I exhibited 2 of my photographs in a pop-up art gallery yesterday for the 1st time, and my CEO came and brought his whole family! 😲🙌
Thanks for supporting your employees inside AND outside of work, Juan Jaysingh! 👏
You’re an inspiration to many for how to lead well! 🚀
How was last quarter for you in achieving ARR quotas (Sales or CX)? Want to see how it was for your peers? Your vote’s answer is visible to no one on LinkedIn except for me as the author. And I will keep it confidential!
In economic uncertainty, it makes it harder to hit quota for most and easier for some. Curious to get a crowdsourced answer for how the economy is affecting most companies.
CEO: “I need Marketing’s help in supporting other GTM areas like Outbound Sales and Channel Partnerships.”
Me: “Agreed, that’s in our plan.”
CEO: “Great. What % of your time will be focused on each?”
Me: “Let me get back to you on that this week.” Thinking in my head, “😳 I haven’t measured that before…”
Here’s how I came back & answered that question. Plus see my actual %s for each:
Take each KR in my OKRs and
1️⃣ Give it an effort rating (3=High, 2=Medium, 1=Low)
2️⃣ Then distribute 10 points among Inbound, Outbound, & Channel.
E.g. 6 to inbound, 3 to outbound, 1 to channel.
Use the points system b/c one initiative may help multiple parts of GTM.
3️⃣ Multiply effort X points to get effort-weighted points for each KR
4️⃣ Do this for every KR and sum up the effort-weighted points for Inbound, Outbound, & Channel.
5️⃣ Get the % of total for each item. E.g. Inbound is 52% of the total effort-weighted points.
➡️ Now go share how much of Marketing’s time is spent generating inbound, supporting Outbound, and supporting Channel.
Here’s a partial example:
My last post talked about 1 of my 5 OKRs. I’ll show you how I gave points to them.
🚀 Key Result (KR) 1: Launch X groups of ads on LI/FB (integration-specific ads & educational ads). Quant: Reach X people in our target audience. Maintain a X%+ CTR from LI ads. Direct traffic to high-intent pages (home page, pricing page, demo page, customer stories, etc) increases by X%+.
➡️ Effort: 3. Points to Inbound: 6, Points to Outbound: 3, Points to Channel: 1
🎯 KR2: Implement & adopt metadata.io’s Metamatch to make our ads even more targeted to our ICP, esp. on FB
➡️ Effort: 2. Points to Inbound: 8, Points to Outbound: 1, Points to Channel: 1
✍️ KR3: Grow social engagement: employees & corporate posting regularly. Engagement rate: LI – X% QoQ, TW – X% QoQ. X total posts by ZT employees.
➡️ Effort: 3. Points to Inbound: 6, Points to Outbound: 3, Points to Channel: 1
📣 KR4: Zingtree folks get on X podcasts for free
➡️ Effort: 3. Points to Inbound: 8, Points to Outbound: 1, Points to Channel: 1
I did that for all of the OKRs. In the end for the effort-weighted points, I got:
52% Inbound, 24% Outbound, 24% Channel.
What do you think are ideal effort-weighted point % ratios?
Think you can apply this for your personal or team OKRs?
We are cutting our paid search spend by 50% & expecting almost NO impact on pipeline creation.
Why? B/c we’ve found keywords that have never created an opportunity in the last year. It’s likely that these won’t in the future.
Now we can repurpose this budget for more effective initiatives.
For us, that primarily means starting paid social focused on distribution and reach to our whole audience with our key messages.
To move them from:
problem unaware -> problem aware
category unaware -> category aware
solution unaware -> solution aware
What % of your keywords have never produced pipeline? Or do the analysis & report back your findings!
Here’s a REAL example with performance stats of “DAM the Demand” 👀
Below are the early results, how we did it, and our specific examples.
ℹ️ DAM the Demand is an idea from Christopher Lochhead ❄️🐾 🏴☠️: You think you want that, but you really need this instead! When you’re creating a new category, this can be super powerful as a way to get the budget and mind-share switched to your product.
RESULTS in the first 8 days since launch:
➡️ Campaign objective: reach (we want guaranteed distribution to our whole audience)
➡️ Reach: 7.3% of our our target audience
➡️ Avg Frequency our audience has seen the ad: 1.6
➡️ CTR for specific ads range from .44% to 1.01%! (CTR is a proxy for high interest, and .4% is a good benchmark for solid ads.)
➡️ We even got 1 high intent demo request from them already! Self reported attribution and Hubspot attribution both showed it, even though the campaign objectives are reach!
HOW WE DID IT:
➡️ These are educational DAM the Demand style ads on LinkedIn and Facebook. Optimized for DISTRIBUTION and REACH, not for lead gen forms or website visits.
Audience network and audience expansion are turned off.
➡️ Our goal is to educate them in the feed itself; not optimize for getting them to click out of LI or FB.
➡️ If they happen to click through to our site, that’s a good proxy sign of their high interest! But it’s not the main goal.
OUR SPECIFIC EXAMPLE:
➡️ See the images below for what they actually look like.
➡️ Our unique point of view that is different:
“Let’s be real. AI for Support only works for small use cases. But you probably have lots of complex cases you need humans for.
Elevate your humans through Zingtree’s conversational workflow software.
Turn every agent into an expert regardless of their tenure by guiding them through your company’s best practices in real-time.”
❓
Questions on this?
Have you considered Daming demand?
How have you done it or what are you considering?
How to go from Marketing Associate to CMO 🤓📈🧑💻
I’ll walk you through the common criteria for moving up each phase of the ladder 🪜
1️⃣
To become a Manager of a specific discipline in Marketing (e.g. Product Marketing Manager)
• Demonstrated completion of successful projects
• Curiosity to learn more
2️⃣
To become a Senior Manager:
• Able to estimate timelines & due dates accurately & consistently
• Able to plan out & execute projects with high performance from framework to collaboration & review to completion
• Proficient with the relevant tech stack
• Able to track the quantitative performance of activities
3️⃣
To become a Director:
• People management experience (ideally 2+ people)
• Deep expertise in the specific discipline of Marketing, perks if you have experience in another discipline too
• Has shown quantitative impact on ROI, pipeline, ARR, or other relevant metrics to the discipline
• Has shown the ability to create strategic plans but still able to get your hands dirty
• Able to do budgeting, forecasting, & financial management, most likely with the help of someone more senior
• Proficient with analysis & reporting
• Proficient with your own discipline’s tech stack & some abilities in other disciplines’ tech stacks
• Strong collaborator with other teams inside & outside of Marketing
4️⃣
To become a Senior Director:
• Do things that Directors do but be consistently achieving or outperforming people management, marketing planning, & quantitative goals
5️⃣
To become VP of Marketing:
• Luck or providence
• People management experience (ideally at least 4-6+ people, some may require 10+)
• Product/brand marketing experience & demand generation experience
• Expert at budgeting, forecasting, financial management, headcount planning, & agency management
• Able to speak to past quantitative pipeline & revenue results
• Experience in a similar industry
• Able to speak to how you build culture & employee engagement for the whole Marketing team
• Able to solve cross-functional issues, not just Marketing issues
5️⃣
To become 2x VP of Marketing:
• Was already the VP of Marketing at a company with ARR greater than the ARR of the company you’re joining (they want to know you can get to their level; it’s risky to a company if you’ve never worked at their level already)
• Proven pipeline & revenue results from the last company you worked at
• Able to speak to specific campaigns end to end
• Able to give examples of how to solve people management issues
• Able to put together a solid 90 day and/or 1 year Marketing plan
6️⃣
To become CMO:
• Some years of experience as a VP of marketing
• Results at multiple companies are consistently solid
• The items in the 2x VP of Marketing are a must have now
This is the final post in my series on this geared towards marketing in startups. If you got this far and liked it, let me know!
Also, I hit LinkedIn’s character limit so check the comments for additional context.
27%+ of our entire target audience has now learned about Zingtree in the last 30 days 🔥
Before, probably <2% knew about us.
How did this happen?
We started running educational category, product, & customer ads on LinkedIn and Facebook. Optimized for DISTRIBUTION and REACH, not for lead gen forms or website visits.
Each person in the 27% saw our ads avg 7+ times in that month, so we kept a high frequency.
And there are fresh messages: 3 themes with a total of 20 different ads, so they’re not seeing the exact same thing.
Our goal is to educate them in the feed itself; not optimize for getting them to click out of LI or FB.
If they happen to click through to our site, that’s a good proxy sign of their high interest! But it’s not the main goal.
The exciting thing is that our CTR (as a proxy for lots of interest) is crushing: 0.85% avg with some ads as high as 1.56% 🤯 (Keep in mind, we’re optimizing for reach, not CTR!)
And we’re seeing positive signals in other areas too (website traffic, high intent demo requests, meetings, etc.) 📈
Want to see examples? Go to our Zingtree page, go to posts, then filter to ads.
Anyone else seeing success in creating demand like this?
Do you know what your “Date WOW” and “Marry WOW” is for your B2B target audience?
Date WOW – what is that thing in the 1st meeting that gets the prospect to lean forward in their seat and say wow? It might be solving a problem in a unique way, an easy way you integrate with their system, or a report.
You need this to get the second “date” aka the second meeting with the prospect.
Marry WOW – what is it that will help the champion at the prospect get internal buy-in from more senior people? Showing the vision for why you’re a great partner long-term is key.
When you figure this out, you can rinse and repeat and scale to lots of buyers b/c you understand what they care about most & how you can help.
Shoutout to Tae Hea Nahm & Bob Tinker for their “GTM Fit” terminology & framework that I’m summarizing here.
Here’s some top factors to review when analyzing your ICP:
– Think about your sweet spot ICP versus your total TAM ICP
– Large pain that you can help with your current product today without many enhancements needed
– Medium to large deal size (likely most companies want this)
– High win rate
– Fast sales cycle length
– Industries
– Company size
– Job titles
– Regions
– The related use case
Keep in mind: your current ICP may not be your future ICP as the product evolves.
Great talking to Sam Dunning about how we cut our paid search budget by 50% and still produced $10K more pipeline that month!
Give it a listen and let me know if you have any questions 👋