A powerful way to visualize the impact of spending more on Marketing is to look at the overall increase in Enterprise Value on each additional $1 of Marketing Spend.

Assuming a CAC Payback of 12 months, Net Revenue Retention of 110%, an LTV of 7 years and a 5x revenue multiple, each additional dollar invested into Marketing is worth almost $9 in seven years.

The better your business fundamentals, the more aggressive you should be with your marketing spend. The increase in enterprise value alone justifies it.

One thing founders underestimate is how strong their business fundamentals really are. The stronger the fundamentals, the more aggressively you should be investing in your marketing.

If you were to take the Scorecard below, and score your business out of 5 on each of the KPIs and then total your score, you’d be able to come to a recommendation on how aggressive that business should be with their Marketing investment. The higher the score, the better positioned a business in their ability to invest in Marketing.

Less than 5 (Poor): Lots of work to do, including finding Product-Market Fit and improving overall retention.

6 to 10 (Below Average): Reduce leaks throughout the funnel, continue improving retention.

11 to 15 (Average): Begin optimizing GTM spend as retention has moved into healthy levels. Continue focus on improving conversion rates.

16-20 (Good): Drive towards reducing CAC Payback Periods and scaling GTM spend. Get NRR above 100% with Customer expansion initiatives...

The more Marketing Generated Pipeline a company produces, the more mature it likely is. This is why Marketing Generate Pipeline is a good way to quickly map a company’s Marketing sophistication.

It’s rare to find companies that have Marketing Generated Pipeline north of 50%. In Product-Led companies, this is more common of course. But most B2B companies have Sales-Led motions and Marketing Generate Pipelined is almost always below 25% in those instances.

In most Sales-Led companies, Marketing is just not a priority. Every time there is more capital available to invest, the decision is always weighed against hiring another sales rep and inevitably sales gets the funding. Over time, a company can easily grow north of $10M (or even $50M) without ever having more than 3-5 marketers or more than 15% Marketing Contribution to Pipeline (we've seen this countless companies).

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it eventually catches up. Closed Won Revenue is a...

There’s one key area of the PE due diligence process that most firms overlook: marketing. 

Assessing a company’s marketing before an acquisition can give you critical insights into whether or not the business has a healthy long-term prognosis.

How big is their TAM?

What is the lifetime value of a customer compared to how much they’re spending to acquire one? 

Are the assumptions included in their financial forecast based on historical data? 

Answering these questions can help you get a better understanding of the financial health and future prospects of the company you’re considering acquiring, but they’re ones that many firms fail to consider – or don’t realize that marketing can even impact. 

Given the cost associated with making a bad purchase, both financially and in terms of the time devoted to an investment, it’s well worth reviewing these questions prior to proceeding with an acquisition. 

If you can...

The problem with most nurture sequences is that they are linear.

A customer fills out a form for an educational asset and enters an indefinite nurture across email, social and paid channels.

• Does a whitepaper download really warrant a 10-email sequence on all your features and benefits? 
• Should a sales rep really follow up with anyone who attends a webinar?

This is where segmentation and context is critical. You need to meet customers where they are not where you want them to be. Nothing is more annoying than receiving sales emails when all you did was read an educational piece of content.

If someone only engaged with you at an educational level, keep your nurture educational. If someone engages with you at a sales level, only then should your cadences be sales-oriented.

This form of respect for the customer’s needs often breeds far more trust in a brand and product than non-contextual messaging. With this approach, customers are also far more likely to self-select into...

Analyzing Single Customer Cash Flow is more important than your CAC Payback Period.

While CAC Payback Period is a critical metric for companies to evaluate their marketing performance, it misses how cash actually flows in and out of the business.

For example, if a lot of your customers pre-pay for annual plans, you can receive cash for two years by month 13. This cash can help you break even on your CAC much earlier.

While it is true that pre-payments for annual plans are to be recognized across all 12 months of the year, from a cash flow standpoint you break even on CAC much earlier.

The better you understand the cash flow break-even point, the more aggressive you can be with your marketing efforts.

Focusing on demand gen is a mistake when other fundamental pieces of your growth engine are broken.

The 4 essential areas to focus on:

1. Fix Churn: Improve metrics like 90-day retention, LTV and net retention.
2. Drive Expansion: Scale revenue from your existing customer base with cross-sell and upsells.
3. Improve Adoption: Increase usage from customers with better onboarding as they try or buy your product.
4. Increase Close Rates: Ensure your SQL to Close Rates are above 30%, ideally above 40%.

Once the above 4 are handled, focusing on improving demand gen becomes a lot easier.

You can spend a lot more money to acquire customers because your ACV/LTV is higher and you need fewer leads to reach CAC Payback Period.

Better marketing leads to higher pricing and improved margins.

The more you invest into your messaging, positioning, content, education and thought leadership, the more your perceived value in the marketplace increases.

If your business is built to consistently deliver on this increased perceived value, it translates to increased actual value experienced by customers. This can come in the form of specific solutions, verticalized offerings, purpose-built products and much more.

The combination of the two creates a unique and differentiated position in the marketplace, where customers are willing to pay a premium because they expect a higher value to be delivered by your offerings.

Private equity firms, portfolio companies and investment funds are facing complex challenges. Amid unprecedented economic and geopolitical uncertainty, increased competition and rising stakeholder expectations, firms are under exceptional pressure to deploy capital and deliver returns. With an endless number of possible strategies and techniques, it can be difficult to know what the right approach is for each transaction.

If you’re looking to get advice, stay on top of trends and hear what’s worked for others, podcasts are a helpful resource. But most people in the PE space can’t risk wasting valuable time listening to episodes that aren’t applicable to their situation or don’t have actionable takeaways.

To save you time, we’ve put together a list of 9 private equity podcasts that are packed with valuable insights and are worth taking the time to listen to. Plus, we break down the topics you can expect each podcast to cover so it’s...

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...