The Field Marketing Playbook: Tips on How to Start & Build a Field Marketing Team

Signs You Could Benefit from Investing in Field Marketing

Field marketing can take on many different forms depending on the needs of your company. Remember, the sole purpose of field marketing is to support sales and the entire sales process, so in order to understand how to build an effective field marketing team you must first understand what sales and marketing challenges you currently have that need to be addressed.
Below are three common areas to focus on:

• Sales snags and bottlenecks: Are your prospects perpetually getting stuck at a particular phase of the funnel/buying journey? For instance, do you routinely have the most trouble getting prospects to bite on a demo? Or do you have a closing problem where you just can’t get the prospect to commit?

• Post-sales issues: Maybe the problem isn’t getting deals in, but keeping customers happy once they sign up. Is that reflected in a high churn rate and/or low satisfaction scores?

• Sales and marketing misalignment: Is your marketing team creating materials that aren’t actually being used by your sales team (such as whitepapers, case studies, data sheets, etc.)? Do you host conferences and events that aren’t well attended by prospects or customers? Or do your sales and marketing leaders simply not agree on what success means?

It’s important to take all of these considerations into account and fully understand your gaps and the problems field marketing may either be hindered by or able to actively address. The best way to do that is by talking with leaders, contributors, and of course, taking the time to analyze the underlying data.

4 Questions to Determine What Your Needs Are

Once you have a thorough understanding of the challenges and opportunities then and only then can you begin ironing out exactly what field marketing should look like for your company. Here are four questions to help you develop a clearer picture of where your needs are and what you should focus on accomplishing:

• If you have a communication problem between marketing and sales, how can you align the teams to better communicate and share ideas?
• How can you better support each sales rep in the field, each industry you serve, and each region you have a presence in through a more proactive approach?
• If you have a prospecting problem, how can you better equip your sales development team and/or your field sales team with more tools? How can you align your marketing tools and processes to support not only the top of the funnel, but the middle as well? And how about helping sales close deals by getting them aligned with the right executives who are truly engaged?
• Finally, what happens when a customer is won? How does marketing support beyond the signed contract?

Tips on How to Start and Build a Field Marketing Team

If field marketing is new for your company, it’s hard to justify plunging in head first with little to no proof that it will actually work. Instead, why not find a trusted member of your marketing team who already has a solid relationship with sales, and have them pilot field marketing in a specific region/group? This is exactly how I got my start and it not only empowered me to try new things and experiment, it also gave me comfort knowing we weren’t spending tons of money on a brand new program that may not ultimately work.

As a first step, identify a trusted individual in your marketing team and introduce them to the members of a region/group where you are under-performing. Have this new field marketing rep create a questionnaire to use to get to know each sales rep and the deals they are working on. Then ask the field marketer to create a game plan for every rep, starting small.

When you find successes, celebrate them as a team and then start reinvesting in them, amplifying the approaches and tactics that work to try them in other regions/groups. If things go well, you may be on your way to having field marketing support across every region/group and perhaps even tactical contributors supporting the field marketer(s). But the key is to start small and to grow in the areas that thrive.

Best Practices from Two Real-Life Case Studies

I’ve personally helped to build a field marketing team at a large enterprise SaaS company, added a field marketer to my team at a mid-sized healthcare technology company, and have assisted several start-ups with developing their own field marketing functions. Every company has its own strategy and areas of need. The two examples below are good examples of just how unique field marketing can be:

ExactTarget

When I started field marketing at ExactTarget as a pilot program supporting the West region of the U.S. back in 2010, the company was not quite 1,000 employees and had just expanded globally. We were still trying to figure out how to align sales and marketing better, and we needed to truly listen to what the sales reps were experiencing out in the field.

I began by creating “market development plans” for every rep. We would review these with both the sales rep and their sales development rep on a weekly basis to understand their pipeline, competitors, industries, etc. and even dig into specific deals. I would then create an action plan, which took the form of specific tactics aligned to each stage where deals were at in the pipeline:

• Prospecting: Creating customer materials or working together on a blitz campaign.
• Deals in the middle of the pipe: Planning a specific event or putting together custom materials such as audits, landing pages, or videos.
• Closing deals or supporting the account reps: Hosting exclusive VIP-only dinners or hands-on experiences to create lasting relationships. Sometimes, we’d even use our executive team to help by placing a call, sending a hand-written letter, or personally inviting prospects to an event.

After time, I grew very close with my team and would join their weekly call, present at onsites, and would share any feedback I heard to the marketing team. Eventually, the sales and marketing teams became very close and aligned. Most importantly, we proved that through our efforts, we had a much higher close rate, a better ACV, and a shorter sales cycle. After we proved what worked (and what didn’t), then we scaled the team out to support every region, and eventually even added specialists to help create the customer material.

ClientSuccess

Meanwhile for ClientSuccess, a high-growth startup with a talented team of about 10, field marketing looks much different. While they don’t have a formal field marketing team or even a pilot program, they have found that certain tactics from the field marketing playbook work incredibly well for them.

As a company dedicated to customer success, relationships are literally everything for ClientSuccess. The company has launched a series of events across the U.S. called “The Keys to Customer Success” in which groups of 10-12 prospects and customers gather to discuss the customer success function. They share best practices, key learnings, predictions for the future, and most of all, build important peer relationships with those in similar positions.

After just a handful of these events, ClientSuccess has already began to see impact and results. Even though the intent is not to sell but rather to learn together, they’ve found that by sharing knowledge and learning with peers, the company has become a trusted advisor to their prospects and customers.

Field Marketing Metrics to Track for Success

Identifying what success means for your field marketing team and then measuring how their activities perform is incredibly important. Not just so you understand how marketing contributes to sales, but also to show how field marketing is performing in specific regions, across industries, etc. That way, you can determine how to grow the team and amplify specific programs based on what’s working.

In my field marketing experience, I’ve found that there are two distinctly different ways to measure programs — both are dependent upon creating and measuring the following “campaigns” in your CRM.

Sourced

This applies to any specific deals that marketing generates without the help of sales. For instance, you send a direct mail quarterly campaign, which your marketing team (or sales development team) follows-up on, and qualifies the lead then passes on to sales. Because marketing generated this qualified lead, it is considered “sourced” by marketing. 

Influenced

While more ambiguous, I’ve found that measuring influence is the best way to track field marketing performance. Why? Because field marketers are involved in every aspect of the sales cycle — not just the prospecting (or lead qualifying) stage. They work on deals that even sales finds and qualifies themselves. Because of this, the best way to measure these activities is by measuring the number of campaigns and the kinds of campaigns that are attached to various deals.

Tip: Compare to a Control Group

To truly understand if field marketing is working for your company, try running a sample set of measurements after six months or a year of having it in place. Do this by taking a control group of closed deals that had no marketing influence compared with a group of the same number that were influenced by at least three marketing touch points.

Is the average contract value (ACV) higher? Is the time-to-close shorter? Is the close percentage better? These calculations will give you a true sense of whether or not field marketing is having a positive impact on your business.

Learn More: Free On-Demand Webinar

Want more field marketing tips and tactics? Watch our on-demand webinar, “Field Marketing: The Secret Weapon to Fuel Enterprise Sales,” for more guidance and proven, tactical advice on how to get started.

Photo by: orion_Katerina