Lead scoring is the opposite of how customers want to be treated.

Under a lead scoring model, you try to equate a series of actions into the same level of intent as someone who announces that intent overtly. 

But a blog post + webinar + email open does not equal a demo request.

Lead scoring is unnecessarily interruptive. Often, it means introducing a sales rep when the buyer is not ready to talk to have a sales conversation.

Instead, companies would be far better served to add content and educational assets to nurture prospects to help them self-announce their intent for a sales conversation.

This means:

1. Having great top of funnel content to educate the prospect, even if it has nothing to do with your product
2. Having great resources for them to interact with so you stay top of mind with them 
3. Having problem-aware content that helps them understand their options to solving their problems
4. Having solution-aware content that helps them become develop a clear understanding...

How do you scale paid media to drive more pipeline? How do you think about it in a framework that lets you build scale and grow the business faster? 

This post won’t get into tactical details and specific plays, or examples of plays other companies are running - that gets too much into the nitty gritty. Instead, we want to give you a framework of how to think about the problem, how to implement this in your company, and the principles that are almost evergreen, regardless of where you are.

We'll cover:

• The process to scale
• Auditing current spend
  
  • Overall spend
  • Channel analysis
  • Campaign analysis
• How to optimize, reallocate and scale
  
  • Analyzing total potential spend
  • Reviewing total spend by funnel stage
  • Reviewing channel spend by funnel stage
• How to identify new channels and campaigns
  
  • Building a roadmap
  • Budget allocation
• Testing and collecting results
• How to adjust budget allocation
• FAQs

Process to Scale

There’s a five-step process when we're...

Content teams often end up with a load of different priorities from the business. Depending on the complexity of a company, this can be a pretty big challenge to navigate.

There are a ton of tactical resources out there - for example, on building out a good SEO roadmap, diving into specifics like keyword research and prioritizing based on keyword difficulty. But in this post, we're going to focus on the strategic side and the preliminary layers that help you figure out where content should focus its attention, resources and overall strategy.

A lot of the frameworks and models we cover here will apply to the majority of businesses, so you can apply them to your particular business and find the best way to think about content roadmaps and strategy for your users.

In this post, we'll cover:

• 9 roles content needs to play
• The right order to create content
• Challenges content teams face
• The solution
• A method for prioritization
• Creating a consolidated content roadmap
• FAQs from the...

Too many teams / sub-functions think of their work in isolation. This leads to siloed and dysfunctional organizations.

Your content strategy needs to be a subset of your overall marketing strategy, which needs to be a subset of your overall growth strategy, which needs to be a subset of the overall company strategy.

This is why starting from the company strategy / outlook / plans is the best way to ensure the success of your function as a leader and increase your impact across the organization.

Ask questions like:

1) What are our revenue targets? How fast do we need to grow?
2) What are our financial constraints? (Burn rate, EBITDA etc.)
3) What growth opportunities are the biggest focus for us as an organization? (New logos? Expansion? M&A? Pricing? New products?)
4) What is required from all the key teams (product, marketing, sales, CS, ops) to deliver on our biggest opportunities?
5) How can our respective function contribute to what is required?

Thinking like this changes how a...

It's a question a lot of our clients ask us: what does your marketing team need to look like for you to maximize the value you're capturing?

There’s no quick answer here: depending on where you are as a business, the answer is going to look different.

In this post, we’ll walk you through a framework for building the right marketing org structure for your particular situation.

4 considerations when structuring your marketing team

The realities many organizations experience are that:

• Marketing teams are usually small and mighty. They're usually in charge of a lot of items, projects, tasks, initiatives, and large revenue targets. 
• Aggressive growth targets are being set by the board or by the executive team. There isn't nearly enough bandwidth to execute on what's needed to hit those targets or do all the activities you need to take the company where it needs to go.
• At the same time, there's an inability to get approval for more budget for additional...

Taking a top-down approach to Enterprise B2B accounts limits possibilities on Go-To-Market because TAM is often limited to a small set of very valuable accounts.

You need to expend incredible amounts of acquisition dollars to land a $100K-$1M+ deals. Often this work is led by Sales since 1 to 1 outreach is required.

Marketing ends up focusing on ABM to drive demand by Marketing supporting the 1 to 1 outreach with 1 to 1 content and messaging.

While this is what is required in a lot of cases, the problem of limited TAM can be solved by expanding the universe of people who actually drive decision-making for an enterprise account.

This means:

1) Marketing to Buyers, Users, Influencers and Stakeholders of your solution so that a far larger audience can then be targeted to drive demand more efficiently.

2) Building a product that can be adopted by individual users who can collectively influence the buying decision of the overall enterprise organization

3) Targeting individual users via...

Rebranding is more expensive than companies and their marketing teams realize. 

Every year, Marketing teams invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into changing the brand, logo, website, tagline etc. for companies that likely don’t need the change to begin with.

Along the way, political capital is wasted, VPs of Marketing get fired and current brand equity is squandered.

Most importantly, revenue does not go up.

The bigger the company, the more the waste. E.g. A Fortune 500 company doing a rebrand can cost millions of dollars in new marketing collateral, website changes, building signs, retraining of sales teams etc. 

At the same time, smaller companies doing rebrands can waste limited resources on a rebrand that doesn’t meet the ultimate goal of driving growth.

Reasons cited for these brand overhauls include:

-Increased M&A activity and needing to tell a bigger story

-Current branding not matching what the company really does / offers

-Needing to...

If you’re considering bringing in a marketing consultant, you’ll likely be wondering: Will you actually get the results they’re promising? Is what they offer the right fit for your team? And will you get a good return on your investment?

There are four concerns we often hear from people in our pipeline - including many companies that go on to become customers (in some cases, several times over):

1. Will a consultant really add value?
2. How well will they work with my team?
3. Will this reflect negatively on my marketing department?
4. Can I justify spending on a consulting engagement?

Below, we’ll take a closer look at each of those questions and explain our approach to these challenges, plus you’ll hear from some of our customers about their experiences in each area.

If you’d like to learn more about how How To SaaS engagements work, you can read all about our process and perspective here. 

1. “Our marketing is...

There is a mismatch between how markets perceive growth externally vs. how growth actually happens internally.

Externally, it looks like growth is a function of 1 big idea after which everything falls into place. This is hardly ever the case.

Internally, growth looks like a plethora of building blocks stacked on top of each other, feeding off each other to actually engineer growth.

It is very rare for companies to reach unicorn status / IPO without stacking growth levers on top of each other.

Some examples:

-Shopify (app marketplace, domains, payments, dropshipping)

-Salesforce (M&A, bundled licenses, partners)

-Netflix (original content, international expansion, pricing)

For most companies, growth is usually a combination of:

1) Expanding net new acquisition (demand gen, sales efficiency)

2) Growing the existing base (account expansion)

3) Cross-sell and upsell (additional product lines)

4) Pricing (increases, expansion revenue)

5) Improving...

Are you under pressure to deliver more (and better) sales pipeline, but aren't sure how to get more of the right kind of leads through the door?

In this post, we'll cover the core framework we take our clients through at How To SaaS to scale marketing and demand gen. You can use this approach to think about marketing for any company - a lot of the concepts you'll learn about here are first principles. By the end, you'll be able to apply this framework to your particular business.

We'll cover five sections:

1. Market forces and dynamics at play that lead to the impact marketing needs to make inside organizations. 
2. Company dynamics and how to apply these principles for your specific scenario.
3. Demand generation and a framework for prioritizing your demand gen roadmap that you can apply to basically any business. 
4. A step-by-step process for using data to scale up demand gen for your business or product line.
5. Frequently asked questions...