Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's CRM Magazine web event brought to you by Tray.io. I'm Bob Fernekees, and I'm the publisher of CRM Magazine, and I'll be the moderator for today's broadcast.

Our presentation today is titled trapped by your MAP, strategies to unlock efficient lead life cycle management. But before we start, I just wanna explain how you can participate in this live broadcast. At the end of the event, we will have a question and answer session. So if you have any questions during the presentation, just type them into the ask a best, box ask a question box and click on the submit button.

We'll try to get to as many as possible. If for some reason we don't get to yours, don't worry. We'll follow-up after the show by email. Plus, if you'd like a copy of the presentation, you can download a PDF from the handouts tab on the console once the event is archived.

And just for participating in today's event, you could win a one hundred dollar Amazon card.

So now to introduce our speaker for today, we've got Nils Fote, senior director, automation solutions at Tray. Welcome to the broadcast, Neils.

Hi.

Thanks for having me here. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to talk about, lead life cycle and automation and, just share, some insights that we're seeing here in the market.

Okay. So, just to get things kicked off, a little bit of background about me. So as Bob mentioned, I am the senior director of automation solutions here at Tray.

And for those of you who may not be familiar with Tray, Tray sits in the integration and automation space. So we offer a platform called the Tray Universal Automation Cloud, and our platform is used by modern enterprises to integrate their systems, to automate their business processes, to connect different parts of their organizations, different parts of their technical ease ecosystem together to facilitate their go to market strategies.

Tray is built on an enterprise cloud, which just simply means that it has the scale to handle fairly serious production workloads, the governance capabilities to ensure that infosec and IT teams can trust the platform, and the compliance capabilities to deal with your most sensitive data. Tray also is built on three core experiences.

Generally speaking, when we think about things like automation and integration, we think of it as a team sport. So there are technical people inside your organization, like engineers and IT folks who need to have a platform that meets their needs. There are business technologists, like operations teams, that need platforms that sort of sit within their capabilities. And there's even frontline people who are working more and more with different cloud softwares, and they need the ability to connect to those systems as well. And Tray helps organizations do that. So in terms of the agenda for today, what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk big picture about what are revenue leaders trying to do with the customer journey today.

After that, we're going to get into the somewhat provocative title of this webinar. Right? Are you trapped by your MAP, and are marketing automation platforms keeping up with the needs of go to market organizations today?

After that, we're gonna sort of frame that question within the lead life cycle. Right? So as marketers, we're all here looking to help our sales partners generate more revenue, and we, are spending quite a bit of money on generating demand for them and and nurturing our leads and getting them to the sales floor and and why it's important that we look closer at the systems and processes that are backing that up.

We're gonna talk about how modern organizations are rethinking their systems and their revenue stack, in light of some of the challenges that those organizations are facing with those systems. And then finally, what we're gonna do is we're gonna jump into some examples of what rethinking those systems and processes look like, specifically within the context of an automation solution.

Okay. So without further ado, let's let's jump in.

Okay. So big picture, what are we trying to do as revenue leaders today?

So I know what's not changed, right, is we wanna look at every stage of the customer journey. Right? So we wanna think about the early stage journey where prospects are sort of considering what kind of problems do they have, and we're making them aware of those problems. We wanna look at the decision, Craig, the decision journey.

We wanna look at the onboarding journey, the post sales journey. There are many different aspects that we need to consider when we're thinking about how do we efficiently generate revenue, and we have to think about those journeys across a variety of channels, whether that's through, social channels or through or through search or through community is even more and more important these days. Right? There are many different places in which we need to find and engage our customers, and we obviously wanna do that fast.

We're all moving at lightning speed, it seems these days, faster and faster and faster. Right? But at the same time, B2B buyers are expecting more personalized experiences. So there's the sort of, somewhat cliche now, quote now that we say, like, B2B is acting a lot more like B2C now.

And so we not only got to move quickly across a variety of channels, we have to do it in a personalized manner. And, obviously, we need to do that in lockstep with our sales partners. And so we wanna make sure that we're all on the same page, focused on the right ideal customer profile with the right message at the right time. And, really, efficiency is more and more the name of the game.

So for any of you folks out there who have been in the B2B SaaS world, right, we've come out of what is, I would say, known as the growth at all cost phase in the last few years, where lots of capital was injected into software companies. And the idea was to gain as much market share as quickly as possible in order to build up a moat and get our organizations through to the other side. However, as the market has somewhat shifted lately, we're realizing that there's a lot of inefficient use of capital in that strategy. And so what we're really looking at today is how can we make sure that as we work across these channels, across the journey, in lockstep with sales, that we're making the absolute best use of our resources.

And that is the name of the game today. So in my mind, as a person who focuses on many things related to the operations world, in order for us to be able to deliver this kind of experience, operations is more important than ever.

And in this particular slide, what we're looking at is the core responsibility of marketing operations. Right? There are many different aspects to marketing operations that we have to consider.

Take platform operations.

So this is where a lot of the automation automation world sits. When you think about how do I ingest my leads from different sources, how do I make sure that they're enriched and clean and scored and routed and nurtured and all the things that we need to do to orchestrate the customer journey?

We think about campaign operations. There's demand gen teams who are spinning up campaigns and getting the message out through those multiple channels, building landing pages, sending emails, going to events. Right? These are all supported by your operations groups.

We have to have good intelligence. We all wanna be more data driven. We wanna make sure that this money that we're putting in market, that we need to be extremely efficient. We have good intelligence as to what's working and what's not.

And now even more so, we're all using many different software platforms. So if any of you are familiar with Scott Brinker, the chief Martech, he likes to release his annual report of all the Martech that's going to the market, and it's only getting more and more. And we're all trying to connect these systems and use that data, and we're adding more and more technology to our marketing tactics. And we have to and more and more organizations are hiring engineering or IT like groups inside their operations groups to help make sure that these systems come together, and it all works in the way that makes sense for their business.

Now I don't know how you all feel, but trying to do this right, as an operations professional, specifically within the context of marketing automation platforms, sometimes feels like it's tough to keep up. Right? So there's, you know, this idea that the treadmill is just getting faster and faster and faster, and we're trying to keep pace with all this change. And oftentimes, what we hear from the revenue operations professionals that we engage with is that they're seeing all these challenges with their marketing automation platform.

They're spending countless hours troubleshooting. I was talking to a senior director of marketing operations about two weeks ago who said that the individuals that he uses to help conduct platform operations on their marketing automation platform, HubSpot, feel more like data scientists, where they're spending hours upon hours troubleshooting problems, trying to figure out what happened, when and where inside this very complex set of processes, which they're orchestrating on their MAP.

There are a few individuals who can self-service. So if you think about marketing automation platforms, there's a lot that they're trying to do. We talked about a little bit of that where you're building emails, you're building landing pages, you're segmenting databases, you're doing all these different activities in order to get a campaign in market, and you need all this specialized knowledge to use these platforms because they're very challenging to use. And, therefore, you're sort of bottlenecked at the operations route because you need specialized knowledge to know how to use all that functionality.

We hear about native integrations falling short. So we're all told that, yes, we have an integration to your marketing automation platform. And then when rubber hits the road and we try to actually use those integrations, what we oftentimes find is that they don't quite function how we expect them to function.

And we're still hearing about lots of manual work. We're hearing about, we work with one of the largest shipping companies in the United States right now where who is taking a brand new product to market, and their sales operations group has told us how they're still spending hundreds of hours every month uploading lead lists to their marketing automation platform, cross referencing them to multiple CRMs, and making sure that they know how to get the right leads to the right people.

This is a story we hear all the time. There's still tons of work. It's surprising how much the B2B go to market experience is still powered by Excel or CSVs or Google Sheets. Right? We're still doing tons of data entry work.

We often hear about reliability issues. We work with one of the largest digital contract signature companies in the world, who had one of the largest Eloqua instances in the world. And they told us how often they're dealing with Eloqua going down, knowing that it was going down before Eloqua knew it was going down.

And lead syncs, sorry, CRM syncs getting backed up and just constantly troubleshooting the reliability, which is, which is interesting to have all these problems because we're spending so much money on these platforms. These are not inexpensive systems. Right? We're talking about, oftentimes in the six figure range. So we'll see it anywhere from a hundred and fifty thousand a year to three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand a year getting spent on these, in theory, robust platforms.

So why is it that we're still facing all of these challenges? Is it just me? Is it just you? And the short answer is no.

It is not just you. In fact, this message is a post from John Miller, who is the cofounder of Marketo. He put this on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, and he starts talking about these challenges. And he hits every single one of these nails on the head.

He says, you know, it's been eighteen years since I cofounded Marketo, yet I'm continually hearing from CMOs and operations leaders about how these platforms are falling short, that that the first generation MAPs are holding us back, that that there's there's, this amount of this this type of sort of stagnant innovate stagnancy and innovation that, yeah, it's great for email, but it's not handling the different channels that we're operating in today, that we're trying to deal with different types of data, and people can't get that data in their systems in order to be able to orchestrate the journeys that we wanna orchestrate.

And he caps this off with this provocative questions is will executives have the vision and courage to invest in a transformative new solution?

This is really interesting. Right? This is like, okay. Well well, what does a solution look like?

And it's understandable if these types of questions make folks feel uneasy. Right? We've built our careers on these platforms, and they're handling many of the mission critical processes that power our marketing organization. So if we are to rethink and change them, then this is something not to be taken lightly.

And he sort of phrases it as this very provocative statement, which is, are you suffering from marketing automation Stockholm syndrome? Right? Are you feeling challenged by, are you feeling sort of hopeless about these challenges and how we begin to address them?

So let's take a step back from that for a moment, and let's look at the big picture. Why is it important that we address these issues?

So let's take the lead life cycle as an example or the demand waterfall. Right? We think we have this perfect funnel in which we're building awareness, we're capturing leads, we're nurturing those prospects, we're putting them through the sales funnel. Right? And much of this process is built on the backs of these critical systems, like marketing automation platforms and CRM and all the different martech we're using.

But because of this complexity and because of the fact that a lot of these processes are being powered by solutions that are, frankly, been around for quite a while, right, they're not quite acting like we think they are acting. Right? There's a lot of opportunity throughout the various stages of the funnel because of this complexity for leakage to occur. And if we're in a time period where we're thinking about efficiency and we're thinking about choreographing the journey across multiple channels, then then it's time for us to look closer at the way we're doing this in order to get on top of it. Because if we don't, then what we end up having is problems with conversion rates impacting different parts of the funnel.

It increases our acquisition costs and our time to recover those acquisition costs.

It slows down our lead delivery, which opens up the door for our competitors to get to those leads faster than we are.

It creates manual work, and that manual work means that there's lost productivity among your, amongst your staff. It means that there's less job satisfaction with what they're doing. Nobody wants to do data entry anymore. Right? That's not the kind of work that we would want our highly paid technologists doing for our marketing organization.

I led an ops team over at New Relic for several years, and it was inevitable. I had all these specialists doing all this campaign operations work, and it's about it. You can pretty much predict at about the twelve month mark that they get fed up with it, and they wanna move on to a different role because the work is menial and trivial. We should not be tying our operations resources up in manual, menial, trivial work.

So and it's not just job satisfaction that's at stake. It's our revenue. So there's a report from IDC that sort of looks across all of our, all of the possible inefficiencies across the funnel. And, essentially, what they found that is when we don't address these inefficiencies, you have the potential to lose twenty to thirty percent of your revenue.

Right? And if you think about how much money we're spending to generate demand and the cost of lead acquisition, right? Ranging, you know, perhaps on the low end to a hundred dollars a lead to on the high end for some enterprise, go to market organizations to as much as a thousand dollars a lead. Right?

That these are not trivial costs that we're talking about. And so what I would propose to you is, as Mister Ramsey would say, is to start over. Right? To start rethinking how we're going to address these modern challenges.

And what does that challenge require? Well, one of the core concepts that we like to talk about is best in breed technology. Right? So the solutions that we use need to be incredibly good at what they do.

Right? So think about, like, from my experience, even simple things, like building an email inside a platform like Marketo. It's really painful. It's like it looks like it was built in two thousand and five, or building a landing page.

There's lots of great companies out there that specialize in these capabilities, and they do it really well. And that's because what they're not trying to do is everything. They're not trying to do everything that marketing could possibly do. They're focusing on what they do, and they do that really well.

So that's a theme that we need to be thinking about is how do we buy the best tool for the job that gets the job done in the most efficient, most user friendly manner. We need to think about making our customer data portable and accurate. Right? So if we're thinking about it, we can't think in silos anymore.

Right? So we all know the trends that we're seeing in cloud data warehouses where we're trying to get our data out of silos and into a place and make sure it's accurate so that when we're thinking about different parts of the journey, everything is aligned. Right? We're talking to where the person is to who the person is at the right moment.

We need to make sure our data is accurate and in the right place. We need to be able to do that quickly. Right? So it's not just about how fast do we go to market, which is important.

Right? We need to get our leads to the right part of the journey quickly as quickly as possible. But it's how fast can we move doing that. So what we don't want is to be able to have to file an IT ticket every time we need to get access to a certain amount of data or to spend five figures on an integration consultant to get what the data or the tools that we need working inside of our stack.

We need flexibility. So you need to be able to accommodate your specific business needs. One size does not fit all. Your every business and every go to market is unique. We need the ability to be flexible in how we conduct our go to market.

And perhaps as important as anything, we need transparency.

So too often, our systems are black boxes, and we don't understand what's happening when and where. And therefore, we can't solve our problems because we're hindered by the fact that we can't see inside the systems and see what's happening.

Okay. So how do we do this? How do we get there?

Well, let's talk about some of the things that are some of the trends that are happening where modern teams are rethinking their revenue strength. And so there's this trend out there that I call the great abstraction. And the idea is that there are specialized technologies that pull our data and our processes out of their silos, and they sit across our systems.

There's another term for this, which is called composability.

And you'll see platforms like, again, cloud data warehouse where we're putting our data in a central place. You'll see things like reverse ETL where it's like, okay. Now we've got it into this central place. We need to get it out and out into our systems.

You might have heard of customer data platforms or CDPs where we're collecting different types of data from the various tools that we have in a standardized fashion, and we're getting them over to our cloud data warehouse, or we're doing centralized segmentation.

So these are all pretty common trends and especially for those of you in the B2B SaaS world. But one thing that is even, that's happening more and more now is, okay. Yes. We have these tools to get our data into a central place and to move it in bulk, but we have a journey to orchestrate. We have a process here that needs to be choreographed, and that's the idea of automation as a stand-alone capability.

And so it's not enough for your operations group to have the traditional marketing automation capability, but you need an automation capability.

And that automation needs to be within the grasp of the operators who are running these systems. And that's why we think low code is really important because what it does is it makes automation as a stand-alone capability far more accessible to the technologists inside your organization who are trying to choreograph the journey across the systems that are powering our go to market.

And so that's a key concept I wanna sort of talk about here now. And I think that one of the easy ways to frame this and give an example is to look at the lead life cycle. Right? Because it is a fairly complex journey across a number of systems.

And if we're gonna rethink things, then I love using the jobs-to-be-done framework.

And the jobs to be done framework is essentially a framework in which to say, okay. Let's put aside the systems that we have, and let's just think about what are the core jobs that we need to accomplish in order to process a lead.

And there's things like capture. Right? So we need to be able to capture a lead from any source, whether that's through list uploads or whether that's through your paid social or your website. Maybe you work with vendors who are generating leads for you. Whatever it is, we need the ability to capture that lead from anywhere.

And then before we put that lead in a source of truth, we need to get it clean and prepare it. So you wanna do things like validating whether or not it's even a good lead to begin with. We shouldn't be putting bad data in a source of truth and then dealing with it, having to clean it up after the fact. That's not the way it should work.

We should clean it up before we do that. We need to do what's known as normalization. Right? So if we have things like job titles or state and geo data, all that sort of stuff, we wanna clean it up and get it normalized again before we put it in the source of truth.

We wanna do things like enrichment so that we have more complete data so that we know how to do things like what kind of nurtures to put them in or how do we route them, those sorts of things. And then we record it in our source of truth. So we wanna make sure that we're stamping accurate data that talks about where do we source it from.

How do we score it? Right? We wanna make sure that we have good data recorded in our source of truth so that it can go out to the various systems. And then finally, we wanna engage that person promptly.

Right? So that and in a personalized manner. Again, that could be through okay. We're gonna put them in a specific nurture sequence tied to their job per or their persona, or it could be that we're gonna look at somebody who has demonstrated high intent and meets your ICP criteria, and we wanna get that person routed and in sales hands as fast as humanly possible.

And so these are all the jobs to be done of managing the lead life cycle. And so let's look at some simple examples of how automation as a core capability can be applied to that in a best in breed solution.

Alright. So in this simple example, what you're actually looking at is a very basic workflow meant to address that manual work problem. Right? So we have let's say we have a campaigns team who's gone to an in person event, and they're scanning badges, and they're getting leads, and they're taking notes, and they're putting that into some kind of spreadsheet.

Could be, again, an Excel file. It could be a CSV. It could be a Google Sheet. It doesn't really matter.

But rather than filing a ticket with your ops team, having them clean up all that data, waiting two weeks, further extending out the amount of time it takes to get that lead into your marketing automation platform, what if we just simply give them a form where they can attach that CSV to that form? They hit submit, and then a workflow runs. And this is a simple example here. So this is not a full lead life cycle example, but the point is just that, okay.

Well, maybe we have some connectors here where we can get the data from the CSV, and then we can loop through each of those rows in the CSV. And we can check our source of truth and say, does it exist? If it does, update it. If it doesn't, create it.

Right? We don't get duplicates in our system because we're preventing that from happening at the outset. And this is what we call Tray build. It's a low code automation builder that allows you to create your process in a visual manner, and it's accessible to technologists so that they can build it in a way that makes sense for their organization.

Now this is what we would call a human in the loop process, meaning there's a person who needs to run something to actually do it. But what if we want to think about it in a more seamless way? So same platform, but let's talk about paid social. Another example of lead capture.

Right? So same platform, but a slightly different layout. So here, anytime somebody submits a form for a campaign that we're running on LinkedIn, we listen for that form submission. And similar to our previous workflow, we're gonna check a different source of truth this time.

So what if we actually think about Salesforce as our source of truth? And we actually wanna put our data there first rather than having to rely on some kind of sync that may be problematic. We can actually go straight to the source of truth.

And we'll do the same thing. We'll check and see if that lead exists. If it does, we'll update it. If not, we'll create it. And so what I wanna do here now is start to build out this lead journey for this specific example. Right? So not only do we wanna capture that reliably without duplicates in our source of truth, but maybe the next thing we wanna do is clean it up.

Right? So in this example, we've added four steps to this workflow.

The first step is to call NeverBounce because which is an email validation service. We wanna send the email from our form submission to NeverBounce.

And then we're gonna make a logical check and say, was it valid? If it wasn't, we're not gonna put it in our source of truth. We're actually gonna put it in a Google Sheet and let our campaign manager know that, hey. This lead source is generating bad leads. You might wanna take a look at this campaign.

Now the point here is not specifically that this is exactly what you should do for your business. The point here is that we can build it in a way that makes sense for our business.

And, again, if it's valid, fine. We'll follow our standard process here where we're gonna check our source of truth, create or update the lead. K?

Now let's take it a step further. What if we wanna make sure that every time that lead comes in, if it's new, we make sure we enrich it with our enrichment vendor before it goes into the source of truth. Not waiting on a native sync, not having to deal with delays, and and hope that we time it just right. We're actually gonna say, every time we create that lead, we're gonna call Clearbit and make sure that we get things like their job title, their location, their company size, their phone number. We have complete data at the time of creation.

This could just as easily be ZoomInfo or Apollo or whatever regional enrichment vendor you have, right, built for your process up to date in the source of truth at the time of creation reliably. Transparency into exactly how it works, when it works, and what happens.

Okay. Let's take it a step further. So now that we've captured our lead from LinkedIn, we've cleaned it up. We've ensured that it has a valid email.

We've made sure that they have all the enrichment data we need. We wanna create reliable attribution data. Right? So we wanna make sure that we create a campaign membership and that we know so that we know if our LinkedIn campaign is actually working as we expect it.

So it's just one more step that we're gonna add to this same workflow where we're gonna create a connector where we're gonna connect to Salesforce. We're gonna create that campaign member for either the new lead or the existing lead in the same way every time.

So as we continue to build out our lead life cycle journey, we wanna do one last thing. We need to make sure that they're engaged. Right? So we're gonna add two more steps to this.

We have a sales engagement platform called Outreach. Maybe you use something like a SalesLoft or something else. It doesn't really matter. Right?

It can be whatever stack you have, but we're gonna add a step here to put that person in a personalized sequence tied to our LinkedIn campaign as soon as they come in the phone. Right? And then we're gonna make sure that we let the rep know this time through email. This email connector could easily be a Slack connector or a Microsoft Teams connector.

Doesn't the point is, again, we got this person from the point of collection through all of our lead life cycle processes to sales outreach in a very seamless, fast manner. Right? We know exactly what's happening when and where. So this results in an excellent, or excuse me, a high performance speed to lead because we're making our process do exactly what we need it to do, exactly when and where it needs to happen.

Now this is what I would call a simple example. And so while it's an interesting thought exercise, in reality, right, we need to apply these concepts to all of our leads no matter where they come from. And so while I think the examples that I've shared with you help articulate what is possible to be done with the lead life cycle jobs to be done, what I really wanna do is sort of take a step back and show you how what we can do with this same platform is create what we would call composable architecture, which would give us the ability to be far more, flexible in how we apply this process to any lead source in our funnel.

And one of the key concepts we'll talk about here is this idea of within composability is this idea of modularity, which is to say, we can actually take these life cycle jobs to be done and turn them into what we would call a service or a microservice, where they have a narrowly scoped job, and that job is mapped to one of the life cycles jobs to be done.

Let's dive in and show you what I mean.

Okay.

So what you're looking at here is a reference architecture for how you can configure your automations through an automation a best in breed automation platform to orchestrate all the jobs to be done of the lead life cycle. This is what I would call a run state with automation. This is a sophisticated architecture meant to process leads in a consistent manner no matter where they come from.

And one of the ideas with this automation platform is that these workflows can actually be constructed in a way where they can call one another. So for example, if you look at these little squares here, each one of these little squares are in and of themselves a workflow, similar to what you looked at you saw in our previous examples.

We have a workflow that we call the lead processing pipeline. The job of the lead processing pipeline is to choreograph the lead lifecycle journey.

And the first step of the lead processing pipeline is to call another workflow, which is our validation workflow. And inside there, you will find NeverBounce.

You'll also find Clearbit Risk. We're actually triangulating validation data across multiple vendors to absolutely make sure that the leads that we put into our funnel are good leads.

We even have our security team even has their own service inside there, which is able to screen bad actors. So we know if somebody comes into our funnel who is a bad actor and we don't want to give them access to an automation platform, not only do we validate their email, but we validate them, against our security team. Right? So that gives us very robust controls over who comes into our systems.

We have another step where we search our source of truth, in our case, Salesforce, for existing leads or contacts. We don't create duplicates in there. The job of this workflow is you send it an email address, and it tells you, is that email a leader contact in our CRM? Who is the owner? What is the account? And it gives you all the data you need about that lead.

If they don't exist, we have an enrichment process. And similar to the example before, yes, we call Clearbit, but we also call Apollo. Right? So we're using multiple vendors, and the job of this workflow is you pass it an email address, and it gives you a fully enriched lead back.

So the point of this is, again, that we have used these services and choreographed them in a way that makes sense to our lead funnel.

And this is the idea of composability.

So, for example, our attribution process creates a campaign membership for anybody who's going through our lead funnel.

Its only job is to create campaign memberships in Salesforce, and it's a very robust process. A lot of marketing operations teams, deal with challenges around what's called roadblocks when they're thinking about their marketing automation platform to CRM sync because they're because, essentially, what happens is the native sync starts to, get caught up whenever they're trying to create cam whenever it's trying to create campaign memberships through that sync.

Our process has graceful failure built in. It will actually retry and retry and retry and retry until that campaign till that roadblock resolves itself and that campaign membership can be created. Not only can that campaign membership workflow be used here within the context of our lead pipeline, but we can use that anywhere. So anywhere we wanna use create a campaign membership, we can actually call that same workflow that's used in this concept. This is the idea of composability.

So one of the examples that we use that for is swag fulfillment. Our campaigns team sometimes offer gifts and the way that through a platform called Sendoso. And the way that you actually send those gifts out is to create a Salesforce campaign membership. We have workflows that use the same attribution process that we use in the pipeline to create campaign memberships elsewhere for another process.

And when you architect and then you build this way, you get a process that meets your needs, and it happens fast, and it happens reliably.

So what I wanna actually show you here is live data that I pulled yesterday evening from our workflow, which does that. We take leads from the point of capture to the point of engagement roughly within the range of thirty to ninety seconds.

There's some people that we're talking to who would be just amazed with the ability to do that in twenty four hours.

Right? So when you are able to use a best in breed platform that its job is to do this specific function as best as possible, you get a much more performant solution.

And, not only do you, again, get it to happen really fast, but it's really reliable. Right? It's built for scale. It's built to handle the throughput that we need.

So this is and we have a feature called insights where we can actually look at any one of our processes, and we can know exactly how reliable is that process. So I pulled the same data for the last week from all the sort of workflows that choreograph this lead life cycle. We've had about two thousand leads in the last week, and ninety nine point nine percent of the time, that worked. I know exactly if it's working or exactly if it's not, and I can go back and look and find those problems if not.

So we had three failures. Right? And then about two thousand eighty successes. And so my question to you is, can your MAP do that?

Right? Do you even know, can you specifically point to the reliability and speed of your processes, and at each point in the journey?

And this isn't something that, just we're doing for ourselves.

I mentioned before that we worked with one of the largest contract life cycle management companies in the world, and they're the largest Eloqua instance in the world. They route fifty thousand leads a day, which is absolutely insane. Like, obviously, many of us are not doing that kind of volume.

But, they trusted a best in breed automation platform to handle that because it's so mission critical. And they were able to reduce their lead routing time down by seventy percent. When we first started talking to the marketing systems architect over there, he told me that he would actually get calls in the middle of the night from Australia from the SDR managers there saying, hey. Why haven't we gotten leads for twenty four hours?

You have to address this for me. Right? And so that's when he sort of realized, like, wait a minute. We have this tool that is in theory doing all the things it's supposed to do, but it's not up to the task. We need a different way to address that. And that's what I would like to just start the discussion with you all on today is have you started looking differently at your systems and your solutions to meet the needs of the modern go to market organization?

And a few takeaways here. Alright. So we have a lot more data than ever before, and we're doing our best to get that data into central locations and into a standardized format.

But we need to be able to unlock it. So it's not good enough just to get it there. You have to get it back out and use it to choreograph your business process from there. So you need a way to unlock your data. Too often, we're blocked by this.

Automation is a competency in and up itself. It sits outside the four walls of MAP, of CRM. Right? It sits across your systems. You need to be able to choreograph across your systems.

If you master this skill set, the ability to use platforms like this, your organization will move faster with more agility and better return on investment both on your technology and on your marketing and sales dollars. Right? We spend more money than anything actually on our sales teams. Right?

We need to make sure that those individuals are operating with the best possible data and the best possible prospect at the best possible time with the best possible message. Right? So this is a sophisticated challenge that we need to address. And my contention is that mastering automation will help you do that in a much more streamlined manner, in a much more cost effective manner.

And that's really what I have to,

share with you all today. I know this was a lot of information really fast, and, so I think it would probably be a good breaking point here to kinda open, for a q and a, open for some questions, and I'd be happy to dive in and tackle those now.

Hey. Great. You know, wonderful presentation, Neil. So I really have to commend you. I also really love the, direction and perspective that you're giving all this because, I think everybody is just astounded at how many point solutions there are and how features and benefits have, you know, grown in, you know, the the platforms we do use, Marketo and, HubSpot, you know, fantastic platforms, but, certainly feature rich and, you know, the devil is in the details.

I mean, it really is. And I think that that's, you know, just the way you started off from tracing the capital and how much money is spent, you know, uploading spreadsheets and doing all sorts of automation to, you know, details that, you know, can now be addressed. So we're gonna jump in. I wanna ask everybody if you've got a question for Niels.

He's on the line right now. So, you know, now is the time. I'm gonna start off with an easy one, Niels.

Niels. The question is, so what do you use to send emails?

Oh, okay. So for the longest time, we were a Marketo shop.

And so that was our, both you know, it was everything that we discussed today. It was our platform operations platform, right, our database marketing tool, right, all these sorts of things. And so what we actually did is we slowly pulled out some of those processes out from a platform operations perspective. And then what we chose for our database marketing platform, in the spirit of best in breed, was a tool called Iterable.

And Iterable actually was classically came up as a B2C, database marketing platform. But what they offer is a couple of really interesting things. So on the simple side, they offer a really easy to use intuitive email builder.

That was, like, the one of the main things we wanted was, like, can we just allow anybody to build an email in an easy fashion? Like, do we really need to pay developers for custom code to, create an email template and then, have an interface that looks like again, it was from nineteen ninety eight to actually create that?

No. No. There's better solutions at this. They have a really nice email builder.

The other thing that they have is they work really well with what I would call, like, a modern sort of data stack. So, the ability to create a data model for your contacts and accounts there was very flexible and the ability to use what we would generally call event data.

So a lot of companies out there now are doing things like PLG where there's, like you know, they have a free trial or their people are you know, they're freemium. Right? And they're using their products, and they're generating all these events that are happening, and then we wanna use those for segmentation purposes. Right?

So, oh, you started a new trial and you're very in the product, and you're very engaged in that product. Right? Well, we can use event data to actually determine who is most engaged with those products, and then we can trigger journeys based upon that. And so they have a really good use of the strong ability to use event data in there.

They also have a very intuitive journey builder. Right? So it looks a lot like the workflows that I was actually showing in the examples where they have, sort of this visual workflow builder in which you can create a journey, and it's multimedia. Right?

So it's not just email. Right? They can actually do in app messaging. They can do, essentially what's known as a webhook, which is basically, like, they can call out to another system, like, in a journey.

So imagine, like, you wanted to send a text to someone. Right? You could actually make a webhook over to a, a tray workflow or an automation, basically, and that with some data, and then that thing could send out a text or push notification. Right?

So it has this real flexible, journey building capability. So I know that was kinda long winded, but the point is that for our database marketing and journey orchestration, we bought a best in breed platform that's really good at segmentation, email building, and database marketing.

Okay. Great. Hey. You know, you mentioned twice. You mentioned just now and also a little bit earlier, in the presentation.

This is a question of mine. Is B2B and B2C basically the same at this point from your point of view?

I wouldn't say they're the same. No. Like, there are aspects of it that I think where we can, I think, be inspired by what B2C marketers have been doing, particularly on, like, the data infrastructure side? Like, they were adopting customer data platforms and doing personalization far before we ever were.

Right? Like, if you think about ecommerce and things like that. Like, they've had a pretty strong sort of data backbone, I'd say, relative to B2B, for a while. So I think there's a lot to learn there.

But, the like, just take buying committees as an example. Right? Like, I think, B2B right now is you really have to think about a group of people Right. And the signals you're getting from them and how you engage them.

Like, that's in and of itself is like a whole, like, different construct. Right?

That B2C doesn't have to think about.

Although, I do have my maybe my wife is part of my buying committee, but the, who I have to run all my purchases by.

But anyway, might be a little too, the superficial part certainly seems like they're merging in some way.

Here's a great question from Lynn. And please, I know the people in the audience have the best questions.

So he's, you've kinda covered this pretty much the whole presentation, but his question is, what are the, what are some of the common challenges organizations face when using marketing automation platforms, you know, MAP, for lead life cycle management?

A common one I've seen is I'll give you a few. But the one that really came to mind for me when I first came to Tray, which we were experiencing, is order of operations.

Like, essentially, you have all these sort of programs running, and I would sort of generally say, like, in parallel, I guess you could say. And the ability to control what happens, when and where, and then go not just, like, set it up that way, but then go in and confirm.

Like, literally look at it and go, okay. Is it operating as I expect it to operate? And if it's not, why? Right? Like, that ability to both configure it and control it and then have the transparency to know that it's doing that is to me, like, a major pain point, which is which is fundamentally, I think, underpinning a lot of the data challenges that that people have when trying to deal with their marketing automation platform. So that's one.

Another one is, costs. Like, it's really expensive. Like like like, there's always a baked in uplift. There's always, like every it seems like every negotiation is this, like, painful exercise of, like, well, you got a hundred thousand, five hundred thousand more contacts.

Right? That's gonna be more. Right? You need all these extra modules. That's gonna be more.

Right? And it's just you end and because they're doing so much. Right? Like, there's so much that they're trying to do, and they're so central.

Like, you have no leverage, basically. And I feel like a lot of people are getting taken to the cleaners on the cost. And, again, if you had better control over that and better tools to do that and you're sort of relegating it to a database marketing platform, then you have more leverage and you have the ability to control those costs much better.

Not even to say all the benefits you get from, like, a more modern stack and using your data and, like, all the other things we were talking about. But, those are a few that come to mind.

Great.

I really love your mention of Stockholm Syndrome. I think pretty much everybody has that. It's just too hard to change.

That's John Miller.

That was John Miller's words. I he I I it was like it was funny. It showed up on my LinkedIn feed, and I just laughed.

Like, I was like, oh, this is cold.

Like, Yeah.

Everybody gets it. Yeah.

Okay. So here's a question from, oh, jumped out of my way here.

Okay.

Let me go to Gary.

Well, actually, let me go to Dina. What are you using for integration?

What are you using for integration platforms?

APIs, Boomi, Red Hat. What's your compatibility rate with the various applications needing to be integrated into your workforce solution? Do you understand that message?

Because, I do.

Yeah.

So it may not have been obvious here. Right? Because a lot of what I presented today was what I would call, like, workflow or process orchestration. Right?

So that's that, like, in a within a specific context, which was lead life cycle management.

Another example just to, like, add some additional color there is, like, there's lots of stuff. Like, there's the deal life cycle. There's the lead life cycle. Right?

There's the sort of, sort of onboarding life cycle. Right? There's employee life cycles. Right?

Like, hire, retire, job change. Right? These are all processes that can be orchestrated on a platform like Tray. But, actually, one of the things that we all also do with it is integration.

Right? So API integration. Right? So how do I literally just, like, connect data between two systems?

So I mentioned that we have Iterable, right, as our database marketing platform, and we use CRM as our central source of truth. We actually built an API integration with Iterable through Tray, where it's connecting our Salesforce instance to that really highly flexible sort of data model that I mentioned on Iterable. So integration can be done with a platform like this. In fact, I wrote a whole blog post called steal this custom Salesforce sync, which specifically outlines the architecture that powers that integration.

Great. Hey.

You know, just to remind you, let's mention your blog later on, before we wrap up, because I want everybody to kinda know about those, about your blog.

So another thing that you mentioned that really kinda blew my mind was automation as a stand-alone capability within an organization.

It is that what part of somebody's job is that or people's jobs or where do you see that at right now? Because it seems to me that, you know, there's a lot of functionality that people just can't tap into that they've already paid for.

Yeah. Yeah. I have a silly cliche, which is if you flow, you know, which is it's really just to say so there's Salesforce flows. You know? Yep.

It's basically up I think operations groups. So both sales and marketing operations groups have the perfect people for these kinds of capabilities. Right? So we all grew up, whether you're a trailblazer or whether you're a Marketo champion or you're, you know I don't know what they call HubSpot champions or whatever.

But, right, like you, we all grew up with this system specialty or focus. Right? Where, where, like, okay. Great.

We're all trying marketing automation. We're all doing CRM now. Right? So they created these amazing communities of operators who got certified on these platforms and could wield that technology.

I think the same thing will be true about automation is you'll find that these technologists, essentially, operators who are close to the business problems, who understand what the campaigns teams are trying to do, who understand what your sales leaders are trying to do. Right? They're intimately familiar with what they're doing, are the perfect people for this. Because, as opposed to, let's say, you're an engineer, a shared engineering resource, right, that may be at arm's length from those problems, who don't intimately understand how to solve these challenges.

I think that there's a problem. The further away you get from the business unit, essentially, the less likely that that technical resource is able to solve the problems in the most effective way, which is why when we talk about automation as a competency and we talk we the importance of low code, of visual capabilities, of lowering the technical barrier is so important because you if you put a tool like this in the hands of a technical operator, that marketing ops for that Marketo champion, that Salesforce wizard, right, whatever it is, that business technologist, right, they can use it to solve problems that they intimately understand without having to go wait in line for twelve months and lobby some shared resource team for their time, right, to actually solve the problem.

And then when that shared resource team solves the problem, right, it's not solved because they don't understand the problem well enough. And I've seen that countless times.

Like, we need to empower the operators to solve these technical challenges.

Absolutely. Here's another question that just popped in that I love as well.

And the question is, what's the typical process of, you know, your customers moving off a MAP solution and over to Tray? And how does that process work? Does it happen all in one at once? Does it, you know, what kind of perfluffle does it cause?

Yeah. No. It's not a, there's no easy button here. Right? Like, it's not like you just go, okay.

You know, flip the switch, turn it over. Let's move on. No. Like, what I'm this is why I talk about the importance of the capability.

Right? Like you, these are sophisticated challenges. Right? We're dealing with a sophisticated world with a lot of technology and a lot of data, and these are these are business challenges and they're technical challenges.

And so you don't, you don't just hop in and, like, buy it and it's done. Right? What you need to do is you need to develop the competency. So generally speaking, what we do is we work on, kind of like we want to build the competency within the group.

Right? So you need to make sure that you have the right people in the building. Right? So a lot of these people are there, like I said.

Right? If you flow, you know.

But then what we try to do is we try to pick a quote, unquote, high value but low effort use case. Meaning so we'll work with our customers to go, okay.

Where is a process where it's like, there's not necessarily a lot of risk per se or a lot of difficulty, but we can, we can apply automation to help you get your legs underneath you. So a couple good examples are those lead capture use cases where it's like, hey. I need to get my leads from this lead source, and I can't. Right?

And I just need to get it into my marketing automation platform. Right? So we've had a couple customers come to us and do that for, like, LinkedIn, for example. Other paid social could be in.

Another would be list uploads. Right? That list upload example I gave you. Where it's like, okay.

I just need to process a list. Like, I wanna save myself a handful of hours a week. Right? Or I just wanna, like, kinda, start addressing that.

And then slowly but surely, what we do is we build that competency with them, and they understand the platform. And then and then they start chipping away at it. Right? So, okay.

Now I got all my lead sources done. Right? Let me work on a standard normalization process to make sure my data is clean. Right?

And it's about a twelve month journey is what it is. Now we work with them to like, we have, like, templates, and we have specialty sort of, like, subject matter experts that sort of work with them through this phase, and we help them build a road map to journey off the MAP. Right? Like, to and so it's a combination of, essentially, like, learning the platform first, building a road map to slowly migrate.

You build those capabilities up, and then next thing you know, it's like, oh, well, there's our database marketing platform.

Like, you wanna give us a better price or you wanna we wanna look at something else? Great. We'll do that.

Great. Hey. You know, we're right up at the top of the hour, but there's one more question that I have to ask because I'm kind of interested in myself.

What's a typical type of company that this would be good for? What's a common, you know? What does it look like?

Makes sense.

So it's not like a twenty five person start up. Right? Like Right. It's not a small company is what I'm trying to say.

Those companies are incredibly resource constrained, and I don't think that like, while I would love to pretend that they can, that they're, they have to be very careful with their resources. It's usually a company that's it's a B2B company. You know, we all like to we all draw arbitrary lines. Right?

But I think it's, like, somewhere around the five hundred or more range of employees. They have a, you know, a fairly good sized sales floor. They're making a fairly material investment in their go to market strategy. Right?

They got a lot of technology and people. Right?

And they have those people who fit the profile. Right? Like, they have the technical operators there that have the competency to actually work with the platform.

Right. It also seems like, you know, they're also at the size where there's a lot of value to unlock if they get it right.

So hey. Listen. You know, we are up one minute over the hour. Apologize to everybody that's on the line right now.

You know, definitely, you know, I definitely would like to thank everybody that came today.

Thank everybody that asked questions.

Also, I'd like to thank our speakers, Niels Fogt from Tray.

Don't everybody jump right now even though I'm going through my closing thing.

I just wanna make sure everybody stays online because we're gonna get a little bit more information from Neil's, after I go through the housekeeping things. Don't worry.

We will send you an email once the event is archived. So you can go there and you can pull down the presentation. It'll be archived for ninety days. You can also find out if you are a winner. And let's just bounce back to Neil's for a second and just kinda wrap up.

Awesome. Yeah. Thanks, Bob. I really appreciate the time and the thought provoking questions and everybody, taking, considering what I had to say here. If you're interested and you wanna talk more about it, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to have a discussion with you.

At the close of this webinar, you're gonna be redirected to a blog post series we did on, which goes into much deeper detail on how this whole sort of solution works.

Obviously, we'd love to talk to you too. You can come to Tray and just reach out, and we can set up some time to chat that way. And, we'll also be following up with a handful of resources via email.

Great. Fantastic. Thanks, everyone. This concludes our broadcast. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Bye.