Bonnie Crater of Full Circle Insights: Here Are My Top 5 Tried + True Marketing Strategies
An Interview With Rachel Kline
Base your decisions on good data. Find the best way you can to create and manage your marketing data. That way you’ll be basing your decisions on the best data possible. We recommend putting your data into the CRM so that both sales and marketing can see the same information and to foster excellent collaboration with your sales team.
Generally speaking, someone who is a CMO has learned a tremendous amount about marketing through years of experience. A CMO is in a perfect position to know what is more likely and less likely to work when it comes to marketing. What are the top 5 tried and true marketing strategies that CMOs recommend to other business leaders? As a part of our series called “CMOs Share Their Top 5 Tried + True Marketing Strategies,” we had the pleasure of interviewing Bonnie Crater.
Prior to joining Full Circle Insights, Bonnie Crater was a five-time vice president of marketing and executive at many software companies in Silicon Valley — Genesys, Netscape, Network Computer Inc., salesforce.com, Stratify, and VoiceObjects (now Voxeo). A ten-year veteran of Oracle Corporation and its various subsidiaries, Bonnie was vice president, Compaq Products Division and vice president, Workgroup Products Division. In 2013, Bonnie was named one of the “100 Most Influential Women” by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, in 2015 the Sales Lead Management Association named her one of the “20 Women to Watch” and in 2016 Diversity Journal honored her as one of the “Women Worth Watching.”
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Thank you for having me! Prior to joining Full Circle Insights, I was a five-time vice president of marketing and executive at many software companies in Silicon Valley. I always loved marketing, using both right and left parts of the brain. With the introduction of the internet and more sales and marketing data becoming available, I became really interested in measuring the effectiveness of marketing. My journey began at a startup called Stratify (now OpenText) where I wanted to create a simple sales and marketing funnel using Salesforce data. I was able to cobble together one but I knew the data wasn’t as reliable as I wanted and required a lot of handcrafting. I knew it was very useful but I wanted better data and more automation of the results — a real marketing measurement system that I didn’t have to tweak every week. In 2010 I got a call from a former work colleague, Roan Bear, who had identified a Salesforce-based solution to this problem and Full Circle was born!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I am very grateful for our Full Circle Founders Roan Bear, Andrea Wildt, and Dan Appleman for all they have taught me: Dan’s technical prowess ability to communicate very complex topics so simply, Roan’s genius of be able to hold so many detailed topics at once and make sense of very complex marketing data, and Andrea’s product vision, marketing abilities and superhuman communication skills. The four of us built solutions that have helped hundreds of companies and thousands of marketers get more efficient, grow revenue, and make an impact.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
What the last few years have shown us, if anything, is that uncertainty is certain. We have a culture based on values that we discuss and live, that truly fosters growth and comradery among our team amidst an ever-changing climate. Even during a pandemic and a recently uncertain economic climate, our team has persevered and stuck together to allow for continued growth. I’m proud of the community we have built and the people who have continued to show up for the business over the last few years.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Our company launched our latest product last September, Full Circle ABM, to help marketers gain prospects and retain customers by measuring the performance of tailored ABM campaigns on pipeline and revenue. We’re leveraging Full Circle ABM to monitor our prospecting efforts, but also expand our upsell and cross sell opportunities with our retention team. Our products help marketers with their most crucial ask, proving the quality of your marketing campaigns by measuring the impact on pipeline and revenue.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There are so many different types of marketing, from digital campaigns and content to influencer and PR. In your experience, has any one area had a bigger impact on business over the rest? Have any of these changed over time?
I like this question because it speaks to one of the most valuable tools a marketer can have — measurement and optimization. The most important aspect of marketing really is the tools they have to evaluate just that. Campaign attribution and funnel metrics are crucial so you can see what aspects of your marketing efforts are working and what needs to be cut.
This also is contingent upon the KPIs you have set for your company. Are you focused on driving demand in new or current markets or expanding brand awareness? When used together, brand awareness initiatives like PR and demand generation activities such as your lead gen advertising campaigns can complement each other.
How often do you try a new marketing strategy, and which ‘boxes’ does it need to tick before you’re willing to implement it?
In these unprecedented times, it’s crucial to have an accurate means of monitoring your marketing spend so you aren’t wasting time or your marketing budget on campaigns that don’t drive results. We work towards the 80/20 rule. 80% of our marketing are tried and true programs and 20% are new experiments. That way we keep it fresh and are always learning. We know that every marketing strategy needs to align with our business goal or KPI’s and it’s important to leverage funnel metrics and attribution metrics to learn what is working and what is not. Our marketing and sales team meets every other week to review progress against our goals and make recommendations for follow up.
In your opinion, is it better to try out new marketing tactics or to stick with what you know works? How do you decide where to allocate your budget and resources?
We use Full Circle to drive our marketing efforts in house, which is great. We can see what campaigns are contributing to engagement across our target accounts and monitor key funnel metrics to ensure we are optimizing our marketing strategies and reallocating budgets for optimal performance. With this bird’s eye view of campaign attribution, we can optimize based on the campaigns that are driving the most pipeline and closed won deals.
This is the main question of our interview. Can you please tell us your top five most successful marketing strategies? What kind of results did you see? Can you please share a story or example for each?
1 . Focus on efficiency. In 2023 many marketers’ budgets are flat or decreasing. (58% according to LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/business/marketing/blog/trends-tips/b2b-marketing-budgets-key-planning-considerations). So “choices” is the watchword for 2023. Marketers will want to be more confident than ever in recommending investments to their top performing campaign efforts.
After reviewing the campaigns that contributed to both the engagement of our target accounts as well as those that contributed to pipeline growth, we were able to reallocate funds to support campaigns that were driving the most success for the company this quarter. We were able to identify patterns in content consumption and the types of content that were generating interest among our ICP and have created additional resources to further support these trends in Q2.
2 . Practice giving color to your “no.” Marketers love to say yes but if your budget is tight, you may find yourself saying “no” to requests more often this year. Being able to provide the context of this decision using accurate marketing reporting is important to help the organization understand your decision-making process.
3 . Base your decisions on good data. Find the best way you can to create and manage your marketing data. That way you’ll be basing your decisions on the best data possible. We recommend putting your data into the CRM so that both sales and marketing can see the same information and to foster excellent collaboration with your sales team.
4 . Measure, measure, measure. The best way to become efficient is to know the math of your company. What does your funnel look like? What are your volume, velocity and conversion rate numbers? Which campaigns or campaign combinations are impacting pipeline and revenue the most? Adopt a strong measurement capability and use it to set a baseline and make adjustments to reach your annual targets.
5 . Make friends with IT. Martech is getting more and more complex, and you may not have the technical capabilities on your team. It might be time to go back to IT for some help to optimize your martech.
Can you share a time when a strategy didn’t deliver the results you expected and what you learned from the experience?
Oftentimes, strategies don’t work. That’s okay! In fact, if you’re not learning from your marketing results, I would question the software or service you have in place to track your progress. Especially with ABM, it’s important to be able to track and measure your performance so that you can see what campaigns drove sales for your company. For example, we had a great event last year and while we did not see increased pipeline activity right away, we closed a two-year deal at 4x return. We could see this result even months after our event but because we had tracked this touchpoint in Salesforce using Full Circle.
What expert tips can you share with those who just starting to build out their marketing strategy?
As a revenue focused marketer, ensure that you are align with key business KPIs and quarterly goals. Attain a marketing measurement tool that will allow you to identify what tactics are driving ROI and optimize your strategy based on the data you are collecting. Collaborate closely with sales teams to ensure you are aligned in delivering qualified leads or prioritized accounts from a prospecting perspective as well as assisting with retention and upsell campaigns.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
When I had 2 close friends get sick with Lyme disease, I worked with friends to start 2 foundations to address the issue. Today I spend my free time outside of Full Circle helping two foundations Bay Area Lyme Foundation, focused on research for new diagnostics and therapies, and the Center for Lyme Action focused on growing federal funding for Lyme and tickborne disease.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can follow me on LinkedIn or keep up with my blogs on www.fullcircleinsights.com. Feel free to join our mailing list if you would like.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
