An interview with technology sales & marketing innovator Grant Swanson, Sr. Director of Demand Generation at DataStax
DataStax, Inc. is a data management company providing commercial support, software, and cloud database-as-a-service based on Apache Cassandra. Grant is responsible for all things demand generation, as well as coaching Corporate Events and Experiences, Digital Marketing and Enterprise Marketing and Marketing Operations teams at DataStax. Check him out on LinkedIn.
What are you trying to achieve using Informa TechTarget?
We’re using [Informa TechTarget] to generate more qualified leads and drive pipeline by identifying the active, in-market prospects and using relevant insights in our outreach. We originally decided to deploy [the Informa TechTarget Portal] because I am a firm believer it’s the best buyer intent platform in the market. Not only can we see intent at the account level, we can also see the person-level topics of interest based on what they are searching for and where they are at in their buyer’s journey, which is incredibly relevant for us.
How are your sales and marketing teams leveraging the Informa TechTarget Portal? How does it fit into your tech stack and workflows?
One of the main value drivers for [Portal] is that you can automate the extraction of the leads into your marketing automation system and at the same time allow your sales team to add leads themselves with a single click into Salesforce.
On the nurture side, we are automatically exporting leads from our website visitor list in [Portal] into buyer-based persona nurture streams we built in Marketo. The nurture streams allow us to generate additional responses after we collect buyer intent leads from [Portal]. With [Portal], we can ensure that the campaigns we’re running have the actual people that are in-market researching topics that are of interest to us. We’re able to use those intent signals from [Informa TechTarget] to get hyper-targeted in our outreach. When we get a response from our nurture tracks, our BDR team follows up and sets meetings with these prospects. The nice thing is that when our BDR team reaches out, they can get really personalized using the prospect-level insights and technographic data [available in Portal]. This helps the prospect to be more open with us because of the relevancy of the insights. We have a bi-directional sync between Marketo and Salesforce and depending on the status of the lead we’ll put them into either a nurture or an outreach sequence. There’s oftentimes direct outreach from our Enterprise Sales team that will do personalized prospecting and outreach using the insights from [Portal].
On the sales side, we have account lists based on our sales territories built within [Portal]. Our sales reps will log into [Portal] to do their prospecting in their territories and when they identify a new prospect they will decide if they want to add that prospect directly into their Salesforce instance. They are selecting new prospects to add into Salesforce based on relevant research activity. For DataStax, if we see signals around Apache Cassandra or NoSQL or database as a service in the cloud, they know that is an indicator they should be engaging with those prospects and they will add those people into Salesforce.
What happens after a rep decides to add a new prospect into Salesforce? How does the sales team go about their outreach?
When a rep uses [the Add to CRM capability] to add a new prospect from [Portal] into Salesforce, the prospect typically goes into Salesforce as a new lead. If the prospect is at an active customer that already exists in Salesforce, they’re added as a contact. Once a BDR adds a new prospect into Salesforce, they typically will synchronize an Outreach sequence tailored to the persona. The reps build reports based on lead sources so that they are specific to prospects [from Portal] and they can automate the push for those prospects into an Outreach sequence.
Our Enterprise Sales Managers leverage insights [in Portal] to do personal outreach to the strategic and global accounts they are focused on. Similar to how a BDR will decide who to add into Salesforce, our Enterprise Sales Managers identify what a prospect is researching with [Informa TechTarget’s “Top Interests”] to tailor their conversations.
One of the big things we push for at DataStax is building a sphere of influence so that we can expand throughout the buying team. [The Informa TechTarget Portal] does a wonderful job of displaying those buying team members so that we can build that sphere of influence so that we aren’t selling to a single person but really selling to a team.
In the first 5 months, we have nearly $1 million of marketing-generated pipeline, $8 million+ in influenced pipeline and 12 opportunities coming from [Informa TechTarget].”
What are some of your favorite things about the Informa TechTarget Portal?
One of my favorite things about [Portal] is the fact that the prospects and accounts are refreshed weekly, along with the stack-ranking that allows us to quickly prioritize prospects. Also, the ability for us to segment based on intent signals and installed tech data is invaluable to us. Our sales team is also very happy with [Portal] and how user-friendly it is. They like that they have their account lists built so both the BDRs and the Enterprise Sales Managers don’t need to weed through prospects to find what’s relevant to them.
[Portal] is also great when you go outside of North America. For EMEA, where there is GDPR, [Portal] is vital because we can confidently extract prospects and not have to worry about compliance issues.
What type of success have you seen using Informa TechTarget so far?
We have attribution codes set up so that we can track exactly what comes from [Informa TechTarget]. In the first five months, we have nearly a million dollars of marketing-generated pipeline and 12 opportunities coming from [Informa TechTarget]. We’re just above eight million dollars of influenced pipeline and 58 opportunities that have been influenced since September.
Tell us about your experience working with the Informa TechTarget team.
I work with a lot of vendors and have Customer Success Managers who are assigned to DataStax and oftentimes we don’t hear from them until there’s a renewal. The [Informa] TechTarget Customer Success team has done a wonderful job of supporting DataStax – from the onboarding of the platform to the sales rep trainings. They even did a training [on Portal] for a couple hundred sales reps at our Sales Kickoff this year. The [Informa] TechTarget team is just great.
A big thank you to Grant for sharing some feedback with us. We look forward to hearing about more of your wins using Informa TechTarget products in the future!
