAP.

Benefits are huge but can be summed up in two points:

Mastery over your contact DB
A common language for sales & marketing

What makes this project so hard?

JT, I know you’ve done this in Marketo and HubSpot for clients and in-house -- it’s potentially a huge project... Why on earth should anyone take on this project?

Stay tuned for part 2/5 next week.

If you absolutely can't wait 7 days for...

Previous Episode

11: Jonathan Simon: Do you still need a degree to have success in marketing?

Our guest today is Jonathan Simon. Jonathan is Director of Marketing and Professor of Digital Marketing at Telfer School of Management - University of Ottawa. He teaches an undergrad and a master’s level course. Before that, he also taught at Algonquin college for almost 4 years.

So he’s been teaching marketing for a while, since 2014. But he hasn’t always been a prof...

He’s worked in-house before, best known in Ottawa for his expertise in mobile marketing and the gaming industry. He was Director of Marketing at Magmic – a leading publisher of mobile games working with global brands like Hasbro and Mattel.

He’s an extremely well networked marketer, he’s found more jobs for marketing students in Canada than any other prof in history, ever.

It's not every day you get to interview a Professor.

Some of the topics we cover in the episode:

How do you teach while also being a Director of marketing?

Do you still need to do a degree out of highschool to have a successful and happy career in marketing?

What are some of the best side projects students can take on to help get them jobs early on?

How do you manage interns and fresh marketers?

How do you stay happy in your career while managing multiple hobbies and being a father?

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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus

Next Episode

13: Lifecycle: A Martech Saga part 2: Don’t overthink lifecycle

You want to keep your project neatly scoped and deliver this project on time. Give a skinny MVP and build upon it rather than starting with a complex model that no one will ever use.

We've seen these types of projects be it scoring or lifecycle go into dark rabbit holes and never emerge.

You build a 5 step process, but somewhere in the depths of the definition of a picklist value in step 1.15 has erupted this debate between sales and product.........

Let's preface the value of project management for these types of projects, and even talk about why a lot of marketers don’t really work on these skills enough.

Project management is key to getting lifecycle off the ground.

How do you organize projects to ensure they don’t go down the rabbit hole? I used to think that anybody could manage projects and it wasn’t a great skill to specialize in. And then I discovered how bad I was at it.

I’ve gotten pretty hardcore about projects, particularly when I’m working as a consultant. I like a 5 stage model based on Discovery, Design, Build, Deploy, and Review. Each stage has clear deliverables so that we know when to leave that stage. I’m also pretty hardcore on timelines. I’d rather we hit a timeline and reduce scope than expand timelines to keep scope.

One thing I’ve seen ops people obsess about a bit too much is these micro stages in between stages. Your main stages are Lead to MQL but along that path a lead might get confirmed and engaged. How many micro stages is too many? At the end of the day it’s about conversion rates and you don’t want to muddy your table with too many percentages. Lifecycle really allows for measurement of conversion points.

Question: JT, I know you’ve worked in Marketo and HubSpot. Marketo gives you unlimited freedom, but HubSpot’s default lifecycle stage is fixed. What model do you like better?

Yeah, I’ve used Marketo for 7 years before I started working HubSpot. At first, I was like, of eff this noise with HubSpot. But I’m a little more lenient - HubSpot forces you to simplify and focus on really key stages. Going from MQL to SQL is a big change - one that can trigger insights if you’ve got your analytics tuned properly. Also, no one is making you use HubSpot’s properties - you can totally spin up your own.

I think as a mental exercise, it’s better to lean more toward the HubSpot model than completely reinventing the wheel.

This is the type of trivial details that bogs down the project. You want to customize things, but you don’t overcomplicate things.

We talk about the importance of alignment in this endeavour and something I’ve wrestled with a lot has been the best vehicle to communicate to my team what is happening along the lifecycle. The scoring, the micro stages, the touch points, the segments, the emails the in app messages. Like as much of that story as possible.

How do you prevent this type of scope creep that’s bound to happen as everyone starts to unpack things?

I think it’s so important to use a visualization tool like a flowchart -- LucidChart, Mural, or whatever -- to show your lifecycle. People are resistant to complexity when you start to chart things out for them. No one wants a complex process but we often arrive at complex solutions before we’re trying to compromise.

By using a flow chart, you start to grind away at the concerns folks have that this stage isn’t represented or whatever. It also allows you to show that there’s a lot that goes into each stage. Like an MQL stage that depends on scoring also requires building a scoring program.

The concept of an MVP is so important here. It gives us unrivaled permission to push something that isn’t 100% what we want. It’s a forcing function that gets something out the door.

It’s like conversion rate testing -- everyone just leaves you alone as soon as you say, “oh, I’m testing this.”

You do need two things before this magic trick grows old: 1) you need to follow up with future deliverables; 2) you need to show data.

For lifecycle, it’s getting an initial report into your stakeholders hands. This isn’t a PhD dissertation - it’s something you need to do and deploy.

Thanks for listening folks.

Doon't forget to check out part 1 in the last episode.

If you absolutely can't wait 7 days for the next episode, we'll give you a super secret link to unpublished episodes if you sign up for new episode notifications here humansofmartech.com.

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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
Podcast artwork font by StarJedi Special Edition by Boba Fonts