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...

Most B2B companies find themselves over-relying on Sales to generate the bulk of their pipeline.

In such companies, Marketing doesn't have enough budget and does not provide nearly enough coverage to drive revenue.

These are the companies where cold calling, events, relationships are what grow the business. These are also often the companies where Sales reps miss quota more often than not.

The key is to get Marketing Generated Pipeline into a healthy range (at least at 30%). In some cases, this number can be as high as 70-80%.

That's how you know the market is actually coming to you inbound when it needs a specific pain point to be solved. They're aware of you, they've read your content, they trust you as an authority and resource.

It's also how you know that your brand has enough value in the marketplace to win business that does not depend on you dialling to dollars to succeed.

Marketers who over-index on SEO or Paid Search often (incorrectly) rely on “search volumes” and “keyword difficulty” as their guides on what to prioritize.

This leads to companies fighting for market share like a commodity, inevitably inflating CAC and Payback Period metrics.

Instead, starting with Differentiation as the goal changes how you Go-To-Market:

1. You invest heavily into understanding market dynamics and customer pain points
   
   
2. You build a strategic narrative to educate the market on how to resolve those pain points while separating yourself from the noise
   
   
3. You create content to educate buyers on the strategic narrative at every stage of their journey
   
   
4. You leverage demand generation channels and campaigns to scale distribution of the content to your ideal buyers

This approach focuses on the customers and the message, not search volumes or keyword difficulty. 

It brings down CAC and improves your Payback Period.

It also opens up infinite scale...

Companies often try to solve problems without investing enough into hiring, onboarding and nurturing talented team members.

In such companies, salaries are capped and growth is limited. Employees end up playing musical chairs until they eventually decide to leave the company and a new batch joins to replace.

These companies have high-control (and often political) environments, with more oversight and less freedom to emerge as a valuable contributor.

In contrast, companies that realize that talent is everything prioritize hiring the best of the best and are also willing to invest significantly more in those A-players. This includes higher compensation, more freedom to operate, better support and more resources.

These companies end up significantly increasing their likelihood of success because they realize the most essential truth of building winning teams: 1 Superstar is worth just as much (if not more) than 5 average contributors.

They build around Who before they focus on What.

As...

There is an inherent mismatch between implementing new technology into your Marketing stack and how much time you have as a Marketing leader.

While the latest ABM or Attribution or Content (etc.) platform may sound like a phenomenal idea, it is more than likely setting up Marketing leaders everywhere to fail in the long run.

Reason? Tech stack implementations take a lot of time, effort and energy to sort through. Meanwhile, sales targets still need to be hit and not enough pipeline is being generated.

These Marketing leaders find themselves in board meetings a couple of quarters in a row talking about the new programs they are "going to launch" once the platform is live.

Over time, this erodes trust with CEOs and Boards until eventually a change is made.

Instead, Marketing would be much better served focusing on executing plays that generate pipeline and revenue as a starting point to build enough political capital that buys them time to implement a new technology in the first...