Jonathan Morgan - AchieveIt

In this episode of the Demand Generation Club Podcast, host Franco Caporale interviews Jonathan Morgan, the VP of Revenue Operation and Head of Marketing at AchieveIt. Morgan discusses his career trajectory and how he ended up in his current role. He also talks about how he manages both marketing and revenue operations responsibilities on a day-to-day basis, emphasizing the importance of prioritization and focusing on high-impact activities. Morgan shares the tech stack used at AchieveIt, including Salesforce, marketing automation tools, and various analytics and enrichment platforms. He also discusses the strong relationship between marketing and sales at AchieveIt, highlighting the regular meetings and collaboration between the two teams. Morgan explains the key metrics used to measure marketing success, including inbound revenue, pipeline contribution, MQLs, and late-stage pipeline. 

Transcript

INTRO: The Demand Generation Club Podcast is back, and we're turning up the heat with Season 3. Get ready for insightful conversation with experts from Splash, TrustCloud, WorkRamp, UserGems, and more as we dive deep into B2B marketing approaches that are making an impact in 2024. This podcast is brought to you by SaaSMQL, the SaaS growth agency that helps B2B software companies land seven-figure deals with highly targeted multichannel campaigns. Since 2018, SaaSMQL has helped over 100 SaaS companies generate millions of dollars in sales pipeline and recurring revenue. To learn more, go to saasmql.com.

Franco Caporale:
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Demand Generation Club Podcast. I'm here today with Jonathan Morgan, who is the VP of Revenue Operation and Head of Marketing at AchieveIt. Hi, Jonathan.

Jonathan Morgan:
 Hey, Franco. Thanks for having me.

Franco Caporale:
Really, it's a pleasure to have you here on the episode today. As usual, I'd like to start with few words about your background, and how did you end up becoming a RevOps and marketing at AchieveIt? What was your career trajectory for everyone listening here?

Jonathan Morgan:
Yeah. Honestly, I think if you asked me five years ago if I would be doing this right now, I never would've guessed it. And I think if you talk to a lot of people in RevOps, very few people have initial goals to be in RevOps, you kind of just by happenstance fall into it, and that's what happened with me. I actually was at AchieveIt, part of our customer engagement team, wanted to start a family so wanted to stop traveling. And we had the need as many growing SaaS companies do to have a more operational focus and operational function.

 I started in that role originally in sales ops, and then based on some internal changes and pre-COVID having to do some reorgs and layoffs of our own, I ended up absorbing marketing. And that was, I guess, almost four years now. And I've since grown into VP of Revenue Operations and maintained heading up our marketing team and marketing strategy as well. So, definitely a unique role, but it's been a lot of fun and a lot of learning every single day.

Franco Caporale:
That's great. And in fact, I have a lot of questions about that because, in my past, I've done a little bit of both, but never at the same time. So, I'm curious, how do you manage both kind of responsibilities on a day-to-day basis? Is there one of these areas that you think you are focusing more time than the other?

Jonathan Morgan:
Yeah. I think I ask myself the same question some days, is how do I focus on both or where do I spend my time? And I think, as with anything, whether you're marketing specific or ops specific or doing a bit of both, it comes down to prioritization and then also what has the highest impact on both team and the organization? So, we do a lot of planning on a quarterly basis for our marketing initiatives, which helps to identify the effort and time needed on that. Certainly trying to get more strategic about our ops items as well, instead of just being reactive to requests from sales or marketing or customer engagement, but definitely trying to prioritize as much as possible. And also ensure that, from a team standpoint, supporting the individuals on the teams to help enable them to be successful and grow their careers, and everything that comes with being a manager as well.

Franco Caporale:
So, I would like to unpack a little bit kind of both area of RevOps and marketing, as well as marketing ops. First of all, what tech stack do you use on the RevOps side, sales alignment, as well as on the marketing side, just to understand?

Jonathan Morgan:
 Sure. So we have, I'd say, probably a pretty standard tech stack for most organizations, and kind of the typical play that many SaaS organizations would do. Our CRM and Salesforce we use was, I guess now is marketing engagement, from a marketing automation standpoint. Plenty of other small niche tools. On the marketing side, whether it's product tours, we use Storylane, or we use FullStory for some of our website analytics. And then on the sales side, we use many of the standard players there as well, so Salesloft for our sales engagement. We use InsightSquared, which is now MediaFly for a lot of analytics. ZoomInfo and Sales Navigator from a contact enrichment. But many of the big names in the space we use as well as some of the smaller players for more niche team needs.

Franco Caporale:
Assuming your main goal is to keep everything aligned, right, all these platforms and leads flowing through sales and back to marketing and all of that. I would like to touch a little bit on the alignment with sales and how is your relationship with the sales team. How is your interaction on a weekly basis? Do you attend their calls? Tell me a little more about how did you structure that?

Jonathan Morgan:
Yeah, and I'd say that's one of the unique things about the role that I'm in on both marketing and RevOps, is that I really feel like I've been able to help facilitate a strong relationship between marketing and sales, which I'm sure anybody listening to this has been in organizations where that's an absolute nightmare and constant pointing fingers or grabbing for ownership of things. As RevOps, I had to be naturally close to both of those. And then, also by overseeing and leading marketing, I was able to kind of bring that connection together. Certainly, we can talk about what that looks like and how we went through that process. But not only am I involved in regular sales meetings, but a couple of members of marketing are also available and attend sales meetings.

 Every Monday morning, we have our weekly sales meeting where we actually have CE involved in that meeting as well. From a forecasting standpoint, essentially every function of their go-to-market organization is in there. Sales obviously walking through the forecast for the current month. CE is in there to talk about bandwidth and how to expect customers coming on board in order to make sure their resources are aligned. And then, marketing is also there to discuss any requests or updates on the sales and marketing side. Now, we don't spend the whole hour together and we have a section where everybody's on and then CE drops off and then marketing drops off. But it's enabled us to have a really strong relationship, not just sales and marketing, but across the entire go-to-market team.

Franco Caporale:
I've seen organization where they have three goals for marketing, separate goal for sales. Sales is always revenue obviously, but marketing might have MQL or they have top of the final leads, or they have scoring, all of that. What is your goal from the marketing side? How do you measure it?

Jonathan Morgan:
 Yeah, I think both sales and marketing, no one's ever been concerned about having enough things to measure, right? It's what are the correct things to measure, and it's been a journey. But on marketing right now, our primary three, I'll call it three to four KPIs. Our first is inbound revenue, and I mentioned inbound specifically because we can talk on that in a bit. Of course, pipeline contribution, so what are the amounts and number of opportunities from an inbound standpoint that we're contributing to the pipeline? MQLs, as well as we also monitor late stage inbound pipeline to ensure that we have enough later in the sales pipeline that will eventually turn into revenue. So, there's the main four, MQLs, opportunities, late stage pipeline, inbound ARR contribution.

Franco Caporale:
 How do you capture that? Because sometimes, attribution can be tricky, especially for inbound, understanding. At the enterprise level, even more when certain opportunities have multiple touches. How do you attribute that?

Jonathan Morgan:
 Yeah. Obviously, attribution is a huge topic and anytime you're on LinkedIn, you can find plenty of people debating about the importance of attribution. I think where people really get attribution wrong is not thinking about what is the type of attribution model we're going to do. It's when they set their team and organizational goals on attribution. It goes back to the goals I mentioned for our team. It's not marketing source revenue or marketing source pipeline. It's inbound pipeline. And what we mean by that, and this is a change we made a couple of years ago, is instead of thinking about it around who internally sourced this opportunity or who did what worked, we think about it from the customer side. Did they come to us? Was it inbound? Did they fill out some form on our website? Did they reach out to someone on our team?

 Did they attend an event? Did they come to us or did we go to them on an outbound standpoint? Was it a sales call? Was it a BDR? Was it something we were proactively doing? And so, I think by setting our goals related on inbound versus outbound, it kind of naturally broke down some of that resistance that happens in teams, because what people end up fighting over, right, is, "Oh no, this is a marketing sourced opportunity."

 And the sales person said, "Oh, no, no, I emailed them eight months ago. They didn't respond, but I emailed them, so this is an AE source." And what we've done by setting our goals at one level above that is, that doesn't really matter then. We don't need to fight about that. Let's pick whatever is the truest thing from an attribution standpoint that we can then learn about to inform our campaigns, but we don't need to worry about fighting over what is our actual goal. So, obviously there's tons we can talk on related to that, but that's been something extremely beneficial, not just from a goal-setting standpoint, but for facilitating that relationship across teams is, we don't need to fight about it. Let's pick whatever makes the most sense. And our goals are based on something entirely different.

Franco Caporale:
I would like to also talk about a little bit the marketing side of the equation. What are some of your top channel today that you are seeing success at driving this inbound pipeline, inbound opportunities?

Jonathan Morgan:
 So, I think one thing we focused, and I say we, since I've been involved in the marketing team is, we really wanted to make sure our primary demand channels we had is buttoned up and geared up as possible. So, like many SaaS companies, we have a good approach on different review platforms, whether it's G2 or Capterra, continuously boosting our profiles there, reviews. It's, in the case of Capterra, to make sure that when people are searching for tools like AchieveIt, which is strategic planning, software strategy, execution software, but they know where to find us. Of course we have typical Google Ads, we're experimenting with LinkedIn as well this year. All the typical demand channels. And we're now to the point where we have the basic demand, so if someone's looking for a tool, we want them to find us. Now, we're doing a lot more this year.

 Our strategy is to focus on brand. Ensuring that people, when they hear the name AchieveIt, they have an experience that they know to think about. So, it's high quality thought leadership content around strategic planning and strategy execution, whether that's from pure content where we've also just launched a podcast, Franco and I have talked about this now, having the similarities in podcasts. Ours is called the Strategy Gap, where we are speaking with strategy leaders about how they implement and execute strategic initiatives across their organization.

 So, I think a lot of people, when they try to implement new marketing strategies, the thing now is brand, like let's do brand, brand, brand. We are doing that now, but I think a lot of people forget, you still need to do the foundational demand steps to get your demand funnel working for people that are actively looking before you go all in on brand.

Franco Caporale:
 I have a question for you that I really want to ask because you're sitting in both side of the equation. From your perspective, the BDR STR team, should they report to marketing, to sales, to RevOps maybe, or a combination of the three?

Jonathan Morgan:
 Great question. I think you see the same question being asked about RevOps is, who does a RevOps report to? There's not a clear answer for either of those questions. The easiest way to answer it is whoever is going to give it the attention that it needs. If you have a sales leader that's really great about driving alignment and having BDRs that support both sales and marketing, and the marketing person maybe that isn't their forte, report it to sales.

 If the marketing person is really great with the BDR strategy, I would report to marketing. And then, same on the ops side. For our organization, we actually use outsourced BDRs right now. So, we have a firm that we use that, they're doing entirely outbound, so in that case, it makes sense that we have it report to sales. But certainly, in a case where we were leveraging BDRs for inbound, I could easily see how that could roll up under our team and under marketing.

Franco Caporale:
 I have two more questions for you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Morgan:
Yeah.

Franco Caporale:
 First of all, where do you see the future of RevOps next three, five years?

Jonathan Morgan:
 Something I'm fairly passionate about is, people have been, I think it was, what, the number one job on LinkedIn last year that they said was the fastest growing job was RevOps. Everyone just thinks they need to hire it, but I think a lot of people don't really understand what that means, and they're just having somebody that reports the VP of sales and creates reports in Salesforce, or adds unnecessary fields. So, what my hope is for the future of RevOps is that we stop thinking about how are we supporting our internal teams? Obviously, it's important to align our teams, but that's not the goal of RevOps.

 The goal of RevOps is to create the best customer experience possible, and that happens through having a cohesive process across those teams. I think the more we can think about the future of RevOps being creating delight for customers, then we can back into what does that mean for our teams internally? How do we build roles and teams and individuals that support each element of that customer journey, and ultimately enhance customer experience with our products?

Franco Caporale:
Last question, Jonathan. What is one thing that you wish you knew at the beginning of your career, both from a marketing side or the RevOps side?

Jonathan Morgan:
That's funny. We asked the same exact question as our final one on the podcast, and I had never thought about what would I answer to that question. Honestly, I think just being open to being uncomfortable. I've been in my current hybrid role for four years now, and every single day I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm supposed to do this week or next week, or what I need to do to cause this or fix this problem. I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that, but anybody who I talk about this with, they're like, "Oh yeah, I feel the exact same way."

 There's always this sense of uncertainty with your future, your career, or what you should be doing next. As long as you're willing to just roll up your sleeves and figure things out, that's okay. So, I've come to terms with that now, but certainly struggled for a while with, "I have no idea what I'm doing. How am I going to solve this problem? How I'm going to help our organization grow? How am I going to fix this?" And it's just a natural part of anybody's career and career growth.

Franco Caporale:
Jonathan, thank you again for joining us today during this episode. I really enjoyed our conversation, so thank you very much.

Jonathan Morgan:
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Thanks, Franco.

CLOSING: That's a wrap for today's episode of the Demand Generation Club podcast. If you're curious about how we're landing enterprise deals and unlocking millions in recurring revenue using account-based marketing and integrated direct mail campaigns, check out our website, saasmql.com. That's saasmql.com. We share tons of every week on tried and true strategic ABM initiatives that actually generate pipeline from enterprise accounts. Thanks for tuning in.