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Welcome to BDI’s Field Marketer Fridays where we interview a new marketer every month with the goal of sharing lessons learned, insights, and perspectives about the ever-changing landscape of field marketing. This week, Tim French of Equinix joins us and brings over seven years of marketing experience ranging from social media and digital marketing on the agency side to field marketing in the tech sector.
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What is your role and summarize the number and specific types of field marketing programs you are leading:
I am a Field Marketing Specialist for Equinix’s Americas Field Marketing Team, West Region.. This includes a territory west of Denver including Western Canada and consists of five sales teams in total. The major cities in our team’s region are Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, but extends to other metros such as Portland, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Diego and Vancouver. We produce around 40 field marketing events per year and our team is also responsible for two large trade shows, one in Hawaii and one in Vegas. Our team partners with global marketing teams to identify key topics/content and incorporate those programs into our field events, which include networking happy hours, professional sports games, thought leadership lunches for customers and new prospects with BDI, C-suite conferences, executive dinners, executive race car experiences and more.
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How do you measure and track your field marketing programs?
The majority of field marketing activities we do are events. Key performance indicators include number of registrants, actual attendees, leads generated, and new contacts created. More specifically, our team is interested in the number of customers and prospects that attend the event. We use an Account Based Marketing (ABM) approach for our field marketing strategy and our team has named accounts called Star Accounts. There is a major emphasis to recruit and involve Star Accounts in all of our field marketing activities.
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We track everything using Salesforce. Each activity or event has a unique Salesforce code and that’s how ROI is measured for our team – we look to see what type of influence marketing had on the overall outcome. Today, we are more focused on pushing qualified leads down our funnel vs. top of funnel. Our Sales team is measured on their ability to add new logos while our field marketing team is also measured on the number of customer references created annually.
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What are your top 3 lessons learned about Field Marketing?
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Be flexible. We work with a lot of different stakeholders, both internal and external, which involves working with many different types of people. Adopting to change is required for this type of role as well as the ability to set and manage expectations with everyone I work with.
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Communicate effectively with sales teams, vendors, stakeholders, and other members of marketing. Communication is our secret sauce for maximizing our partnership with sales. We schedule weekly or bi-weekly calls with sales teams either in-person or on the phone. We use this opportunity to provide a general update and summary on marketing programs, events, and anything else that should be on their radar. We also meet with the Regional Vice President of Sales on a bi-weekly basis. Here we discuss any challenges with the sales team, plan how field marketing and sales can become more closely aligned and any upcoming events or activities the team needs to be aware of. Additionally, we send out a monthly update that breakdowns everything the sales teams in our region need to know. It includes the event schedule, partner schedule, update on customer references, sales content, partner content, and any new products the team can push to the market. It is essentially a one stop shop for all things happening in marketing that sales team needs to know. We encourage them to review it, and we do our best to keep it short and sweet with quick hyperlinks. Ultimately, communication is at the heart of everything we do with sales.
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Be organized. We’ve created with everything the sales team needs to know. It includes event lists, email invites, sales content, folders specific to customer references, invites to global event – and everything is specific to each team. Organization is the foundation for all of our team’s success.
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ABOUT TIM FRENCH
Tim French has over 7 years of marketing experience ranging from social media and digital marketing on the agency side to field marketing in the tech sector. In addition to working on the Field Marketing team at Equinix, Tim enjoys playing sports, fantasy football and exploring all the Bay Area has to offer. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Lucy, and his 6-month-old Portuguese Water Dog puppy named Humphrey (be sure to follow him on Instagram @humphreyfrench). Above all else, Tim is a shareholder of the 13-time World Champion Green Bay Packers.
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