Author: Grant Duncan

Categories
b2bmarketing hiring interviewing

Unconventional Interviewing Strategies: How a 90-Day Plan and Team Research Can Transform Your Job Hunt

2 pieces of uncommon interviewing advice I gave to a friend yesterday:

1. Create a 90-day plan for what you’d do if you joined, even if they don’t ask you for this.
This helps show initiative and can show you know your stuff, their business, etc. 🌶️Arthur Castillo and John McDevitt shared they have both done this in the past and found success with it.

2. Research who is on the current team. 
That will help you see if you’re backfilling someone or if it’s a net new addition to the team. Also see how many are on the team, esp. in your specific discipline. Then position yourself accordingly.

What’s your’s uncommon interview advice?

Categories
careergrowth hiring marketing

Unlocking Success: Essential Skills and Strategies for Securing a Director or Senior Director Marketing Role (Part 4)

Want to get a Director or Sr. Director Marketing role? Here’s what you need (part 4 of the series)

Director-level:
– 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, and financial management, most likely with the help of someone more senior
– Proficient with analysis and reporting
– Proficient with your own discipline’s tech stack and some abilities in other disciplines’ tech stacks
– Strong collaborator with other teams inside and outside of Marketing

To become a Senior Director in Mktg:
– Do things that Directors do but be consistently achieving or outperforming people management, marketing planning, and quantitative goals

Reminder: Stages I’ll show: Intern, Associate, Manager, Sr. Manager, Director, Sr. Director, VP, 2x VP, CMO.
To see each stage, follow me & click the 🔔 icon on my profile for the next stage posts.

Was this similar to your path, or did you have something else to get into your 1st Dir/Sr. Dir job?

Or if you’re not there yet, what have you been told that you still need?

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration facebookads linkedinads

Unlocking Customer Insight: The Power of ‘How Did You Hear About Us?’ in Marketing Strategy

10 REAL answers to our “How did you hear about us?” form field below 👇

Context: 
Some people write PARAGRAPHS of text giving us amazing qualitative insights – things marketing attribution software alone will never be able to show us.

There is no way Marketing can get these insights from dark social if we don’t have this field. 
Add it as a required free text field, not a dropdown… 

EXAMPLES:

– From web and from friends in other Companies that have used/tested the product

– Linked-In

– Facebook ad

– Referred by Zendesk Support

– Talkdesk AppConnect

– Used it in my last company

– I have been looking for a solution for our Technical Support Operations and Customer Experience team that would centralize data, reduce onboarding and ramp up time, standardize troubleshooting and integrate with existing systems. I went through an extensive search online and found several options but none of them met my expectations. I came across a 58 min and 42 second youtube video, “Getting Started with Zingtree”, hosted by Brad Schieber and Debbie McCormick, that was everything I was looking for and more. That video as well as a dozen or so other videos led me to your free plan which allowed me to get hands on with creating trees. I presented the demo trees to company leadership and my director has asked me to reach out to you to see if we can schedule a demo.

– Previously used Zingtree when employed by [previous company]. Left company for several years after aquisition by [company]. Not sure what happened to Zingtree use in my absence. Would like to demonstrate the value to my boss (DIrector of Global Support) with a proof of concept example. Thanks /[his name]

– I met clinical research md’s who will be using platform for stroke patients. I work for a company running a clinical trial for stroke and would like to know more information.

– Hello, my Name is [name] and I am a [job title] for [company] in Germany. We at [company] are looking for a Salesforce integrated Agent Scripting tool to replace a legacy tool with Salesforce integration. I became aware of Zingtree through my own online research for agent scripting tools with native Salesforce integration. We’d like to get a demo of the agent scripting capabilities of your product. Looking forward to hear from you, [name]

What’s holding you back from adding this field? If you already have it, what do your answers look like?

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration facebookads linkedinads

Unlocking Business Growth: A Comprehensive Guide to Implementing OKRs for Effective Demand Creation in Marketing

Steal my OKRs for Creating Demand, and put them in your Marketing plan 👇

Objective 1: Create demand

🚀 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%+.

🎯 KR2: Implement & adopt metadata.io’s Metamatch to make our ads even more targeted to our ICP, esp. on FB

✍️ KR3: Grow social engagement: employees & corporate posting regularly. Engagement rate: LI – X% QoQ, TW – X% QoQ. X total posts by ZT employees.

📣 KR4: Zingtree folks get on X podcasts for free

Notes:
1️⃣ We have 5 objectives this quarter, and the other objectives affect creating demand too, but this is the primary one about it.
2️⃣ I’ve taken out our specific numbers so that you can adopt it to your business easily.
3️⃣ Creating demand is very new for us (I’m new to @zingtree), so that’s why my KR1 doesn’t have specific opp or pipeline goals associated with it. It takes some time before we can count on these producing later stage results.

What do your create demand OKRs look like? What would you add/change about mine?

Categories
Uncategorized

Experiencing the Power of Supportive Leadership: My First Photo Exhibition at a Pop-up Art Gallery

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! 🚀

Categories
b2bmarketing customersuccess sales

Unlocking the Impact of Economic Uncertainty on ARR Quotas: A Crowdsourced Insight

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.

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration okrs

Strategic Breakdown: Allocating Marketing Efforts for Inbound, Outbound, and Channel Partnerships

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?

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration googleads

Revolutionizing Pipeline Creation: How Cutting Paid Search Spend by 50% Boosted Our Marketing Efficiency

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!

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration facebookads linkedinads

Exploring DAM the Demand: A Real-World Performance Analysis of Innovative Marketing Approach

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?

Categories
b2bmarketing cmo hiring

Unlocking Your Potential: The Ultimate Guide to Climbing the Marketing Ladder from Associate to CMO

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.