End-of-Year Wrap Up: Marketing’s Past, Present and Future

Josh Baez: Hey there, folks, and thank you again for joining us for another fireside chat. We are talking with Daniel Rocheleau of Iron Horse, and we're here today for an end of year wrap-up. We're going to talk about Daniel's big wins, lessons learned, and his key priorities for the new year. I am your host, Josh Baez, senior manager of corporate marketing here at ON24.

Before we dive in, I want to make sure that I draw your attention to the slide that's on screen right now. Don't forget that by watching these sessions, you're being entered to win a series of prizes thanks to our partners at Sendoso. So be sure to watch four, seven, or 10 sessions between December 20th and the 22nd, and you'll be entered to win all of these things that you see. And also be sure to complete a short survey, which you can find in your console. We will send everyone who does a little thank-you gift so you can treat yourself this holiday season.

But without further ado, let's go ahead and dive in here. Daniel, I'm so glad that you can be here to join us today to talk about your end of year priorities. I would love for you to kick things off by introducing yourself and what you do at Iron Horse.

Daniel Rocheleau: Sure, Josh. Thank you for inviting me to this end of year wrap-up here. As you said, my name is Daniel Rocheleau. I'm a senior marketing director here at Iron Horse. My typical day pretty much has me developing B2B marketing strategies, finding activations, and managing a team to get it all done.

Josh Baez: Love it. That's great. Yeah, so you kind of have your eyes on making sure that everyone's connected, right?

Daniel Rocheleau: Absolutely, yes.

Josh Baez: This is going to be great. Well, then that brings us to the first question. With all of that in mind, there's a lot that you have your eyes on. What is one thing that you would really be proud of this year? What's something that really stands out to you?

Daniel Rocheleau: Something we've really been proud of as a company here at Iron Horse is just really helping our clients connect all the dots. We work with a lot of major organizations. There's lots of silos going on there, and just making sure that everyone kind of pulls together, and pools together, and works together before they kick off. Having your plan in place before you start.

We feel that the days of push and pray, those are gone. Those just really don't work anymore. We like to remind you that integrated marketing starts with understanding your audience segments and not just working from all your different departments, right? Everyone's firing and doing their own things. We want to bring them all together.

We want to remind them, understand your customer journey first. Understand where they're at, where their watering holes are, what they do, how they engage your brand. We really want to begin there.

Again, in matrix organizations, they have media departments, they have email teams, they have web teams, they have analytics departments. We need to make sure they're all firing on the same message. They're all pulling people through that customer journey in a unified way. So there isn't a disparate experience when the customer gets an email, or sees a media campaign, or goes to the website and they're like, "Wait a minute. Is this even the same company?"

So we see that. We see that. We'll see emails. Like I said, an email or online campaign. It's like, "Is this even the same company? Because you're telling me two very different things because those teams, they just weren't synergized." 

Josh Baez: Right. Well, that's great. I mean, I love the idea of connecting the dots, especially I think as we make our stride into 2023 and a lot of marketers are being forced to do a lot more with a lot less. And so I think that the connections that you have from dot to dot to dot, those are becoming even more impactful and even essential than they have ever been before. How have you, in your work, seen successful companies make sure that those dots are all connected?

Daniel Rocheleau: Well, again, it really starts off with that marketing strategy and plan. You really need to understand what it is you're trying to communicate, who it is you're trying to get in front of. One of the things I always fall back on is WIIFM, the what's in it for me, right? Making sure you're communicating to the customers what they want to hear, not what you want to tell them.

If you can take that lens off of, "We just developed a new product or service, and it has these three new features. We're going to push that on the customer." It's like, "Wait, did you ask them? Are they interested? And are you conveying it to them in a way that they realize there's a benefit to them versus just a new widget?"

So just really pushing the hard work up front and pulling the teams together up front and going... I was going to say singing Kumbaya. We're all on the same page, and we're all driving to that same goal. We just see a lot of disjoint, a lot of disconnectedness, especially in the larger organizations where that's not happening. So we'll stop, reset, pull everyone together, and make sure we're all on the same page.

Josh Baez: Yeah. That's so funny that you brought up the what's in it for me angle. I used to come from the agency world as well. It was tattooed right on my forehead every day, and I would look at it. Yeah, I mean, that's so essential, I think, especially as our buyers are getting busier. They're getting more and more on their plates without having the right resources and budgets to actually do everything that they want to do. So if you can help whittle that down to really what the most key essentials are for them that's going to impact them, you're going to find the most success there.

Daniel Rocheleau: Yeah, exactly. And it's interesting you say buyers too. To go off on a tangent here real quick, we've really been pushing hard on the ABM, the account-based marketing model. It's buyers. In this day and age, whenever you have a product or service, you're not talking to one person. You're not talking to the CEO.

Josh Baez: Never.

Daniel Rocheleau: Yeah, you've got a team at a table. We found up to six to eight people are involved in the buying decisions, and you have to talk to all of them. They all have different roles. They're all taking in content differently. So you really have to tune in your ABM strategy to get that product or service into a B2B or B2E kind of situation.

Josh Baez: Yeah, I love it. Well, then that brings us to the second question that I have for you, Daniel, and that is what is something that you saw a lot of companies may be struggling with this year?

Daniel Rocheleau: Yes, yes. And so ABM aside, I'm just saying that communication strategy, there's also RevOps, right? That's the whole theory of you've got marketing, you've got sales, you even got your customer success teams. They have to be working together. Again, it goes back to the matrix organizations, the silo organization.

We see marketing doing all this due diligence and effort, and even if they're unified and doing a good job, and then they have a lead that basically gets lobbed over the wall. Then sales... Whether or not they catch it is unknown. The way sales is approaching the customer is their own script, their own approach, their own way. They're not leveraging the information that marketing has already gathered and brought to the table.

Then even after the sale's over, the customer success team has a whole new conversation, has a whole new strategy. Again, the poor customer's like, "Wait a minute. Am I talking to the same company? The marketing I saw is not what the salesman is saying, not what the customer success team is doing." We have to unify those teams.

We really are pushing that RevOps model where even if they don't all report up in a hierarchical structure, which we'd like to see, we make sure they all sit at the table and understand, "Hey, marketing has driven them awareness, consideration, preference, and we know this about them. We've seen some intent signals. Sales, take that information and work with it." The customer success team can go into their CRM platform and see what that was, what sales told them, and then do a better job when they engage the customer on the back end too.

Josh Baez: Yeah, I love that. Is there a tool or a template or some secret sauce that you've found work particularly well when it comes to bringing everyone together? Because I know that a lot of companies are continuously trying to get more and more alignment between teams, but it is hard. It is a challenge. So if you have any tips, if you could share them?

Daniel Rocheleau: I think it's a change in mindset. We want to see marketing considered an extension of the sales team. We want to see sales considering their part of what they do as part of the whole marketing cycle. Again, it isn't marketing's over here, doing their thing, and warming up the client, and then we'll come in and take over, and we'll do our thing. It's like, no, you're all on the same team.

So again, if we can get the reporting structures set up, great. As far as tools, it's interesting. I've talked to some companies where they have two separate CRM platforms. They have the one for marketing-

Josh Baez: You're joking.

Daniel Rocheleau: ... and one for sales, and they're not sharing. We're like, "Oh my goodness. There's so much information that the sales guys just aren't aware of." So, yeah, definitely sitting down, looking at their tech stack platform, looking at what their process is, looking at their reporting structure, and trying to get that all merged together. It's funny. It's trying to form an internal partnership within the organization.

Daniel Rocheleau: I don't know if I would do it, but, yeah, that's the approach, right? It's getting everyone at the same table and reminding them if they're all on the same page, it's all revenue operations. You're all in this together.

Josh Baez: Yeah, yeah. I like that you mentioned the word, partnership. I think that that is becoming more and more of a driving force behind a lot of this stuff. I know that in my role, I put together a program, and I actually meet with our field marketing team who then enables our sales team. We have this very consistent line of progression of how information is getting communicated, who communicates what, very clear roles and responsibilities on ownership.

I think that that really helps us drive a lot of transparency as well between what is it that's working, what's not. I get feedback directly from sales on, "Hey, next time around when you write us some sales templates, maybe don't make it sound so markety."

Josh Baez: That's a really good piece of feedback, and you don't get that if you don't meet regularly with your team to make sure that they have what they need for success.

Daniel Rocheleau: You're hitting on another one of the key points that we had been pushing hard on this year is optimization, and you have to have that closed-loop feedback. You have to have the teams talking in order to optimize.

We see that in marketing. People are again working in silos. So the media team will do their thing. Then they'll optimize against click-through rates, but not looking at the goal, the ultimate objective you're trying to achieve. Again, marketing and sales aren't necessarily working together to optimize that process.

This whole work smarter, not harder thing is really coming into key as we see the shift in the economy, and we see downsizing, and we see less budgets or whatever. It's like you have to do more with less, and that means you have to look at your results. Lots of times, we're not looking at what our customers are telling us. They're engaging with the media. They're engaging with our sales teams.

They're telling us, and if we don't have the systems in place to capture that information, and we don't have the stop, look, and understand what they're saying, and then change, and adapt, and adjust what we're doing, we're wasting that information. That's not optimal.

Josh Baez: Definitely not. No. And it doesn't help you scale for growth in the next year either.

Daniel Rocheleau: No, no. Not at all.

Josh Baez: But then speaking of the next year, I would love to know what you're most focused on. What are your priorities for the team?

Daniel Rocheleau: Yeah. I mean, it really is that. We really are starting to focus on optimization primarily through intent data. We're seeing the world where security's kind of cracking down, and cookies are kind of going away. There's just less information coming in from that point of view.

We are seeing the advent of a lot of intent data platforms, and we are spending diligent time looking at that intent data. What does it mean? How can we react to it? We're really encouraging companies to embrace that data and work with that data.

To get into the minutias a little bit, it's like you see a piece of intent data come in, and you assign a value to it, but why? Why did you assign a value to it? That tells you what you should do with the data. If you placed a lot of weight on it... Someone read a white paper on your website. You're like, "Wow. That's worth a lot." Well, why? Why? Well, because mainly we might be close to conversion. Okay. Act on that data. Move. Get that in there so you can close that deal kind of thing.

So we're really pushing people to be intelligent about the data they're gathering internally with the full analytics stack and making sure it's integrated as well as intent data coming in from parties, and sitting down, and working with that. Again, getting away from the pushing, right? Getting smart about the marketing efforts you're putting out there.

Josh Baez: Yeah, you're peeling back the layers of data, and it's not just about the signal. It's about what that signal means, right?

Daniel Rocheleau: Right, right, right, right. And then nothing we do that we talked about earlier is partner marketing. I referenced it internally, but externally as well, we are funding great successful partner marketing.

If you've got someone who's got a product and someone else who's service and you're both trying to talk to the same audience, what better way to optimize your marketing resources than to work together and to package the deal? So that when someone goes to buy a product and they're like, "Oh, I don't know if I have this staff. I don't know how to implement this." Well, the service is coming bundled with it.

It's like, "Oh. Well, that just reduced my barrier to entry. Now, I feel okay buying this product because I know someone's going to help me with it. Someone's going to help me implement it." And so that whole one plus one equals three approach is... It's like we're really pushing. We're always looking for synergies between our clients where we can kind of encourage those partner marketing.

Josh Baez: Yeah. I love that. And I think too when it comes to partner marketing, and the future on engagement in general, and how audiences are engaging with us, it's becoming more and more apparent that we need to break out of our own little... You've been talking a lot about silos, but our own silo too as an organization and really demonstrate that we have the capabilities to work alongside others. When we do that, there is a better together story that can be told. We love that

Daniel Rocheleau: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All about that optimization, right?

Josh Baez: Yeah, yeah. And then that helps you scale too. I think that's what we've been talking about. It's about optimizing what you do, scaling your approach to make sure that you can do more with less, and really peeling back those layers to get more as to why are you doing the things that you're doing, and less about just checking boxes on a list.

Daniel Rocheleau: Exactly. Exactly. My nemesis, checking boxes, especially thoughtlessly. If it's a well-laid-out plan, then I'm okay with it. Yeah.

Josh Baez: Yeah, yeah. Well, we do have some time, Daniel, for one last question. What is one piece of advice that you would give to a marketer who wants to accelerate their momentum into the new year?

Daniel Rocheleau: Yeah. I think everything we've been talking about here, Josh, has just been the working smarter, not harder thing. I think historically, we've found something... Especially in the past couple of COVID years, whatever, we found something that worked, and we just threw money at it. It's like, "No, it's time to stop, be thoughtful, and optimize, and not just be loud."

We're entering a time where success is coming from a well-integrated and strategic approach where we're definitely looking, analyzing, optimizing. You're going to keep hearing me say optimize. The key is go back and reflect upon what you're doing and find a better way to do it. You have to do it with less resources. The best way you're going to do that is to sit down and do better planning.

Again, we talked about account-based marketing. We talked about RevOps. Let's go back to some of these well-thought-out strategies, and really double-click on them, and determine the best we can take action on them.

I'll leave you with what we started with here, the WIIFM, the what's in it for me. Remember that your job with marketing, sales, whatever, it's not trying to push upon your customer the new feature, the new thing you want to tell them. You have to understand your audience. You have to understand where they're at in the cycle, and what they're willing to hear, and what they want to hear if you're really going to close that deal. It's just understanding and having that empathy for your client, right? Understand, put yourself in their position, and that's how you want to approach the whole marketing.

Josh Baez: Yeah. Well, that's great. Daniel, thank you so much. This has been such a great chat with you today. This is Daniel Rocheleau of Iron Horse. Thank you so much to everyone who watched our session.

Don't forget that by watching up to 10, between now and December 22nd, you'll be entered to win a bundle of prizes from puzzles to gift boxes and ice cream. I am your host, Josh Baez. From the both of us, we wish you a very happy holiday and a wonderful new year. Thank you all so much.