Mark Nardone, EVP at PAN Communications, speaks with Matt Heinz, President and Founder of Heinz Marketing. Matt is well respected within the marketing industry and is known for his success as an author, keynote speaker, repeat winner of the ‘Top 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management,’ and listed among the ‘Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers’.

Watch the video or read the transcript below to learn about the evolving nature of marketing teams and how they can efficiently operate with limited resources.

Interested in learning more? Check out other sections from the conversation here: Insight from Experts: Engagement and Personalization with Matt Heinz.

Maximizing Limited Resources

Mark Nardone: How do you deal with marketers that are faced with limited resources? They’re either operating on a shoestring budget, or they’re a skeleton crew wearing multiple hats and they don’t have the right level of resources to put that content in front of that buyer and get them to a path to purpose, engagement and purchase.

Matt Heinz: This doesn’t start with a software technology stack. This doesn’t start with how many marketing channels do I have access to, or have a budget for. This starts with how well you understand your buyer and how well you can communicate with them. I got a question a couple of weeks ago: What’s the minimum technology stack to do modern marketing today? And my answer was the telephone. If you fundamentally understand the complexity of the buying environment you’re selling into, and those different roles that people have, and you understand the nuances of how to communicate with them, then if you have one salesperson you teach them the difference between those different roles. You teach them how to have those different conversations, and even then, if you have no resources but one sales guy, you can customize that conversation and hopefully create more resonance between your message and their needs, which helps you get a lot further along in the process.

If you had more of a budget, then maybe you could hire more salespeople and do that. If you had more of a budget, you could hire more tools to automate the beginning of that conversation, so that the reps come in in the middle. But you can do a lot of this through hand-to-hand combat to start with; that can at least give you some proof of concept. It can demonstrate to yourself and your organization that this works, and it gives you more confidence to then go and say, “Hey listen, I think it’s time for us to invest in greater resources because we know that this process works. If we could automate or scale it – think about the impact it could have for us.”

Roles and Responsibilities on a Modern Marketing Team

Mark Nardone: What kind of advice can you give the head of marketing as they’re thinking about either re-engineering or adding more value into their existing infrastructure, with the pressure that they’re facing on the customer and buyer side?

Matt Heinz: Yeah, I think that’s a good question and I don’t think a lot of marketers have thought about it that way. So, if you were to step back and say, independent of just having people run campaigns, what are the roles that I need? There’s a couple roles that I would point out, and this isn’t exhaustive, but there are a couple roles that I don’t see very often that I think would help. One is a product marketing manager that really champions understanding the customer. Someone in the organization needs to own the personas, not only creating them, but maintaining them and ensuring that those personas are used by every customer facing department.

Make sure that the personas are embedded in the way that the sales team trains and creates their systems and their playbooks and their messaging. You want to make sure that those personas are built straight into the products that you’re building and the features that you’re prioritizing. Clearly, it’s got to feed into the marketing you’re doing as well – your content strategy, your offer strategy, how you’re engaging those prospects on a regular basis. That’s critically important. So, one is the voice of the customer, which I think operationalizes in a product manager type role. It’s someone that has an active role in sales enablement. I think modern marketing really needs to embrace the idea that you are not done when the lead is generated, you’re done when the lead is converted.

I’m excited that more marketers are embracing their role all the way through the process. So, sales enablement means content, process, and tools. What can you do to make the sales team more efficient and more effective? Increasing conversion of your opportunities in the field. And the third one is someone in a marketing operations role, that is not only going to be able to help manage your marketing technology systems but help think through the processes that you’re developing as you identify things that work – things that are repeatable and scalable. What are the best ways, not necessarily to automate those but to create the most efficient means possible to follow that process every time? Those are three areas of focus that many marketers really haven’t put a focus on before, that I think can really drive success and scale moving forward.