The idea of going from zero leads to closed-won with nothing but a phone – and actually scaling a startup that way – is central to the lore of the tenacious pipeline building and to “if I could do that then, imagine what we can do now” pep talks everywhere. The problem? It’s rapidly becoming obsolete. Unless you price your offering at upward of around $200K per year, hiring live salespeople to find and close deals is simply unaffordable. Scaling a startup simply doesn’t work that way anymore, especially cloud software products whose average deal prices don’t economically support more then short tele-sales calls, at best.

Let’s talk about why that is, and why, today, success for growth-minded startup CXOs now hinges around one key objective: building an automated lead generation outreach system with verticalized messaging – and executing it at scale.

COVID changes the calculus on scaling startups

A few years ago, if you asked a startup sales rep what their highest-return lead gen methods were, two likely answers would have been:

• Lone-wolf prospecting culminating in picking up the phone for a smile-and-dial
• Hitting the conference circuit and engaging face-to-face

Then, in 2020…well, you know what happened. “Post-COVID New Normal” discussions are nothing new, but the pandemic’s impact on startup lead gen was so massive we can’t ignore it here. In February of 2020, conferences were a blast, and a wellspring of leads; by April, they’d been slapped with the much-maligned label of “superspreader event.” And with everyone working from home, business-appropriate phone numbers aren’t always available, making cold-calling even more of an uphill battle than it already was. In the cloud software space, all of this converged with a downward trend in price points, which have now gotten so low that one-prospect-at-a-time cold calling no longer scales profitably.

In the aftermath of this shift, the B2B customer journey has migrated almost entirely to the internet – and it will probably stay there regardless of the virology outlook going forward. After all, following the customer journey is much faster and more efficient when it happens online. For one thing, it can be automated; for another, without the time, money, and effort required to host and travel to conferences, it’s much cheaper and less intensive. We’ve talked to several CROs who say their days on the road are over, as they’ve become so much more productive closing business by digital means.

This represents a fundamental change in the way startups will scale from here on out, and there will certainly be some growing pains (more on that in a moment). But it’s not necessarily as daunting as it sounds. Yes, the internet is a big place – but when it comes to B2B lead generation, the good news is that a plethora of on- and offline lead sources converge on only a few relevant online touchpoints – and it’s at these key touchpoints where most B2B customer journeys will either start or end:

• Landing pages fed by SEO and nurture tracks
• LinkedIn ads, connection requests, and / or InMails
• Cold and nurture emails
• Paid and/or organic search results

Figure 1 is a detailed breakdown of most common B2B lead sources to be leveraged in the company’s verticalized messaging, with all ending up in the same handful of digital channels (more below).

With just about all B2B traffic funneling into this handful of online channels, it’s not too hard for startups to make their digital lead generation efforts both effective and efficient. Which brings us to…

Verticalized messaging, 2022 style

Verticalized messaging is, of course, not a new concept – but the way companies typically approach it has two major flaws that won’t stand in the fully digital post-COVID era. First, its deployment often relies on live, initial contact, which isn’t viable anymore, especially for lower-priced offerings. Second, companies too often treat it as an afterthought – marketing teams might draw up some rough notes about how to message to different verticals, but they often don’t take the time to build out a meticulous verticalized messaging framework in advance.

With digital marketing and selling, starting a customer’s journey without tuning your messaging to their precise needs will lead to lower click-through and conversion rates and thus a lower volume of good quality leads coming off the Internet. If you move forward without a scalable plan in place to verticalize your messaging, you’ll end up underwater. But if you take the time to build a robust plan up front, you’ll start scaling in no time.

So why is verticalized messaging so pivotal today? It’s really quite simple: In a fully online lead-gen paradigm, a one-size-fits-all approach to messaging will not work. In the pre-COVID days, back when it was easy to phone a lead directly or chat one-on-one at a conference, there was no need for the messaging deployed in those conversations to be particularly flexible. The audience was n-of-1 – as long as you spoke to the needs of the person you were talking to, you’d be alright. And a good sales person could work that out on the fly.

Today, lead generation is no longer a one-on-one conversation. It’s search engine ads, LinkedIn ads or invites, email blasts, and other digital channels – all seen by hundreds or thousands of people. That larger audience will consist of diverse segments of buyer personas, and you’ll need to have the tools, assets, and mechanisms in place to speak to all of them – with specific messaging and value propositions that relate to them. To successfully scale pipelines and grow startups today, then, you’ll need to automate the verticalization of your messaging.

Here’s what a high-level action plan for verticalized messaging should look like:

1. Build out value props and precision segmentation
   Your first steps are to establish your value propositions, break your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) into precise segments, and map them all together. If you’re a healthcare software company, for example, which ICPs will resonate with your product’s ability to ensure regulatory compliance? Which will instead resonate with other benefits like accelerated data entry?
   Pro tip: A 2D grid, with value props on the X axis and ICPs on the Y axis, is a great way to lay this out visually.
2. Develop and incorporate assets
   Now that you’ve mapped your value props to your ICPs, it’s time to identify the channels you’ll leverage to deploy the right messages to the right people. The biggest lift here is up-front content production. How many landing pages will you need to produce? How many LinkedIn ads? Your 2D grid is now 3D, with each cell identifying a verticalized asset that incorporates the three considerations of lead channel, value prop, and ICP: A LinkedIn ad focused on regulatory benefits for Compliance personas, a landing page focused on accelerated data entry for end users, and so on.
3. Execute at scale
   You now have everything you need to deploy your messaging in a robust, verticalized, and automated way – to a much larger audience than your sales reps would ever have been able to reach via lone-wolf prospecting. Once your message is out in the world, don’t forget about essential post-launch tasks like campaign management and performance metrics, both of which are essential to making optimizations based on early results.

There’s no denying it: This will take some planning and preparatory work. But it will also empower you to maximize both the effectiveness and the efficiency of your messaging, leaving little doubt that the investment will pay off. As Anna Courval, V.P. of Marketing at Afterburner, puts it, building a scalable and automated verticalized messaging plan “has been a game-changer for us. It’s allowed us to find a clear path to our revenue goals for the year.”

Modern verticalized messaging in action 

How this plays out in real-world scenarios will, of course, vary – and may get a bit more complicated depending on the needs and realities of the company in question. Below is an example of how scalable and automated verticalized messaging played out for a startup in the crypto space. As with any company operating in a still-burgeoning space, views of their business ranged from enthusiasm to skepticism to confusion. This made for a wide array of buyer personas, requiring the company to develop a wide array of tailored messages to kick off the customer journey.

Step 1

The company started by mapping out the various buyer personas they’d target (Figure 1). They took a hierarchical approach, first breaking down their market into Existing Customers and Net-New Bookings, then further segmenting the buyers within each category. Within the Existing Customers category, the segmentation was pretty simple – but for Net-New Bookings, the company leveraged demographic, firmographic, and psychographic attributes to create much more detailed and precise personas.

Once that was done, the company mapped each persona to the value props they’d developed, creating a 2D matrix indicating which personas would receive which message or messages.

Figure 2: Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) broken out into precise segments with matching value props (Example shown)

Step 2

It was then time to add the third dimension to the matrix by identifying their digital messaging channels (Figure 1 above). Here, too, they took a hierarchical approach, first dividing their lead gen into Inbound and Outbound channels, and then assigning specific channels to each of those categories – SEM, LinkedIn, and email for Outbound; SEO, chat boxes, and “Contact Us” forms for Inbound. And because traditional, pre-COVID methods haven’t lost all of their value, they also made space for Sales-driven lead gen.

Step 3

Finally, it was time to think about content. The company identified the assets that would need to be produced for each persona (Figure 3 below) and got to work developing those assets, making sure each one messaged the right value props to the right personas. Figure 3 is about mapping customer touchpoints to ICPs, while Figure 4 is about the verticalized messaging component of an automated lead gen outreach system is mapping value props to ICPs, and Figure 5 highlights a planning matrix of content assets to be developed for the targeted ICPs:

Figure 3: Mapping digital touchpoints to ICPs is a critical aspect of verticalized messaging (Example shown)

Figure 4: The verticalized messaging component of an automated lead gen outreach system maps value props to ICPs (Example shown)

Figure 5: Part of the inventory of content assets to be developed for various ICPs (Example shown)

When they were done, the company had everything they needed to deploy precise verticalized messaging at scale. For each ICP, they knew which value props to message, and the content assets and digital channels they’d leverage to do so.

You can no longer accelerate your growth without planning

People like to think of the early days of a startup as scrappy: a small team, with few resources but a lot of fire under their feet, getting on the phone and making things happen. Taking the time to think things through in detail and making sure all the pieces are in place to achieve your goal doesn’t exactly jibe with the ethos of moving fast and breaking things. But today, it’s truly the only way to scale.

To be clear: This is good news. Once those pieces are in place, things will move faster than ever. Startups who try to scale the old way might think they’re moving fast, but they’ll hit a wall before too long. Startups who build the necessary infrastructure to launch a scalable verticalized messaging plan – and automate it – are the ones who will see accelerated growth in 2022 and beyond.

The post Verticalized Messaging at Scale – Key to Effective Digital Lead Generation appeared first on Premonio.

The problems? Few if any of these tools provide the kind of forward-looking insights that B2B startup leaders actually need today to drive growth quickly and thrive. 

Times are changing, and many C-level leaders are no longer looking to legacy martech solutions to carry them into the future. Even the well-known martech pundit Scott Brinker notes in a recent blog that “90% — that’s 9 out of 10 CMOs — are implicitly, if not explicitly, looking for better martech solutions” (scroll to his second graphic).

Keep reading as we explore the chasm between tomorrow’s C-level needs and today’s solutions and illustrate how this chasm should be driving the evolution of martech.

The Challenges: Too much marketing analytics, not enough “Growth Architecting” 

• An underserved market in martech
  One commonality among the vast majority of existing martech solutions is that they’re designed to serve operations specialists or mid-level marketing and sales managers. These professionals often have backward-facing goals: They aim to use marketing analytics to show how their specific activities were producing results. As such, their tech stack might help them attribute a certain source of leads retroactively or show where web traffic came from over the past X months.That’s all well and good – if you’re not tasked with creating an integrated, cross-company engine for growth. But if you’re a C-level leader, you’ll find that what these stacks don’t do is facilitate the kind of forward-looking, cross-functional “growth architecting” you’re looking for. C-level leaders don’t need software showing where the specific groups of leads came from last quarter – they need to figure out what they can promise the board in terms of pipeline and bookings for next quarter. That means precise and accurate growth forecasting, which implies an increased focus on top-down, forward-looking goal setting instead of bottom-up, backwards-looking analytics. Unfortunately, however, these issues are today hard to avoid in a martech landscape focused more on trying to measure growth than actually driving growth.
• Performance woes
  To make matters worse, to the extent that C-level leaders do rely on existing martech, the results are underwhelming. Ask any C-level leader how long it currently takes their Ops tech stacks to, for example, tell them the impact of Marketing lead sources on their bookings, and they’ll often tell you they’ve given up waiting and don’t trust the data. Never mind the costs associated with standing up a tech stack or a scalable ABM implementation.
• Current realities raise the stakes
  The C-suite has always been on the hook for growth commitments to the board, but current conditions have conspired to put even more pressure on leaders. For one thing, B2B companies today are increasingly questioning conventions pertaining to the org chart, resulting in marketing teams increasingly coming under the command of Chief Revenue Officers and other C-level acronyms that conspicuously lack a middle M. These leaders are new to the marketing game – and often lack experience in marketing operations and insight into historical lead performance. This makes it harder for them to know what to expect from the newly acquired marketing team under their command, which in turn makes it almost impossible for them to make accurate growth forecasts, amid multiplying variables, with nothing more than a spreadsheet and, in a startup’s case, limited staff. Hanging over all of this, meanwhile, is the ongoing COVID pandemic. For a year and a half, now, the virus has changed the business landscape, suddenly and repeatedly, in ways that are hard to foresee. Accurately forecasting B2B growth metrics amid all this uncertainty, as well as other volatile macro-economic conditions, requires the ability to quickly model and optimize different growth scenarios without having to wait for the analytics team to come back with their next forecast.

Looking ahead: The needed sea change in martech

The B2B martech world in 2021 is due for a pivot. C-level leaders need to be able to develop robust and dynamic forecasts that account for multiple growth scenarios; course-correct faster, when necessary; execute on target; and lead with clarity. As these leaders face ever more pressure to deliver accurate growth forecasts, and ever more challenges in doing so, it’s time for those leaders to demand a tech stack that facilitates their needs and goals, and that helps them navigate a business landscape in which variables change everywhere and visibility is low. 

Growth architecting from here on out will require an unprecedented level of sophistication, including:

• Understanding how much pipeline you need, when you’ll need it, and which sources you’ll get it from
• Optimally allocating budgets between and across those lead sources and across different growth scenarios
• Having a clear and measurable line of sight from raw leads all the way to closed deals
• Leveraging scenario modeling to plan for variations in sales velocity and other contingencies
• Creating forward-looking KPIs that can serve as an early warning system, to keep pipeline creation on track

This is what the martech of the future should look like, and what C-level leaders should be demanding of their martech partners in 2021. Anything less, simply put, will fail to meet the moment – and continue to leave the needs of C-level leaders in the lurch.

The post From Reactive Analytics to Proactive Growth: What B2B Martech Needs appeared first on Premonio.

Overcoming this challenge requires taking a novel approach to demand generation: We have tested and proven such an approach that can help your team do more with less. After you have read this post, you will have a reference blueprint to build a low-cost MarTech stack that gives you much of the power of a stack consisting of enterprise-grade apps like HubSpot, Marketo, and Salesforce … but literally at a fraction of the cost.

Digital selling is evolving:

COVID-19 has catalyzed many long due developments in B2B Marketing and Sales. In a time when customer preference for digital channels is only rising, the importance of digital marketing and selling has increased radically for B2B companies. Recently, HubSpot in its COVID-19 benchmark data report pointed out that digital marketing outreach, open rates, and database growth have increased since the start of the crisis. BCG is calling this the inflection point for digital sales and says that planning today to invest in the technologies and people needed to make that digital shift will pay off tomorrow.

If you are not already into digital marketing and selling or want to get better at it, our lean MarTech sample stack is a solid combination of affordable and easy to implement tools that can work seamlessly together at every stage of the B2B sales funnel. Here’s an easy to implement digital demand generation tool kit and plan with answers questions like “Who to target?”, “How to target”, “How to implement your low cost MarTech stack?”, and “How to track results?”

1) Who to target?

Fewer marketing dollars leave less room for error in the customer segments that you want to target. With AI-based tools like patternai.co, you can conduct precise segmentation for a fraction of the cost of a consulting engagement, and do so in real-time with automated updating of segmentation analyses. Better and rapid segmentation results in more targeted marketing which in turn leads to higher conversion rates and lower marketing costs.

2) How to target?

• ENGAGING: Now that sales calls, demos, and even trade shows have become virtual and will stay that way for quite some time, virtual sales meeting solutions like goldcast.io can help you engage current and prospective customers live online while you capture leads, engage with prospects, and track event effectiveness, all in real-time.
• CONNECTING: With our simple, lean MarTech stack we can connect with decision makers within your target businesses through omnichannel campaigns that combine LinkedIn ads and invites and email nurturing campaigns. Tools such as Dux-Soup and SalesHandy that have out-of-the-box integrations with a low cost CRM tool like Pipedrive are tailored to help small businesses find and connect with very precisely targeted audiences, as well as score and track the resulting leads.
• ADVERTISING: You can develop very targeted lead generation campaigns using tools like LinkedIn advertising and marketing. By integrating first LinkedIn and then Google advertising campaigns, you can target and then retarget exactly the right decision-makers and influencers within a business. These platforms also provide trackability that makes it simple to measure ROI.

3) How to implement your low cost MarTech stack?

So far, we have laid out all the elements you could be using to enable digital selling and marketing and how tracking and analyzing your campaigns can optimize your pipeline. Since you might be interested in more specific information about these applications and how to make them work, we added some more details here:

1. Pipedrive, Dedupely: Pipedrive is an easy to implement and integrate sales CRM and pipeline management software that will do most of what an enterprise grade CRM does at a fraction of the cost. Dedupely can then be used to track and consolidate duplicate lead entries to create a high-quality database.
2. LinkedIn Navigator, Crunchbase, Dux-Soup, LinkMatch, CrystalKnows and Sharetivity: LinkedIn is an important part of your B2B pipeline-building tool kit. The combination of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Dux-Soup, and LinkMatch can automate the importing of your newly generated and old network contacts into your CRM tool (here we’re using Pipedrive). Sales Navigator supports an advanced lead search, makes lead and account recommendations, and helps you stay up to date with target company news. LinkMatch allows you to instantly see which LinkedIn profiles are in your CRM and which ones are not. You can then save profiles into your CRM and synchronize your CRM whenever a profile is updated. Dux-Soup can automate connecting with these profiles with personalized messages while collecting every profile’s contact information that can be plugged into your CRM system. How can you ensure that these profiles respond to you? CrystalKnows is an AI tool that you can use to scan a person’s LinkedIn profile (you have to be visiting their profile for CrytalKnows to run on it), assess their personality type, and get their optimized suggestions on the type of messages that are most likely to get them interested (e.g. to get them to take an appointment, to introduce yourself, etc.). A companion piece to CrytalKnows is Sharetivity which in a few seconds give you the loaded profile’s externally visible presence like published articles, company announcement, their social posts, etc., etc. While CrystalKnows tells you how to approach them, Sharetivity gives you material relevant to them that you can approach them with. Both together are great to strike up conversations with.
3. SalesHandy, mail-tester.com: While the pipeline management and LinkedIn tools will ensure that the leads in your database are constantly updated, email nurturing will ensure that customers and prospects are consistently hearing from you. SalesHandy automates and tracks your email outreach for you. Set up email cadences to execute email outreach and nurture campaigns for your leads. A solid email campaign requires a clean database and mail-tester helps achieve that by evaluating the deliverability (aka “spammyness”) of your planned emails.
4. Goldcast.io, Patternai.co, Challenger Selling: Real-time and automated segmentation using tools like Patternai.co can help businesses tailor their messages and offering to meet the needs of different customer segments. Goldcast.io is used to help set up memorable online sales events that are complete with networking sessions, group discussions, lead generation capabilities, and collects rich data for follow-up. Do your sales and marketing teams feel like a lot is changing very quickly? Challenger Selling can be taught via commercially available transformation programs that help your sales team change behaviors and develop engaging sales skills during a downturn while providing strong financial results for your organization.
5. Hootsuite, Bitly, Medium, Paper.li, Flipboard, Meetup: Consistent and high-quality content marketing and social media marketing is essential for pipeline building. Good content facilitates conversion by building trust with and educating your leads and customers. Medium is a social publishing platform where you can post thought leadership content that can be discovered by your target audience. You can then use Bitly to identify which platforms give you most traction. Bitly helps you brand and customize links, track real-time click data, and identify top referrers and locations for all your links. A newsletter is a powerful way of creating awareness about your brand and products. Paper.li helps you curate already published content into newsletters which you can proactively send to your customers and prospects to build familiarity with your brand. Similarly, you can create a magazine using Flipboard and populate it with content from your brand’s blog, social media accounts, and website. If you want to engage with prospects and customers beyond blog posts, emails, and social media, Meetup may be a great marketing tool for you. Build groups that cater to the interests of your prospects and customers and engage them with virtual educational events. A great way to start using Meetup is to frequent other groups and see if the organizers will have you speak for five minutes about a topic in which you have expertise. To tie all of this content marketing and social media promotion together, use a social media management software like Hootsuite that helps you create, schedule, and analyze your content.
6. Google Analytics, Crazy Egg: Now that you have a website and all this content out there, it is important to analyze the traction it is bringing you so that you can optimize your content and your promotion strategy based on real feedback. Google Analytics allows you to analyze your website performance and track audience behavior and demographics. How to make sense of all this data? Crazy Egg is a great tool for your MarTech stack that helps you visualize your Google Analytics and optimize your website through A/B testing.
7. Asana, GetHarvest: Now that we have a fair bit to execute before we start generation leads through our lean MarTech stack, let’s talk about a project management tool. Asana can help your marketing and sales teams collaborate on plans, manage interdependencies and expectations, and prioritize their workflow. Keep track of the time and resources you invest in your endeavors via GetHarvest which is a time and expense tracking tool.

Here is a graphic showing how to implement this methodology using our lean, low-cost sample MarTech stack (pricing out at about $400 per month):

Figure 1 – Flowchart Outline of Low-cost Digital Marketing Stack

4) How to track?

Even the largest marketing budget will not yield optimum or any results unless you are tracking your progress and leveraging analytics:

• Quantitative Pipeline Modeling and Graphical Sankey Visualization: We have helped marketers across B2B startups analyze and optimize the return on their spend from all their lead generation sources. Our cohort models and Sankey diagrams (sample in Figure 2) help marketing teams identify the most effective demand generation sources so that they can optimize their spend while maximizing pipeline generation. The pipeline visualizations make it easy to see where marketing spend is warranted and where further optimization is needed. These visualizations are also great eye-candy in important meetings, e.g. with board or other exectives.
• Tracking KPIs: Once your growth pipeline has been modeled quantitatively, these quantifications can be turned into early warning systems by extracting “leading indicators” like activity metrics or KPIs (emails sent, calls made, impressions generated, etc.) that are occurring at the top of the funnel (TOFU). The “lagging indicators” or outcome metrics (i.e. bookings, pipeline generated, or SQLs produced) occur at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). The latter is what everyone wants, but the benefit of modeling lies in knowing whether the TOFU KPIs measured now are sufficient to generate the outcome BOFU metrics three, six, or nine months from now.

Figure 2 – Sample Sankey Pipeline Graphic

If you would like to know more about how to implement our sample, low-cost MarTech stack and build a well-oiled demand generation machine with parts that talk to each other, please reach out to us on LinkedIn, Twitter, at info@marqetu.com, or call (001) (650) 727-0983.

The post Post-COVID Growth: Do more with less – Automate digital marketing with a simple, low $ MarTech stack appeared first on Premonio.

That’s a deep, profound cultural shift that benefits from starting with alignment around the question of “what are we solving for?”. This third blog addresses that issue and more.

3) Agree on common measurements and analytics:

• • Exec staff, sales and marketing all need to agree on a common pipeline definition: What are the pipeline stages everyone agrees to use from raw lead to close and post-sale?
    • A typical lead and sales pipeline might look like this:
      1. Raw lead (i.e. a name or an IP address if it’s an online lead)
      2. Lead (complete information, they have been identified)
      3. Marketing Qualified Lead (“MQL”; the lead has a minimum score)
      4. Sales Qualified Lead (“SQL”; a lead that is deemed ready for sales)
      5. Sales Accepted Lead (“SAL”; a lead that a rep has accepted and has converted to an opportunity within the CRM system)
      6. Developing (sales has contacted opportunity, established need)
      7. Proposing (sales is formulating a proposal for the opportunity)
      8. Negotiating (sales is in contract negotiations with the prospect)
      9. Closed Won (the deal was won)
      10. Closed Lost (the deal was lost)
    • Measurements then are what percentage of leads progresses from one stage to the next in the pipeline, what percentage gets returned to nurturing or to a prior stage, and how fast are the conversions happening. For example, how quickly is a typical lead moving from one stage to the next. The complexity then starts when these statistics need to be generated for all marketing campaigns, lead sources, sales reps, territories, segments, and so on, to ensure sources of slowdown or friction are constantly eliminated, and patterns of rapid potential growth are identified.
  • Throughout these pipeline stages, different organizations touch leads. The handoffs between these organizations need to be precisely defined in terms of desired quantities and lead quality.
    • Getting these handoff criteria right is crucially important if the ABM system is to function smoothly. To illustrate how complex things can get, these organizations could typically be involved in owning / managing the above 10 stages:
      1. Marketing Operations – Raw lead
      2. Marketing – Lead, MQL, SQL
      3. Sales – SAL
      4. Sales, SEs – Developing, Proposing, Negotiating, Closed Won
      5. Customer Success – Closed Won, Closed Lost
    • A crucially important handoff is from marketing to sales. This often becomes an emotional issue because sales reps bet their livelihood on the leads that marketing generates for them, and in turn marketing / sales development gets paid by the number of leads that sales accepts. We have always made it a practice to put a heavy emphasis on marketing producing the SALs, i.e. leads that sales is willing to accept. This breeds a lead quality consciousness that if marketing were to get paid on SQLs (i.e. the leads they submit to sales, be they accepted or not) would not be there. We always train our demand generation teams that supply sales with lead flow to ensure they understand that we reward success (i.e. SALs) and not just effort (i.e. SQLs).

4) Jointly work thought leadership and compelling, differentiated content and sales narratives:

• • Technology startups are founded to disrupt existing sectors. More and more this has become the Silicon Valley’s raison d’être, which for B2B startups means that they must compellingly explain why they do what they do better than anyone else in concise, easy to understand language. Getting their messaging right is non-trivial and requires a lot of understanding of the marketplace, the competition, and a good sense for what not only is logically defensible but also emotionally compelling. We have found it useful when all parties involved in external communications collaborate on how best to craft the associated narratives.
  • The sales team typically has a keen understanding of what sells today, what customers are looking for, and often have become masters at knowing how to sell “what’s on the truck” now (i.e. the available offerings). Marketing, on the other hand, often views the market more strategically, looking at competitive differentiation, what the analysts say, and so forth, and thus often has more of a sense of “the larger story”. The overall messaging benefits when both, sales and marketing collaborate constructively on the formulation of a compelling “why us” story.

5) Agree and execute on a joint events strategy:

• • Finally, marketing and sales collaborate on a joint approach to maximizing the lead generation potential of events like tradeshows, public speaking events, and conferences where the startup can interact with buyers and influencers. Attending events, especially if there is a booth to be set up and manned, is an expensive proposition and thus maximizing the leads developed from events is key to getting a good ROI out of the events.
  • However, this requires the marketing team to closely work with sales who usually staffs the booth, and who meets with prospects. So, both organizations need to cooperate on which events the company should attend at what funding level, who goes where, which event formats work best, and who staffs the booth.

If these five conditions are fulfilled and everyone works together, then ABM can be a work of art. The upsides are a large volume of high-quality leads and lower cost pipeline, and after the initial investments the ROI is compelling. We have seen the “marketing yield” (i.e. $ pipeline generated per $ of non-personnel marketing spend) go from 3X to 11X and higher once ABM was implemented.

However, there also are potential downsides that need to be managed: An ABM system is more complex and takes time to ramp up. Targetable segments need to be precisely identified, and targeted with content and contacts they find compelling, then those prospects need to be nurtured with content. Systems need to be implemented, new content and artifacts created, and so on.

So, compared to, say, a tele-sales cold calling operation, an ABM system will not produce leads as quickly. But, within 6 to 9 months, depending on the size of the operation, it will outperform those more traditional go-to-market approaches, and will do so more cost-effectively. At one security company, we saw costs per qualified lead and per deal decline by 36% and 67% respectively over the first twelve months of the program, while increasing quarterly output of new business deals by 40%.

For anyone interested in further reading about Account Based Marketing, here are some additional links:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Account-based_marketing
• http://www.heinzmarketing.com/2016/07/lead-based-marketing-vs-account-based-marketing-heinz-marketing
• http://www.heinzmarketing.com/2016/05/is-abm-right-for-your-business
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/accountbased-marketing-ma_b_10004668.html
• https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/blog/linkedin-b2b-marketing/2016/what-is-account-based-marketing–10-definitions-from-the-experts

The post Aligning Sales and Marketing (blog 3 of 3) – Key to Successful ABM appeared first on Premonio.

Which brings us to the next key to success, namely the cultural changes needing to go along with implementing an ABM system:

2. ABM drives cultural changes throughout the organization:

One of the aspects of implementing new processes is navigating the transition to becoming data driven. There are two challenges here. One is obvious, while the second is subtle:

• The more obvious challenge pertains to the mechanics oflearning the pipeline models the organization uses; understand and knowing how to interpret the various metrics used at each pipeline / sales stage; as well as knowing how to use the available software tools to obtain and interpret the data.
• The subtle challenge is the fact that the use of these systems implies a profound cultural shift away from political or emotion-driven decision making to data-driven decision making. Which in turn drives the need for the management team as well as sales and marketing to be analytically trained to utilize these systems and base their actions and decisions on the data underlying their pipeline.

The ability to navigate this transition to becoming data driven is most important among the executive staff. If the CEO and her / his team base their decision on fair and rational assessment of the underlying facts and act on the data, understand analytics and reward honest reporting, and have a clear grasp of the needed budgets to navigate this transition, then the impact ABM and the underlying systems can have on organizations is profound.

Implementing ABM in the sales organization means three things:

• Sales reps need to get into the habit of inputting accurate information and data into the sales and marketing automation systems. This data includes pricing, likely close dates, probability of moving to the next sales stage or to closure, lead sources, and contact information. If the entered data is inaccurate, the whole effort will be for naught.
• Related to the above issue, is a shift in thinking. All too often sales reps are uncomfortable at having their performance measured accurately. If sales management makes it clear that transparency is being valued and if someone’s pipeline is soft, they can expect help and coaching instead of a verbal lashing, then reps will use the ABM systems more willingly.
• Third, sales reps need to accept SLAs (i.e. Service Level Agreements) or a minimum time within which they need to respond to and dispose of an incoming opportunity from the demand generation team. This way they are the lucky recipient of a rapid and growing opportunity pipeline. Once they get into the habit of responding quickly, their commission checks at the end of the quarter will benefit just by the sheer law of numbers (we’re assuming processes to assure lead quality are in place and demand generation teams are training in them).

Life within marketing will change dramatically in an ABM world as well:

• Gone are the days of marketing being immune from measurable accountability, and or the days when if PR, events or branding initiatives were collectively deemed successful, then marketing was considered as having done a good job. The shift now, however, is away from such earlier focus to measurable results, preferably with pipeline impact. For example, how many social media likes or even leads were generated by a contributed article, or what was the revenue contribution of a series of speaking events, and so on.
• Marketing professionals must become increasingly analytical. They need to understand the new lead flows and the associated systems used to measure progression through the various lead stages and identify observable behaviors of emerging leads. When we work with marketing teams new to ABM, we often ask them to take Excel classes, for example, and we expose them to basic analytical techniques and terms such as “MECE” or regression analysis to understand the pipeline contribution of various artifacts, and cohort analyses to model lead flows and needed budgets over time.
• These analytical techniques are needed to assess whether new campaigns, pieces of content, or initiatives are working in terms of awareness building or lead generation potential. This also implies the need for experimentation and agile, “fail fast” approaches where new ideas get tested and, if needed, get modified or even aborted to give some other initiative a chance. Often marketing organizations are not used to the rapid pace of change that’s needed to optimize marketing-generated pipeline funnels.

All involved organizations (i.e. executive staff, sales, marketing, operations) need to meet for weekly analytics meetings to understand and interpret the previous week’s and month’s data to interpret what worked, what didn’t, and what should be planned for going forward. If needed, updates to the cohort model and the resulting marketing budget should also be initiated at these regular gatherings. As part of these series of regular meetings, sales and marketing need to agree on common definitions for what constitutes qualified leads and lead criteria. For example, when can a lead be considered qualified and sales ready?

Don’t turn that dial, we’ll be back with more …

The post Aligning Sales and Marketing (blog 2 of 3) – Key to Successful ABM appeared first on Premonio.

• Plummeting software prices: Cloud solutions are being sold at lower prices than ever before, motivating the need to replace more expensive techniques like enterprise selling or cold-calling with cost-reduced sales and marketing processes.
• Customer journeys are changing: It is a rare customer that has not done online research about the product they’re about to purchase. A recent article in McKinsey & Company’s “Marketing & Sales Insights” series provides compelling data on how even for large, key accounts the digital buying journey has changed the way they purchase, making old school selling insufficient.
• The sophistication of marketing automation software: Innovation started with the likes of Hubspot and Marketo and has now evolved to include many other tools. As have the myriad of vendors that support ABM through a wealth of online behavioral data that tracks – and intercepts – eventual prospects’ digital journeys.
• Cost-optimized demand generation processes: The above trends drive the need for deeper behavioral analytics as well as much more cost-optimized demand generation. Which in turn necessitate closer cooperation between sales and marketing. This sales-marketing alignment will help focus precisely defined customer segments, even down to a prospect in a market of 1.

Successful implementation of such high volume, high quality, and low-cost processes is doomed if sales and marketing cannot figure out how to work together. This blog is based on our experience with five concrete approaches that we employed to align marketing and sales. The results were impressive in that our teams were able to produce 75% of accepted sales opportunities within 9 to 18 months, all the while supporting business growth.

What were those keys to success?

1) Executive staff and sales and marketing teams need to be familiar with the basics of ABM:

• It all starts with setting realistic expectations with the board and executives. While modern demand generation approaches are more cost-efficient and result in high-quality leads, the process and infrastructure requirements are complex. Therefore, it’s important to set realistic expectations for how quickly results can be generated; what is involved in setting up these systems; and, more importantly, how much will need to be invested for how long before management and the investors see upticks in growth.
• Second, sales and marketing teams need to meet frequently to understand the system to be built and learn each other’s languages. This ranges from how the two teams perceive market realities (for example, sales reps will see the political landscape of a prospect, while the marketing folks will home in on the prospect’s standing in their respective market place), on to communication and interpersonal differences (for example, salespeople tend to be more extroverted, while marketers quite often are more introverted; sales reps usually place a higher value on incentive compensation, while marketing folks derive motivation also from intrinsic rewards; etc.). Bridging these perceptions and communication differences requires patience and self-awareness.
• Last but certainly not least, the CEO and the board need to embrace analytics, and promote a data-driven and transparent approach to managing the opportunity pipeline. This implies learning how to use and analyze the data that the new systems provide. Since many executives have cut their teeth in the enterprise selling days of software sales in the 1990s or earlier, when selling was art more than science, some find the wealth of data in modern systems overwhelming to use and difficult to understand.

Don’t turn that dial, we’ll be back with 2 more blogs on aligning sales and marketing …

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Compare and contrast: “Predictable Revenue” vs. ‘’Account Based Marketing”

It’s useful to begin with framing the alternatives and explain the forces that led to the development of the two principal approaches we’re discussing here: Predictable Revenue (i.e. mostly outbound prospecting and the associated marketing campaigns) vs. ABM (i.e. mostly inbound, online lead nurturing and account-focused selling). Both are industry-accepted terms which we explain below.

Predictable Revenue is a formulaic process to create consistent, year-over-year growth to be able to predict how much revenue a business is consistently generating. Typically, it involves calling into a highly defined database of prospects that are well segmented to match the target criteria of prospects that are likely to become buyers. There are multiple parts of predictable revenue generation: inbound (web), marketing campaigns (webinars, events, etc.), channel partners, and finally outbound SDRs.

The folks doing the calling are “Sales Development Reps” (SDRs) who don’t close deals, but instead pass on “qualified leads” to sales reps who will close them. By making this a repeatable process it can be improved and optimized, and the actual sales reps can focus on what they do best, closing deals (vs. having to prospect for them). So, sales productivity goes up all around.

Account Based Marketing, on the other hand, is a strategy to create sustainable growth within the most important accounts. It is intended to be a collaborative approach between sales, marketing, and customer success. Another aspect is the targeting of specific accounts and decision-maker groups within those accounts, not just by sales but also by marketing.

ABM gives marketers the ability to build scalable, personalized campaigns, measure their results against a set of KPIs, and prove revenue contribution. Instead of creating thousands of low-quality leads, ABM is about identifying the best opportunities up front and dedicating resources to those accounts. That up-front identification of targets is done online, and therefore ABM is fast becoming the marketing approach of choice for cloud software companies. Cloud software is researched, tried out, bought, and consumed all online. Why not market to potential buyers where they’re looking at you?

What do Predictable Revenue vs. Account Based Marketing have in common?

There is a common core that led to the development of both methodologies: Predictable Revenue and ABM are successive attempts at creating more cost-efficient and effective demand generation approaches that are profitable given plummeting software prices. Gone are the days of million Dollar ASPs (Average Selling Prices) from the on-premise enterprise software days; as software prices fell to the hundreds of thousands, and lately to the tens of thousands of Dollars, lower cost and higher productivity ways to sell, but still at a profit, had to be developed.

Predictable Revenue does that by optimizing productivity of the sales process, but ABM takes it a step further by largely automating the initial interaction with prospects when they’re online. Here is a table that highlights some key aspects and compares the two approaches:

* Please note, the pipeline yield estimates are from our own experience; as mentioned at the beginning, there is little in way of hard data out there that compares the spend efficiency of both approaches.

So, which approach(es) do I go with?

In our experience it all depends. It’s a bit like in politics, the ultimate implementation works most efficiently if there is a constructive, dynamic balance between the two approaches. They both have their strengths and weakness. Key to success is knowing how to optimize spend, i.e. how to balance investments both near-term and over the long haul between the two approaches.

Spoiler alert: In our experience, you have to start with Predictable Revenue-type prospecting because you need to create pipeline quickly to keep the investors and CFO happy. However, you also implement a heavy dose of analytics to know where you’re wasting money and where not. That then tells you where you can take costs out of the current efforts (e.g. an easy one is automating the SDR workflow so they can spend more time on the phones, or cutting non-productive events or reducing spending, say, on PR or branding that doesn’t have direct lead generation potential) so you can then re-invest that money in transitioning to / complementing the outbound process with ABM over time. All within your existing, overall marketing spend budget (that saves the CEO the budget-request pilgrimage to the investors after they hired you; CEOs tend to hate doing that ?).

Also, because of its rapid time to spool up, Predictable Revenue is better at opening new markets since all you need is a good database, a bunch of SDRs, and telephone lines. But over time ABM helps a) make the demand generation more efficient, and b) it intercepts potential buyers online and establishes a brand relationship with them there. Which is where most customer journeys start these days.

So, putting all your demand generation eggs into SDRs and outbound prospecting initially should get revenues flowing quickly. But it’s inefficient over the long haul and will cause missing the demand generation spend benchmarks that investors might be judging your startup with. Please note that those benchmarks are likely to implicitly incorporate the savings inherent in the more cost-efficient ABM approaches since they’ll look at marketing and sales spend rates (typically as percent of revenue) of best-in-class companies in your software cohort. Those leaders often are already using ABM.

On the flipside, putting it all in ABM approaches will cause near-term spend go up (e.g. subscription fees for software to build out the MarTech stack, online advertising, syndication, etc.). Yet the pipeline growth is sluggish since it depends on nurturing online browsing and shopping behavior over time until enough lead score is accumulated for a target prospect to become qualified enough to be passed to the SDR team.

So, it’s not either / or, it’s both. Disagree with our theses? Please send us your comments.

For anyone interested in further reading about Account Based Marketing, here are additional links:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Account-based_marketing
• https://technologyadvice.com/account-based-marketing-software
• https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/predictable-revenue-summary

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The post Is ABM a panacea or too hard? Know thy demand gen ROI! – Blog 2 of 2 appeared first on Premonio.

Namely the question that I had been discussing with my other executives for a while; they had basically asked: “We’ve given you budget for the last 2 years and waited patiently for you to build this amazing marketing engine that’s producing good, new pipeline. However, why was that a better investment for us than just hiring a crop of Sales Development Reps (“SDRs”), buying a big lead database, and start cold-calling?”. At first, I had tried giving them the usual techie answers of online lead nurturing, revenue attribution, better conversion rates, and so on. But they did not understand and thus didn’t believe it.

So, being a marketer, I stepped back and thought, well, if my internal customers can’t wrap their minds around what I do, maybe I should learn how to better explain the benefits of ABM, especially its ROI. It is reasonably easy to calculate ROI on an aggregate level (e.g. for a CAC / ARR calculation) since one doesn’t need to do a detailed cost allocation analysis, never mind the needed revenue attribution work. However, my colleagues’ question was deeper and really dealt with the larger question of ROI optimization – and metrics to help with that – across the entire demand generation funnel.

Hence my question to the ABM expert seated next to me over dinner. He understood the question right away and said that other than the long-term brand building benefit that comes from a stronger online presence through ABM, he wasn’t aware of any benchmarking data that quantified the ROI of ABM.

Fast forward to a recent webinar by another MarTech expert during which I asked the same question. His answer was that the incremental ROI data is “directional at best”, discussed that it’s basically a revenue attribution question, and said that you’d have to be satisfied with getting 80/20 answers. Now I had the answers from two of the industry’s foremost ABM experts, and the absence of hard benchmarking data that they both mentioned got me thinking. Being a determined analyst, I pressed on and launched my own online research. And those results were equally non-quantitative.

Okay, back to the CMO dinner I started this blog with. After more red wine and desserts were making their way across the table, the initially erudite conversation about digital marketing had progressed to the more heart-felt commiserating with the other CMOs about “how sales just don’t get it”. It was a bit cathartic to know that I wasn’t the only one battling it out with old school sales execs, DNA and cultural differences, and all.

But in the back of my mind, I realized that until marketers in general and the MarTech community, in particular, know how to provide that quantified answer, the questioning from sales and the CFOs will continue. And justifiably so. Getting an ABM system stood up is expensive and requires patience; why undertake the expense if you can’t quantify what they’ll get for it?

Marketing needs to be accountable. So does ABM and MarTech. But how?

Hence this blog. Because my colleagues asked the spot-on right question, which goes at the perennial problem marketers have had to justify their existence: What are the hard numbers marketing can be held accountable to? The promise of the dramatic growth of marketing analytics, digital marketing, and so on over the last decade has been astounding. Yet, somehow in all that techno-frothiness, no one seems to want to answer THE question every investor, CEO or CFO (and the head of sales) do want a quantified answer from the CMO to: “If I give you your requested $X Million, what will I get for it? And why is that better than the next best alternative?”.

Generally, we’ve found that the marketing metric most acceptable to sales leaders is the closable pipeline for the quarter, i.e. sales qualified pipeline that has a close date within the current quarter. For enterprise sales, the metric of a closable pipeline for a future quarter is also relevant. That’s just for starters. Having developed approaches to answering that question on several occasions, which starts with the precise framing of what the underlying demand generation problem is that needs to get solved, I see this as the marketing industry “intellectual white space”.

In fact, it has gotten me so fired up that a few of us are launching a new offering to provide hard, quantitative answers to this and the surrounding questions. It can be done. Don’t turn that dial; return to this blog for part 2, and for more explorations on how to provide the needed analytics.

Don’t turn that dial, we’ll be back with more …

The post Is ABM a panacea or too hard? Know thy demand gen ROI! – Blog 1 of 2 appeared first on Premonio.

So, both, the number of CROs and the number of ABM literate professionals, are probably lower bounds for some true number of executives and non-executives skilled and interested in ABM. But what matters to our central thesis in this blog, namely that the punditry’s ABM vision is outpacing today’s business reality, is the ratio of CROs to skilled marketing automation professionals. It’s a surrogate measure for the maturity of ABM’s readiness for the market. The supply of skilled experts and technicians doesn’t seem to match the CRO hiring record. As an interesting side observation: Only in the marketing consulting services vertical is the number of skilled professionals greater than the number of CROs. J

If we assume that the average CRO / CMO has about 3 to 5 marketing automation experts on staff, this would mean that if ABM implementations (as evidenced by the number of identifiable, skilled marketing automation professionals) were to keep pace with the strategic intent of moving toward ABM (as evidenced by the presence of a CRO), then we’d expect at least 900 to 1,500 identifiable, deep ABM experts. Our sample could only find 10 to 17% of that number.

Which brings us to our central concern: There is too much ABM hype out there in the blogosphere without talking about how to pragmatically make it work in any sort of credible way. Hyping the ABM vision might drive up the online ratings of bloggers or distributors of the hype, but it doesn’t do the industry a service by providing actionable information. Too often the blogs are either self-serving (e.g. vendor or consultants’ blogs trying to market their offerings). Or they’re devoid of practical details that come from “been there, done that” experience to make their writings relevant to real world implementers.

Most importantly, they too often don’t express an understanding of how the executive and budgetary approval processes for such strategic initiatives work in the real world. For example, most are completely silent on useful arguments with which to communicate the near-term ROI that needs to be demonstrated to warrant ABM’s growing share of the corporate budget.

Never mind talking about how to deliver the pipeline growth that sales needs in the next two quarters, to hit the corporate revenue goals that need to be met so ABM can continue to be funded. For example, what are other sources of budget that could be tapped into while the ABM machinery is still being built?

We’ll give you a hint. Nationwide, general PR programs, re-branding exercises or international events budgets often are sacred cow marketing spend, yet with unclear lead production potential that can be converted to ABM use without missing a revenue generation beat.

They also often miss providing practical tips on how practitioners can go to their management to overcome objections around timing, costs, and skilled resource requirements for successful ABM rollouts.

They don’t answer questions regarding metrics and dashboards and how they will be built to make the ABM machinery measurable and accountable, and are those metrics agreeable to all stakeholders? Or what are the handoff criteria for when a lead can become an MQL, SQL, or SAL? And do those criteria incent passing through high volumes of low quality leads, or do they encourage responsible handoffs of high quality leads?

Closely tied to the above issue are compensation guidelines on who to pay how much for lead production at what stage in the funnel. If not done well, compensation squabbles can scuttle an ABM implementation.

ABM is a great invention but by simply hyping its promise without also addressing the true, Monday morning challenges faced by organizations trying to fund, recruit and scale an ABM infrastructure, the punditry risks doing this marvelous invention a disservice. As in business, over-selling risks high attrition rates. By now, the core sale around the vision of ABM has been made for any serious sales or marketing professional actively following the evolution of modern pipeline generation techniques. What’s needed are concrete best practices on how to make these implementations successful on time and on budget.

So, we believe that less hype, and more factual research and meaningful implementation tips and tricks would do the industry good as that information would reduce adoption barriers for the serious practitioner. But that’s a lot harder to write about, and hence less often found.

Disagree with our thesis? Please send us your comments.

In the meantime, for some further reading, here are links to some useful articles:

How to make ABM work:

• Great questions and info for what it takes to make ABM work – http://bit.ly/2jRezoI
• This article is not too deep but it mentions that ABM is not a panacea – http://bit.ly/2jqewQO
• Some duh in here, but also some good talking points – http://bit.ly/2k2xcW9
• http://bit.ly/2iLK6qm – Another mention of the ITSMA survey, and includes a link to Laura Ramos, VP and Principal Analyst atForrester Research

Issues around ABM

• Note the industry map in the second half of this article – http://bit.ly/2k2BuNb
• A bit of a Marketo plug but a good read – http://bit.ly/2jBgCQ0
• Some hype but also some good areas for sales and marketing cooperation – http://bit.ly/2k2xrAu

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