Companies often confuse what their intellectual property really is.
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:
Anyone can imitate a portion of the whole,...
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:
All three of these involve having Marketing play a major role. Marketing needs to:
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.
Most marketing campaigns stop getting funding well before their true pipeline value is understood.
Why?
Because marketing leaders are constantly being asked for an immediate return on their efforts.
Unrealistic pipeline growth expectations from CEOs and boards lead to the exact opposite result of what they are hoping to achieve.
Pipeline growth takes time. You need to:
Meanwhile, the potential of channels and campaigns are judged on their first iteration. This is why you hear things like:
"Facebook Ads don't work for us"
"This is a relationship based business so we have to go to events"
"Why would I give more money to marketing when I can hire 2 more sales reps?"
Etc.
Similar to how sales reps become more valuable after full ramp up + training + pipeline building, marketing becomes more valuable after experimentation + better distribution + better messaging.
Not only is giving...
Building an audience takes time. This is the 100th drawing of SaaS Marketing Simplified. Here are the biggest lessons from the journey so far:
Things like gated content, newsletters, webinars and drip sequences still have some value but customers don't pay attention to these mediums like they used to.
Instead, they'll:
All of these nurture touch points that companies do not try to orchestrate enough.
Instead, the obsession with attribution leads to the creation of gated e-books and downloads so that you can source a lead to a particular channel and add lead scoring as certain steps are taken.
In the process, you may have better attribution metrics but lose the overall picture of what's actually driving revenue.
Your prospects want to be nurtured across multiple channels, mediums and formats. Those are the brands they end up trusting more.
The best businesses leverage automation wherever possible. The worst businesses have virtually no automation and require custom human intervention every time.
Automation and repeatable systems have two benefits:
The second benefit is the most overlooked when building companies. Surely, you can still build a lot of enterprise value without automation.
But you will also surely have more unhappy employees and customers, which is the exact opposite of what businesses should hope to achieve.
One of the most common ways companies ruin customers' experiences is by categorizing reps and limiting their ability to handle certain questions / inquiries.
To your customer, one rep is an entry point to everything your company has to offer.
Each time an internal "gate" is created based on job title, the customer has to jump through a hoop to get to where they want to go.
Empowering reps to deliver better experiences by addressing more inquiries at the first point of contact instead can create much better outcomes.
First call resolution should be a sales metric just as much as it is a support metric.
Mike Lipps, CEO at Intelerad, has been working with private equity-backed companies for years, so he understands what it takes to rapidly scale small, founder-led organizations. “Functions like demand generation and brand building need to become more process-driven instead of individual heroic catches,” Mike explains. So when Mike and private equity investors Hg came to Intelerad in 2020, the demand generation process was one of the areas they looked at first.
Intelerad’s platform was clearly creating value for customers: They had sky-high customer satisfaction ratings, including net promoter scores of 55+. The company was achieving consistent double-digital organic growth based on the quality of the product and word of mouth, but Intelerad wasn't as well-known as its customer success deserved.
Intelerad's demand generation was primarily event-driven, boiling down to one or two key events that drove 85%+ of the pipeline for the year. Relying...
Your growth engine is only as good as the operational framework of your business. Key components:
The ongoing culture of deploying this operational framework is how teams continue to deliver and scale past ambitious...
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