Listening to what your ICP says is 🧠 food.
One way we’re doing that: I got the whole Marketing team set up on Gong and Evan Patrick Shaffer is training us today on it. Next quarter, everyone will have a goal to listen to 10 Gong meetings and/or speak with 10 ICPs, customers, or prospects on their own.
Then we’ll be sharing insights we learned in our weekly team meeting with each other to cross-pollinate ideas.
How have you gotten Marketing regularly hearing insights from your ICP?
If you can swap your competitor’s name onto your web pages & nothing changes 😳, you probably don’t have unique POVs.
Here are 5 prompts to help create them & stand out: 💡
1. What do we believe that our competitors would disagree with?
2. What are things we believe are true but others would view as non-obvious, an interesting insight, or different from the norm?
3. What do we take a different angle on compared to our competitors?
4. If you were giving a talk, what would be new or unique concepts for the audience to hear?
5. For a certain product, what are our unique points of view on the market based on understanding 100s of customers?
How to take action on these:
1. Make a list of answers to questions like this
2. Brainstorm them further with others
3. Choose one to write up some notes about and explore it further
4. Turn it into an article or a video talk
>>> What are other questions you like for creating unique POVs?
Want a quick win? Include these at the bottom of every email newsletter:
“Leave a G2 review & get a $50 gift card.
Email a screenshot to marketing@xyz.com & we’ll send the gift card.”
“Refer a customer and get $X [after they take a meeting with us / after they become a customer].
Refer them by [doing xyz].”
I’ve done this in the past, & we got new reviews & referrals for basically no additional work.
What are other things you like to put at the end of every email newsletter?
Soon after starting at HST Pathways, I asked a COO at a happy customer, “What else is part of your tech stack other than HST Pathways?”
COO: confused face 😯
I quickly clarified, “What other software tools are you using?” Then she named a couple of others.
What I learned:
1. Our ICP doesn’t use the same jargon as me!
2. Most of them are not as tech-focused as other industries.
3. Reiterated the power of customer interviews, especially when in a new job.
>>> Watch the body language in customer interviews as much as you listen to the words said.
What have been some aha moments for you when speaking with customers?
I like to create a deck of my initial findings after one month of starting a new job. This helps others catch the vision for where we can go, creates a good opportunity for feedback & discussion, and helps others learn my thought process.
Here’s the format I most recently used at HST Pathways:
2 slides:
Marketing Findings
Non-Marketing Findings
Each slide had 4 boxes:
Observations – Highlights
Observations – Opportunities/Lowlights
Recommendations
Where You Can Help
In the past, I sometimes have deep dives on specific topics too.
If you have a team, many of the observations and recommendations will be a synthesis of what they have suggested to you and what you have seen yourself.
Have you done something similar before? What format do you like to use?
Think you might try this in your next job?
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?
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.
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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
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What would you add to this list?
Anything you love here?
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
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,
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What else would you add to the list?
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!