We recently got a chance to sit down and talk with PiPerformer Brooke Ames, Director or Marketing – North America, at Resolve. We covered everything from maximizing efforts of a small team to lead-flow and funnel visibility. Watch Brooke’s story of how Resolve executed their digital strategy to manage MQLs and drive success.
Jeff Coveney: Welcome everyone. Today we have with us, Brooke Ames, who heads up demand gen at Resolve. We’re going to be talking about some of her recent successes. So welcome today, Brooke.
Brooke Ames: Thank you for having me.
Jeff Coveney: You’re running demand gen. Can you talk about your day to day role?
Brooke Ames: So it’s really a mixed bag of things. We’ve got the operation side, running Marketo, helping out with Salesforce, all the different tools that we use. I think MarTech stacks are getting out of control these days. So we’ve got a lot that we’re running there. Also making sure that we’ve got enough leads flowing through for the SDR. So I work with the rest of our team.
We’re a pretty small group here but work with the rest of our team to make sure we’ve got leads coming in, what’s that plan looks like, executing our digital strategy. So it’s really fun getting to work with the sales team and also getting to manage the operations side of things and making sure that all of our processes make sense and are flowing through correctly.
Jeff Coveney: In your role, you do a number of things, from demand gen, and then you also have responsibility on the operation side. What’s your biggest challenge that you have in the kind of looking at both of those roles?
Brooke Ames: So I think what makes it fun is we’re a small team. So a lot of teams I think are trying to do more with less, are trying to do more with the same number of people. And it definitely can get challenging. We’ve just actually worked with Digital Pi to build up our prospect life cycle and actually working on our customer life cycle.
We can really measure how many MQLs are coming through, what are the SDRs taking, what’s coming through the pipeline? And I would say that just the visibility has been a huge success for us.
Jeff Coveney: If you had to look back to, say six months ago, what was your visibility then into marketing compared to now?
Brooke Ames: Pretty much all we could show you was program information. So how many successes did we have? How many new names did we get from our programs? And to us that was a win, like, did we get 150 people to register for a webinar? Great. But now we can actually say, okay, what’s the quality of those 150 people that registered, and how many of those are actually influencing opportunities that are being generated? So it’s really cool to get that full-funnel visibility into everything. So we’ve come a long way.
Jeff Coveney: If you think about everything that you’ve been working on, what are some of the results that you have today? Do you have any results that you could talk about that maybe others should start to think about from a measurement perspective?
Brooke Ames: We’ve started to track our MQL, SALs, SQLs, all the terminology through the funnel. And I think we’re starting to ramp those things up and we’re kind of in that stage where we’re kind of tracking it. We probably have a… for our first full I would say three to six months of visibility and that’s enabled us to really build out what that plan looks like. We’re more in the area of tracking to our goals.
And we’ve actually, I think, for the first time have really set those goals because now we can actually track to them and have that visibility. So it gives us the opportunity to really be agile in our marketing strategy and kind of say, okay, next quarter, what are we going to do?
Jeff Coveney: What’s your relationship with Digital Pi? How does Digital Pi help you on day to day basis?
Brooke Ames: So I’ve been working with Digital Pi, I would say probably about five years now. I’ve worked with them at two different companies… actually, maybe even three. And they helped me to basically build the foundation of my knowledge, but also have been so instrumental in building out all of this. I mean, the visibility and to what marketing is doing in our Marketo instance. So my favorite part is the gold standard.
There are a hundred ways you could do something in Marketo and Salesforce and, but what’s the best way. And I think that’s where Digital Pi has been huge in helping us to understand what’s the best way to do this. And that’s really been key for me. They’ve helped our team to achieve our goals by building out our reporting structure and building out our life cycle and the lead scoring, but also it helped me to build out my personal goals, because I think it’s important as a marketer that when we work with agencies, a lot of people are like, “Well, I’ll just let the agency do it.”
Brooke Ames: And yes, that’s part of the reason why we have an agency, but I think it’s also a huge advantage when that agency is willing to help teach you and show you the ropes of it and kind of say, okay, if you want to try and do this on your own, here’s how you do it.
Jeff Coveney: Well, thank you so much for joining today. You’ve provided a whole host of recommendations for the audience, and congratulations on your continued success and being named a Pi Performer.
Brooke Ames: Thank you so much for recognizing me. I really appreciate it.