Karim Azar: Turning Data Into Demand: A Media Engine That Builds Pipeline

Sourabh:
Thank you for joining us, Karim. I'm going to jump right in and address sort of the elephant in the room, because you guys were famous for this a few years ago and we need to explain it, okay?


Karim:
Let's do it.


Sourabh:
Reltio, as a team, why did sales and marketing, why did you shift from the traditional sort of leads-based metrics to direct opportunity and pipeline tracking?


Karim:
Yeah, absolutely. So thank you for having me, first of all, appreciate being here. So we looked at our business, now we're well into our third year in this transformation and we were a very typical lead-to-opportunity model, right? So you've got your good old 2012 serious decisions, right? Lead, MQL, SAL, SQL, opportunity, close one, we're measuring conversion rates, working our way through the funnel. And we looked at that and we saw that we can generate MQLs, I mean, one of the easiest things for a demand marketer in the world to do is generate an MQL, right? Partly because we own the scoring model and we own what we call an MQL, right? So it's like, hey, just create whatever you want. And we were delivering all these things and saying, hey, here's all the pipeline and it would flush out and things wouldn't work. We wouldn't get down into sales, we wouldn't get into a sales pipeline. Our win rates were pretty microscopic, we were a growing organization, right?

So we were just trying to pump up the funnel, the idea is fill the top and it'll fall out through the bottom and you forget about everything that falls out through the sides when you do that. So we looked at that and we coupled that with the idea of we have a product that's high six figures, right? We've got a product that takes nine months in the sales process and we're like, you know there's not any one single person at any organization who's going to say, I am going to buy that, right? You've got to bring in a handful of people in that buying group, right? In order to move that opportunity through and have that confidence. So what we did is rather than, you know, let's just go and say, hey, we're going to hit every company under the sun, right? We looked at who do we actually want to sell to, right? Came up with, this is our ideal customer profile that we would get from any organization. We've narrowed it down to specific industries that we want to play in and then we went and did a whole lot of contact building at first.

So we actually started out in a sense of, let's create a database of organizations that we can sell to. Let's go try to find every contact at those organizations that we can find. hey don't know who we are and let's target at a macro level those accounts, right? So this is not ABM, right? ABM marketing is a very tailored custom program that you focus in on a small number of accounts and do really cool things and move a funnel there. This is truly, you know, ABX, as you see kind of out there. And, you know, we started in a place where I think our first iteration, we had 15,000 accounts, something crazy like that, right? And we're like, we're going to try to target 15,000 accounts.

We took those accounts. We built out a marketing funnel that was account focused as opposed to lead focused. So we actually have, you know, things that show, you know, this is what the funnel looked like when it was a lead motion. Here's what it looks like when an account motion. And at the top of the funnel, you know, basically everybody who we want to sell to, right, whether they know who we are, whether we know if they have any kind of use case that we can adjust to, whether they know they have a problem that we can solve, right, we, you know, we put them into this, we categorize them by where their interest is. So using lots of data, lots of intent signals all throughout our marketing tech stack, you know, and put them into stages in the funnel, you know, at the very top, we'd call them suspects. These are people who they could be very interesting people that we could sell to, but they have no idea who Reltio is.

They have no idea if they have a problem that we can solve. They may not be out in the market searching for anything, right? As the interest grows and we see that on our web traffic, we see that through sixth sense signals, we see that through a whole bunch of other intent signals that, you know, we're feeding into our systems, we move that account down our funnel. And, you know, so the next stage down, we call it detected. And then we have an engaged stage and then a prioritized stage. And then finally, a qualification stage. So what it did was it changes my goals as a demand marketer to not necessarily focus in on getting that one person to fill out a form and say, hey, here's an MQL that they asked for a demo. It's more so pulling in and like, how do I take this group of accounts and generate awareness, generate interest in them? It's truly the coupling of brand and demand in a lot of sense. So when we started out with the project, let me just finish on this one part here, you know, 75, 80% of our target account list had no clue who Reltio was or if there was a model out there or anything that, you know, a buy in motion, anything like that.

A year later, we flipped the ratio. So we actually brought 80% of them down now into a marketing funnel who are active people that we can go out and reach out to. Because we know through a lot of our systems, through a lot of our intelligence, that there's a there there. There's something happening in that account that we can now target to and actually speak to them at a different level than just doing that broad awareness.


Sourabh:
And when you're doing this at the account level, right? If we take the methodology, how does this impact the job titles that you're targeting or the number of people in an account? Do a certain number of people need to be in an account, they need to be qualified to move to the next state or can it be driven by one champion as long as they're the right job title?


Karim:
So the funnel can be driven by the one champion, right? But you're the group of people that you're going after is going to move together through the funnel. Right, so with that activity. So we're going to see, especially at that top place, you're just going to see interactions happening, right?

But you're the group of people that you're going after is going to move together through the funnel. Right, so with that activity. So we're going to see, especially at that top place, you're just going to see interactions happening, right? So you can do some IP lookups, de-identification on the website, different things like that. So we can actually see what organizations are on our website, right? We don't necessarily know the individual people. We don't know if it's the same person doing 100 things. We don't know if it's 100 people doing one thing, to be honest with you. We just see those interactions happening at that account. It's like, okay, there's something there. And what that does is it informed our media programs, right? And we were able to change the goals on our media programs. So now, rather than looking at a click-through rate that takes somebody to a forum and then wanting to see a conversion, I just care about driving that traffic. I have campaigns that are running to these accounts, right? Just to bring them onto the site and get them to interact. Don't care if they're downloading anything. Just want them to do stuff, right?

Do emotions, do different things. Then we can pair that up and match that as, oh, hey, we're seeing that account show up at a webinar. We're seeing that account show up at our trade show booth. Those emotions are now feeding into the system and actually helping to move down that marketing funnel, which changes our media campaigns on where we target them. So now we're going to start feeding them more content, more things that are actually driving to a registration, driving to downloading a white paper. Some things are gated, some things are not. Some things are soft gated. We're doing a bunch of different tactics and a bunch of different things because, again, the goal is just to move them down the funnel. All the same time, we are pairing with our BDRs, right? We're talking about this in the prep part, right? We don't have an inbound BDR team. We don't have an outbound BDR team. We have an all-bound BDR team. That's what our BDR leader likes to call it. They've got to not only react to everything that's coming in, but they are aligned on those same accounts and as these accounts are moving into different stages in our funnel, we are allowing them to go fishing in a pond as opposed to an ocean because now they're going to go prospecting into accounts where we know there's activity happening and we know that there's interest there and they understand who Reltio is.

Three years ago, a prospect would come by our trade show booth and have no idea who Reltio is. And our sales sellers would have to do all kinds of education. This is who we are, what we do. It's what caught your eye to come here. Today, all the feedback we're getting from our feet on the ground at trade show booths are like, it's so cool that everybody can come in and start having that conversation at the technology level instead of an awareness level. They understand who we are. This is purely because we've been able to sync all of our marketing programs into this one funnel, measure them all the same way, right? And have them all work together, right? To bring those accounts down through into our marketing funnel and then ultimately get them into a qualification stage.


Sourabh:
And so this has been really fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about how you sequence the engagement or what content or what media generally works better through the suspect, through the detected, through the various stages?
Just some examples. I know there's not one size fits all, but just so the audience understands.

Karim:
Absolutely. So we look at our audience across all of our industries and we have them sitting in these horizontal levels coming through our funnel, right? And we target the messages differently. So at a suspect level, again, these are people who may or may not know who RelTO is, may or may not know that we do demand data management, right? MDM software, right? Anything like that. That's what our messaging is about, who Reltio is. You have a data quality issue. You have a data management issue. You are struggling with different silos of data. Come check us out. Pure awareness play. Land them onto a page that just gives them education. It could be a blog post. It could be a high-level product page, not a deep technical page. Just something to get them to understand and to learn that, hey, there's a solution out there for a problem that you may be having.

As they move into a detected phase, that message then starts to shift as to like, why are you having this problem and that there's a solution out there to help fix it? It's a subtle thing. So now we're not having to necessarily talk about who RelTO is because there's an awareness of who Reltio is, right? Now we can start talking about the pain points that they have, the different aspects of things that they are looking to solve, okay?

And as they move into our engage stage, at this point, we're going to start trying to put people behind the motions, right? So we're going to start driving them to pages that we can maybe match an email address to, that maybe we can, it's a little bit more lead gen kind of aspect, but at this point, we've done all of that awareness and all of that learning and everything. Now we want to start putting things out, and it's not necessarily so that we can feed them to somebody to go call them, right? It's just to start putting names behind them so we can now put them into actual nurture programs. We can do some AI research or outreach. We can do a bunch of different activities at that level to get people more engaged and doing more interactions on our website, do more interactions, invite them to events, invite them to webinars, do all kinds of different things like that.

And at that level, we're also now talking about, hey, Reltio is a leader in this, right? Fortunately, you know, we've been a Forrester Wave leader, so we can promote that. We've, you know, we have Gartner accolades that we can point to, and it's like, you've got a problem. We have a solution for you, and we're one of the better ones out there, right? So get them to interact with that kind of contents and that kind of contents and work through, you know, those motions.

And then as they come into that last stage, now we're starting to try to fill out a buying team, right? So now we're working with our BDRs to like, okay, we have an account here that's doing all of these different things. Let's start trying to get multiple people doing these things, doing these actions and doing these activities. And once we get three of those, right? Then that actually is going to get prioritized to a BDR that, okay, this is an account that you need to reach out to get some time on the calendar and actually get them into a meeting, right? Move them to that point.

The equivalent of an MQL is way up the funnel in this process. So it's at that third stage down, not the fifth stage down where it used to be. So it used to be, or the equivalent, I'm sorry, the other way around. The MQL would have been at that third stage down where they would just have downloaded that initial piece of content, signed up for a newsletter and we would have sent them over to the BDRs and say, go get a meeting with these guys.

Now we need to have those people do multiple activities. We time bound it. So they need to do multiple activities within the last 60 days. And we need to get three people doing multiple activities within the last 60 days to get the equivalent of what one MQL used to be. And what that's done at the bottom of that marketing funnel going into sales is it's changed our conversion rates into sales pipeline and it's driven all the way down to win rates. So instead of going from a 2% at the top to the bottom, we're now at like 30, 40% from top to bottom.

Sourabh:
And with this approach, right? Given that a lot of you've got very structured content, right? You've got very structured activities or let's call them experiences, right? That you want to hit certain goals around, like you said, awareness, right? Then around familiarity, then around credibility, right? Then around product strength and positioning, right? And then probably, you know, just your natural vendor strength. You want to work with us for more than one thing. So you're working through all of that. You've got content for that. Do you treat that differently if it's your domain versus say a social media platform versus say a third-party platform or an event? Or are they all just channels and you're just driving measurements?

Karim:
They’re all just channels, and we’re measuring them all in the same way. That’s a key thing, right? So even at a trade show, we’ll categorize the prospects that are coming in based on the conversation that they have because of the content that they’re absorbing at that show is different. If they’re flying by our booth to grab the free pen—free pad of paper, whatever it is—we’re not going to give that the same kind of credence as somebody who actually sat in and had a conversation with a rep on the floor, maybe even did a quick demo on the floor or something like that. That’s going to be at a very different level, right? And they’re going to move down that funnel a lot faster. And it’s the same kind of measurement that we’re going to do on the website. It’s the same kind of measurement we’re going to do in our organic traffic, same kind of measurement we’re going to do in our organic social as well as our paid social. Like, they’re all going to act differently.

And it’s interesting because we actually see it in the campaigns that we’re running—like how it’s affected that. We see it in how it’s affected our channel spend across things. So like in that old MQL model, right? Search was huge. Paying for Google Search was gigantic. Like, that was—of my demand spend—that was three quarters of my demand spend because I just needed to get form fills. So you go after people searching for the intent keywords that you care about, send them to a demo request form, get them to fill out the form, and there—boom—done, right? I can justify that spend right there. I generated that person. We’ve completely flipped it. We’re spending 80% on awareness now. And we’ve seen no drop-off on conversions—on the actual number of conversions out of our search campaigns—even though we’re spending a quarter of what we used to spend, right? Because what’s coming through is so much more higher intent, so much more qualified already, right? That we can bring that into the funnel in a much, much faster manner.

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Sourabh:
Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. And so how does this play out? And I know we only have like, I think five, maybe even less than five minutes left. So if you have a question for Karim, throw it in. These are short, Kareem. We always run out of time, right? But how does this then equate to your relationship and the BDR's work after the rep is engaged? Does marketing continue working on the account? Because there could be other people in the account that you would then discover before a rep would as they’re working through the ones that are most engaged.

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Karim:
Yeah, so it changes some of the tactics that we have. So now once we get to something in the sales pipeline, we start running different kinds of programs, different kinds of campaigns to that account with them in pipeline in mind, right? So it's no longer, hey, check out ROI, hey, we’re the best, hey, we’re... Because they’ve gone through all of that already. Now it's gonna be like, check out our innovations, right? Now it's gonna be, all right, we are a very, very good fit in that data IT space. We are trying to broaden our awareness to the rest of the line of business. So let’s start going and bringing in those contacts and those outside influencers that could be a beneficiary to when IT implements Reltio inside the organization, right? As to why marketing is gonna care about it, to why ops is gonna care about it, why finance is gonna care about this, right? And we start building out those contacts, right? At the same time.

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Sourabh:
Yeah, and I mean, now you're spreading that familiarity across the account, right? And so, it's RelTO showing up in more conversations, which is what a rep wants to hear, right? Is, “Hey, were you guys reaching out or did you do something? 'Cause someone just asked me about you.”

Reps love to hear that from their champion. It's like, “Well really, what do they want?” It's like, “Let me sign them up.”

Yeah, exactly. Have you had—and I'm gonna end on this 'cause we're gonna run out of time, Kareem, right? It's slightly unrelated, but I can't help but ask you—have you guys been able to do anything like this in such a structured manner around renewals, around keeping accounts?

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Karim:
We are having open conversations about that right now, to be honest with you. And short answer from a marketing point of view—yes and no, right? I think that there is a level of, when you have customers that are contractually renewed and they’re happy and they’re working, it’s easy, right? But I think the value that marketing can bring to them is helping with that onboarding process, building out the awareness inside the accounts that are there, and frankly, keeping accounts off of the worry lists, right? 'Cause every sales team has a worry list, right? Like, “Hey, this is an account we’re worried about.” Fortunately, ours is not gigantic, but I think the best place marketing can play in is keeping accounts off of that. And we do that in sync with our CSMs, in sync with our professional services, and all the people who are touching current customers.

Sourabh:
This is wonderful man. I might need to bring you back. It's like, we kind of did a part one, there might be a part two, you know?


Karim:
I'll be back with another funnel.

Sourabh:
Exactly. Well, you clearly love what you do. Thank you so much and thank you everyone for joining us. If you have any other questions, please reach out and I'll make sure they get to Karim.