Bring more innovation to your demand generation now

Do you routinely look for ways to drive innovation with your
demand generation approach? Or do you feel behind the curve?


According to Circle Research, marketers are split. Half say
they’re “old school,” while the other half believe their approach
is innovative.


Circle Research found that most marketers (93%) who describe
themselves as innovative say that it has made their marketing
more effective. However, 83% of lagging marketers plan to bring
innovation into their approach this year.


I interviewed Jeanne Hopkins (@jeannehopkins), CMO at Lola.com,
on how marketers can bring more innovation to demand generation.


Share a little bit about your background.


Jeanne:  Thanks, Brian. My undergraduate degree is in
Accounting.


Believe it or not, the accounting office where I started told me
in my annual review that I probably didn’t have a future in
accounting because I was too loud. Everything was balanced
andhing was good, but I was too noisy for a nice, cut-and-dry
accounting office.


That’s when I moved into toys. I worked for Milton Bradley
Company’s in-house advertising agency. Then, I moved to LEGO and
then to other consulting companies.


I got into the software, an internally funded company called
Datum E-business Solutions, which delivered a trusted time
application.


A long time ago, way back in the year 2000, it used to be that
you’d send an email. Maybe somebody would send it again, but it
would be like three hours later or three hours before, and that’s
because networks were not on the same timing device.


So, the whole concept of having timing and having to be secure
became something that became critically important to all
networks. From there, selling into IT, B2B technology companies,
that sort of thing. So that’s my gig.
What does Lola do?

Jeanne: Lola.com is a corporate travel management solution that
allows finance people, office managers, and business travelers
themselves to be able to see their full travel details and
integrate with an expense platform. I know, Brian, you’ve
probably done some expenses before-


Brian: Yeah.


Jeanne: You take a picture of the expense, you watch it go into
the cloud, you fill out the form, and it takes half an hour or
hour and, I bet you avoid it, right? It’s like one of those
things-


Brian: You wait until the last minute to do it, and if the
reports are due on Monday, you’re doing it Sunday night.


Jeanne: Of course, taking away from family time.


Brian: Right.


Jeanne: We integrate with Expensify, Concur, a whole bunch of
different finance applications, as well as travel. You can book
all your travel with us.


We have a complete support network that helps you get checked in
and makes sure that when disruptions come up (reroute people, get
people back sooner or back later) and any other hiccups that
business travelers endure. We’re trying to mitigate that for
them.


Brian: I wanted to highlight you because you’ve done so much, you
know, since you and I met, and we could date ourselves a bit here
but-


Jeanne: That’s okay.


Brian: Way back, as we spoke, I think, at a MarketingSherpa
Conference.


Jeanne: 2006, yeah.


Brian: Yeah! I was impressed by you and just how you were
bringing innovation and creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking.
Also, you’ve continued to do that throughout your career.
Driving more innovation with demand generation

How did you start thinking differently to drive innovation with
demand generation?


Jeanne: Well, I can’t claim the credit myself, so I’d say that
there would be a couple of different influences. I would say both
of my parents are artists of a kind. My dad paints, he plays
music, he writes. My mom sings, plays music, and paints.


So, when I was in high school, I majored in Art. We had to submit
a portfolio, and I enjoy thinking from an artistic view of the
world. That’s the left-handed component of me.


However, then, when I graduated from high school, I went to
college for Accounting because I’m ultimately practical, right? I
said I could always get a job adding things up.


I read constantly. I’m trying to always look for something a
little bit different, a little bit ahead of the curve.


I don’t want to be an early adopter, but I want to be at the
forefront before the competition catches up with us. So, I’m
lucky to have a kind of a creative outlook, and I think.
Start seeing stories

My dad was a newspaperman. He was a managing editor of the
newspaper in western Massachusetts, in Springfield, and I can
look at things and look at story ideas. This a story, like just
us having a conversation right here, Brian.


Jeanne: So, we each have a story, we have a back story that goes
back some 13 years now-


We know each other. We worked together, you know, you have a
family, you know my family, and that’s a story.


So, I sent a note to my internal content team, and I said, “Hey,
I’m doing this podcast. When it gets published, I think we should
do a press release and post it on the blog and backlink to
Brian’s blog because that’s where he’s going to be posting it,”
but, that’s not creative.


Don’t you think that’s where people kind of drop the ball?
Getting it done

Brian: I do. I think it’s like bringing the two pieces together
and what I’ve respected about you is that you were always willing
to try something new, you know? And you would see it through and
wouldn’t let it drop.


Jeanne: Are you saying I’m a nag?!


Brian: Well, I think a little bit. You want things done well, and
you own it. Being creative is great, but being creative or
innovative isn’t going to matter much unless you can get it done.
Generating revenue

Jeanne: A place that I worked at a few companies ago, one of the
salespeople contacted me and said, “Oh, they’re completely
rebranding. They’re doing all this kind of stuff.”


I feel like marketers who go the rebranding route, the new logo
route, they’re arts and crafts marketers because while that’s
important and a brand is essential, it’s not as important as
generating revenue.


Brian: Yeah.


Jeanne: But almost a thousand of them were untouched by sales
because we don’t have enough salespeople, so working with an
organization to make sure if people are downloading content, you
want them to get touched.


They may not be ready to buy, but you want to be able to make
sure they’re touched. So, I’m trying to come up with a solution
to that internally. To go figure out what I can do to help the
sales organization achieve the revenue targets that we have as an
organization?
Seeing the whole business

Jeanne: I think that one of the challenges that many marketers
have is that they don’t look at the whole business.


Because our job is not just as marketers, and this concept of
arts and crafts marketer and saying, “Okay, I’m going to change
this logo from orange to pink,” and therefore all these people
are going to come to us and say, “Oh, I love your new logo and
can I buy from you?” That’s not going to happen.
Generating revenue and building a great relationship with sales

You haven’t given anybody anything of value. I feel and have
always felt that my job is to generate revenue.


And that becomes challenging for many marketers. If I looked at
what this brand person is doing, you’re going to spend a couple
hundred thousand dollars with an agency, and you’re going to go
through this whole process.


I understand this individual has been there for eight months, and
the sales team hasn’t seen a single lead. I would stick a fork in
my eye if that were the case. My job is to generate leads.


I want to have an excellent relationship with sales.


I want to make sure that the sales leader that I’m working with
is somebody that I like, and respect and we’re joined at the hip
to grow the business together.


Brian: I want to call attention to something you’ve said that
it’s so important that you go beyond the lead. You’re looking at
the whole business and focused on revenue. I think it’s just part
of being a good marketer is looking at execution.
Getting and keeping customers

How do we take this person we built a relationship with or start
a conversation with and carry it through to helping them become a
customer?


Jeanne: Yes. Also, stay a customer.
The four circles

Jeanne: Because when you think about it, I feel like there’s like
four circles, if you will.
1. Employees

The center ring is employees, and if employees don’t have a sense
of what’s going on and they’re not being communicated with, like
here are the events that are coming up, here are the PR things
that are coming up.


What’s the full transparency so that the employees know what’s
going on with the product, marketing, sales, team, and
everything?
2. Customers

The next one is customers; unfortunately, customer marketing as a
concept is not something marketers dig. But they don’t think
about them until they’re gone.
3. Prospects

Then the next level is prospects. Many marketers focus just on
prospects.  Then, what’s the conversion rate, visit-to-lead,
visits-to-CTA, CTA-to-opportunity, the opportunity-to-customer?
4.Community

Oh, that’s all great, but you also have a community, and when I
worked at HubSpot as an example, we had a million people that
were part of the community. They were not going to become
customers, but you know what they did? They amplified content, so
we had a new E-book on something, sent it out, the community
would leverage it, and that’s what you want.


But if you don’t start with employees and customers, the rest are
all for naught, and prospects look at reviews and what other
people are buying. You must have a solid core of employees and
customers, and that’s the holistic view in my mind.


Brian: Well, as I talk with CEOs, I hear the metrics they care
about looking at customer acquisition costs (CAC) and lifetime
value (LTV) because they tie back to the diagram you just shared.


How much effort and money do we need to spend to acquire a
customer? And how well are we keeping them?
What is the most significant trend affecting
marketing?

Jeanne: I think it’s the immediacy of things. I think we are all
suffering; I mean, you’ve read the attention span of a goldfish
and all that kind of stuff.


We use Drift on our website because people want to get
information right away. At my previous company Ipswitch, we
implemented Drift.


As a global company, we expanded the hours for the third-party
company to monitor all of our Drift interactions.


They acted as kind of a tier zero to funnel people to the
community, be able to answer in Spanish, and do different things
with our Drift implementation.


Over these eight months, we generated $3.6 million worth of
pipeline because people got answers right away. They will set up
a demo and make sure you get to the right salesperson. I think
that there’s such a flood of information, people want answers
right away.


So, the great thing about Drift and this implementation that we
leveraged is that it is a personal one. It’s not a robot if you
want some help. Let’s schedule this. Let’s do this.


Point them in the right direction to get people the answers they
want when they want it.
Closing the marketing black hole

I’m sure you’ve had these instances where you send a note, which
has been happening to me increasingly. You send a note to the
contact desk email thing, you fill out the form, and you never
hear back.


It’s just a black hole. You wonder, as a marketer, have you ever
filled out one of those forms for your company? Do you know if
anybody’s ever going to get back to you? So what a wasted
opportunity.


Brian: It’s such a great tip. Be a secret shopper of your own web
experience and your 800 experience, and your Drift experience.
Ask yourself, how does it feel?


Jeanne: Right.


Brian: And seeing things from the customer’s point of view, you
spend time talking about connecting with salespeople.
How marketing can drive sales and revenue better

Jeanne: I think most marketing people would benefit from some
sales experience.


I’m lucky enough to have, in the course of my career, worked in
sales. I carried a bag, carried a quota. I like marketing people
to feel that they’re tied to sales and their ability to hit their
numbers.


It’s not just, “here, I generated a thousand leads and throw them
over the fence; you deal with them.” But have you ever called any
of those leads?


Have you ever touched any of those leads when people are saying,
“I don’t know who you are? I never downloaded this. I never do
that,” and that happens all the time.


Jeanne: And if salespeople, out of every ten leads they get eight
of those, “I don’t know who you are, I don’t know why you’re
calling me. I don’t know this.” They’re going to start to avoid
the leads that you’re sending them.


Even though you tell salespeople you’re going to have a hundred
“nos” before you get a yes. Selling is hard. It’s very, very
difficult.
Scrubbing leads

So, it’s our job as marketers to scrub the leads. That’s what I’m
trying to do here is before I throw them over the fence, I want
to scrub them.


We’ve taken out international. We’ve pushed to nurture anything
that’s a public email address. They want company email addresses,
and we’re trying to narrow this down as far as our service level
agreement is with them.


But my advice would be walking a mile in their (sales) shoes, and
you’ll build some empathy for how hard it is.
Ways marketers apply empathy better

Jeanne: I think empathy’s a tough thing, Brian, right? You talk
about the emotional quotient like such as intelligence quotient
like that your EQ.


I’m lucky enough in my career, I’ve always had a good
relationship with finance people because if I want more money,
for whatever reason, I want to be able to say, “give me 100
thousand dollars and I’ll get you 500 thousand, and this is how
I’m going to do it.”


I’ve done it before. That sort of thing because most marketers
with finance people are over budget and don’t understand how to
talk to a finance person.
Understanding finance people

So, finance people, let’s talk about them in travel. Finance
people are the bad guys. They are always the bad guys. They’re
the ones that kickback your expense reports. And they say, “this
isn’t going to get covered, or they may say, “you need to get
your invoices in the next five days,” or your expense reports or
whatever.


It’s always the bad cop, bad cop, bad cop, and you know, these
people don’t travel, so what do you think their viewpoint is of a
salesperson that is travels or maybe overspending? How do you
think they feel?


Brian: Well, they feel they are probably irresponsible or not
looking out in the best interest of the company or, you know,
feel like they’re entitled and want the white table cloth
treatment.


Jeanne: Yes. You know, they want to be business class. So, we’ve
been doing this series of webinars on implementing a travel
policy like “how to sell your travel policy within an
organization,”  “How to take the pain out of creating a
travel policy” because, in our consult, we can put parameters
like nobody takes a first-class trip.


They can bypass it, but if you have set up a travel policy and
somebody books first-class to go to Austin or something, it gets
triggered, and then they know that when they were doing it like
this, it’s out of policy, and that’s very intentional.


It’s like video cameras at Wal-Mart or something. You’re looking
at it is going, “oh well, okay,” you’re being watched a little
bit.


So that provides a level of transparency and clarity to the
employee where most employers have policies that are “use your
best judgment,” so what is your best judgment?


Your best judgment. I need to stay at the Intercontinental for
$400.00 a night, and you’re like, “oh, no! The La Quinta’s
perfectly fine for 99 bucks a night.”


So, what’s reasonable? Is La Quinta 20 miles away from your
meeting, and you must rent a car for $150.00 to go back? It’s
trying to rationalize what works and what doesn’t work for an
organization and take the emotion out of it.
Seeing from the perspective of your customer

Brian: Well, it’s interesting because you’re thinking of the
experience of what it’s like to be in finance, and you’re trying
to help solve the problem they’re dealing with, which is we’re
human.


We don’t want to feel like the bad guys all the time, even people
in finance or HR or whomever it may be. They serve a considerable
value to the organization in driving profitability and ensuring
people have payroll met and all these essential things.


Jeanne: Absolutely.


Brian: So, it just sounds like you were trying to see from their
experience how do you make it better, and then you focus on
helping them solve it. Is that what I’m hearing?
Applying empathy to personas

Jeanne: Well, and another example is another persona that is a
user is, say, the office manager or whoever’s responsible in the
office for booking.


You’re responsible for booking people to go from office A to
office B regularly. If you could see this all in one place rather
than worrying about this person’s travel itinerary and that
person’s travel itinerary-


Jeanne: What we figured out from an ROI calculator that I worked
on is that the average business trip takes 60 minutes to book.
You go to four to five sites.


You could go to Marriott, or JetBlue, or Delta. You’re trying to
map out your itinerary.


You’re trying to get it for a reasonable price, but also on your
schedule because you want to be home on Friday night, you want to
be home on Friday night no later than 5:00 so that you can have
supper with your family and watch a movie, right?
Solving related problems

However, if you had a choice, this becomes problematic for
people, and then you, as an individual, are talking to Donna at
the front desk. You’re going back and forth, back and forth, the
flight is gone, this is that, and if you could manage it all and
you could save time, and you could save productivity, that’s good
for the company.


It’s good for you as the traveler and that poor office manager
that’s like a rock-hard wall.
Layering empathy

Jeanne: That’s having the degree of empathy for the user, the
customer, and as a business traveler, too, that we want to help
them be able to get home.


The busiest travel times that we see, people start booking Sunday
night, and they’re booking Mondays and Tuesdays for travel, and
it might be traveling out two weeks or something, but they’re
thinking about their schedule.


Also, another thing that happens is people don’t think about the
changes. Think about the business trips you’ve been on, and I’m
pretty sure that one out three of your business trips changes.
You book it out two weeks in advance and then suddenly, somebody
wants to meet you here.


They can’t meet you at this time; they’re gone. So, you end up
trying to travel, change your travel, and your flights are not
refundable, and your hotel is pre-paid. What do you do? Those are
some costs because you can’t get your money back.


Jeanne: So we’re trying to deal with refundable and trying to say
don’t always go non-refundable because you got a one out of three
chance that it’s going to go away, so you might as well spend the
extra 50 bucks to make it refundable and not worry about it.


Brian: You’re looking from the customer’s experience, seeing it,
and you said earlier for the sales team, walking in their shoes.
Going from frustration, annoyance, anger to feel calm.
Advice to be a better marketer and rise to CMO

Jeanne: I would say the most important thing that they need to
learn is how to speak. They need to know how to talk in front of
a group without using all those crutch words.


If we’re talking on this podcast and every other word I said was
“um, you know, like,” those are all crutch words we don’t feel
comfortable hearing.


Jeanne: And I would suggest that people that want to be able to
move forward in their careers join a group like Toastmasters, Or
Start a group like Toastmasters so you have the practice of being
able to do this so you can have conversations on webinars, on
podcasts, and be able to present in front of your company.


As you know, speaking in front of people is hugely intimidating.
How do you get over that hump where the people in the audience
are feeling just as scared, if you will, and can present your
company, offer your point of view.


If you get called into a board meeting (and every CMO is in the
board meeting every single board meeting), you must present your
information in a way that makes sense to the board and build that
level of internal confidence. So, that would be the advice that I
would share.
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