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.
Category: b2bmarketing
How to Nail TargetingĀ šÆ: Create combos of Use CaseĀ + ICPĀ + Industry/Company CharacteristicsĀ + 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 effortsĀ ā¬
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?
Hereās 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 itās 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>:
Whatās 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! š„ 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.
Use this template for nailing targeting (for both inbound Marketing & outbound Sales). Below are the steps
1. Create your version of this spreadsheet.
2. Ask Sales, Marketing, CX, & Product to add their ideas.
3. Make logical combinations of the ideas in the top section (if not already done when people added their ideas).
4. Ask people to rank their top 3 (or 5) rows of the combo of these characteristics.
5. Come to an agreement on what your top 3 rows/combos are, and then focus almost all your efforts on them only.
Now you have your exact targeted audience to go after. AND your messaging can be very targeted to their pain points and opportunities.
For paid social in LinkedIn, metadata.io, Clearbit, or some other tool – use these job titles, company characteristics, countries, etc. to narrow down your audience.
For outbound, use the criteria to make your list for outreach. You can use ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, Lusha, or others to filter down companies & contacts using the criteria you created. Now outreach to this niche audience with a specific message.
Every company is going to have slightly different columns. E.g. Some may not need “Integrations Required”.
What would you change about this template? Have you found success doing something similar?
(Click on the image to make it bigger. Or right-click the image & click “Open Image in New Tab” for a full-screen version.)
Want to make talking to customers, prospects, and your ICP a priority for Marketing?
Make it a goal for everyone on your team to have X interviews, calls, or meetings with them in a quarter.
If this is new, I’d suggest setting 10 each as the goal.
And make sure to discuss these convos as a team so that the insights get shared with each other.
Use this PMM content kit template for every new product integration youĀ have.
Core:
1. Simple messaging guide (internal)
2. PDF one-pager
3. Demo video
4. Partner marketplace web page
5. 3+ screenshots of actual integrations
6. Dedicated website page on your website
7. 1-2 slides to go in the general sales pitch deck (internal)
8. Feature matrix
9. Pre-sales enablement deck for Zingtree (internal)
Collab With CX Team:
1. Documentation about the integration
a. 3 short videos
i. How to integrate (likely just a couple of mins)
ii. How to use 101
iii. Advanced how to use 201
b. Article āHow to integrateā
2. Ideally an Implementation & best practices guide
3. Implementation Plan (when applicable) (agenda, team, etc.)
Ideal:
1. Ideally a customer story and customer logos
2. Ideally how integration compares to top competitorsā integration with the same one (internal doc)
3. Ideally a pitch deck for the partner to pitch you to their existing customers (internal)
4. Pre-sales enablement deck for partner sellers (internal)
5. Discovery questions for Sales related to the integration (internal)
6. Feature matrix comparing integration features and limitations (internal)
Shoutout to David Chase, Brad Schieber, Guillaume Tarralle – āGTā, Danna Troncattty Leahy, and Farhad Rizvi for helping me create this.
What would you add/subtract from this?
You should talk to peers before buying a new piece of software.
The reality is most people are doing this before they ever hit “Request a Demo”.
This requires marketing in a different way than just Google ads. Make sure you’re creating demand too.
If your company is primarily “capture demand” focused and you want to move to “creating demand”, then you may want to make a transition to more create demand $ somewhat gradually.
Otherwise, you might pull the wrong levers accidentally.
Better to move as a transition rather than a light switch so that you don’t cause mistaken harm.