B2B Software Marketing Masterclass: Romain Doutriaux
Lessons From Pigment and Dataiku
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Today we’re speaking to Romain Doutriaux about B2B software marketing. Romain was previously Head of Marketing at Pigment and VP EMEA Marketing at Dataiku - he has built and scaled marketing across data infrastructure and application software. This interview is full of actionable advice for founders and operators setting the foundations of their marketing strategy - thank you Romain!
Romain Doutriaux is a seasoned B2B marketing leader with over a decade of experience driving growth for startups as they scale into international players. He believes that the essence of marketing lies in telling impactful stories, which shapes his approach to combine creativity with a results-oriented mindset. This philosophy emphasises creating effective alignment with go-to-market teams.
Romain has co-built the marketing strategy at Dataiku and successfully rebooted it at Pigment. His expertise spans the full marketing spectrum, including product marketing, account-based marketing (ABM), branding, customer marketing, and demand generation. More importantly, he is passionate about building strong teams and fostering individual growth.
In his spare time, Romain enjoys spending quality moments with his family, nurturing his greenhouse, and mountain biking through the forest. He has promised himself for over a decade that he would write a fiction book addressing the shortcomings of the B2B SaaS world. Perhaps this will finally be the year he makes that a reality.
To set the stage for our readers, how would you define marketing in the context of B2B SaaS, and what key activities fall under marketing's remit?
How has that evolved over time?
What is marketing exactly? You could define it by all the channels we're using or by the different campaigns we're running, but I think marketing is fundamentally about telling impactful stories.
We try to tell different stories, whether they're about ourselves, our competitors, the market, or our customers. We're trying to tell stories that are going to follow the path of our customers - from the top of the funnel all the way to renewal and loyalty. These stories need to be impactful - they need to drive both lead generation impact and awareness impact.
In an ideal world, marketing wouldn't exist because the product would be so perfect it would sell itself - but we live in an imperfect world. It's up to us to try to make it look a bit more perfect, a bit more natural for any potential buyer.
Under this definition, what falls under marketing's remit becomes clearer. It can be divided into three buckets:
Product marketing: How do we sell the product, but also how do we influence the product roadmap based on what we're able to sell in the market and ecosystem?
Awareness/branding: How do we educate our potential buyers? How do we educate a wider audience?
Lead generation: How do you drive pipeline? How do you ensure there's an impact on the P&L, on the bottom line?
In recent years, I've also seen a stronger focus on customer marketing – how do we market to our customers or market through our customers.
Dave Kellogg argues that "marketing exists to make sales easier". How has this manifested in your roles?
In B2B enterprise, due to the length of the sales cycle and the diversity of personnel involved, you can't afford to be disconnected from the rest of go-to-market (GTM).
This is how you switch from random acts of marketing to marketing that makes sense – marketing that serves the sales team. A good example is campaign organization - you can run your own campaigns, but you'd be wasting your time if you don't align with the industries, use cases, or accounts that the sales team wants to go after.
It's much more fruitful to build campaigns that enable the sales team. As a marketing leader, you'll activate content and stories, but you'd be missing the point if you were the only department activating it. You need the sales team, BDRs, and CSMs to activate it too. That's how you get the strongest GTM alignment.
Campaigns where you align the whole GTM on the vertical, use case, customer, or account you want to go after – creating and activating educational content – are the best example of alignment with the rest of the GTM.
How do you think about justifying marketing investments that often have a much longer payback (e.g. brand building or thought leadership)?
It's a classic fight between the CMO and the rest of the C-suite. Part of the budget will have a direct impact on the P&L – events, paid advertisements, specific campaigns. Another part is spent on building awareness over the longer run.
At Pigment, we built an index that combined share of voice (coverage in the press), number of mentions from analysts, and increase in web traffic. You can aggregate a few KPIs to show the impact on awareness in the short term.
The rest is a lot of education.
It's been well-studied and proven that companies without consistent brand awareness efforts will see their lead generation efforts plateau and their acquisition costs grow substantially.
Even with the best BDRs and salespeople, if the rest of the market doesn't know about you, you're probably wasting your time.
Awareness efforts help pre-build and prepopulate the market. It will have an impact in the long term, but it requires a lot of education towards the board, especially as it involves significant investment that will likely pay back in a few years.
Founders often grapple with the sales and marketing expense ratio. What have you seen as an optimal ratio, and how can it be tracked over time?
The balance between sales versus marketing expense within any team is typically one-third marketing, two-thirds sales. This includes both payroll and campaigns. Of course, the payroll for the sales team is often much higher than marketing, but they get almost no budget for campaigns.
The S&M costs (as % of ARR) vary based on the ARR targets of the company. For smaller companies, it makes sense to have a higher S&M % because you're kick-starting the company, your marketing efforts, and your sales team. As an example, in companies around $10 million ARR, the S&M expense is about 60% of the pipeline generation - if you want to achieve $10 million, you're going to have to spend $6 million in S&M costs, which includes payroll.
As the company and target grow, this ratio will decrease. For an optimal, mature company, it should be around 30-35%.
How have you approached attribution in marketing? There's this notion of a "dark funnel," where the impact isn't easy to measure. How can this be addressed in the interim before payback?
Attribution is probably the biggest challenge any B2B SaaS company is facing at the moment. It can be extremely complex with many different attribution systems - first touch, last touch, multi-touch, etc. But at the end of the day, it often creates frustration internally because leaders use it to determine who should get credit for closing a deal.
I find it much more useful to use attribution to define the winning combination. You're able to go through 10, 20, or 50 deals and find out how many touchpoints we had, what kind of touchpoints they were, and correlate that with the length of the sales cycle and the size of the deal. This helps you find your sweet spot, your ideal customer profile (ICP), and the ideal combination that works well.
When you think of attribution this way, you start having a much more meaningful way to think about who's done what. The way it's being computed today, inbound is often fighting against outbound, with everyone trying to take most of the credit. It's much more interesting when you agree that BDRs are doing a great job because they're enabled by marketing, and they've been able to meet people at an event that marketing organized, and so on.
The inbound/outbound differentiation is probably not making as much sense nowadays from that standpoint.
Then there's a question of how you allocate that budget across different stages of the funnel. What have been the right combinations of budget allocation you've seen in marketing?
What I see is really two-thirds on lead gen, one-third on awareness. Lead gen is how you're going to feed your pipeline for the next quarter. Awareness is how you're going to prep the market for the next year.
To give you more details on the lead gen %, most of the time you're going to have one-third on events, one-third on paid advertising, and one-third on a few other things.
There's an element to brand awareness where only some of your customers (c. 5%) are ever in the market at any given time. You want to be top of mind for the remainder of customers in the future. Can you expand on that?
Absolutely, only 5% of the customers are in-market at any given moment, and the goal is to nurture the relationship with the remaining 95%. That's why our awareness efforts actually have an impact, whether it's public relations, analyst relations, customer testimonials, or community efforts.
When you dig a bit deeper, you realise the differences are more blurred than you might think. For example, let's say we're attending an event and someone who's not in the market today sees us. Even though there's no interaction, we're nevertheless creating a touchpoint that means they'll think about us when the time is right, maybe in a few years.
That's why the difference between in-market versus top-of-mind awareness is not that obvious. The way we try to solve it in B2B SaaS is by scoring leads. If a lead is within your ICP and also exhibits relevant behaviour on your website (like spending a lot of time on it), and if you get good intent data about this company, it helps you define if this lead is in the market or not.
More companies are combining some level of product-led and sales-led motions. How does marketing complement a hybrid motion?
To me, the biggest difference between Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Sales-Led Growth (SLG) is that in PLG, marketing is going to be doing more on their own. There's going to be a very strong focus on digital acquisition. Of course, most of the time, it's a much smaller Average Contract Value (ACV) than SLG. But at the end of the day, the marketing team can almost work on its own.
In PLG, you're going to spend online budget to create advertisements to bring people to your homepage, to your landing page, and to convert them. Versus SLG, which is much more focused on how we enable the sales team and the BDR team to have an impact.
What’s appealing about PLG is that you can go much quicker because you're on your own. In SLG, though it takes much more time, most of the time the impact is much bigger because when you're successful, you're going to bring in 150K to 200K, versus 20K or 25K when it's PLG.
So both motions are attractive. From my standpoint, I have worked mostly in enterprise B2B sales companies where SLG was the way to go. But nurturing this PLG motion is interesting, especially as you need to mature in terms of marketing techniques on topics that are quite complex - paid, rev ops, marketing ops, and so on - where most of the time, it's much more relevant in a PLG rather than SLG motion.
You touched on the importance of executive sponsorship and getting buy-in for marketing. One thing that's obviously challenging is when the CMO has to negotiate with the CRO and CFO. What are best practices for building alliances?
There are two key aspects. On the CRO side, you must align on the pipeline goals. What do we want to reach? Which accounts do we want to reach? Which deals do we want to focus on? You just align with the GTM strategy as a whole. Then you're able to create a marketing strategy, which is going to be a mix of events, paid advertising, or specific campaigns that make sense.
With the CFO, I think it's more about the rationale of spend. There are a few ratios that are well accepted today. At the end of the day, if you want to reach a certain amount - let's say you want to make $10 million of net new ARR next year - you're probably going to need to have 4 to 5 times more pipeline. That brings you to $50 million pipeline. Then you're able to take that to the average value of one deal, and that defines how many opportunities you want to create. Then you can come up with the cost of one opportunity, and that gives you your budget.
There's a very mathematical way to do it, which is extremely pleasant as a marketer. It’s a combination of the left brain and the right brain - the creativity, the story, the emotion, but also the rational, computing the right amount. The idea that you need to spend X% more to get X% more in terms of results is extremely satisfying, because it's simple. Sometimes it doesn't work, but at least you get a rational calculation which helps you make sense with the CFO and CRO.
Events have gone through a lot of change in the last several years. How do you see the role of events now in this post-COVID world? You have some doing virtual, hybrid, and in-person events. How are your buyers reacting to events?
To me, there are several aspects. Of course, there's the hybrid/virtual events. But even before getting there, from my standpoint, the more important difference would be between third-party events and first-party events.
Third-party events are the ones you're going to buy from external suppliers, like Big Data London or Gartner events. Most of the time, they're unique, and when you get there, if you apply your normal ROI calculations, you're probably going to be disappointed. It’s better to view those events from the lens of brand awareness.
Then there are first-party events, like the events you can organise on your own that cost close to nothing and are often much more profitable. For physical events, I'd buy a few big third-party events where I know my ROI calculation is more brand awareness than leads (still necessary).
First-party events are much smaller, much quicker to organise, and there are many more of them, where you're going to have a real impact on pipeline and overall impact. This balance is probably not so well considered today by marketing leaders, but they should really give it some thought.
As for the balance between physical and virtual events, I love virtual events, especially when they're recurring, because they create a habit with the target audience. That means when they go on your website, there's always going to be a next webinar that's going to be a very strong lead magnet.
And from time to time, I like to organise one big webinar series, like a virtual day or virtual week. That's what we did at Pigment. We called it "Switch." It's interesting because you're not going to come up with many webinars, probably 6 to 8 max, but you manage to align the whole company around them, so everyone is activating to get an advantage, and suddenly, you get a much bigger impact and alignment.
There's a balance, of course, as you're especially selling in the enterprise, around what we touched on - lead gen and awareness campaigns - with account-based marketing, which becomes very key for larger and larger ACVs. How have you seen that be balanced in terms of effort across all these different parts of the budget?
When you use very targeted Account-Based Marketing (ABM), you're probably going to go after large accounts with a very promising Average Contract Value (ACV). Therefore, you can afford to take customisation pretty far. It's a change because it used to take a lot of time to customise. Nowadays, with the new martech world we have, you can customise at scale. This saves a lot of money, and the same goes for physical, although with physical events, you can't really save on cost.
Advanced ABM for big opportunities is really a great way for the GTM team to align - you need to be aligned with the messaging, the targets, what you want to tell them.
That's a bit different from the broad market awareness campaigns where you're not going to have that many pipeline generation targets or very specific business numbers to reach. It's where you're going to try to push a global message. So most of the time, it takes a lot of time to ideate, but the delivery is quite easy - you're going to be putting ads everywhere, basically. ABM is much more costly and takes much more time, but it's probably much more interesting for everyone. To take the metaphor of the F1 car, ABM is like fine-tuning your race strategy for each specific track.
Content marketing is another facet of inbound, where you want to ensure that it's aligned with all of your other short and long-term lead gen and brand awareness goals. How do you ensure that consistency?
In marketing you need three things. If you want to run an F1 race, you're going to need to have an engine, a pilot, and fuel. To me, content is exactly like gasoline. You can have the best marketing organisation, the best marketing team players, but if you don't give them content, like a story, they're going to be unable to drive their car and to win any race, to be honest.
In this framing, content moves from being about writing playbooks or white papers no one cares about, to a central place in the marketing team and therefore the company. They're the ones creating the messaging, but also shaping the way we talk to our customers, to our prospects.
That's why I often recommend to people I talk with, when they want to start a marketing motion, to increase their content motion as it's really going to be the alpha and the omega of everything we can do in marketing.
You've built the marketing functions at Dataiku, a leading data infrastructure company, and then Pigment, a leading application software company. How do the marketing approaches compare?
The biggest difference is that for one of them, you're more likely to be at the beginning of the market, at the beginning of the hype cycle curve from Gartner. You're going to be educating mostly. There's going to be stronger thought leadership about explaining what your software is about, how it's helping people, and why they should give it a try.
In contrast, for the application software company, it's going to be mostly a replacement market. Some application software is new, but at some point, they're just trying to modernise, improve or consolidate existing software solutions. You're going to be spending a lot of time explaining why your product features are better than your competitors.
You're also going to benefit from the efforts of the company you're facing. They've spent a lot of money and resources in the past to educate the market. And when you arrive, the market's already educated and it's just up to you to seize it, to grab it.
When you ask me about the core principles for any of the scale-ups when you're marketing, you need to be able to market one year in advance. Perhaps this year your company is going to be making $5 million, but you need to be doing $15 million next year, so you need to be planning next year pretending you're a $15 million company when you're not yet there.
A good example for me is when you organise a big proprietary event. You know, there are events that cost a lot of money, that last for 1-2 days or half a day, that are really all about yourself and the customer being able to gather around you. These are huge investments, especially when you're a small company. Most of the time, you're going to be organising them one year in advance, not more. It's a bet you're making, but as the marketing leader, you need to always be looking ahead of you. Because if you only focus on the next quarter, you're probably not bringing a lot of value
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