Aaron Stein: Marketing KPIs that Matter for your Executive Leadership Team

Sourabh:
Thank you for joining me and Aaron. Thank you so much. I have so many questions for you. You've had quite the career, some huge brands, and the work you're doing now is very exciting, as we'll talk about. Not everybody gets to be in a role as strategic as this, right? Many of us are just grinding, grinding, grinding, right? Getting results for the field or the sales team every week. You've got that bigger picture, which is, it's a wonderful position. So I'm going to sort of kick us off, Aaron, with when we think about results, when we think about reporting, when we think about KPIs from everything that marketing does, right? Can you start with just the foundation at Infor, and also across your industry? How do you guys think about how you should be measuring KPIs and results when you're reporting up to your VPs or your CMO?

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Aaron:
Yeah, it's a great question. So it's kind of multifaceted. You definitely start from a KPI perspective. It's definitely program-specific, right? So there are definitely aggregated benchmarks that you look at across every delivery, but definitely at a program-specific level. Whether it's a particular campaign or a field-level activation, you certainly want to look at it based on channel as well.

But fundamentally, you're looking, I think, from my perspective, and I've always looked at it from kind of looking with the end in mind, right? What are you trying to accomplish? What is the overall outcome? Are you trying to drive butts and seats or registrations or engagement metrics and so forth?

So it's kind of a vague answer, but with an intention of you really have to inspect and kind of start with the end in mind, look at the objectives. But it could have a wide-ranging set of measurement. It could be, again, KPIs, could be registration data. We're on a session today. You would want to know at the end of this session how many people registered, what is my engagement opportunity with them based on their persona type, how is their score? There's a lot of different components to that that are fairly complex, right?

So it's not an easy answer to say you want to look at views, you want to look at registrations, you want to look at MQLs if you're looking at a funnel metric. You really need to truly inspect kind of the journey mapping and think about kind of that ultimate outcome from a value-based component to the business. What is the ultimate goal going to be in delivery to the business? Pipeline is certainly where we want to go, but there are top, middle, and bottom of funnel components that you would look at and evaluate.

Sourabh:
And I think that's a really good sort of level set for where most of our clients are, right? Which will be a director or a senior director or even a senior manager from a marketing position. So they're close enough to the program where the transactional, as you mentioned, the transactional metrics or measurements would be really helpful.

I'm going to take this up a level. You talked about value creation and impact to the business, right? A CMO can't be looking at hundreds of measures like this across their global programs. So how do you, or in your experience, how do you report up to CMOs? How do you explain, one, what the impact of the business is when it's such a large business across so many regions and industries? And then secondarily, are there learnings or more of the why behind what's happening in marketing that they really want to know about?

Aaron:
Yes. Again, multifaceted. I'll jump straight kind of in the insights perspective, right? So it's one thing to deliver compelling results tied to an execution or a longer-term activation. It's another thing, and I think it's important. I don't think it's always inherently there, but you really need to inspect the learnings and the insights and think about what are you going to do as an outcome of what you learned, right?

So is it going to affect change from an acknowledgement that it didn't achieve the intended results or outcomes? That's okay. But what are you going to do to advance and optimize? You crushed your KPIs, but what are you going to do from a learning perspective to continue advancement?

So jumping straight into the insights and the ability to translate the outcomes is really important and equally as important from a measurement perspective. Just take an event, for example — you would, again, going back to the earlier part of the conversation, want to know how many people registered, how many attended, what were some engagement metrics, and did you have questions during the session? At an acute level, you always want to be able to summarize what did that thing drive from a value creation standpoint and did it meet expectations?

But I would say the most important part of this when you roll up to leadership or your supervisors is you would want to definitely be able to convey the value, the impact, and more importantly, the learnings. But I would almost say the most important part is what are you going to do next? You learned, you did, you learned, you potentially optimized — and the optimized is kind of co-joined with what are you going to do next, right?

If you're not thinking with those kinds of measured components, I think you really need to inspect why you even did it and how you would advance it. I'm a big proponent of laddering things together, telling stories that build, not detached siloed activities. Those happen, but I think it's far more advantageous to think about — you did A, B, maybe you jumped to D, but you need to really think about how those things connect. Is there a breadcrumb trail to tie them together?

To summarize, it's really about offering the insights. We're here from a strategic perspective — there’s faith in marketers to do their job. What is the ultimate value that the program brought and what are you going to do to evolve it, optimize it, and affect any changes that would be needed?

Sourabh:
Yeah, I love that. I think, like you said, there's a hard metric. So you were going to do a thing. Did we do the thing? If we did the thing, so what? And then I think this is the key insight you just touched on a couple of times there — okay, now what?

The so what? And the now what? I think you're right. I think executives are always looking at, well, what am I going to do in the future? Because it's the only thing they can actually control, right? They're not normally hung up on the past as much as we might be running the programs themselves.

I'm going to throw a really difficult example at you and then we'll switch gears and talk about the same sort of practice, but when we're reporting outside of marketing. So a really difficult example, but a really crucial one for what you do. And for a lot of tech brands, let's say you're trying to make a decision to invest in an analyst report.

There's very little control in that scenario and there's a lot of hope, but there's not a lot of control. It's not yours and it's valuable to clients or prospective clients because it's not yours. How do you evaluate a decision like that? It's a significant investment and it could be a game changer or it could be a dud.

Aaron:
It's table stakes, right? The analyst firms provide great assessments of the wide variety of products and the categories. So it's often more of a table stakes kind of element — we're going to acquire this report. Our team has been very intentional and stood up a programmatic structure to ensure that from the acquisition of the report, there's a structural kind of integrity to how that report gets consumed in the organization.

We work closely with our AR team and then we, as a kind of a layer, work with the AR team to ensure there's utility and actual activation in the organization. You purchase those reports, which are fairly expensive but have tremendous value. Often historically, you purchase those reports, they live on a landing page, they might get a press release and some initial attention, but then they kind of wane or just sit on the shelf.

We've been more intentional, and we have a member of the team that's really focused heavily on integrating with the AR team and keeping the duration of that report alive for, let's say, one to two years. That's programmatically aligned with media, sales enablement, marketing enablement, and integration into inline activities. So it has visibility at events or is also something you might add into a console for a program like this.

It's about perpetually keeping the thing alive so it has value. Furthermore, we're looking to also understand the impact downstream. Sales would typically say they're valuable and needed, but what we don't always have clear measurement on is — did it help close or impact deals? As we move forward and further value creation from those reports, we would want to know: did it affect 10% of deals, which is pretty powerful if you look at average deal sizes?

So there's more work to be done in terms of understanding the actual consumption rate, but the idea is to ensure that those have a place, a plan, an implementation, and a measurement.

Sourabh:
Thank you, you segued naturally into where I was going to ask the next question, which is about sales. So putting aside what you and I have done for decades, putting aside demand gen, putting aside a certain number of leads in a certain number of target accounts — that's your bread and butter when you're working with field teams or sales, right, or BDRs.

Putting that aside, in your experience, what does senior leadership in sales want to hear? What do they want to see from marketing, and why?


Aaron:
It’s funnel entry and funnel movement and funnel impact, right? So what are you doing at a top-line funnel acquisition perspective? That’s across different capabilities within marketing, but everything is geared towards connecting with that potential prospective buyer at the point of challenge, pain, or other — and the intersective offering, solution, and benefit.

Not just an “in for” story, but a true connection: you have this challenge, we have this solution, let’s offer that value in a conversation. So trying to win hearts and minds, kind of to speak to that.

And then when we look at just the funnel, we align on a funnel narrative — top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel. We’re trying to capture that engagement into the funnel, ultimately from a scoring methodology, to get that individual or prospective customer engaged in the right type of activation so they become a lead.

They become a candidate for our BDR or SDR organization to talk to, get scoped, armed, and enabled so they can have a fulfilling conversation. Hopefully, if the timing aligns and the needs align, those individuals go into the funnel, and then further downstream, we can report aggregate and very specific on stage progression, value creation from a pipeline metric.

We can look at win rates. We can look at pretty much any metric you can think of and name. Those are the specific levels of conversations we have with sales leadership and organizational leadership to ensure, again, connect the dots back: we did this, we optimized, and we drove this.

It’s not about just an isolated thing— it’s about organizational value, benefit, and outcome perspective. That’s what we’re really geared at, and those are the measurements and conversations often had from a leadership and executive perspective.

Sourabh:
And I think that's superb what you said there about you're measuring the we — right? Like, what did we do together? Yeah. How did this deal come to be together? Not just, hey, I'm focusing on marketing.

Did this sales wants to see what's working or not in sales? Right. They've got quotas to close. Right. And I think we sympathize with our sales colleagues.

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Aaron:
Yeah, I just, just you know, you talk about the sales marketing dynamic. Right. I think we're trying to, you know, eliminate that. And it's more about a collaborative kind of all all, you know, you know, everyone, all everything rises together.

So we're really trying to not think in terms of a siloed, really thinking about, again, the value creation is really an operative term. Right. Because it's it's about what are we creating in value? Who does it, how it gets done. Everyone's collaborative. And we all kind of win if we look at it that way in that mindset.


Sourabh:
Right. And I think the newest term for it is go to market. Right. Like that's where we go to market teams. Right. We're all just bringing something to market and keeping customers — right, retention.

OK, now I'm going to switch gears on another difficult decision. And I'm not holding back. I'm just asking you all the hard questions. OK, I only have you for like six more minutes.

So you're in a role where you get visibility across Infor's global campaigns and industry campaigns. And you have experience working with field teams and industry solutions teams.

How do you decide how you're going to invest in, say, different countries that want assets localized or personalized or customized? Versus no, that's not the right investment for us from a campaign perspective. Those are very difficult decisions to make.

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Aaron:
Yeah, we're a global organization. Right. So we every country you can think of, we serve every priority across the gamut of enterprise software, cloud software we serve.

So when we architect campaign structure or hierarchies, you know, starts with message and thematics and kind of the umbrella nature. And then you look at the industry specificity, which is a big focus for Infor.

So we look at all the intangibles and all the criteria. We also obviously have prioritization from senior leadership in terms of where we focus. When we look at implementation and activation in regions, we work closely with our field marketing team and the regional teams to ensure their requirements are captured.

Sometimes there's an opt in, sometimes there's an overarching statement that we must do it in these languages. We really look at it from, again, requirements back to kind of practicality. Right. So translating things is not always easy. Right. And it's not an exact science in terms of for a lot of reasons.

But we certainly look at it from a criteria based requirement perspective. And then when we work with our regional teams to implement a translated asset, we're intentional in terms of looking at the utilization and the consumption rate. Right. The consumption is really a key term.

You know, we want to do the work, but we'd like to also ensure there's impact. So field marketing teams in our organization, they build their inline plans and they have their activations where they're going to deliver it in line with a content syndication program or something like that.

So a lot of the build and the run component takes shape there. And then we look, you know, we really just measure. We really want to understand, you know, was the the language where the 10 languages that we produce this content and did it merit, did it did it result in the right level of activation?

Was it, you know, more more truthful? Was it worth the time to do so? And I think we need to critically that's not just for this, but critically assess those kind of things, because there's there's a heavy, you know, man hour or persona person hour investment in this type of thing.

So it's really just kind of critically assessing, but it all is informed by the strategy, the goals and the outcomes, you know, and again, global organization. There's a there's a baseline expectation that you deliver and have multi, you know, multi language delivery.


Sourabh:
Yeah, of course. Right. I mean, otherwise you can't succeed globally. Right. It's just it's just the way it works. And opportunities come from everywhere.

So I'm going to step back because I just want to quickly summarize. So we talked about how you're reporting upwards. Right. And then the metrics that matter, the KPIs that matter as we get to leadership and especially insights, things we're learning, what we're going to do next.

And then we talked about how you're delivering to the regions. And obviously, as you know, in the field, in the region, sales and marketing are very much glued together. It's just they're smaller numbers. They work much tighter together than you would like a larger headquarters.

Right. Yeah. The third category is product marketing. And you were a product marketing manager earlier in your career. Like I said, you've done it all. How do you look at reporting or measurements when it comes to product? Does marketing have a stance or visibility or any sort of dashboard about how products are being affected by your efforts?

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Aaron:
Yeah, it's a great question. We have a really tight synergy and alignment with our solution marketing, which is akin to product marketing in the organization. So from a messaging hierarchy and architecture, we rely heavily on the solution marketing teams.

You know, I think it goes back to, you know, from an informing product. I don't know. I don't know about that as much as just the influence of production of assets in line with a release cycle or with a product delivery, you know, and how is it being, you know, again, utility, you know, creation with the with the utilization in mind, if you think about like that.

So there's a launch. We're going through a launch cycle. Everyone comes together in a kind of a pod model. It's led by a project manager. We all come together from a capability standpoint and kind of scale what's our role and our function in this activation.

So we look at it from a launch perspective, but also from a inline campaign utilization and a field marketing utilization when it's new product functionality, you know, or whatever it might be. It's it's around connecting all the dots. So, you know, message creation. What's the real estate or the landscape where the tools are going to be used?

And that those those consumption rates or, you know, reactions to the messages, feedback into, you know, the kind of the machine to inform, you know, how did it resonate? You know, do we have enough exposure? Was there enough? You know, what's the adoption rate of a particular release?

So there's, you know, it's multifaceted as we've been talking about. There's no clear one answer for a lot of these things. But, you know, it's around, in my opinion, and kind of history experience has been it's about informing, again, the consumption adoption and, you know, did it meet the expectations?

You know, if you do a launch event and you have 2000 people register and attend, that's pretty compelling. But if your total addressable market is 100000, you got, you know, X percent of penetration. So you really need to just look at message.

Right. And, you know, and just customer behaviors, perspective, customer behaviors. Right. They're different. They've evolved pretty much every year since we've been at this game. And they might might be more frequent than that with, you know, newer technologies and just, you know, how people behave.

So you've just got to be able to adopt and really think thoroughly and thoughtfully in terms of not only who are you targeting, how are you targeting them and what the messages are. And you look at all that data, those interaction points, and you think, you know, you come back to it and say, it worked, it didn't work.

Again, it informed this. You know, we spent all this time on this product. It's an amazing product. And now we need to go do more, you know, and think about different ways to kind of engage the target audience.

Sourabh:
OK, thank you. I'm going to ask one last question. Again, it's not an easy one. You can think about it. You can handle it however you want.

So you I mean, you've been deep in data for decades like me. Right. And you have a passion for it. You love it. Right.

But there must be things, there must be KPIs that you wish you had that you don't.

So from a marketer's perspective, right, are there things you wish you could measure? But you know right now that we can't. Is there anything?

Aaron:
It's a good question. And I think I can think of one specific thing. I think the exciting part, the thing that excites me as a marketer kind of in this time frame is we're at the kind of just at the doorstep of so much that we don't know that's coming. Right. AI, you know, and other things, you know.

And I think there are going to be so much we're going to be so much more data rich in the near term than we even are today. And so I don't have one specific thing that I want, but I think the thing that excites me and how I'd answer it is there's more to come.

And I think that's where we can all really be excited about, you know, how's that going to inform us? How's that going to educate us? And how's that really going to impact and drive, you know, the collective outcomes in a better way? And how are we going to learn from it? And what are we going to see kind of how things are going to evolve?

And I think that's really the exciting thing that we should all really be thinking about. Not that it's going to replace our jobs. It's really going to give us more standing to become experts in particular domains and think about, you know, delivery and outcomes and really doing probably cooler stuff than we could ever imagine.

Sourabh:
I mean, that's such a positive note to end on here. We've run out of time. I didn't know I was booking a motivational speaker.

That's a great pitch to give, you know, people that are getting their marketing degrees. You have no idea how good it's going to be with the data that you're going to have.

Aaron:
We'll check back in a couple of years if this was true.

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Sourabh:
If this is true, exactly. Well, we're right back and we still don't know anything.

Well, Aaron, I can't thank you enough. This has been wonderful. And again, we just scratched the surface.

So I'd love to, like, maybe in a year.

Aaron:
Well. appreciate you having me. Thank you. It's great.


Sourabh:
Yeah, no, absolutely. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Take care.