Paid Media and Content scale differently. That's the main reason why companies jump to invest in paid media while hesitating to invest in content.
One has a low-barrier to entry (money). The other has a high-barrier to entry (time, effort and creativity).

Building the content engine for a company takes patience and playing the long-game.

Content is also how you scale paid media faster because all kinds of possibilities open up beyond the usual campaigns that everyone else in your market is competing for.

As many companies have found out firsthand, hiring salespeople with great track records doesn’t guarantee your sales team will hit their targets.

Even if you fill your team with talented sales reps, they won’t be able to deliver their maximum value unless you train them to be experts on selling your specific products to your specific target market.

A study by Bridge Group shows that the average tenure for a salesperson is only around 1.5 years, so chances are you’re regularly onboarding new salespeople. The faster you can get them up to speed and selling effectively, the more value you’ll be able to get from your limited time with each rep. 

The key to training reps better and faster is to create a sales playbook. This asset outlines your company’s particular sales processes and best practices so everyone on the team can refer to and learn from it. The sales playbook should include all the resources new reps need to start making sales.

Whether...

Digital marketing can generate incredible ROI, but to capture that potential value you need a well-organized team of experts.

If your Facebook ads are already driving leads, a paid media expert and a skilled marketing designer could optimize the ads to deliver leads that are higher quality. If a blog post is capturing 20 email addresses each month, the right writing and SEO skills could help it capture 50. 

Building a team that can maximize the impact of your digital channels isn’t just a case of hiring extra digital marketers. Instead, the most successful marketing teams are structured in a way that focuses on digital marketing results and includes specific key skills.

You can use these links to jump to a specific section:

• Two hiring approaches that hold teams back
• What a digital marketing team should include
• How to structure a marketing team
• Digital marketing team role descriptions

When you're ready to start hiring, click here to download our Marketing Leader Job...

Does it seem like your team is churning out content without any means of prioritizing what to work on next?

We see this often within companies that have recently merged or made an acquisition and have a central marketing team. Teams can slip into the habit of working on each product line in a siloed way and lose sight of the projects that can best benefit the business as a whole.

Instead, the output of Marketing needs to be managed across product lines by focusing on measurable results. Building a cross-product content marketing roadmap allows you to strategically allocate your resources and drive leads in the most efficient way.

You can use these links to jump to a specific section:

• The content dilemma of multiple product lines
• The data-driven alternative approach
  
  • Inventory audit
  • Performance audit
  • Gap analysis
  • Redesign, repurpose or merge
  • Prioritize
  • Timing and resources
• Roadmap output

The content dilemma of multiple product lines

Many companies with multiple product...

One of the things we see when companies are acquired is that the acquiring company will do all kinds of due diligence. For most companies, that includes technical, financial, and legal due diligence, as well as an assessment of the market and the pipeline. But one area that we see being consistently overlooked is marketing due diligence. 

There is plenty of data, information, and opportunities hidden within the marketing side of every business that aren't analyzed before an acquisition. With all the other kinds of due diligence happening during the LOI-to-close stages, marketing due diligence often isn’t prioritized. 

In this blog post, we’re going to show the types of insights that can be uncovered, and the value they can help you capture, and even give you a step-by-step checklist to follow. We’ll cover:

• Why marketing due diligence is critical
• Three marketing questions you need to answer in the due diligence period
  • Where are the opportunities to...

One of the biggest opportunities post acquisition is to find efficiencies on the marketing side, and this is often an ignored area because there are usually a lot of efficiencies in sales, product, finance and services.

Within marketing, there are five domains that you can look to integrate:

1. Brand: making multiple business units and product lines look like one entity.
2. Programs: initiatives core to the investment thesis to grow the business
3. Teams: you have multiple business units with their own marketing teams and so you have to try to find synergies 
4. Data Governance: you have customer data now living in multiple databases
5. Marketing Stack: different business units are likely spending on the same tools or overlapping tools and paying for both

Planning your integration? Download our ultimate marketing integration checklist.

Brand

The biggest mistake is when companies focus on branding as the primary driver of value creation from the marketing function after an acquisition for...

On episode 29 of the How To SaaS podcast, Shiv interviews Dave Gray, the former CEO of Daxko and current CEO of the Biso Collective. Dave and Shiv discuss how Daxko deployed a growth by acquisitions strategy to scale its business and the importance of focus in growing companies. Dave also shares the vision for his new initiative, Biso Collective, and how he plans on deploying a buy-and-hold strategy to give founders of mission-critical software companies a third alternative to a liquidity event outside of a strategic or financial buyer.

Listen to the episode here:

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How many times have you been approached by CMOs asking for more budget?

And how often can the CMO give a solid, data-backed business case for why they should get that extra budget? 

This is a common problem. Marketing teams often can’t get the increased investment they need because they have trouble relating their activities to business results. They’re usually focusing on hard-to-track benefits like brand awareness instead of ROI, and many aren’t ready with the kinds of metrics CEOs and PE investors need to justify giving them more budget. A recent Gartner study showed that marketing budgets have been stagnant for the last few years.

Meanwhile, sales teams are facing challenges too. Nearly 60% of sales reps expect to miss quota, which can impact your board meetings, projections, budget, and whether or not you can acquire more companies. At the same time, the average tenure for a VP of Sales dropped by 26% between 2010 and 2017. On...

One-on-one meetings are one of the most overlooked pieces of real estate when it comes to growing your career and growing your business. The one-on-one is incredibly valuable time that is often misused for the wrong topics and both parties lose in that equation. The employee loses because they're not getting enough advice and support to grow their career. And the company loses because the team member is not performing up to their full potential to help the business go forward.

If you prefer audio, listen to the podcast episode here:

One of the best pieces of advice that I've ever heard on this topic came from Harley Finkelstein, who is the COO of Shopify, on Cameron Harold's COO Alliance Podcast, where Harley shared my one-on-one with Toby is my opportunity to get what I need for Toby to have a bigger impact and do my job better.

Let's look at what Harley says once again. He talks about the one on one as his opportunity to get what he needs to help Toby...

Has your company ever missed its quarterly or annual sales projections? This is one of the top reasons why C-Level executives are let go from growing companies. It often happens inside companies where forecasting is treated more like a math exercise and the underlying growth model for the business isn't strong enough. That's why on this episode of How To SaaS, I talk about how executive teams can forecast sales projections more effectively, while still setting ambitious targets. 

If you prefer audio, listen to the podcast episode here:

This is actually a very common problem that plagues a lot of companies. And the reason is that with investor pressure and funding comes the responsibility of growing the company faster. Quite frankly, however, a lot of that pressure is self-inflicted, because we're incredibly optimistic and bullish on how fast we can grow our company. And we often overestimate how quickly we can get to the next plateau of our growth.

And so this creates a...