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Are You Treating Positioning as a Feedback Loop?

The best companies treat Positioning as an ongoing, ever-evolving loop influenced by their market and customers, not as a one-time exercise with an end point.

Each time you tell your company's narrative and story, more prospects are found and more deals are closed. Each cohort of customers reveals additional information about:

1) What types of customers are ideal fits

2) Who has the most success with the product

3) What type of messaging resonates with those customers

4) What pain points the product still fails to address

5) What other solutions those customers are looking for

As more information is uncovered, it needs to be fed back into positioning to change the overarching story around a company / brand.

With every cycle, more scale is found because more opportunity is uncovered (e.g. more TAM, higher LTV etc.)

 

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Is Your Business Relying on At-Risk or Healthy Pipeline?

Organizations that over-rely on Sales and Events for pipeline put their sales targets at risk.

This is most often seen inside Sales-led organizations where Marketing has a limited budget.

How can you expect to hit aggressive sales projections when you aren't engaging with your buyers on channels where they are spending most of their time?

Instead, investing into digital and buyer-centric channels increases the odds of hitting pipeline targets.

Growing Marketing Generated Pipeline is the key to hitting aggressive sales projections.

When Marketing stops over-relying on events and begins building new channels to acquire customers, it forces the organization to be less Sales-led.

This takes time which is why Marketing leaders need to lobby CEOs and Boards with the right budget asks to invest in the right channels to become more Marketing-led.

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The Link Between Market Growth and ICP Growth

Focusing on a broader set of customers inevitably leads to growth of customers that fit your ICP.

Segmentation theory argues that segment your best fit prospects / customers and customize your messaging to those people.

While there is truth to this, especially in enterprise B2B environments where ABM is a lever, broader awareness marketing still has massive benefits:

  1. You inevitably reach your ICP as you increase your awareness in a broader category (e.g. Trello captures all types of organizations and functions by going after the broader project management space)

  2. You enable customers to identify additional expansion ICPs for the business (e.g. verticals and markets who your perfect segmentation strategy ignored)

  3. You grow the brand as more people know of you and refer you as a solution (the downside is your CAC increases as you go after a broader market so this needs to be managed)

Even in environments where TAM is super small, there needs to be an element of marketing that goes...

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Most Expensive vs Least Expensive Customers

The most expensive kind of customer is a New customer.

This is why it's shocking how so many marketers focus entirely on acquiring new customers as their primary means of impacting growth.

New Customers require a lot more investment to attract, nurture and convert towards any offering.

Meanwhile, existing customers present a lot of growth opportunities that companies leave on the table. These include:

1) Increasing retention rates and LTV -- this has the double benefit of giving you the ability to spend more to acquire new customers.

2) Expanding existing customer accounts -- including working with product and customer success teams to increase usage in terms of functionality and number of users.

3) Upselling and Cross-selling -- having existing customers buy additional solutions that connect to the core offering.

Marketing thinking about these growth levers increases the odds of the business growing faster and hitting its targets.

Think beyond new customer acquisition and you'll instantly...

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3 Marketing Onboarding Tips + Checklist

After weeks (or even months) of searching, you’ve found the ideal candidate to fill a role on your marketing team. You’ve both signed the contract, and they’re starting next week. At this point, a lot of CEOs and marketing leaders breathe a sigh of relief. The position is filled; their job is done.

Only, your job isn’t done once the new hire starts.

Even with the most thorough hiring process and the most suitable candidate, a lot can go wrong in the onboarding period. If you don’t start off a new marketing employee’s tenure with your company the right way, you’ll likely see:

  • Unengaged and unmotivated employees
  • Fragmented team
  • Missed targets
  • Rapid employee turnover
  • Low ROI on your hiring investment
  • Limited or even negative Marketing-led growth

Investing time and resources into effective onboarding is in the interest of the business, the marketing team, and the individual employee.

Of course, every company, team, and individual will need...

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3 Ways Marketing Should Be Using Full-Funnel Reporting

This post was originally published on the Crownpeak blog.

Everyone wants to scale Marketing, but doing so without the right data framework in place is a bit like playing roulette with your budget. 

Many marketing departments allot their budget based on engagement stats, MQL numbers, or even just gut feel, and cross their fingers that those choices pay off. Maybe you guess right and invest in the right space, but maybe you don’t.

Alternatively, you can use data to connect Marketing to revenue and build a predictable engine that allows you to invest more dollars with confidence. The right metrics will give you hard evidence of which campaigns are working and which ones are not. With this information, you can determine where to allocate your budget and track the success of those investments.

To connect Marketing’s actions to revenue and get clarity on where your marketing dollars are going, you first need to track the performance of Marketing-generated leads from the...

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Digital Marketing Team Growth Toolkit

Whether you're building a digital marketing team from scratch as your company scales, replacing a team member, or restructuring a newly integrated function area, growing a digital marketing team comes with plenty of challenges:

  • Do you have enough budget to hire for all the roles you need?
  • Does your digital marketing team have the best possible structure?
  • Are you looking for the right skillsets? 
  • Can you find qualified candidates?
  • Can you merge new hires into your team?

From helping dozens of SaaS companies build better digital marketing teams, we've put together a toolkit of templates that addresses these challenges.

In this toolkit, you'll find:

Fill in the form below to download the toolkit now, or read on to learn more about each template. 

 

Marketing Team Structure Deck

It's easy to default to just replacing employees who leave or adding...

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When Is A Fractional CMO The Right Choice For Your Business?

Fractional or interim CMOs are a common choice for startups and small businesses that can’t yet afford or don’t yet need a full-time CMO. In the earliest days, many businesses don't have 40 hours of CMO-level work each week, and fractional services can be a way to get the benefits of CMO experience for less than the salary of a full-time employee. However, this is just one situation in which fractional CMOs can help. 

Have you considered what a fractional CMO can offer to established enterprise-level businesses?

While some fractional CMO services focus on covering the basics for small businesses, others are designed specifically to take successful businesses to the next level.

So, is a fractional CMO the right choice for your business? What can they offer that you won’t get from a full-time CMO?

In this article, you’ll learn:

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How Much Should You Spend on Marketing?: Marketing Budget Calculator + Benchmark Report

You can have the best marketing team, the most creative campaigns, and an incredible product-market fit, but if you don’t have the right budget to power your marketing, your efforts will fall flat.

Many businesses aren't spending the appropriate amount on marketing to hit their targets. There are several reasons why this might be the case for your business—including not knowing if your spending is in line with other companies of your size and vertical. 

You might have heard various percentages of revenue or total budget suggested as the average amount to spend on marketing, but the reality is more complex. The amount businesses spend on marketing depends on their vertical and the company size.

This benchmark report shows how companies are spending their money on marketing. The raw data is drawn from Deloitte's CMO Survey 2021 and Gartner's Annual CMO Spend Survey 2020-2021. We’ve organized it so you can see at a...

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Marketing Leaders: Here’s what to expect from a How To SaaS engagement

If your business is considering bringing in an external marketing consultant, it's likely that the in-house marketing leaders will have (and should have!) a lot of questions. These questions might include:

Will the benefits Marketing sees actually warrant the time and expense of the engagement? 

Does the consultant have the relevant experience to understand your business and give valuable insights?

Will they work with your team to make changes, or will they just hand you a list of unrealistic recommendations? 

At How To SaaS, our team is made up of marketing professionals, and almost all of us have been in this position. We've asked these questions, and we've often been frustrated by how vague some consultants are in their answers. 

We want your experience with How To SaaS to be different. To help you get a clearer picture of what working with us means for your marketing department, this article covers what you need to know: 

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