Lots of well-meaning activity—but where was the productivity?

Because the marketing strategy wasn’t formulated anywhere, there was no way to align all those existing activities to the business’ needs. Jennifer knew having a documented strategy would clarify a lot.

“It’s the marketing strategy that guides how you build,” says Jennfer. “It determines the processes, the people, and the measurements. So getting that was fundamental.”

“It’s the marketing strategy that guides how you build … so getting that was fundamental.

Inverta kicked off and began interviewing teams and auditing the systems, workflows, and SharePoint documents. Together, the Inverta team and Jennifer found that most marketing programs were reactive, responding to requests from the sales team. The Salesforce data wasn’t where they needed it to be and the marketers had a habit of downloading large, unreliable contact lists from third party systems. The CRM programs to scrub and cleanse those MQLs did work—but they weren’t maintainable or scalable. 

“We had people doing the best they could without a clear North star. We had some product marketers, an event person, a partner person and someone doing basic paid digital—but they all reported to someone different so they weren’t even aligned,” says Jennifer. She overheard people calling campaigns “offers” and drips “nurtures.” Upon review, the team had never actually executed an integrated campaign. 

“We couldn’t do it all at once so we agreed that it was best to start with operations and reporting,” says Jennifer. “That way, as we fixed things, we’d know, and could relay that impact. This was a crucial step in rebuilding trust with the rest of go-to-market.”

“We had to examine, how do we go to market? Are we targeting the right companies and people within them? What's our messaging like? Does our content resonate?”

Better ops led to crucial wins in lifecycle and reporting

Often, when you change marketing reporting, it will get worse before it gets better. Any initial improvements tend to break the old reporting schema, and until all the bad data flushes through, it looks like marketing’s contribution is plummeting. But Jennifer knew this was coming, and everyone was prepared.

Meanwhile, Inverta led or supported a series of initiatives to:

Research the market to clarify the ICP and messaging

Inverta helped unearth data and stories about who Actian’s buyers are and what they care about. This provided new storylines for far more enticing content. 

Totally refactor the lead lifecycle

Inverta rethought the lead management and lead scoring in Salesforce and Marketo.

Build a nurture ecosystem

They set up signal-based nurtures so Actian’s visitors and prospects would start to receive communication relevant to their interests, stage, title, and account.

Launched an ABM pilot with Demandbase 

The two teams worked on the bi-directional sync to implement Demandbase and launch an ABM pilot, which they’ve now replicated across several audiences.

Refactored campaign content to match the new ICP

Inverta helped them team audit and organize their campaign campaign content, and ensure they prioritized pieces that spoke to the newly defined ideal customer persona. 

Change management to implement it all

Inverta was there to train the team, write job descriptions, sourcing new hires, and everything else Jennifer needed to build the organization piece by piece. 

Together they built a marketing org that could support the business

Today, Actian’s operations are clean and explainable—Jennifer has dashboards and the team understands how to build true integrated campaigns. They can flex across multiple channels and orchestrate outreach with other teams. Marketing team members are working together, no longer siloed, and making their own designs and plans to target specific industries like finance or manufacturing. 

The lead flow is now truly effective, and there’s a two-way dialogue with the sales team. Jennifer has rebuilt that trust and both sides are listening better–marketing is gathering more input from SDRs and frontline sellers, and able to integrate that feedback. “The relationship is far better than three years ago,” says Jennifer.

Then Actian acquired another business. This was the “agile” moment Jennifer had been building the organization for, and the new plan was to go upmarket. Rather than the catastrophic change this might have been to the prior marketing org, Jennifer’s team was able to nimbly adapt to targeting an enterprise buyer—because the underlying engine was there. 

It’s now been three years of work together. When JJ hired a new VP of marketing, she said there were two things she couldn’t touch. One was Inverta. 

“We’re leagues ahead of where we were a few years ago and Inverta’s been in it with us every step of the way. I can lean on them like they’re a part of my team, because they helped me build the team. I could not have done this without them.”