Where do I spend the money? Is this campaign bringing prospects to the finish line? Is my talent pool established and who do I need to hire to hit this big, hairy, audacious goal in three years? All valid questions, and all questions your marketing leaders are likely asking themselves. If there was a SaaS tool out there that could perfectly predict a multi-touch attribution model, and tell you when to hire and fire, and where to invest your budget, it would be a unicorn overnight. Guaranteed.

Of course, this doesn’t exist because figuring out how and why people buy is hard. These days there is so much direct and indirect noise in the purchasing decision that it is virtually impossible to account for and determine every little variable in the attribution model. Sure, we can make reasonable assumptions — traffic jumped after this podcast aired, so it must be the podcast — but they are nothing more than educated guesses. But educated guesses doesn’t get the budget – a solid foundation does.

In this episode of AMP UP Your Digital Marketing we meet Shane Murphy-Reuter, the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Intercom, a customer messaging platform. Through depth and breadth of experience, and making some mistakes along the way, Murphy-Reuter gives us insight into the ‘three buckets’ he follows for marketing budgets, delegation, and learning attribution models. His actionable tips will help you answer questions such as:

* How Do Marketers Spend Their Budget Wisely?

* When Do Marketers Validate Their Hiring Decisions?

* How Do You Delegate the Marketing Tasks?

* How Does a Marketer Learn Their Attribution Model with Imperfect or Incomplete Data?

* How Do Analysts Affect the Non-Directly Attributable and Not Direct Response Efforts?

Transcript:

Glenn: Welcome back to the show. Today we’re speaking with Shane Murphy-Reuter. Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane: Thank you, Glenn. Really happy and excited to be here.

Glenn: Shane, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Shane: Yes, so, obviously, I’m Shane. I run marketing right now at Intercom. I’ve spent probably the last – God – maybe 15 years working in marketing, variety of roles. Started probably the first-half of my career working in proposition development which is now called product marketing and more in the brand side as well. And then shifted, sort of, the second-half of my career towards more of the demand and now kind of running all of that at Intercom within, sort of, the B2B space. And so, I’ve had the pleasure to have a pretty varied background in marketing and really glad to be at a company that really cares deeply about all the different areas.

Glenn: And just to give people a sense of the size of your marketing organization today, can you give us some rough numbers?

Shane: Yeah. So, the marketing team, once we are fully staffed, will be 80 people. We are going into a hiring drive at the moment. So, anybody out there who is in marketing and would like to join Intercom, let me know. And yes, we’re about 80 people. And, you know, we have a pretty typical split of the team across product marketing, brand, demand-gen, content. Those are kind of our four key pillars of the team. And then from a budget perspective, you know, we have over $10 million in actual dollars that we can use to execute marketing. So, like, media buying or marketing technology cycle, that sort of thing.

Glenn: And so, when you think about that, I mean, it’s a sizable budget, it’s something that you really have to think about, am I putting this to best use? So, what do you think about that and how do you even get your team to think about, you know, highest and best use of the dollars and the resources that you’re allocating?