But if you’re the CEO of a small to medium-sized tech startup, your true objective is to minimize your time to future revenue – and last quarter’s metrics alone aren’t going to get you there. Sure, historical performance can offer lessons in how to optimize going forward – but, for the most part, the past is the past, especially if the underlying data is insufficient or of low quality. The key to faster and greater revenue lies not in recapping last quarter but in accurately forecasting achievable performance for the rest of the year. That’s what the Board wants. That’s how you identify the resources necessary to hit your number. That’s how you win.

And what tools do today’s CEOs use for their forward-looking objectives? Little more than homegrown spreadsheets full of numbers, distributed across various computers in their companies. Between the CFO’s company model, the CRO’s bottom-up forecast or quota capacity model, the CMO’s marketing metrics, Revenue Operations’ pipeline calculations, and the CEO’s own model, there often are five or more spreadsheets … that don’t talk to each other and that often are based on different assumptions that can’t model the complexities of a company’s growth. And trying to cascade a coordinated set of changes through these disconnected spreadsheets takes days or weeks to ensure everyone is in sync – if ever.

It’s long past time to shift from backward-facing marketing analytics tools or simple, disconnected spreadsheets to forward-looking “Growth ArchitectingTM”. This means investing in planning tools and approaches built to produce reliable company growth plans, enabling CEOs and CROs to actually succeed in their jobs without having to report to the board at the end of the quarter being on the defensive (for a deeper analysis of these risks, see our recent blog, “Are you missing your number or is someone over-forecasting?”). By making these shifts, C-level leaders can accomplish two things:

• Faster time to revenue – They’ll have the data-driven plan they need to start producing revenue sooner.

• A steeper ramp – Not only will the money come in faster, there will be more and more of it as time goes on.

Legacy tools aren’t actually that bad…are they?

We get it: Change doesn’t always come easy in business – especially when you’re locked into a subscription deal with a SaaS vendor for the next seven months. But the longer CEOs put their forecasts in the hands of legacy tools that haven’t changed with the times, the more they – not to mention their investors – are going to be disappointed. 

Here’s where existing tools fall short.

Marketing analytics

Again, marketing analytics tools are great for recapping the past (if the date they contain is accurate and timely). But the only forward-looking value-add they provide is trial and error – if your data shows that you fell short last quarter, for example, then you know to try something different next time. 

By the time you can process these trial-and-error insights and turn them into an improvement plan, however, it’s too late to actually yield any benefits in a preventive manner – next quarter is already off to the races. No tech CEO with a hungry board of investors has time for that. 

Homegrown spreadsheets

What can tactfully be said about attempts to use spreadsheets, a product category first released in the 1980s, to make accurate sales forecasts in 2022? Homegrown, disconnected spreadsheets lack the functionality to seamlessly optimize for different budgets and other key variables. They don’t exactly make it easy to map out detailed, upstream KPIs. Owing to these factors and others, they’re prone to overprediction, meaning more missed goals, more uncomfortable conversations, and more lost jobs. 

Faster and steeper revenue production with Growth Architecting

The core difference between Growth Architecting technology and legacy systems comes down to this: Growth Architecting tools are actually designed for accurately planning growth within a modern annual-recurring-revenue business model. These tools are forward-looking rather than backward-looking, and they don’t require you to try to bend a simple – and, let’s be honest, ancient – spreadsheet tool to your specific, high-stakes needs. They’re built upon the reality that tech executives need to be able to define lead flows, account for key variables, and make data-supported adjustments on the fly if they hope to set a realistic revenue goal and actually hit it. 

Shifting to Growth Architecting means investing in tools and resources to level-up your revenue planning – and your successful revenue attainment. It means accelerating your time to revenue through data-driven decision making, clearer direction, and faster buy-in from key stakeholders. It means steepening the upward curve of your closed-won sales chart by optimizing your budgets, eliminating lead starving, and reducing waste. Once these pieces are in place, you’ll be in a position to stroll into your next board meeting not on the defensive, but with a confident smile on your face. 

Learn more about growth architecting in our related blogs.

The post Path to Faster Revenue Attainment – And Steeper Revenue Ramps 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.

How did we get here? Why have one-year revenue forecasts proved as unreliable as one-week weather forecasts? And what can companies do to be more confident in their ability to hit their numbers?

When a sales team falls short of its quota goal, the common reflex is to assign the blame to the sales reps and their managers. But in our experience, the underlying problem just as often turns out to be overly optimistic, imprecisely formulated revenue growth forecasts.

With this in mind, it’s important for companies experiencing quota shortfalls to consider a fundamental question:

Is your team underperforming, or is someone over-forecasting?

This report will drill down into this question, diagnose some outdated norms that have led to such high rates of quota shortfalls, and show how teams can create a roadmap to consistent alignment between forecasted revenue and actual revenue using a process we call Growth Architecting^TM. This will empower teams to:

• Improve relations among C-Suite leaders, especially sales and marketing
• Keep the company in good standing with the board
• Validate their growth strategy without spending three or four quarters on trial and error – leading to accelerated time-to-revenue.

Underperforming vs. Over-Forecasting: A Case Study 

A good place to start exploring this issue is with a recent case involving an information security software company. When the company’s CEO announced the coming year’s forecast in Q4, the Revenue Operations teams took it at face value. The CRO mapped out a plan, and everyone was off to the races.

The Sales and Marketing teams were able to deliver expected growth numbers quarter after quarter – but they were one quarter delayed compared to the CEOs original Q4 forecast – and by the end of the year, they had fallen short of the CEO’s projection. Instead of rewarding the best quarter-to-quarter revenue growth the company had experienced in its history, despite the one quarter delay, finger-pointing ensued as the board looked for someone upon whom to hang the failure. In this case, that person ended up not the CEO but the Head of Sales. That VP lost their job – only to be replaced by someone far less competent, who led the team head-first into a series of losing years before being let go later, as well. When all was said and done, the company had gone through multiple executives, experienced turnover in the sales and marketing ranks due to a culture that had become unpleasantly political and failed to create any real value for the investors: Seven years later they were sold at a lower valuation than at the time when the CEO had made that original, fateful forecast.

As for the original VP of Sales and other key members of the Sales and Marketing team? They went on to have stellar careers, successfully scaling multiple startups. This suggests quite clearly that the problem isn’t always poor leadership or performance in the Sales and Marketing teams – more often than one might think, it can also be a case of unrealistic forecasting.

Why Forecasts and Actuals Get Disconnected

The case study above begs the question: What if the CEO had been able to see from the outset, using scientific and data-driven insights, that the projection was unrealistic – and understand the changes necessary to make it feasible?

Growth forecasting makes this possible – and it starts with understanding why over-forecasting occurs in the first place. As we survey common practices today, certain aging norms emerge as primary drivers of the problem:

1) Disconnect between decision makers and executors

The revenue figure that the CEO demands typically comes from a board of investors with one goal in mind: to achieve a corporate valuation that will yield large payouts. The growth pattern seen as the best way to achieve this goal might look something like this:

• Year 1: 3X revenue growth
• Year 2: 3X revenue growth
• Year 3: 2X revenue growth
• Year 4: 2X revenue growth

By Year 5, the common idea is to have created enough value to get acquired or go public.

The problem? These edicts delivered from on high are often completely divorced from realities on the ground, where CEOs or CROs, as well as other sales and marketing leaders, struggle to define a path to hitting their board’s revenue projections – or to determine whether such a path even exists with the resources at their disposal. Making these goals feasible requires an interplay between those making the revenue forecast and those responsible for hitting it, whereby leaders on the ground can either:

• Push back: Convey to the board, using data, what revenue attainment is actually feasible given the resources they have.
• Prescribe: Show what resources and practices will be necessary to hit the number that has been assigned.

Without the will or means to pursue a negotiation like this, CROs have little choice but to embrace a revenue goal that they may well lack the means to achieve, thereby setting up their CEO, their team, and themselves for a painful end of the year.

2) Failure to incorporate complexity

If hitting a projection were merely a matter of mapping out the number of leads and the conversion rate necessary for a team to hit their number, it would be easy. Rev-Ops leaders could estimate the number of reps they’d need, the CRO could toss some funding to the Marketing team to expand demand gen activities as needed, and everyone would watch the money come in.

Let’s look at an example of what such a calculation might look like. Say, the CEO forecast closed-won revenue for the year at $15 million – a not-atypical projection for a startup just beginning to stand on its own two feet. If the average deal size expected for the year – based on pricing and historical performance – were $30,000, then the Sales team would need to close 500 deals, either in new bookings or renewals. If we imagine they planned for a lead conversion rate of, say, 1 in 15 (6.7%), the team would need to generate 7,500 leads for the year.

• CEO annual forecast
  • $15 million
• Simple calculation
  • Average deal size: $30,000
  • Bookings needed: 500
  • Lead conversion rate: 1 in 15, or 6.7%
  • Leads needed: 7,500

In reality, however, things aren’t so simple. To truly understand what it would take to hit $15 million – or if that number is even feasible – the CEO and CRO would have to incorporate a lot more complexity. That simple calculation would be blown up by a plethora of variables, including, but not limited to:

• Conversion rates

A lot happens between “new lead” and “closed-won.” Leads at different stages of the sales cycle convert at different rates. How does the MQL-to-SQL conversion rate compare to SQL-to-SQO? What about SQO-to-closed-won? Conversion rates also vary by lead source, whether they belong to a cold call to an executive, an inbound demo request through the website, or something in between.

• Sales cycle

Selling a small deal to a startup flush with VC cash might take no more than two or three weeks. Selling half a million dollars to a Fortune 500 account, on the other hand, may take months of pitching, proposal writing, technical reviews, wining and dining, and negotiating. Depending on the underlying sales velocity, a deal that’s essential to hitting your revenue goal this year might not actually close until next year.

• Ramp times

If hitting a goal requires hiring new sales reps, accounting for variations in ramp time is paramount. Based on factors like industry experience and seniority, it typically takes between three and six months for a rep to be fully ramped. Hiring a rep today doesn’t necessarily mean their close rate will be tracking with a simple spreadsheet forecast by tomorrow.

Once all variables are accounted for, what was once a simple calculation might now include a lot of unknowns, and the resulting revenue growth looks something like this:

And drilling into first touch revenue contribution by lead source looks something like this:

The issue isn’t that CEOs, CROs, and sales leaders aren’t aware of all these factors. It’s that they have neither the time nor the tools or resources to incorporate them into their forecasting model and game plan, leaving them no choice but to rely on simple models – typically using ordinary spreadsheets that aren’t well-equipped or dynamic enough to handle the necessary complexity – and fall short as a result.

How to Use Growth Architecting to Make Things Right 

Aligning forecast revenue with actual revenue requires relying on an often incomplete or imperfect body of data. It requires using detailed calculations to either push back against an unfeasible revenue forecast or prescribe the changes necessary to make it feasible. It requires the flexibility to adapt when unexpected challenges emerge along your way to your goal. Growth architecting, at its core, is a methodology that incorporates all these measures.

Here are the key steps to successful growth architecting.

1) Define an integrated, detailed lead flow

As you map out your lead flow, consider the following questions:

• What lead sources will we need to tap to hit our goal, and that can be shown to target the precise segments or ICPs that we want to engage?
• What minimum lead conversion rates will we need to maintain, and how will they differ for each source?
• Given this information, and the resources at our disposal, how many leads will we need each source to deliver?
• What will the average deal size need to be?
• What additional budget and resources will we need to achieve all of this?

If, after answering these questions, the numbers look unfeasible, then either push back on the forecast or use the data to map out the necessary increases in, and reallocation of, resources and budget.

Keep in mind that when it comes to lead sources, there’s often an inverse relationship between volume and conversion rate. For example, an email campaign can pull in a healthy volume of content engagement-based leads – but few if any of them are likely to convert to opportunities; meanwhile, BDR prospecting or inbound web leads may pull in a much lower volume of leads, but at a higher conversion rate.

2) Account for key variables

Certain aspects of your calculations will involve a range rather than a fixed number. To keep forecast revenue aligned with actual revenue, teams need to account for variations in:

• Sales velocities

If your customer profile includes companies of all sizes, you’re likely to see a wide variety of sales velocities. A lead at a small company will probably close after a relatively short sales cycle – pulling in that lead near the end of the quarter or year is probably safe. But if your plan includes enterprise leads, you may need to either increase the volume, or create a mechanism for pulling them in before the end of Q3, to account for a sales cycle that often stretches for months at that level.

• Ramp time

Just as different leads take different lengths of time to convert, some sales reps ramp up more quickly than others. If and when you enter negotiations for more resources, keep in mind that getting new reps onto your payroll does not, by itself, get you to your goal. You have to make sure they’ll be ready to start closing early enough to produce the revenue you need from them.

3) Check in periodically

After you map out, in detail, what it will take to get to the revenue you need, it’s time to switch from planning to monitoring. Check in regularly to see how you’re tracking against your goals and determine what optimizations, if any, you need to make. We suggest starting at bi-weekly or monthly intervals, as this will allow for tidy recaps of the beginning, middle, and end of each quarter.

In some ways, this is nothing new. But while most teams today check in on their progress toward goal during their weekly or monthly syncs, these check-ins are often treated as informational, with little to no talk of optimization when the data reveals a shortfall. And quite often there is no line of sight between raw lead sources – say, search engine ads or BDR cold-calling – and their resulting contributions to closed-won bookings. This needs to change.

Beyond Revenue: The Fallout from Inaccurate Revenue Projections

Everyone has an interest in making sure forecasts and actual revenues line up. The board wants a return on their investment. The CEO, by committing to a number, is laying their reputation on the line, and therefore wants confirmation that that number is achievable. The CRO wants assurance that the available resources and budget are commensurate with the revenue forecast, so they’re not walking into a buzzsaw. The CMO, meanwhile, wants a clear roadmap for bringing in the necessary quantity and quality of leads, so that a miss can’t be pinned on their demand generation engine.

The true tragedy of missed forecasts is that even though all these leaders share the same goal, the reflexive instinct for self-preservation often leads to finger pointing and strained relations instead of a problem-solving attitude. This creates more harm than just lost dollars and cents:

• C-Suite relations can sour

Everyone in the C-Suite needs to be on the same side if the company is to succeed. Infighting will only stymie progress. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what often happens when a company misses its number and finger-pointing ensues.

• Careers can suffer

As the case study with the infosec company makes clear, a missed number and the resulting finger-pointing can have a serious impact not just on the health of the company, but on individual careers. People lose their jobs. What would otherwise be career-long, mutually beneficial professional relationships are strained and broken. Especially with the heads of sales, their careers end up having to take unexpected turns – even though the problem wasn’t them missing their number, but rather that their “number” came from an unrealistic, poorly-architected company financial forecast that didn’t take feasibility into account.

• The optics are unsavory

Just as bad as these events themselves is the fact that all of it is playing out in front of an audience. Leaders bickering as revenue falls short paints a picture of instability and incompetence, causing customers to lose faith – which, of course, further imperils future revenue generation. Never mind the loss of credibility and faith with the employees.

Conclusion

Growth architecting asks a lot of C-Suite leaders. It demands a level of meticulousness and detail in revenue forecasting that busy leaders have historically found impractical. It also demands a culture change, whereby leaders and their teams exchange finger-pointing for problem solving and a stronger sense of shared purpose, even in times of trouble.

This culture change comes from committing to a data-driven approach to pipeline management. In regular intervals – every two to four weeks is a good place to start – all revenue generating teams should convene to review what worked and what didn’t, what achieved the KPI goals and what fell short. It takes people a while to pursue their work this way, both dealing with the potential discomfort of having all one’s numbers out in the open and having to discuss other people’s ideas if their area happens to be the one not hitting KPIs.

But it also provides the tools to either push back on unrealistic forecasts or prescribe the means to make them realistic. Having a truly data-driven pipeline will make leaders more confident – in their revenue projections, in their negotiations with the board, and in the overall success of the company. Then they won’t have to consider whether their Rev-Ops team is underperforming, or the CEO is over-forecasting – because the answer will be neither.

The post Are you missing your number or is someone over-forecasting? 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.

As a follow on to MarqetU’s recent blogs on low-cost lead generation approaches for B2B companies to re-start their sales pipelines, MarqetU’s CEO Johannes Hoech recorded this 7 minute instructional video below on how to use LinkedIn Navigator and 4 companion extensions to generate highly targeted leads.

The 4 extensions useful for leveraging LinkedIn Navigator’s wealth of high quality contact information featured Johannes’ video are Dux-Soup, LinkMatch, Sharetivity, and CrystalKnows. We have launched several new demand generation efforts using paractical, high-velocity strategies such these since the pandemic hit in March 2020 with good success and on rapid timelines.

These two graphics show a recent B2B lead generation effort where we hit the goals set by the company’s growth architecture within a few weeks of launch:

     Figure 1 – H2 2020 New Growth Architecture                                        Figure 2 – H2 2020 Lead Generation Goal Attainment

If you missed the two prior MarqetU blogs about low-cost lead generation approaches, here they are:

• “Post-COVID Growth: Do more with less – Automate digital marketing with a simple, low $ MarTech stack” (Link)
• “Telling your story via video: How to easily create, edit, and promote native video content on LinkedIn” (Link)

Here is the 7-minute video:

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 Grow more with less budget – Low $ demand gen with LinkedIn tools 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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