Matt Heinz is one of the funniest B2B marketers I know.
Not only is Matt Heinz a hilarious and dynamic speaker, he’s also an award-winning blogger, an author, and the founder of Heinz Marketing. He and I recently sat down for a chat about one of my favorite topics: how sales and marketing teams can better support one another. He shared his thoughts about account-based marketing, and I even learned a thing or two about baseball.
Here are a few interesting facts you should know about Matt Heinz before I jump into his marketing words of wisdom:
His top three favorite sales and marketing pros?
David Brock — Sales guru David Brock is President at Partners in Excellence, Inc.
Mike Weinberg — Mike Weinberg is a top sales coach and the author of New Sales Simplified.
Andy Sernovitz — Andy Sernovitz is the CEO of SocialMedia.org and WordOfMouth.org, and he’s also a passionate blogger at Damn I Wish I’d Thought Of That.
His favorite pieces of marketing technology?
The telephone. As much as Matt loves shiny new things, he is a bit old school when it comes to connecting with people.
Handwritten note cards. Matt reverts to pen and paper when it comes to connecting with his prospects to creates a deeper connection.
His favorite book?
Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins, the Father of Direct Marketing
Check out my full video interview with Matt Heinz here:
Now I’d like to dive deeper into four of the marketing strategies Matt discussed in our interview.
Automation is the Key to Increasing Your Batting Average
Matt’s advice for winning with marketing automation is finding intelligent technologies that help you do more with greater efficiency. Rexter is one of Matt’s favorite tools for this. Every morning, the platform sends him a list of the top five people he should call based on rules he creates in Salesforce. He often makes these calls during his morning commute to make the most of his idle time and kick off the day on a great note.
However, there is one caveat to automation that Matt points out. “Though we have great tools to help us be more productive,” he says, “marketers are still responsible for making sure the messaging is relevant to the person we are trying to reach.”
Leads Keep You In the Ballgame, but Revenue Gets You Past the 7th Inning Stretch
“The closer you can get to the revenue, the better,” says Matt when asked what the top priority of today’s CMO should be.
Once we start thinking in terms of revenue the way sales teams do, the perception of marketing changes from cost center to profit center. What this looks like in action? Well, it really comes down to how marketing can help sales, and it can manifest in a variety of ways. Maybe it’s nailing the right messaging. Or maybe it is rounding up your best customers for case studies. It might even be using marketing technology to provide your sales reps with the buying signals they need to contact prospects at exactly the right time to close a deal.
[Tweet ““The closer you get to the revenue, the better.” — @HeinzMarketing on CMOs’ priorities”]
Hitting a Grand Slam with Your MarTech Stack Requires Strategy
“You can’t let the tail wag the dog,” says Matt while talking about developing a martech strategy. In other words, you have to research tools that are right for your business situation and select the solutions that best meet your greatest needs.
Matt and his team recently released 9 Steps For Building Your B2B Marketing Stack, which gives marketers a great starting point for planning their technology strategy. And here at Terminus, we’ve partnered with over 35 martech companies to form the Account-Based Marketing Cloud. I recommend you explore both to learn more about your B2B marketing technology options. At the end of the day, of course, the best technologies are the ones that help deepen the relationship between your marketing and sales teams — and your customers.
[Tweet “Marketers should ask themselves where the sales team is falling down. — @HeinzMarketing”]
Account-Based Marketing Is the Lead Off You Need to Score Closed Deals
In baseball, a lead off gives the base runner a head start and helps them get to the next base faster. The same concept applies with ABM. Nurturing target accounts helps them perceive the company as a trusted advisor that can provide a solution when a problem arises.
This tweet perfectly sums up Matt’s sentiments on account-based marketing during our interview:
At any given time, only 3% of your market is actively buying. 56% are not ready, 40% are poised to begin. #c2c15
— Matt Heinz (@HeinzMarketing) February 17, 2015
“The job of marketing is to activate the 40% that are poised and convert them into paying customers,” he said. Account-based marketing is especially useful in this scenario to make sure that your brand stays top-of-mind with those “poised” prospects — or even the dead ones.
[Tweet “40% of the market is poised to buy. Marketing’s job: turn them into customers. – @HeinzMarketing “]
Spending time with Matt Heinz was a joy, and it reminded me of a famous Evan Carmichael quote: “People buy from people, not companies. So get personal.”
