Hot take: Sales Engineering should have access to the same Sales & Marketing funnel metrics and dashboards that Marketing has. They’re a valuable piece of the pie and contribute good ideas, esp. when empowered with the same data!
Month: August 2023
Understanding the tech stack of your customers & prospects is underrated in ICP research.
This helps you figure out how you fit into their overall strategy, integrations you should promote or build, and where the budget might be coming from for your product.
How has this question helped you?
Day 3 of the new job: I’m joining Sales calls, meeting with my team, and meeting with peers. Why?
1. Hear the pain points from customers. Remember the *exact* words they use so that you can use them in your Marketing.
2. Build rapport with your team and hear their ideas.
3. Start hearing what Marketing needs to improve.
I was interviewed on a podcast talking about how to do B2B influencer marketing.
Views & % watched on YouTube can actually be helpful metrics to track if you’re certain your content is spot-on.
It shows you how people are engaging with & understanding your point of view.
Check out the full episode in the comments!
Make sure not to over-index on conversion rate optimization in B2B.
Adding one more field to a form isn’t going to deter someone with high intent on contacting you.
Marketers, are you aligned with Sales?
If not, here are a few tips for how to do that better.
Shoutout to Jeremy Bergeron with Mission.org for asking this important question during a podcast interview when I was still at Voximplant.
How to Nail Targeting 🎯: Create combos of Use Case + ICP + Industry/Company Characteristics + Region
Create a spreadsheet and map each combo of those 4 things together. You’ll probably have a list of 5-15 rows.
Then rank your top 3-5 and discuss with key people (Sales, CX, CEO, Product) to come to an agreement.
Then this drives all of your efforts ⬇
1. Marketing runs targeted campaigns with a specific use case message to people with specific titles in specific industries at specific companies in specific regions.
2. Marketing creates content & community that resonates with this targeted audience.
3. Sales does outreach to this targeted audience & becomes experts in their internal buying process.
4. CX puts a bigger emphasis on retention and upsell with this targeted audience.
5. Product builds new features for this targeted audience.
Of course, you’ll iterate these over time as you learn more, but this approach will drive a focused strategy that you can rally the whole company around.
What am I missing? Agree/disagree?
Here’s my Marketing status report template that I like to use with each team member.
It helps me stay aligned on an individual’s priorities and helps me clear roadblocks for them so that they can be more successful.
Also, reviewing this before our 1:1 makes it so that the 1:1s can be more strategic and about topics they want to dive deeper about.
I provided an example under each section so that you can see what I mean.
May 11-17
Questions for Grant:
– What is the latest regarding the target account list?
Waiting on others to complete something and date it’s been pending since:
– SEO agency to share list of new backlinks – 5/2
Published (externally or internally) since our last meeting:
– New YouTube video about X published
Accomplished this week:
– Published a new customer story video with Tesla
Plan for next week:
– Hold enablement session with Sales to train them on new positioning & messaging
Quarterly Roadmap/OKRs/KPIs Progress Completion (depending on what you use / call these):
– Publish 5 customer stories: 2/5 complete
People kudos and/or concerns:
– Kudos to Maura for helping me develop the new eChart positioning & messaging guide
Feedback for Grant:
– When you said ___ to Elon, that was very insensitive.
Feedback for <your name>:
What’s your template? What would you add/subtract/change?
Create unique points of view if you want to STAND out in the market.
Yours should be based on what you see across hundreds of customers and conversations – a perspective that few others have.
Here’s how to develop them and have them relate to your product:
1. Think about the mindsets that need to shift for people to move from “problem unaware” to “problem aware”.
A popular one in Marketing is that marketing has become too focused on doing activities that show up in attribution software, which makes them ignore common-sense practices that are harder to track in attribution software.
One of them in the CX world is that companies’ knowledge bases aren’t actually helping contact center agents enough, b/c knowledge is only half the battle. Execution is the other part.
2. Create a list of 10 of them. It helps if they’re contrarian or will peak someone’s interest.
3. Meet with your go-to-market team or leaders and give them a couple of minutes to come up with more. (People frequently interacting with customers often have to think about this).
4. Combine these lists. Discuss all of them together and riff on them to improve or reject them.
5. Then ask people to vote on their top 3-5.
5. Now you have a ranked order of your unique points of view on the market based on understanding 100s of customers.
6. Now go test and iterate on these top 3-5 to see if they resonate with people. If so, lean into them! If they don’t rework it or choose another on your brainstormed list.
We recently did this at Zingtree, and it was super fruitful.
What would you add/change from this?
From 2022:
3 hours of building a pipeline & ARR forecasting model today with our team.
And it was awesome! 🔥 We built a model from the ground up to quantify the monthly pipeline needed to hit our ARR targets for the year.
There was no fear of conflict – we were disagreeing with each other a lot but it was built on a foundation of trust. And now we’re excited and committed to our plan.
See the pipeline forecasting model for a generic template of what we created.
Shoutout to Juan Jaysingh, David Apple, Scott Kincaid, and Danna Troncattty Leahy for a great session.