On Purpose: Aaron Bird at the Intersection of Content, Marketing, Sales and Technology

The Buzz Bin’s “On Purpose” feature explores the thinking behind the strategies and tactics top marketers and senior-level executives employ in pursuit of business goals.

Aaron Bird is the CEO of Bizible, a marketing analytics startup that allows companies to easily track the ROI of their online marketing inside Salesforce. He also is the founder of PipelineMarketer.com. Previously, Aaron was the Senior Lead Program Manager at Microsoft on Bing Ads.
Aaron Bird is CEO of Bizible, a marketing analytics startup that allows companies to easily track the ROI of their online marketing inside Salesforce. He also is the founder of PipelineMarketer.com. Previously, Aaron was the Senior Lead Program Manager at Microsoft on Bing Ads.

Aaron Bird is CEO at Bizible, a marketing analytics startup working hard to help businesses align their sales and marketing activities. The company recently announced a new round of funding and counts some great brands as clients, such as ADP, Aveda, Curtis Wright and Delta Airlines.

It also occupies a space increasingly important to communicators: the intersection of content, marketing, sales and technology.

We talked to Bird, who holds an MBA from Pepperdine and a computer science degree from UCSB, about how he sees that crossroads developing.

Buzz Bin: How will technology change B2B marketing and sales departments in the next five years?

Aaron Bird: Marketing automation used to be a competitive advantage. Now it’s table stakes, so companies are looking for the next major advantage, and I think that will be around making all the sales and marketing data actionable. Channel specific performance projections, “what if” scenarios and more.

What prevents companies today from realizing that vision?

It’s really about collecting and making sense of the data. If companies haven’t connected sales and marketing yet, they’re already behind. Next will be about surfacing actionable insights, which is what we are doing with Bizible.

If companies haven’t connected sales and marketing yet, they’re already behind.

How does Bizible put marketing and sales departments “on the same page?”

One of the common problems with disconnected sales and marketing data is that both teams are measured on different metrics. For marketing, it’s leads and cost-per-lead, and for sales, it’s customers and revenue. This causes strain between the teams and the “you’re not driving quality leads” and “you’re not doing a good enough job closing them” discussion.

It’s essential that companies connect sales and marketing so that all teams are being measured on a common metric: revenue. Bizible makes this incredibly easy. It takes about 15 minutes to setup. It’s about tracking and optimizing marketing down to bottom of the funnel metrics, which we call pipeline marketing. 

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