219 - ft. Christina Del Villar - How Marketers Can Talk So the C-Suite Understands

Pam Didner: A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with Pam. Christina Del Villar is our guest today. She's the author of the book called Sway. Does that sound cool or what?

 

Christina Del Villar: I think so.

 

Pam Didner: And the book is all about marketing strategy, revenue and growth. Woo-hoo. Like me, she is also a B2B marketer. So welcome, Christina.

 

Christina Del Villar: Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited. I know, Pam, you and I could talk B2B geeky marketing for hours.

 

Pam Didner: Yes, yes, yes.

 

Christina Del Villar: Absolutely. Absolutely.

 

Pam Didner: So the topic we want to talk about today, and we want to get some insights and wisdom from Christina is how a marketer can better talk to the C-suite so they can understand us so much better. And marketing tend to be very complicated, and many marketers have a hard time helping their C-suite understand marketing's impact. So, Christina, do you have any suggestions in terms of what marketers should do, go about communicating with C-suite?

 

Christina Del Villar: I have so much, and it's interesting because I feel like marketers in general do a bad job marketing ourselves, right?

 

Pam Didner: What? That is not true.

 

Christina Del Villar: I know. I know. It's-

 

Pam Didner: I'm completely offended.

 

Christina Del Villar: Well, maybe you're amazing at it. There's some people who are amazing at it, but-

 

Pam Didner: Trust me, I'm not.

 

Christina Del Villar: Right. But I think that's the key issue that we have as marketers is really understanding, first off, that we are speaking a very different language than the leaders of our companies are speaking, right?

 

Pam Didner: Yeah.

 

Christina Del Villar: We are in our day-to-day, our minutia, and really trying to help the company overall. But then we have a really bad way of articulating what that is to leaders. So basically, whenever I go into a board meeting, I have one slide, and it shows the revenue that we brought in for our company. And it usually is all of the revenue that the company brought in, because we had an impact in that, some way, shape, or form, along that entire customer journey. And we'll start with that number, and then we can have conversations about it. And so that's where I start.

Now, obviously, not everybody's going to be going into a board meeting. And so how do you talk about it? How do you phrase it? And how do you think about it? And I think that one of the key things that we need to do is really start understanding that we own revenue. We are the ones who are bringing in the revenue, and we need to start talking about it from that standpoint. I know you talk a lot about data and AI and how all that's playing into it, which I think is amazing. And we need to take that and really talk about what it is that we're doing, the value that we're bringing, the impact that we're having from the standpoint of revenue.

 

Pam Didner: That's great. I love that, but I know a lot of marketers, they have a hard time quantifying the revenue contribution.

 

Christina Del Villar: Yeah.

 

Pam Didner: So what are some of the specific steps they need to do from the get-go to make sure they capture that?

 

Christina Del Villar: There's the component of the data itself, like you're saying, and that actual revenue number, and then there's the attribution, right? And that's where we often have trouble with that. And so I like to take it a little bit further back and think about the entire customer journey and all of the things that marketers are doing as part of that customer journey. Like, starting with a product, what do we do with product and the product team to help them build a better product, think about features and functionality, look at pricing and bundling? We are involved in all of that when it comes to product. And again, we are involved so many different ways across that customer journey: sales, obviously marketing, sales enablement, and then even customer support and success. Again, we do a lot with B2B, so we're talking long-term contracts, multiyear contracts. And how can marketing help customer support and success ensure that we can reduce churn?

So these are all areas that marketers actually already have a hand in. We just need to recognize that more and then help others in the organization understand the contributions we're making across that customer journey. Therefore, when we say, or when I go to the board meeting with my one slide that shows all the revenue we brought in for that quarter, and it's all attributed some way to marketing, they have a better understanding of what I mean by that, right? So I can say, "Well, by increasing our price and talking to product and increasing our price or changing our bundles, which allowed us to contribute more value and charge a higher price, this is how marketing contributed to revenue from that standpoint." From a sales enablement standpoint, what content, how did we help sales sell better, sell faster, sell bigger deals? Right? We can show that because now people understand all of the different ways that marketing has played in these different roles.

And then from a customer success standpoint, again, when you're talking about churn, are we helping customer success build how to videos, or do webinars, or have FAQs on our website, or manage the knowledge base? What are we doing as marketers? Which, again, we're already doing all of this, we're just not thinking about it in terms of how it really is contributing to the overall number that we're looking at, which again is usually that revenue number.

 

Pam Didner: Number one is to expand a marketer's influence, kind of like when I call it upstream.

 

Christina Del Villar: Yeah.

 

Pam Didner: Like, as a part of product development, as a product, the bundling package, if you are selling SaaS-based platforms or whatnot. And understanding in terms of how the pricing work. And if you actually have external data or some insights to actually share that information, bring that in.

 

Christina Del Villar: Absolutely.

 

Pam Didner: And so that's on the product side. And on the sales side is obviously sales enablement. What can you do to actually support them? One of the easiest way to support them is actually share the content with them, especially for the long purchasing cycle. And content is one way of doing it. And also, if you understand their sales stages and along the different sales stages, what can you do to actually support them? But I think in order to do that, you have to understand what their needs are. Would you agree, especially on the sales side?

 

Christina Del Villar: Absolutely.

 

Pam Didner: You have to understand what they do, what they need, then you tailor your support specifically for that need.

 

Christina Del Villar: Absolutely. And I know we do that in marketing with our own roles. We're trying to get better at it from a sales and a sales enablement standpoint. And then from the product standpoint, I think it's important to consider sharing things in context, right? So like when we're talking about why we need this feature or function or why we want to bundle it this way, or why we need to maybe listen more to our customers and manage an advisory committee, whatever that looks like, we need to put everything in context so they understand what it is that we're trying to accomplish and how we can help them.

And I think that goes very much to sales as well, right? There's so many times when we're like, "Okay, here's a script," or, "Here's a case study." Right? We don't really explain how to use the content that we're developing and, like you're saying, at what stage we should be using it, right? Like, "This is a perfect piece for when you're nurturing it. If you have a really long sales cycle that's 18 months, at 12 months, this is a good piece to use." We need to help them understand how to use that content as well.

 

Pam Didner: Understood. Another thing I would like to get your thought is obviously for marketers, a lot of things we do, especially the money we spend on, tend to be for campaigns and outreach. It doesn't matter if it's inbound and outbound, right? And it's driving leads, build that brand awareness and drive demands. And a lot of information we receive or checking, in terms of marketing, the performance, is based on the past campaigns we have run. And you said that's lagging indicators.

 

Christina Del Villar: Yes.

 

Pam Didner: Yes. In a way, because, well, that's shared the results of the campaigns we have run in the past six months, right?

 

Christina Del Villar: Right.

 

Pam Didner: And if that's lagging indicators, and you mentioned leading versus lagging indicators, can you talk to us a little bit more about that? Well, I am being measured by how many leads I brought in. Of course, that's going to be lagging. How can I put myself a little bit more proactively upfront?

 

Christina Del Villar: Yeah. And I think that this is another problem that marketers have, because if you think about it, first off, again, we are in our day-to-day minutia, right?

 

Pam Didner: Yeah.

 

Christina Del Villar: So we're like, "Oh, web traffic increased today. This is great." It really doesn't mean anything to our CEO. It may not even mean anything to your CMO, right? Because they're trying to understand, "Great. You have that, and that's nice, but how is that going to help us get to our goals?" Right? And so these lagging indicators, again, we as marketers, we need to have that. We need to measure that. We definitely want to show ROI for the campaigns that we have, no question about that. But if we're talking about leading indicators, we're talking about, how is this now going to predictably have usually revenue growth or growth of some kind? What is this going to lead us to? And so this is why it's really important. So if you think about, let's just take an example, right? Let's say you have 20,000 visitors to your website this month or this quarter. So if you go into a meeting and you say, "We had 20,000 website visitors," there's no context around it and it means nothing.

 

Pam Didner: Nothing.

 

Christina Del Villar: It means nothing to leaders, right? So a good way of saying it, but it's still talking about still lagging, is to say, "We had 20,000 visitors, which is a 10% increase." So now they're like, "Oh, okay, you spent some money and now you've increased by 10%." So, that's a good way of talking about it. But a better way would be to say, "We increased our target audience website visitors by 10% because we knew what they were looking for, and we created content and delivered specifically for that audience." So, that's a better way of saying it.

But best, combines the lagging and the leading, would be to say, "We increased our visits by targeting our audience and increased it by 10% due to our campaigns that we knew we were going to do. And we expect that this will lead to 20% more pipeline and 10% more revenue." Right? We don't really talk about it, but everybody in the company is trying to get to predictability, right?

 

Pam Didner: Yeah, true.

 

Christina Del Villar: That is how you can say, "This is what we're expecting." And so if you can bring more of that leading into your conversation, it helps them frame it, like, "Okay, I know what you spent your money on. I can understand the ROI, and I can understand what your expectations are going forward."

 

Pam Didner: Actually, we can take one step further, if you will. And I like the way you expand it, right? It's not just about 20% growth, but you talk about 20% growth in relationship to how you're going to help the sales, how it's going to help the business objective.

 

Christina Del Villar: Right.

 

Pam Didner: And also that you really narrow it down to a target audience. We can also expand it a little bit more, take all your points, if you will. Sometimes if you use IP sniffer, you can see which account or what companies that actually come to our website. If you actually do a little research and not just look into the aggregate number of 20,000 traffic, but you can also say, "Out of this 20,000 traffic, these two, three account is actually account that we want to go after." Guess what? Some of them actually come to our website. So I think call that out will also help tremendously.

 

Christina Del Villar: Absolutely. Or to your point, even if, again, because we're in B2B so we have multiyear contracts, usually if we see that even one of our customers is on our site, and so that might mean that not everybody in that particular company knows that they already have the solution, or maybe they're looking for something else from our solution. So it's a good opportunity for the account managers to go take a look and see what's happening, or customer success, to hopefully either reduce churn or help when it comes time to renewal as well.

 

Pam Didner: Yeah. All this, honestly, Christina, I agree with you, but it does require some work on the marketing side. You actually have to analyze and go behind the data to understand what the data is trying to tell you and then find the nugget.

 

Christina Del Villar: Yep.

 

Pam Didner: And that's work. I always tell B2B marketers, like, "The job is not that easy." A lot of people say, "Oh, there's a lot of blog posts out there, say, 'Oh, B2B marketing make it simple.'" I was like, "Seriously? It is hard work."

 

Christina Del Villar: I think I was at a Starbucks one time, and I don't know how it happened, but the barista was like, "Oh, what do you do?" And I said, "Marketing strategy." She's like, "Oh yeah, that seems really easy. Maybe I'll get into that." And I was like, "Many degrees, 30 years of pain, a lot of drinking." Right? Yeah. And I think that somebody once asked me like, "If you were to tell a marketing person or somebody who's interested in marketing, what's the one thing they really need to focus on?" And that is understanding data. If you're afraid of it, you don't want to touch it. There's so many things that marketers could do better, and one of them is literally owning the technology, right?

 

Pam Didner: Yeah.

 

Christina Del Villar: I know your book about AI is really important and critical. It's not just about AI and how it's used in marketing right now and how that will help you become a better marketer and help your company succeed both professionally and from a business standpoint, but it has to do with marketers understanding that we can use this technology to do our job better and show that influence and impact and value that we're bringing. But that means owning the technology. I can't tell you how many times I've come into a company and it's like, "The IT owns Salesforce and my marketing automation tool." And I'm like, "Well, what does IT know about the data I'm trying to extrapolate?"

 

Pam Didner: A lot of time they probably can own it in terms of maintaining the tool.

 

Christina Del Villar: Sure.

Pam Didner: But in terms of what the tool will do, that part of it needs to be owned directly by the sales side. And then you also need the administrators and developers. A lot of time you still have to do some custom coding-

 

Christina Del Villar: Oh, absolutely.

 

Pam Didner: ... to make sure the tool is useful for you.

 

Christina Del Villar: Yeah.

 

Pam Didner: Yeah. I mean, that's work. Again, that's work.

 

Christina Del Villar: It's work. It's work. And I think that's one of the reasons why I've been so successful and my teams because I push two things. One is, "We own revenue, period, whether you like it or not," and, "You need to understand the data." I've had people on my teams who are like amazing, amazing writers and content producers, and they're not going to get the data. And that's okay. Then I'll supplement with somebody else on the team to help.

 

Pam Didner: But I always encourage marketing of, oh, skill set or facets, if you will, that they make an effort to understand other fields of marketing.

 

Christina Del Villar: Right.

 

Pam Didner: Say, if you create content, you know what? Well, try to understand email marketing. Well, if you understand content, well, try to look at Google Analytics and see how your content is performing. Right? You need to somehow get out of your specific job roles and responsibility, do a little bit more of that. Yeah.

 

Christina Del Villar: Right. And again, like you're saying, really understand it, because I think whether it's your own marketing teams or whether you're expanding and working more closely with product or sales, having that understanding and going back to the context really helps you do your job better and present, going back to the original question, present what it is that you're doing in a way that's understandable for that audience. I mean, we do it. That's what we do as marketers. We create for a specific audience. So we should do that internally as well.

 

Pam Didner: Well, that leads to another question, internal communication. And obviously, one of the key models of the marketing is to understand your audience, understand your audience deeply. Obviously, that also apply to internal communication with C-suites. It is actually for the marketer to frame their discussions or their takeaways around the CEO, COO, CTO, and CRO, if necessary. So can you give us an example in terms of how to frame that discussion, say, if you want to talk to, say, COO and the CTO?

 

Christina Del Villar: Yeah, yeah. And you should. And it's interesting because as a marketing leader, you know the suite, we talk to the CEO, the CFO, the CIO. Every CXO that's out there, we talk to them. But it's important for everyone in your marketing organization to feel comfortable speaking to those folks, or at least to having that knowledge to present. Because I've been in meetings where it's not like a board meeting, we're not presenting results necessarily, but the CEO might turn to the person who just did an event and be like, "Oh, well, what's our expected revenue?" And they're like, "What?" And then they look at me. I'm like, "No, no." You need to own your campaign and know what it is and feel comfortable talking to them. And I think, again, it goes back to really understanding, at the end of the day, what it is that this person is seeking. Again, know your audience. So the CEO, or let's not even talk about the CEO, let's talk about a VP of sales, they're concerned about pipeline and revenue and making sure that their team meets their numbers and their quota, right?

 

Pam Didner: Yep.

 

Christina Del Villar: So, that's what you need to be speaking to them about. When I was working at a company, one of the sales team complained that, "Marketing just talks about all the great stuff we do," and it's meaningless to them. And so I thought about it, and I'm like, "Yeah. No, I get what you're saying. We're like, 'We're great. This is what we did.'" And he said, he's like, "It makes sales look bad when you have..." Because I had this big chart up, like, "We brought in 50,000 leads this month."

And then unbeknownst to me, the CEO's like, "Well, marketing just brought in 50,000 leads. What are you doing with them?" Right? Not even realizing that we haven't even given those to sales yet. Right? We're still nurturing them. They're still with us. They're not qualified for sales yet. So we were giving this misimpression to the CEO. It was making the sales team look bad. So we had this monthly meeting that we would have with the sales team, and we would always start off- 

 

Pam Didner: Make sure you're on the same page. Yeah.

 

Christina Del Villar: Yeah, yeah, right? And we were about to go into this meeting, and it was right after this conversation I had, and I told the person my on my team who presented, I'm like, "Flip our slides." He's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Start from the back. Start from how much pipeline and revenue we brought in. And then if we ever get to how many website visitors we have, it doesn't matter, right? Because this is what's going to engage sales to have an interactive conversation about what's working and what's not working." So he's like, "Okay." So he literally flipped the slides around and we started with, "This is the pipeline we brought in, and this is the revenue we brought in." And we never got to how many website visitors we had, because it didn't matter to them. They wouldn't understand.

 

Pam Didner: It didn't matter to them anymore. Yeah.

 

Christina Del Villar: Right. And so that's what we're talking about here. Think about who you're talking to. And again, I've had this happen so many times. You're walking through the hall, and somebody's like, "Hey, blah, blah, blah." It's not scripted, it's not a planned meeting, but people want to know what's going on. And so you always have to have these nuggets in your back pocket so you can talk about it. But again, you need to talk to them in a way that's meaningful to them.

 

Pam Didner: Yeah. I do agree with you. On the sales side, I 100% agree, even with the CRO, chief revenue officers, talking about the sales revenue and the pipelines are very important. And CEO cares about that a lot too. If I talk to a COO, I usually focus on processes. What kind of processes that we are doing, especially on the Martech Stack. On the CTO side of things, if they really care about all the tools that we are using, and I always talk about in terms of how tools are performing, right? There's no tools are downed, and Salesforce, or the CIM, or marketing automation tools are running very nicely. And another thing I will bring into COO and the CTO's attention, it's usually about processes and also how the tool's usage.

 

Christina Del Villar: Right, yep.

 

Pam Didner: What's the tool's usage? And to make sure that they understand that part of it. But most of the time I do agree with you, the key things that everybody cares the most tend to be a revenue and growth impact.

 

Christina Del Villar: Right, right. And that makes sense, because if you think about what your overall corporate objective is, it is usually a revenue number, right?

 

Pam Didner: Revenue, yeah.

 

Christina Del Villar: Right? Even if it's an IPO, maybe you're looking at revenue, maybe you're looking at EBITDA, maybe you're looking at number of accounts, or you're going to look at some of the things, but, at the end of the day, you're really looking at that revenue number. And I think the other thing, to your point, that's really important when you're talking to that COO, CIO, CTO, they want to understand, because some of that, oftentimes that budget will come from their budget or they-

 

Pam Didner: Exactly. To support it.

 

Christina Del Villar: Right?

 

Pam Didner: Yeah. Especially in a big enterprise. Yeah.

 

Christina Del Villar: Where they're putting resources. Absolutely. I can't tell you how many times people are like, "Well, I have this list of all of your... Do you use all of these tools and technology?" And it's like, "Yes."

 

Pam Didner: "Do we need it? Do we need tools?"

 

Christina Del Villar: "Do we really need Salesforce? Do you need that?" Right.

 

Pam Didner: "Yes, how did you use that in the past two years?"

 

Christina Del Villar: Right. To be fair, there are times when I'm like, "Oh yeah. Okay. We should probably leverage that more or get rid of it." And that's great. It's good to do that kind of an audit. But again, we need to help them understand how these tools are helping us do our job better, and again, getting us to that ultimate corporate goal that we have.

 

Pam Didner: Understood. So what is one thing that marketers need to do when preparing their communication or presentation to C-suite? If you actually have one advice, what would that be?

 

Christina Del Villar: Yeah, I would say keep it short.

 

Pam Didner: I love that. I like that.

 

Christina Del Villar: I know, right? And it doesn't need to be a fancy, pretty slide. Again, I literally just throw up a number. It's like, "4.5 million this quarter," right?

 

Pam Didner: Five million. The font size, 78.

 

Christina Del Villar: Right? Keep it super simple, because what you want is you want them to take that away immediately and then you still need to have that backup material, because they're going to ask more questions about it, which is fine. But I would just say keep it simple and keep it to the point, and again, what it is that they're looking for, right? If the CTO is trying to understand how you're leveraging the technology and, "Do we need all these licenses?" then start with that. If the CEO wants to understand what revenue is happening, talk about that sales pipeline, right? Product really wants to better understand how people are using their product. And marketers tend to have that information because we own all the tools that people are communicating with, whether it's chat or-

 

Pam Didner: Certainly.

 

Christina Del Villar: ... things like that. Right? So there's definitely ways that you can consider it. And if you don't know, simply ask them, like, "What motivates you?" Right?

 

Pam Didner: Just ask.

 

Christina Del Villar: I know. Have a conversation. Just ask, right? Just ask. It was funny, I had a conversation with an engineering team. I basically made them come to a marketing brown bag once, and they were just like... The fact that they even showed up was great, but they were all on their phones, eating their lunch. And at one point I was like, "Look, this is the role you can help my team. We need data about how our customers are using our products. And we need to get some information on case studies." And suddenly this one guy pops up and he's like, "Oh my God, we have 10 years of usage data. Would that be helpful?" I'm like, "Ah-

 

Pam Didner: Yeah!

 

Christina Del Villar: ... yeah. That would be freaking amazing!" And they got all excited about it. And so then they felt like they were part of our process. They were total geeks about the data, so they were deep diving into it. And again, just helping them understand how they can help you and you can help them, and helping them really understand what it is that you are doing and how they can help you as well as you helping them.

 

Pam Didner: Very nice. Very nice.

 

Christina Del Villar: Yeah. It was super cute.

 

Pam Didner: How can people find you?

 

Christina Del Villar: Yeah. You can find me at christinadelvillar.com. Also, my book is on Amazon, Sway. And I'm on LinkedIn. I love connecting. I love talking about this. I know you do as well, so happy to always chat with people and be their mentor, give advice, just commiserate, whatever.

 

Pam Didner: Excellent. Well, Christina, it's wonderful to have you. Thank you so much for coming to my show.

 

Christina Del Villar: Yeah. Thank you.