Imagine you’re preparing to make a delicious loaf of bread.
But you have to forage or farm all the ingredients yourself. There’s no supermarket down the street with flour, sugar, or salt.
That would make the bread baking process a lot more strenuous, right? It simply wouldn’t be scalable.
That’s similar to what it’s like for B2B marketers when proper data orchestration hasn’t been delivered.
In this episode of #FlipMyFunnel, Ali Rastielo shares how BigCommerce uses data to fuel action.
Here’s what we’re unpacking today:
- What data orchestration is
- Effective data orchestration tools
- How data orchestration helps marketers achieve results
This post is based on a live session with Ali Rastielo. You can hear the full session here and below.
What is data orchestration?
Ali: What data orchestration does is it automates the data processes so that your data is teed up for action.
As a marketer, that is super important to me. That is the number one thing that’s going to make me scalable and make me able to go to market as quickly as possible. I need to hit those numbers.
Data orchestration is setting up the data so that you’re not running human processes to make sure it’s ready for you and for your marketing team.
What has been your data orchestration solution?
Ali: We ended up with Openprise. We looked at a couple of other vendors as well, but with Openprise, you can run these incredibly easy programs to do basic standardization that will help you to save thousands of dollars. It’s like a data technician.
We created an operation in Openprise that would extract the domain from the provided email addresses of every lead. It deposits them in their own fields, then Openprise matches them to the list of domains that we have.
It does all of that for us. Then, as soon as that lead is cleaned and goes through all the processes, we can drop them in the right messaging tracks.
We saw a 15% lift in revenue right away. We got the right person the right messaging so fast it made the selling process so much easier.
We also introduced a standard clean. This happens to every lead that comes into the database. The phone numbers are super important to our SDRs because they have autodialers. We need that standardized in a way that the autodialer can work properly.
Who does data orchestration help?
Ali: BigCommerce has a lot of what we call “dreamers” coming into our business wanting to start an online store.
Data orchestration for lead collection
We get a lot of Gmail addresses or Hotmail or whatever private email address someone uses. There’s a lot of common ones and they get misspelled very easily. Openprise already has in the system what those should be and will transform them into the right context so you’re not missing out on marketing to that person.
The next thing we did that was really important was taking a job title and discerning with the job function and job level. That’s so we know we’re talking to the right person who’s the decision-maker about whatever it is that we’re trying to do.
Or, maybe we do want to talk to an influencer. We have different messaging for them. So, it’s really important that it works.
The way it works for me is if I see an “assistant to the VP of demand generation,” it’s likely not a decision-maker. They may be an influencer and they can get some attention to what I’m trying to do.
Data orchestration for events
Openprise is also a great tool for event lists and understanding the quick segmentation of who was at an event you visited. Openprise put together who they’d be targeting at this event in two minutes. They can see which companies are really prevalent here and the job functions of the folks here.
Then, they put them into the right marketing tracks.
Data orchestration for compliance
Openprise also helped us with our GDPR compliance. We were a little behind when we were starting to really work on getting compliant for GDPR.
Openprise already had it plugged into the system what the countries were that were affected by GDPR regulations. We ran it against the database and we carved out three lists of known GDPR countries. That way, we didn’t have any sort of fuzzy logic matching.
Once we had those lists broken down, we put them on marketing suspend lists and ran opt-in campaigns to them. We slowly started building back up the list of people we could market to and carved off the ones that never responded.
Why is data orchestration important?
Ali: What the most important thing that this type of work does is it puts marketing ops in the driver’s seat of strategy.
They are now in control of how the data is sorted and the data strategy that’s being used in campaigns. My team is brought to the table before anything is launched, whether it’s a new product or a campaign.
It puts them in this strategic role that sometimes they’re not viewed as. We can really start setting ourselves up for true ABM in a way we weren’t able to do before.
