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 bec...

Increased price transparency helps everyone win.

• Customers win because they can self-serve and identify if a solution is a good fit for them.
• Sales wins because they have conversations with more qualified prospects who understand what they're in for.
• Marketing wins because all MQL thresholds include price education earlier in the buyer journey.

Most importantly, efficiency increases because far less time is spent on having customers jump through hoops to get a pricing 1-pager that they cannot afford.

Even if you're a B2B enterprise company with a $100K offering. Boldly put your starting price point on a pricing page for the world to see.

Your whole Go-To-Market motion will improve and your buyers will trust you more.

Increased sales volume breaks internal processes.

As you close more deals, your organization has to figure out a way to deal with increased complexity.

This is where questions like the following become increasingly important:

1. How can we deliver faster?
2. How can we increase automation across the business?
3. How many people do we need to scale?
4. What will our margin be as we scale?
5. What is the core business we are in?
6. Which opportunities should we say no to?
7. What kind of operational framework will help us scale to the next level?
8. What should our product focus on to help us scale even more?
9. What are our scaling bottlenecks?
10. Who do we need in which seats to scale?

These kinds of questions only become relevant and evident as sales volume crosses certain thresholds.

This is one of the most undervalued contributions of sales: As more deals are closed, the organization is given an opportunity to examine key strategic questions that would otherwise remain unaddressed.

As those...

Rethinking meetings for mental health and productivity is more important now than ever before. Here are 12 principles worth following:

1. Don’t use the full scheduled window
2. Gamify / add rewards for ending meetings earlier
3. Don’t attend meetings you don’t need to be present for
4. Don’t invite everyone possible to a meeting
5. Add a 5-10 minute buffer minimum between meetings
6. 7 to 10 minute meetings are often all that’s needed
7. Longer meetings don’t equal increased value
8. Sometimes the best meeting is no meeting
9. Use asynchronous communication (Loom, Slack) instead of meetings
10. Cancel / push unnecessary meetings every morning
11. Change frequency of recurring meetings. They don't need to be as frequent as you think.
12. Try to purposely take a day / afternoon / morning off meetings

Scaling companies would be a lot easier if companies behaved more like sports teams.

Training in most companies halts after onboarding. This is part of the reason why tenure in a lot of roles (especially executives) is below 2 years. In a market where the demand for talent far supersedes the supply of talent, internal training can be a competitive advantage.

Hire high potential employees and invest in them by:

1. Having them report to a manager that educates them on how to level up their skills.
2. Give them access to premium education resources so they can self study and improve on their own time.
3. Help them connect with communities so they can learn from others facing similar challenges.

Each of these empowers team members to come back to the company with capabilities to contribute even more.

As they level up based on your investment, reward them with higher compensation to recognize their increased ability to contribute.

If your business model doesn't allow you to invest in t...

Increasing team member tenure can be one of the keys to unlocking growth long-term.

Each time you lose someone, you take on the added tangible costs of onboarding and training replacements + the intangible costs of lost institutional memory.

This is why employee satisfaction and retention is not an HR issue. It is one of the biggest growth priorities for companies yet unfortunately not treated as such.

People leave companies for a variety of reasons. These include:

Level 1 - Salary, Title, Benefits. What do I financially gain from working here?
Level 2 - Safety, Security. Can I trust this company / leadership to take care of my needs?
Level 3 - Culture. Do the values of this company resonate with me personally?
Level 4 - Opportunity. Do I see a path for personal and professional growth here?
Level 5 - Alignment. Does this align with my long-term goals?

Each leader in a business must be fully attuned to these questions and proactively engage team members to ensure all 5 levels are ad...

Immature organizations view growth as a Sales-only problem. These are the organizations where:

• VPs of Sales get fired constantly
• SKOs put all the pressure of growth on sales reps
• Marketing and Product have no revenue accountability

Mature organizations, by contrast, view growth as a holistic problem, owned by everyone in the organization. To scale, they ask themselves questions like:

1. What value does our product need to provide to the customer so that we can increase conversions to Closed Won?
2. How much budget does Marketing need to drive the pipeline required to ensure Sales is successful?
3. What kind of Onboarding and Retention programs are necessary to increase LTV and lower attrition?
4. What is the optimal pricing strategy to maximize expansion revenue and net retention?

Immature organizations miss all these growth avenues because their conversations are one-dimensionally focused on sales just working harder.

What these organizations don't realize is that putting less...

Companies often confuse what their intellectual property really is.

• A blog post (as a content format) is not intellectual property, it is a commodity.
• A video is not intellectual property, it is a commodity.
• A drawing — like this one :) — is not intellectual property, it is a commodity.

This is why as things start to work, people notice and start to make the similar things — why wouldn’t they when it’s working?

But the medium and format are not the secret sauce.

Instead, here are things that actually create differentiation:

1. Positioning and messaging and how you solve a specific pain point.
2. True expertise and value provided to the customer.
3. The audience and customers behind a business and the affinity they have for the business
4. Strategic advantages at the business’ disposal (e.g. supply chain, partnerships, cost efficiencies etc.)
5. How effectively you execute on a bigger vision for a market or category

Anyone can imitate a portion of the whole, but it is impossible ...

Always helping your prospect get closer to their stated and unstated goals has to be the simplest, most effective sales advice.

It means adopting principles like:

1. Make it about them, not you
2. Act as a their fiduciary in their best interests, even if it doesn't help you
3. Give them free content and advice to get them closer to their goals, even if they don't buy from you
4. Generating awareness around how customers with the pain point can alleviate that pain.

All three of these involve having Marketing play a major role. Marketing needs to:

• Position the customers as the hero and showcase how the solutions helps them on their hero's journey.
• Clearly articulate who the solution is best suited for, and who it is not a fit for so that the organization knows who not to sell to.
• Build content that helps customers and prospects self-serve their way to a solution and establishes authority and trust within a market.
• Distribute and disseminate the message so that more people with the ...

The problem with marketing is that some channels are easy to attribute through to revenue, while others are not.

This is why "correlation" is, in many cases, more important than "attribution".

Understanding this concept takes understanding how buyers are really behaving.

If you think your buyers are making decisions only by searching on Google, a lot of marketing activity will seem irrelevant. This is why attribution tools don't tell the story well for non-linear channels.

It's easy to talk about if a lead from Google Ads became an opportunity. It's hard to talk about the value of a Facebook video view or a Podcast download or a YouTube channel.

This is why Correlation is more important than attribution, especially for activities related to content.

The entire environment you create for buyers across all marketing activities is what impacts conversions. If you pull one thread, you may end up impacting revenue on the other end.

You just won't be able to directly attribute it.