A framework for developing your second half demand generation plan

 

You are probably in the middle of developing your demand generation plan for the second half of the year.  Your sales targets for the second half are growing at a faster clip than your demand gen budgets. How do you squeeze more efficiencies and effectiveness out of your demand gen budget to drive your plan that includes virtual events (and perhaps some physical events starting October 2021), online and print advertising programs, digital marketing programs, website, content marketing and marketing infrastructure? Here is a five-point framework to help you.

• What worked well in in the last six months?  Use your analytics to identify which marketing investments performed well in the last six months.  Filter out from that list certain programs because the themes or situations they represented are no longer relevant.   You now have a short list you want to continue for the second half.

• What did not work well in the last six months? Analyze the reasons behind their performance, to ensure you are not eliminating programs or activities whose weak performance was due to factors outside your control. Armed with this analysis, you can filter out programs you do not want to continue in the second half.

• Where would you like to add in the second half?  There may be new imperatives you need to support such as new product launches or entry into new industry segments or new geographies.  Or there may be new things you want to try such as account-based marketing or capturing intent-to-purchase marketing or supplement your content marketing strategy with video-based marketing.  It is always good to have some ‘experimental dollars’ to try some new approaches, tools or platforms in your marketing mix.  Once you add these programs and take out the ones selected for phase-out from the analysis above (bullets 1 and 2), you now know how much you have left to scale up the programs that you want to keep, to support your growing second half sales targets.

• Use a simple planning model and iterate:  Based on the analysis above, create a planning model that helps you capture your entire second half marketing mix and key target metrics.  Ensure that the allocation of spend across your planned marketing mix allows you to meet your overall objectives – in terms of building awareness, generating demand for new customers (‘land’ component of land and expand) and customer marketing (“expand’ component of land and expand – more on this topic in a future blog).  The plan must support these three marketing objectives – awareness, land, and expand across the various personas and regions you are targeting.  You will probably iterate this model multiple times until you feel good about your second half marketing plan. Target metrics in the model may include number of opportunities that need to be created (factoring in your sales cycle length across current and new products by region, target customer sentiment scores, expected social media audience and engagement growth etc. You should then use this model to track your actual performance against target metrics, so you know how you are doing against plan.

• Keep slack in the system: I believe in a well-known quote that even the most well formulated battle plans change on first contact with the enemy.  Ensure 10% to 15% percent of your budget remains uncommitted at the beginning of the second half, so you have enough room to take on a new initiative that appears suddenly or you have the means to switch to plan B when plan A (and related investments) fared worse than you expected.  You also need the flexibility because you do not know yet how soon some of the demand generation practices will switch back from digital to physical, given the vaccine is becoming widely available

It takes a lot of work to create a good plan – aligning with the above principles can ensure your plan stays relevant and focused, while giving you the flexibility to make changes as the year evolves.

What role did luck play a role in your career?

If I look at my career, 50% was luck and the other 50% was hard work.

I was lucky to have joined some great companies with nurturing work cultures and amazing colleagues. I was also very lucky to have multiple very good mentors who gave me the opportunities I would not have had access to otherwise. And when I started my consulting practice in 2001, I was lucky to have a network of past colleagues, who became early clients.

But I also worked hard to make the most of these opportunities, that came my way. I have always been very focused on making my clients or managers successful. As a result, all my clients came from referral business – not a single cold call.  During the journey, I met some clients who pushed me, and I am very thankful for them because I grew significantly from those experiences.  While working with some clients, I was able to expand my practice into areas such as ROI Models to help their customers justify solutions, Monthly Win-loss Analysis, Sales Play books, lead-to-deal flow optimization and competitive analysis and deliver significant value to them and many others.

But one practice I would like to share with everyone in this post is the practice of owning your day/week that I have intensely followed. I attribute a lot of my success to it.  At the beginning of each quarter, I plan for what I want to accomplish for the quarter and for the first month. Then every Sunday I review my monthly plan and then make a list of deliverables for Monday and for the week – not action items, but what I am going to deliver or accomplish. And they need to fit into my monthly goals.  Then every day of the week I start my morning with what I am going to accomplish that day.  This keeps me intensely focused during the day.  I spend a few minutes at the end of the day to see what I accomplished, where I am on my weekly plan and any adjustments I need to make to my pace.  I also reflect on, if anything needs to change in my weekly, monthly, or quarterly plan based on any new developments.  My goal always is to finish everything on my list by mid-day Friday, so I have some buffer built into it.   This practice has become foundational for me and not only allows me to deliver what I promised, but more importantly, continue to grow personally.  Reason is my personal growth goals are a part of my quarterly plan.

What worked for you?  Please share with others by replying to this post.  We all learn from each other.

The age old question - is that marketing or sales that primarily generates our pipeline?

 

It takes a village. Attribution for leads is an age-old problem.  But I have a proven solution.

When I became the CMO of one of my previous companies, I immediately knew I had a problem. The marketing team used last touch attribution for sales leads i.e., the lead source in the CRM system was attributed to whoever touched the lead last. This led to lots of conflict between sales and marketing.  The sales cycles for the product were long – so invariably every lead was touched by one of more nurture marketing campaigns, even when sales (or SDRs) had brought the lead in and kept it engaged.  So, on the surface it appeared that over 85% of the leads were brought by marketing.  However, when I spoke to the SDR team, they scoffed at the volume (and quality) of leads send to them by marketing.  I knew I needed to solve the problem immediately, to not only get marketing and sales to start working together, but more important, understand the real ROI of demand generation investments.

The solution was simple.  We created multiple lead attribution fields.  The Lead Source field was used to capture which team (and program) brought the lead into the company such as Google Ad Words, trade show events, webinars, outbound calling from SDR team etc.  This gave us visibility into what top-of-the-funnel programs were working. These programs tend to be expensive and conversion rates tend to be low.  But some programs typically do better than others.  So even a slight change in marketing mix here can yield huge returns.  Then we a created last-non-marketing-touch field to understand which SDR and sales campaigns were the leads responding to. We also left in last-marketing-touch fields to understand which marketing nurture programs the lead was responding to?  By adding date fields alongside these attributions, we were able to capture the timing of that touch.  These fields non only helped us get clarity into whether marketing or sales was being more effective for certain segments/regions/verticals, but more important, it gave us a better understanding of the customer journey, as well as the ROI of various sales and marketing programs.  With this data, we were able to map how customers moves through the process and the investments we need to make in the website, content, and programs to make those interactions more engaging for the customers, as well as more productive for us.

It does take a village to make demand generation programs work well.  The right tracking is critical not only for getting the right collaboration between sales and marketing, but more important, delivers the insights you need to improve the effectiveness of your precious marketing spend.

Please let the readers know how you solved this age old problem by adding your comment below.

Win-Loss Analysis - Revisited

 

In the last few weeks, I have spoken to at least three ex-colleagues who wanted some insights into the win-loss analysis work I have done in the past for clients.  They were all looking to significantly enhance the win-loss analysis program within their product marketing organizations.  Here is the summary of thoughts I shared with them.

1. Win-loss and competitive analysis are two sides of the same coin.  The programs feed into each other to help you give your sales reps the information edge they need to compete and win.
2. Win-loss analysis contains two components – qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, and you need both. 
• Analysis from your CRM system can give you good quantitative insights into your sales performance against major competitors in the last quarter(s) by segment and region, why you win and lose against them, as well as quarter over quarter trends.  Of course, the quality of analysis depends on the quality of data being entered by your sales reps in the CRM system.  Your Sales Ops should help you continuously improve the quality of data within the CRM system.
• If there was an RFP associated with that opportunity, gets your hands on the RFP response. Also get your hands on the proposal submitted by your sales rep, as well as any notes about the opportunity within the CRM system.
• You need to complement the quantitative analysis and RFP/CRM notes with interviews – with your sales reps, pre-sales engineers, partners, and your customers (both won and lost) to get a 360-degree perspective about that opportunity.  The more interviews you can do, the richer your understanding will be about why you won or lost that deal. Key is to keep those interviews open ended (except for a few scripted questions at the beginning to validate the information within the CRM system).  This will give you deeper insights into what were the triggers that led to the customer looking for a new solution, what was the perception of your company before the sales cycle started, how it changed over the course of the sales cycle, what was done well in the sales cycle, what could be done better and why did they choose your solution over your competition (or vice-versa if you lost the deal).  You will be surprised with what you can learn from these interviews, including what marketing messages are working and what are not.

Key is to get to this information quickly – do not wait till the end of the quarter to start the interview process.  Within a week of winning or losing a deal, you should be scheduling calls with your sales, pre-sales, partner, and customer to get the whole picture.  Sometimes it helps to get an independent consultant to do this for you - they can look at the data more objectively and there is more open sharing of information during the interviews - both internal and external.

I had written multiple blog posts on this topic last summer.  Here is the link to the first post in the series.

Please share your win-loss program war stories  - especially what worked well and what changes you need to make to get the program back on track (where you were not happy with initial results), so other readers can learn from them.

Challenges in working with Industry Analysts, when you are trying to create a new category.

 

Having been the CMO of multiple startups (with successful exits), and more recently, providing consulting advice to many more over the past 15 years, I am often asked what is the best way to work with industry analysts?

As a young company with next-generation technology, you are trying to be the 2.0 player in your space. To get there, you are trying to redefine an existing industry category or create a new category that represents your solutions. Chasing a position in an industry analyst's leaders quadrants or waves in the existing industry category will not give you the results you desire.  At best you will be placed as a niche player. Why?  To understand how industry analysts define categories, you must look at the world from their perspective. 

• For starters, an analyst will define the footprint of the solution category to be large enough, so that they can build a ‘financially viable practice’ around it.  So, you should expect to find several established vendors in the solution category you are likely to be placed in, which conflicts with your objective of being positioned in a new niche category.

• Analysts formulate a large part of their hypothesis on market trends based on their client inquiries - what problems are their clients looking to solve, which vendors they are evaluating, how much budget they are allocating to solve these problems, what trade-offs they would like to consider etc.  Most of the paying clients of an analyst practice are likely to be mid-sized to large enterprises.  While a few of these customers may be early adopters, a large majority of them statistically fall in the mainstream category – early majority and late majority.  To stay ahead of their clients but not be on the bleeding edge, the analysts are likely to formulate hypothesis that reflects what the early majority is looking for. If you are trying to invent a new category with your solution or redefine an existing category, you need to be ahead of the early majority. So, aligning your product and go-to-market strategy with what analysts are saying about the category would not help you achieve your goals.

• As I mentioned earlier, most of the paying customers of analysts tend to be conservative (upper mid-sized to large companies and not early adopters). Hence, financial viability of the vendors, as well as successful proof points of their technology is an important vendor selection criterion for these customers.  As a result, most analysts use a revenue cutoff or size of customer base in that solution category to exclude vendors who do not fit that profile. If you are a young vendor with new cutting-edge technology that is challenging the status quo, you may not make it to the analyst reports due to their revenue cut-off or installed base requirements.

 So, getting analysts to create a new category, where you can be placed in the top-right quadrant will be challenging. But these analysts will also likely cover some ‘cool’ upstart vendors, or mention them as a side-bar in their reports, where you should try to get mentions.  Also getting into the Niche category in their waves and leader quadrants can also pay dividends.  This is because you are likely targeting early adopters and not the middle majority, and those prospects are likely to evaluate vendors listed in the niche category.  Pairing these analyst mentions with customer stories and blog posts that highlight your industry-changing solution capabilities can get you the leverage you need from your industry analyst investments.

How to refresh your Go-to-Market within 30 days

 

I spoke to an old friend a couple of weeks ago, who is a CMO at a SaaS company.  He was in the process of updating their Go-to-Market (GTM) for their new Fiscal Year and wanted my thoughts on it. Below is an approach I proposed – not an exhaustive study but something that allows him to update within 30 days - ongoing tweaks to their messaging/value proposition to stay current, as well as where they should (re)focus their solution in terms of new geographies and industry verticals/sub segments.

I suggested that they either have their senior product marketing manager run this process or hire a product marketing consultant from outside.  The inputs they need are:

1. Industry analyst reports that highlight key trends in customer buying behavior, recent new entrants, changes in relative positioning/ranking of key players and finally, the strengths/weaknesses of the company with respect to these players.
2. Win-loss analysis, conducted by product marketing, from each of the last four quarters.  If the win-loss analysis does not exist, would recommend doing one using the CRM data as a starting point.
3. Internal competitive analysis, including SWOT analysis, done by either product marketing or product management organization.
4. Review of about ten to fifteen RFP responses/pre-sales responses to deals that are currently in play or the company won/lost in the last 3 months.  This is key to understanding what customers are asking for and if it tells a different story than what you saw in win-loss or competitive analysis.
5. Internal workshop/calls with sales, pre-sales, and professional services teams on what they are seeing with respect to why we win or lose and how customers are deploying and using the software.  This activity allows the product marketing/consultant, who is working on the project to do deep dives into questions/gaps they may have from the first four input sources above.
6. Finally, speak to at least 5 customers who selected your solution in the last 6 months to validate your findings or deep dive into some open areas.

Armed with this information, you can decide what tweaks are needed to ensure Go-to-Market stays aligned with the changing environment. It is always a good idea to do this analysis at the beginning of every 12 months, preferably in the first quarter of the new fiscal year – keeps your go-to-market current by ensuring your messaging/value proposition for your solution aligns with the ever-evolving customer needs, as well as finding new opportunities for your solutions such as new verticals/sub segments or new geographies. This process then helps you identify opportunities for new marketing content, new sales enablement tools/refresh of existing sales enablement content and new marketing programs.

3 tips to create highly engaging top-of-funnel content.

 

Digital channels have become more saturated than ever before.  Customers are being bombarded with top-of-funnel marketing campaigns containing offers for analyst white papers, webinars, infographics and even solution briefs.  Problem is that the content in these offers is not written for a prospective customer that is at the top of the funnel i.e., someone trying to understand how your solution addresses their unique problems and if they should take a closer look at your solution. In addition, the content often tends to use too much marketing jargon.  It ends up consuming 5 to 10 minutes of your customer’s time without providing them any unique insights.  Each interaction at the top of the funnel is critical – once the customer feels they wasted their precious time consuming your content, chances are they will not come back again.   

Tip #1: Create a point-of-view on a topic of interest to a prospective customer.  Ensure it also happens to coincide with your marketing agenda.  For example, if you are a next generation ecommerce software company, then “What is headless commerce and why it matters?” may help you educate a prospective buyer on a new paradigm in ecommerce software.  If you provide high performance NoSQL solutions, then “How NoSQL technology helped a credit card company implement a high-performance fraud detection solution?” may help you engage prospects.   Pick the persona you are targeting and create a jargon-free content that articulates your point of view very clearly, but along the way, give them a nugget that will be relevant to them in their job. Point of view could be delivered through a 2 pager or a podcast.  In this era of PDF saturation, an engaging and well produced 5-to-7-minute podcast can do the trick.  People will listen to something interesting while they are eating lunch at their desk or taking a short break between meetings. I have seen Point-of-views as very effective top-of-funnel content pieces.

Tip #2: Customer case studies that highlight the unique problems and how customers creatively solved them using your technology also serve as very good top-of-funnel content.  But it is important that the case studies are jargon free and focus on the ‘early adopter’ solutions i.e., customers who are doing something that is innovative and on the cutting edge.  Remember, your immediate goal is not to sell software, but to sell the dream – the art of the possible, so they come back to learn more about you and your solutions.  

Tip #3: Follow the rules in my blog post ‘how can product marketing create more relevant content’.