For the past 10 years, ScaleVP has focused on the digital marketing lifecycle, investing in such companies as: Omniture, ExactTarget, Hubspot, Vitrue, Datasift and Demandbase. But we strive to always stay ahead of the new “hot thing” in marketing and that starts with really understanding CMOs’ top pain points and obstacles. That is why I am thrilled to announce that Tim Kopp, former CMO at ExactTarget, has joined us as a part-time Executive-in-Residence to help ScaleVP assess new markets.
Most recently, Tim ran a nearly 300-person marketing organization at ExactTarget, a ScaleVP investment. During his 6+ year tenure the business grew dramatically resulting in a successful IPO in 2012 and acquisition by Salesforce.com for $2.7B in 2013.
Responsible for marketing to marketers, Tim has a keen understanding for what marketers’ want, the solutions that are available today, and where existing solutions fall short. In addition to consulting with us, Tim also serves on the board and/or advises several SaaS marketing companies such as: Ahalogy, Monetate, G2 Crowd, Clarastream, Bright Funnel and Mass Relevance. From the frontlines, Tim has shared with us some of the top pain points facing marketers today: CMOs lack a comprehensive dashboard, an end-to-end view of the customer experience, and predictive pipeline analytics. Whichever company has a cure for these pain points will attractive to a CMO—and ScaleVP would like to help accelerate their growth.
“Mint” for Marketers
A lightweight, CMO-centered dashboard that can do for marketing what Mint.com did for personal finance. Some strides have been made, but more work can be done to create a solution with gorgeous design, a mobile interface, and simple dashboards that cut across the marketing stack.
Tim explains, “Many CMO’s spend time trying to cobble together systems tracking pipeline, deal stage, key events and other metrics but lack a single view of a campaign.” While some firms offer business intelligence dashboards, these mainly serve CEOs.
Master Customer Record
When companies have many different marketing systems, the customer gets a disjointed experience. They receive multiple messages from various marketing software tools that don’t talk to each other. CMOs can access many specialized, best-of-breed solutions to track engagement but no single application offers a complete picture of the customer lifecycle for a particular brand.
Again, a dashboard would be helpful. “Companies”, Tim explains, “want to be able to predict the ideal engagement path customers take when they begin to interact with the company and then map that journey to a perfect digital experience”.
Take Ritz Carlton, for instance. Customers “like” on Facebook, receive emails, and get offers via other travel companies. Ritz Carlton actively engages with the customer but lacks a master customer record with attributes, engagement data, actions, and experience feedback. With a master customer record and dashboard, Ritz Carlton would be able to see both the path customers took and the next interactions the customer should have with the company.
Predictive Pipeline Analytics
It’s the last week of the quarter, how do you convert your pipeline prospects to customers? Most sales and marketing teams have a set of marketing activities they execute in order to convert prospects to paying customers. But without historical performance data on these actions, sales and marketing can’t intelligently opt for one marketing activity over another. If they understood the correlation between different marketing activities and closing deals, they could increase their conversion rate.
A lightweight, predictive analytics application that combined some business intelligence with Salesforce or other CRM data could act as a guide in these situations. The application could suggest the next best activities for marketing and sales to get the highest conversion of existing prospects. Does a discount, better payment terms, or free professional services lead to a higher closing rate?
As SaaS simplifies systems integration and our analytics capabilities improve, isn’t it time we took care of the CMO?