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.

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.

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/

The post The end-to-end DIY video cookbook 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.

Welcome back to our newsletter. In a recent online survey, we asked two simple questions of B2B sales and marketing professionals: 1) Since Covid-19 hit, have your lead goals gone up or down, and 2) have your budgets gone up or down?

The results of that survey are shown in the featured graphic at the top of this blog.

Chances are your situation is the same. How do you produce more with less, esp. since it has become more challenging to convince prospects to part with their money? So, today’s issue highlights recent, pragmatic articles for practitioners that focus on simple, quick-to-turn-on approaches for B2B marketers to build more pipeline.

Practical tools and tips for B2B marketers to generate leads asap:

• Low-cost marketing stacks to maximize productivity:
  • “Automating digital marketing with a simple, low $ MarTech stack” – Link
  • “How to HubSpot If You Have Little Money” – Link
  • 40 of the Best Sales Prospecting Tools for 2021 – Link

• Using LinkedIn for B2B lead generation:
  • Low $ demand generation with practical LinkedIn tools: Link
  • Publish native video on LinkedIn:
    • “6 High Performing Video Content Options for LinkedIn” – Link
    • “Telling your story via video” on LinkedIn – Link
    • “How to Make Viral Videos for LinkedIn in 15 Minutes” – Link

• LinkedIn Advertising:
  • “MetricTheory – THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO LINKEDIN ADVERTISING” – Link

UPCOMING EVENTS AND WEBINARS

• Now April 14 -15, 2021: Topo Summit 2020”; Register here

Thank you for reading our Newsletter. You can forward this link to others to subscribe.

We wish you a safe and productive month; thank you,

Krishnan Natarajan
B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn
krishnan.natarajan@cybersecurity-insiders.com

The post B2B Tech Marketing Community Weekly Newsletter: Sept 12, 2020 appeared first on Premonio.

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.

The post Telling your story via video: How to easily create, edit, and promote native video content on LinkedIn appeared first on Premonio.