#27 Managing change in MOPs ft. Gary Verster

Gary Verster is the Director of Marketing Operations at Trend Micro, a multinational cyber security software company. He joins Pierce to talk about how the Trend Micro team rolled out a marketing automation platform globally across more than 60 offices, and the steps that were required to do it properly.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1) How Gary rolled out marketing automation across Trend Micro

2) What intent data is and why it’s important

3) The value of account-based marketing (ABM)

Show Notes

If you’re rolling out a new software solution across a large enterprise, there are a lot of things that need to happen before you even get started. For one, you need executive buy-in and backing from your leadership. Then, you need to invest the time up front to educate the people that will be impacted and get them accustomed to the idea that they will be doing things differently moving forward.

This was a big lesson for Gary Verster when he rolled out Marketo at Trend Micro, a global cyber security company. The goal of adopting the platform was to ensure alignment across teams, but that required undoing and dismantling a lot of the processes that had been developed by various regional marketing teams across the organization. For marketers that had been at Trend Micro for years, this was a big barrier to adoption.

Now, six years on, Gary feels like they’re still working towards that alignment, but the tool has been invaluable. In terms of things he wishes he’s done differently, he would love to have had the resources to build documentation so as to reduce the amount of time that’s being spent on introducing people to the platform when they join. This is a challenge that’s familiar to marketing ops professionals around the world. Unfortunately, there’s never enough time to spend on building documentation.

Another important transformation that Gary has been overseeing at Trend Micro is the adoption of account-based marketing (ABM). Beyond adopting and identifying the right technologies, this has also required building a closer partnership with Sales. After all, you can’t run ABM without running accounts based sales. To this end, there have been a lot of conversations around what sales reps get out of this new approach, which mostly comes down to fewer calls required to obtain a qualified lead.

Paired with ABM, the team at Trend Micro is leveraging third-party intent data to get a better sense of what their prospects want to learn about, and producing content around those topics in a timely way. This has been an important transformation for how their global team proactively meets the needs of their prospects.

Follow Gary on LinkedIn