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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, Marc Hansen of Workfront joins us with nearly ten years of experience in digital, event and field marketing within the enterprise software and engineering industries.
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What is your role and summarize the number and specific types of field marketing programs you are leading:
As Senior Marketing Manager at Workfront, I lead the North America Field Marketing Team which encompasses event and webinar programs. We run approximately 40 live webinars, 18 conferences, and 30 regional field marketing events per year. Our team supports seven sales teams across four major territories with an emphasis on New York, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, San Francisco, and Seattle. We partner with our internal marketing teams, sales leadership, and external partners to identify the right content to impact the right accounts within the right locations. Our “go-to” field event format is a thought leadership panel over lunch but we also put together networking happy hours, industry dinners, and suites at pro sports games when it makes sense. Our Creativeworks series with BDI has been quite successful and a lot of fun.
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How do you measure and track your field marketing programs?
We partner with our Marketing Operations Team to measure our success. The main KPIs we review are number of registrants, actual attendees, new new leads created, account qualified leads (AQLs), marketing influenced qualified sales opportunities (QSOs), and total pipeline coverage ($).
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We use Salesforce and Marketo to manage and track the campaigns. Then, we report on the data using Tableau dashboards.
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Much of our focus recently has been on an account-based land and expand strategy. Each account executive has a set list of “targeted accounts” which informs the invite list for an event. We often design incentive programs for our account development reps and measure the number of targeted accounts they recruit for an event.
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What are your top 3 lessons learned about Field Marketing?
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Let your customers do the selling for you. No one wants to attend an event and be sold to the entire time by the host. Focus the content of your event on thought leadership around common pain points and involve your customers, partners, and industry thought leaders in the conversation.
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A typical pitfall for event marketers is to focus so narrowly on the target list that they forget to invite (or intentionally block) happy customers. Design your event in a way that allows your champions to network with- and influence -your key prospects. That’s where the “magic” happens. Just last week, I sat at a table in Los Angeles with an important prospective buyer and an experienced customer. They talked throughout the event about their similar challenges and discussed ways to solve those issues by using our product. Our customer even gave a live demo of our mobile app! I didn’t have to say a word.
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Get buy-in from sales and over-communicate. For any field marketing event to be successful, you’ll need to get your sales team on board first. It’s vital to partner with sales leadership early on in the planning process or you’ll risk a lack of engagement when the event comes around. Ultimately, your event could flop.
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I hold monthly planning meetings with the sales leaders. We also sit on bi-weekly calls with the sales teams to provide updates on upcoming events and understand their pipeline needs. When an event launches, we send out a kick-off email to all the stakeholders involved and provide weekly summary emails from there.
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In general, we seek to over-communicate using a variety of tools such as a centralized Google Doc with all the necessary links, a shared Google Calendar, a dedicated #FieldMarketing Slack channel, and a formal monthly newsletter. It’s probably overkill but somehow there’s always that one individual who is unaware of what’s going on.
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The details matter. A great experience is built on little details. Take the time to build your invite list, create a solid promotional plan, and write good content. Think about the pre-event, onsite, and post-event experiences.
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Is the registration process easy and effective? Have you tested your links? Do your confirmation emails have the correct info? Could a pre-event survey help you gather important insights?
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What about onsite? Have you thought about parking? Seating assignments? Leave behinds or giveaways?
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Check and double-check your to-do list. Then, build a project template in Workfront and repeat.
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ABOUT MARC HANSEN
As Senior Marketing Manager at Workfront, Marc leads event and field marketing strategy and operations for Workfront. Prior to Workfront, Marc held digital marketing and automation roles in the enterprise software and engineering industries. He’s a music junkie, avid traveler, and enjoys spending time with his wife and three young children. Check out his profile on LinkedIn and be sure to follow him on Twitter at @marcrhansen.
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