🇬🇧 Measurable Marketing: Turning Data into Growth Strategy

[MUSIC] Welcome to Beyond revenue, narratives of revenue leaders. Today we will talk about measure on marketing, turning data into gross strategy. In a world where every marketing leader is under pressure to prove impact, Stephanie Pillon has built a career on one core belief. Marketing should be as measurable as it is creative. As a CMO at Singola, she helps global gross content teams connect marketing performance to real ROI, turning fragmented data into a unified view of what truly drives revenue and ARR gross. Stephanie and I, we have explored how measure on marketing is reshaping go to market strategy in SaaS. Together we impact what it takes to transform data into business clarity and the lining marketing with revenue operations, scaling attribution models that link campaigns spend directly to customer value. This conversation offers a blueprint for building marketing systems that drive sustainable and measurable results. But let's dive into it in the episode with Stephanie Pillon. Stephanie, I'm very happy to have you today in the show. I'm talking about these topics. One of your main creators is that everything in marketing needs to be at least as measurable as it is creative. You're the chief marketing officer, a singular and I believe you can introduce yourself much better than I do. That's why handing over to you, who are you and what are you doing? Thanks so much Michael. I am really honored and humbled to be here on this podcast with you today. As you said, I am the CMO at singular and at the moment I really focus on building AI power growth infrastructures for the app economy. We service big enterprise apps as well as SMB apps who are spending a lot of money on marketing usually or they're making money in their app through subscription revenue. We basically focus also on delivering revenues of the business. So as we're marketing, we're sort of in charge of driving all the pipeline within the organization. So within that building systems and working on transforming our marketing team to be really focused on the bottom line. It's super interesting. So you worked across ethics, us digital transformation. So you have a lot of exposure to different business models. And if you have to describe your career journey in three words, what would it be? That's really good. I love this question so much because I think, you know, at the beginning of my career, I actually started in sales. So I think it's interesting to be somebody, you know, now in the seat of a CMO who started in sales. And often I talk about myself being this sort of sales CMO at the end of the day because I'm so accountable to sales anyways. Those three words for me would be curious. At the beginning of my career, I was so curious and I still am. I remain curious all the time about, you know, how did marketing operate? How did sales operate? What were our products about? I got so deep into the different products that we had, you know, being from SaaS companies needs to understand how the product works to be able to sell it. So curiosity has always been this red thread throughout my entire career. I'm also relentless like I love winning and I want to get an answer and I think that sort of goes hand in hand with curiosity. So the second word would probably be relentless and commercially minded. I actually studied accounting and law. So I have this sort of bizarre brain that's wired in different ways on top of the creativity. Having this curiosity, being relentless about what we're delivering and then always thinking from a commercial point of view of is this going to drive revenue to the business at the end of the day and have impact. Oh, I really love that. That's perfect. Perfect explanation to it. And I really like the three, the three buckets. Let's connect creativity with accountability. What's one project or campaign that best catch up that balance for you? I think there's so many and I would probably have to draw on a recent one, you know, like within my seat, because we recently we've done repositioning basically within the company. And I think a lot of times, you know, CMOs, joint companies or senior marketing leaders, joint companies and they're like, oh, we're going to do a rebrand. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. We're going to add these new colors. And to me, that's not really thinking like, why are we doing this? So when we did repositioning and we're thinking around for us, it was around delivering true ROI to our customers. So that's sort of our flow. And if you will, we did it with in mind to measure pipeline against that. So it became something that was in like every single campaign, every event, every outbound message. And we could actually see pipeline moving. Maybe not necessarily because of that one message that we created, but all of that together, sort of being the way if that's driving everything. Let's talk about a little bit about the measurable marketing and what it actually so what it truly means means on the one side, but how you can connect marketing to business outcomes. So in you, what separates measurable marketing from the traditional performance marketing? I think that this is such an interesting question because I was sort of dwelling on it and thinking, you know, what is the difference between performance marketing and measurable marketing? Because at the end of the day, you do measure performance marketing. But if I peel all of it back and I'm thinking about performance marketing, I think of almost like this sort of direct response marketing. Where you're like, I'm getting an outcome right away from performance marketing, where when I think more holistically on measurable marketing, there's going to be so many activities that are leading someone down a funnel or creating that broader story of like when we do X, we get Y outcome. Whereas performance marketing to me is just like one to one, okay, I did this thing and I have this other thing on the other side. And measurable is like really being able to tie so many things together to have a broader picture of how all of your marketing activities are working towards some outcome. Yeah, I would even say right and I really like connecting the dots right bringing from Y to X. So what is what are the topics and what does it really bring me right instead of I would say the traditional quite quite often and it's still in a lot of companies, it stops at CPL and number of leads and I'm my answer is always that's unfortunately the most boring KPI you can have. Yeah, because I can create I can generate no many leads if I want to. If I don't they don't generate the or bring us to our business goals. That's not interesting. That's why really love your answer. I think it really nails it. But maybe going a little bit further so how can marketing leaders make data actionable for them right instead of just being focused on the one topic of generating a lead but really understanding whatever we do in marketing brings the business to a certain point. And how can they turn analytics into a really strategic module that really drives ARR gross in the end. I think there's a lot to unpack here and I would also like to think of the answer previous as well. So like at the beginning, I think it's really important to understand that what you're trying to achieve right we should start with why why are we doing this. And you know, I know we're going to also discuss like the idea of you know how close we are with sales organization and things like that but like at the beginning, what are we trying to achieve and is that you know expansion is it just net new revenue and when you have an idea what you're trying to achieve at a high level, then you can figure out what things you should be looking at. And then we're talking about performance marketing before you could look at every type of campaign in a silo and not actually figure out what makes all of them what is driving performance. So I think it's important to be looking at the entire picture with the goal in mind and an example is you know for us. We have so many different programs that we're running that are obviously driving leads and if I turn off one thing, I can actually have an incremental test and see what the impact is across everything that I'm doing by just turning off one and then you start actually seeing that there's like connective tissue between all of the different activities that you're doing and marketing. So I think it's important to have a very good view of everything so I don't think you can have a definition of measuring too much. I think you should be measuring absolutely everything that you can and then figuring out how it's all connected to one another and that starts with having really good data and in my seat that's having like really good data in my CRM. It's having really good data across every single campaign that I'm running and then having really good dashboards to look at that data and be able to tell that story about the data and tie it back to that main goal that we have at the beginning, whether that is impacting you know churn are we reducing churn by what we're doing are we driving net new revenue are we driving expansion plays. So I think all that comes together absolutely I would always say what I what I trying to put it in this I think you need a backbone of a customer journey so you can end to end have a look on on everything because if you have a non structure you haven't defined it and you have non connected systems. You have no chance in marketing then looking at each channel individually and maybe and maximum measure it to when you hand over right and in 226 is I always say it's waste of money not not building your backbone because you don't know and they so in. interconnected, really like the connected tissue, what you said, because it really is right. And then you understand that what drives organic growth is sometimes the performance marketing, yeah. Or the brand with the brand goes into a program of it. You cannot, if you cut one, it will impact others. So if you look at them individually, you think, oh, this one channel is perfect. And let's cut out the others when they need to cut costs. And then you cut out the others and this one perfect channel is gone. And I think that's why I really like your perspective here, because that's, that's the right view on it. And I think also there is no exact funnel that customers are taking either. And I think that's really important to understand. And you know, you can see for us, anyways, you know, we're very lucky. So we're an attribution company, actually. So we're helping marketer's, their performance campaigns and their apps a lot of the time. And really we have our own attribution as well in marketing. So we're looking at MTA. We're looking at like multi touch attribution for all of our campaigns. So I can really see a journey of one customer and all the touch points they're doing. But as you said, if I looked at one in a silo, I'm never going to really understand what happens when I cut one, when I add something else, I have to really look at it in a holistic view altogether. Yeah, absolutely. So let's dive a little bit into operationally in building this, this growth engine and, and aligning a marketing with revenue. What the ideal outcome is, right, that marketing becomes the core driver of pipeline retention and ARR, right? In the end. So what's been key for you to align marketing, let's say, with revenue operations or marketing with sales and customer access through revenue operation? And how does it work for you? So how do you structure it that it actually is one running engine? Such a great question, because I think this is key to success. Is that alignment? You have to be friends. You really do. You have to be really close. You have to have each other's back. You have to have the same goal at the end of the day. And one of the things that I jumped in and when I joined Singular was OKRs. And I'm a very big nerd when it comes to OKR. So that was like number one, all of us now have shared OKRs. We also need to share definitions of things. So this was another big thing. Like what's our SOP of how a deal moves through, actually? What are the SLAs that we're going to have in place for no show of meeting? So there's like so many different things that you need to be thinking of when you're structuring how a GTM team should operate on just a like rule based level or goal based level that are going to make a success. And that really starts with having a shared objective. Like of course, we want to move pipeline through. Of course, we want to win new business. OK, well, how can sales help me in marketing do that? They can give me feedback really quickly and tell me if something's good or bad. They can show up to the meeting that we're booking for them, you know, they can work with us really closely like CS can help us by inviting customers to our webinars and making sure we have customer representation. So it's really this communication, this working really closely together because we have shared goals. And for us, our goal is all around obviously pipeline generation, revenue generation, but also keeping our customers happy as well. So this retention metric that we work with. And I've seen it work really well in organizations, but I've also seen it work not as well in organizations. And I feel really privileged that now I'm in an organization where we work so so well together. So I could not be happier and I think it's that alignment at the beginning and us knowing that we want the same thing at the end of the day that has made that possible. Good. Nice. Good to hear. Yeah. That's really cool. When do you think about marketing ROI when having the align goal, but what metrics really meta, which one should the leader or marketing leader really focus on or obsessing on? I think it depends on how a company has set themselves up. So what works for me might not work for somebody else to be fair. And it also depends on like your definitions of things internally. So you know, we operate on what we call like S zero S one S two and it's like how things are moving through the pipe. So for me, I'm going to like reverse engineer, for example, at the beginning, like, okay, we want to get this much pipeline because we know this much pipeline is going to come up to this much revenue in order to have this much pipeline. How many leads do I need to bring through? In order to have this many leads, what activity do I need to do to get that many leads? So that could be like a very basic way that people can be looking at like a very basic math equation, right? At the end of the day, you can build this an acceleror wherever you want to build it and look at it. I'm looking at like week on week pacing for these goals across every region. But on a basic level, you could look at the velocity and you could look at what is influencing my pipeline right now, like what touch points are the ones that are really influencing things moving forward? I'm looking at for me touch points week on week. How can I increase touch points week on week basically? Sales velocity, how quickly sales conversion rate from like a meeting to, you know, us being able to have done medic properly, for example. So I think there's just a number of things that you could be doing, but on a very basic level, figuring out how much money do you want to make? When you know how much money you want to make reverse engineering, how much pipeline do you need based on historical conversion rates to make that and then sort of working your way backwards to what does that equal in touch points or leads or things like that. I really like your CRO view on on idea because that's that's exactly what we're trying to preach, right? To understand the connection between the roles, right? We have one journey, we have just different roles along the journey and we have one model, right? One capacity model in the end, interdependent. And if I don't consider that it's going to be very hard because if I consider it and I change something, let's say top off on a bit marketing, it has impact later on. Maybe not the SIRs, but it has a ease or even on the CS and understanding the connection between it and men managing it. That's for me the right answer to success. So really really like it. I think that's the right view on doing it. And one question to your organist, you have a CSO as counterpart or CRO as counterpart? CRO and a chief customer officer as well. For post-sales. Yes, exactly. Support inspirations and customer success. Okay. And then the CRO is only managing sales then. Indeed, yeah. Okay, interesting. And let's talk about a little bit about the creativity, meets accountability or measureability, right? Because I think that's really interesting topic, right? The one part is the branding and storytelling and the other one is performance measurement and real business impact. And I truly believe we cannot have either or because that's not possible. But as marketing becomes increasingly data driven and I know marketing has always been data driven, but in my opinion, it has only been data driven till and I call it performance marketing, right? Because it's only for we wanted to generate leads. But how do you protect space for creativity and long term brand building? Because that's something we, I would see sometimes gets deep prioritized because people don't understand that the importance of it. What's the overview on it? Look, I don't think creativity is a luxury, right? I think we need to have creativity. And although my previous answer was very analytical, which we definitely need to be analytical in this role because we have to be numbers driven, you know, I wouldn't be in the seat if I wasn't. But the beauty of that is that when you are numbers driven and you start having this view of what works and it's like, let's call it loosely what activities work, what programs that you're running and marketing work. Within those programs, you have the capacity to be creative. That's where creativity can live. It's not about dictating, you know, like what the dashboard looks like, it's more analytical things, it's saying, okay, in our program of, let's say, gated content that we're running, where can we be created there? What else can we be doing there? So there's always room for creativity across any of the programs you're running and marketing. Because again, you're looking and seeing how that creativity is impacting that one program and all the other ones because you have the data. So the creativity, I believe, lives alongside of having really good analytics. It allows you to be more creative because you can say, hey, that thing worked. So let's expect a little bit more. Let's flex a little bit more on this one program that we might not have been doing before. - Okay, like it. And what do you say, have you learned about, let's say, leading teams combining both, right? The creative and then a little few to lead growth? - Yeah, I think, you know, most good people can do both. Obviously, there are different personalities and you have to create that sort of psychological safety for both types of people. I like to think that I'm thinking with both sides of my brain so that I have an ability to be creative, but also very analytical. I believe, you know, the best marketers have an ability to do both things, right? Because, you know, even having a dashboard, it's not anything special until you can tell a story about it. And equally, even having a campaign is not special until you can actually show the data on the other side and the impact that it's had. So I think that you need to show both of these things all the time. And you can test for this and I don't want to. and giving a multiple choice test or something in interview. But there's a lot of the tasks and stuff that when I'm hiring for these roles, I'm looking for people that have that curiosity, which I think leads to analytical thinking because you're actually questioning things when you're curious and also creativity. So how can they take what they've researched and turn it into a story and turn it into doing her. - Nice, like it. Let's talk a little bit about the future of marketing or the future of measurable marketing, some call it revenue marketing. And because it would be very interesting for me to explore a little bit trends and your leadership perspective where are we heading to. So what do you see as the next big evolution in measurable marketing, technology, mindset, structure? What is changing? - Oh, man, that's such a loaded question. I wish I could know and then like you and I could go offline and buy loads of shares in some company because we would have the crystal ball. We'd be rich. What I can see today in my today is, I feel like we're just also overwhelmed, you know? AI is in everything. It's unbelievable. It's in every tool that I'm using now and because we have it, I'm noticing that everything has started to sound the same. There's a sameness to it. If you're running outbound campaigns, cold outbound campaigns, your inbox is flooded with the same type of messaging, the sameness. So I see a future with a lot more sameness and that the people who are going to get ahead are gonna try and differentiate out of that sameness which goes back to what we were talking about creativity. So how can we unlock the creativity so we're not doing the sameness as everyone else? - Sure. I really like that you say that because what I tried always to preach my teams even in a different kind of look, if you do grows and any strategy we have, we just need to be different. So if everybody writes short emails, we write long emails, right? If nobody calls, we call. If whatever it is, at least we need to be different because if not we stand out and I think AI isn't my day-to-day heavily now, obviously. But I think it prevents creativity in my opinion because you're getting used to a tool which helps you in everything. So on the easiest things, you don't think on your own anymore. And sometimes I see myself like really, did I ask the AI discussion? Come on. And then getting back and I think, especially if you're not, let's say you're not experienced, yeah? And you're getting into the job and you learn only through this. I think that it will be, it will, it will has a really better effect. And most probably even on the younger generations, why would they use a lot of computers very early then use AI and all of it? The creativity will be the biggest challenge of us, yeah? And as more you focus on developing it and then using the AI to make it maybe better. But I think that's gonna be quite challenging because I don't know how you manage your inbox but I don't open emails, yeah? So many times. So if they go in a filter, they sound all the same. I get 150, 200 a day. And I think quite often, and I think I say that quite often, we forget that the other person is sending an email to is a human, right? And when I'm asking my clients always, would you read your email? And then there's like the answer is that no, so don't send it there because if you don't read it, why should they read it? And I think that's the challenging part, yeah? - And I saw, so one of my friends posted this on LinkedIn yesterday thinking it was something that really struck me and I can't stop thinking about it. And it's that we're giving up the most fun thing by writing, you know? I love writing, I love reading, I read a lot, and I love writing, and it was like, yeah, why am I giving up the thing that I love to do to AI? And recently I've started using Whisperflow, which I don't know if you know this tool, and you basically press function and you talk, and it starts typing for you. And that is better because at least I don't have to type it anymore, but it's still me doing it that the answer is. But in terms of other AI things, I've sat with my team and one of the exercises we did, which I really recommend other people to do, is we basically got this Excel sheet out, and we put in all of our tasks, how long it takes us to do it, and then we started working through like, what can we automate here? What are the things that we could add automation? We can add workflows, we can do things better. We're doing AI hackathons within the GTM team as well. So, you know, I think there's a lot of AI now, there's gonna be more in the future, there's gonna be more connectivity between systems, automation, but we still need to keep, as we said, the creativity, we still need to keep our uniqueness, what makes us dynamic, what makes us who we are, and not lose sight of it as we're getting into this world of more sameness, like can we stop all the geniuses? - Absolutely, and I believe most companies, or most people in general in business, they have the problem of fast, fast, everything is fast, right, and then we always say, look, spend time on detailedness to build your backbone because like this you can go further. And AI pays into it, right? We can go faster, faster, even faster, and then we don't control anymore. And if you just rely on the AI, the outcome quite often, it's not, in my opinion, it's quite often not so good. If I speak with it and I adjusted, I give some feedback in it, and then the outcome is really amazing. It's something, I would say it writes better, more beautiful sameness than I can, if I have worked with it, yeah, and then did it. And I think that's the chance, but the threat in my opinion as well. Let's talk a little bit about the future as well for CMOs, who need to connect marketing with sustainable ARR, impact, I don't know if you say it like this, but having real impact on ARR, what's the capabilities they should have? What are the capabilities I should train in order to become a future, successful, revenue marketing CMO? - I think analytical thinking is a really big one. When I was in university, there was a marketing wing or whatever, and I always thought, "Oh, they're so lucky they get to be creative all the time as I'm studying accounting, and now I'm sitting in a CMO role." And there is creativity, of course, in so much of what we do, but so much of it is analytical thinking, and looking at numbers. - Of course. - And within that, I think we've sort of touched on it here that it is about the system as well. So is the system set out to deliver me the answers that I need? There's no point in doing anything if I'm not measuring it properly. It's just wasted, it's screaming in the wind, there's literally no point in me doing it. So is the system set up properly? Do I trust the numbers? This is a big one. I cannot stress enough how big that is. Do I trust my income number? Have we led anything? - They're all numbers, right? - I long the funnel. - Yeah, like is it reliable data that I'm looking at? Is this legitimate? Did anyone fall through? Is there stuff that I'm missing here and auditing the systems constantly? I mean, you should have this regularly in your diary like that. We should audit the system and make sure that it's working the way it should be. Blow, system blow as well. Is your tech stack operating the way that you imagine it? Is there things that you can cut out? Is there duplication of features that you don't need in one or the other? And all of this, again, goes back to that analytical thinking of the beginning of like, why are we doing this? Why are we here? What are we trying to achieve? So I think you really need to understand pipeline in short. So how does it operate? How is a sales cycle working? So any experience that somebody's had in sales before is really helpful. Any experience that someone's had in operations is very helpful. I'm not an expert at REVOX, but I've had to become a little bit dangerous in these systems as well to be able to talk about it and understand and get our works. - Yeah, but I think the way you think, you could be quite good in REVOX as well, right? - I mean, because holistic, yeah, I really like it. Because what we're trying to put the picture always in on the walls, like look, growth is like a factory, a producing factory. So you define the goals, you define the outputs, and then you define very clear governance. You call the lab before I think you spoke about the cleanness of SOPs and who's doing what, and that's what you have to define in a producing factory. But then in this, why they have success is because they control it. Right, everything there is controlled. So you control that everybody is following the SOPs and governance because if not, their pieces don't work into each other. And I think this controlling part is quite often missing, but we build the factory in, a lot of companies build three houses and then one one outcome, yeah, instead of building one house. So that's why I like you. - That's a good idea. That's a good idea. - You have you on it, on it. And I think that's the part for really having one having sustainable growth in the end. So totally agree with you here. But what the one advice you would give marketing and revenue leaders to try to make their, let's say the entire go to market engine, their go to market strategy measurable and to end. - Measure everything. Measure everything you possibly can. Have a very good, you know, you're using the word backbone and I think that that makes sense. Like what is the backbone? Are you measuring things? How's your database? Get rid of duplicates. Like all of this stuff makes it, if your database is messy, it makes it, I can't even say how much harder, like a hundred times harder to do things. Like I don't know what the multiple is. But if you're working with bad data, you'll never get a good outcome. And I think we've had this whole sort of adage for a long time, like garbage in, garbage out. And you know, it's the same for AI. What are you feeding AI? I think the backbone is really, really important. This is foundational. So and then decide how you're gonna measure it. For us, we're measuring it with multitouch because it makes sense because we have a person that will come in and download content and go to a webinar and we'll invite them to an event and maybe then they'll say, "Oh, you know what? I want a demo." So I need to understand that flow of a user. The more insights I have, the better. That's why I say measure everything. And it does help again that I'm working for Singular who is a measurement company for our app marketer. So it's kind of like I'm willing to myself at the end of the day. Stephanie, thank you very much for your time. I think I could go on with you discussing these topics for another couple of hours. So really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you very much for your time and sharing your insights. Thanks so much, Michael. It was my pleasure being here and I really appreciate the invite. [Music]