Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration salesdevelopment

Inbound Lead Qualification: Best Practices, RACI Matrix, SDRs Reporting to Marketing

We recently moved inbound lead qualification from the Sales Development team to the Marketing team to create a more streamlined end-to-end process.

Here’s how we’ll continue to keep a close connection between Sales Development & Marketing.

We created a RACI matrix to define how to collaborate and delineate roles & responsibilities (kudos Lyndsey Lumpkin!).

We wanted to ensure:
– That the Inbound SDR will continue to have a peer group of people in a similar role
– There is a career path for them into Sales (or Marketing)
– They can benefit from the great training from Sales Development on soft skills, sales techniques, product training, etc.

Again, kudos to Lyndsey for creating this and for Caleb Norris and Nick Latz’s input on this and our overall plan.

We can foresee a future in which we route leads directly to AEs, but we’re not there yet.

What would you change or add to this matrix?
Does yours look similar?

Categories
nonprofit refugees

Global Crisis Unveiled: Understanding the Causes and Solutions for the 103 Million People Displaced Worldwide

Did you know there are currently 103 million people forcibly displaced worldwide?

The primary root causes:
– Conflict & persecution
– Economic
– Climate change

I’d encourage you to think about how you can help!
– Volunteer with a nonprofit
– Co-sponsor a refugee family to help them settle in your country
– Donate to help

What are your thoughts on forced displacement?

Shoutout to Derek Lee for sharing this slide.

Categories
Business professionaldevelopment saas

How to Boost Your Business Acumen: Top Books and Podcasts

Level up your business acumen with some of my favorite resources below. What would you add to the list? 👇

1️⃣ Required learning:

  • Zero to One by Peter Thiel & Blake Masters
  • YouTube: YC How to Start a Startup YouTube course
  • Traction by Gino Wickman
  • Podcast: All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

2️⃣ Additional suggested books:

  • The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
  • Good to Great by Jim Collins
  • The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
  • The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
  • The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
  • Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
  • Case in Point by Marc Cosentino

3️⃣ Additional suggested podcasts:

  • Acquired
  • Bad Bets
  • How I Built This with Guy Raz
  • Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy
  • The Oficial SaaStr Podcast
  • The Survival to Thrival Podcast
  • TechCrunch Daily Crunch

Note: I purposely didn’t include leadership & professional development books or any discipline-specific resources (e.g. Marketing focused). Those will be in another post soon.

——
What would you add to the list?
Love any specific one listed?
Disagree with any of these?

Categories
leadershipdevelopment learning

Best Leadership Books for Growing Leaders

To become a better leader, check out these resources:

🔋 Required Learning:

  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
  • Radical Candor by Kim Scott
  • High Output Management by Andy Grove

🧭 Additional Suggested Learning:

  • Getting Things Done by David Allen
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
  • The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
  • Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
  • The 5-2-1 Principle by Greg Campbell
  • The Surprising Power of the Coil by Greg Campbell
  • Who Moved my Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
  • Radical Candor podcast

——
What would you add to the list?
Have any favorites here?

Categories
b2bmarketing contentmarketing productmarketing

Best B2B Product Marketing & Content Marketing Resources: Books, Articles, Podcasts, & Communities

Want to learn B2B Product & Content Marketing fast? Read these 2 books + 1 article.

2️⃣ books
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon

1️⃣ article
The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen by Andy Raskin

That’s it! You’ll learn 70% of the concepts from these.

 —

Want to get to near 100%? Check out these additional resources:

🎧 Podcasts:

The Bigger Narrative

Cheat Codes: Play the Marketing Game on Easy Mode

The Product Marketing Experts Podcast

📚 Books:

Play Bigger by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney

Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Start with Why by Simon Sinek

Niche Down by Christopher Lochhead, Heather Clancy

Founder Brand by Dave Gerhardt

Category Creation by Anthony Kennada

Buyer Personas by Adele Revella

Ca$hvertising by Drew Eric Whitman

The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan S. Kennedy

The Copywriter’s Handbook by Robert W. Bly

Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo

Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller

Story by Robert McKee

📟 Third Party Communities:

Product Marketing Alliance

Sharebird

Superpath

Writer Hangout Slack community

The Buffer community

CopyAI – Official Group Facebook group

Jasper Official Community Facebook group

What would you add to this list?
Anything you love here?

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration

Unlock Modern Demand Gen Tactics: A Comprehensive Guide to Top Resources and Podcasts

Want to learn modern Demand Gen tactics? Here are resources to start with:

Article: How to create demand & generate net new pipeline by Blake Strozyk and me

Refine Labs podcasts: Revenue Vitals, Stacking Growth

Bull Media B2B DIY Ads Guide

Demand Gen U podcast by Metadata’s Jason Widup & Mark Huber

Exit Five podcast by Dave Gerhardt

Demand Gen Chat podcast by Chili Piper’s Tara Robertson

Driving Efficient Growth podcast by Blake Strozyk

Demand Slack Community

Exit Five community

Revenue Era Slack Community

What would you add? I’m sure I missed some items

Categories
generativeAI marketing

Unlocking the Full Potential of AI in Marketing: Why APIs Trump Traditional SaaS Tools

Hot take 🌶️: Today’s cutting-edge Marketing teams use AI through APIs rather than merely relying on point-and-click SaaS AI tools.

All the current SaaS generative AI tools I’ve seen are too limited because so much has to be manually done. A human copying and pasting a similar task repeatedly are a time waste. Also, you can’t auto-post something to Google Docs or WordPress or take in a CSV of multiple prompts you want to work on.

Hopefully these SaaS tools will change and enable better workflows, integrations, and APIs (without charging $50K+).

Until then, write simple Python scripts to automate the work…
And if you can’t do this, ask an engineer at work to spend a couple of hours/week helping you. They probably want to use the AI tools anyway!

Categories
b2bmarketing generativeAI technicalmarketing

Marketing Engineer? Why Coding is Helpful for Marketing Skills & Can Enhance Your Marketing Strategy

Knowing how to write a bit of code is a sneaky unlock for Marketers 🔑
Especially now that tools like ChatGPT or Bard can make you much better than you are by yourself.

For instance,

  • You can look at HTML and CSS code and edit things for your website
  • You can understand how a technical software product works more than many Marketers
  • You can write Python scripts to take text from video transcripts that are too long for any SaaS AI tool to handle and analyze it in pieces and make a blog draft from it.
  • You can analyze large data sets yourself using code or SQL

—–

What else would you add to the list?

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration linkedinads

Mastering LinkedIn Ads & Examples: Achieving a 6.17% CTR with In-Feed ABM Campaigns

6.17% CTR from these LinkedIn ads 🤯🤯🤯

That’s the power of scroll-stopping ABM ads & focusing on in-feed consumption of our content.


I’ve typically heard & used 0.4% CTR as a benchmark for good engagement on brand awareness reach-focused LI campaigns, & we’re crushing that in this campaign that launched recently (about a week of data).

More context on our strategy:

– The goal of these ads is to get our target audience to consume our key messages inside the LinkedIn feed. We don’t expect direct leads to come from these, more about getting the message to them.

– Looking at clicks / click through rate (CTR) can be used as a proxy to see the interest / engagement level of the target audience. So it’s great that ours is so high right now!

– This is one of many tactics we’re using in an ABM campaign, so they’ll be seeing other touchpoints from us as well.

Nice work on these, Lyndsey Lumpkin!

Categories
b2bmarketing demandgeneration marketinganalytics revops

Unlock Your Marketing Analytics: 11 Essential Data Analyses Every Team Should Implement

Below is a list of must-do data analyses for any Marketing team. Consider saving this or sending it to your analytics guru to help you create these.

Analyses:

1. Paid search analysis of keywords that have led to opps and customers (and those that didn’t). This may enable you to free up some of the paid search budget for other uses.

2. Split the funnel analysis: to see all the way from lead to bookings what is driving pipeline and bookings. The rows will be dependent on the main programs / channels that have been in use.

3. Paid social audiences and metrics. List the audiences used in paid social and what is included in them.

4. ABM campaign results from last year (& this year). It helps you understand what was done & the related results.

5. Current pipeline and bookings compared to goal, by product and net new vs expansion

6. Lead, pipeline, and revenue targets and historical results, by product and net new vs expansion

7. Conversion rates from lead to meeting booked to meeting attended to opportunity to closed won by pipeline source, product, and net new/expansion

8. Time it takes to move between each of the above mentioned stages

9. ACV for each product by net new/expansion

10. % of customers that have bought more than one product

11. Pipeline conversion % cohort for each quarter and the amount that close wins in the subsequent quarters broken out by expansion and net new and product

What would you add to the list?