First let’s address the silly legal jargon. Or the silly jargon:
To put both a spin on a famous acronym in cybersecurity, SOC (security operations center) and for the purposes of covering something marketing, “MOC” was born (Marketing operations center).
Other marketers refer to this as MOPS, but since we are in cybersecurity, hey, let’s make this fun! MOC it is.
Now, if we let this train of thought ride…MOC…Mock…Mock trial, of course! 💡 (Also full transparency, I always wanted to do one of these.)
Okay, what the heck is going on here?
Let me back up.
Marketing and sales have always been a classic love story. The marketing-sales relationship is full of honeymoon stages, breakups, divorces, and everything in between. Clear alignment between the two is a matter of survival, the lifeline of growth, business success, and every pretty KPI we marketers like to worship.
On to the trial!
All rise! The honorable Judge Leadsman 👨🏽⚖️
The Defense gives their side:
Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury (usually the senior leadership team) my client, the marketing team, has been creating growth strategies to increase brand awareness, establish thought leadership, and a strengthen the digital presence. They work tirelessly to prepare for trade shows, press coverage, and speaking sessions, and ensure we have the best tchotchkes that attendees can’t wait to stick in their kitchen drawers.
Exhibit A: Tchotchkes
As many know, marketing is an integral piece of the business success puzzle. Building a solid sales pipeline relies heavily on marketing activities that generate demand and bring in leads. But the journey is long and arduous. I’d like to take you on a trip ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let’s take the customer journey together.
The first stop on our journey is google.com; our customer is looking for a solution to secure third-party connections into their network. Behold! 2 million search results appear and the choices are endless. The marketing team’s effort to rise above the noise and establish BFF status with google algorithms goes something like this:
- Build a rich library of engaging content that is helpful in nature but not too “salesy”. Ensure the content speaks to the buyer personas pain points and provides actionable solutions. Publish content regularly and keep it interesting. Easy peasy. 😊
- Build and launch search campaigns targeting the right keywords potential customers use to find information. Luckily Adwords has a crystal ball that helps all marketers. Just kidding it doesn’t, but it does have a keyword planner tool that’s useful.
- Regularly conduct an SEO audit on the website, ensuring page load speed is up to par, page titles make sense and metadata is available, and your content pillars and clusters are connected and topics complement each other.
So does this help land the prospect onto the website? Nooooo of course not. InfoSec customers are much more complex than that. They usually turn to peer reviews, security forums like SANS Institute, Cybrary, or Peerlyst.
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a miracle! She (our lead, the Information Security Analyst) finds a solution and she sets out to find out more. But keep in mind, she’s not ready to buy, ask for a demo or receive any technical details just yet. Budget must be approved first.
She visits the website, reads the blog and likes what she reads. The content is fresh, informational and provides immediate value so she subscribes to the blog! She decides to spend a few more minutes and check out the product, because why not. And because the marketing team is so brilliant, they made sure they had a call to action (CTA) to a success story/case study to emphasize the product works and there are customers that are quite pleased with it already.
Is she a hot lead yet? an MQL? an SQL?
See how lengthy and slow this can be? For the sake of this exercise, let’s speed it up. 3 months after subscribing and engaging with the content, she later attends the RSA conference and stops by the booth and watches a demo. A week later, she returns to the office, boasts about the amazing t-shirt and stickers she was able to score and receives her thank you for attending email. Fast forward one month, she downloads the annual report the marketing team published. The report includes some eye-opening data and stats on the hidden risks of APIs and sends it on to the team and the CISO. The CISO is intrigued and asks her to schedule a demo.
BOOM! 💥
Queue the prosecution team, representing the state of…..Sales.
Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I must say, quite an impressive presentation by the defense team. I felt like I was in a circus! Because – let’s be honest here – doesn’t marketing sometimes feel like a circus?
But let’s talk reality here, my clients, the sales team go to sleep everyday with their sales quota on their mind. Meeting their goals is their livelihood; it is literally what makes or breaks them! Being fed lukewarm leads from marketing isn’t going to close deals, it’s wasting sales’ time! They need SQLs! Give them opportunities, give them demo requests!
Let’s do ABM, they said, it will be great they said…
Though we sympathize with the long journey leads usually take to land on my client’s pipeline, it’s not sustainable, there must be another way.
A key witness takes the stand:
Defense: Your honor, we’d like to call Sales Director Mr. Bob Squarepants to the stand.
Mr. Squarepants, in March of 2019, you were part of the team that attended RSA and helped manage the booth and conduct demos, correct?
Bob: Yes.
Defense: After a week long of fine dining, social networking parties, and sleeping in cloud-like luxury hotel bedding, you return to the office with 300+ leads. The marketing team chases you for two weeks to help them qualify which leads are hot, and then assigns you your favorites. Now, 6 months later, how many follow ups have you made?
Bob: Not many. They were crappy leads, all they wanted was our pens and free t-shirts.
Defense: No further questions, your honor.
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