Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jim Regan, CMO of MRP (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. You said 19 of the top 20 technology companies are your clients. Do you have metrics of having impacted their sales at a certain level using these kinds of technologies?

Jim Regan: For most of the clients in a traditional sales and marketing funnel, it goes in-house at some point. It’ll go to their enterprise sales team. Then we’re blocked out. We can see the efficiency by which it moves through the first three of four stages of the funnel where it goes from an automated qualified lead to a marketing qualified lead, to a sales accepted lead. These are your classic top and mid-funnel stages.

We are able to track the efficiencies. The most interesting number that popped up is that the deal seemed to be larger. That it could be a function indicates just a much higher quality. There’s lot less stuff being handed off to sales. The whole process is becoming much tighter.

At the end of the day, the goal is, the only things you put into salesforce.com are things that are real. Now, not only can we prove it from a marketing touch, but that conversion – the point on the time series graph – is backed up by the content that that buying center is consuming at that location.

Sramana Mitra: You help qualify the leads and flag signals of engagement. Contacting people who are showing signals of engagement is definitely a good way to accelerate a sales cycle.

Jim Regan: It’s not just that they click an ad. It’s that action plus the amount of research that that particular buying center is doing in a particular period of time. When you marry those two things together, you’re really transforming and challenging leadership on the structure of their organization. You can’t wait until things go to market. You just see how everybody is operating these silos.

Sramana Mitra: We’re operating on very little data. For the amount of signals that is available out there, a lot of that is invisible about who are marketing and selling.

Jim Regan: But now it’s not. Now you put this in front of a CMO or VP of Sales, you really challenge the structure of how they operate. It’s been fascinating and challenging. People really dug in. They want to treat this as just another thing. It’s not. This is what this organization is doing.

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears, if you take a 30,000-foot level view of the sales and marketing workflow and cycle, what do you see as open problems where applying AI technologies could substantially impact things? Where would you point new entrepreneurs to work on?

Jim Regan: I think about this all the time. The arms race in this industry as we move towards every organization being driven by an algorithm is the inputs. Customer engagement is not just about your marketing materials. Customers are engaging with your brand in all of these different ways.

For us at MRP, the big challenge that I face right now is, I can’t get to all of these inputs fast enough. The example I always use is, when you attend a conference and go see a speaker, that shows the topic that you’re interested in. That data is sitting in an app developer’s database. They’re not plugging that back in. The thing that we talk about a lot is, there is a field that is going to emerge out of input aggregators.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jim Regan, CMO of MRP
1 2 3 4 5