Katie Bullard of DiscoverOrg on rethinking product marketing

I’m super excited to have Katie Bullard, Chief Growth Officer of DiscoverORG, on the show today.

DiscoverOrg provides the most accurate data intelligence to over 4,000 sales and marketing teams. With products that find lookalike prospects, help create competitive takeaway campaigns and adjacent product campaigns, and provide valuable information on contacts for sales personnel, DiscoverOrg supercharges growth plans for companies including IBM and lenovo.

Katie shared how she melded product and marketing teams and changed critical metrics to create all kinds of growth after she stepped in as CMO only a year ago.

This was an incredible interview and I know you’re going to get a lot out of it.

Joining Product Management and Marketing

Katie recently made a big change at DiscoverOrg joining the product management team with the marketing team. She believes product teams are separate from the pulse of the buyer too often. Bringing product management and marketing together helps the company build products that really fit customer needs and launch at a better growth rate.

While Katie believes the benefits of bringing these teams together are huge, the challenges are losing connection with product managers and developers. Goal one for Katie was to make sure they didn’t lose this tight connection with the development team.

Also important in this change was that project management began to gather market feedback and sit with internal users to get better at writing requirements and understanding needs. Keeping an alignment with technology was maintained during this additional process.

The connection with product management and marketing has been very beneficial for the marketing team because they know what’s coming down the pipe. They are now able to make sure that products really launch instead of leak out.

Making Structural Change

Moving from a traditional structure is not an easy thing to do. The first thing Katie did before the teams merged was create a separate product marketing function that worked with product management hand in hand.

When the actual move happened, Katie worked with their CTO to map out what the product management to product development to product marketing process looked like so everyone was comfortable with the new structure. This actually helped strengthen connections between teams because things were mapped out in ways they hadn’t been before.

Then Katie got product management out on the streets in front of customers. While they’d been been writing requirements and working with development, they lost their connection with the customer. Sparking that connection is now is not just a one-time thing, Katie pointed out. It’s a continuous process for product management.

Metrics to Measure Success

When Katie first came on board, product was measured by if it got to market, marketing was measured on leads, and sales was measured on revenue. Katie’s fundamental charge was to create an organization that was focused on revenue. It didn’t matter if there were a bunch of leads if there was no increase in revenue.

Katie’s first focus was to put in place KPIs that emphasized revenue. She was more interested in conversion and win rates than leads. When product came on board, she added measures of the kind of pipeline building for new products, revenue generated from products and usage increases with enhancements.

Katie shared that the whole organization has changed since these metrics were put in place. While tracking leads through sales with the help of Full Circle, Katie discovered their second biggest lead source had resulted in only one deal in the past six months. The team stopped wasting efforts on that channel and put more of their efforts into channels that were working. Total lead numbers dropped, but conversion rates doubled because the sales team wasn’t chasing bad leads.

Working with Sales

Katie partnered with sales thought leader, Steve W Martin, to better understand how people respond and react to salespeople. The team decided to test how different buyer personas responded differently to sales personnel. In a 76 question survey for 200+ people, they found many interesting things about how marketers go through the sales process.

The study revealed differences in how buyers perceive sales personnel as positive or negative. Only 35% of B2B decision makers had a positive view of salespeople. Surprisingly marketers had a more positive view. Only 18% had a negative view.

To learn more about this fascinating report check out www.discoverorg.com and their ‘Why Didn’t They Buy’ report. You can also connect with Katie on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Katie was an absolutely amazing guest. I hope you got a lot of value out of this interview.