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How Field Marketing Can Align Marketing and Sales: Nick Bennett
67 Plays3 years ago
In an ideal world, B2B SaaS marketing and sales teams move forward in lock-step.
In reality, they often operate in silos.
The result? Sales complain that marketing gives them crappy leads. Marketing counters that sales can’t close deals.
How do you address this conundrum? The answer may be field marketing.
While it may not be the best-known marketing term, field marketers quarterback sales and marketing activities.
In this episode, Nick Bennett offers insight into field marketing; what it is, how it works, and why it is so effective.
Recommended
Transcript
The Underrated Role of Field Marketing
00:00:03
Speaker
It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Ask people about field marketing, and you may get a variety of answers and perspectives. It's not as high profile as a growth hacker, content marketer, or social media specialist. But field marketing plays an important role in bridging the gap between marketing and sales to attract and engage customers and drive revenue.
Meet Nick Bennett: Field Marketing Guru
00:00:27
Speaker
To peel the proverbial onion about field marketing, I'm talking to Nick Bennett, director of account-based and field marketing at Alice in Boston. Welcome to Marketing Spark. Hey, thanks for having me, Mark. Super excited to be here.
What is Field Marketing?
00:00:41
Speaker
Obvious first question, what is field marketing? Does it have a low profile or does it operate under the radar? Because to be honest, until I ran into you, I didn't even know there was something such as field marketing.
00:00:55
Speaker
I think honestly, I think it varies company to company, especially in like the B2B world. And so like my definition of field marketing is that you're the person that's quarterbacking all of the programs on the marketing side to drive pipeline and revenue for the sales team. So it's like field marketing 2.0. Field marketing has always been thought of as strictly events. And like I've been trying to solve in kind of
00:01:22
Speaker
debunk that myth that it's only events. And it's really, you want to be looked at as another tool in the arsenal for the sales team. Okay, well, that's a good start. I'm still not getting it. It might be easier if you describe what's the day-to-day world like for a field marketer?
Diverse Responsibilities of Field Marketers
00:01:40
Speaker
What do you do? How do you work with sales and marketing? What are you responsible for? How can your success be measured?
00:01:46
Speaker
Yeah, so I think honestly, one of the biggest things is every day is completely different, at least in my world. It's like a perfect example. This week, we're at Friday already, it's great. So I have been putting together account-specific landing pages, so like leveraging that one-to-one personalization.
00:02:04
Speaker
I've also been jumping on sales calls where being in the MarTech space, the sales team leverages me to hop on calls with them a lot to just talk about how we use it ourselves. So I've been spending a lot of my time on sales calls, listening to gone call, seeing what our customers and prospects are talking about so that I can make sure that the messaging that we're leveraging on say these landing pages or the events that we're doing all come back to tell an actual story that is interesting.
00:02:32
Speaker
Besides that, I'm also hopping on QBRs. I am running events is another big piece of it that we do, whether it's, you know, sponsored events or hosted events. So like, every day is completely different. And it's, I've never met a field marketer where Monday through Friday, they're doing the same exact thing every single day. So how is that different?
00:02:56
Speaker
than a marketing coordinator or the VP marketing. Because, ostensibly, a marketing leader should be working with sales, should be looking at landing pages, overseeing content. But it sounds like a field marketer is almost like a jack of all trades where their job is to actually get their fingers in a lot of different pies under the auspices of the head of marketing. Is that accurate?
00:03:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's definitely a good representation of it. It's like you want to be a full-stack marketer. You got to understand events, you got to understand the digital piece, you got to understand content, creative. How does it all come together? But you're the one that is, I guess, pulling those levers in determining with the sales team where we need to go and then leveraging the other pieces of marketing.
00:03:45
Speaker
So what's the power dynamic, maybe that's the wrong term, between a field marketer and the head of marketing? Because if you're the one who is active on a number of different fronts and helping the sales team make better decisions, connect with prospects better, how does that align with what the head of marketing is supposed to be doing and their responsibilities?
00:04:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think it comes back to their goal should be more strategic of like, okay, this is the overall theme or messaging of goals that we need to hit. The failed marketer is usually the one that's doing a lot of the tactical work that is like rolling up their sleeves in every single day, like they're that go to person that the sales team can kind of leverage.
00:04:29
Speaker
Okay, so to borrow a baseball term, and it's well known that you have a passion for baseball, and it sounds like you're a pretty good pitcher, are field marketers five tool players, given that they're involved in brand building, customer building, lead generation, marketing? Is that an accurate depiction of someone who's a field marketer because they're good at a lot of different things?
00:04:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think so. That's a great example because I've never even thought of that. But I think so. It's like you have to be able to understand everything. And I've never worked in other functions within marketing. I started off in sales, went straight to field marketing. I've never done product marketing or content or anything. But I still have to understand how all those pieces work and tell that story so that the prospects and customers at the end of the day
00:05:18
Speaker
our driving pipeline, and ultimately revenue.
00:05:22
Speaker
I guess one of the ways to look at it is that field marketing could be like the perfect pathway to be the head of marketing because as the head of marketing, not only do you have to operate strategically, but you really have to have an understanding of how the different pillars work and how they come together. So when you're a field marketer, you're really getting your hands dirty in a lot of different places. And that strikes me as awesome experience if you want to become a marketing leader and you really want to drive strategy because you've been there, done that.
00:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And so it's funny, could they mention that? Because like a lot of people will say, okay, you know, what's your long term goal? Do you want to become a CMO? Do you want to become like a VP of marketing? Because it's like, you understand all of those pieces. And I feel like it's an easier path. And I mean, ultimately, you could go from like failed marketing to a head of demand gen to ultimately leading a marketing organization. At least that's the path that I know a lot of people have taken.
Field Marketing vs. Account-Based Marketing
00:06:17
Speaker
There's a lot of talk these days, growing amount of talk about ABM because I think as it becomes increasingly difficult to connect with prospects, the idea of account-based marketing has a lot of appeal because you can focus your efforts on a small group of customers. I'm interested in getting your take on the relationship between field marketing and ABM. Is it just another marketing activity that you're involved in or is it a different kind of relationship?
00:06:45
Speaker
Yeah, honestly, it's the same thing. I've always had the understanding that failed marketing really equals ABM. Because if you think about it, like, field market, I guess this is more pre-COVID, but they were always in the field. They would be responsible for a specific territory, say, the East Coast. And so within that East Coast, they are responsible for driving pipeline for target accounts with the sales team. That's really all ABM is. They're just doing it on a smaller scale versus a national or global scale.
00:07:12
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely the same thing and it's funny because a lot of people will be like, why is your title, say, account-based and field marketing? Personally, it's more of the ABM side of it, but I've been in field marketing for so long that I didn't want to lose that as part of my title, so it was important that I had it for the community that I've built. But honestly, it's the same exact thing.
00:07:35
Speaker
Curious about your take on ABM and the amount of attention that it is receiving right now. You see companies like Terminus and they're actively waking the flag for ABM and Chris Walker will talk about the value of ABM. Are we looking at a matter of marketing focus and marketing efficiencies? Because as marketers, we can spread our efforts all over the place. And as marketers, we love to do that because it's a lot more fun to be using different channels. But what is the focus on ABM mean to you, given that so many B2B SaaS companies are
00:08:05
Speaker
trying to implement it and as important. What are some of the keys to success when you haven't actually done a bm before.
00:08:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's yeah, I definitely think it's, you know, being able to figure out, okay, we're working on the subset of accounts. So it's more of a targeted approach, which honestly should help with spend. Because if you think about if you're going back to that, like, spray and pray mentality of like, everything else that's out there, you're just spending money across channels and levers and all these things. But
00:08:37
Speaker
They may work, they may not, they may not even be your ICP accounts unless you've really identified what those are. But it's like, okay, you've come up to, for us, it's 50 accounts on the net new side and then 50 accounts on the expansion side. And so out of those 50 accounts on the net new side, for example, we have very strategically and personalized the one-to-one experience for each of them. So it's a very targeted, we know the path that we want to take them down.
00:09:05
Speaker
There's content specific to that. There's a specific kind of even with gifting like how we play across in that journey, it ultimately it's going to lead to a higher conversion versus just sending it out to, you know, alice.com because if you send them to a website and it's just like, okay, they may or may not convert, they may raise their hand and kind of request a demo. But if you're personalizing that experience for the person and not just the persona,
00:09:31
Speaker
Um, it hopefully works a little bit better. Uh, and then the second piece of your question is the biggest thing I think is the, the list. Nailing the list is like 50% of the job because it's like, you can't market. You can't say, okay, we're going to go after these, these accounts sales is going to say, eh, you know, not those, those might not be great accounts. You have to develop the list together and you have to develop the KPIs and metrics together.
00:09:55
Speaker
to make sure that it's a successful program. And if it's just like marketing doing their thing, sales doing their thing, it's still very siloed. It's not gonna be...
00:10:04
Speaker
It's not gonna be that successful and you have to really rally the entire company around an ABM strategy. And it more becomes not even just ABM, but it's like account-based everything. Or account-based, you know, ABX is another hot term that a lot of people are using right now. And it's like, okay, you got sales and marketing, you're really just bringing in like the customer success side. That's what we're doing too. It's just, you know, the list was the biggest piece.
00:10:28
Speaker
So a couple ways we can go here one follow up a little bit on the list and so are you talking specifically about a list of customers and once you have that list how much deeper do you need to go to determine okay these are the influencers these are the decision makers you have to be precise so that you've got not only personas but you know exactly who you want to talk to.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So it's like we break it out into a few different pieces when we're starting to determine our reps only cover named accounts. So each rep has about 90 named accounts. We don't cover territories currently. And so within those 90 named accounts per rep, there is four things that we look at when picking a like tier one ABM account.
00:11:11
Speaker
And so the first thing is accounts with the biggest potential for growth to compliment kind of our land and expand strategy. It's just like what our product is. And so like once we can get into say marketing, it helps us kind of break out into other functions within a company.
00:11:25
Speaker
The second piece is accounts that are already identified on our named account list. So basically the sales team actually develops that named account list. We then together develop this ABM piece. The third piece is best fit accounts that are based on our ability to service them and make them successful present day. We don't wanna set accounts up for failure that we know are gonna end up churning because we can't do something for them. We wanna make sure that they're successful
00:11:55
Speaker
Bye.
00:11:55
Speaker
Say we sign them today and we're launching them on Monday. We want to make sure that by Monday, we 100% are able to make them successful. And then the last piece, and I think this is a big one for us, and I think just ABM in general, is accounts that add credibility to our brand in the enterprise space. And so when you see Adobe and other large accounts like that that are customers, like similar companies that are in the same space or same size as them, we'll see that and be like,
00:12:25
Speaker
okay if they're using it maybe i should check them out to just kinda like makes our job a little bit easier and add the credibility piece where we can then still personalize an experience for them but it just kind of add that extra layer you mentioned something earlier about marketing and sales working together and not operating in silos and a podcast.
Bridging Sales and Marketing
00:12:45
Speaker
I did recently with John and that was something that we explored a lot because what happens in a lot of organizations is sales is doing its thing marketing is doing its thing and in many cases customer success is doing in its thing and there's no coordination there's no sense of removing and lock stopped lock step together so that
00:13:04
Speaker
We have a plan of attack and we're all coordinated. What role does field marketing play in making sure that all those pieces come together so that you work as a team as opposed to sort of individual players? If we're going to go with the baseball or sports analogy. Yeah, I mean, I think honestly, I think you're that middle person between everything. It's like a two way street. So you've got the field, which is really the sales team. And so you're kind of that person that is hearing things from the field.
00:13:32
Speaker
relaying it back to HQ. From HQ, you're the marketing team, you're passing stuff to the sales team. So you're that middle person within the two-way street that's delivering information and also relaying information. And so it's like, you wanna be able to not be another corporate marketer that's jamming stuff down people's throat, especially the sales team or customer success team. Everyone's busy, they're trying to close deals. How can you be looked at as a asset?
00:14:01
Speaker
Versus just another marker that's, you know, trying to get me to do too many things and not make me hit my number at the end of the day. And so that's where I feel like that's where field marketing really shines like being able to be that that leverage piece and build those relationships like I
00:14:18
Speaker
I started off in sales before I went to marketing, but I always walk a pretty fine line between sales and marketing where I don't want to be looked at as like a corporate marketer, but I also don't want to be looked at as a salesperson. I kind of balance that line and I build these relationships where they trust me because I can deliver value. But then when I need something from them, they know that they'll be able to give it to me without issues.
00:14:39
Speaker
Sounds great. You spend a lot of time on LinkedIn talking about content and the value of content, which I find obviously is a content-driven marketer. I find that interesting and relevant. I do want to get your take on the role of content within the ABM process, because obviously if you're developing personalized campaigns and you're being very focused on specific people with specific interests, then how do you make sure that your content is relevant,
00:15:05
Speaker
is on point and is developed and offered at the right time in the right place. What kind of strategic approach do you take and how do you make sure that you can tactically execute in a very flexible and agile way?
00:15:20
Speaker
Yes, I think it's understanding where they are in the buyer's life cycle in developing or if you have the content already, figuring out where to deliver it within that life cycle. Because if they're at top of funnel where they're just starting to understand or say they're going down the gifting path and it's like, okay, there's some companies out there starting to explore, but right now we just send gift cards to people.
00:15:45
Speaker
okay, want to kind of do one piece of content down there. And that's more of like the one to many, one to few approach where it's going to be delivering content where they are. When you get to the one to one and developing specific content for kind of your tier one accounts, it kind of brings it up a notch. And I can tell you right now, we're not currently doing this just because we don't have the bandwidth. It's on the list to get to, but you could also purchase software that could help.
00:16:12
Speaker
with this and it's like developing the content that one speaks to your prospects but also has like their name all over so they think it's a personalized piece of content or info graphic or whatever it is for them it just kind of usually does a better job you want to be able to and you could use like a uber flip or a path factory to kind of curate
00:16:33
Speaker
content where they are too. I've used a couple of those in the past and it's worked out really well to just kind of tell that story and take them to the next piece and just kind of keep on going down. It's just important to figure out, one, do you have enough content? The content that you do have, is it relevant for your prospects? And then it's like, how can you take your existing content and maybe personalize it to a specific account?
Leveraging LinkedIn for Field Marketing
00:17:01
Speaker
I wanna talk a little bit about LinkedIn. I mean, a lot of people have been on LinkedIn for a long time, but I would argue that.
00:17:08
Speaker
most of us have really used it in a different way for the last 14, 15 months. And to talk about your LinkedIn experience, because as you probably mentioned in other podcasts, you're one of the few field marketers that is active on LinkedIn, or at least who declares that they're a field marketer. How have you used LinkedIn over the past year or so, and how has it evolved? I'm really curious about the journey that a lot of people are on, because as much as people say, everybody's on LinkedIn,
00:17:36
Speaker
We're all using it the same way we're not me a very small percentage of people are actually using it to drive content and i'm curious about your experience and how bad is changed overtime.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah. When I first started out, I just wanted to get people to understand what field marketing was and that it wasn't just events and how important as a pillar it was to any B2B company. And it worked really well because again, there was no one talking about it. There's still no one talking about it. I don't know. That blows my mind that there's millions and millions of people on LinkedIn
00:18:08
Speaker
And there's thousands and thousands of failed marketers, because I can tell you every B2B company has failed marketers. Maybe it's only one, maybe it's, you know, you get into some of these larger companies, you've got, you know, 1520 failed marketers at a certain company. And it's like, no one, no one talks about it. And I'm connected to a lot of field marketers. And you know, all they do is post, you know, events that they're doing a webinars that they're doing, and like, they don't add any additional insights to it.
00:18:33
Speaker
on a regular basis. And I was just like, okay, this this is like a niche path that like I could go down, and I could build an audience and like create a community of like minded people, because there wasn't anything where I could learn from others, or I could bounce questions off of people. And since then, we've been able to create a Slack group for field marketers and event people. And there's over 1000 people that are in there.
00:18:57
Speaker
And I host a monthly field marketing meetup with over 300 people. We're actually doing one this afternoon with Chris Walker. He's coming to talk about field marketing, ABM. Where does he see events going post COVID? So it's going to be really exciting. And for me,
00:19:12
Speaker
I actually posted about this today, but it's a side hustle for me. I don't gain anything financially from it. I don't monetize anything, although people tell me I should. I just give it away for free, and it's starting to get to the point where I have a lot of people that will say,
00:19:31
Speaker
hey, can I pick your brain? Or, you know, would you be open to mentoring me? And just like a bunch of different things that like, I've always just said yes, and it was fine when it was one to two people. But when that one to two becomes, you know, seven to 10 per week, like, and I have a regular job that I'm trying to do, I have a three year old daughter, so like, I'm, you know, I'm trying to balance that. It's, it's tough. And like, I've just had to start to say no. And like,
00:19:56
Speaker
have people understand that I'm not gonna be able to please everyone but for my mental health it's okay to say no and like who knows five years from now maybe I go down the consulting path and you know I consult for field marketing teams all over the world I've thought about it and I've had the piece of marketing CMOS come to me saying hey you know would you be interested in like doing some like consulting for my team to help them and I'm just honestly I don't have the bandwidth right now it sounds really fun but I just can't do it it's like
00:20:24
Speaker
Posting on LinkedIn every single day for over a year now has opened a lot of those doors for me that I probably wouldn't have before. The end goal for me is whenever people talk about field marketing, I want them to associate my name with it. Whether that's good or bad, just say, hey, this is the guy that posts on LinkedIn. I love your stuff. People talk about ABM. There's a lot of people that talk about ABM on LinkedIn.
00:20:48
Speaker
It's a little less niche. There's a lot of people that talk about events, but there's no one that talks about field marketing. So I am forming that kind of community and then growing it over time.
00:20:59
Speaker
One of the things that I find interesting about LinkedIn, especially as marketers, is everything's about attribution. We want to measure everything, we want to quantify everything, and when it comes to LinkedIn, I think one of the interesting things that I found over the last year is that there's a lot of benefits that you just can't quantify. There's opportunities that come up, there's podcast interviews that you get. There's all kinds of different ways that people want to work with you that helps you personally and professionally. You joined Alice three months ago,
00:21:28
Speaker
What role did LinkedIn have in terms of that relationship? Because it sounds like you knew the people before, but it certainly must have helped that you had this stature and that your brand profile was a lot higher than it was before.
00:21:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny. I always joke around like, did you guys just hire me because of my network? And who knows, probably deep down, that's definitely part of it. But it's interesting because in the three months that I've been here, I've been able to get three people hired through my network for open roles. I've been able to pass about 30 sales opportunities over to the sales team.
00:22:04
Speaker
It's funny cause one of the sales reps sent me a slack yesterday, he's like, you produce more opportunities as a marketer than the entire BDR team, which they do a really good job. He's like, for him personally, he's like, you know, you provide a ton for me and it's great, you know.
00:22:23
Speaker
Marketers, especially field marketers, and that's who we sell to, they would much rather hear from another field market versus a sales person. I feel like being in the MarTech space is probably the perfect path for me because outside of that, if I was in engineering, developing, developers, or whatever selling to them, my network would be useless. I could probably do a great job at the actual job itself, but delivering the network piece of the inbound that
00:22:53
Speaker
The amount of marketers that come to me inbound say, hey, we use XYZ, which is a competitor of yours. I'd be open to hearing about you. Awesome. That wouldn't have happened if they didn't start to associate my name with working here. And it pops up. So it's a really great spot to be. One final question. Interesting book that you've read recently or podcast that you love. Anything come to mind?
Resources and Networking
00:23:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely really big into Chris Walker's podcast. I feel like any everything that like he do I listen, I don't listen to I don't really read many books, although I did read Latin East from Six Senses, her book recently, like the no form, no whatever. It was really good. I don't read a ton of books, but I do listen to a lot of podcasts. And Chris Walker's is one that I listened to probably every single week. And just, I
00:23:43
Speaker
I always pull a lot of things out of it. As a field market, he talks a lot about attribution. He goes down a lot of different paths. He's not afraid to tell it like it is or go against the grain, whereas a lot of people will just regurgitate information that's already out there. I always walk away with some piece of knowledgeable information.
00:24:05
Speaker
Great to have you on the podcast and explain to me and other people what a field marketer does. I feel like I've been educated. Got field marketing 101 today, which is really great. Appreciate that. Thanks for having me. It was a blast. One final question. Where can people learn more about you and Alice?
00:24:24
Speaker
Yeah, definitely find me on LinkedIn. It's where I spend most of my time, Nick Bennett. Although I found out there is a few other Nick Bennett's in B2B. So find the one that works at Alice. And if you want to learn more about Alice, go to alis.com or shoot me a note. I'm happy to demo the product myself. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe by iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
00:24:48
Speaker
If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.