Modern B2B Marketing Strategies, Measurements and Sales Alignment - with Matt Heinz, The Sales Pipeline Podcast

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics at Measure Up Podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Matt Heinz, founder and president of Heinz Marketing and host of the Sales Pipeline Radio Podcast. Today, we will be covering four main areas. First, today's B2B marketing strategy. How has it evolved over the years? Second, content and community. How to measure the business impact. Third, how do you measure the overall return on investment for B2B marketing programs in 2021 and beyond? And finally, sales pipeline or revenue, which is the best outcome measurement of a modern B2B marketer. Matt, thank you so much for being a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. And please give a brief background overview of your journey to being our guest.

**Matt Heinz** (1:22)
Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. My name is Matt Heinz. I started Heinz Marketing 13 years ago, just with a laptop and a bus pass. And our focus is really on helping companies sort of figure out how to create more predictable pipeline from revenue responsible marketing teams. Sort of getting out of the lumpiness of pipeline production that often happens from just random acts of marketing. And sort of implementing a real systematic approach to revenue responsible marketing that helps both sales and marketing teams work more closely together and generate more predictable, repeatable and scalable pipeline in that new business.

**Ray Rike** (1:55)
Okay. So I heard some words that just ring so true with me and that's predictable and scalable pipeline. So you've been advising companies on how to build predictable, scalable and high growth pipeline for almost 13 years, as you said. What have been two or three of the big changes you've seen over the last few years compared to when you started, when it comes to strategy and tactics to build pipeline?

**Matt Heinz** (2:19)
Yeah, a couple of things for sure. I would say one is just the increasing tightness of the collaboration between the sales and marketing teams. Used to be you could have marketing working at the top of the funnel and sales working at the bottom of the funnel. And that may just still generally be the roles, but I see an collaboration, especially with complex sales cycles across every stage of the buying journey. So sales and marketing working much more closely at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel. So that's one. I also see the use of data as significantly more important than it has been in the past. I think in the past, we were very transactional, especially in B2B for how we sort of managed leads and opportunities. We would wait for someone to raise their hand or say, OK, here's the right person at the right company. We're going to call and find out what they're interested in today. And if they're not, we might call them next week or next month. The amount of data that is now available to us to give us insights into individuals and companies, to give us buying signals and intent signals, even if someone hasn't necessarily raised their hand, was exhibiting behavior at the account or contact level inside and outside of your organization. That tells you that the situation is ripe for an engagement or is right for an outreach with some message. So that's two. And three, I would say, is this continued shift for many BDB organizations from having a lead orientation to their sales and marketing to an account orientation. And so thinking through the fact that you've got, you know, you can't email a building, you can't call an account, you have to talk to people. But there's some complexity in the way that those accounts operate. You know, there's typically a buying committee that has various roles in a decision making process. And there's consensus building that has to happen internally amongst members of that buying committee for the account to commit. So having an account orientation to coordinate that behavior, not only across members of that buying committee, but across your selling team, across sales and marketing. It gets complex really quickly, but we're seeing companies that embrace that and get their arms around it, are seeing significant increases in not only the efficiency of their sales and marketing motions, but the velocity of the deals in their pipeline.

**Ray Rike** (4:20)