The following post is part of our series on B2B SaaS marketers. You can see our last entry here: Justin Keller, Sigstr.
Our next guest is Jocelyn Brown of Allocadia. As SVP of customers and revenue, Jocelyn oversees marketing, sales, partner and customer success teams to provide an exceptional customer experience. Her teams provide a seamless and value-driven experience to Allocadia customers, from initial interest through their continued growth.
KIM: Explain Allocadia in a few sentences.
JOCELYN: Allocadia gives marketers the confidence to know where to invest their next dollar. The recognized leader in Marketing Performance Management (MPM), Allocadia enables marketers to plan strategically, invest with purpose, measure the performance of their activities, and ultimately maximize marketing’s impact on the business.
Companies like Microsoft, GE Healthcare, Box and Charles Schwab manage more than $25 billion marketing dollars within Allocadia, which enables them to save up to 40% of the time they spend on budgeting and planning as well as double their pipeline-to-spend ratio and ROI.
KIM: How does Allocadia currently market itself?
JOCELYN: Our history has always been to focus on our customers and staying true to that, our marketing is focused on our customers and the pain points that they are facing every day. We know how we can bring value so we focus on helping customers at any stage understand the pain points that Allocadia can help them solve. We believe that technology should be purchased to solve a pain, and our marketing reflects that.
KIM: Can you talk about your move from customer success to revenue leadership?
JOCELYN: I fell into my first customer success role at Eloqua because my past was selling to marketers and that is who Eloqua serves. But ultimately as I grew in my role on the customer success side, I realized just how connected all the parts of the buyers’ journey were, and that customer success was just one part of the group that actually influenced a customer’s experience.
I’d already started working closely with the sales, partner and marketing functions as part of this customer experience path so when the time came to lead the entire revenue team it felt like a natural next step for me.
KIM: How do marketing, sales, partnerships and success best work together?
JOCELYN: The best way to align teams at a high-level is to have company goals that every team is working together to achieve. That naturally ensures that each team is working with the same focus, just from different angles. Then when it comes to programmatic activities, its key to have functional leaders who all understand the power of one team, one goal. That ensures that there is a focus on working together to achieve success, rather than fighting over who gets credit for an opportunity, a lead or any sort win.
KIM: How is your success measured?
JOCELYN: The ultimate success of any company is growth. But there are obviously leading indicators that you look at to ensure you’re moving toward that ultimate success – number of sales meetings, growth of digital engagement, customer satisfaction, etc. And for some programs, like PR, we look at things like Return on Intent since it’s hard to map those programs to a specific pipeline number. So in that instance we look at what goal we set out to achieve – could be pipeline, could be reputation, could be retention – in terms of activity level or output, and measure our success there – did we achieve what we intended.
KIM: How does PR fit into the SaaS marketing mix?
JOCELYN: PR is the way you build the right environment for other SaaS marketing activities to succeed. The best demand generation programs in the world won’t work if people don’t know about your product or category. So I view PR as a way to build top of funnel awareness, even just general awareness of the problem we solve. It creates a positive environment for the rest of our programs to operate efficiently.
KIM: What ways do you utilize PR to support sales or other marketing initiatives?
JOCELYN: Similar to the above, it’s the top of funnel activity that creates the right environment and conversations to improve the impact of our other marketing initiatives. On the sales side, media placements and award wins are one more way they can highlight third party validation of Allocadia.
KIM: If you could market any other business, what would it be?
JOCELYN: Canoe trips through the backwoods of Canada.
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