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We're going to talk a bit about how to scale marketing organization. A couple of words about our company. So we're basically connecting the dots between marketing know how and the other two parts are a bit different. One is content and engagement, what we call the beauty, because we are. We have people here that know how to create engaging content and how to engage with people through online channels and the geek technology people that know how to actually build up all the infrastructure required in order to run and manage a B2B marketing operation. Some of our clients are international brands such as Nice Systems, viaccess, Orca, amdocs, Avaya, IMTC and ndg. Just one more word about the type of projects we were doing because it will be relevant for the rest of the discussion. Some of our services are top of the funnel services, meaning that we are building marketing programs in the awareness level and some of them are for the middle of the funnel, for our customers and for ourselves. Everything that we're going to talk about today is based on two things. Either things that we've done in order to help our company to grow and to scale our own agency business, or to how we help our clients to scale their marketing organization. And the challenge of scale is basically not only relevant to companies that are in the service business, it's relevant to companies in both service and product business. For agencies or companies that basically sell hours of their employees or billable hours, this is a do or die kind of thing. For others, they might not feel it in the immediate future, but if they won't be able to scale their marketing operation, they will lose their competition. The budgets unfortunately are not really growing, but the expectations of management or clients do grow. And it all boils down to one simple question. How to do more with less without compromising on quality. We need to beat the numbers with less resources. So what we've learned from our experience is that you can scale your organization if you think about three basic rules. The first one is making decisions takes time and effort. Save it to the most important cases. Automation and streamlined processes are your friends, but with an asterisk, with a node that we'll talk about soon. And the last point that everybody is talking about, but it's really hard to implement is the fact that what can't be measured can't be managed. So let's see how these things really boils down to actual things you can do tomorrow morning. So let's talk a bit about decisions. Many of the tasks that marketing teams are doing are repetitive. You're setting up a campaign, you're planning a webinar like this one, you're promoting a conference, you're distributing some kind of a gated content, and you do it again and again and again. In the case of an agency, it's a bit to the extreme because you do it to multiple clients. But when you are managing product marketing organization, you still do various campaigns, multiple webinars, and so on. Now, there are a lot of decision points when you are doing these kind of activities. For example, how many promotion emails should we send? How are we going to track the campaign? What is the kind of content that we should put out in order to attract the highest amount of responses, and so on. Now we're facing that on a daily basis because we're running a lot of marking programs in parallel. And we had to find ways to take all these specific decision points and make them streamlined as possible. So we started doing the following. We've created templates, which is nothing new, but we use these templates as a part of our project management and collaboration platform. And I would like to show you how we're doing that for a second. So we're using a tool called Basecamp, which is a very simple tool. That's why we really like it. And what we've done, we've created templates for repetitive tasks. For example, one of our partners is Acton. We're going to talk about him in a second. When we need to set up a marketing automation platform such as Acton for a client, we have to ask specific things from our clients, get a lot of material information from them, sometimes also credentials to use some of their systems, and we need to do specific tasks in order to set up a marketing automated solution for a client. Now, instead of going to this Word document that will lie in the 4000th folder in our computers or in our Dropbox, we just, we just created this template within Basecamp, which means that we can easily create a new project with two clicks based on this template. Now, this thing, though it might seem a bit very simplistic, this thing is one of the biggest time savers that we have. For example, take the process of new client onboarding, something that takes a lot of time, especially when in a company like ours that provide customized services. But at the end of the day, again, we need to get specific types of content from the client, we need to do specific kinds of meetings with people from our team, and we need to put this whole thing together in a specific time period by using templates that are feeding into the task management and project management tool. Of the company were able to cut this time in a meaningful way. Just to give you an example, it took us, we pretty much cut 75%, managed to cut 75% of onboarding time for new clients since we started using this system and this tool. Now I know that not all companies are using a centralized project management and collaboration platform. If you're not using one, embrace it asap. Email is probably one of the least scalable platforms out there. It's perfectly okay to send email to one another, but when you really need to ramp things up, when you need to do marketing projects involve different groups within your company, different people within your company, managing these whole things through emails just doesn't work. Sending files with guns from msproject, it doesn't work. At the end of the day, the campaign will be launched, but it would take you way more time than launching the tasks for all of the team and all the people involved with just your clicks. And as you can do by using Basecamp or other tools like that. There is also Asana and Podio and various tools in this area. Trick number 2 till 15 use technology to automate and streamline technology is a huge part of streamlining a marketing operation and scaling up the operation with the same manpower that you have today. Let me show you a couple of things. So let's start with Oktopost and here is why we love Octoposts. So there are different tools that can be used in order to engage and distribute content on social networks. But one of the reasons we really like about Oktopost is the following. I can create take a campaign and I can easily schedule a post. Okay, this is an amazing webinar and schedule it across time with a couple of clicks. What does that mean for us? It means that when Farah, a member of my team that manages a lot of our campaigns, when she needs to create a campaign for a client or for her own marketing activities, she can sit for an hour and basically plan, launch and measure a campaign for two or three months period in one hour. And these are numbers that I'm not just pulling out of my hat. These are things that we've tested. Everything that I'm telling you about time saving, we just timed it and we saw how helpful it is. The fact that we can use old messages, what's called message assets. It's a huge benefit and this is a classic example how a technology can help us in actually launching and scaling a marketing operation. Think how much work it would have been taking us to do it in another tool or if we would have to go to each and every network separately, of course, one of the things we love the most is the ability to to post to multiple groups within LinkedIn. Again, a huge time saver with several clicks, I'm posting to three different groups in multiple times. Now with LinkedIn, I probably want to do that because then I will become a spammer. But in general, it's important to know that this kind of thinking and this kind of tool saves a lot of time and a lot of effort. Add a tool that you love is Acton. Acton is a marketing automation platform that we use a lot and also some of our clients use. And again, it's the same idea like the templates that we talked about before. With a marketing automation tool, whether it's Acton or Marketo or HubSpot, you can basically create very, very sophisticated automated programs with specific steps that enables you to automatically nurture leads, send emails to people that act to any specific behavior, connect it to Salesforce, and update their campaign data and their lead data. And this is something that we really love to use. You have to handle it with care because usually automated programs with marketing automation can go a bit out of hand if you're not managing them in the best way possible. But think about the you're sitting with your marketing team and you're saying, this is what I want to do with a new user, a new person that left his or her details in our landing page, I want to wait for a week and then send them another offer. And if they actually respond to this offer, I want to send them a week later a different offer. And if they don't, I want to do something else with them. And based on that, at the end of the day, decide where to push them to Salesforce or not, to the sales team or not. Without the marketing automation tool, it's either not going to happen or it's going to take a huge amount of time. So creating these automated programs saves tons of time. And the good thing is that you can always duplicate them and create new ones based on what you've learned from the program that you're running. Another awesome example of how you can easily use these tools to reduce the amount of time that you're investing in your marketing efforts is planning webinars. Webinars, just like any other event, have a very structured way for promotion. You have a landing page, you have specific emails that you're sending before the event. You want to send different emails to people that registered versus people that didn't register, and you want to have Some follow up emails. Now, what Acton is doing in a great way, and other products also. But what Acton is doing in a great way is really simplifies things because it connects to the webinar platforms and enables you to easily create a sign up form, canned emails with a default template that they've created for you. And also create those very smart ways to decide, okay, this kind of email I'm going to send to a person that signed up and did not attend. And this side, as you can see at the bottom of my screen, a different kind of email I would send to a person that signed up and actually attended. Now the idea that you can actually sit and in one hour plan the whole promotion end to end, pre event, at the event and post event marketing activities for a webinar or conference. And you can just put it once inside within your marketing automation tool and just press play and you know that this is happening in the background. That's a huge scalability benefit because it means that the same person in your organization that before that had to spend 20, 30 or 40% of his or her time to track what's happening with the webinar, to build all these assets, to send the specific emails at specific point in time and so on, can now do all of that with one or two hours. It's a huge benefit. I can tell that when we started using an all in one marketing platform such as Acton, we've reduced the amount of time that we had to invest in creating new campaigns in something like 80% because the same person could launch the landing page, create the form, define the logic of the campaign and just launch it. So this is a huge tool for that. Another tool that we're using a lot and we recommend using is Nimble. We are living in a world of a complex sale, meaning that we need to create and cultivate relationship over time with our target audience in order at the end of the process to convert them into actual clients. Now, managing relationship both online and offline, both in business and outside of the business world, is not a simple thing. So one of the things that we really love is that we have this tool called Nimble that really helps us to manage to scale up. Let's go this way. Our relationship management, how do they do that? First of all, when we open Nimble in the morning, we see all the people that we have some kind of engagement opportunity with them. We see people that started following us. When we look at their profile, we can immediately see what is their bio, for example. And one of the coolest feature is that we can easily import their contact and boom, they are now in our database. In our contact database we can see who mentioned us and start to communicate with them from this dashboard. Again, a huge time saver. It means that it takes us less time to identify who should we talk with now at this point in time. And if it takes us less time, we can do it with more and more people again. We can scale our engagement and we can scale our ability to communicate effectively with people. That matters. Now another cool thing that exists within Nimble is the ability they have a new feature called Stay in touch. So there are specific people that we are saying that we want to stay in touch with people that we care about. So we want to have this kind of a timer that says a month from now please remind me to ping Dana or Guy or Ron and ask them what's up and how they're doing and so on. Because it might be that, it might be that they couldn't talk with us just now, but we know that a month from now they have new budgets open. Or it might just be that these are cool guys but we're so busy with our day to day life that we didn't have the time to chat Again. What does it mean? It means that we have a very, very, very simple scalable way to to engage with the people that we care most about either from a personal perspective or from a business perspective in the specific relevant time. So it means that for me, I don't need to worry did I had to talk with someone and I forgot about it, which is a huge time saver. Now these all things are great, but here's where the magic really starts to happen. The magic really starts to happen when we start to connect all these cool stuff. And you will see that I'm really excited about it because this is the geeky part, right? So let's say we do a campaign with Oktopost. We'll drive traffic to a landing page with our new marketing automation paper or our new social CRM paper. Now we've integrated Oktopost with with Salesforce which means that as soon as these leads leave his or her contact details from a specific group within LinkedIn, this lead is automatically being pushed into Salesforce. Which is great because this is our main CRM that we're using to track opportunities and so on. But at the end of the day, we are using Salesforce only in order to track opportunities and talk with sales ready leads. So we need to get all those leads into our marketing automation platform. I'M showing you one scenario. And in this scenario, we are pushing the leads only to Salesforce, and then from Salesforce, we're pushing them into Acton. And with Acton, we're doing all those automated cool stuff. We're putting them in the marketing database. We're able to define exactly what to do with them. And it might well be, by the way, that we saw this Oktopost channel. They were engaged with one of the activities that we've done in LinkedIn. We. But we already know them from a different marketing activity. And all this data lies within Acton. So Acton and Salesforce fully integrate together and constantly syncs their database, which is pretty cool as well. Now, when we have a new lead, we want our team to get on top of that. And to tell the truth, Salesforce is a very powerful tool, but its UI is just horrible. And we want to have only one system that manages all our tasks. So we do not use Salesforce for that. As you remember, we use Basecamp for that. So automatically, when a new lead is created within Salesforce, it automatically creates a task to a specific person in my company within Basecamp with a specific due date. And then we have an automated process that the person that sees that in their task, the task list, already knows that they need to contact a specific person and start to engage with them. Now, what we usually get from Oktopost or from landing pages is first name, last name, email address, and in many cases, that's it. So we want to enrich the profile and we want to do this meaningful engagement with these guys using the right tool for that. And in this case, the right tool for that is, of course, Nimble. So here, what we're doing, we are, are syncing between Nimble and Acton. And the reason that there is a dotted line here is because from all the things you see here on the screen, this is the only part that is not fully automated. So just think about what's happening here. You remember Farrah that was sitting for one hour and planning a campaign for three months ahead for a specific white paper. As soon as she did that, and used Oktopost in order to distribute the landing page and the relevant groups and Twitter feeds and so on. All these things that you see on the screen is happening. This is a very, very strong and compelling way to scale marketing activities, because it's really simple to do one small thing. Plan a campaign, press, play, and get all of those other systems in the backend. Just sync together, work together, and leave the people time to do important things that are on the table. Actually engaging with the relevant people, going through the leads and making sure that we are handling the right leads and also thinking about the next marketing campaign. Now, the next trick is extremely important. If you know me, you know that I'm an Apple fanboy and as such, quoting Bill Gates is not something that is easy for me to do. But he did say one of the most important things when you are talking about all these different integrations. The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation would magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. This is extremely important insight. Sometimes you buy all those cool tools. So you're sitting after this webinar. Some of you will go to their bosses or go to their credit card and just start buying all those cool tools that we just shown you today. Some of you will reach out and ask me how we've done some of these things. So you have all these things in place. But these are only technologies. If you don't have the right process in place, if you don't have the right idea of what exactly you're going to do with these tools, it's probably best to do all the things we talked about in a more manual way. Otherwise, for example, if you'll start to connect your marketing automation tool to your CRM in a very liberal way, that everything that goes through the marketing automation tool will be pushed to to your CRM, you will start to contaminate the CRM database. Other things happen, of course, with task lists and so on. These are the things that are very, very tricky. So that's why we always tell our clients and also when we're looking at our marketing operation, that we try everything manually first, we do all these processes that we've shown you manually in the first or second time. We see what works, we see what doesn't work, and then we start to put all those automation and smart things into play. KPIs are your friends. Key performance indicators are really essential if you want to be in a situation that you are actually able to continuously scale your marketing operation. And the reason is very, very simple. Until now, we talked about how to take things that you know that you want to do and do them faster or more efficient way. But if you don't know how to measure the impact of these activities, it might well be that you're doing an extremely efficient process for something that doesn't bring you any value. And this is something that we really don't want that will happen. Right. We have to make sure that it. It's not enough that we've done this amazing job in being extremely efficient. At the end of the day, nobody cares how efficient we are. We want to scale our marketing organization, meaning bringing more leads that are more mature to our sales team. What we've done internally is we took each and every business process and we started with really defining them in a good way. We looked at all the activities that we were doing then that are actually creating tangible value, either through internal clients. So for example, our analyst provides specific kinds of reports. So if these reports are providing tangible value to project managers in my company, then we put a KPI to see how we can measure the effort that he's investing in these reports. Not necessarily trying to find out how much time they're doing they're spending on it, but more what is the impact of the time they are investing in it. This is for internal customers of the work of my team. But when we're talking about clients, then we are also trying to see what are the things that we are doing that actually provide them value. Usually these are the things that are in the price offer. To make things simple, then we are trying to find the most meaningful way to measure them. And it doesn't have to be one KPI per activity. There is this approach saying that every activity that you do need to be measured only by one parameter. Unfortunately, life is a bit more complex than that. But you have to find the most meaningful way to measure it. And then you need to find a tool in order to do this measurement and embrace it across the board. And I will give you an example for one of the things that are usually one of the softest part of our work. So let's talk about content operation. So we create content for our clients. And also if you're a marketing department within a company, it means that you have people that are writing blog posts, for example, and in many cases they need to do iterations with other people in the organization. So what we've defined as a KPI for content operation, and it's only for the operation, by the way, it's not for the impact of the posts, because the impact is being measured by amount of leads generated and so on. If I want to see how well my team is performing in the operational level of creating content, I need to find the right KPI for that. And what we've defined internally is that our content operation KPI is the amount of posts divided by the amount of Iterations it took us to actually get this post out the door. The closer the number is to one, meaning every post had only one iteration, the better we are. And if the number is very low, it means that we're in a very bad situation. This is a classic case of putting a KPI that measures something which is meaningful, a meaningful business activity of the company, because creating content for our clients is an important part of what we do and put a number to it. And now we're also able to compare across projects, across marketing programs, and so on. And then we are easily able to identify, you know what, this marketing program here. We have a bigger challenge with our content operation than in another marketing program or with another client. A couple of bonus tricks. Leadership is key for scaling up your organization. People don't like to change the way they work. They just don't like it. We all employ people that are very, very talented. They're very, very good. It means that they work in other places before. In most cases, it means that they have habits. And then you come into the room and you tell them, look, guys, I know that you know how to work and I know that I've hired you because you're such an amazing marketer, but I want you to work differently. For example, I want you to stop using email. I wanted to use Basecamp. I want you to stop using this marketing automation platform because I want you to use act on or I want you to stop using Acton because I want to use something else. I don't want you to use Hootsuite anymore. I want you to use Oktopost because it provides us the ability to track leads in a better way than other solutions. Now it's really hard for people to change their. Their habits. So without leadership qualities, without the ability to get them involved, and also without the ability, this is a very important part. Without your ability to get management sponsorship for these kind of processes, you will probably going to have a hard time to succeed. This is something that we saw internally and externally in a lot of cases. Having said that, if you are in the management position or in the leadership position, you have to be ruthless in implementing these methods. I want to give you an example. When we started internally working with Basecamp, the goal was to reduce the emails that are being sent internally and externally. And the reason was that we saw that email is not a good way to communicate and a good way to collaborate. It's a great way to waste time. And I was sick and tired of spending so much time in just cleaning my inbox. Inbox is supposed to be a tool for me. I'm not supposed to be an inbox cleaner, right? So we've done internal tests and internal pilot of using Basecamp. And at a specific point in time, when we saw that this tool answers our needs, I went back to my team and told them, you cannot send me any emails. That's it. If you want me to do something, you have to put a task in Basecamp for me, assign it to me, and I will do that. Now, in the beginning, when I said that they can't send me emails anymore because I'm not going to answer them, my team thought that I'm not serious. But then what happened was that whenever I got an email with a task, I've sent back an email with only one word, basecamp. And it did the job. And now all of us are on top of it. Now we're a smaller company. It's simpler to do that than when you're in a large organization. I can't tell you that all our clients work. Not all our clients really like to work with us through Basecamp. Some do, some don't. But as soon as you decided that you want your marketing organization to work in a specific way in order to achieve scalability, you have to be consistent, ruthless, and not blink for a second. Because otherwise you go back to point number one. People don't like to change the way they work. So it has to be something that you are doing from a leadership position. It has to be something that you truly believe in and you are able to back it up on a day to day basis. Another important point is you should probably also look long and hard on your own productivity. Are you automating your workflows in your own field? I can tell you again, my company is all based on Macs and iPads and iPhones. So we're all in this kind of ecosystem. So we're using text expander and Alfred and all these kind of tools. That enables us to reduce the amount of time that we spend in doing the manual and simpler things with our computers and with our hardware and software. If you're not doing this kind of stuff in your specific field, in your workflows, if you're not automating anything, if you're repeatedly doing those manual tasks, it's probably best for you to start to look at the way that you work and try to change it. Because when you are doing that, you will become a true advocate of this idea of, of integration, automation and streamlining and smart use of technology. In order to increase scalability. And the last point is that it's all about the team. Convince, lead, recruit your team to make this process a joint success. This is extremely important. It's not something I can tell you that is an easy task. It's just like any other change that you need to do in your organization. But it's extremely important to have everyone on board. You have to understand the following, and this is key. All the things we talked about can work when everybody are on board. You cannot utilize all the templates that we talked about and and all those collaboration tools that we talked about in the best way. If one person still wants to get his or her task via emails, it means that all the templates that you've built are lay to waste. You will not be able to fully utilize a tool like Oktopost or a tool like Acton or even a tool like Nimble if people do not see it as a part of their day to day work, as a part of their basic workflow. Without these things in place, without their full commitment, you will not get all the benefits that can be received from working in this way.
