Latest Cutting Edge Data Tactics for Marketing Operations

About the Guest

Tom DelMonte is Head of Marketing Operations for SAP’s North America Marketing organization. In this position, Tom’s team supports over 100 marketing and communication professionals in the areas of budget management, demand management, marketing technology design and deployment, and performance management. Prior to his current role, Tom held positions in Global Marketing Operations, Services Marketing, Brand Experience, Global Support, and Internal Business Consulting.

Connect with Tom DelMonte

Quote

“I think data is really going to be driving the efficiencies within marketing now.”

Highlights from the interview

What is marketing ops? What does it mean to be data-driven?

Our relationships are going more digital, so selling has become social selling with layers of platforms involved. You have to understand how those platforms complement one another, you don’t want them to contradict one another. Budgets and headcounts are shrinking, but expectations are rising. You can only get smarter, so I think enabling digital platforms and collecting that data, turning it into insights, is the way to bridge the gap between the data geeks and the business. You must be able to speak the same languages. Data will be driving the efficiencies within marketing now and in the future. It’s looking at metrics and asking: Do those metrics drive the right behavior? Is that the right metric to be looking at to achieve our goal?

What are the latest, cutting-edge data tactics available?

We have some incredible technology for our customers, but sometimes we don’t have the latest and greatest technology internally. That’s changed over the past five years or so, so now we’re loving intent data and technographic data. As an enterprise software provider, we were very relationship-driven, so we didn’t need a lot of intelligence. Now, you can be your own line of business, own your own budget, and purchase your own software, so you’ve got to get smarter digitally when those line of business heads are researching intent data.

How are B2B marketers identifying and targeting the right accounts from a marketing operations perspective?

You go from traditional attributes and titles to using intent data to look at listening signals. Who’s popping up on the radar as interested in something? They’re more likely to respond if you market to them. Retail folks do this all the time. You can combine intent data with platform and competitive information, making sure we’re obeying data privacy laws, to make those data elements available as attributes when our B2B marketers do segmentation.

What are the critical data points and fields for every marketer?

The ones you should know are industry, first-party data for website traffic, and whatever feeds your scoring model, like RFE (recency, frequency, and experience). Marry all of these with intent data.

Do you have any advice for marketers having trouble combining multiple data sets?

What I have found is with all of these new platforms, you can suffer from getting distracted by the next innovative solution… but there’s no perfect answer. My recommendation is to always bump up the conversation to the strategic level and identify what it is you’re trying to accomplish and pick the technology providers that meet your criteria. Have a list of what you want to attain. Do your due diligence and just ride them out. You can get so much further along by doing a few things well rather than bouncing from vendor to vendor, not gaining momentum.

How will marketing operations and the concept of being data-driven evolve in the future?

Traditionally, marketing ops have been focused around the Martech stack. In the future, I see marketing ops evolving into a strategic marketing operations with technology leading the way. Marketing operations are going to become more strategic, kind of like the COO, to help your marketing executives.