Speaker 1: This is the Full Funnel B t B Marketing podcast,
Speaker 1: brought to you by full funnel dot Io. Let's starve.
Speaker 2: Everyone. I'm good to see everybody on our full final
Speaker 2: live new episode. As mentioned last week, we are in
Speaker 2: the middle of writing of our first book about full
Speaker 2: funnel marketing. So while working on the book, we sided
Speaker 2: would be handed just to chef our insights and anyhow.
Speaker 2: We're receiveing always questions about full funnel marketing and how
Speaker 2: the full funnel strategy can be used to try enterprise pipeline.
Speaker 2: So we decided to document our process a few fundamental
Speaker 2: principles that might be helpful, but the fabul dive in.
Speaker 2: I see people are joining us. Let me know, guys
Speaker 2: in the chat where you're all tuning in from. Again,
Speaker 2: I'm broadcasting from Solanny and almost it feels like it's
Speaker 2: summer here in Spain. Let me know where your all
Speaker 2: journey from in the chat and while you are tight
Speaker 2: and again just to mention, you can ask any questions
Speaker 2: in the chat or in the K and A section
Speaker 2: and we are going to cover all of them. Plus
Speaker 2: thanks a lot to everybody who has submitted the questions
Speaker 2: before the before these episode. So I have collected the
Speaker 2: most relevant and the most interesting questions here, so at
Speaker 2: the end of this episode we're going to cover them.
Speaker 2: Hire rather good to CEO, Hello from Ust and good
Speaker 2: to see you, let us know, let us know, guys,
Speaker 2: where you're all coming from, and to just maybe to
Speaker 2: set up our conversation. I don't know if you have
Speaker 2: attended our how to Survive as B two b CMO
Speaker 2: in AI era weather or because that maybe three weeks ago.
Speaker 2: During that webinar, we have shared the stats from AURA
Speaker 2: the state of full funnel marketing research. We've been interviewing
Speaker 2: plus minus one hundred eighty B two b cmos and
Speaker 2: one of the questions that we were asking them what
Speaker 2: are the main challenges you are facing, and the top
Speaker 2: three challenges were sixty five percent told us that the
Speaker 2: biggest challenge is proven the direct impact of marketing on
Speaker 2: pipeline and revenue. The second one was around forty two percent,
Speaker 2: was lack of close collaboration with sales, and the last one,
Speaker 2: the top sol challenge, was lack of long term prem
Speaker 2: programs to create awareness and build trust with the target accounts,
Speaker 2: such a nine percent shared with us. One If you
Speaker 2: look at the three challenges. They are all intertwined. We
Speaker 2: are not trying the let's say long term print campaigns
Speaker 2: that are not creating awareness inside the target accounts. We
Speaker 2: don't have enough engagement and intend data that could be
Speaker 2: used to co create let's say a list of engaged
Speaker 2: accounts together with sales and then run joint programs. You
Speaker 2: can call it account based market and it could be
Speaker 2: even more simpler playbox that you can run together with
Speaker 2: sales to activate the engaged accounts. But the entire point
Speaker 2: is that we don't have enough of that data and hence,
Speaker 2: at the end of the day we end up with
Speaker 2: debate and have let's say, internal wars with sales who
Speaker 2: should get the credit for the opportunity created right, and
Speaker 2: obviously quite often it would be the sales touch, so
Speaker 2: sales would claim that this is the credit or quite
Speaker 2: often there is another argument, especially inside the teams that
Speaker 2: are working in Sillace, that we would anyhow close these deals.
Speaker 2: So marketing is always losing right in this game. The
Speaker 2: entire problem here is that in these companies there is
Speaker 2: a huge pressure revenue creation and pipeline creation, and to
Speaker 2: prove it, most teams they are just focusing either on
Speaker 2: something that is easy to attribute, you know, the old
Speaker 2: school MKL game, or just focusing on the demand capture right,
Speaker 2: something that might help to drive the pipeline. Now, I
Speaker 2: just wanted to share all of these challenges with you
Speaker 2: and to avoid further debates because again we have hosted
Speaker 2: the webinarround this topic. The entire point is how to
Speaker 2: solve this, and as a first solution, I think this
Speaker 2: is a This was the first, let's say, the NAPCIN
Speaker 2: version of full Final marketing framework that I probably created
Speaker 2: ten I think even both ten or twelve years ago
Speaker 2: when I just started as a solo consultant, way before
Speaker 2: the company Full Final data was created. And partially the
Speaker 2: reason was that the challenges that I shared it with you,
Speaker 2: I was here and all the time. They were described
Speaker 2: in different ways, but the point was the same, the
Speaker 2: eternal problems of marketing and sales miss alignment, not being
Speaker 2: able to attribute marketing's impact or showing marketing marketing impact
Speaker 2: on pipeline and revenue creation right, and as a result,
Speaker 2: all the budget and the programs that should be used
Speaker 2: to drive the enterprise pipeline, they were removed from the
Speaker 2: marketing plan and not approved by far.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So this was the solution that I wanted to present
Speaker 2: as a list framework to influence the entire bar journey. Right.
Speaker 2: And as you can see, quite often we think about
Speaker 2: the bar journey in terms of the CRM stages. Right,
Speaker 2: there is like the fastage when we have the call
Speaker 2: and then we have closed one and that's it. But
Speaker 2: we all know that the bar journey starts much earlier.
Speaker 2: Probably again we have shared with you and you have
Speaker 2: seen lots of researchers and bar shot list vendors way
Speaker 2: before the bar journey starts and then stick to the
Speaker 2: short list, et cetera. Right, And another point was this
Speaker 2: framework that we were we wanted to emphasize and highlight
Speaker 2: is that the real relationship and the real path the
Speaker 2: revenue starts after the deal is closed one. Right, Because
Speaker 2: the truth is, lots of companies they are talking about
Speaker 2: expansion and Churm prevention and saying that expansion is a
Speaker 2: new avenue, which is true, but in most companies there
Speaker 2: are simply no processes to drive this. Right. Client success
Speaker 2: often is a passive function, completely disconnected from sales and marketing,
Speaker 2: mostly acting as kind of on demand function. When client
Speaker 2: and the question they're welcome to submit the ticket, and
Speaker 2: this function can help maybe run on some basic on
Speaker 2: board and get that's it. But this function is not
Speaker 2: actively helping clients to shorten the time to value. This
Speaker 2: function is not capturing the insights about the buyer journey,
Speaker 2: and it's not capturing the insights about what's happening in
Speaker 2: this companies that the transfer to the sales and used
Speaker 2: for cross selling and up selling and expansion happens in
Speaker 2: a completely silent way in most cases. Again, I'm just
Speaker 2: sharing our experience what we have absorbed, right, so I'm
Speaker 2: just generalizing a little bit here. What happens in many
Speaker 2: companies is that account executives they just built a list
Speaker 2: of the biggest customers and try, you know, run the
Speaker 2: same typical outbound campaigns to different business units, saying, hey,
Speaker 2: we're working with you guys, let's have a discovery code. Right.
Speaker 2: But what they are completely missing that these other business
Speaker 2: units might be absolutely unaware of your existence. And especially
Speaker 2: if you're selling to big enterprises. Right, let's say you're
Speaker 2: selling to Microsoft. Had the chances that different business units
Speaker 2: idea were a few they are miserable and this framework
Speaker 2: was an idea of how to fix it. This is
Speaker 2: what we started and basically this format framework was the
Speaker 2: representation of the approaches that mean Lot we used to
Speaker 2: structure and plan marketing when we were working for enterprise corporations.
Speaker 2: I was working for Kimber the clerk Lot was working
Speaker 2: for Sonia, So that was like, this is where it
Speaker 2: all started, right, Awareness, demand generation, demand capture, and activation,
Speaker 2: client success expansion all looks as a holistic motion. While
Speaker 2: it sounds good and see it, quite often the companies
Speaker 2: come to us and say, hey, but how can we
Speaker 2: implement it? Were anyhow doing some search, We're doing some
Speaker 2: let's say we're right in case status were created block quantam,
Speaker 2: then sales are running the sales process, et cetera. So
Speaker 2: how all these stages are connected. How the holistic motion
Speaker 2: looks like? So this is and if you can't see it,
Speaker 2: well you can zoom in. This is the first kind
Speaker 2: of diagram that we have created, and basically Lot was
Speaker 2: architect in it. So maybe you can just jump in
Speaker 2: and share the way how we got match out to
Speaker 2: demonstrate how all the stages and full final framework are connected.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Andre, Sorry for being late. I
Speaker 1: didn't know we were actually starting fifteen minutes earlier, in
Speaker 1: fifteen to ten or four. Hello, everybody, So what I
Speaker 1: think we'd like to highlight here is that you kind
Speaker 1: of see three big parts. You see something on the top,
Speaker 1: you see something in the middle, and then you see
Speaker 1: some colorful rectangles at the bottom. So kind of let's
Speaker 1: address them one by one. We group at the top
Speaker 1: brand awareness and demand. Andrew mentioned this already. We know
Speaker 1: that a lot of studies that have been run recently
Speaker 1: show how the B to B buyers nowadays actually select
Speaker 1: the vendors before they start the buying process, or in
Speaker 1: other words, they become aware of those vendors, so when
Speaker 1: they start the buying process actually already start with a
Speaker 1: short list. And if you're basically what that means is
Speaker 1: that if you're only trying to capture the existing demands
Speaker 1: by for example, running kind of cold outreach or just
Speaker 1: for example Google search or other kind of higher intent
Speaker 1: channel trying to capture that, you're usually too late. The
Speaker 1: B to B buyers, especially enterprise bit to be buyers,
Speaker 1: might sometimes take you into their consideration set simply because
Speaker 1: they need to have three five vendors whatever their procurement
Speaker 1: is asking. But they kind of already have their preferred
Speaker 1: vendors short listed. And this is I think one of
Speaker 1: the biggest gaps for a lot of companies is not
Speaker 1: proactively driving this brand awareness. Although there is obviously, like
Speaker 1: a lot of company, you're doing a lot of things,
Speaker 1: a lot of things to create the awareness there. Now,
Speaker 1: another thing to realize is that because these virus are
Speaker 1: not buying when they discover those vendors, it means that
Speaker 1: we can't just be in our brand awareness. We can't
Speaker 1: just be communicating about our product, right, So if they're
Speaker 1: not looking for the product, and usually the product solved
Speaker 1: is situated within some sort of a business process or
Speaker 1: part of the let's say a larger challenge. So let's
Speaker 1: say I'm selling you know, background checking tools for recruitment
Speaker 1: managers in large enterprises. Well, the background checking is part
Speaker 1: of the process of recruitment that I'm in charge of
Speaker 1: or talent acquisition that I'm in charge of, right, but
Speaker 1: it is a small part and it's not something that
Speaker 1: I think about every day. But I do have top
Speaker 1: of mind challenges that I'm thinking involved. So I think
Speaker 1: a lot of companies can already benefit from understanding better
Speaker 1: the top of mind challenges, strategic challenges and priorities of
Speaker 1: the target accounts and driving some of their communication around
Speaker 1: those proder challenges, and of course creating an association between
Speaker 1: the kind of the challenges and the problems and how
Speaker 1: we can improve that. Going back to my example of
Speaker 1: the background checks, well, background checks are usually something that
Speaker 1: is not perceived as a most friendly part of most
Speaker 1: pleasant part of being hired. So it's kind of you
Speaker 1: could you could start thinking about it as part of
Speaker 1: the candidate experience, which is kind of a broader topic,
Speaker 1: you know, candidate experience and having a more frictional ass
Speaker 1: hiring process for example, Well, that is something that the
Speaker 1: talent position manager will be hearing about, and this is
Speaker 1: a broader topic we can talk about and then position
Speaker 1: our solution as one of the solutions in that within
Speaker 1: that challenge. Another point that I wanted to mention here
Speaker 1: when it comes to brand awareness is that we have
Speaker 1: kind of like two schools of thought, like go on
Speaker 1: as many channels as you can, you know, and market
Speaker 1: your product right or kind of double down on whatever
Speaker 1: Google LinkedIn email and go there. I think what you
Speaker 1: see here on the top of this drawing of this
Speaker 1: diagram is that there's different kinds of activities and different
Speaker 1: kinds of channels there. And I think the key here
Speaker 1: that I wanted to mention is that it's really like
Speaker 1: very important to understand where your buyers are hanging out
Speaker 1: and learning and discovering a product like yours. And it's
Speaker 1: not just necessarily the you know, the usual channels that
Speaker 1: we use in our marketing mix, but it is usually
Speaker 1: the part that, for example, the so called dark socials,
Speaker 1: so they might be active on specific communities or following
Speaker 1: some specific people on LinkedIn, tuning into specific podcasts, et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So it's important to consider that and understand
Speaker 1: where your buyers are actually hanging out so that while
Speaker 1: not buying, that you can reach on them to them
Speaker 1: on those channels. And just one last point about the
Speaker 1: top of the funds, So basically understanding which are the
Speaker 1: channels where your target buyers are buying, Understanding what their
Speaker 1: top of mind challenges are, not just as they relate
Speaker 1: to your product, not just talking about your product in
Speaker 1: other words, and then having that multi channel program where
Speaker 1: you're consistently, you know, creating content and showing up on
Speaker 1: those channels. And I think also where I portant for
Speaker 1: enterprise buyers as well is involving sales, so not just
Speaker 1: doing it from a marketing perspective, but also involving sales
Speaker 1: earlier in the process. And that means, for example, via
Speaker 1: let's say we are doing awareness creation by sharing content
Speaker 1: on LinkedIn advertising on sharing content on LinkedIn, we can
Speaker 1: involve sales sharing via their profiles. They can be also
Speaker 1: engaging with target buyers on LinkedIn or on target communities.
Speaker 1: Let's say we are running some events, webinars, podcasts like
Speaker 1: this one, we can engage in our sales as well
Speaker 1: to connect to buyers who are registering for these events
Speaker 1: pre and post event, et cetera. Et So this is
Speaker 1: kind of the top of the funnel where we're creating awareness.
Speaker 1: And what happens there is that a lot of companies,
Speaker 1: like Andrew mentioned, do a bunch of activities on top
Speaker 1: of the funnel. And when you look at also the
Speaker 1: quotu quo, the bottom of the funnel where you have
Speaker 1: the demand and the buyers are maybe reaching out to
Speaker 1: you or they're booking the calls. Companies, a lot of
Speaker 1: companies have something at the bottom of the funnel. It's
Speaker 1: usually the sales process that kind of tries to capture
Speaker 1: those buyers. But what a lot of companies miss is
Speaker 1: the link between these two link between the brand awareness,
Speaker 1: demand generation and actually the bottom of the funnel and
Speaker 1: in the middle. And this is where ABM is situated.
Speaker 1: And the way that you can think about it is
Speaker 1: that a lot of the programs that we run on
Speaker 1: top of the funnel to create awareness and start generating
Speaker 1: the demand are generating engagement signals. So we start to
Speaker 1: understand if these buyers are aware of our brand, if
Speaker 1: they're engaging, what their interests are are there, you know,
Speaker 1: for example, aware of our brand websites, attending events, et cetera.
Speaker 1: We also now now can start identifying accounts that actually
Speaker 1: fit our ICP, especially Tier one and Tier two higher
Speaker 1: value accounts which deserve a more dedicated attention, which have
Speaker 1: a higher revenue potential, where we can now also say, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, for those accounts, let's start more proactively engaging
Speaker 1: the other members of the buying committee multi threading, multi
Speaker 1: threaded engagement, and let's start trying to understand and collect
Speaker 1: the information about those accounts. What are directual priorities and challenges,
Speaker 1: Why are they now engaging and considering that which is
Speaker 1: what we call progressive profiling, together with sales leveraging the
Speaker 1: marketing touch points to collect not only public information which
Speaker 1: is part of account research, but also the quote unquote
Speaker 1: insider information from those buyers through quote unquote progressive profiling
Speaker 1: to get some insight into those accounts. And then once
Speaker 1: you have enough insight, you can start also driving more
Speaker 1: one on one program So I have engaged accounts, we
Speaker 1: are aware of our brand, we have those signals, we
Speaker 1: have collected some information about those accounts. We know that
Speaker 1: they are high revenue potential, they are a good fit.
Speaker 1: This is what's happening in the middle of the funnel.
Speaker 1: Now I can start driving more one on one with
Speaker 1: one on one programs, speaking specifically to their priorities, their challenges,
Speaker 1: building relationships with their buying committee, and driving them into
Speaker 1: into sales. Now, as Andrew mentioned, this is not the
Speaker 1: end of the story, which is this is actually where
Speaker 1: the real relationship with that account, it starts with our
Speaker 1: customers starts. So the full funnel should then also include
Speaker 1: programs to create customer success to actually successful, to facilitate
Speaker 1: and enable that successful implementation of the product, to turn
Speaker 1: that success into customer advocacy or basically into case studies,
Speaker 1: into reference clients, into maybe client events, etc. Like. This
Speaker 1: is something that every company should be working on because,
Speaker 1: as we all know, a client, a new prospect that
Speaker 1: comes from a client referral is five or more times
Speaker 1: likely to become a customer than a call prospect. And
Speaker 1: then obviously the relationship shoulds evolve because this account is
Speaker 1: in a market that keeps on changing. The organization is
Speaker 1: changing and evolving, and their needs are changing and evolving,
Speaker 1: and you need to also have people and the programs
Speaker 1: to kind of be in touch with what is happening
Speaker 1: with those accounts and proactively start looking for the new
Speaker 1: use cases, new departments within those target accounts where you
Speaker 1: might be able to expand to now turn that initial success,
Speaker 1: you're turning that maybe in customer advocacy to attract other clients.
Speaker 1: But also the biggest opportunity for a lot of companies,
Speaker 1: especially for sustainable growth, comes through renewals obviously and expansion,
Speaker 1: and for that we really need to know how these
Speaker 1: clients are evolving, what are the new business cases, Are
Speaker 1: they actually still satisfied with the solutions are they're getting
Speaker 1: most what they need out of it. Are they maybe
Speaker 1: starting to look for other solutions, because unfortunately, more than
Speaker 1: I believe ninety percent, I'm not sure about the exact number,
Speaker 1: but it's a very high number. I believe more than
Speaker 1: ninety of customers B to B customers are going to
Speaker 1: churn silently. They're not going to say anything, They're just
Speaker 1: going to churn. So having that proactive relationship is so important.
Speaker 1: And one last thing that I wanted to say about
Speaker 1: this diagram here about this process. How we think about
Speaker 1: full funnel marketing is that whatever how, it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: how good your demand gen and your ABM is right,
Speaker 1: accounts will fall through the cracks or obviously the majority
Speaker 1: of the accounts that are going through this process are
Speaker 1: not going to end as a sales qualified opportunity and
Speaker 1: a one deal. But that's very frequently not only because
Speaker 1: you did something wrong. There's many other reasons, such as
Speaker 1: the timing wasn't good. You know, they didn't understand something,
Speaker 1: the priorities have changed, whatever is happening in that account.
Speaker 1: But very very important is to quote and quote never
Speaker 1: stop nurturing. So we want to make sure that we
Speaker 1: don't remove those accounts when cold et cetera. From our
Speaker 1: demand generation. This is how we close the loop, because
Speaker 1: maybe in one quarter, two or three quarters, the opportunity
Speaker 1: may come, the timing might become right, and you might
Speaker 1: engage them, you know, in another way, with some other messaging,
Speaker 1: with some other campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. So this
Speaker 1: is an overview of the full fund marketing, how we
Speaker 1: think about it, and I.
Speaker 2: Think they fulel move forward. I will just bring a
Speaker 2: couple of questions that you guys asked us upfront, as
Speaker 2: they are highly relevant to what we just presented. Well,
Speaker 2: two of them very similar from Michelle and Rob is
Speaker 2: what the employment the full final framework differently for a
Speaker 2: different stages of startups? And what does the main different runs?
Speaker 2: And the same one is is it kind of applicable
Speaker 2: only to big companies or could the downfall let's say,
Speaker 2: smaller companies. The entire point is that what we were
Speaker 2: sharing this uh, this diagram or even this framework right, uh,
Speaker 2: this framework represents marketing and sales activities, but what's really
Speaker 2: it is aligned piece is the how the demand is
Speaker 2: created on the buyer's end, right, how the buyers are
Speaker 2: moving from I just want to learn something I just
Speaker 2: want to discover somebody's practices right to like I want
Speaker 2: to buy your solution. This is the key and the
Speaker 2: entire point is that, again, it's never linear, it's never
Speaker 2: something that we can control. But can we influence it
Speaker 2: with SALVA activities for sure if we do it holistically.
Speaker 2: If we're not doing this in silence, marketing is doing something,
Speaker 2: product is doing something, demand is doing something cells and
Speaker 2: then completely opposite things, right everybody is running into different
Speaker 2: directions purchasing the KP price. No, it's it's the entire
Speaker 2: point that you map it out to your team, to
Speaker 2: your capacity, and you put the buyer journey on the top.
Speaker 2: And also the second question here was what are the
Speaker 2: top let's say, top activities of best practices to improve
Speaker 2: MKL to SCL conversion. As I said, unfortunately, lots of
Speaker 2: companies still run let's say broken or obsolete MKL playbook
Speaker 2: where we try to report an MKLS and then throw
Speaker 2: the MLS to sales. We're not talking about this the
Speaker 2: entire point. You can still use these definitions, but you
Speaker 2: need to tie MKL SQL to these different stages of
Speaker 2: the buyer journey. Right, So when MKL basically what for example,
Speaker 2: we say, what could be a good definition of m
Speaker 2: KEL MTL could be an engaged account. Right, So when
Speaker 2: you have this, what's what was highlighted the engaged criteria
Speaker 2: and you define together with sells the engagement threshold. Right
Speaker 2: at this stage it's and it's qualified obviously it hits
Speaker 2: your qualification creater. It could be called MKL and from
Speaker 2: this point you start the ab M play with sales
Speaker 2: running specific PLAYBOOKX right to move this account to SQL,
Speaker 2: and SQL actually is when you have the discovery call
Speaker 2: and the needs confirmed. Right, that could be the best
Speaker 2: and the best practice here he's doing this holistically, right,
Speaker 2: that's the key. So without like if you there is
Speaker 2: no practice, and this is what we try to advocate
Speaker 2: and explain for years. There are no best practices to
Speaker 2: improve some nortural and automated sequences and expect that your
Speaker 2: conversion would restically improve or just improve some outbound and
Speaker 2: mails of whatever. No, what actually impacts that conversion from
Speaker 2: mt A the SQL is the holistic way of influencing
Speaker 2: the barer journey. And to answer Hannah's question, we're able
Speaker 2: to access this chart for sure. You can't just send
Speaker 2: me of what message and LinkedIn and we'll share it
Speaker 2: with you absolutely no problem. Now the core question is
Speaker 2: how to implement it, right, We're not going just to
Speaker 2: be honest today, we're not going to dive into a
Speaker 2: specific timeline, et cetera. But we want to explain the
Speaker 2: fundamental principles, right, what you need to have in place
Speaker 2: to be able to implement the full funnel marketing strategy.
Speaker 2: And as I said, so we're working. It's already in
Speaker 2: the middle of the progress. We're working on this full
Speaker 2: final marketing book. So hopefully in one once you guys
Speaker 2: will be able to pre order this and this is
Speaker 2: where I will share the timelines, the specific stages, et cetera.
Speaker 2: So for now, we want to focus on the fundamental principles.
Speaker 2: What's what's actually they needed to implement full Finnel marketing
Speaker 2: for ourselves. We have defined the six fundamental principles that
Speaker 2: we are going to present today. One of them is
Speaker 2: strong go to market fundamentals. The second one is cross
Speaker 2: functional collaboration between client face and teams, market and sales,
Speaker 2: client success, product, etc. Next, influencing the entire bar journey
Speaker 2: and putting the buyer journey on the top of your priorities,
Speaker 2: basically making it as a central as the core of
Speaker 2: your marketing strategy. Next one balance and long term and
Speaker 2: short term programs and balancing always own programs with the
Speaker 2: experiments because you still need to innovate. But you can't
Speaker 2: just innovate all the time. You still need to drive
Speaker 2: the pipeline. Next, holistically measure marketing and sales performance not
Speaker 2: just only by pipeline and revenue, but flipp andersh board.
Speaker 2: You start with this metrics, but then you do the
Speaker 2: decomposition of the like what different metrics you can apply
Speaker 2: to full funnel stages up to the print metrics and
Speaker 2: plastly how you can implement it use an OURPOS framework
Speaker 2: which stands for Pilot Operasonalization scaling. So these as sex
Speaker 2: fundamental principles and will share them one by one. The
Speaker 2: first one and will just like spread this presentation between
Speaker 2: me and Flat. The first one is having strong go
Speaker 2: to market fundamentals IPHO. Now will stop sharing slides and
Speaker 2: we'll just open uh the screen share and so you
Speaker 2: guys would be able to see this entire scorecard that
Speaker 2: we have once created across Flat and again if anybody
Speaker 2: wants to get access to the scorecard. Feel free to
Speaker 2: send us an message and we're going to share it
Speaker 2: with you. This is the scorecard that we use as
Speaker 2: an ideation process and also an audit of go to
Speaker 2: market strategy. And this is what we recommend to do
Speaker 2: forever go to market team, and I mean obviously by
Speaker 2: go to market, not only marketing, but again sales product
Speaker 2: clients access all clients facing functions. Right, think about this
Speaker 2: scorecard as the full body checkup because quite often, right,
Speaker 2: lots of people can say, hey, I'm absolutely healthy. But
Speaker 2: if you are going to make the whole body check up,
Speaker 2: unfortunately some things could pop up, right, and then you
Speaker 2: receive specific recommendations. You need to improve this, You need
Speaker 2: to improve that, You need to focus on this, and
Speaker 2: this would be your priorities, right. And obviously, as human beings,
Speaker 2: we can't do multiple things I mean for our organism,
Speaker 2: for our body at the same time. Right, you need
Speaker 2: to prioritize. You can't at the same time I don't
Speaker 2: know builds, muscles, improve, I don't know your health, skin, etc.
Speaker 2: You need to prioritize, right. But the entire point also
Speaker 2: when you going to improve it, that you need to
Speaker 2: do it holistically. It's Also, for example, if you need
Speaker 2: to lose weight, it's not about just having a nice diet,
Speaker 2: but it's also about doing specific sport activities right and
Speaker 2: adjusting your schedule, prioritize, and sleep, et cetera. Multiple factors
Speaker 2: impacting on the end goal the same as here. So
Speaker 2: that's why when we are doing this audio of our
Speaker 2: goal to market strategy, we start looking at goals and challenges.
Speaker 2: What are our goals? What are the challenges we are facing? Right?
Speaker 2: Why these challenges are happening? Are there any new initiatives
Speaker 2: that our board was considered or presented to us, other
Speaker 2: new initiatives that were considered by different teams, right? Why? Next? Also,
Speaker 2: it's really important question if we want to run new initiatives,
Speaker 2: do we have the necessary skill set? Because quite often
Speaker 2: this is what we observe and it often happens when
Speaker 2: companies want to launch account based marketing. They say, yeah,
Speaker 2: I love a b M, let's do it. But the
Speaker 2: reality is that there is no skill set and understanding
Speaker 2: of what is required to make a b M successful. Right,
Speaker 2: So this is this, This is an honors assessment that
Speaker 2: you are doing for yourself. Right, Do you need any
Speaker 2: help where you can get it. Next assessment of your
Speaker 2: marketing team and the skill set of this team. Stack,
Speaker 2: what is another stack and who owns that tack? Who
Speaker 2: owns specific technology and how we're using it? Are we
Speaker 2: using it to the whole potential? For example, when all
Speaker 2: many teams are using zoom info and the only usage
Speaker 2: of that theom info is just finding emails of people
Speaker 2: and that's it. So, but it can obviously prink you
Speaker 2: much bigger insights or the same for six sense for example,
Speaker 2: we have heard multiple times companies are blaming sixth sense
Speaker 2: that they overpaying for it. But the truth is that
Speaker 2: just a couple of people who check the intent data
Speaker 2: and that's it, right, and not using the maybe eighty
Speaker 2: or ninety percent of the platform capabilities. So this is
Speaker 2: the entire point you need to evaliate.
Speaker 1: Are you.
Speaker 2: Are you using the tools that you already have? Who
Speaker 2: owns this right? How can we make maybe the product
Speaker 2: adoption and our company for the processes that we are
Speaker 2: running ABM readiness. We mentioned that ABM is a breach
Speaker 2: between demandsen and sales activities. So this is basically the
Speaker 2: playbook that helps to or the strategy that helps to
Speaker 2: close the gap between marketing and sales and fix the
Speaker 2: misalignment right. But the entire point is, before saying we
Speaker 2: want to do ABM, you need to do an assessment.
Speaker 2: Are we're ready to do this right? Thinking about the
Speaker 2: questions for ABM? Next going through the go to market strategy?
Speaker 2: What is our business model? What are our icps for
Speaker 2: different products or use cases that we have, who could
Speaker 2: be our partners, how the wire journey looks like for
Speaker 2: the icps that we have prioritized. What are the core
Speaker 2: segments of this icps right? Our differentiation, How competitors are
Speaker 2: betting us right? What they are doing better? Where do
Speaker 2: we overcome competitors? What is our collaboration with seals from
Speaker 2: one to five? And how can we ramp it up?
Speaker 2: Report and budgeting right, how our budgets are formed, attribution,
Speaker 2: et cetera. And basically not just go and maybe through
Speaker 2: the entire scorecard, because I mean, I just explained it
Speaker 2: enough what we're doing. Next, we start thinking about the
Speaker 2: core processes awareness and demand generation, content creation, demand capture
Speaker 2: and seals and activation, client success a BM and two
Speaker 2: maybe not so obvious points friction points. Do we have
Speaker 2: clear prices? And I know lots of companies would say, yeah,
Speaker 2: but we can just show pricings on our website fair enough,
Speaker 2: But can we make some estimates? Can we make explanations?
Speaker 2: So can we make a good documentation that at least
Speaker 2: can set up evaluations for our bars, because I think
Speaker 2: the worst experience that sells a face is having discovery
Speaker 2: calls with bars that just want to ask about the
Speaker 2: budget and then understand that they simply don't have this budget. Right,
Speaker 2: waste of time for everybody, So book and call and
Speaker 2: book and call. Some lead out. And it's almost twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six, but still many companies have like the obsolete
Speaker 2: webforms where you submitted and then you wait until somebody
Speaker 2: will come to you and book a call with you. Right,
Speaker 2: So this is obviously this creates tons of friction and
Speaker 2: the simple things product over you and sandbox. To be honest,
Speaker 2: I firmly believe that in the AI era, trying to
Speaker 2: hiden your product is just playing back or basically firebacks.
Speaker 2: It's on contrary when you show how your product and
Speaker 2: today you have like interactive damas, you can record product too, videos,
Speaker 2: et cetera. It just helps to onboard the customers and
Speaker 2: if you highlight the values if you high light different
Speaker 2: use cases, et cetera, it will just serve you better. Right,
Speaker 2: And a couple of things that are important to also
Speaker 2: incorporate in this analysis inter in your subject matter experts. S.
Speaker 2: Subject matter experts should be the people who used to
Speaker 2: work as your primary buyer persona. This is critical. So
Speaker 2: with these people you can discuss who are the power
Speaker 2: users of our product, why and how they are using it? Right?
Speaker 2: What are their jobs to be done? How frequently they
Speaker 2: using it? What are the strengths and weaknesses of our product,
Speaker 2: how we can play on them, what our differentiation? And
Speaker 2: then you can also and ask like, for example, what
Speaker 2: are the typical technical questions our power users asking? Because
Speaker 2: and you can create technical documentation especially this is essential
Speaker 2: if you sell them to a T teams or a
Speaker 2: TA teams are a part of the buying committee. Right,
Speaker 2: what are the typical business questions? Because this is something
Speaker 2: that you need to include in your buyer and problem
Speaker 2: and generally in your content strategies. So I'm seeing your
Speaker 2: questions about the score card and the template. Just send
Speaker 2: me of what message on linked and we'll send you
Speaker 2: a copy. Guys, no problem at all. But again, just
Speaker 2: to wrap it up. The entire point is define the
Speaker 2: core stages that you want, define the core points of
Speaker 2: core elements of your goal to market strategy, define the
Speaker 2: core questions, and then sit down with your team and
Speaker 2: do this holistic by the check up right organism. This
Speaker 2: is the core because this is how you can identify
Speaker 2: what should be operationalized, what should be your core programs
Speaker 2: that could become You always own programs where you are
Speaker 2: not doing well? How can you improve it? And then
Speaker 2: what order? What should have higher priority? Right? What should
Speaker 2: be the first thing that you need to work on.
Speaker 2: This is the key and on the top always you
Speaker 2: have goals and challenges. You need to align it with
Speaker 2: the goals and the initiatives of your leadership, because if
Speaker 2: you try to do assumption that is not aligned with
Speaker 2: the leadership vision, with the initiatives that prioritized, your programs
Speaker 2: simply won't be approved or budgeted and supported. As simple
Speaker 2: as that. So this is the first element. The second
Speaker 2: one is the cross functional collaborations. You're okay and this
Speaker 2: nice andtographic. Lets please.
Speaker 1: A couple of points without diving too many details. I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people who are attending this and
Speaker 1: listening are aware that it's really important and really hard
Speaker 1: to get sales and marketing working together, and especially in
Speaker 1: the way that or even like with best intentions, the
Speaker 1: way that organizations allocate assigned KPIs to the different teams
Speaker 1: is actually a kind of a root cause of that problem.
Speaker 1: So if you have misaligned KPIs, if marketing is in
Speaker 1: charge of let's say awareness metrics or mqls, while sales
Speaker 1: development let's say representatives SDRs are in charge of booking
Speaker 1: the meetings and hitting some activity numbers, while the account
Speaker 1: executives are in charge of booking a new pipeline, while
Speaker 1: CS the customer's success is in charge of extension expansions
Speaker 1: i'm sorry, preventing chairs or renewals. Then you have a
Speaker 1: very misaligned organization. It's really difficult to get them aligned.
Speaker 1: And I think there's a couple of couple of things,
Speaker 1: because like there's also things that are within your control
Speaker 1: and the things that are not within your control. So
Speaker 1: we can talk all day here about the ideal picture,
Speaker 1: but I wanted to just drop two kind of practical
Speaker 1: things to consider, and the first one is that even
Speaker 1: if you look at the marketing team, often you have
Speaker 1: marketing marketing misalignment, you might have you know, separate especially
Speaker 1: larger organization organizations, excuse me a separate content from demand generation.
Speaker 1: Demand generation usually in charge of running demand capture ads,
Speaker 1: usually content producing, maybe SEO content, maybe some sort of
Speaker 1: you know, white papers or whatever, quote thought leadership content,
Speaker 1: and a lot of product related content. Then you have
Speaker 1: you know, your SDRs, et cetera. Now, even just within
Speaker 1: the marketing team, we have seen a lot of times
Speaker 1: you try to implement a program that is more focused
Speaker 1: on a specific ICP ideal customer profile, on specific type
Speaker 1: of accounts, which means creating content for that. Well, oh no,
Speaker 1: you have to get into the queue of the corporate
Speaker 1: content team, which has other completely other priorities. Other KPIs
Speaker 1: related maybe to traffic, the number of white papers they
Speaker 1: produce and SEO articles on whatnot. And it's almost impossible
Speaker 1: to collaborate. One simple thing that we did with one
Speaker 1: of the teams when we were trying to address that
Speaker 1: was just making very explicit, just creating basically one spreadsheet
Speaker 1: the calendar from month to month and making explicit all
Speaker 1: the different activities that these different teams are planning to do.
Speaker 1: So the field team is running some events, and the
Speaker 1: demand gen is running this campaign promoting the new product launch.
Speaker 1: I don't know which is what the product marketing is
Speaker 1: driving and content is doing that. And then try to
Speaker 1: at least connect some of those dots. Okay, we plan
Speaker 1: to produce some content, and product marketing wants to put
Speaker 1: this new let's say product feature a product launch, so
Speaker 1: we need to talk more about that. And sales is
Speaker 1: focused on the enterprise customers. Okay, what are the things
Speaker 1: that we can do to align those activities? Came in
Speaker 1: at least like plan maybe those events to be on
Speaker 1: the same topic as the content, as the product marketing,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. Already trying to connect those dots
Speaker 1: is going to help. But the other practical suggestion that
Speaker 1: we will come back to and I a little bit
Speaker 1: more detail, is through cross functional collaboration, because honestly, if
Speaker 1: you are trying to go after a specific high value
Speaker 1: ideal customer profile, you know, to kind of like high
Speaker 1: fit high value customers and accounts, it's really difficult to
Speaker 1: do that in any sylo because you want to implement
Speaker 1: you want to excuse me, you want to influence their
Speaker 1: complete buyer journey from top to bottom. And if your
Speaker 1: buyer journey is influenced by different teams, you know, some
Speaker 1: content on the top and some demand gen in the middle,
Speaker 1: and then sales doing their own thing. They're all working
Speaker 1: on a different, different message in different content, different types
Speaker 1: of customers. It's extremely difficult to basically implement a process
Speaker 1: that is going to influence the complete buyer journey of
Speaker 1: those target accounts. There will be a lot of misalignment. Okay,
Speaker 1: but how do you solve that? As I said, we'll
Speaker 1: dive more into that. But what we like to do
Speaker 1: is to define a kind of a minimal viable team,
Speaker 1: cross functional team, even if it's not going to be
Speaker 1: a real team. You now formed a kind of a
Speaker 1: pilot team where we excuse me, somebody, let me take
Speaker 1: care of that. Even if for a you know, we
Speaker 1: define a pilot and we speak more about it, scope
Speaker 1: down on maybe one vertical, one segment, and we pick
Speaker 1: one person for the key departments, one person from sales,
Speaker 1: one person from marketing, one person from content, and we
Speaker 1: enable them to work on the same targets on the
Speaker 1: same ICP for a period of you know, a quarter
Speaker 1: or two. You're probably going to see and you do
Speaker 1: this properly, you're probably going to see wins that. Then
Speaker 1: you can present to the organization and show them, hey,
Speaker 1: see what we can that we can get much better
Speaker 1: results when we work together, when we are aligned. We
Speaker 1: have done this pilot, we can show that, hey, this
Speaker 1: is working much better now thanks to the marketing awareness,
Speaker 1: targeting the same customers, sales is able to get better
Speaker 1: response rates. When we have response rates and we booked
Speaker 1: the meetings, these meetings are now with better target accounts.
Speaker 1: These accounts seem to be more sales ready, they close better,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Once we close an
Speaker 1: ICP account, we know that also customer success is happy
Speaker 1: because they know that this is a good fit and
Speaker 1: we can actually create value for them. They can become
Speaker 1: a long term customer. Everything is kind of fixed and
Speaker 1: you can create that alignment. I know this is one
Speaker 1: of the most difficult points to solve. It requires a
Speaker 1: lot of change management. That's why we always and we
Speaker 1: will talk more about our BUS framework when we when
Speaker 1: we talk about it, but it is a very critical
Speaker 1: thing because otherwise it's really really difficult to move the
Speaker 1: needle on enterprise accounts.
Speaker 2: Your music Yeah, sorry, I was muted. I wanted to
Speaker 2: say before we'll move forward. Quite often we're here or
Speaker 2: received the question where we can learn about full Finnel marketing,
Speaker 2: and so was flat again maybe just sharing a little
Speaker 2: bit behind the scenes. We are designer, but we want
Speaker 2: to call the Netflix for a Bit to B marketers.
Speaker 2: This is the definition one of our full Final Academy
Speaker 2: students once gave to us. But jokes aside, what we're
Speaker 2: working on is redesign an our full Finnl Academy. I
Speaker 2: will drub the link in the chat, and this is
Speaker 2: where we built the holistic educational portal of for a
Speaker 2: Bit to the marketers for different roles CMOS, healths of Marketing,
Speaker 2: demanden and a BM. Marketers basically given access to all
Speaker 2: our courses and playbooks, account as market and demand generation,
Speaker 2: go to market strategy, et cetera, and all the future updates.
Speaker 2: So if this isssumthing that you are looking to learn about,
Speaker 2: that would be a good, uh, let's say, place to
Speaker 2: dive deeper into the topic. Now moving forward to the
Speaker 2: SOT companyent, we already spoke about this, so I will
Speaker 2: just very briefly explain a couple of things to about
Speaker 2: influencing the entire buyer journey. Right, So on the left
Speaker 2: side you see the full final framework. Then in the
Speaker 2: middle what you can see is the buying process. Right,
Speaker 2: how the buying journey and what are the critical stages
Speaker 2: of the buyer journey could be? This is something that
Speaker 2: you need to define together again as the cross functional
Speaker 2: team and what could be actually very helpful. We highly
Speaker 2: recommend you guys at least once run a small experiment
Speaker 2: take one, two, three recent deals, and then visualize the
Speaker 2: entire buyer journey. We have heard multiple times the teams
Speaker 2: tell us, oh, yeah, for sure, we mapped out the
Speaker 2: buyar journey and then when we look at it, it's
Speaker 2: kind of pigma file or mirror board. And then we see,
Speaker 2: you know, the kind of sticking notes with the bar
Speaker 2: journey which is linear, and we assume that it's it
Speaker 2: looks like this, but we all know that it's never
Speaker 2: a linear process. So what is our recommendation. We highly
Speaker 2: recommend to those three things. First, run customer research, run
Speaker 2: interviews with the champions and maybe with the power users,
Speaker 2: with the buying committee group that was involved in the
Speaker 2: purchasing decision, and try to understand the buying process, the
Speaker 2: key touch points, et cetera, and how the internal process
Speaker 2: look like, because this assumption that is absolutely invisible to
Speaker 2: all of us, and that's crucial to understand. Right, what
Speaker 2: were the main interactions, how they were thinking about buy
Speaker 2: an our brand, to whom they compared us, why they
Speaker 2: selected us, what were the key questions and discussions happening internally,
Speaker 2: et cetera. Next, try to capture all the digital touch points.
Speaker 2: If you have analytics like hockey Stack or trim Data,
Speaker 2: then you're in a lucky position. But if you don't
Speaker 2: have it, no warres. Try to capture all the touch
Speaker 2: points from your market and automation systems webinars, CRM, calendars, etc.
Speaker 2: And see what were the main interactions at touch points.
Speaker 2: And based on this, then try to visualize the journey. Right,
Speaker 2: Try to highlight these main interactions and touch points and
Speaker 2: map it out to different full final stages. Because when
Speaker 2: you'll finish this, what you can do is actually map
Speaker 2: out a buyer journey for a specific can create ICP.
Speaker 2: One thing though, is that for different icpies the journey
Speaker 2: would be completely different, right, Never try to create a
Speaker 2: universal one. That's that's essential in this case. Again you
Speaker 2: it's presented like a linear journey, but they don't treat
Speaker 2: it like this. The entire point here is mapping out
Speaker 2: the core stages and then mappen out market and sell
Speaker 2: or basically cross functional activities that I aligned with your
Speaker 2: bandwads with your capacity. We don't need to kind of
Speaker 2: you know, were pink colored glasses and say hey, we
Speaker 2: can do a bunch of things. No way, just do
Speaker 2: what is realistically possible to be done to influence the
Speaker 2: entire Bier journey, and then start start mapping out this
Speaker 2: cross cross functional Uh, let's say functions to run and
Speaker 2: execute all of these activities. This would be critical. Again,
Speaker 2: the next point is and we see this is an
Speaker 2: interesting story. I will pass microphone and lot in a second.
Speaker 2: We're now lots of marketers who are falling in love
Speaker 2: with the concept and then they come to the organization
Speaker 2: and try to ignite the revolutions saying, yeah, so we
Speaker 2: were doing marketing in the wrong way. From tomorrow, we
Speaker 2: are going to do things differently, so we need to
Speaker 2: blow it all up right. We are going to invest
Speaker 2: time and vi our journey into these new metrics, new activities.
Speaker 2: We are going to set up cross functional teams and
Speaker 2: you know what happens, It's immediately shut down because nobody
Speaker 2: likes revolutions, right, And the truth is that nobody is
Speaker 2: going to support something that is not proven. Hence that's
Speaker 2: why we always recommend to implement it gradually using this
Speaker 2: pos framework. That's what will share a second you stole
Speaker 2: my own.
Speaker 1: I was thinking of using the same opening. It's an
Speaker 1: evolution and not a revolution. As one of our clients said,
Speaker 1: it's a beautiful way to think about it. We know
Speaker 1: that it's hard to drive change. We just spoke about
Speaker 1: it several times, very hard to change your whole organization.
Speaker 1: The ideas would get shut down. And so what you
Speaker 1: want to do instead? You want to first of all
Speaker 1: reduce the ask, right, so you're not asking to revolutionize
Speaker 1: and change your complete way of working. Because while you're changing,
Speaker 1: there would be no pipeline, there would be nothing happening,
Speaker 1: and it's a very very very risky move for you,
Speaker 1: for your career and the organization itself, and they will
Speaker 1: very very likely not accept it. The framework that we
Speaker 1: use for that is to basically propose a pilot, smaller ask.
Speaker 1: And what is a pilot? A pilot is not just
Speaker 1: doing a small experiment. It's actually a very structured approach
Speaker 1: where you say, hey, you know what, we want to
Speaker 1: run this properly. We want to implement a full funnel approach.
Speaker 1: We want to definitely address our ICP customers, our best
Speaker 1: value customers. We want to prove to the organization that
Speaker 1: A we can proactively go after our best customers. B
Speaker 1: that when we work together and implement this new way
Speaker 1: of working, we can turn more of those potential customers,
Speaker 1: more of those target accounts into actual pipeline right and
Speaker 1: therefore C we can get better results. Because we all
Speaker 1: know it's not about the B to B enterprise B
Speaker 1: two B with high dealsis where you're going after very
Speaker 1: large organizations. It's not about volume as much about quality
Speaker 1: of those customers. So if i can now close several
Speaker 1: of those enterprise customers, I'm probably on the long run,
Speaker 1: I'm going to more drastically improve our revenue metrics and
Speaker 1: our growth than if I'm just doing a kind of
Speaker 1: a more volume approach. Okay, so this is kind of
Speaker 1: the principle. So does it work in practice? Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, you decide, how are we going to sculpe
Speaker 1: this down and we usually say, you know what one goal?
Speaker 1: Do you want to start with a net new because
Speaker 1: that's the highest priority for the organization. The sales is
Speaker 1: complained that there is lack of awareness in target accounts,
Speaker 1: there is zero new pipeline being generated. The inbound pipeline
Speaker 1: is unpredictable, and we are not really getting the ICP
Speaker 1: accounts through inbound. The outbound is not working anymore as
Speaker 1: it used to work. We definitely need a solution for
Speaker 1: the net new accounts, for the new pipeline. That new pipeline, Well, okay,
Speaker 1: then this is our goal, or maybe the goal is expansion. Look,
Speaker 1: we worked the last few years, We've closed these big
Speaker 1: accounts and we know that there is a much much
Speaker 1: higher potential be those. Well, then the goal for that
Speaker 1: might be expansion. Second, who is going to be in
Speaker 1: that team? We said, you can start with a small team.
Speaker 1: It's like one market the one salesperson, one person from content,
Speaker 1: and a supporting role of an SME subject matter expert.
Speaker 1: And you actually don't want to have a large pilot team.
Speaker 1: The larger the team, the more chances for this is
Speaker 1: to fail. It sounds a little bit counterintuitive, but it's true.
Speaker 1: In practice, because you're going to be doing things that
Speaker 1: are different, especially for sales. The more salespeople you involve,
Speaker 1: the more chance of them actually disengaging and not doing
Speaker 1: their part is higher because they are unfortunately, in the
Speaker 1: majority of organizations, they're incentivized short term. For you to
Speaker 1: make this program work, you need to make sure that
Speaker 1: they're also working on future pipeline right. And because of
Speaker 1: this misalignment and asking them to do something new right,
Speaker 1: the chances that whenever the pressurizes things happen, they're going
Speaker 1: to be actually turning away and focusing on what they
Speaker 1: always did, what they know from the past. Words. You know,
Speaker 1: people are like that when they have a need for safety,
Speaker 1: they go back to what they were always doing. So
Speaker 1: you basically the best outcome for you, the best approach
Speaker 1: is to choose one change age and the champion from
Speaker 1: sales who is more engaged, who can help you actually
Speaker 1: implement this process properly, and then show to the rest
Speaker 1: of the organization based on his or her results, Hey,
Speaker 1: look we did these things differently and we were able
Speaker 1: to achieve better results than sales. Will start to listen,
Speaker 1: So small team very important about I mentioned content several
Speaker 1: times the key roles that you definitely want to have.
Speaker 1: And I mentioned sales already, So somebody from sales development
Speaker 1: as a SDR BDR, somebody who's going to engage with
Speaker 1: those target accounts. You want to have a person from
Speaker 1: marketing who's kind of in charge of that program. We
Speaker 1: call this AB and lead. And you want to have
Speaker 1: content and not to have to go on the corporate
Speaker 1: content agenda and ask them to create business of content.
Speaker 1: Somebody who's going to actually be working at least part
Speaker 1: time together with you on that pilot. So these are
Speaker 1: kind of the key, key key roles. And having some
Speaker 1: support from a subject matter expert for the insights that
Speaker 1: you will need about those target accounts. This can be
Speaker 1: somebody asked about customer success. There are in a lot
Speaker 1: of organizations very knowledgeable and a good candidate to provide
Speaker 1: some input. This can be, like under mentioned, anybody who
Speaker 1: ideally has worked as a customer in their previous role.
Speaker 1: They were, you know, in the role of your customers.
Speaker 1: So if you're going after HRS, maybe it's your HR.
Speaker 1: If they are you know, technical, maybe somebody from your
Speaker 1: from your technical team. But very frequently you will have
Speaker 1: either like sales engineers, solutions engineers. They are really good candidates. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you might have, like I said, CS, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: can be a good candidate too. When you have your
Speaker 1: pilot team, you usually we always advise use the current stack.
Speaker 1: Don't invest in a news stack. Just use the current
Speaker 1: technology stack that you have. The most important thing is
Speaker 1: to focus. When you're focusing, to focus on one geography,
Speaker 1: one target segment. We like to define the target account cluster,
Speaker 1: which is basically a group of accounts with similar challenges.
Speaker 1: This is where the customer research that Andrey was talking
Speaker 1: about comes into play, because we know, for example, that
Speaker 1: we have studied our best customers. We have discovered that
Speaker 1: the majority of them came because they for example I
Speaker 1: was talking about, I was taking that example of this
Speaker 1: recruitment talented posician solution because they were hiring like remote rolls,
Speaker 1: a lot of remote roles. Or maybe this is one
Speaker 1: of the criteria that we're going to use companies in tech,
Speaker 1: Let's say, who are hiring remote roles. That could be
Speaker 1: like a segment that you want to focus on. For
Speaker 1: this segment, you want to really nail down the account
Speaker 1: qualification and prioritization criteria, so you can actually build a
Speaker 1: list for your program and then define the full program
Speaker 1: a minimal number of activities that you need but across
Speaker 1: at least the top and the middle and the bottom
Speaker 1: of the funnel. So you need an awareness activity to
Speaker 1: create awareness in those target accounts around specific challenges. You
Speaker 1: need engagement activities. The sales needs to engage with those
Speaker 1: buyers to start getting some information. You need to research
Speaker 1: those accounts, and then you need to have some activities
Speaker 1: to be able to go from the engagement to book
Speaker 1: the actual sales calls. We have a separate frame for
Speaker 1: that and have been diving in various podcast episodes in
Speaker 1: our newsletter, etc. We can share more information about how
Speaker 1: to create that program. So you scope it down, You
Speaker 1: define your program and with a small team, you run
Speaker 1: it during a period of a quarter. Typically the advice
Speaker 1: to do it for at least one quarter, and then
Speaker 1: during that quarter you over communicate any positive signals and
Speaker 1: wins that you have. You make sure that you're constantly
Speaker 1: like like running weekly pipeline review meetings where we bring
Speaker 1: together the piloty members on sales and marketing. We review
Speaker 1: the accounts in our lists, the newly engaged accounts. We
Speaker 1: plan the next activities for those accounts. The content needs
Speaker 1: to be created, what marketing should do, what sales should do,
Speaker 1: so really try to run it in a cross functional manner.
Speaker 1: And then towards the end of the pilot, you create
Speaker 1: a retrospect. You see what work didn't work, and you
Speaker 1: basically document the processes that work. You can then also
Speaker 1: use that retrospect to show to the organization, hey, look
Speaker 1: this is what with it. These were the results We
Speaker 1: believe that. You know, if we can do more of
Speaker 1: that and fix some of the some of the things
Speaker 1: that we believe we can still do better, you know,
Speaker 1: with some help maybe from other team members. Now you're
Speaker 1: starting to basically create a scalable base. Okay, it's working.
Speaker 1: We're having better conversion rates. We just didn't do it
Speaker 1: on mass. We didn't do it. We didn't try to
Speaker 1: do too many accounts, we didn't try to involve too
Speaker 1: many people. We just wanted to show that we can
Speaker 1: have better conversion rates of those target accounts and more
Speaker 1: quality conversations, more quality opportunities coming up from this, Now
Speaker 1: we can start thinking about operessionalization and scaling. What peressionalization
Speaker 1: means documenting these processes creating playbooks. This is also the
Speaker 1: moment where you want to deploy AI, maybe some other
Speaker 1: technologies as well, und proven labok, so you want to
Speaker 1: scale what's proven, not just scale broken tactics. That's why
Speaker 1: we don't immediately jump on AI and other technology solutions
Speaker 1: during the actual pilot and then gradually roll this out
Speaker 1: to other regions. Other segments involve more team members and
Speaker 1: that's actually the third part, which is the scaling. So
Speaker 1: this is the approach that we usually take in order
Speaker 1: to implement full funnel marketing ABM programs new more full
Speaker 1: funnel oriented programs in an organization.
Speaker 2: And I know we are lot of time a little bit,
Speaker 2: so what I want to do. I will quickly present
Speaker 2: two other concepts sort of to other pillars of the framework,
Speaker 2: answer Hannah's question because it's aligned with the metrics, and
Speaker 2: then we'll cover questions from Ashland and from and from
Speaker 2: Karen as well, so just to make sure that we'll
Speaker 2: do it on time. Now, the pillar number five right,
Speaker 2: which is very aligned with what what set and was
Speaker 2: what we were sharing with you guys when you map
Speaker 2: out this buying let's say your buyer journey and the
Speaker 2: core activities when you work on this model, what is
Speaker 2: essential here It would be essential to define what are
Speaker 2: your regular operations. The biggest problem in marketing, to be honest,
Speaker 2: what we observe is the random, random acts of marketing.
Speaker 2: Marketing is not planned well, it's not structured, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And even if you look at ourts TAM right, maybe
Speaker 2: lots of you are following USK quite for a long time.
Speaker 2: We have several pillars that we are breaking down into
Speaker 2: regular operations daily sold leadership activities, weekly, this live podcast
Speaker 2: and weekly newsletter. Monthly we are hosting either webinar or
Speaker 2: any other specific activities of workshops, et ce or that
Speaker 2: we could be that could be kind of capturing all
Speaker 2: of our actives, all of our content that we were
Speaker 2: sharing for one month and some quarter major seams that
Speaker 2: could be big webinars covering like really big topics like
Speaker 2: last months we were hosting this webinar how to survive
Speaker 2: as B two, b C m O and AI ERA
Speaker 2: and our state of full final research. Right, and this
Speaker 2: is the entire point. These are the always on programs.
Speaker 2: We are doing them constantly all the time. But at
Speaker 2: the same time you need to innovate, right, and this
Speaker 2: is aligned with despilot operasonalization scaling. We try the new things.
Speaker 2: It could be tiny improvements that could come that could
Speaker 2: be coming from this go to market scorecard. Right. You
Speaker 2: have to find something that you want to improve and
Speaker 2: the allocay time for it. It could be some new
Speaker 2: activities that you want to try linked and thought leadership
Speaker 2: ready to add whatever. Right, this could be all the
Speaker 2: new experiments. But the entire point is that you need
Speaker 2: to allocate some time to do that. You need to
Speaker 2: define success criteria, and you need to define the pilot
Speaker 2: team to run these activities right while at the same
Speaker 2: time the core team is moving forward with pipeline creation
Speaker 2: using the always on activities. This is essential And the
Speaker 2: last one is what we mentioned at the beginning. You
Speaker 2: need to holistically measure pipeline and revenue creation when you
Speaker 2: define the score stages of the framework, right, the next
Speaker 2: step would be defining the core metrics that you can
Speaker 2: use to evaluate your progress. What we love doing is
Speaker 2: basically mapping out ever so and we put revenue on
Speaker 2: the top and then move down to print metrics, right,
Speaker 2: because then it helps to holistically measure our marketing activities.
Speaker 2: So basically it covers the revenue as the core stage pipeline,
Speaker 2: active focused, future pipeline cluster recipe and print metrics. And
Speaker 2: then you define leading and legging indicators. Again, we can
Speaker 2: share this score card you can use for the inspiration,
Speaker 2: but there are there is no rule of some you
Speaker 2: need to define this together with cells and map out
Speaker 2: the core core metrics. Right. And Hanna's question was what
Speaker 2: is the best data to look at to understand past success?
Speaker 2: I would do the same, I would evaluate this or
Speaker 2: if this data is not available and it's hard to measure.
Speaker 2: Another one is very simple. It's the sales pipeline velocity,
Speaker 2: which is you can have again template for this or
Speaker 2: you can google if you want. It's very simple. You
Speaker 2: start looking at the number of sales opportunities, create an
Speaker 2: average contract value, cell cycle lengths and the wind rate
Speaker 2: divided by the celle cycle lengths. Right, and that gives
Speaker 2: you a pretty good forecast and overview of your core
Speaker 2: revenue metrics. So this this is the key. We have
Speaker 2: just a couple of questions to wrap it up, so
Speaker 2: maybe let's do it very quickly. One I will answer
Speaker 2: this one from current Can you talk me about the
Speaker 2: text tack you need to measure success across all of
Speaker 2: this touch points. To be honest, if you want to
Speaker 2: have a simple solution, you can purchase tools like hockey
Speaker 2: Stack or trim Data. Hockey is Tech. I think it's
Speaker 2: myall advanced in terms of dashboards because then you can
Speaker 2: basically match all of these digital interactions. You can set
Speaker 2: up these dashboards as well. Partially, you can do this
Speaker 2: in your CRM as well, if you use on HubSpot
Speaker 2: or Salesforce. It requires maybe some premium packages, again depending
Speaker 2: on what you would like to measure, but that's absolutely possible.
Speaker 2: My personal preference would be doing this on hockey Stack.
Speaker 2: But also the truth is that you won't be able
Speaker 2: to track all let's say leading indicators. This assumption that
Speaker 2: you still need to track manually with your team and
Speaker 2: two questions from Ashlan, So maybe what you can quickly
Speaker 2: cover this one side pun about the accounts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I touched upon this, but it's good to wrap
Speaker 1: it up. Actually asked about working with customer success to
Speaker 1: build your ICP criteria. We have actually worked several times
Speaker 1: with our clients with their customer success a subject matter experts.
Speaker 1: They are very good candidates subject matter experts because they
Speaker 1: have in depth understanding, especially in organizations with customer success.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like account management or client management depending
Speaker 1: on organization how they're called. And they're actually involved in
Speaker 1: the implementation and are working together with customers on implementing.
Speaker 1: So it's not a reactive role where you have, like you,
Speaker 1: questions coming in and then supporting them when the customers
Speaker 1: have problem, but actually actively working with customers to implement
Speaker 1: the product. Usually for more complex products this is the case.
Speaker 1: And then they will have a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of knowledge and they can give you really good sites.
Speaker 1: I think in any case, they will be able to
Speaker 1: give you a lot of insights, so you can take
Speaker 1: interviewing them and talking to them as part of your
Speaker 1: customer research. You can maybe engage them as an SME
Speaker 1: subject better expert, but they can definitely provide really valuable
Speaker 1: data for your ICP. I think. Also, like I read
Speaker 1: recently very good post about actually asking cs like officially
Speaker 1: and formally in the organization to accept deals. So one
Speaker 1: organization actually stopped accepting deals if the cs won't accept them,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a drastic move, but it's the reason.
Speaker 1: Main reason being is the organization doesn't want to focus
Speaker 1: on customers that maybe possible to close but then not
Speaker 1: retain and having problems afterwards, et cetera. Is what happens
Speaker 1: in some organizations when you have a misaligned ICP, even
Speaker 1: if you're able to close them initially, but it is
Speaker 1: a big waste for the organization in any case to
Speaker 1: focus on on on deals like that. And the well,
Speaker 1: because I need to jump on an call going to
Speaker 1: thank everybody for fantastic engagment, great questions and see you soon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the fu well answer the last question. Let
Speaker 2: me know how did you like this session? Guys, just
Speaker 2: typen the chat and I will meanwhile cover ashlance questions. So,
Speaker 2: do the accounts in your target account cluster share the
Speaker 2: same characteristics as your ICP account? Are are looking for
Speaker 2: additional criteria that justify selecting them for pilots. So to
Speaker 2: the conners, we need to dig deep a little bit
Speaker 2: on how we orchestrate let's say the pilot programs. But
Speaker 2: we usually start with one specific use case, right, and
Speaker 2: if you have multiple products, that should be always one
Speaker 2: product then one specific use case. The next step is
Speaker 2: doing the deal analysis. We look at our fastest deals
Speaker 2: and highest deals. So let's say five fastest deals, five
Speaker 2: biggest deals in the timeframe of the last twelve to
Speaker 2: eighteen months, and based on these deals we kind of
Speaker 2: map out the account qualification criteria. Potentially we can reduce
Speaker 2: some of the information, I mean, some of the exercises
Speaker 2: that you have already done for the ICP creation. But
Speaker 2: this is the process that we always to take. We
Speaker 2: want to look at the fresh data and then together
Speaker 2: with seals, we define what makes an account a good fit,
Speaker 2: what are the account qualification criteria, what should be digits qualification, cretera,
Speaker 2: et cetera. So this is the key so to answer shots.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's match and sometimes it's not. It just depends
Speaker 2: on the use case and the goals that we're setting
Speaker 2: up for ourselves. Some anyhow, thank you all for coming
Speaker 2: today and for asking fantastic questions. It's been a big pleasure.
Speaker 2: And hopefully in a few months we will be able
Speaker 2: to publish our first book. So I hope that next
Speaker 2: month it will be it will be available for pre orders,
Speaker 2: but you'll be definitely hearing from us why newsletters LinkedIn,
Speaker 2: et cetera, and it will be live and the next
Speaker 2: week we are again coming back with full Final Life
Speaker 2: will send the announcement next Monday. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: all again for the fantastic feedback as well, and have
Speaker 2: a great rest of the week. Why why