Defining Moneyball Marketing

In this blog's inaugural post, I introduced the term Moneyball Marketing. I now want to take a few minutes to define it.

The definition will relate closely to the Demand Generation function within marketing so I will start there. I was recently asked by a colleague, "What's the difference between  Demand Generation and Lead Generation?" The difference is stark. To answer I explained that lead generation implies a myopic, top-of-the-funnel activity, while demand generation goes both much broader and deeper – if you think of business as having Supply and Demand, then the Demand side of the business encompasses all possible avenues for the creation of new revenue and a “lead” is just one piece of the process for one of these avenues.

Demand Generation also includes the programs to nurture those leads; the systems that define the qualification of the lead as marketing qualified, the programs that enable sales to be most effective with turning that lead to an opportunity, and that opportunity to a win; the customer marketing programs to nurture and expand that customer relationship over time; as well as other avenues to generate incremental business including additional channels, referral sources or influencers.

So putting pen to paper (or cursor to rich text editor, as the case may be), my definition of Moneyball Marketing is partnering with sales to build measurable and predictable MQL flow through all available sources of new business, measured by MQL and Opportunity attainment, pipeline impact and business growth.

Yes that works as a definition.

Marketing and sales partnership – check.

Measurement and moving to predictive – check. 

Moving beyond leads or even MQL stats to driving pipeline impact and business growth – check.

So that can work as our “dictionary definition”, and beyond that let me share three key behaviors of a Moneyball Marketer:

(1) You run marketing like a business

I find this to be the most fundamental concept. Simply put, when making decisions, you are looking at it to answer the question “What’s best for the business?”. Not what’s best for marketing, not what’s best for you as an individual, or your boss, or your direct reports. Moneyball Marketing is about making well thought out, data driven business decisions every single day.

(2) You consider all opportunities for revenue growth

Moneyball Marketing and Demand Generation are liberating as they consist of all possible avenues to increase revenue, so a partial list:

• Programs to acquire new leads and nurture them

• Maximizing conversion rates through buying process including MQI-to-MQL, MQL-to-Opportunity (e.g. an Evaluation Process) and Win Rate

• Efficient and effective systems to support marketing and sales during the revenue process

• Digital Marketing programs to maximize impact of website as a demand generation tool

• Outbound sales prospecting programs

• Programs via channel - driving demand gen programs through channel partners

• Customer marketing to drive additional customer business through customer education and communications

(3) You are an advocate for Sales within Marketing

Sales management and  reps are incredibly busy, so the Moneyball Marketer has the opportunity to take the overall objectives of sales, which is to maximize revenue short term and long term, and add strategic value and be the advocate for sales within marketing, allowing sales management to focus on driving results for the month & quarter while getting their interests represented within the Sales & Marketing organization.

Next time I'll share the Seven Reasons I love Moneyball Marketing.

Introducing Moneyball Marketing

In January 2010 I moved from LiveTechnology, a growth startup with funding from Omnicom Group that for nearly a decade gave me amazing access to the top integrated marketing talent in the world to Avitage, a B2B marketing specialist firm outside of Boston. The timing could not have been better. Over those next few months I became deeply engrained in a fast moving, rapidly evolving B2B marketing landscape that had three emerging concepts.

Inbound Marketing – HubSpot defined and took ownership of this concept, stating that the new age of marketing was one not led by outbound, disruption tactics, but fueled by a content driven web presence that attracted prospects. HubSpot became the technology of choice, particularly for small businesses aiming to drive top of the funnel lead generation through their websites.

Content Marketing – I started following Joe Pulizzi who espoused the virtues of content marketing. Some came to say “All marketing is content marketing” (to dismiss the notion of content marketing as a new insight), but the point regardless was that the value of thinking like a publisher and creating content to serve the needs of your audience was going to be a key driver for marketing success more than ever before. And I noted in this interview with Aberdeen Group, Content Marketing is essential to Inbound Marketing success and is in fact bigger in scope than Inbound Marketing as it fuels interactions with buyers at all stages including existing customers.

Revenue Marketing - The momentum of Revenue Marketing trailed a bit from the other two concepts, I seem to remember both Marketo and Eloqua stepping into that theme around early 2011. To me, Revenue Marketing meant that the marketer could now impact and measure all the way through to opportunity/pipeline and wins in connecting marketing investments and programs to business impact.

Interestingly, as I Google search these phrases today, we can see how they compare in terms of broad appeal:

• 117,000 results for Revenue Marketing
• 1,140,000 results for Inbound Marketing (10X Revenue Marketing)
• 5,570,000 results for Content Marketing (48X Revenue Marketing)

So the Revenue Marketers are a more concentrated bunch, you might say, while the other concepts have more a broader following. Which is interesting because it's Revenue Marketing that drives sustained growth, through a variety of strategies, of which one will be Content Marketing. So you can make the case that Revenue Marketing is a much broader concept than Content Marketing in spite of only having 1/50th the buzz.

Which gets us to, the compilation of all three of these -- Moneyball Marketing. Moneyball Marketing is Revenue Marketing with a focus on data-driven business growth. Moneyball makes the mainstream connection to say we will do to Marketing what Billy Beane did to Baseball.... an analytics driven approach to building success. 

Moneyball Marketing requires a systematic and programmatic approach to scaling revenue through a marketing-to-sales end to end process.

Within this space we’ll discuss how to drive Moneyball Marketing including areas such as the Closed Loop Marketing process and systems required to power this and all the aspects of Demand Generation required to maximize the impact including digital marketing, marketing programs such as webinars,  customer marketing, influencer marketing, teleprospecting and sales prospecting programs.

I’ll get us started in the next post by defining three key behaviors of the Moneyball Marketer.