Creating connections is the core tenet of our technology. We connect our clients to their customers by serving highly relevant advertising across various channels programmatically.
Growth marketing and sales is a visible theme for B2B tech companies, focusing on a delectable amalgamation of ABM, data analytics, intelligence, AI and programmatic targeting. RollWorks, a B2B growth platform, helps growth hackers a full-spectrum technology suite for broad-based marketing campaigns and highly-targeted ABM programs. Ali Biggs, Director of Marketing at RollWorks spoke to us about her company’s growth roadmap and how they enable customers to adapt to the dynamic state of sales and marketing automation.
Tell us about your role at RollWorks and the team/technology you handle.
As the Director of Demand Gen at RollWorks, my team leads a wide range of programs including digital marketing, events, content creation, social media, and customer and partner marketing. We work cross-functionally with product marketing and creative design, as well as collaborate closely with our sales team to centralize our marketing strategy to positively impact pipeline and revenue.
We are the core users of our own B2B marketing platform, making us both internal guinea pigs and external experts. As marketers marketing to marketers, we have to bring our best work to the table all of the time. A marketer will immediately see through smoke-and-mirror claims and ignore tired taglines and themes. We have to be better, both as users of our own product and as campaign marketers.
Define the ‘State of Sales and Marketing Transformation’ in 2018? How do you enable your customers to adapt to this state quickly?
The expectation is that sales and marketing teams work more closely together than ever before. Gone are the days when marketing only reported on lead volume while sales reported on revenue – now, pipeline influence and revenue targets are shared. RollWorks enables the convergence of this partnership by helping B2B marketers nurture leads and drive high-quality programs alongside their sales team.
Our platform serves personalized ads, based on a contact’s role in the buying process and opportunity stage, to ensure the customer is seeing a highly relevant message that will progress them to the next stage of the sales cycle. RollWorks also has a connector for Salesforce that can synchronize ad performance information with CRM data and update daily to ensure Salesforce is reflecting the most up-to-date information.
In addition, our platform allows for creative uses of personalized ads throughout the marketing and sales cycle. For example, after sending an email, we can serve an ad with a photo of the sales rep that reinforces the contents of the email. After a phone call, you can display a personalized ad to bring them to a benefits page on your website. And after an in-person meeting, an ad showing a third-party testimonial can be served to provide customer validation of your product.
What are the core tenets of your technology? How do you integrate CRM with other MA platforms?
Creating connections is the core tenet of our technology. We connect our clients to their customers by serving highly relevant advertising across various channels programmatically. Our bi-directional connections with Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and soon Eloqua enable marketers to automatically pull in their existing audiences and then synchronize performance metrics back into the system-of-record. RollWorks helps connect sales and marketing teams by providing actionable insights at both the account level and at the contact level, in order to speed up pipeline and revenue growth.
How should B2B organizations strategize and deliver on their revenue management budgets?
Campaign goals vary from company to company and may vary from campaign to campaign.
We believe marketers should focus on strategy and leverage great technology to automate and optimize campaign performance to help drive revenue and business growth. RollWorks is one of a few companies worldwide that have developed a proprietary, real-time AI engine that can optimize results within a given budget. Our BidIQ AI engine optimizes all aspects of campaign delivery, including targeting, bidding, and budgeting. It can automatically shift budget based on the client’s goals and how the campaign is performing.
How do you deliver ABM-focused conversations at scale to your customers?
RollWorks supports our clients’ ABM strategies by identifying quality leads and accelerating conversions, because of delivering highly relevant advertising. When clients connect our platform to their CRM/MA platforms, they can onboard known prospects and customers for targeting.
RollWorks then enhances a client’s first-party data with our cross-device graph of 1.2 billion digital profiles, connecting them to their target audience across multiple channels and devices. If a client is looking to reach net-new prospects, they can leverage our act-alike modeling to grow their target account list at scale. We also have the ability to help clients who do not have access to or are not ready to onboard their first-party data. If a client has defined an ideal customer profile (ICP), we can use our firmographic data to reach users who fit those attributes.
Once our clients attract new leads, there are typically a number of activities that take place during the nurture sequence, both offline and online. Those activities include emails, phone calls, and in-person meetings. Businesses need to serve personalized ads, based on the contact’s role in the buying process, and based on the stage of the opportunity, to ensure their contact is seeing the best message to help move them to the next stage in the buying process.
What is RollWorks’ “Path to Sales and Marketing Mastery” using sales automation and ABM collaboration?
At RollWorks, our “Path to Sales and Marketing Mastery” is about programmatically synchronizing sales and marketing messaging throughout the deal cycle. Sales teams need to shorten their deal cycles as they are nurturing and actively working their ABM target accounts and contacts. To achieve this, our B2B marketing platform has the ability to automate retargeting of high-intent prospects, deliver personalized ads based on the buyer’s seniority, sales stage and more, and complement nurture campaigns with customized display and video advertising.
We do this with bi-directional CRM/MA connectors. The connectors help ensure marketing teams are working with the latest sales information for their ABM programs. The connectors also ensure sales reps can view the latest campaign performance information, so they can know both the right time to engage and key areas of interest for their contacts.
What makes your platform different from other marketing technologies currently available in B2B?
The key components of our RollWorks B2B marketing platform are:
The ability to connect with people, not just accounts. We go beyond IP targeting to help our clients reach the right contact in their target accounts. We have 1.2 billion digital profiles in our data-graph including intent signals.
The ability to manage both demand generation campaigns and ABM campaigns in one platform, which we call our Double Funnel approach. Additionally, our bi-directional CRM/MA connectors make it easier to serve display ads to existing contacts and leads.
The ability to drive performance by optimizing targeting, bidding, budgeting and creative across multiple channels and touchpoints. Our BidIQ AI technology learns from intent and behavioral data to drive more efficiency for our clients and processes over 500K bid requests per second.
As part of AdRoll Group, our B2B marketing platform benefits from 10 years of developing and iterating on our proprietary marketing technology.
What are your B2B marketing and sales goals and how do you leverage AI/machine learning to achieve your goals?
Our goal as a marketing team is to create measurable demand for our sales team and, ultimately, influence pipeline and realized revenue. RollWorks uses AI technologies in digital advertising bidding to ensure that we are reaching the right audience at the right time with the right message. These AI solutions can automatically connect your target audience with personalized creative while optimizing based on your budget, campaign goals, and real-time performance. This results in higher-quality leads that are more likely to close after being passed to sales.
Given the current shift to AI and customer intelligence, what skills and knowledge do B2B teams need to close deals faster?
The best B2B marketers and sellers that I have encountered are those that are constantly testing, iterating, and course correcting based on data collected. Adaptability is key. Once one tactic begins to show signs of fatigue, it is time to test and implement another. Some examples include email outreach sequences, direct mail drops, and timely field-event invitations. If you are looking for a comfortable, rinse-and-repeat job that does not require adapting to change, then you are going to falter in today’s MarTech industry.
In order to speed your time to close, sales and marketing teams have to collaborate to ensure that they are addressing common questions and challenges at each stage. These challenges should be aggregated across the entire sales and marketing org before building out a content matrix to address gaps. Once armed with this relevant content, it is time to put tools like RollWorks to work to provide air cover for conversations and to ensure that your company is getting in front of the right contacts at high-fit accounts.
How could AI in sales and marketing further disrupt SaaS platforms? How do you prepare for the disruptive ecosystem?
As sales and marketing teams align more closely, there is a greater need for our tools to work together. For AI to drive the best performance, the marketing goals, budget, and creative need to be targeted to the up-to-date lead and contact data. This creates a clear need for a centralized view of customer data that can then be actioned upon. Our team is addressing this very important need by connecting data from sales and marketing SaaS tools. Companies can prepare for the future sales ecosystem by focusing on gathering and using quality data, while AI can optimize against complex data sets in real time; driving high performance will be dependent on having quality inputs. Both quality data and dynamic and flexible AI are needed to drive results.
Would you like to participate and feature at tech conferences and events?
Yes. RollWorks currently speaks at industry events, including B2B Marketing Exchange, Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit, Sirius Decisions Summit, and later in the year, the B2B Marketing Forum. The team is always interested in meeting like-minded professionals and peers to network and discuss the state of ABM and marketing as a whole.
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Peter Thelen, Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing @ Zoom Video Communications
Thank you, Alli, for chatting with us about RollWorks and how you prepare for a disruptive salestech industry.
