Revenue Rockstars Advice from the State of MarTech Report

The Revenue Rockstars Series continued with a live-streamed advice from the State of MarTech report session from SharpSpring, Ascend2 CEO Todd Lebo, and Ocreative Chief Business Development Officer, Matt Koeppel. The session entitled, “New Research: Why Your Results are Lacking & 3 Key Strategies for Success” was especially exciting because it featured brand new agency marketing research data from Ascend2. In this blog, we’ll outline some of the key highlights and takeaways from this important session.

If you’d like to watch the webinar in full, you can check it out here. Be sure to sign up for our full Revenue Rockstars Series, running through January 2022, here.

We’re thrilled to help attendees learn more about how revenue rockstars grow revenue throughout the entire marketing funnel in this new webinar series. Through the live sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to attend each show and participate in Q&A sessions. And we’ll share key takeaways on our blog, like these notes from our Agency Partner Panel session.

Todd Lebo on using the findings in the State of MarTech report

So this research was done in July. So it’s very, very new. And we just believe that this should be very practical for you, we’ll cover ways you can make the research actionable. Research is only as good as how you use it to influence your decisions. So we’re hoping that we can give you that here. We’ll review what we found, but also take it to that next step of how you can use it, hopefully to influence 2022, too. And also, you know, the research should be a proof of point for your strategy to your leadership team and to you, to you and your team. So it should help you hopefully make your case, prove the point of what you want to do.

Matt Koeppel on lead “quantity” vs “quality”

So we all say, “you know what, let’s go for the quality leads we want, the quality leads!” But as it gets down to it and into crunch time, sometimes we start worrying about the quantity, as well. Because really, more leads does not always equate to more sales. We really look at quality over quantity. And this is again where we determine which campaigns are the most fruitful, which ones are delivering the quality leads, not necessarily always the quantity. And then let’s expand upon them, learn from them, learn from what we’ve been doing. Learn from the data to understand better how we can continue to shape and adjust our campaigns moving forward.

Todd Lebo on feeling confident in your data

I think as a marketer, you know, that’s truly what you’re striving for, is to feel confident in your decisions, you know? As compared to an email ‘spray and pray’, right? Not a good way to approach your marketing. Not a good way to identify your goals and hit on. So that’s a really important thing.

And attribution…it’s neat as we look through the report. I think if you download this report and start going through it, we break out the data in two different segments. And so there’s a lot of different ways you can slice and dice it and really find how it can apply to your specific organization. But I think one of the things would be, you know, you start seeing how there is a strategic plan that you can start recognizing, right? The data and the tools and having a unified ad attribution. It all does come together in a strategic plan as you start laying it out.

Matt Koeppel on the problem of “too many tools”

When we were working in marketing automation early on, our agency had multiple systems in place. We had multiple silos. And you know, our marketing automation wasn’t integrating with our CRM. The data flow was continuously breaking. We had duplicate contacts across various lists trying to update one of those contacts. You’d have to find all the various places they’re hidden just to update them. And no matter what we did, we couldn’t get it to sync properly to get the information flowing because we were in so many different systems and just didn’t have a good option to connect them all together. And we were continuing to just kind of fight against it until we moved into SharpSpring, suddenly we found this holistic platform and were, like, “Oh wow, this is awesome.” Everything’s in one place.

The integrated CRM, we just fell in love with it instantly because we had a much clearer view of everything. All of our data was in one spot. We eliminated all these silos, and then things were able to talk to each other again. So with too many tools, I mean, I felt that pain, and I know that everyone deals now with so many different tools. And it’s hard because the greater the tools, the greater number of tools presents greater potential for data loss or inconsistencies.

Todd Lebo on sales and marketing team alignment

According to the report, only nine percent of executives describe their marketing team’s ability to control the messaging and cadence of sales outreach as ‘excellent’. So that touches upon probably two things. One would be the alignment of the marketing and sales team strategically. And then also as it relates to the alignment execution via the tools that they have. And so I thought that was a pretty important takeaway. I mean, again, you know, it’s all very strategic as we look at the user experience and how we, you know, how we want to treat that user and that holistic approach, that alignment is critical. 

Revenue Rockstars is for marketing agencies and SMB owners looking to help their sales and marketing teams work together to better focus on revenue instead of vanity metrics. If you want to grow your revenue, we invite you to register for our series and add the dates to your calendar to attend the live streams and Q&As.

Marketing industry guru Jay Baer helped us launch our Revenue Rockstars Series with a live kickoff, you can watch the event here.

If you missed Mickey Locey’s session, “Beyond the Pitch: Rock Star Moves to Not Only Win Business But Deliver on Your Promise,” you can watch it here.

Check out Karl Sakas’ session, “What CMOs Say When You’re Not In the Room… and How It Can Help You Grow Your Agency,” here.

Check out the SharpSpring Agency Partner Panel session, “From a Seat at the Table to Running the Table: How Modern Marketers Are Winning Revenue,” here.

If you missed Matt and Todd’s session “New Research: Why Your Results are Lacking & 3 Key Strategies for Success,” you can find it here.