Matt Heinz is the founder and CEO of Heinz Marketing and the host of the Sales Pipeline Podcast.
Matt's primary goal is to help modern marketers to implement predictable and scalable, revenue-centric marketing programs.
Matt has seen the alignment between marketing and sales for top-of-the-funnel pipeline development significantly improve over the last few years. In addition, he is seeing marketing leaders are more data-driven, especially regarding buyer intent has improved materially. Lastly, he sees marketing being much more focused on the "account" versus the "lead" which reflects the increased use of buying committees.
When we discussed the increased complexity of aligning marketing, sales, and customer success, Matt shared that alignment to the buyer journey, and across these three functions is not yet optimal. Culture is a key part of the issue and goes far beyond sharing common objectives. "Hitting the number" needs to be a shared passion that makes each team member in marketing and sales share a common language and feel they each own the revenue goals.
What percentage of Chief Marketing Officers believe they own the new ARR and pipeline dollar goals - less than 20% from Matt's experience. Though he sees more marketing leaders discuss the need to focus on revenue and pipeline, the actions and departmental measurements do not reflect this is yet their "North Star".
Leading marketers are removing the use of "gated forms" to drive leads and have moved to the open web to identify potential customers in the market (3-4% of companies are in market at any given time) and engage at the point of interest. Unfortunately, vanity metrics such as white paper downloads, web visitors, and even leads still dominate the dashboards and reports a CMO highlights at executive team meetings and marketing department meetings.
Forms are often used to ensure companies can "track" activity. However, not gating content can accelerate and increase velocity in the middle of the funnel by removing friction at the top of the funnel. Educating, mobilizing, and creating a sense of urgency are core tenets of modern B2B marketing.
Matt highlighted, just because you cannot measure it, does not mean it is not important. Modern marketing channels and techniques such as social media posts, podcasts, and YouTube video presence cannot always be attributed to a lead or deal closed, but are still critical channels for the modern B2B marketer.
Matt is a journalist by education and fell into marketing. Matt started his marketing agency by writing blogs, newsletters, and articles. His goal to "tell stories" was a core component of his journalism training. Podcasts were another channel to tell stories, and showcase authors, influencers, analysts, and marketing executives. Matt has found that the "Sales Pipeline Podcast" provides both an opportunity to educate, while developing relationships with the podcast guests who often became customers.
When asked where marketers should focus their understanding of the impact they are delivering, Matt said the CRM is an ideal place to measure impact versus in the Marketing Automation system. What this really says is focus more on the "outcome metrics" in the sales system versus the input metrics in the marketing automation system.
Matt also said moving towards focusing on the marketing cost per "output unit" like pipeline dollars created or new ARR closed is a good step towards more effective and efficient marketing programs.
Any modern B2B marketer or revenue leader will greatly benefit from listening to this conversation with Matt Heinz!