Revenue Based Marketing 📈 ft. Amy Vosko

# Transcript

If you've never truly had one or two people who go beyond the architecture of your sales ops or your CRM to expand that into looking at your entire funnel from the very beginning of when you're trying to attract and identify what accounts you should be going after all the way through to customer retention and being a huge seat at the table to help you connect the dots both operationally and organizationally, that's what RevOps is in my mind.

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagine Podcast. We are stoked today. We have the one, the only Amy Bosco with us, who is currently the VP of Revenue Marketing at PathFactory. But what is really interesting—I think Amy is the first person we've had on the show who has walked the walk on both the sales side of the house and the marketing side of the house and could actually speak to both and talk about how things aren't how they seem on one side. It's not that simple. Amy, welcome to the show.

Thanks, guys. I appreciate you having me on. This is going to be fun.

Thanks for joining. So because you've been on sales and marketing, I'm going to ask a really specific question. Usually we ask what other GTM function would you want to run, but since you've been in sales and marketing, it's got to either be CS or RevOps.

Yeah, I guess I can't say none of them now that you put it in there. But no, you know, I could say none if it's none—to stay in marketing or sales if that's not it—because you would do something else. I'm actually super curious to hear it.

Yeah, well, we were just talking about just owning and selling flowers on the street side sometimes, but yeah, you know, I think for me it's a natural gravitation. I would pick the RevOps side over and over again. I think because I've sat in marketing, I've sat in sales—a lot of the world that I was in when I was in sales was also CS at the time the way the organization was configured. And I have a huge amount of respect and sympathy for all of those lanes, but I think the RevOps side is really exciting. It's really, you know, I geek out about data and configuring the operations of things, but it's super critical for the entire organization. And really smart groups, you know, I've seen some folks where it's like, "Yeah, we've got RevOps. I've got a Salesforce admin, so we totally have RevOps." But that's not RevOps. RevOps is, I think, what business intelligence used to be. You know, the Moneyball folks—like, my mind—I think if you can really configure a good RevOps team, it's helping across the board. So it's definitely RevOps if you're talking Moneyball.

So yeah, you love numbers. We're talking Moneyball. I love baseball too, and I love that movie. And you know, used to be a Brad Pitt fan. But you said a couple things interesting in there. Let's stick with RevOps for a second. So you said that a lot of people will say "I have a Salesforce admin, so I have RevOps," and I see that over and over again in companies that we work with. You know, how are you set up? How are you configured? Talk to me about your RevOps team. And the answer is very much that it's "I have a Salesforce admin" or "I have a HubSpot admin." Why do you think we got to the point that people think having a system admin is RevOps? Because I've worked with some pretty good RevOps people, and they don't want to be your Salesforce admin.

No, they shouldn't be, to be perfectly honest. It's a good question, and I don't know if I have the perfect answer. My initial instinct when you started asking the question was well, it's part the size of the company and what they're actually able to hire. And I also think it could potentially be they don't know what they're missing. Right? If you've never truly had one or two people who go beyond the architecture of your sales ops or your CRM to expand that into looking at your entire funnel from the very beginning of when you're trying to attract and identify what accounts you should be going after all the way through to customer retention and being a huge seat at the table to help you connect the dots both operationally and organizationally, that's what RevOps is in my mind.

And you know, I would be remiss if I didn't include the marketing ops part of this as well. And so in our world, I have—I'm blessed right now—I have a phenomenal RevOps team, and I have a kick-ass person on my team who is marketing ops, and we meet daily about conversations. And it's not just about getting the wires in the right order, but strategic conversations about where are we missing the target or where are we succeeding and how does that all come together to align all the different teams. So that's far away from your initial question, but I think that's part of why companies don't understand the value of RevOps and what it really means. It's not just about making sure that your fields are custom or not custom in Salesforce. That's important too, don't get me wrong. You need that to be efficient and scale, but they don't really know what they're missing. Probably they can't afford it.

So I'm super curious. I saw your title "Revenue Marketing." Like, what is Revenue Marketing? Is it like this new title, or I'm just curious? Maybe I'm just out of the loop.

Yeah, no, you're not out of the loop. I think it makes sense for what my focus is. You know, transparently, I own the whole marketing team, and so it's not just about pipeline and revenue, or also looking at brand and content. I have the BDR team under my belt. But what I think companies are missing the mark on still is if you're hiring a marketing leader who is going to solely focus on your brand or solely focus on, you know, how many customer reviews you have, I don't think those aren't important. But every part of what you do needs to be tied back to revenue.

So a big part of the reason I love that I was in sales and now I'm in marketing is because that's all I eat and breathe. Right? You know, I don't care if I'm buying monkeys for a trade show, which by the way are actually really cool, and I'll send you guys some stuff. Monkeys, yeah, like, oh, they're great. Oh, I love it. Super cool. Not real monkeys. I don't have that kind of budget.

But everything I do, I think about with the lens of: how are we going to track this? How are we going to figure out if this is working or not working? What is it that marketing's doing that is going to contribute to not only the top of the funnel with pipeline, but also all the way through to how we're thinking about what's happening and what are the signals that we should be using to make sure we're retaining our customers?

And so the concept of Revenue Marketing really just kind of positions us as we're not here just to make sure that you've got pretty, you know, gift cards. We're here to make sure that everything we do is contributing. And in 2023, everything can be tagged, and figuring out whether it's contributing or not.

So I cannot tell you how much I love everything you just said. Working with, I think, five or six different companies right now—and when we talk about marketing, you are honestly the first, and I wrote it down and I quoted it—you're the first marketer Dale makes fun of me that I'm always writing down. You are the first marketer that I've spoken to that I have heard say the word "signals" for retaining customers. I've heard listen, everyone talks about leads. Some of the good marketers will talk about, you know, converting pipeline into revenue, and that's a whole separate thing I want to get into because you were on the sales side. Never have I heard someone say marketing is also responsible for retention.

And Dale and I talk about that all the time. Your retention problem, maybe it is CS, maybe it's that you started at the top of the funnel the wrong way.

Yeah, and to be fair and to be transparent, I mean, I've been part of a lot of different startups. For you know, the majority of my career, I've either been midsize companies or I've been in tech startups for about a decade now. Again, bandwidth with how big the marketing team is, oftentimes marketing teams are stretched, and they may not even have a dedicated person just looking at the customer side of things.

Again, fortunate here where I am now, and to be transparent, we're really biting off more of that now. You know, I was just talking to some folks who are in the ABM space that I respect highly, and we're doing an ABM workshop. You know, ABM is sort of my sweet spot now. And one of the statistics that had gotten pulled out recently is that companies are heavily focusing, not just on ABM to help with top of funnel, but they're really shifting to focus more on retention and expansion. And it makes complete sense. What better group of people to focus more attention on and spend more money on are your customers?

And I—there's a lot that marketing can contribute to that. You can do simple demand gen plays: hey, we have a new—

# Product Launching

**Speaker 1:** Do you know about product launching? Um, hey, we've got 15 users signed up for this platform and only two of them are ever logging in. Well, what can we do to make that different?

**Speaker 2:** You know, at Path Factory where I'm at now, we are heavily focused on making sure that marketers and sellers and CSM teams have the tools at their desk to understand what's happening with their buyers—whether they're a customer or a prospect—and ensure that they're continuing to engage with the company. We do that through content experiences.

And so I love when I have a moment where I can come to my CS team or even my selling team and say, "Hey, look, this customer of yours has not engaged with anything that we're promoting in over 30 days. That is a huge red flag." Or, "Hey, even worse, this customer that you're working on has been searching on our competitors for the last 30 days. Huge red flag. What can we be doing differently to have those conversations?"

And it doesn't have to be a huge marketing campaign. It could just be picking up the phone or sending them really good articles or how-to guides, or just, "Hey, I've got some cool stuff to show you." Right? But rather than having all of our teams—whether they're marketing, sales, BDRs—waving in the wind and trying to figure out what the heck to do and where to focus, this is where marketing's role can be really impactful and kind of help guide the organization on where we need to be spending our time and what we need to be talking about.

**Speaker 1:** It's such a massive oversight that I think a lot of marketers are finally acknowledging and saying, "Yeah, so good."

**Speaker 3:** I mean, it's so good. I think Adam's totally spot on, which I usually don't say too often, but yeah, we're putting this on loop. Yeah, being like getting down funnel but actually getting to customers is really cool. So I'm curious, like, you're kind of the top one percent of people thinking about this way—revenue marketing now. I'm making that connection. Yeah. What are some tips, tricks, thought processes that people that are either in marketing or sales or someone thinking about how to get to that next level? Like, what are three things that they could do to kind of get into your mindset?

**Speaker 2:** I think first and foremost, get familiar with your numbers, right? You know, I think there's marketers out there who unfortunately aren't brought into what's even going on in pipeline right now. Start to really spend time getting to know your counterparts in sales and CS, you know, just from a relational standpoint. We're here to work together. And I think, you know, we were joking a little bit in the beginning about the Hatfields and the McCoys, right? And I realized recently that my team does not know what that is because—

**Speaker 1:** [Laughter] That analogy—you explain that one to them?

**Speaker 2:** Like, let's talk about the Hatfields and McCoys. Yeah, um, it was it went wrong and then I just had a lot of puzzled looks, kind of like with my kids. But I think that's the first step, right? Like, you got to get yourself familiar. You own as much of the responsibility of how successful this organization of yours is driving revenue. And if it's not something that your task with or you're measured on—who cares? It will only benefit you, whether in the organization you're in now or down the line. And I'm talking about people who are just coming into their careers and people who are well past what I'm doing, you know?

So I think that's the first step: just start to get familiar with what's working and what's not.

I think the next thing is take a very hard look at your programming and make sure that you've got the technology and the focus set up to help you measure as much as you can measure. And if you don't really know what you're looking at—because data is big, right? We've been talking about big data for decades now, and people are still drowning in data. Reach out to communities, reach out to me. You know, we'll talk about it. I'd love to help marketers because, you know, I love to chat about this. I get really geeked out. But figure out what you're measuring and is it really impactful?

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**Speaker 1:** I mean, honest—yes. People, they don't want to measure that data because they're like, "Is this real?" And then like, they're afraid to say it somewhere because they're going to get fired or like something like that. Super scary.

And I'll be the first to admit, like, especially in the beginning of my career when, you know, I was kind of in charge of some programs but not the whole kit and caboodle, and it's like, "Wait, this isn't working. Oh my God." I guarantee nine times out of 10, an organization would be happy that you unplugged something to start something that would work versus just let it roll and not talk about it, right?

I mean, I don't know, you guys tell me—you've been in as many organizations as I have. But, you know, I've unplugged whole technology because I know that we're spending an exorbitant amount of money on something and I'm not even getting the support internally to use it the way that it's needed. And that sucks, you know? You go to bat to do something for weeks, months, and then you realize this isn't working, and I've got to say, "Hey, you know what? We just put a huge $60k price tag on something that isn't working."

So yeah, get familiar with the data. Talk. Ask questions. And then do some experiments, I think, right? You know, that's kind of the fun part about marketing.

Something else I don't really share often just because it doesn't come up, but I was an art major. So, far from being in sales or marketing, and so not really, you got to—you have to have that artistic, creative side. I was going to say marketing. You have to have that creative brain. You do. But for revenue marketing, it's a whole other side because you've got to think about the numbers. And I think that's for me personally why I love what I do so much, because I get to be on both sides. I get to be analytical and I get to be creative. Creative number crunching.

**Speaker 3:** Yeah, it's funny. My son came into my office the other day and I had like a percentage calculator up on Google and he's like, "Mom, seriously, you're using a calculator?" You know, yes. I'm like, "Dude, I'm working on like people's comps here. I've got, you know, it's marketing math. I need to at least make sure I'm not doing whatever." But are you tying are you tying marketing comp to revenue coming through?

**Speaker 2:** Yeah, so my team consists of both the entire marketing—or you know, demand, ABM, content, design, customer marketing—and then in addition to that, I also have the BDRs on my team as well. And so if you were to compare their comp plans with my marketing team's OKRs, which lead to bonus eventually, the very first cluster of goals are exactly the same.

**Speaker 3:** Nice, interesting.

**Speaker 2:** So if my BDR team is getting compensated on the number of MQLs that they're reaching, the quality and conversion rates of these things moving through pipeline, my marketing team is also bonused on that exact same thing, because we need to work together. And, you know, I've worked through different comp plans for BDRs over and over depending on the organization. Whatever, but I still heavily believe that in order for us to win, we've got to be on the same team.

And, you know, a lot of that mirrors, I think, with the account executives and the CSMs are looking to do too.

**Speaker 1:** So we've said the word "alignment" a lot, right? Aligning comp, aligning teams, aligning OKRs. Yeah. But I think at least in my experience, everyone says they want alignment. Everyone says they want people to—oh, we want sales and marketing to be aligned and to work nicely together. And like Dale and I want to be aligned and work nicely together. And like, it doesn't always lead to—I'm sorry, no, I'm sorry. It can be, depending on the organization, right?

So how do you—you've done this a lot. You arguably are doing it well. I don't strike me as the type that just comes and says a bunch of "that's what we love about you. How do you drive that alignment deeper than, oh, marketing leader to sales leader, we need to align and make sure we're on the same page," which is what most people think alignment is?

**Speaker 2:** Yeah, and it's not easy. You know, I would be really full of it if I sat here and said, "Oh, you know, it happens over time." There is a reason I like working for martech companies because it's kind of part of our DNA and you kind of have to. And that's just one less hill you have to climb.

But I've worked for other organizations where they don't really understand. And I think this is where you have to start a bit slow and you have to use data on your side to show—not case study data, I mean that—

Helps initially, I think, but you have to start slowly with some pilot programs. I literally have taken—I'll use ABM again as an example, right? So the whole idea of account-based marketing is that you are going to identify a cluster of accounts that you want to make an impact on and move further into revenue, and that could be you want them to expand, you want to get them as a client, whatever it is.

My favorite episode, and I've had this happen at every company I've joined—I come in, I sit down with a couple of the sales folks, and I say to them, "Talk to me about your target accounts that you're going after," and they've always got the Walmarts on their list. They've always got, you know, the Googles on their list. And I'll say, "Cool, why are they on your list? How do you know that sitting and trying to target Walmart or Target Google or Target Cisco is the right company for you to be going after right now?" Those are big swings. They're big swings, and they take a very long time. And I'm never going to ask a salesperson to not focus on the big swings, right? But my goal around it is to help organizations understand there's a time for marketing to step in and help you, and then there's a time for you to step in.

So having data to showcase: "Look, this is an organization that you're red hot on, but they're not red hot on us." Let marketing help you by creating programs to get them engaged, creating programs to get you face-to-face with those groups while you spend your time on the people who would not want that. Like, "Well, exactly." And so that's where you begin your alignment: use the data to show them, "I want to help you spend your time in the right place. I'm not saying you can't talk to them, but for the love of God, talk to these people first, and then come back to this."

When I was an Enterprise rep, if a marketing person came up and said that to me like, "Hey, let me show you the data on what customers to focus on"—because you're right, like you only have a limited amount of time. If we can really pinpoint—because that's what people are talking about right now. We talk to customers all the time, and they're like, "We want revenue as fast as possible." It's like, "Okay, but you've got to spend your time properly."

Yeah, so what you end up thinking about—and this, if you guys can envision—I take a look at our entire ICP, and then I start to use technology like intent signals or, you know, Path Factory has a lot of really strong buyer signals, which is down to the individual person. And I say, "Okay, look, we're going to bucket these folks. They're all in our ICP, but this group's red hot, so versus sales, CSMs, you focus on that. Let marketing help you grease the wheels and give you some really cool stuff to engage with, while we take the cold folks and we'll let you know when they're ready."

Yeah, it's tough. You know, I still lay awake and I'm like, "I need more leads. I need more." You know, I will never have enough. But there's never enough leads. There's never enough leads, especially when your economy is still struggling. But I think if you can go to the group as an organization and be really strategic about how everyone spends their time and their money, and you show the data to help prove that out, that is a really good first step to aligning everyone because you're not just up on a soapbox talking. But it's not easy.

You know, I think whenever I interview at a new organization, I need to meet with the head of sales. I feel the same way. I want to meet with each of the heads of marketing. I want to talk to, like, CS. I want to understand how operations is working. And you can smell it a mile away if the alignment is not there. Yeah, they're just going to give you, "Sure, sure, sure." Yeah, but then they're going to revert to their old ways. It just means that I wouldn't take the opportunity—it just means I know how high of a mountain I have to climb. Or you just identify it. You kind of say to the CEO at that time, "Look, we may have a gap here. I'm beginning to set those expectations—soon, like early—like, there may be a gap here. We have to try to figure this thing out if I'm going to come join you."

Yeah, and you know what, you said something really important: setting those expectations. I think marketers struggle a lot with setting realistic expectations and putting them into smaller bite-sized pieces. This is what you're going to see after 30 days. Be super transparent. You're not—my favorite conversation—you know, we sat down with a client, not here, this was a couple of companies ago. We sat down with a client. They just kind of purchased our tech. They were focused on ABM. And you know, I said, "Well, what are some early wins for you for the next 90 days?" "We'll close one deal." Oh, we know this story. We've seen this movie before. Ninety days? You've got a long—you've got a long time. We—yeah, right? You know how long is your sales cycle? Nine months. Okay, well, let's take this into some bite-sized pieces. And you know, it's everybody wants to close one deal. You know, I just had this conversation yesterday with somebody. They're like, "I said, okay, what's your—what do you believe is success? What would success look like for you if we were to come on for the next six months?" And I said, "Yeah, well, I want to have 1.5 million in ARR." And I'm like, "Okay, cool, what do you have today?" And he's like, "50k to 80k." I'm like, "Okay, so what do you consider success?" And I'm like, "So we got him down to 250k of closed business in the next six months, which is reasonable. Like, I can deal with stretches and reasonability. I can't deal with—like, yeah." And it's hard. I've seen a lot of startups, especially—you know, I'm proud to say I've been through: "Hey, I just joined. We're seeding. I'm in B. We've popped. We're, you know, we're IPO." Like, I've seen the horror shows, and I've seen what really works well. And you know, the arbitrary numbers and the arbitrary goals—not good for anybody. Not good for leaders, not good for the founders, not good for the investors. No, and you burn—you burn everybody out. Yeah, well, you know, then God forbid you lose your runway. I've seen that happen too. And it's like, "Well, because you're spraying and praying all over the place, no wonder you don't have any runway."

Yep, one less rose dinner, you know? I'm just saying.

Awesome. So we do a lot of "give the get" here at Revenue Reimagined. Then you've been grateful, so tell the audience what you'd like to provide. That was much shorter than normal, Dale. I like it. Adam loves this.

Yeah, so I have two offers. I know—well, yes, you can have monkeys. Anybody wants, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn. Get a monkey.

So I love—I mentioned I love working with marketers. I love working with you at any stage. ABM is definitely my jam, because it is so much about—whether even if you're not doing ABM, you should really be thinking in these terms. So if anyone wants to reach out and collaborate, I'm super happy to get on and just kind of give you some feedback and some sessions around how to kind of get started on that or how to take it to the next level.

But then I also want to just kind of plug and pitch my company: Path Factory. Yeah, Path Factory. If you're not familiar, you know, the boilerplate is we are an AI-generated content experience platform that helps go-to-market teams from sales, marketing, CS, all the way through. The idea behind it is, you know, we're all used to this sort of Netflix experience now, right? I want to get the content shown to me, the movies shown to me, the music shown to me that I actually care about. Well, Path Factory lets you take all of your content, regardless of what medium it is, and compile it and aggregate it together to create AI-generated recommendations of content for your buyer at an individual level.

So the way we're basically doing that is reading off of third-party data, reading off of your first-party data, and allowing you all of these tools to help you analyze what's working, create really quick experiences. But we've got some really cool stuff coming. We've got generative AI coming to the plate in December. We've got a brand new platform and tons of new analytics, and I'd love to showcase that to somebody.

You know, I also would love some feedback. I could use some conversations around how would you as a marketer—or how would you as a salesperson use some of this new technology to communicate with your buyers a little bit more.

So the offer here is not just for me to showcase it to you, but we are offering up 10 free seats once you actually do purchase it. And so that could definitely help an organization get started really quickly.

So how do you figure all this out? Reach out to me on LinkedIn: Amy Vosco, V-O-S-K-O. And I'd be happy to chat. Nothing scary, nothing car salesman here. I don't have time for that.

That for everyone listening, that is revenue marketing, not just regular marketing. That is revenue marketing. Some lucky people will get to take advantage of that. I wish I would have taken advantage of the ABM offer earlier. We have a lot of clients who are very, very focused on account-based marketing.

Amy, before we wrap it up, we'd like to do a little bit of rapid fire questions. Must be ten words or less. Oh God. Dale, Dale hits a gong. Okay, all right, here we go.

What song best describes your revenue strategy?

That's a good one. Oh yeah. Still waiting for someone to say "Living on a Prayer." Yeah, I'm gonna say I don't know. My daughter's been listening to a lot of Taylor Swift lately. Love her. Yeah, yeah. I love it. Good, good, good.

If you had a crystal ball, what's one revenue trend or strategy that you predict will take center stage next 12 to 18 months?

So a trend that becomes center stage. Yeah, I think it's really leaning into AI in a strategic way and leaning into it in a way that helps you develop a revenue strategy that's stronger.

Awesome. Yep, totally agree. I don't know if that was ten words or not.

Yeah, you're good. Amy, you talked about a lot of tips and tactics, but what is one lesser-known tip or tactic that's made a surprising difference in revenue outcomes you've helped drive?

Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of folks are event-led, right? We're semi-event here, but a lot of folks don't think about the experience before the event, during the event, and after the event with content. So we at PathFactory really lean into signals on what people care about before we even start to develop what the content for that event is going to be. So that way we can guarantee you're going to get a really great showing. People are going to be engaged, and you're going to continue that fluidity after the event.

Simple, simple. It can also help you with directions. That's way over ten, but this is not a game to play for money, so I love it. No, that's a big one because a lot of people go to events, but they don't leverage it properly. So it's a really good tactic.

Okay, earlier in the show you said that you want to be a RevOps leader. Tomorrow morning you grab some coffee, tea, whatever your drink of choice is. What's the first thing that you're doing?

Looking at pipeline. I need to understand what we did over the last week, what we did over the last month, finding the holes and the gaps.

Awesome. Yeah, I love it. All about pipeline. Amy, thank you so much for joining us. This was an absolute pleasure. I personally learned a ton. I don't often go back and listen to our episodes, but I am going to go back and listen to this one because I think there's a ton of knowledge dropped in there.

I normally would ask where people could find you, but you plugged that earlier. Guys, check it out. Amy Vosco, V, LinkedIn, and it is PathFactory. Do.

Amy, thanks so much. It was a pleasure having you.