It’s that time of year again. No, not for holiday shopping, although if you haven’t started yet, what are you waiting for? Instead, we’re talking about the time of year when marketers everywhere are busy planning for next year. The lists they are making aren’t for what gifts to buy the good girls and boys in their life, but for the resources, roles and budgets marketers will require to help meet the expectations placed on them by their CEOs and executive staff. 

Proper planning has never been as important for marketers as it is in 2021. Marketers today are under more pressure than ever to deliver revenue and help fill their company’s sales pipelines—two objectives that cannot be accomplished without deliberate and purposeful planning. And with COVID-19 expected to continue affecting companies through most of 2021, many marketers are even building two separate plans: one for pre-vaccine and one for post-vaccine. 

So we figured, who better to talk to about best practices for planning and budgeting than Venkat Nagaswamy, the Global VP of Marketing at the leading integrated cloud communications platform 8×8? Venkat is an experienced marketer who has previously led worldwide enterprise marketing at Juniper Networks and advised CEOs and CMOs on their business strategy as a McKinsey consultant, on top of having founded an AI-based marketing technology company called MarianaIQ. 

An engineer by training, Venkat has an extremely analytical mind and is the perfect person to help us understand how revenue-driven marketers should think about planning for 2021. An edited transcript of our conversation is below, but you can listen to the entire podcast to hear all of Venkat’s great insights and helpful advice. If you like what you’re hearing, please subscribe to our “CMO Stories” series for more podcasts with some of today’s top marketing leaders. 

You have a pretty diverse set of experiences. How does the role of Marketing at 8×8 differ from other companies that you have previously worked at?

If I look at what we did at McKinsey or Juniper and what’s going on today, the general trend has been towards making marketing more responsible for metrics and revenue, and that trend is probably the reason why I became a marketer. Now if you think about Juniper and any company of that type and generation, marketing’s role had to do with typical communications around AR, PR, branding, and so on. The amount of pipeline we were generating that went from marketing to sales was relatively low, at that time 5 – 10%. On the other hand, the role of marketing at 8×8 is much different, and this is a trend that I’ve seen at SaaS companies where the roll of marketing becomes super important. It results in marketing being a much bigger source of leads and pipeline at 8×8 than what it ever was at a place like Juniper.

Planning this year will probably be even more complex because of the pandemic and greater economic uncertainty. What is Marketing’s role during planning at a company like 8×8?  

Historically, marketing would be given a target in terms of budget, and if the CFO is enlightened you might get a pipeline target but typically you get a budget target and then marketing would report back on what they did with that. Now, the big thing is to flip the model to say, “Based on what the company needs to achieve, what is it that marketing needs to do?” And especially since marketing is a big part of pipeline production at 8×8, planning becomes critical. The revenue planning is set by finance. From there, finance then comes up with a bookings target, and then we work with them and sales to define our strategy. Marketing says that based on these bookings goals and the other things we see around conversion rates, sales cycle, etc., we then determine what is the pipeline required to deliver on that overall bookings target, and then we work our way back to say what is the budget required to make it happen. 

Once you know your revenue goals, how do you plan your marketing mix? How do you determine which programs and campaigns to execute? Do these vary by market segment? How far in advance do you plan these programs?

To meet our pipeline number, depending on which segment or geo you are in, we know where the pipeline has been coming from historically from a channel perspective. Then we make some strategic decisions on top of it to determine what it needs to be. For instance, at the beginning of this May, we revamped our site and went through a huge exercise in redoing content on site, and so on. So when planning for this fiscal year we didn’t just assume the pipeline ratio from last year. We set ourselves lofty goals to see what we can do. Primarily we optimize based on cost per pipeline or cost per sales qualified opportunity. At the end of the day, marketing is a portfolio of bets, and so given that we have all these instruments, we are trying to optimize to the best cost per opportunity or pipeline we can get. 

How do you build an internal business case for your budget request? What role does Sales play in helping you negotiate your budget request? 

I remember a conversation about a year or two ago, where our enterprise sales leader was asked by Finance to say how many more sales people they needed to reach their bookings target. He pauses and says it’s not just about how many sales people, it’s also about how many marketing dollars we need to put into channels to be able to get there. So sales is absolutely an important partner for negotiating a target in terms of spending or overall bookings. I don’t want to diminish the role of creativity, but it just becomes a math exercise. It becomes a lot less fraught with “he said/she said” discussions because it’s just math, and it becomes easy for us to have a discussion with sales and have sales be our partners in asking for the right targets and numbers from Finance. 

Let’s talk about people and organization. I would imagine that a lot of the marketing organization is already in place. How is Marketing organized at 8×8? How do you account for your company’s evolving needs? How do you know which new skills to hire?  

Broadly speaking, marketing is split into Field and Corporate. In Corporate, we have product marketing, communications, branding, and so on. And then there is my team which includes marketing technology and digital. In Field marketing, we have marketing for partners and events. But in terms of structure, it’s about more integrated campaigns than in the past. We ask, how can we have the same messaging from brand and PR to the web site, to the emails we send, to Google ads copy, and all the way to when our ADR’s call to make appointments? Are they hitting the same messages we agreed upon? So that end-to-end orchestration has been new for us.

Similar question regarding your marketing technology stack. You have your core applications such as marketing automation and CRM. You also have applications for specific needs like email, chat, sales engagement, web analytics and advertising. How do you justify the business case for newer applications such as Fortella? 

It depends on whether the app is going to increase our pipeline, convert more leads, and so on. We ask, how does it relate to volume, effectiveness and quality of pipeline? And then we look at it from a cost savings point of view. For example, when we work with data sources like Bombora, do they help us increase pipeline or decrease conversion rates in some fashion? On the other hand, for a tool like Fortella, the way I justify the spend is to say how much time does it save for us from a planning and reporting perspective. When we first started using Fortella, it did save us a lot of time — about half an analyst’s time — and then you guys added planning and now moving into channels, and so on, so each of these features save us even more time. 

Every marketer these days, especially in technology, loves to say how they’re “data driven.” But you are truly driven by the sales and marketing data that your company captures. Which metrics do you look at on a daily or weekly basis? How do they guide your decision-making? And how does Marketing get measured at the corporate level?

Marketing at 8×8 gets measured on pipeline. Every week my boss reports the pipeline creation to the e-staff and that’s the number one thing we look for. I myself look at pipeline creation  every week. As well as the number of leads coming in from different channels, and based on the results from the pass, how they convert, and based on what Fortella tells me, what is projected for the quarter. So I look at it maybe 3 – 5 times a week, and because some of our business is very high velocity, I also look at metrics like the time it takes a lead to go through our cycle. Everything starts at the pipeline and then it boils down to various metrics. 

Thanks for joining us Venkat! 

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