5 Not-So-Obvious Tech Tips Every Startup Marketer Needs to Know 

Author: Jessica Foster Brandt, Director of Demand Generation at Lily AI

A lot of tech has more promise than impact, and the stakes are high as the opportunity cost of investing, or not investing, in the right tools is even higher for a startup marketer. You don’t have the luxury of time or money. 

Let me save you some time and hassle by offering a few not-so-obvious tips!

Tip #1: Whatever you do, integrate integrate integrate

It all starts with a CRM and MAP (Marketing Automation Platform), likely a Salesforce or Hubspot. This is your System of Record all data should flow through it automatically so both you and your sales team have a complete view of all important activity.

As you add new tech over time, you’ll want to make sure it integrates with your CRM and MAP.

Here’s an example of the core systems in my stack:

1. CRM: Salesforce
2. MAP: Hubspot
3. ABM: 6sense
4. Call Recording: Gong
5. Web Chat/Meeting Scheduler: Drift

Here’s how they integrate together, and with Gmail, Slack, LinkedIn, and Google:

1. Hubspot integrates with Gmail: so sales emails sent and opened can be tracked in Hubspot and Salesforce.
2. 6sense is synced with Salesforce: so priority segments are updated daily as new accounts are prioritized or de-prioritized.
3. Salesforce is synced with 6sense: so all account activity, including anonymous web visits, can be monitored without having to leave their Salesforce tab!
4. 6sense is synced with LinkedIn Ads: so priority segments are synced automatically with advertising campaigns to make those media dollars work harder.
5. LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads are synced with 6sense: so you can track media activity as part of the overall account activity driving engagement.
6. Drift is integrated into Salesforce: so you can tailor chat playbooks by account and further capture important messages from the chat history on the contact record.
7. Similarly, Gong is integrated into Salesforce: so you can see what sales calls took place and when and with whom, and listen to the recordings or read the call summaries if you’re short on time! 
8. Hubspot is integrated with Slack: so you can configure real-time alerts for the activity that matters most to me or sales, like demo requests!

Integrating these tools and systems will improve your workflows by enabling you to automate tasks, enhance collaboration, and ensure data consistency for ongoing monitoring and optimization. Best of all, you’ll maximize your own productivity and the benefits of each tool so you have more tech success vs tech regrets!

Tip #2: Sales call recordings are a marketer’s gold mine

A tool like Gong is typically a Sales expense that’s used for coaching, but it’s also an amazing tool for:

• New employee onboarding! In my experience, nothing helps you understand a company more than to listen to your sales team pitch, hearing the questions and feedback they receive on those sales calls! Instead of asking your team to join a call, just peruse the library. 
• Sharing customer feedback, like clips or full videos. In the startup world you need to be adaptive and pivot as needed. Gong helps everyone keep the pulse of these conversations so you can gather data and market feedback quickly. 
• Feedback on sales decks for product marketing to see how new materials are being used and what the market reception is, so you can quickly finetune further without having to schedule time with your sales team after every call. 
• Better-qualifying marketing contribution for sales opportunities for demand generation and revenue marketing. There’s a wealth of info here on the first introduction call specifically to learn where they heard about your company and what they understand or hope your product will solve.
• Answering questions. I find that many questions you want to ask your sales team can be instantly answered by doing a search or setting up a listening report. 
• Plus, all of this data can be integrated into Salesforce. 

Tip #3: The mixed bag of ABM platforms, and why you’ll still need one (eventually)

If you’re a B2B tech company and you’re entertaining any form of ABM (Account-Based Marketing) of any size, an ABM platform will unlock a ton of insight, though not always right away. The key here is configuring the tool and the modeling to meet your business needs and then ongoing training and highlighting of account activity insights with your sales team.

A lot of ABM platforms will also tout the ABM (programmatic) advertising within their platforms to fill the top of the funnel or for 3rd party intent signals to understand what accounts are researching what problem or solution. Ironically, I find neither of these that valuable.

Here IS what has been a game changer:

• Daily and Weekly alerts that show both account and lead-level activity. You and your sales teams need both! 
• Anonymous web visit activity that is captured in the above alerts, especially lower funnel pages (pricing, demo) or more niche topics (like blog posts), are more powerful predictors of near-future interest! This is like a strategic double-click in the web activity from Google Analytics/GA4, because behind the numbers, what really matters is: are you attracting the attention and eyeballs of the right companies?
• Automatically create and sync segments from your CRM to your advertising campaigns, like LinkedIn and Google Ads, for both targeting and measurement. As accounts get prioritized and de-prioritized each day, these advertising target lists will automatically update in the ad channels that drive leads, ensuring the leads you generate are ones your sales team is excited to follow up on!
• If you’re exploring a channel partner strategy, and looking to understand which platforms your top customers or prospects are using, this too can be easily organized in an ABM platform by creating Technographic segments. 
• If you’re building or refining an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), you can quickly and easily analyze segments by firmographics. 

Tip #4: You need to feed the beast

Whether your focus is building brand or audience or both, you’ll need to feed the beast. This means fresh content and new distribution channels to tell your story and drive new eyeballs and hot leads. 

Remember that:

• Content gets stale. 
• People unsubscribe and change companies. 
• Advertising channels and their audiences can fatigue.
• Market dynamics and interests change. 

Your lead gen + content machine must be an “always on” exercise to feed the beast!

Tip #5: It starts and ends with your CRM

To bring it back full circle to a CRM, here are final takeaways that I’ll leave with you, both tactical and slightly more strategic:

• If your sales team is reporting pipeline in a CRM like Salesforce, and if marketing has a quantifiable goal to support sales, then you need your reporting to be in the same system. Typically, this will include some mix of opportunity source reporting and Salesforce campaign history. It’s not perfect or elegant, but at the end of the day, if you have a bottom-line “marketing contribution” goal (typically anywhere from 10-30%), you want to be in the same system looking at the same data.
• In a system like Salesforce, there are Lead records and then there are Contact records. In B2B, people are just people, not leads or contacts. In my experience, most sales and marketing team members couldn’t tell you the actual difference. Yet, in Salesforce, they are two different record types that, in my experience, create more problems than they solve. In addition to duplicate records, you’ll have a hard time seeing a complete picture when you have to pull reports by Leads vs Contacts. I suggest tracking a person’s status (New/Accepted/Disqualified) etc. as a status field on the Contact record and saying goodbye to Leads. I’ve seen it done, and it works! Don’t be scared!
• My biggest tip along the same lines is a topic near and dear to my heart: the unique identifier. In B2B, this is the business email. Yet there are two MUCH better persistent IDs at a person level: the LinkedIN profile url and the personal email. Why the personal email? Yes, it’s often undesirable by sales because the thinking goes, if someone downloaded content from a personal vs business email, they must not be a serious buyer, so why bother reaching out. Then, a Sales Ops team takes that further to “cleanse” their CRM of these undesirable emails. Don’t let that happen! The personal email also has tremendous value. 

Bonus Tip: B2B is Still About People, Not Just Accounts

If I leave you with one final pearl of wisdom, it is this: In B2B it’s an ABM world, yet we can often be too hyper-focused on accounts.

The spirit of ABM is focus, and this is where, too often, the accounts overshadow the importance of people. People are the champions who love your brand, your team, and your product, or they can be the skeptics or detractors who don’t. Either way, these VIPs are so important to follow as they are promoted or change roles or companies. 

While the importance of people can be painfully obvious to sellers, it’s not top of mind for marketers. That’s often because we don’t have the systems in place to operationalize tracking people at a person level; we map people at the account level.

Buyers of your product will change companies and jobs, all the time. But their experience with your brand will carry on into their next role. It’s important to retain that history and connection as you eventually build the most important segment of all: your champions and customer advocates.