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David Cowings joined RingCentral to help improve lead quality and align metrics. Since joining the company two years ago, Cowings has worked hard to link people, leads, contacts and accounts to a hierarchy of companies so its marketing and sales teams could understand reporting hierarchy and discover who RingCentral’s largest customers actually were. He is also working on enhancing customer and prospect data to make it more robust, tying in information around companies’ growth signals, such as historical hiring trends.
With more than 17 years of management experience, Cowings has always been a top performer paying great attention to detail. RingCentral has seen higher conversion rates, with a 5% to 10% lift in the ability to move from MQL to SQL. In addition, click-through rates are about 3% to 4% higher, and there’s a higher rate of sales qualifying and accepting the leads from marketing.
A sense of curiosity for new ideas, a friendly and caring persona and his keen ability to multi-task make him an ideal team player and leader.
Can you share any particular achievements you are most proud of in your current role?
I have built an internal architecture that unifies all accounts, leads and contacts under a definition of a company as it has been defined by RingCentral to power our account-based marketing and sales initiatives. This system enables us to link to third-party ABM solutions to track intent, ABM engagement and our FIT models, which allow us to target our ideal prospects. We are in the process of unifying this into a single-source-of-truth data lake that will power our master data management, ABM initiatives, inter-departmental KPI reporting, and analytics and predictive modeling. We are also in the process of deploying a new unified view for sales to have access to all of the information within Salesforce.
Why do you think innovation is important in today’s B2B marketing landscape? Do you see a need for traditional approaches to be transformed?
Anything is possible with time and resources, but in today’s world, you must continue to innovate to maximize your revenue. It’s like being a shark. If a shark stops swimming, it dies. The same holds true for innovation. The status quo must always be challenged.
What does the future have in store for your efforts? Anything interesting planned?
We want to unify all of our scoring models and integrate them into our sales and marketing flows to improve our prioritization of companies to increase our conversion rates.
Any fun facts/interesting personal notes you would share that other B2B peers may find interesting?
I like carpentry, working on my 1970 Plymouth Barracuda, playing guitar and spending as much time as possible with my three children and my wife.
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Streamlining tech stacks not only have a positive impact on B2B marketing and sales teams’ daily routines, they also position themselves to streamline and scale new and innovative campaigns. Tim Noble of TIBCO Software found the power in technology when transforming the company’s nurture programs from a static drip campaign to a dynamic, self-service experience for their prospective customers.
Using content engagement data fed into their marketing automation platform, Noble and his team are better positioned to identify sales-ready leads and optimize their nurture program to feature the top performing content. This new nurture program has seen a MEL to MQL conversion rate improvement of 27% and a 5X increase in opportunities.
Can you share any particular achievements you are most proud of in your current role?
The achievement I am most proud of in my current role relates to how I integrated the content hosting and analytics capability of PathFactory into our lead nurture flows. Working closely with our business operations team, we integrated the content engagement data from PathFactory into our Marketo lead scoring matrix, and began scoring leads based on actual content consumption, rather than vanity metrics such as clicks or downloads. By identifying content-engaged leads and accelerating them down the funnel, we have seen a significant lift in marketing qualified leads from our nurture program, and a corresponding increase in opportunities.
Can you share any details about how your team, or individuals on your team, have helped drive innovation? How has your whole team helped achieve results?
Our whole team is quite innovative, even in the day-to-day. One way in which that manifests itself is the extent to which everyone is excited about integrating new technology into existing projects and campaigns. For example, another team member manages our digital account-based marketing efforts. As I was integrating PathFactory content engagement capabilities in our nurtures, she was doing the same with her ABM campaigns. Together, we then worked to combine Demandbase account engagement data with our content engagement metrics, culminating in a dashboard to track account engagement. Armed with these new capabilities and tools, we were able to provide our sales team with enhanced information about engaged accounts within our ABM strategy. This example perfectly highlights our team’s drive to innovate, adopt new technologies and collaborate to drive results.
How have you helped try to foster a culture of innovation within your team and organization?
I believe I have helped foster a culture of innovation within my team and organization through my relentless pursuit of the “what” and the “why”, combined with a willingness to challenge the status quo. I take a detail-driven approach to understand the current landscape, and I’m not afraid to analyze it for potential improvements. As I go on this journey, I take others with me – teammates, internal and external subject matter experts and relevant cross-functional departments. This deep-dive approach equips and empowers both me and others within the organization to think critically about current systems and processes and how they can be optimized, which results in encouraging a culture of innovation.
Any fun facts/interesting personal notes you would share that other B2B peers may find interesting?
In my free time, I enjoy technical mountain sports such as rock climbing and ski mountaineering. The challenge of combining personal fitness, a detailed knowledge base, technical gear and on-route problem solving appeals to me as a great and enjoyable challenge. In other words, even in my personal live, I never stop pushing for performance and innovation!
