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.

Lon Baker, Chief Operating Officer, VirtualPBX

VirtualPBX Wins with Premonio

• 30% projected YoY revenue growth 
• 4 consecutive months of surpassed revenue goals – and counting
• Smarter planning with Premonio’s Sankey, Budget Optimization, and KPI tools

VirtualPBX is a private branch exchange provider serving both remote and in-person professional teams across a wide variety of business areas. After partnering with Premonio, they were able to turbo-charge their growth through smarter revenue planning and more targeted optimization.

Challenge: Make a Clear Plan for an Ambitious Goal

The leadership team at VirtualPBX had set an ambitious goal for year-over-year revenue growth from 2021 to 2022. But although they had a steady stream of incoming business on the strength of a powerful product suite and strong service, monthly metrics showed they weren’t growing as fast as their goal demanded. If they were to hit their target for the new year, something would need to change.

The issue had nothing to do with their team’s sales acumen or their product, but instead stemmed from a lack of early visibility into the kind of resources, time, and personnel they would need to hit their goal. During the planning stage, they had relied upon homegrown spreadsheets, but these were insufficient for handling the myriad factors and variables they would need to account for to stay on track. They had also partnered with a software vendor, but had a negative experience both with the product and with that company’s leadership.

Solution: Partner with Premonio

The team decided to leverage Premonio’s Growth Architecting system, combining the “GOALS” tool and consulting services to kick their revenue growth into a higher gear and create a comprehensive implementation blueprint toward their 2022 goal. One of the resources they leveraged was Premonio’s budget optimization tool, which projects what a team’s budget will produce under current conditions and practices, shows the maximum the budget could produce if optimized, and prescribes the specific optimizations necessary to achieve that maximum.

In the budget optimization stage, VirtualPBX discovered they could additionally increase their revenue by revamping their lead generation model – in particular, by reducing their investment in SEM and reallocating those funds to LinkedIn-based lead generation and organic inbound efforts. They used Premonio’s Sankey graphical output to map out, in detail, how much they would need to take out, or put into, each channel, and how that would impact their revenue.

Once the changes were in place, the team used Premonio’s KPI tool to ensure that if any further optimization were necessary, they would know quickly. The tool enabled the team to pull early-funnel leading indicator metrics that would illuminate specific problems, such as an underperforming lead channel or lower-than-expected conversion rates, while it was still early enough in the quarter to fix them and get back on track to hit their number.

Results: Record-Setting Growth

VirtualPBX implemented Premonio’s growth architecting system in June of 2021. In the many months since then, they have not only hit, but surpassed each of their monthly targets. In fact, in every month since June, they have set a company record for monthly revenue, through a combination of net-new business and renewals from happy customers. 

“Premonio’s experience, process, and tools helped us develop a deeper understanding of our business and develop a plan to accelerate our growth,” said Lon Baker, Chief Operating Officer at VirtualPBX. “Premonio’s team was incredibly talented and focused on helping us achieve our accelerated goals. Overall, Premonio is unlike any company I have worked with in the past and we will leverage their offering moving forward.”

So far, the company is tracking to grow more than 30% this year, and are well on their way to 50%. This shows the power of using growth architecting to back up revenue forecasts with clearer visibility, better accounting for variables, and more granular planning. 

About VirtualPBX

VirtualPBX develops powerful communication solutions for SMBs through Voice, Video, and SMS. Enjoy professional features like Auto Attendant, Ring Groups, Zapier Integration, and full-featured Web Phone with every plan. Upgrade to Video Calling, Business SMS, Call Recording, AWS External Storage, and more as needed. VirtualPBX supports office phones and personal devices in all its phone plan features. Award-winning SIP Trunking and networking services are also available from this San Jose-based business. Learn more about VirtualPBX here: https://www.virtualpbx.com

The post VirtualPBX Carves a Clear Path to Strong Growth with Premonio 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.

The good news: It’s perfectly possible not just to survive, but to thrive in this new environment. But it will require teams to take a step back, re-align the resources still available to them, up-level their digital skills, and make a detailed, if not quantified, growth plan.

Why has this happened, and what, exactly, has changed?

Success in the new era of B2B marketing will require teams to reckon with four major, simultaneous, and interrelated, challenges:

1. Higher demand generation goals
   As companies retrofit their operations for the post-COVID business landscape, they’re asking a lot more of marketing. Nearly 60% of surveyed marketers report seeing their teams’ lead gen goals jump since March of last year when U.S. lockdowns began.
   
2. Lower budgets
   Not only are marketers being asked to do more – but they’re also more strapped than ever for the resources with which to do it. In addition to higher lead gen goals, most marketers are also seeing shrinking team budgets. Notably, this pressure is not being distributed equally across organizations – while marketers are tightening their belts, sales teams are reporting budget increases as often as budget cuts. 
3. Blocked lead flow
   The pandemic has closed the valve on many of the sources marketers depend upon for their hottest leads. Events, for instance, have long been among the most reliable producers of quality marketing leads. Still, between budget cuts and the obvious epidemiological concerns around crowds, no one’s giving out demos and swag in a Las Vegas conference room anytime soon.
   Instead, marketing pipelines, like the rest of the world, are going digital. But this poses even more challenges, as sales and marketing teams are falling short of the digital literacy required to thrive in this environment: Surveys show that marketers have even overestimated their digital literacy. And as sales teams realize that most of their customers’ journeys begin online, they need to partner more closely with their marketing teams, who are more schooled in intercepting and finding prospects during their online searches.
4. More accountability
   With more digital marketing and the need for tighter cooperation with sales comes more accountability for marketers. Both sales and marketing are under more pressure than ever to prove their worth. For sales reps, who are already used to being only as good as last quarter’s number, this isn’t hard to take in stride. But for marketers, this new level of accountability represents new territory they’re going to have to learn to navigate – and fast. Specifically, this means knowing how to correlate MQLs with generated $ pipeline and new bookings.

These factors have converged to create the perfect storm lurking right on the other side of the pandemic – and B2B marketing teams are sailing right into it. As teams step into the brave new post-COVID world, they’ll need a robust strategy for generating more leads, with less money, without access to their favorite tools, in an unfamiliar business environment. All the while, they’ll need tighter integration with and accountability from their sales counterparts.

How can teams position themselves to confront these challenges?

It’s clear, now, that B2B marketing teams have some major pivoting to do. But they’ve had a year to plan for all of this, so they must be ready, right?

Unfortunately, the kind of robust strategy that will be crucial in the future is one more thing that marketing teams, by and large, do not have. Only 7% of surveyed marketers have a quantified growth plan for how to do more with less, while almost 60% are without such a plan – even with the perfect storm looming larger and closer than ever as we’re well into the first quarter of 2021. That compares to 80% of sales teams that have quantified plans, goals, and or pipelines. Which of those two functions would you put in charge of your scarce 2021 growth budgets?

So, what are teams to do?

1. Get used to digital
   Marketing events and client dinners are out. To fill the gap, some teams are turning to LinkedIn as a source of new B2B leads and a forum for nurturing them. But while online networks are great for establishing connections, figuring out how to convert those connections into leads without annoying them with an obvious sales pitch is trickier. Tools like Dux-Soup, LinkMatch, or Seamless.ai can help with this, as can lots of other digital resources available right now – and teams should be keeping all of them on the table.
   What they shouldn’t do, however, is see digital as a panacea. No tech stack can substitute for the core tenets of B2B marketing: precisely defined segments of resonant buyers, compelling and differentiated value propositions that can captivate in 300 characters, and ample content to attract prospects.
2. Maintain situational awareness
   The new era of marketing has a lot of moving parts. It’s a delicate situation that will require an intricate and comprehensive game plan. Teams need to invest in resources, from MarTech to consulting to everything in between, that will empower them to stay on top of it all.
   Not only are new apps required to establish a connection and decide who’s worthwhile to go after and how digital selling and marketing offers a great opportunity to capture lead funnel analytics data like never before. But that requires more than just familiarity with the tools that help capture that data. Users of those tools will also need a baseline understanding of how to frame and complete quantitative pipeline analyses.
3. Align with Sales
   With higher goals and lower budgets, every lead is more precious than ever. Attrition is never fun, but today, it’s something teams can’t afford. If sales and marketing can keep the lines of communication open and get on the same page, they can plug leaks in the funnel and keep conversion rates high – specifically at the MQL-SQL boundary, where sales take those MQLs and try to convert them to opportunities.
   Successful teams in 2021 should be shooting for MQL-SQL conversion rates of 50% or higher. In reality, though, rates can get as low as 3 to 5%. To improve conversion rates, higher-quality MQLs are key, requiring greater accountability and a higher volume of leads sourced online. This, in turn, calls for tighter integration of sales and marketing, as already mentioned.
   Inhibiting that integration is all-too-often great cultural and DNA differences between the two groups and differences in measuring accountability and focus on demand generation metrics. In our next blog, we’ll talk about how sales seem to be winning the associated political shootouts, as CROs tend to recruit themselves from sales backgrounds, in part because of sales’ higher degree of comfort in providing measurable insight into their activities and the resulting accountability. If B2B marketing teams can present a solid plan for meeting the new era of marketing’s demands, they’ll be more likely to get more attention and favor from their CROs when it’s time for the next round of funding. And that’s when real change can happen.

This is a make-or-break moment for B2B marketing teams. What happens in the coming weeks and months will separate those who thrive in the new marketing landscape from those who fall by the wayside. If a team can’t manage the converging challenges facing B2B marketers today, the perfect storm will sink their ship. But if they can, it’ll put new wind in their sails.

Learn more about how to build a strategy to weather the storm here.

The post The Perfect Storm Facing Post-Pandemic B2B Marketing Teams appeared first on Premonio.

At MarqetU, we can help you develop engaging and authentic video content to attract, engage, and delight your prospects and customers. To get started with your video marketing strategy, start by developing a video content plan:

There are many types of video content that can be leveraged to attract and retain customers in different stages of the customer lifecycle. Some of the types of video formats that you can leverage for your B2B technology startup include:

1. Brand Videos: Showcase your products, services, your mission, and your vision in a brand video. You can use this video in the about section of your company’s LinkedIn page, as a pinned/introduction video on your YouTube channel, and on your website landing pages. We made this video recently for our website along similar lines.
2. How-to Videos: You can create how-to videos or how-to series to help your audience with education about topics that they need help with. For example, we recently developed a video about automating lead generation for our LinkedIn.
3. Product Explainers: These videos can be used to help your audience build a foundational knowledge of your business and solutions. Your sales and service teams may also use these videos as tools as they work with customers. You can develop a series for your YouTube channel where each video explains a different functionality or use case for your product.
4. Interviews: If you know an expert whose ideas could be informative for your audience then it may be time to set up a chat and interview them. This type of video content will also help you establish credibility in areas that your customers are looking for advice on. 44% of businesses say that informative videos receive the most engagement online. For example, Lukas Haensch from Pathmonk recently invited us for an interview about thought leadership and demand generation on his LinkedIn podcast.
5. Customer Testimonial Videos: If you have customers that are willing to speak about how they benefited from your product or service, developing a series of testimonial videos could help new customers make the purchase decision. Testimonial videos are great for not just establishing credibility but also demonstrating actual use cases for which your product or service has been used.
6. Live Videos: This type of video content works really when you want to capture live events, start a live dialogue with your customers, interview an expert, or even host a Q&A session. Platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube will also send out a notification to your followers/subscribers when you go live to help attract eyeballs.

Now that we’ve learned about a few types of video content, let’s talk about the steps you can take to create your first video.

Scripting videos:

Irrespective of whether you’re shooting a quick video or an elaborate interview, writing a script will bring structure to your video content and save a lot of time at the editing table. Develop your script in the form of a word doc consisting of a table with two columns – one column for the shot by shot description of the audio portion of your video and one for the description of the visual portion. Below is an example of how we used this format to write a script for one of our videos:

Writing a script as opposed to recording extempore, will enable you to get feedback from your team members and also stick to the time limit. The ideal duration for your video content varies depending on the platform that you’re posting on and the topic of your video.  

Remember to close your script with a strong call to action. A call to action ensures that your audience is directed to the next step you would like them to take – Do you want them to like, subscribe, and/or comment? Do you want them to check out the link to a new product? 

Choosing the platform:

The right platform can elevate your video marketing strategy, but the wrong platform can destroy it. Think about your buyer personas and goals before deciding where to post your videos. Some of the options are LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc. Once you’ve selected the platform you will be sharing on, you can always cross-promote the link from that platform on the accounts of your other platforms. For example, you can easily share the link to your YouTube video on LinkedIn.

Shooting the video:

On the day of the shoot, get ready for the camera. You can wear whatever dress code is acceptable in your industry and your customer’s industry but remember to look professional. Clean up and wear something that won’t blend into the background (no white shirts against a white wall :). Choose a spot that is well-lit. Look into the camera and maintain a personable tone.

There are a lot of different cameras and peripheral equipment that you can use to shoot videos. However, we recommend getting started with a basic setup like the front camera of your mobile phone or mounting your phone on top of a make-shift tripod i.e. anything that will hold your phone and keep it stable while you record. You can also use the webcam of your laptop for the shoot.

Another great way to shoot a video is using the record feature on a video conferencing app like Zoom or Google Meet. This setup is especially useful for product demos or instructional videos where you may need to share your screen.

Remember to look into the camera and keep it conversational. Make sure that all your footage is shot in the same orientation i.e. horizontal v/s vertical. Most platforms including LinkedIn and YouTube favor the horizontal or landscape orientation.

Editing the video:

Most marketers will agree that shorter content, while tougher to create, is more effective and engaging as compared to longer videos. To edit your footage, use free video editing platforms like iMovie (iOS users) or others mentioned in this Shopify blog post. Next, remember to caption your videos. 85% of social media videos are now watched with no sound. If possible, include images and infographics that will aid visual interpretation for your audience even when their audio is switched off. We have used YouTube studio to trim, blur, and subtitle our videos before and it worked great! Learn how to use YouTube studio here.

Now that we have your process in place, what should you be adding (if at all) to your Shopping list to succeed at video marketing?

To create great video content, you don’t need a great set up you just need a set up. However, here are some of the easy to use resources that we recommend:

Recording yourself: Your phone can record good quality audio and video and even help you edit it. We often use iMovie on the iPhone to edit and subtitle our videos. Android users can download one of these free video editing software apps for the same.

Recording your screen for a demo video: Windows users can use the instructions in this video or use the Xbox Game Bar in Windows 10 to start capturing your screen and your voice for a product demo or an instructional video. Mac users can use the QuickTime player which is already installed on your mac to record your screen and voice.

Editing: You can edit your videos using iMovie on a mac or any of these free video editing software products. Like we mentioned earlier, YouTube studio is a pretty good platform for editing your video even if you intend to share the video via another platform. Just download the edited version of your video from YouTube studio and publish the file via your platform of choice.

A study by Heinz Marketing found that 68 percent of organizations plan to increase their investment in video marketing in 2020. If you’re looking to engage new and existing customers with exciting video content, feel free to please reach out to us on LinkedIn, Twitter, at info@marqetu.com, or call (001) (650) 727-0983.

Additional resources from MarqetU about video publishing are:

1. https://marqetu.com/b2b-tech-marketing-community-weekly-newsletter-sept-12-2020/
2. https://marqetu.com/telling-your-story-via-video/

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So we wanted to share our own experience in creating fun, low-budget videos that tell your story, especially on LinkedIn, which is fast becoming the most trusted social media platform for B2B marketers. Since we are in the process of developing some quick and engaging video content for the LinkedIn audience, we realized our research may help you utilize LinkedIn’s native videos too.

So what is the difference between videos shared from platforms like YouTube, Vimeo etc. and LinkedIn’s native videos? Unlike shared video content, which requires an initial upload to YouTube prior to sharing from a link, native videos can be uploaded directly into the LinkedIn video feed.

Why LinkedIn video and not another platform like YouTube?

LinkedIn has a very engaged user base with 40% of LinkedIn’s engaged users accessing the platform on a daily basis. It is better to upload your videos directly on LinkedIn as opposed to sharing a YouTube link because the LinkedIn algorithm gives native videos more weight. This means that native videos show up more often in the feed than a video that was uploaded on another platform and then shared on LinkedIn.

Appearing more often in front of your LinkedIn audience can help you increase brand awareness and loyalty with B2B decision makers and influencers on the platform. In fact, 38% marketers use LinkedIn video and 75% of them believe that LinkedIn videos are effective.

To make a video LinkedIn native, you can upload your video from the same area in the newsfeed page that you generally use to write posts.

In this post, you will find a quick end-to-end guide to developing and sharing LinkedIn native videos that covers steps like messaging, scripting, shooting, editing, and promoting your videos.

Defining your message, scripting, and call to action:

Like it is in case of all types of content, LinkedIn videos should be well-thought out, catchy, crisp, and easy to find and consume. Each piece of video content can be structured using a defined message, a script, and a call to action.

To define the message, ask yourself “What do we want the audience to take away from this video?” Keep this message at the center of your script. Some types of video content that you could create for your B2B audience include an introductory video about what your company does, quick chats with employees that are strong advocates for your company, instructional videos about your product etc.

Once you’ve decided your messaging, write a script to ensure that your message can be communicated clearly. Irrespective of whether you’re shooting a quick video or an elaborate interview, writing the script will bring structure to your video content and save a lot of time at the editing table. Develop your script in the form of a word doc consisting of a table with two columns- one column for the shot by shot description of the audio portion of your video and one for the description of the visual portion. Below is an example of how we used this format to write a script for one of my videos:

Writing a script as opposed to recording extempore, will also enable you to get feedback from your team members before you shoot.

Next, close your script with a strong call to action. A clear and strong call to action ensures continued engagement in the form of LinkedIn comments from your audience. These comments may also be a good source of ideas for future videos.

Shooting your video:

Marketers are increasingly realizing the value of the quality of message over the production value of videos. Get started with a basic setup like the front camera of your mobile phone or mounting your phone on top of a make-shift tripod i.e. anything that will hold your phone and keep it stable while you record.

Another great way to shoot a video is using the record feature on a video conferencing app like Zoom or Google Meet. This setup is especially useful for product demos or instructional videos where you may need to share your screen.

As for your look, dress casual or formal based on your brand image. Remember to look into the camera and keep it conversational. We also recommend shooting horizontally because LinkedIn automatically transforms a vertical video to the horizontal format after upload. However, if you’ve already got some good footage vertically, don’t fret. Shoot the rest of the video vertically and maintain uniformity.

Editing your video:

Most marketers will agree that shorter content, while tougher to create, is more effective and engaging than long videos. I had previously shared similar opinions from a Silicon Valley marketing community meet up here.

So, how long should the video be? While LinkedIn allows the upload of videos anywhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes, videos that are one to three minutes long are known to perform the best.

For editing your footage, use free video editing platforms like iMovie (iOS users) or others mentioned in this Shopify blog post. Next, remember to caption your videos. 85% of social media videos are now watched with no sound. Not just that, make sure to include images and infographics that will aid visual interpretation for your audience even when their audio is switched off.

Sharing and Promoting:

Once you’re satisfied with your edit, upload the video on LinkedIn with a supporting copy, relevant tags and hashtags, and a link to your website/product in the description.

For the supporting copy, describe your video using 150 characters or lower. The supporting copy sets the context for the video and piques the interest of your audience. Including a relevant link in the copy makes it easier for your audience to find out more about your brand if they decide to do so after watching your video. Based on the topic of your video, remember to use appropriate hashtags and tag any relevant companies or people you’ve mentioned in your video. This will help you get your content in front of people beyond your immediate network.

Finally, continue to engage with your audience by replying to their comments under the video. Commenting with updates or other related links under your post even after people have already engaged with the post helps you cover multiple facets of the topic and sometimes may also help you put together a summary of the things you learnt from audience feedback after you posted the video.

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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.

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Fellow CMO Jill Richards (link) and I continued our April 16 explorations around what and how B2B marketers should cope with the impact and aftermath of COVID-19 (read that blog here).

Today we presented the follow-on webinar to Dennis Shiao’s “Bay Area Content Marketing” Meetup group (link is here) with additional market data (courtesy of HubSpot; link is here), and the resulting series of quantitative and qualitative survival tips.

Like how to re-forecast, how to protect your existing revenue and pipeline, how to optimize spend, how to tune your messaging, how to align with the sales team as well as drive revenue. And for the adventurous among us, how to go after your weaker competition? If you got the financial staying power, now is the time.

You can download everything here:

1. Download the presentation at this link
2. And watch the entire presentation here

Lots of practical advice that we’re learning from our clients, friends, and the marketing community out there … passing it on in real time.

Good luck and stay safe,

Jill & Johannes

The post “B2B Marketer’s Survival Guide: Adapting to a Changed Landscape” – Webinar Video & Presentation appeared first on Premonio.

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted people and businesses. Many of us are now working from home and trying to stay productive amidst a barrage of unsettling and sometimes confusing news.

But what is productive at this moment? How do we, as B2B marketers, set ourselves and our companies up for success as we navigate this crisis? This blog will provide some information to answer those questions. We will also be hosting a live interactive webcast with more detail on this topic on Thursday, April 23rd, at 9 am PT / 12 noon ET /5 pm BST, and we invite you to attend. You can sign up here.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

Despite the confusion of the moment, one thing is clear: the landscape for marketers has changed. That 2020 plan cooked up in Q4, likely won’t work now. But how do you know what has changed and in what ways? Here are some highlights to give you some perspective.

1) The crisis has not had a uniform impact across sectors.

Many sectors have declined while some are actually growing. It’s important to know what’s happening in your target sectors. Here is an excerpt from a recent article by McKinsey & Company:

2) Website activity and exploration is up, but deal creation is down

Source: HubSpot: Benchmark Data: How COVID-19 Is Impacting Sales and Marketing Performance

3) Selling is out; marketing is in

Marketing is at the fore now in its role of understanding current market needs and translating that to product and sales teams in ways that are sensitive to the market and its needs

Source: Lisa Nirell: Stop Messaging, Start Making Meaning: The Secrets of Growth CMOs

Join us! We’ll share additional information in the upcoming webcast.

Success and Survival Will Require Being Proactive

We’ve shared this taste of available data on what’s happening now because, as a marketer, you know it is essential to be informed by data to assess any crisis. Information is power. It gives you something to work with and can be a catalyst to action.

Marketing teams that proactively evaluate their environments and options rather than freezing in fear will be in far better shape now, and as the crisis passes. So, it’s a good idea to create a path to survival and success by acting: gathering data on your resources, your customers’ needs and your options for retooling,

As a starting point, you can simply determine which of these categories you might be in:

• SINKING: Cutting expenses and staff without a clear plan for success, in a cash flow crisis
• SWIMMING: Changing tactics to more digital conversations, but sticking with the same market approach and budget
• SURFING: Actively adapting focus, spend and staffing to pivot now to drive future business strategically

The Marketing Crowd Has Your Back

To move you into the Surfing category, we’ve compiled several practical ideas from colleagues and research that you can implement now. Again, we’ll have more information as well as Q&A in our webcast, so if you need more ideas, we encourage you to join.

At a macro level, there are more significant changes you can think about driving to ensure success. These are things like:

• Shifting the business online. From your offerings to remote working, consider how/what you could move online. This can not only save costs but also open up new opportunities to serve customers.
• Shifting to digital marketing. Many already have digital as a major part of the mix but what if you have to shift everything to digital for the foreseeable future? Can you? What changes are required in your marketing stack, your budget, your staff, your content, your metrics?

At a more tactical level, almost everything is a candidate for change or adaptation. Think about:

• Getting (even) more customer-focused. Now is the time to listen to customer needs by convening (virtually) your CABs or just doing a weekly listening tour inviting customers to speak with you and share what is happening in their businesses. Ideas for products and revenues always emerge from these kinds of conversations.
• Re-forecasting. Things have already changed, and you need to get started re-forecasting leads, opportunities, and revenues to be able to make adjustments. Think about areas of decline and those that might be growing or could grow.
• Update your messaging. If you are making any changes to offerings or products, you’ll certainly want to update your messaging. But, this is also a great time to turn down the volume on sales language and adapt your messaging to be more educational and supportive and less deal-oriented.
• Change your offerings. This is an ideal moment to introduce promotions or pricing that earn long term loyalty by actually helping your customers. What do they really need? What can you do for them that no other company or your competitors cannot?
• Retool for virtual selling. Enable your sales teams and revise your outreach to replace in-person interactions in your marketing and sales successfully.
• Shift to inbound. Task inbound marketing with more of the lead load by enhancing SEO, social, and content to align with educational and updated offer messaging.

While investors may be less optimistic and are focused on reducing spend and surviving, this is an excellent moment for B2B marketers to shine by adapting well to the current realities, being the voice of the customer, and delivering value to the executive, sales, and product teams.

Thank you to my co-sponsor Jill Richards and to all of our friends and colleagues who have shared their time and ideas to support our B2B marketing community.

Jill & Johannes

The post B2B Marketer’s Survival Guide: Adapting to a Changed Landscape appeared first on Premonio.

Of course, being at that knee is associated with a marked increase in the public’s concern for everyone’s safety compared to a week or two ago. However, there continues to be little in the way of practical and fact-based guidance and information for marketing professionals to come up with concrete measures that probably should be undertaken now.

In last week’s blog (click here), I published a compendium of factual information sources. I suggested a) separating accurate reporting of the current public health crisis from media and political attention, and b) 8 practical planning steps for an organization. Many of those planning assumptions rest on the macroeconomic outlook, which in turn depends on an estimate of how much bigger the epidemic will become – or public perceptions of it as that also drives the economy.

How bad will it get?

In that vein of trying to publish rational, fact-based analysis, in the last section of this blog is my prediction of where we stand right now. It paints a milder picture. My review below suggests that the reproduction number (i.e., the number of new people infected by one infected person) in the US has already dropped from a high of 7 or 8 to now almost 2. If this trend continues, it would suggest we’ll be hitting the inflection point of when the epidemic’s growth will begin to decelerate reasonably soon.

One would thus hope for a moderate economic disruption, but don’t forget the economic effects of sensationalizing and fear. A lot of what companies do now depends on their expectations of how bad the economy will get. Depending on that assessment, companies then need to re-forecast Q2 and the rest of the year accordingly. So, the rest of this blog deals with some practical steps marketing and sales leaders can take to accomplish this re-forecasting quickly, as well as with an illustration of how an analyst could assess the epidemic’s likely ultimate size in the US.

A quick, practical approach to re-forecasting 2020 B2B bookings and pipeline

Here is a step-by-step process:

Marketing – Create a top-down booking and pipeline forecast:

1. Take your monthly or quarterly pipeline forecasts for 2020 and make percentage allocations to distribute them into four new, post-COVID-10 buckets:
   1. % of quarterly bookings with no change, i.e., they stay as is
   2. % price reduction needed, i.e., how much that portion of the pipeline is reduced
   3. Reduce closure rates by a %age, either by delaying lead and sales velocities to model later close dates or canceling deals altogether
2. Create high, medium, low estimates of the above, estimated % changes
   1. E.g., segment these four buckets by vertical and grow the forecasts for likely coronavirus gainers (e.g., healthcare, bidets, select tech sectors, etc.) and reduce the ones for losing verticals (e.g., hospitality, some manufacturing, travel, etc.)
3. That results in a new, top-down pipeline and bookings forecast for 2020

Sales – Create a matching, bottom-up forecast for at least the next two quarters:

1. Estimate which deals are at risk of delay, price reduction, and cancellation
2. Create four new columns next to the expected bookings for each deal, i.e., no change, price drop, delay, or cancel
3. Enter the deal amount into one of those columns.
4. And then add up the new totals for each of the four columns to create a unique, bottom-up forecast.

Compare and align bottom-up with top-down forecasts.

1. It is essential to calibrate both approaches against each other because the sales team may have an incentive to forecast low to create a safety cushion. While marketing has an incentive to forecast high to avoid the pressure of having to dramatically ramp up pipeline production to make up for anticipated reductions
2. After calibrating the two approaches against each other, it will be useful to make high, medium and low estimates of the resulting, combined forecasts to model different economic outlook assumptions (see above and bottom)

Plan and model compensatory measures to make up for likely forecast reductions:

1. Identify sales reps and territories that are most likely going to lose or delay sales and focus lead generation on them.
2. Shift marketing spend from events-based lead generation to digital sources (i.e., SEM, social media campaigns, email marketing) and teleselling
3. Ramp up content production, and in particular thought leadership content that is not self-serving in this crisis; people remember who helped them when times were tough

Rerun your forecast/revenue model and implement spend shifts

1. Model in all anticipated changes described above
2. Then layer in the budget shift to/from sales from/to marketing
3. And budget shifts within marketing (e.g., from events to digital)

Handoff to the finance department so they can rerun their company cashflow model and growth projections

As already said, the extent to which you’ll use an approach like the one outlined above to modify your forecast down (or up?) will depend on your assessment of the macroeconomic outlook. This, in turn, should be correlated with the extent of the ultimately resulting epidemic.

However, this raises an interesting dilemma: If you listen to some media coverage and watch stock markets plunge, the world economy may well crater, and we should all prepare for a recession. Which would suggest cutting your forecast to the bone (indeed, one of my pro-bono client’s head of sales just proposed a 90% cut; talk about cya). However, with that comes to the inevitable budget cuts or, worse, layoffs. Once those are executed, it will take months to turn the demand generation machine back on.

Now, what if the epidemic will be milder than it’s hyped up to be (as I’m suggesting in the following section based on China’s precedence and some virus propagation modeling)? If your marketing and sales budgets are cut to the bone, you’d be handing market share to your deeper-pocketed competition if they can hit the ground running faster than you can since they didn’t cut back as deeply.

So, the emotional knee-jerk reaction to the coronavirus of cutting way back risks being a massive over-reaction that would cost you market share. On the other hand, if the economy does indeed falter and you didn’t cut back budgets, you’ll risk making painful losses.

How you square that dilemma all depends on what you think the economic impact will be, and in the sea of contradictory, unclear, and sensationalized information, that’s hard to do. Hence, I’m concluding this post with a description of how I created my estimated outlook of the epidemic’s likely course in the US for the next one or two months as a way to calibrate and ground my thinking in all the noise.

The Estimated Epidemic Spread in the US

Please note that I am not an epidemiologist nor otherwise an expert of pandemics, and I am not a trained medical professional, nor am I trying to render an official prediction here. I am, however, illustrating a reasonably straightforward process a trained analyst could go through to form his/her own opinion, which is needed right now. Your management or board will want your advice on where this is all headed because they need to decide how to adjust the 2020 budgets and growth expectations. This blog aims at helping with the formulation of a well-reasoned response that can be replicated. Vs. Simply reacting from the gut or, worse, from a place of fear.

With that said, my estimation of the pandemic in the US suggests that the inferred reproduction rates underlying the daily infection statistics do not paint a doomsday scenario. I had used the same model with the Chinese infection statistics back in January and February, which predicted a stabilizing of their crisis by the end of March. This is indeed what has been happening there since late February.

Now, applying the same model to the current US data (as of March 15, 2020) suggests that the number of additional patients that a new patient infects has dropped from initially almost 8 to now near 2 (this number is called the “reproduction number” or R₀; for an explanation refer to this Wikipedia link). Once R₀ drops below 1, then more patients exit the infected pool than enter it and the epidemic will begin to die out. Here is the graph of my estimated R₀ for the US for the first 15 days in March:

In China, the similarly estimated R₀ had dropped below two by the end of January when about 8K to 10K patients were infected, and the epidemic peaked out a month later at 81K infected. I.e., an 8X to 10X multiple compared to the number of infected when R₀ had reached 2 for the first time.

Now, assuming that the voluntary quarantining in the US works as well as the government-imposed quarantine worked in China (in either method, the virus runs out of other people to infect), and assuming that similar social contact rates and discipline apply, this would suggest that the US’ total patient count would peak at between 30K and 40K infected (i.e., 8X to 10X over the 3,800 on March 15).

March 27, 2020 Update

Since we published the above estimate, it has become apparent that the number of undiagnosed cases was much more significant than had been published. With an acceleration of the growth of reported infections having additionally come from wider spread testing, not just the underlying spread of the epidemic. You can see the resulting update to the US’ reproduction rate estimate R₀ in the new graphic below.

There is good news and bad news: The good news is that R₀ is falling again in the US (of course, subject to the availability of accurate infection data), and is now again around 1.5. Still, an R₀ of 1.0 or below needs to be reached for the epidemic’s growth to be reversed. The bad news is that two weeks since the last estimate went by without consistently implementing the needed quarantining measures, and between the higher discovery rate due to wider spread testing now and the lack of social distancing (i.e. continued travel, the Miami beach episode, etc.), the virus continued its course mostly unperturbed.

Thus we now have over 100K infected, and assuming by now infection data is accurate and quarantining measures hold consistently (two big ifs, admittedly), and applying the above 8X multiple again would now suggest that the number of infected people in the US should peak out at around 800,000 people.

In these two weeks, the cost of inaction and indecision is these 760K people increase in the size of the ultimately infected population; that’s unfortunately how epidemics work. Second, it has made a damaging economic impact a self-fulfilling prophecy. Dealing with 40K infected and a roughly 4 to 6-week quarantine would have been one problem, coping with 800K+ infected, unprecedented layoffs, and economic contraction is now another. Funny what a difference two weeks make ?

Here is my most current R₀ estimate:

Now, this model’s purpose is to illustrate a simple estimation technique that a marketing forecaster can run to visualize R₀, a critical leading indicator that one should watch if one wants to have a sense of where the epidemic is trending. This model is not an official forecast.

However, if you are interested in a serious simulation of the epidemic, a MUST WATCH for anyone seeking to understand how COVID-19 spreads and what to do to minimize its impact is Grant Sanderson’s “3blue1brown” (deserves a huge Shout-Out). He has produced THE most coherent, yet easy to grasp video of how this epidemic grows and how to contain it. It’s 23 well narrated minutes and can be found here (link).

Important Caveats

1. As mentioned, this is not an official prediction; it is merely my modeling, which only has predicted well once thus far (China). I am not guaranteeing this outcome, and I instead want to illustrate a rational estimation process a business planner could go through.
2. Given the irrationality in the market right now as no one has a good feeling for how big the pandemic will get, the markets’ fears may well make a recession a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can’t model that.
3. And, most importantly, this more optimistic picture should not be taken as a suggestion to not self-quarantine; quite the opposite: The only way to keep R₀ low enough is precisely for everyone to stay home; probably for about the next four weeks if the Chinese experience is any guide (note that four weeks also is roughly the sum of the incubation period plus the probable outer limit of the time one is sick with coronavirus, i.e. it is the outer limit of the time an infected person can pass on the virus).
4. Last, this estimation is only as good as the officially available data. If the hidden number of infections in the US is much higher than what is being reported, the ultimate size of the epidemic would have to be adjusted upward accordingly, but not its principal behavior and timing if the self-quarantining holds.

So, what’s your choice: Hoist more sails, stay your current course, or turn into port?

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