Mat Sweezey, Principal of Marketing Insights, Salesforce

Brand new research from 7,000+ marketers from around the world gives useful answers: For the first time, we now know the difference between a high performer and an under-performer. In this presentation, Mathew Sweezey, Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce and Author of Marketing Automation for Dummies, shared the five key traits of high-performing marketing organizations, outlining such details as what is a best-in-class budget, how many and what tools are high performers using, and what are their winning tactics.

Matt was engaging, clear, and to the point. He wasn’t trying to be as humorous as the other speakers, but he was very approachable. His presentation was informative. Helpfully, he has shared his slides online for everyone to review. This data is based on 7,500 marketers around the world over a period of two years across all industries.

The New Idea Of Marketing Is That Marketing Creates Experiences

• All of your tools should work to create an experience for the client
• Marketing has now become the product, as opposed to before, when it told consumers about the product
• The product is in the experience

An Extension of This is That Marketing Now Becomes the Primary Value

• New era formula: Market>Sell>Build (example: Tesla who spends 1/150th of what Mercedes Benz sold on advertising when Tesla’s cars didn’t even exist before they sold them)
• High performers have bigger budgets, according to statistics - however, the Tesla example suggests otherwise
• High performers’ marketing budgets will double in 1.8 years
• They understand how to leverage a stretch budget (a stretch budget is based on sales and marketing forecasts that are higher than estimates)

Better Technology Becomes More Important

• High performers use up to 14 different technological tools to create a cohesive experience
• A user views, on average, 1.7 pages on your website
• Personal experiences for the customer are what your technology should be working to create

Agile Workflows are Imperative

• Agile is the modern production method
• The agile process: User stories>test>review>execute
• Ask these questions via the phone: What were you looking for? Did it meet your expectations? Have you seen better?

High Performers Collaborate

• High performers are 17x better at collaboration across the customer lifecycle
• Growth teams are their secret and they will analyze the experience from the first marketing touch to the product
• Growth teams work with other departments to set up test runs for resolving issues
• Growth teams review results to iterate on findings in an agile format

Key takeaways

• Learn to embrace the high performers’ new idea of marketing
• Learn how to get the budgets high performers get
• Dig deeper into new ideas of production, like agile production methods, to allow you to do more with less