Integrate CMO & Co-Author Deb Wolf Spills The Tea On New Book On Precision Demand Marketing

The Demand Gen Report team sat with Deb Wolf, CMO of Integrate, during the B2B Sales & Marketing Exchange in Boston, to dive deeper into book’s key takeaways. Wolf discussed the impact precision demand marketing has on the B2B industry and how important it was to share these insights with the world.

Demand Gen Report: You launched a new book at B2BSMX, tell us a little about it: Why did you decide to create it? What was the inspiration behind it?

Deb Wolf: We decided to write a book because many of our customers said, “This PDM thing sounds interesting, but how do you do it? The book is super practical in explaining precision demand marketing and there's a lot of quality stuff in there including: How to connect all these different channels and how to build a journey, as well as the five principles of PDM: Target, activate, govern, connect and measure. Our marketing team and our demand team could read this but we wanted to think more about our ideal customer persona. We did not want an ethereal sort of strategic book that didn't give the reader the practical aspects of what to actually do.

DGR: Which element of the five principles of PDM do you think is the most essential?

Wolf: I personally spend the most time focused on measurement because every CMO must go in front of a board. If you gave me $5 million… what did I give you back? It used to be that sales and marketing would point fingers at each other but now marketing is running alongside sales. Now, there's a pre-opportunity creation and then a post-opportunity creation through the sales cycle. I spend most of my time talking about measurement or optimization and defending spend. If I was talking to somebody on my team, like a demand marketer, they would probably say “activate” because it's what they do every day. They spend their time driving campaigns to hopefully drive leads to drive customer journeys and experiences that eventually end up in revenue. I think about all the people across my marketing team that must align all of those five principles. Marketing ops must both defend the spend, plus they must connect all the technology together to make sure they have all the right data because, without the right data, you can't tell a story.

DGR: Why did you feel it was important to incorporate customers’ perspectives and advice in the book?

Wolf: I did not want this to be another vendor telling people their perspective. Precision Demand Marketing isn't necessarily about our product or our platform. It's about the jobs that marketers must do. They must target people, govern data, activate campaigns, connect all their technology together and measure it and give feedback to the executive team. In this book, we tried to mirror the sections off on what the demand marketing team or marketing team must do. We really wanted to understand how everyday people are doing it. I wanted customers to tell us their stories. That's honestly what I liked most about this book because there are a ton of different perspectives in there from big companies, medium-sized companies and even start ups.

DGR: What is the biggest takeaway you want readers to have from this book?

Wolf: The biggest takeaway is that the buyers are in charge now. We must adapt as marketing and salespeople — adapt to the buyer, not the other way around. These frameworks, with all due respect to all our analyst friends, these crazy frameworks never go as planned. People are like, “This is how it's done and this is what is going to happen,” and you're like, “Yeah, in an ideal world,” but it never works out that way.”

I believe you must be in tune with what your buyer wants and that's the number one thing that I would want people to take away from this book. Buyers have just become a different breed. They do all their shopping on their mobile device and they're on multiple social channels at once. Marketers must start marrying their B2B buying habits after the way people have built their lives in the B2C world because they are just people. They're just trying to get information about what they want to buy. Yes, they're buying for their company or their team or their department, but they are still people when it comes down to it.

DGR: What advice would you give marketers looking to start PDM off on the right foot? How should they start?

Wolf: Last year, we did research with the Heinz Research Group and assessed marketers’ org structure, strategy and technology. The people that participated in the survey evaluated their teams against those three criteria and then we placed them on the marketing maturity curve based on the information. At the bottom, there were very siloed teams in marketing where technology wasn't connected and there was no strategy. At the very top, we saw very buyer-focused journeys with lots of feedback from customers as well as alignment with sales and connected technology. However, most people we surveyed fell in between the two. There were some at the bottom and some exceptions at the top, but most people usually fall in the middle.

So, how do marketers think about precision demand and try to work their way up that maturity curve? They'd want to evaluate all three of those things. The hardest thing for me to do as a CMO is to get my team to work collectively on a shared goal. You must really sit back and re-evaluate your org structure. If you're going to drive alignment with your field, you must think about how its organized. Figure out if you have the right team in place and the right processes in place and if you guys work together across those silos.