As Director of Marketing at NAVIS, a reservation sales and marketing platform for the hospitality industry, Jeff Robertson is responsible for advising company strategy, advocating marketplace needs and accelerating growth.

We caught up with Jeff to learn more about what he and his team at NAVIS are currently working on—from rolling out ABM to leveraging more direct mail content— as well as unique campaigns and key technologies the company is in the process of rolling out.

What are some of the top priorities for you right now in your organization?

We’re deep in the throes of fully rolling out ABM with our sales colleagues. While we’ve always executed some elements of account-focused marketing, we’re now building out our programmatic system and better aligning with the sales organization. We’re nearing completion on our data clean-up by building out contact details for all buying committee members, refining the cadence and content of touches in our various plays, and streamlining lead handling with the sales team to increase advance rates. We’re also researching and writing updated personas to better map the buying process, which will help us refine our brand story by focusing more on the primary market problem and optimize our content mix to ensure we’re addressing each stage.

What new technologies or approaches are you either rolling out now or are excited about checking out in the future?

We have several exciting technology additions either in process or planned for our Marketo/Salesforce tech stack this year. We’ve recently added PFL to help us scale our dimensional direct mail usage. We’ve had great success leveraging direct mail to open doors for our sales team (see below for details on our most successful campaign!), and PFL enables us to do more without burdening my team with time-consuming production, fulfillment and reporting.

Earlier this year, we implemented Uberflip on our website to open up access to our growing catalog of content. We’re excited about creating more streams of content by persona to encourage binge consumption and increase lead velocity. We’ll soon begin evaluating webinar platforms to integrate with our stack. Our webinar usage has increased dramatically in the last six months, and the ad hoc technology we use today is cumbersome, particularly in extending the life of these assets as on-demand content that can use to continue to drive leads.

As students of CEB’s Challenger Customer, we’re also focusing more marketing support on influencing the buying committee this year. We’ve identified three stages of our selling cycle where we want to improve advance rates to move more deals successfully through to a win. Coupling these needs with insights gained from mapping the buying journey will enable us to craft impactful tactics (direct mail, media retargeting, email, etc.) to more closely support the success of each salesperson.

How are you seeing expectations/goals of B2B marketers change in the current business climate, and how are you and your team responding? 

We’ve followed the path of changing expectations that Kathleen Schaub of IDC described so well in her B2B Marketing Exchange session this year: volume, then quality, then accounts. In the last year, my team has moved from being measured by the number of leads 12 months ago to the volume of quality sales accepted leads six months ago, to now being focused on engagement and number of sales discovery meetings and opened opportunities (# and $) with identified accounts.

The finish line has moved several times in a short time span, and I’ve been focused on rallying support for and awareness of these changes with leadership to ensure my team has an opportunity to achieve success in the eyes of stakeholders around the company.

Are there any new campaigns or content pieces your team has created lately that you are especially proud of/you would share with other B2B marketers?

Our most successful prospecting campaign is a direct mail piece that works 85% of the time in opening doors and creating sales conversations with C-level executives. We send iPads with an iPhone-shot video introduction by the salesperson. The iPad is ‘road-blocked’ with the video so the recipient has to watch the video to access functionality. We also load the iPad with relevant E-books, videos, client case studies, etc.

The less than three-minute videos are purposefully amateurish in production value and feature the salesperson holding a handful of poster board-sized art cards to help introduce themselves, light-heartedly apologize for being so persistent in attempting to contact a busy executive, share a few impressive client logos with a success story, and ask them to accept a call because we think we can have the same impact at the recipient’s company.

While a handful sent the iPad back referencing their gift acceptance policy, the vast majority take the call, compliment the salesperson on the very creative outreach, and acknowledge they dodge sales people all the time but feel compelled to reward the innovative approach with their time. We’ve sold millions of dollars of business using this approach to open difficult, but high-value doors.

Now that we are a few months removed from the B2BMX event, can you share any key takeaways you’ve been able to bring back and apply to your business?

I thoroughly enjoyed the B2BMX event; I learned so much that has been useful to our marketing department. Highlights include the IDC research data that helped justify my annual budget request, the numerous learnings and insights from B2B marketers farther along the ABM implementation curve, identifying new technology partners to expand our capability and efficiency, and new consulting partners to help guide us along the adoption path more swiftly.

How are you sharing and implementing learnings from our event and other sources with your team? What is most successful for you from a collaboration standpoint?

I’ve created a library of educational materials distributed at B2BMX and other events on our intranet, and share emails that offer content relevant to current and future projects. For really high-value content, I’ll carve out time from our weekly marketing meeting and/or company leadership meeting to walk through and discuss the content. I’ve found that challenging my team to consider how a new concept might impact us, then brainstorming immediately as a group is a powerful way to transform an idea into action.