Market View
Beyond MQLs: Reframing success in B2B marketing
Sponsored by:
Produced by:
Scott McIvor
Head of Marketing Operations at Texthelp
About Scott McIvor
Scott McIvor is the Head of Marketing Operations at Texthelp, a leading assistive technology company. With over a decade of experience in marketing and operations, Scott oversees market operations and drives strategic initiatives. His expertise spans account-based marketing, data-driven decision making, and leveraging AI in B2B marketing.
How has the shift towards account-based marketing influenced the way marketing is measured today?
We're now focusing more on measuring influence and engagement at both the account and individual contact levels. Previously, we mainly looked at lead generation, nurturing, and conversion for individuals. Now, we aggregate that data to see the bigger picture at the account level.
This helps us understand how we're reaching and engaging key decision-makers within our target accounts. It's not just about individual connections, but how they add up and what that means for overall buying opportunities.
We're using a multi-touch attribution model to measure marketing effectiveness and account conversion. This gives us a clearer view of our impact across the entire customer journey, from initial contact to final sale.
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We're now focusing more on measuring influence and engagement at both the account and individual contact levels.
What are the top KPIs you focus on, and how do you see these evolving?
Three of our top marketing KPIs are MQLs generated and influenced, Lead>MQL>SQL conversion, and MQL>Closed-won conversion.
We also report on many other marketing channel, campaign, business growth and ROI metrics.
When planning KPIs for our next financial year, I want to make sure that we have an even greater focus on account-level KPIs, aligned to our overall account-based business approach.
How do you leverage data and technology for insights into account health and buying intent?
CRM data is key. It's our central source of truth, connecting multiple systems and processes, such as marketing automation, sales outreach, financial reporting. We then leverage business intelligence and visualisation tools to transform and present all of that data in dashboards.
Web and digital marketing analytics are crucial too. We track how customers and prospects move through our website, which channels they come from, and how they convert.
This helps us understand how leads reach us and how we're nurturing existing contacts.
All of this data helps us provide customers and prospects with personalised experiences, based on their intent and engagement history. And it enables joined-up marketing, sales, and customer success communications throughout the entire buyer lifecycle journey.
While it's great to have top-notch systems and big teams to innovate, that's not always possible for every company.
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Generative AI can be a great enabler for creativity, efficiency and effectiveness.
How do you see generative AI impacting B2B marketing, and what areas are you exploring?
Generative AI can be a great enabler for creativity, efficiency and effectiveness. I see it improving personalisation and customer engagement, enhancing content creation abilities, and fuelling data-driven insights and decision-making.
We're exploring several areas:
- Content creation: Ideating new content, refining existing content through AI proofreading and translation services.
- Collaborative work management and planning: Implementing tools which can leverage AI to significantly enhance our campaign planning, project management and creative production processes.
- Hyper-personalisation: Delivering dynamic lifecycle communications to each of our target audience segments, based on a mix of CRM data, digital analytics and AI insights.
- Marketing research and insights: Using AI to help us predict future trends and customer behaviours.
- Chatbots: Enhancing our website user engagement and conversion journeys through personal chatbot conversations.
There's so much more still to come and learn about, which is exciting. For now though we've definitely found that it's more useful for some things than others. Our brilliant team will always lead on the strategy - they're the specialist experts, supported and enabled by AI, where appropriate.
How do you approach account-based marketing, and what benefits does it bring?
We interact with individual contacts, but we always keep the whole account in mind. When someone engages with our marketing, we look at what to do next. Should we pass them to sales, or keep nurturing them through marketing?
We've set up systems to see all interactions for an entire account in one place. This includes recent activities and engagement scores. It gives us a full view of how engaged an account is with us.
This approach helps us create better targeted campaigns. We look at an account's entire history - what campaigns they've seen, which channels they use - to plan our outreach. Our reports show not just which campaigns work for individuals, but how they impact the whole account. This big-picture view helps us link our efforts to pipeline growth and overall account expansion.
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This big-picture view helps us link our efforts to pipeline growth and overall account expansion.
How do you view the role of revenue operations in marketing and sales collaboration?
Having a strong focus on business performance and growth is really important. It can help create and enable efficiencies, effectiveness and opportunities.
It aims to bring together different operational functions like marketing ops, sales ops, and customer success ops. The idea is to break down silos and work more consistently across teams.
From a team perspective I've worked both in a revenue operations team and directly in marketing. And from my experience, centralising everything into one revenue ops team isn't always the best approach. Some priorities, like creating sophisticated marketing automations and cross-channel customer nurture journeys, can get lost when a marketing operations person is pulled too far into revenue ops.
For some companies, keeping marketing operations within the marketing department may work better. The key is to maintain strong relationships with other operational functions, with clear collaboration, priorities and responsibilities. This way, you can still break down silos and work together effectively.
Overall the most important thing is to balance customer needs with business growth goals. How you structure your operations really depends on your specific business model and internal dynamics. There's no one-size-fits-all solution.
About Texthelp
Texthelp is a pioneering assistive technology company that enhances understanding and communication globally. Focused on education and workplace environments, they develop tools for reading, writing, learning, and mathematical processing. Their innovative solutions serve as both accessibility aids and productivity boosters, empowering students and professionals alike. Texthelp's mission is to provide everyone with the means to understand and be understood, tailoring technology to diverse user needs and abilities.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.
