The Data Heroes Podcast (powered by RingLead)

“Marketo is the best system of execution for what it does within that marketing sphere.” Justin is a Marketo expert and 4x Marketo Champion. Early on in his career, Justin specialized himself in Marketo to provide empowerment to people, processes, and platforms to enhance Marketing and Sales operations. In this episode of The Data Heroes Podcast, Justin Norris (Sr. Director of Solutions Architecture at Perkuto) talks about Marketing campaigns and how powerful solutions, like Marketo, enable superior management of the customer life cycle.“One of the very earliest lessons I learned in marketing was the importance of knowing your customer, whoever they are.” For Justin, developing a fundamental understanding of the customer, their voice, pain points and needs is the only way to effectively target them and provide outstanding customer experiences. And data is needed to create those automated, scalable experiences. “Whether that's more on the marketing side piping data into CRM to enable customer success use cases or, actually improving the customer experience through data.”No matter your market, a successful ABM strategy requires a successful set of tools and accurate data to empower your CRM. Justin and John also discuss usability of marketing systems, dirty data disasters, and specializing in Marketo and Salesforce.

"It all comes from strategy and that strategy is informed with data," is Jeff's mantra when it comes to targeting ideal accounts and businesses in the market. In this episode of The Data Heroes Podcast, Jeff Ignacio, Head of Revenue and Growth Operations at UpKeep talks about RevOps, and the successful alignment of strategy and execution to dominate the maintenance market."We started to take a look at the existing customer base for patterns". To expand and refine their customer base, Jeff and his RevOps team began analysing existing data sets to determine more ideal accounts to go after. With ICPs defined, territories were appropriately divided up amongst reps, and strategies decided upon for executing successful campaigns for their diverse customer spectrum. UpKeep specifically developed organic content to engage customers and build communities, improving user experiences, brand image, and company trust. “It's not enough to just win a customer, but do they stick around?” Utilizing RevOps capabilities, Jeff ensures that alignment on strategy is always retained to meet objectives and improve business outcomes.Jeff and host John Kosturos also examine data management tools, ICPs, SLAs and MQLs.

“Making it interesting for the customer,” is Andrew Mahr's mantra. In  this episode of The Data Heroes Podcast, Andrew Mahr Chief Customer Officer talks about goals, strategies and requirements for implementing one-to-one customer personalization. “For personalization to work in an account based context, it needs to be based on insights and good data of the account.”By personalizing marketing campaigns, you ultimately improve the customer experience and the overall effectiveness of Sales and Marketing efforts. “Personalization has to be done correctly for it to have a good impact. Focus on the needs and interests of the account.” Orchestration and alignment are key for collaboratively utilizing cross-channel strategies to keep messaging consistent and engaging. “Given different data signals and given different qualifying criteria, we identify how we actually want Marketing and Sales to engage accounts.”Andrew and host John Kosturos also discuss ICP targeting, intent data, and improving campaign effectiveness through high quality data. “You want a system that can understand the difference between when to feed someone top of funnel brand awareness messaging, versus when to trigger a higher cost marketing tactic.”

“How do we consistently align with sales?” Max and his Marketing team continually uphold this question to strive to overcome this challenge. By implementing holistic company alignment, tactics and strategies are more likely to succeed, allowing teams to become more effective marketers and sellers. In  this episode of The Data Heroes Podcast, Max Maurier ,Director, Marketing Operations and Analytics at Druva, talks about accurately identifying, targeting, campaigning, and selling to ideal account profiles.“Part of our strategy is propensity modeling.” Druva's strategy includes utilizing 3rd party data to find high level accounts with commonalities; “The common intent signals, common demographics, to try and put together a target account list”. Using intent data, Max and his team then go after high intent accounts that match their ICP, marketing to those accounts through campaigns. Max exclaims that this strategy's success relies on holistic alignment between sales and marketing. “If we're just generally on the same page, it's a really helpful platform for us, for our automation and marketing purposes.”Max and host John Kosturos also talk about revenue planning, dirty data, branding yourself in Marketo, and analytics tools.

''Keep on top of who's actually engaging with our emails and make that decision of whether or not to keep them.” Britney is an advocate for applying effective database management strategies to get a handle on all dirty data challenges. In this episode of our The Data Heroes Podcast, Britney discusses marketing operation strategies to make sure you are always on top of your data, ensuring it is accessible and actionable to serve insights and business decisions.She highlights the need to effectively convey data quality importance to the company higher-ups and how dirty, inactive data affects system processes, attribution and campaigns. “Just taking the data to tell that story. Have those real examples to show that because of dirty data, we can't do X.” Identify key accounts to focus on and create understanding by aligning teams on methods, tactics and utilization of tools.Britney also discusses her Marketing Ops role, ideal account tools, duplicates, Marketo and how to use insights to fuel campaign efforts. “Always analyze your data: campaigns like what's happening after you've launched that campaign? How is your data actually doing?”

''Make sure the data has its coat on!'' Susan's idiom is all about data maintenance and highlights the importance of continued data quality management; to make sure it's always consistent, organized, accurate, and trustworthy. In this episode of our The Data Heroes Podcast, Susan Walsh (Founder at The Classification Guru Ltd) gives tips about getting on top of your data issues through normalization, deduplication, segmentation, and categorization.“Ultimately, I want them to take back responsibility and ownership of their data and manage it.” Susan talks about client challenges faced and how she trains teams to develop database health strategies to ensure data is always as actionable as possible. Susan discusses supplier normalization, taxonomy development, and her upcoming book ‘Between the Spreadsheets: Classifying and Fixing Dirty Data'.“If you've never classified data in your life, you could pick it up, read it and follow the instructions in it and classify data!”

“With the data you have available in Marketo, you can make it happen,” describes Melissa, talking about the possibilities and potential of marketing automation platform. In this episode of Data Heroes, Marketo champion Mellisa Day from The Chemours Company explains how powerful Marketo is when it comes to cleaning and utilizing data. Melissa details how crucial database health is and provides tips for marketing on how they should approach and apply available data. Melissa views data as a form of currency and explains the advantages companies can gain from focusing on perspective. Melissa also talks about her beginnings in business and what pivoted her career toward data and Marketing. She thinks the Marketo community is a great place to learn and find support. She also shares advice on using Marketo and talks about essential strategies for gathering, cleaning, and utilizing data.“By cleaning the data, we will have more effective lead scoring.”

“Find system limitations and then expand outward.” Corey's digital marketing and technical experience is founded in Marketo and has aided his career in code and data analytics to deliver responsive content for campaign initiatives.In this episode of The Data Heroes Podcast, Corey Bayless (Marketing Automation Program Manager at Amazon) explains the state of the digital marketing world, and how technology can enable ABM strategies to improve lead scoring and ICP targeting. “ABM allows for you to create a hierarchy and find who those decision-makers are.”Corey also discusses opportunities laid bare by data compliance laws, lead to account linking and improving user-facing content solutions that target customer issues.

“Standardizations are a key aspect,” for segmenting data into clear buyer personas for targeted marketing campaigns. According to Alex Greger, internal marketing analysis on how to aggregate and segment by job titles and scoring are still required, with a lot of manual effort to append information.In episode {06} of The Data Heroes Podcast, Alex Greger (Marketing Automation Manager at Skillsoft) talks about Marketo as an invaluable database management tool and how data is bucketed through thorough data analysis. “Connecting the dots between a persona and what I would call codifying that persona.”Alex and host John Kosturos, also discuss database hygiene strategies, enriching with 3rd party data for normalization, and Skillsoft's B2B opportunities from their B2C market.

'“How do we talk about data? And how do we understand it?” In episode #6 of The Data Heroes Podcast, Courtney Tobe (Manager of Marketing Operations and Automation AvidXchange, Inc.) strikes up an interesting conversation about the strategic account approach and the best way to look at data relevant to the customer journey. She also talks about her day-to-day campaign operations, her role in shaping their go-to-market strategy, and the customer experience.“We have implemented an intelligent lead routing tool to do a better job of improving the overall prospect and customer experience,” says Courtney. Empowering customers with a consistent experience can boost sales, and that's where a data orchestration platform like RingLead really comes in.Courtney delves into the importance of data health for streamlining business and alignment of sales and marketing. “You have to be able to start with your data in a really good place in your CRM system to effectively do account-based marketing.”

Data is everywhere. We are surrounded by it. However, instead of being inundated by information-overload, the greatest companies use their available data to fuel their customer approach and improve their marketing automation strategies. But what do these processes look like, and how do companies such as Marketo tackle data-related matters?In this episode of The Data Heroes Podcast, Amanda Thomas and our host, John Kosturos, discuss significant aspects of marketing automation, data clean-up, and the importance of solid collaboration between marketing and sales teams. Amanda generously shares a great piece of advice to all those who'd love to join Marketo, encouraging them to seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.Amanda Thomas, a five-time Marketo Champion and MarTech consultant who excels in marketing automation, also talks about the wonders of data and how it can help companies get vital information about their customers. She shares some of the best strategies to obtain desired data, focusing especially on data segmentation.

“You had the data you had, and you did the best you could with it,” says Andy, referring to old, simpler approaches to data in times gone by. In this episode of The Data Heroes podcast, Andy Caron joins our host, John Kosturos, to discuss the data landscape evolution. She delves into the requirements of the modern marketing world, and the importance of having a marketing automation platform to perform specific functions.Andy talks about her professional path and explains why the community is the biggest strength of Marketo. Our guest and John also chat about the Ideal CustomerProfile (ICP) and best approaches for building it out. 

2021 Marketo Champion 3x Marketo Certified Expert Tucson Marketo User Group Leader and Co-Founder“Stay relevant and do the most good for your prospects, your customers, and your company,” is Lauren's marketing motto that she applies to all of her projects.In episode #02 of The Data Heroes Podcast, Award-winning senior marketer, Lauren McCormack (Senior Manager, Digital and Marketing Automation at Neo4j) reviews refined product tactics & marketing strategies of her current and previous roles. She provides insights into the world of Marketo, marketing automation, aggregating data sets, and learning how to quantify, measure, and optimize for revenue.Lauren also covers the dynamics between sales and marketing and the importance of viewing your customers as people in a 2-way relationship. She emphasizes the need for companies to pay attention to landing the right kind of content and messaging, call to actions, and compelling campaigns to maximize ROI.

6X Marketo ChampionAdobe Fearless 50 Marketer, Marketo Champion of the Year,Marketo User Group Leader of the Year“Intent is like a new toy” is Jessica's analogy for this trending market strategy. In episode of The Data Heroes Podcast, Jessica Kao, Senior Director of Demand Operations at F5, talks all things intent, scoring systems, and ICPs. Jessica is a data hero at analyzing and understanding trends in the data, and looking for signatures of pattern behavior to uncover customer intent.  “Every situation is going to be different” explains Jessica - companies should be equipped with flexible frameworks, strategies, and thought processes for managing intent data for different customers. She suggests businesses should be prepared to apply maturity scales and additional point-scoring systems, such as keyword scoring to reach MQLs. Outside the corporate landscape, Jessica has even implemented her data analysis skills in the world of science. At Stanford University she completed her Ph.D. in cancer biology, breaking down the data to understand the signals of breast cancer in women.