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 more on embracing a champion role for your buyers, the importance of understanding your buyer and the nuances of communicating with them.

Below are a few key points from the video:

Mark Nardone Intro: CMO Pain Points

It’s interesting what’s happening with the CMO and their pain points. They’re tasked with a lot of responsibility from sales, revenue generation, customer experience, and driving conversion. I think that’s all going to put a little bit more pressure on them for defining KPI’s, but it kind of goes back to the buyer and the seller, and the relationship they have – how the buyer still controls a lot. What does that look like now for the marketers, as they get into the engagement side? Does the buyer really want that much personalization from the marketing teams?

Matt Heinz on Engagement and Personalization

That’s a really interesting question, and I love that you couched everything around what the buyer needs. I think it’s really easy for modern marketers, especially modern CMOs, to start thinking about it as, how do I contribute to my organization’s success? How do I start to measure my results based on business metrics, not marketing operational metrics? But I like the way you couch it, because at the end of the day none of it really matters, unless you’re providing value to that customer. What is that value, and how are you measuring that? How is the customer measuring that? How do they value that relative to all the other things they’re trying to achieve? And how are you best communicating and creating that value for the customer in the environment that exists today? That may be different than the environment that existed for that customer five years ago, two years ago, or even 10 years ago.

So, from that standpoint, there aren’t enough marketers or CMOs that are embracing their role as the champion of the customer – playing that customer champion role and driving home an understanding of the personas of the people you’re selling into. Know that you can’t create a persona around an organization – say OK we’ve got these target accounts we’re going after, and that’s fine, but buildings don’t write checks.

Inside a complex B2B company, CEB now says there’s 6.8 people on average involved in the internal buying committee to make a decision. How well do you understand who those 6.8 people are? What roles do they play, what approaches do they bring to the table that are different from each other? And how do you build consensus amongst them, around the need for a product like yours, while still creating value for their organization? Answering those questions continues to get more and more complicated, but successfully answering those questions unlocks the ability for marketers to truly create value for their own organizations.

Watch the full video here.

What are your CMO pain point when it comes to engagement and personalization? Let’s continue the conversation @markcnardone.

Interested in learning more? Check out other sections from the conversation here:

• Insight from Experts: The Modern Marketing Team with Matt Heinz
• Insight from Experts: The Marketing Funnel with Matt Heinz
• Insight from Experts: The Roles of Sales and Marketing with Matt Heinz