How To Market Marketing Internally with Steve Stano, B2B & SaaS Marketing Leader | Ep. 331

0:00Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. Today's guest, Steve Stano, a marketing leader at one of Wall Street's biggest firms. If your team's ever been seen as a cost center, this episode is for you. We talk about how to prove marketing drives revenue, how to run smarter ABM with real buyer signals, and why internal storytelling is just as important as external marketing. This one is packed with practical ways how to earn your seat at the table as a marketing team. Excited for you all to listen. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies.

0:51The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. What is up, Steve? Welcome to the podcast.

1:06Steve Stano:Hey, man. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Huge fan of the marketing millennial in many ways. I want people to understand where you're coming from. So could you please give a little background? I know you've been in the financial industry for a long term, worked for some huge banks out there. But just give a little background, like what you've done in your career, so people get an idea. Definitely. So I've always been within the financial services space ever since I graduated college, which seems like years ago at this point, and it is. But I've really only been with two of Wall Street's largest financial services institutions in that time.

1:44Steve Stano:And it's always been within the marketing space, whether it was supporting various businesses and leading off on financial wellness programs or product marketing, or now sitting in a seat where I'm leading a full team, focusing on how do we drive the business's impact from a workplace financial solutions perspective to a corporate audience. And then in turn, how do we best engage with prospects via acquisition marketing? How do we deepen that relationship, that client relationship with the corporate from a customer marketing perspective? And then ultimately, how do we wrap that all around or how do we wrap all around it through our global market intelligence program?

2:25Steve Stano:Really providing insights on the work that we do to help further a data driven approach. Let's talk about that approach because one thing I know most marketers feel is their department is the first to get cut because they've seen as this huge cost. People don't really understand marketing. They don't think it is a growth driver. They might just want to fall back on sales or other product, but they seem to just target marketing. So how should marketers go from being seen as a cost center to an actual growth driver in the business? Sure. And it's such a great question, right? And actually, I have a few stats that I think will help to bring this to life.

3:06Steve Stano:So if you checked out PwC's pulse survey on chief marketing officers, what you'll find is roughly 40 % of CMOs strongly agree that the value of marketing is understood. That's just 40%. And by the way, that's down from 53 % or 54 % last year. And then this case, right, there's obviously a huge upside to potentially increasing the value and increasing that understanding of marketing to business leadership. Equally, if you look at Gartner's recent survey on proving marketing value to the business, you'll find a few stats here. In fact, from a CMO perspective, perception of marketing's ability to provide or rather to prove value to get credit for the work that's done was roughly 50-50, which, again, I think was really interesting.

3:59Steve Stano:So to me, there's really four key areas to focus on. One is how do you focus on that long-term holistic impact of marketing and how do you prove that value? Two is how do you build a highly tangible and understandable narrative? that's incredibly important right having business leaders understand what marketing does in the words that they use i often say no one in the business cares about impressions i only do because i'm marketing but for the most part the business doesn't um three how do you how do you increase the variety of metrics that you're showing to the business and how are you focusing on what matters most to them and four how do you expand business involvement i think to daniel to your point you had mentioned sales, right?

4:45Steve Stano:Sales and marketing are on the same spectrum, just different ends of it. But like those four key areas that I just laid out are incredibly important to shift the narrative of marketing being a cost center to being a growth partner to the business. And it is entirely possible. It's actually crazy. The first that you said about like, first of all, it's down, but only 40 % of people like CMOs think that they could prove the value of that but it also makes me also think and i want your perspective how you do this internally too is like sometimes we as marketers get caught up in like external marketing but we forget that we also need to do what we're doing externally to internally we need to be the best advocates for ourselves because nobody else is going to be advocates for ourselves so what are some things you've put together to make sure that the impact has been seen by leaders, other teams, other stakeholders in the business?

5:46Steve Stano:Yeah, sure. And, you know, I love this topic. It's something that I preach about internally, not just to my team, but to others, right? We were able to build a really close strategic partnership with the business and have a seat at the table to be able to influence, you know, where the business goes based on data points that we see from a marketing perspective. And I'll tell you, a really tangible example of how to do this is we host a monthly marketing meeting featuring business leadership. Not just the head of the business and his leadership team, but also the click down from there and then plus two from there.

6:18Steve Stano:So in that way, we're getting in front of not just leadership, but also those that we're working with on the day-to-day to ensure they understand what marketing is doing and the terms and the words that they use, focusing on the things that matter. So what does that mean? In this monthly marketing meeting, we'll talk about a variety of things. It could be marketing that we're doing in terms of sales enablement. It could be upcoming webcasts. Or it could be the more strategic items, which I get more excited about, is how can we take our acquisition efforts and talk about paid media? Less about the performance from an activity rate or an engagement rate perspective, but more from an intent and a signal perspective.

6:58Steve Stano:In fact, this is an area that my team is shifting to. So it's less about ABM or just ABM and more about smart ABM. It's how do you apply those, that signal-based approach to those accounts that you're targeting with an ABM perspective. So imagine you're targeting a hundred different corporate through paid media efforts. That's easy. And that's easy to tell that story. But imagine you're able to hone in on the 15 corporates that are showing the highest intent. And then being able to bring that information to the sales team and then arming that sales team with actionable next steps based off of content that aligns to each of the different areas of intent that they're showing high, medium, low against.

7:43Steve Stano:And that's obviously based on the keywords. that to me is how you create a significantly valuable relationship with the business and that's how you get them to understand that marketing is a growth driver and is there to help them reach their goals that's just one example one thing you're also saying which is is very very important i think we also forget this because we were so deep in the weeds is that every internal person there's a different language and different things that they care about like for example sales where you just said sales care about what accounts are you penetrating like in b2b what accounts are you penetrating are you penetrating my accounts like how how many accounts have you have you touched in the last um how many accounts have seen our paid media efforts like Who are we trying to target now?

8:42They care about that. But if you're talking to a financial partner, they're caring about a total different metric. And if you went to talk about penetrating accounts, they might be like, what are you talking about? I just care about, are you efficient? Are you spending your money? Is it turning into value? So you have to tweak your messaging to each person. And I think sometimes we don't want to do that because it's the easier way or we don't have time to do it. But it's so important to tweak messaging like that.

9:17Steve Stano:Yeah, 100%. And it's all about finding what your partners care about. In that example of sales, they care about what is an account or a corporate that is showing high signs of intent, signals, engagement, etc. for them to reach out to, for them to get the win and then secure the revenue. business leadership is to daniel to your point like are we are we doing our job are we doing it efficiency efficiently rather um are we being smart with the dollars that we have it could be our finance partners that have any that have a similar question or legal that we're looking to push out um where we're push looking to push out messaging we want to make sure they're aligned so it's definitely different messages to different groups but grounding it in the outcomes that we drive and that's that big shift that we've made over the course of the last year or two is how do we focus on outcomes and it could be outcomes for legal outcomes for sales or for servicing and toning in on a similar story but nuancing that nuance nuancing it based off of what they care about most one thing i want to get what you do internally is a lot of marketing teams have like a marketing team dashboard and then one that they show to other teams the key metrics so what are what are things that on your marketing team dashboard and what are you what are the like broken down metrics that you're showing to leadership to other teams like what are the the comparatives so people understand you can have both but two of them are showing a different picture sure sure and we definitely have two two different dashboards so the dashboard that we show to marketing leadership it focuses more on impressions engagement rate activity rate cost per lead all those metrics to be able to prove that the that marketing spend is driving some sort of impact and maybe that impact is mql right and i have my own separate opinions about that it It could be an MQL or it could be account engagement and list penetration.

11:25Steve Stano:So that's all about the dashboard for our marketing leadership versus that of business leadership. It's the accounts that have been penetrated. It's the accounts that are showing signal and high to medium to low intent. But then it's also being able to show the connection of what accounts have been penetrated, what percentage of those accounts have engaged with our content, And then in turn, what percentage of those accounts are being engaged by sales? In fact, true example, when we did a report last week to show or to share an update on our paid media efforts, we saw 75 % of the accounts we were targeting had penetration.

12:09Steve Stano:We saw roughly 60 % to 65 % aggregated were engaging with our content. But guess what? Only 32 % of those penetrated accounts were being engaged by sales. So from a marketing perspective, that means we have to continue to warm and nurture those other ones to keep them ready, to keep them sales ready for the sales team to end up reaching out. like that to me is the marketing to sales story that we're trying to tell by it while also caring for the messages that we have to share to our respective leadership whether it's marketing or business leadership so that way we're arming them with the data points that are needed as they go off and have their own conversations one thing i want to do for like the non-b2b or non-b2b that do abm could you just describe what is like an abm approach what is account-based marketing because i know people are saying might be thinking account penetration what is that like how do i what is account penetration what does that look like so how do you think about like how do you think about abm and what is like what is account penetration what are people actually what are you actually looking at when you say account penetration absolutely so i'll kind of root this in real examples so account-based marketing this is all about looking at accounts that are most important to the business, in just the most basic language, if you will.

13:34Steve Stano:Let's use private companies as an example. There are thousands of private companies out there, whether early-stage startups all the way to late-stage pre-IPO companies. Where the business is strategically focused, at least for the firm that I'm at, is call it in the mid - to late-stage private companies. So for us, we work with our sales partners to identify those corporates, those accounts, if you will, that are mid to late stage private companies. And in turn, what we end up doing is we end up identifying this audience of, let's say, 500 to 600 different accounts, different corporates. And then we target them through two different approaches, right?

14:14Steve Stano:And I should note, ABM comes in three ways. One is a one-to-many approach, then a one-to-few approach, and then a one-to-one approach. We play mainly in the one-to-many and one-to-few from a budget perspective. So from a one-to-many perspective, we'll reach out to all 500 to 600 different private company accounts and invite them to a webcast. It could be a webcast on any topic. We're just looking to see who comes and who ends up engaging so that way we could follow up in the future. What we then do is we get far more targeted in our ABM approach and especially that one-to-few, if you will. And we're looking at those accounts that are showing signs of engagement.

14:53Steve Stano:Those accounts that we're looking to nurture further because they're high value and we believe that there's an intent to convert to a sales-ready conversation. We then put them in front of our leadership partners, whether it's product or on the business, whether it's AI or if it's on the markets, to be able to have a conversation, a live conversation like the one we're having now, Daniel, and getting them exposure to our different partners so that they could see the value of what the firm brings. What that does is it takes that one-to-few approach and provides a more intimate session via a targeted virtual forum.

15:29Steve Stano:So I just share those examples, kind of those basic examples of how we take ABM, how we actually deploy it from a one-to-many approach, and then how we deploy it from a one-to-few approach. and usually like in abm you're segmenting the accounts based on like hey these are like the highest priority like or the bigger like whales we want to go after for certain like the bigger accounts and there's like they're segmented and then the approach based on the one-to-many or one-to-few can change based on how you're going after those specific accounts but also i one thing you said that is very valuable is you want people to take small actions before the big action so like attending say like a virtual event or something else you're doing it's high signal that they they're taking a next step of intent with you as a as the company so i think people always try to go for that especially in abm like especially probably the accounts you're targeting They have long sales cycles, long, and you have to warm them up over months and months.

16:42You can't just try getting the door one second and you'll close them.

16:47Steve Stano:Yeah, 100%, right? And again, keeping with the example of private companies, early stage private companies, startups, are likely to make a purchasing decision for the product that we market in roughly, let's say, one to three months. Late stage pre-IPO companies are taking far longer. It could take two, three plus years, and then public companies take even longer than that, right? So for us, it's very much how do we warm and nurture over time. But the one thing that I do want to go back to that I actually started the conversation at is we've evolved from a B2B marketing perspective over the last few years.

17:22Steve Stano:Where we used to spray and pray, if you will, we then evolved to ABM, account-based marketing. Now where the future is going in the course of the next few months and even in the next year is how do we create smarter ABM? So how do we use, let's say, an MQL that's been submitted? And then how do we append that with those signals? And to me, and this is a hypothesis, we haven't proved it out yet, if you engage MQLs that are showing high intent, even medium intent, at scale, you are far more likely to see significantly higher conversion to a sales-ready conversation than that of an MQL that's being submitted.

18:03Steve Stano:And I think over time, we have to evolve away from MQLs. It is not enough to just say, hey, I'm submitting a form. I want to be contacted. That to me is a legacy way of thinking. It is far more powerful to utilize different data points to really hone in on those accounts via your ABM approach that are really showing signs of making that purchasing decision and if you're doing that you're being far more efficient with the limited budget with the limited resources that you have allocated to your to your team and your business the problem is that the marketing qualified lay that comes in the mql um there's so many definitions of that in different companies where like some companies like okay filled out a con a content download that's an mql some companies it's like strict they meet my form field requirements on my form but usually those high intent ones that actually are becoming mqls already doing the research before and already have done the research so you everything you did beforehand with all the the other marketing efforts have probably led them down to that effort if you're only tracking mqls you're losing all of that stuff where they, buyers are smart now.

19:20We have AI now, we have Google, we have marketing acquaintances around here. So usually those people have made a decision when they've came to you. Your job is to like, before they make that decision, be as top of mind as possible and show them as many different type of educational product ahead of time.

19:43Steve Stano:No, absolutely. And that is our ultimate goal. But the interesting part is, and Daniel, you made a really great point, a large majority, and there's actually a stat here, and I don't have it off the top of my head. I think it was somewhere around 70 to 80%. Don't quote me on it though. 70 to 80 % of purchasing or rather decision makers have already made a purchasing decision in their minds before they even start looking or before they even and start researching. That to me is an incredible stat. I can't, again, remember who published that stat or where it came from, but to me what it's saying is you need to make sure that you continue to have high brand awareness.

20:22Steve Stano:If you have high brand awareness, high sustained brand awareness, then you're part of that conversation, if you will, when that 70 % to 80 % of decision makers are already figuring out what their purchasing decision is. What is far more important and where my team is spending a lot of our time now is how can we move folks through or how can we move prospects through consideration to decision and consideration is likely far lower than awareness but man imagine if you're able to keep that high sustained awareness and increase your consideration by by 10 to 20 percent you're likely going to see a far great a far greater number of corporates corporate prospects getting to the decision phase and when and ending up making a purchasing decision that is likely in your favor let's like break that on the statue like let's say internally you say i want to move 10 of people from that state to that stage um how does that look from going back to what we originally talking about how does that look like i need to like what marketing efforts do i need to do how do i communicate finance to get me some budget to do this what does that look like you've already come up with that stat the that target as a marketing team so just like reverse engineering from hey i want to move let's say five percent ten percent from these stage i need to do x y z marketing tactics i need xyz budget to do that now i have to have a conversation to get that what does that look like yeah and and listen like like literally Daniel, to your point, reversing it, it's what are the results that we've seen?

22:00Steve Stano:What produced those results? What cost went into that work that was done and then proving it out? Literally, it's almost like you're turning the funnel upside down, if you will. Once you start by targeting your key accounts, you're engaging them with marketing, you show results, and you show results, you just flip it. Then you show the results, you show what was done, and then ultimately what you end up needing and who you would end up targeting. So to me, it's a very similar story. It's just a different angle that, let's say, finance cares about. But that's ultimately what you need to do to end up moving a corporate through the funnel in terms of looking for more budget or in terms of getting additional resources.

22:43Steve Stano:But if you were to say, Steve, how do you move somebody from awareness consideration to decision? It comes down to intent. And then it comes down to the targeting. and it comes down to all the outreach that's done, whether it's through marketing or for sales. Awareness is easier to build. Consideration is harder to influence. And then ultimately decision, there's so many factors that go into it. But all of your marketing efforts work in unison. And if you have all your marketing efforts working in unison at the same time and you're orchestrating them, then you're creating that halo that ultimately will drive awareness, consideration, and decisioning higher.

23:18Yeah, like people forget, because i give you for example paid media budget get x impressions impression doesn't necessarily mean someone saw or paid attention to that piece of content it just means that it was served in the feed of someone who is your target audience so that's like a lot of attention is cheap so if you can get like strong attention, like getting people to take action for, um, attending a, uh, virtual event or attending a live event or attending, like those are more stronger action points that someone paid attention to you. They got in front of you. It took taking a next action.

24:03Cause when you don't see any signal and sense of that, some people, that's why creative is the new, targeting because it's hard to like impressions a lot of the impressions are just like they're guaranteeing you distribution but they're not guaranteeing you attention and that's the problem and that's why people forget that like just because you get impressions doesn't mean

24:26Steve Stano:actual people are paying attention yeah i i agree at that point right maybe that helps to build brand awareness but if we're getting 40 million impressions as an example and you get less less than 1 % converting, like then, then what, what are we doing versus let's say getting 10 ,000 impressions, if you will. I know it's kind of drastic difference, but getting 10 ,000 impressions, um, of those that you actually care about and of those that you actually care about having 5 % convert or 5 % engage. That to me is so, so much more powerful. It's very similar to what I say to my team. My team will say, oh, this webcast didn't have a high number of attendees or a high number of registrants.

25:11Steve Stano:Okay, that's fine. Because if you focus on the quality, then that's a much greater story. I much rather have 100 people register and attend a webcast that we hold for those corporates that we care about versus 10 ,000 register and attend for those that we don't care about. It all comes down to the accounts, the targeting, focusing on those that you care most about, focusing on the different approaches, proving out the story to marketing, business leadership, and finance. That's what it comes down to. And I think it ultimately is where your priorities, how do they align to the business? If the business is looking to, let's say, spray and pray, if they're looking to just get anyone, then great.

25:55Steve Stano:We'll take 10 ,000 of any corporate that's out there. If they're looking to focus more heavily on the quality that's coming in, then to me, it is far more powerful to get that thousand or that hundred than a much larger number. What do you think the biggest mistake a lot of marketers get stuck on when they're in cost center mode or being seen as cost center? They're not understanding the way to tell marketing story in a way that business, finance, and other leadership members will understand. It goes back to the conversation we're having around impressions. For marketing leadership, we care about impressions.

26:39Steve Stano:For everyone else, we don't. And that's where marketing gets stuck. Not everyone understands marketing. It's important to use the words and the language that they use to convey messages to their team. That is the big blocker. Yeah. Instead of saying I got a thousand impressions, you could say a thousand people in these X companies have seen a piece of content we put out or like attended a webinar. Instead of like, you just got to change. You can't talk marketing to even us marketers get, when we're creating content, We try to assume that everybody understands what we are understanding. The terminology we use in everyday language is when we talk to our own team, but not everybody talks like that.

27:28So we have to simplify it. I have a question. If you're taking over a new team right now that is seen as a cause center, what are three things that you would do to get them out of that situation as a marketing team? Sure. First, I would meet with business leadership, and you better understand their priorities real quick.

27:52Steve Stano:Two, I would orient your team around what are your reasons to exist. I think a really good model to use is the McKinsey strategy house that breaks between what is the mission, approach, priorities, and enablers for your team. And then the third is to start incorporating the business's language within your presentations and building those key relationships with partners. It all comes down to if you have a relationship with business leadership, you understand their priorities. If they understand what the hell you're doing and then you orient to how they're thinking and the way that they're speaking, there is, I don't want to say guaranteed, but there is a higher probability that you are able to shift marketing's view from call center to being a strategic partner.

28:46Steve Stano:The one thing I will say is that takes time. Do not expect that to happen overnight. That is a continuous pattern that you have to maintain for at least six months to a year. So it ends up resonating with folks because they may already have a perception of the team that is going to be hard to break. I always say to people like when we're doing advertising and marketing, we're showing people the same things five, six, seven, eight times, like over and over. But sometimes we forget that it's okay in every single meeting to bring up the same things that we're saying over and over just to get it in people's heads.

29:28And also there's always a new person in the meeting or new people. So we need to keep repeating over and over why we're doing things. This is why we care about this thing. This is our goals. This is the values of the marketing team. So you just get it in their heads. And we just seem to forget that we need to do this type of marketing internally all the time. And marketing is not just one time telling people like this is a metric. It's like your monthly weekly marketing meeting, your weekly email. Like you need to continually be in people's heads to understand that one, you exist as a marketing team.

30:07Two, you're actually making impact that they care about. And three, like you're moving metrics that they care about as business leaders.