Sales & Marketing Collaboration
Marketing is undergoing some of the most profound changes it has seen in the past two decades. These transformative shifts impact the marketing team and spill over into the Sales team. Regrettably, many B2B companies are still clinging to outdated practices, resisting or finding it difficult to adapt to these changes. This resistance to change could significantly contribute to the mounting pressures being felt by Marketing.
The old way of Sales and Marketing collaboration:
Get input for targeting in paid campaigns
Handover as many leads as possible
Create pretty collateral
The new way:
1. Shared Goals
Sales and Marketing are two sides of the same coin, so it only makes sense that these two teams have shared goals in order to achieve success. Whether the goals are to generate a net new pipeline, renew contracts, accelerate the pipeline, or go upmarket, these teams need to work hand-in-glove.
2. Aligned Metrics
Then, of course, with the shared goals, the KPIs need to reflect on meeting those targets. Beware of metrics based on a Marketing to Sales hand-off of leads - it's a trap you want to avoid.
Instead, look for leading indicators to determine whether you're making progress toward meeting your goals.
3. Shared account qualification
It can be incredibly tempting to cast as wide a net as possible, but success is achieved by having a laser-sharp focus for campaigns and goals. Together, agree on the firmographics, technographics, and custom qualification criteria for targeting and list building.
4. Shared account scorecard
Taking account qualification a step further, take the time to agree on your prioritization criteria, such as revenue potential, relationship, product-need evidence, and vendor awareness.
5. Buying committee structure
Align the typical roles of champions, decision-makers, influencers, and blockers with their goals, needs, and pain points. This will allow you to build robust sequences, ad targeting, content creation, etc.
6. Joint account prioritization and planning process
Agree on the primary sources of account insights, intent, and engagement data, who is responsible for these sources, and how often they should be checked. Then, regular meetings should be set up to review the pipeline and prioritize newly identified accounts. Also, the insights and next steps for accounts currently in the active focus or pipeline should be reviewed.
7. Buying triggers and jobs to be done
B2B buyers don't buy because they saw an ad or an SDR email or received the fifth nurture email. They buy because their business priorities shift to a high-priority challenge they cannot afford anymore. Analyze and agree on":
- The buying triggers and the jobs to be done by your best customers, especially those with whom you have a competitive advantage
- Signals that can help you map clusters of accounts with the same triggers and JTBDs
- Content, messaging, and activities to market to these clusters
8. Joint programs
Define joint programs by defining specific sales and marketing activities to:
- Generate awareness in target accounts
- Nurture and move forward accounts that are early in the buying journey
- Collect key insights about target accounts
- Accelerate opportunity creation with highly engaged accounts
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Fixing marketing and sales collaboration is not just a challenge but also one of the most significant opportunities for 2024. With the right strategy, we can overcome the hurdles and achieve remarkable success.
👨🎓 Lessons Learned
Mistakes and failures are a natural part of marketing; it comes with the job.
We've all heard "Fail fast" or "Failing to plan is planning to fail." I know there are lots of opinions on the matter.
Regardless of your approach to experimentation and failure, what you do with the information learned matters.
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One of my biggest mistakes happened a few years ago. Chasing after some sweet marketing development funds, I rushed through a campaign to introduce the company to a new audience. In a rush to meet a deadline, I cut the campaign down to two mediums. Essentially putting all my eggs into one basket.
Worse yet, the campaign just focused on pain points. There was no storytelling or humanizing of the company—just bland pain points meant to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.
It fell flat.
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Remember, business is human. Tell a story and be relatable. Show an interest in understanding your prospect's business. It goes a long way to being a better marketer and hitting your goals.
Beware of short deadlines and the compromises they ask of you. Ask yourself if you can do everything you know you should do for the campaign to succeed. People consume information differently: video, short text, long text, audio, self-discovery, word-of-mouth, etc, so prepare your story in as many formats as possible to be heard.
Let's get off the MQL rollercoaster
It seems obvious; you want to skyrocket your customer base and supercharge your revenue. But here's the thing: an over-reliance on Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) can stunt your growth. It's time to break free from this cycle and explore alternative strategies to take your customer acquisition game to the next level.
So, how can you achieve this lofty goal? Simple. Follow these steps:
Step 1: Develop a compelling brand story 📖
Customers are drawn to captivating stories that resonate with their values and needs. Craft a brand narrative that engages and inspires your target audience. Bring your company's mission, uniqueness, and value proposition to life. Show them why you're the perfect fit for their needs. Remember, B2B is still human-to-human.
Step 2: Leverage the power of referral marketing 👥
Your existing customers are your biggest champions. Capitalize on their loyalty. Encourage and reward them for referring your products or services to their networks. Word-of-mouth is a powerful driver of customer acquisition, and it's time to harness its potential.
Step 3: Nail your customer experience journey 🛒
Want to win over customers and keep them coming back? Deliver an exceptional end-to-end experience. From the moment they discover your brand through to purchase and beyond, make every touchpoint memorable. Personalization, responsiveness, and seamless interactions are key.
Step 4: Build strategic partnerships 🤝
Sometimes, collaboration can be the key to growth. Identify partners who align with your brand and have access to your target audience. Together, you can create powerful joint campaigns, share resources, and tap into each other's customer base.
Step 5: Embrace the power of social media 📱
Social media platforms are more than just cat videos and memes. They offer unparalleled opportunities for customer acquisition. Create engaging content, participate in relevant discussions, and leverage the targeting options available to you. Engage and connect with your audience where they spend their time.
By diversifying your customer acquisition strategies beyond MQLs, you'll open up a world of possibilities. Remember, reducing reliance on MQLs doesn't mean abandoning them altogether. It means broadening your approach and exploring untapped avenues for growth.
Looming recessions are tough for marketing teams
But we just pulled off some fantastic results for the quarter with our Google Ads.
- 500% increase in Closed Won!
- 70% decrease in Cost per Closed Won!
I've been so busy in the account, working on keywords, ad copy, bidding strategies, and landing pages, I didn't realize how well the quarter was shaping up.
As much as I'd like to share some secret tricks to this success, it's a lot of hard and iterative work. Here are some of the highlights:
1. Used Opteo as an AI assistant to flag any number of issues, big and small
2. Set up ClickCease to deal with all the fraud and bot traffic. Worth every penny!
3. Jumped into SEMrush and studied competitors' strategies. It illuminated some keyword groups we didn't previously have in the account.
4. Spent time listening to Gong calls and talking with the Sales team to glean the keywords our prospects and customers use about Resolve.
5. Put to work just about every ad extension (now called Assets) Google has to offer: images, site links, company name, logo, and callout.
6. Refined the ad copy. With Responsive Search Ads, testing ad copy as before feels impossible. So I focused on getting the Ad Score to at least Good and updating the copy with any lessons learned from landing page tests and Sales conversations.
7. Under Keywords, I checked out the "Search terms" that triggered my ads, sorted by CPC, and excluded anything irrelevant.
8. Reduced the use of 'broad match' keywords, preferring phrase match.
9. About every three months, I went through all the campaigns and pruned any keywords that had yet to result in conversions for at least the last six months. I'd also hunt for new keywords to add to the mix and test.
10. I also switched to a Maximum Value Conversion bidding strategy - not all leads are the same, so providing Google Ads offline conversion data for the most valuable leads was essential. It took a fair bit of work to get all the conversion data set up and working correctly, but so far, it appears to be working well.
11. Oh, and plenty of copy and layout experiments with the landing pages!
Marketing Tools on my Radar
With the ever growing landscape of marketing technology tools, its hard to keep up, which is why my bookmarks keep filling up with interesting new sites. Here are a few that have gotten my attention, but I haven’t been able to use just yet.
Opteo.com - “the smarter way to manage AdWords accounts.” One of a number of tools designed to help better manage your accounts; adding a layer of machine learning to spot trends and opportunities. Looking forward to trying this out to help simplify Google Ads, which just keeps getting more and more complicated.
Funnel.io - Marketing is all about data, so its a constant endeavor to make sure all your data sources are integrated so you have an accurate picture of whats happening. Funnel is one of the apps that might be a great fit. Datarama is another app I’ve looked into, which was bought by Salesforce.
Oribi.io - Google Analytics provides looks of information, but boy can it be a challenge to derive the correlations and insights you’re looking for. Oribio bills themselves as being able to cut through the clutter and tell you what you need to know.
HyperWrite.ai - Recently a number of new tools have been coming out to help with copywriting, or writing in general. HyperWrite uses AI to assist in your writing; perhaps it can get me through my writer’s block.
Heirlume - A new service for SMBs to get their trademarks registered and secured in a simple process and whole lot cheaper than going through lawyers.
AlliAI - looks like a super easy to install and use AI tool to improve your site’s SEO.
Jarvis - another interesting writing tool focused on writing high converting copy for ads, emails, websites, etc.
Proof - enables marketing teams to personalize websites for each visitor without writing any code. I worked with a tool similar to this when I was managing a website with global acquisition goals; the customization definitely helped conversions.
Let me know if you have any suggested tools to check out.
My favourite Martech tools (so far)
My name is Erik, and I love SaaS marketing tools. Especially if they make my job easier and more effective. I’m going to dive in, in no particular order, on some of the tools I’ve used in the past and I little bit why I think these are worth checking out.
P.S. A quick word regarding all-in-one platforms, like Hubspot. Though these platforms have value, and perhaps most especially for enterprise level decisions, I prefer to stay away from them for most small and mid-size companies. When it comes down to it, these platforms are the sum of their parts, and none of those parts are best-in-class. I much prefer to choose ‘the best’ tool for each part of the marketing stack, and make sure each ties into one another. It takes a bit more research and planning, but with services like Zapier making it possible to connect them all together, the end results are worth it.
autopilot.io - a marketing automation platform. Newish to the scene, this one is listed on top for a few reasons. Most important of all, its easy to use, to the point they’ve developed a visual workflow (with templates and examples) to set up all your marketing automations. I don’t think I’ve seen an easier tool to jump in and get set up. Plus, they use one of my favorite email building tools: Beefree.io (below), and have some really friendly pricing.
instapage - a landing page platform. Depending on your needs, you might have lots of options when it comes to building out landing pages. If you’re running ads, I definitely recommend using something like instapage, so you can better try out different combinations of assets and targeting to make the most of your budget. Instapage makes it really simple to build, test, and optimize those pages.
pipedrive - a sales CRM. There is this long standing notion sales and marketing don’t get along very well. A while, each looks at the business in different frames of time, they need a symbiotic relationship to succeed. I came across pipedrive as I was looking for an easy-to-use CRM that would work well with autopilot, and my sales team. Every sales team has their own way of working and getting things done; pipedrive is a sales CRM worth checking out to see if it fits yours..
Basecamp - project management. If there is one thing every marketing department needs, its organize project management. It’s a huge red-flag if you’re managing projects or teams from your inbox or a spreadsheet. Basecamp does a great job proving the tools and structure needed to stay organized and to keep all of the stakeholders up-to-date with the latest without the need for meetings. Other tools like Asana or Todoist work great too, but Basecamp takes the cake!
Zoom.us - it almost feels silly to include them on this list now, but it wasn’t that long ago they were still up and coming. Word of advice: go through all of the settings and check out whats possible.
Zapier - the holy grail of app connectors. The list of tools a marketer has to choose from is getting bigger and bigger every year; its impossible for every tool on your list to automatically work with every other tool. That’s where Zapier comes in, making it possible to integrate your tools and really make the magic happen.
Moz - an SEO tool. This is a great tool to help you monitor and improve your organic keyword rankings. Know the keywords you rank well for and which need some work. It’s better to own your traffic than rent it.
Calend.ly - scheduling tool. By now we’ve all used a service like this to book appointments; its especially great for marketing to set up introduction calls for the sales team.
Buffer - probably my favorite social media management platform. I find it to be incredibly intuitive and convenient to use, especially when compared to Hootsuite. Works pretty much with all of the major social media platforms, Buffer is a great way to jump in to your social media marketing while staying organized.
Elementor - site builder for Wordpress. Chances are most marketers have managed and/or built the company website on Wordpress. The challenge, at least for me, was working around the limitations and complexities of site templates without getting a developer involved. Generally my rule of thumb: if a developer is required to make something work, its already not working for you. Elementor is basically a WYSIWYG layer on top of Wordpress allowing you to layout your pages akin to laying out a brochure. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you have the hang of it, you can publish some great looking websites.
Adspresso - an ad automation platform. When I ran social media advertising at Fujifilm Canada, this was my secret weapon. Input a variety of content and headlines, plus some tracking inputs, and Adspresso will put together every conceivable combination and split up your budget accordingly. Then its a simple matter of optimizing whats working and what isn’t. And now they’ve added Google Ads to the platform!
Jotform - a form/survey tool. At some point you’re going to be collecting data from someone, but don’t just collect that data in your inbox. It just creates work and eliminates any chance at some pretty valuable automations. I had a lot of “fun” using Jotform for all sorts of data collection points, and connecting the data collected into other systems; automating a lot of work along the way. It works with Zapier and has several of its own integrations.
Later - social media management tool. I’ve used Later specifically for managing Instagram post scheduling and keeping a close watch on my content calendar. Plus it has useful tools for getting user generated content on your feed as well. I know other platforms have started adding support for Instagram, but Later is definitely worth a look.
Dasheroo - a marketing analytics tool. Data data data. It can be a challenge pulling in all your data sources and keeping an eye on any trends; which is especially tough for smaller businesses. I stumbled upon Dasheroo as I was looking for a cheap and easy to use tool to pool and visualize metrics for a company. Easy and simple.
Hubspot - an all-in-one marketing automation platform. Remember how I said I don’t care for all-in-one platforms? Well that’s still true, but Hubspot was also the “first on the scene” of inbound marketing; and they’re still bring tremendous value to the table. Especially with their own marketplace and support for third-party integrations; its easy to integrate Hubspot into your marketing tech stack where it makes sense and other tools where it doesn’t.
BeeFreeIO - and email design tool. I’ve design and coded a lot of emails over the years, and BeeFree is BY FAR the best tool I’ve come across. In the case of autopilot, they’ve built in BeeFree as their email editor; but you can also export your final email from BeeFree and import the file into your email marketing platform.
Feedly - and RSS reader. It’s so important to be staying current with the news pertaining to your industry; not only is a great source of inspiration and new ideas, but it can be a great source of content for your own purposes. Feedly is my choice of news aggregators, which I can then integrate into Buffer for example. So when I’m catching up on the day’s headlines in the evening, its easy to follow up on interesting articles for my social feeds the next day right in Buffer.
Mailchimp - an email & SMB marketing platform. For me, Mailchimp made email marketing accessible for thousands of small businesses without needing a technical background. Though BeeFree has taken over as my preferred email building, Mailchimp is still on of my favorites for managing email lists and sending out content. Plus they’ve been adding a ton of great tools especially for e-commerce sites.
These are just some of the tools I’ve worked with over the last 15 years or so. Next, I’m going to dig through my bookmarks for marketing tools I have yet to try out, but boy am I excited to put them to work.
https://chiefmartec.com/2020/04/marketing-technology-landscape-2020-martech-5000/
"Influencers" Outreaching to Brands are Doing it Wrong
I currently find myself as a sort of gatekeeper for a popular consumer brand; receiving about one to two inquiries from so-called influencers looking to work with us. Most of the time, these messages go something like this: “Hello, I love your products and would love to do something with you. Thank you.” Almost always those type of messages go in the trash. I’m a busy guy so I don’t have the time to track down a reason for why we would want to work with you in return.
On the occasion I click through to check out the social profiles, here is out it goes.
The number of followers the influencer has is just in the four-figures and there is no sign the person uses our product. Deleted.
Four-figure followers, but he or she actually uses the product. However the quality of their posts are too low to bother with. Delete
Four-figure followers, uses the product and the quality go the posts are really great. Honestly this is pretty much a white whale; people consistently posting great content are going to have strong following. However, finding someone in the category can be an opportunity of “getting in on the ground floor” in terms of economically creating interesting content together. Follow-up and see what they might be like to work with.
Six to seven figures of followers, but no sign they use the product. Ugh, they’re just looking for a pay cheque and probably have an agent. I say ‘ugh’ because these types of influencers can just be a pain to work with, however thats not to say they’re not worth it. Working with this level of influencers can be great for a outreach campaign to target customers. Reach out and get an idea of their rates and their process for negotiating; then adding them to a list for future campaign plans.
The messages from influencers pretty much guaranteed to get a response layout he or she is a fan of the brand and uses the products, what kind of engagement they have and specifically what they are interested in working on with the brand. Even better yet, these messages should show example(s) of their work and what we can expect.
I’m working with an influencer right now that did just those things. She demonstrated being an brand fan, showed an example of a video she had already done and requested an interest of making a video for another product in our lineup. The video example was fantastic and although her follower numbers were low, it was obvious her video editing skills were promising. We immediately send of the product she was interested in and waited to see the results. Again, the resulting video was a strong showing; easily worth our investment of time and product.
I can tell you know, she is at the top of our list for future plans and I’m looking forward to seeing the relationship grow and develop. The experience also sets the bar for the messages I receive daily from ‘influencers’ reaching out. Those one-line messages are filling up my trash can.
Ecommerce Lessons Learned Building Thresherman.ca
Build an audience before launch.
This one was really hard for me; how do you get people's attention before you have anything to show off?! But I see new brands doing it all the time, and it makes the world of difference. I think this is one of the situations I needed to have recognized my limitations and found someone with the right skills for the task.
As you're developing your concept; researching the competition and suppliers is front and centre. As you're finding these targets, research how they launched. Or if it's a new brand, study how they're building their audience and learn from it.
Beware of getting caught up in the details, have a story and tell it.
At this stage of the business, everything is a detail and requires attention. But dont get caught up in figuring out how best to manage the accounting for example and lose site of building your brand story. After the first six months I realized I had spent too much time figure out the mechanics of the business and wasn't writing the story. In my mind I have a great brand story to tell, but I had completely lost sight of it in the marketing. Which means my audience has no idea what the brand is about and less of a reason to connect with Thresherman and share the site with their networks.
Keep your costs low to maintain efficiency. Plan to scale up is easier than over building.
Its so easy to jump in the deep-end and go gangbusters buying equipment and supplies to set up the office. I know it can make it feel like you're accomplishing so much, and gosh darn't a real business has a laser printer!
I made the mistake early on committing to a long-term contract that seemed to make a lot of sense at the time. Ultimately however it was way too soon and costly waiting out the terms to cancel.
Don't focus on competitors. Do your own thing.
Ok, its very important to know what your competitors are doing and steal the good ideas. Just don't lose sight of what your own brand. Start out with your own strategy and tactics, and then compare and contrast against your competitor's approach and adjust as needed. I think it can be far too distracting to start by looking at the competition and taking ideas from them to start your plan, you run the convenient risk of just flat out looking like the competition. Being a copy cat means you're already in second place.
I've certainly borrowed ideas from the competitors, and at times I've worried if I copied ideas instead of adapted them to the brand. We're all busy people and taking a short cut might be easy, but in the end the gains won't be as good as they could be.
Podcasts with great ideas and conversations.
Meetups with other entreprenuers is a great way to exchange ideas and think about your business from another person's perspective. Finding a good group may not always be easy or convenient, especially while working a full-time job, so as a good substitute I've found several ecommerce podcasts to do much the same.
Although you're not sharing your businesses specifics with other people for comment and evaluation, you can hear others sharing their startup stories. I've learned to keep my notebook nearby while I'm listening as I'm always jotting down new ideas to investigate later.
Here's my list of recommended podcasts to try out: