Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at MongoDB: How the Hell Do You Get More Leads? (Video + Transcript)

Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at MongoDB: How the Hell Do You Get More Leads? (Video + Transcript)

In what manner do you obtain additional leads? It's a question worth millions of dollars.Additionally, there is never a single, definitive solution, even with all the sophisticated new technologies available to marketers for measurement and optimization. We are fortunate that Meagen Eisenberg, a top industry expert and current CMO at MongoDB and former VP of Demand Gen at DocuSign, offers her blueprint for streamlining the sales process from start to finish and turning leads into actual, paying clients.

The significance of optimizing your online sites to reach more people, how marketing can support sales to attract new consumers, and the various ways you may create leads on a short budget are some of the key lessons to be learned from this talk.

Meagen is one of the few people that excels in this area. You don't want to pass up this opportunity if you need more leads—and who doesn't? Here are Meagen's slides for viewing.

We are publishing a new session every week if you would want to see more from 2016. To receive notifications, sign up here. Don't forget to get your 2017 Annual tickets as soon as possible.

Emmanuelle Skala: With great pleasure, I present Meagen Eisenberg as our second CMO speaker for the day. Meagen is well-known to many of you. She is presently the CMO of another open-source startup, MongoDB.

She has worked in high-tech marketing for 20 years. Adweek called her one of the Top 50 Most Retweeted People. She has a great deal of brand influence. She has also received numerous honors in the Bay Area.

She most recently served as DocuSign's vice president of marketing. Her home is in the California region. Meagens will discuss the topic that everyone is interested in hearing about: how in the world can you get more leads?

Greetings from the stage to Meagen.

Meagen Eisenberg: I'm grateful.

Meagen:Indeed, extremely pleasant. I'm grateful. It makes me happy to be here. I appreciate the pleasant introduction.

This is undoubtedly something that everyone is concerned about when they are working with their sales team and attempting to expand their firm. Leads are a common obsession for many, and quality leads are what matter to us.

Looking back, even at DocuSign at the location where we were when I joined, our marketing database, Eloqua, held roughly a million records. We had roughly 23 million over three and a half years when I departed.

I've now joined both the open source community and MongoDB. I've spent over 11 months there. When I joined, we had a million leads, and now we have twice as many. Were in our database just over 1.8 million. Fundamentally, I believe the topics I'm about to discuss are applicable at any point in your company's development.

I do provide advice to roughly six startups that are attempting to solve this issue as well. In the upcoming minutes, I will discuss this.

Before I get too technical with the people process technology, let me say this: as a business grows, you will undoubtedly need a combination of these technologies, which your marketing team will be developing to cover the whole funnel. This goes double for those of you who are marketers and those of you who are not.

You're operating a variety of items at the front of the funnel that are providing you with air cover. First, you are introducing yourself to potential clients. As leads come in, you have multiple inbound initiatives underway to educate and shorten the sales funnel for them.

To increase the number of leads in your funnel, you need your customers to advocate for you after they become clients. It's true that everyone requires social proof, and influential is one of the methods we employ at MongoDB.

People conversing with one another is consistently the most important thing. How do you spread the word so that more people see it? Speaking with the marketing team always makes me realize how many different things we need to accomplish.

Nowadays, a lot of it is done online, but individuals still absorb information and acquire knowledge through a variety of channels, so they must be aware of all of them.

In my opinion, the three most important hiring made at the last three firms were: one, product marketing. You need a writer who is also able to understand the needs of the client and comprehend the material.

A web developer or marketing technologist is required because a lot of this is done online and consumers are consuming content before contacting sales. You require assistance from someone who can help you promote it online.

The third is quite imaginative. Looking at DocuSign and MongoDB, I was fortunate to have excellent product marketers. I immediately recruited a web developer who is a technologist. I hired a creative individual shortly after I started working at MongoDB, where that person started with me.

The worst case scenario when trying to get anything done is having to go through an agency or not having the talent on staff. I strongly recommend hiring someone to develop the assets you need to get online because doing it yourself merely slows you down.

Undoubtedly, identifying potential prospects for your sales staff to speak with is a crucial aspect of generating leads. We had a ton of developers when I started working at MongoDB. Although sales prefers to speak with those who have finances and are creating and putting our product into production, we still adore developers and want to work with as many of them as possible. They genuinely want to speak with database administrators and operations.

We have to consider carefully how to stand apart from the developer. If we continued to give developers and they insisted that these weren't the leads they needed, we wouldn't have understood who they wanted to talk to in marketing. To help your sales team succeed, it's imperative that you work as a team with them and that you know exactly who they want to talk to.

Then, naturally, we are aware of significant contents. Going back to the original product marketing hire, there are more people that can assist you with content creation. These people include thought leaders in the field, analysts (assuming you have any), and Magic Quadrant. How are you briefing those analysts? Depending on the context, ensure that you're included in their chats and that they are aware of your offering.

I recently returned from an all-day SaaS meeting with Gartner that began at six in the morning, so I am aware of the value of our analysts and the partners who can assist spread the word about your product as you go to market. Verify that the appropriate individuals are engaged in your business.

I'll jump right into technology since I believe your website will provide the biggest boost for you. Your online properties are the primary source of most of your leads. Yes, without a doubt—I've heard 67 percent. For us at MongoDB, I believe it's above 90%, and it was comparable at DocuSign.

Numerous events are available, but there are far more individuals online. People, in my opinion, don't set up their web properties. They are often slow to respond since they outsource the creation and maintenance of their websites. When you visit their home page, there isn't a call to action that is really obvious.

People are curious about you, but you have to draw them into your funnel as soon as possible. What kind of optimization are you doing? In this case, how you photograph individuals matters a great deal. We had roughly 30,000 leads in my first quarter, then we rapidly jumped to 60,000 in the second and 80,000 in the third. This was all achieved by focusing on our web property and making sure it had the information that people wanted to fill out forms for, even though we didn't have a lot of money when we started.

Make that the material is being gated correctly. Don't restrict customer case studies; you want them to be visible to all as social proof. Let's go back to that example. Additionally, you shouldn't gate product briefs or anything like.

Although it might be challenging to persuade individuals to read such material, valuable resources such as analyst papers, how-to manuals, architectural guides, and thought leadership are all quite valuable. People are aware that registration is required for webinars, of course, so include it in your mix and serve it accordingly.

First of all, you need a name so you may address them.

Secondly, a title. I contend that most businesses enter with distinct personas. I won't be able to convey that personal message to an architect if I speak with them like a developer. Content for a C-level audience differs greatly from that for an A-level audience. My follow-up is less successful if I do not have a title. My sales force isn't as successful.

I would estimate that beyond five or six fields, you should use backend technologies to obtain the remaining data. You should cease requesting location-related information. With an IP address and Java code, you can obtain it. Remove the question if you're requesting location information, as less individuals will fill it out the more questions you ask.

Make your forms as efficient as possible, and invest in the technology that will retrieve the code or add the information afterward. You can obtain other technologies on the back end, along with information on the industry, company size, and location. If you follow this, you will notice a jump right away.

If the assets are attractive enough, I believe individuals will provide you with just enough information to do that. I have also observed this on trial forms.

To elaborate on technology a bit more, you undoubtedly require a marketing database to work with. A marketing database is not what Salesforce is. Only those who sales should be interacting with and working with should be sent there.

You will need a marketing database from which to draw leads. Purchasing lists and entering them into Salesforce is not what you should be doing. Your sales staff will then say, "You're giving me junk," at that point. It's true that these folks are chilly. That information is incorrect, and all you're doing in Salesforce is making unnecessary noise.

A marketing database is required. Although you can purchase lists, you won't be able to connect them to Salesforce unless they interact with you. You can sync them over and score them unless they click through, fill out a form, or otherwise indicate that they are a live body and are showing interest.

If you have the appropriate data, we can utilize Eloqua, Demand Base, and InsideView for targeting and personalization. These tools not only add information and enhance the user experience when visitors visit our website but also when we follow up with them.

Demand Base is what we use to update our content. We have an e-commerce cloud solution that we sell, and you can join up to monitor MongoDB without ever speaking to sales. We provide enterprise options that are multi-year, multi-server, and include a license that provides security in addition to all the other features that you will discuss with a sales representative when purchasing.

Your company's size will determine which of those offerings apply. Smaller businesses typically utilize Cloud Manager. You are speaking with our enterprise team if you are a larger one. If I can tell right away when you visit our website that you are a small business, I will extend the Cloud Manager offer to you. I serve you our enterprise product if I am familiar with your business.

We do make advantage of these tools to instantly modify our call to action. We can also add new customers to our list and provide them with various offerings in an effort to grow our business relationship.

We even direct our rivals to our Careers page. If they're interested, we can load them up and invite them to come work for us.

Meagen: We are definitely able to capture the traffic that is on your website thanks to these fascinating technologies that are available. That is the greatest boost you will receive, and I would like to issue you with this challenge: Consider how many visitors to your website do you currently have; imagine how many more leads you could generate if you improved it.

Naturally, you should also make sure you have a CRM system in place. While most of us do have one of these, as marketers you should be configuring the Campaigns module if you have Salesforce, which is the platform I am most familiar with.

You want to know what is working with your budget, so you should be keeping track of everything that comes in. After analyzing it, you decide how much money to spend the upcoming quarter on the things that are truly generating leads that close. Getting things that actually translate into an opportunity for your sales staff is more important than volume.

Salesforce's campaign tracking feature enables you to achieve that; yet, if you solely offer products as marketing-generated—that is, This was a highly targeted webinar with paid search for very particular material; you won't know how to adjust your budget for what you're testing.

When I initially start working for a company, I also do this.I started working for Cisco Systems as an IT engineer right out of college, specializing in manufacturing IT. [Giggles] Upon obtaining my APICS certification, I learned all about the manufacturing floor, bottlenecks, and what passes through and what doesn't. It genuinely pertains to lead flow and the transition between sales and marketing.

When you begin to examine your system and see where it is flawed, you will be astounded. This is only an example, but you will run into problems if you are unable to map it out. Along with performing basic inspections, you want to have that discussion with your marketing and sales operations personnel.

Salesforce recorded 10,000 leads that we had passed over. 10,000, assuming sales were to be allocated, went to the 3,000 eligible salespeople. How is it received by the sales team? What is the reasoning used by APICS to route and assign these leads?

The majority of people divide it up by territory and then play a round robin within it. What guidelines have you established? Take a seat with your sales representative, or STR. Which report are you using to examine your leads?

I'll tell you what happened at MongoDB: they were only seeing 10% of the leads we were sending over because, when they sat down, they were using a filter that we no longer employ. I barely receive fifty leads.

Upon perusing the report, it appears that X, Y, and Z are not included, nor are you including your area. The moment we revised their reports, they suddenly have 1,000.

You'll be shocked at how these Salesforce instances have changed and how much churn there has been. Nobody even knows how or why they were originally set up, and the information that was there is no longer there.

If you are at a startup or company, make sure you understand and set this up because just streamlining this procedure will improve your leads. It's the feedback loop as well. It is how sales informs you about the qualification status of your leads, how they were marked, and even whether or not they are being pursued.

I've discovered that having a very clear grasp of the flow and outlining this process is crucial to my success and my collaboration with sales.

I love SiriusDecisions and their waterfall, of course. When you speak with salespeople at most firms, I believe their primary concern is their pipeline. They define pipeline as having prospects in Salesforce that have money attached to them and that are four or five times larger than what they need to close.

They don't include any of the other funnel stages, which are important because those stages typically include marketing, a qualifying team, and sales representatives. You want to smooth out and identify any issues that may be present throughout the funnel and handoffs.

In case you are not observing the various phases, we have an additional stage called SQO, which comes right after the SQL stage at MongoDB. It's very difficult to create a demand generation engine and ensure that the leads you do receive are turning into business if you're not looking at these.

I would pay attention to every step that comes before the operations funds. Whether or not your sales teams receive anything, I believe a large portion of it rests with the qualification team.

lead scoring as well. This is an additional tool to ensure that the leads you are providing to your representatives are the quality they require. It is crucial that sales and marketing collaborate to develop this, that you both agree, and that you truly establish, Is it a particular sector? Is there a maximum size for businesses? Did they fill out a particular form? Do those who signed up for a trial matter more to you than those who just visited the event booth? Most likely.

A person who was browsing the careers website crawled about was surpassed by someone who downloaded an enterprise worksheet. It matters what they see, what they take in, and ultimately, it affects who they are. That's definitely a very low scoring lead if it reads "student" or "consultant," and that's not the target market you sell to.You will receive a higher score if the position is listed as VP of IT or IT director, and that is who you want to target.

Your sales team needs this to be more productive if you have a lot of leads so they can work as efficiently as possible. This can help you identify prospects that your sales team actually wants to speak with, better rate them, figure out what converts, and then make improvements to this, even if you don't have a lot of leads.

Ads, I have briefly discussed this before. You must put this up and give it a taxonomy if you are not utilizing it. Everything that appears in the marketing source is merely marketing at the firms I've worked for. That isn't helpful when attempting to determine what truly converts.

Does the topic of NoSQL and its definition require additional webinars, or does security require more webinars? Some perform better than others, therefore you should identify those as such, as well as the specific campaign and follow it through to the end.

Of course, the question of who sourced it is always up for debate. In your case, it is difficult to respond to the question, "Who is sourcing the deals that sales are closing?" since you don't have campaign information on it. This will enable you to determine the solution. Establishing a naming system will undoubtedly improve your reporting, classification, and finding abilities.

I believe that nurturing fits in well with your sales staff from the outset, and there are a number of reasons for this.

I've spoken with a few businesses that, once the lead is turned over to sales, are reluctant to follow up with it. In my opinion, you should continue to support each individual as the sales follow-up procedure is unreliable. Frequently, you're assisting them because they're not receiving all the information they require to make that choice.

Knowing that it was lawful was crucial. It is allowed to sign documents electronically, so make sure they get that information at some time during the nurturing process. Who else is utilizing it, then? automating that nurturing and providing them with case studies.

At DocuSign, we offered more than a hundred distinct nurture programs, each tailored to a user's persona, industry, type of trial, and customer profile. The programs were also available in multiple languages.

There are currently a little over 20 nurturing programs at MongoDB that are based on personas, trial results, area, and client type. We really believe that it is both impacting and expediting our transactions. That involves teaching individuals as they go.

Also, each person arrives at a distinct point in their readiness to make a purchase. By ensuring they have the appropriate information, you are bringing them all up to speed. As I develop this, the buyer's path appears across the top, followed by the content drip.

You can also build up web triggered content among other things. Suppose they visit your trial page and, although not signing up for the trial, you are aware of who they are since they previously completed a form elsewhere.

It is similar to Pottery Barn. After I go look at a table, they say to me, "Hey, I saw you looking at our table," for the next four hours. Do you really not want to purchase? Maybe I'll come back and buy. It is identical. While I was examining the trial, someone passed by my desk. Even if I didn't join up, I go back and do.

Or, we have a person access our documents. We send them information on a topic they are interested in. We send them a guidance in case they are looking at some architecture-related material. To ensure you're at the front of their mind, it involves first identifying what they're looking at and then providing that material.

These three primary points of differentiation are the reasons why people choose MongoDB. If you're not content or the alternative vendor you choose didn't meet your needs, we'd be happy to speak with you. Your representatives won't remember to follow up on that after five or eleven months; instead, they will simply move on to the next contract. In this approach, you can expand your pipeline.

You want to make sure that, first, your deal cycle is starting to shorten, and second, that the things that are influencing the transaction are indeed impacting it. You can run campaign influence reports to examine all of the things that impacted that specific deal after it was made and closed.

When it comes to startups, I always end up with less than $10,000. I'm not wealthy enough to purchase all of that technology. How am I able to help? It is mostly a test. There's not much, so experiment, see what happens, and keep trying.

Content is important. It's obviously time, but content, if you can publish pertinent content and establish a digital watering hole that attracts users. Getting quality content online would undoubtedly assist, as people are still Googling and looking for information, and Google is still crawling.

Influencers and social media, as we discussed previously, are great ways to attract attention. Some examples of this include obtaining people in your industry that are looked up to as advisors, educating them about your product through webinars, or getting them to tweet.

At DocuSign, the majority of our huge webinars were either co-hosted by someone who was a significant influencer in the field or we collaborated with someone larger than us who had a more well-known brand; their logo attracted attention since we both extended invitations to the webinar.

It takes work to partner with people and do webinars, but the rewards are worthwhile. Attending webinars indicates a high degree of curiosity, no doubt about it. Naturally, blogs are fantastic. Webinars were mentioned.

Trading horses. Trade something that you have that you can give to someone else in exchange for cash if you don't have any. At DocuSign, I exchanged technology for someone to write a white paper or participate in a webinar. I believe it's all well and good if you can trade your technology for something else that someone else will trade back. However, your budget may go much farther in this case.

Looking at all of these factors, I believe that, if you hire the right people, have the right technology in place, know how to work as a team within a company, collaborate with your sales team, and educate the analyst, you will be able to make better decisions based on the data you are gathering.

Is it possible for you to make your website work? Make sure you are obtaining the available traffic. Make sure you're increasing conversion rates and doing as much A/B testing as you can to ensure success.

Being in sync with the sales team, your CRO, your head of sales, and really listening to them—as well as working with them and treating them like internal customers so that you don't have to argue with them—is, in my opinion, the key to my success. [Giggles]

There's no use if the leads you're delivering don't work, so find out what they need and provide it. Demonstrate to them what you're going to deliver, and decide on a measurement strategy.

Of course, knowing your numbers is important if you want to be respected at the executive level. Understand what functions. Regardless of the size of the budget, demonstrate what is effective and be open and honest about what isn't in order to earn their trust.

Internal marketers frequently say things like, "Everything is great, everything is great, we're doing great," but if you don't present your company in a fair way, people won't trust you when you say things are going well. Therefore, you should also disclose your shortcomings.

I'll stop talking now. I'd be pleased to address any inquiries.

Emmanuelle: I loved that. Meagen, it was incredible. I'm grateful.

Emmanuelle: There will probably be a ton of questions, in my opinion. I'm going to make the request to start it. If we can get the microphones to get to these people up front, I see two right here.

Have you got a service level agreement? You mentioned the collaboration between marketing and sales. Do you and sales have a SLA? Is it a MQL number, a money number, or a pipeline number? What is your sales SLA, and how do you determine what's agreeable to both of you?

Meagen: The score was a key component of our SLA at DocuSign. It was within eight hours if it was an A and it was a business day. It was within 16 hours if the result was a B. The ones with lesser scores worried us less. We're still working on the SLA at MongoDB.

It is highly recommended to have such follow-up agreement. Even though we don't have a SLA in place, all of the sales leaders receive a weekly dashboard that lists all of the qualified leads (MQLs) that the sales team has never opened. We then rank each representative who is meant to be working the leads and indicate who is and isn't working the leads.

People enjoy competing. Individuals want not to be at the bottom of that. If sales leaders see a dashboard with a large number of leads that haven't been worked yet, they will find it difficult to complain about not obtaining leads. [Giggles] I believe that having the dashboards is very helpful.

Meagen: It exists. I started doing this approximately eleven months ago, at the start of each year. I examine the income goals. I examine our average deal size for each of the various firms. Using the targets and average deal size as a guide, I utilized industry benchmark conversion rates on the funnel I displayed to determine the exact number of leads, MQLs, SALs, SQLs, and deals that marketing needed to source and deliver in order to succeed.

Although we only completed this exercise this year, I was still able to use our real conversion rates from the previous year. I spoke with our CRO for almost an hour and a half about the model, how it works, and our goal of agreeing to source 50% of the business based on these conversion rates and these definitions.

What has changed is that I was measured using MQLs last year. I was drawn to SALs this year, which is a step up, but I believe that in a partnership, the CEO comes last, followed by the head of sales, CMO, and so on. For this reason, I have an incentive to ensure that we meet our target in its entirety.

Emmanuelle: chuckles I believe I am in disagreement. Head of Sales, I believe, goes first. Here are few questions: where is the microphone?

Spectator: This very moment. One more is directly in front of you. Gaze directly ahead. I am in this place right now.

Meagen: Hello, I'm sorry.

A member of the audience: You're blind? [Giggles]

Meagen: I'm blind. The lights are really glaring.

Spectator: Alright, it makes sense. Many thanks for such a thorough session. You mentioned the final two items, and I have a ton of questions right now.

How much qualifying should account representatives or SDRs be undertaking at the SAL stage, in your opinion? We constantly strive to improve this with our MQLs. It's really difficult.

Meagen: If your models have high scores and are actually the ones you should be speaking with, you should perform many interviews with them. You ought to perform more than three.

I believe I saw the statistics on insidesales.com. Reaching out to someone requires seven tries on average. If a lead has a low score, I would advise calling them once or twice and letting marketing continue to warm them up till their score rises; but, if they have a high score and are expected to convert, you should be calling them more frequently.

Emmanuelle: That's correct, exactly.

Meagen: In terms of merging them, account-based marketing is typically used; from what I've seen, this is more so for your enterprise sales. We have e-commerce, enterprise, and a corporate team. We accept their named accounts when they use enterprise. More often than not, it's filling out engagement within that specific count rather than source.

I employ a very different strategy. There are additional meals, webinars, and pipeline acceleration. Direct mail and door openers are examples of products that you truly have to interact with. It involves sitting down, deciding who to talk to, and then focusing on one person. It is promoting their accounts on social media.

It is undoubtedly leveraging technology such as DemandBase that will enable you to customize or personalize your website in a particular way as those accounts visit it. Occasionally, it involves developing microsites for them. There's plenty. Engagio is currently in beta testing. Numerous products are now addressing ABM.

I usually state that the funnel remains the same when it comes to measurement. Even though you're not sourcing, you're still making a greater impact or contribution to that specific account. Even while it might not be the first lead, you are still keeping an eye on the five, ten, or more individuals you are adding from the same account. You're still assigning them a score and ensuring that the appropriate sales team receives them for follow-up.

Emmanuelle: There's still time for one more query.

Meagen: In addition, sourcing for enterprise often accounts for a smaller amount than sourcing for corporate. You will procure a larger portion of their business. The enterprise people often need to be elephant hunters with a solid Rolodex, and you're assisting them in improving their relationship with that account.

Meagen: No problem.

Emmanuelle: Fine. Meagen, thank you very much. Thank you so much for that; it was fantastic.

Here are Meagen's slides.

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