Beyond leads, StartUP MQL implements scalable demand generation frameworks within your startup

StartUP MQL

Every cloud-based SaaS company is trying to implement a selling motion that can complement the traditional system of enterprise-led sales. There are a number of thought pieces on how to individually scale ‘product-led’ and ‘enterprise-sales’ motions but in reality a business needs to implement a hybrid version that caters to the need of different customer profiles. That is not an easy task to accomplish and requires a delicate balance between different functions and conventional vs practical wisdom. product-led Before we dig deeper, let us define key Go-To-Market motions: Bottoms-up product adoption targeted primarily at end users (e.g., developers) driven by open-source distribution and/or freemium-style product offerings. Product-led growth: Top-down segmented sales motion targeted directly at senior leaders and/or decision-makers. Traditional Enterprise sales model: Bottoms up product adoption complemented by enterprise sales model. Hybrid product-led, sales-assisted model: In this article, I will share a few best practices that companies can adopt as they look to adopt this hybrid motion in their organization 1. Take a segment-based view There is a misconception that product-led sales primarily cater to customers. While it is true that the SMB teams derive immediate benefits from monetizing customers that have been using the product. SMB However, a lot of times the real benefit is how product-led growth can unlock the path to signing multi-million $$ deals with large enterprises. This is particularly true for companies selling developer or collaboration tools and thus have a large pool of end-users that could already be using the freemium version of the product. An installed base of customers, who are avid users of the product and have ‘road-tested’ it, provides a compelling reason for the executives to approve larger deals which would traditionally be negotiated on a top-down basis. There is a need, however, to look at what approach works best for different segments. An enterprise segment would most probably require a POC which provides initial validation of the effectiveness of the solution and addresses concerns of security, compliance, and infosec teams. Building a tailored hybrid motion that works for every segment is absolutely critical for success. 2. Invest in systems/processes/metrics to drive accountability Successful hybrid motion requires customized solutions for various operational aspects (tracking of product engagement, pricing, and billing, top-of-the-funnel engagement) of the PLG motion. GTM Without appropriate tools, companies are left with creating workarounds to overcome the limitations of their current software stack. There are a number of startups attempting to create tools for the hybrid GTM motion but companies can't wait for a perfect solution in the market. Here are a few things that a SaaS company can do to ensure they progress in the meantime: Ensure product qualified lead (PQL) measure is defined and tracked alongside MQL and SQL. Change the definition of an opportunity to include product-based criteria and review the definition on a periodic basis to make any adjustments Drive clarity with the sales team on when to engage with product-qualified leads and define an appropriate SOP for the same Ensure customers have the ability to keep on expanding via the product so they don't feel compelled to engage with salespeople if they don't see a need to 3. Challenge traditional GTM roles Traditional enterprise sales motion is underpinned by various customer and non-customer-facing GTM roles e.g., sales engineers, account executives, customer success and support, professional services, business value advisors, product marketing, account-based marketing, demand gen, etc. There is conventional wisdom that guides the ratios of each role which is based on years of the software selling motion. It is important to evaluate each function and look at its importance in a hybrid selling environment. While you will still have a number of these roles to cater to your highest tier of strategy enterprise customers, a well-run product-led motion can reduce the need for these roles (or help them be more productive) for the majority of customers. A large portion of pre-sales and post-sales customer-facing teams are structured to help customers understand the functionality of the technology or get them onboarded with white glove service. In a product-led environment, companies spend more effort upfront to invest in ‘ease of use’ features and also on ‘DIY’ tools/content that helps them get onboarded quickly 4. Allocate separate $$ to invest in ease-of-use features Every company works under healthy tension to determine product priorities - a lot of time is spent trading off investments in ‘ease of use’ vs ‘security/compliance/governance’ features. Investment in the latter is generally driven by the needs of large customers and is easy to measure in terms of $$ impact. of the former is harder to measure since it is based on metrics like increased customer satisfaction, higher retention, etc, and is not directly related to sales. ROI However, as noted above, product-led and sales-assisted hybrid motions can only scale if supported by a product that is easy to onboard/get started with and does not require human intervention to get up to speed. The best way to accomplish that is to agree on a separate bucket of $$ that is focused on ‘ease of use’ so it doesn't get de-prioritized by enterprise-grade features. One of the most important tasks of a CEO or a CPO is to figure out the right balance in terms of investment in ‘ease of use’ vs ‘enterprise grade’ features depending on the maturity of the business 5. Ensure appropriate engagement model for both end users and executives Whereas companies with traditional enterprise sales focused messaging disproportionately on middle/senior management owing to their buying power, pure product-led companies tend to focus solely on end-users. In a hybrid world, you need to build capabilities to cater to both sets of stakeholders. Anyone who has attempted this in practice knows that it's not a straightforward exercise. An example from Confluent which caters to developers and data engineers is interesting: To ensure end-user engagement, Confluent builds and invests in developer communities via separate online forums, content (incl., blogs, webinars, talks, etc.), in-person summits, education courses/certifications, open-source investments, etc. To ensure exec engagement, Confluent has built technical/exec marketing materials, customer advisory panels, exec leadership summits plus subject matter experts in specific verticals that could build customized business value materials. Similar to what we discussed in the previous section, it is important for a CMO to find the right balance between investment in marketing activities targeted at end-users vs senior leadership in this new hybrid world 6. Hiring is key! While a great sales and marketing leader would find a way to thrive in most GTM environments, the vast majority of the company’s hires would not have the skillset to wear different hats in a hybrid environment. A lot of emphasis needs to be placed on hiring appropriate folks who understand the modern hybrid selling motion and are comfortable leveraging products in closing deals or making customers successful. Most companies tend to hire leaders with experience in product-led motion early on in their journey, switching to experienced enterprise leaders once they mature. This is generally not a great approach and can make it difficult for companies to build a hybrid approach that works at scale. A better approach is to use a mixture of experiences while ensuring a strong voice (generally founder or COO) who believes in hybrid motion and can thus steer the ship in the right direction Finally In conclusion, the rise of product-led sales-assisted hybrid motion has created an unprecedented opportunity by democratizing the selling process and breaking the monopoly of a few incumbents with strong connections with senior leadership. However, to fully monetize the hybrid motion, it is important to understand the nuances between different GTM motions and ensure the resources, metrics, and roles are structured appropriately.

Adopting a Hybrid Product-led and Enterprise Sales Approach in Your SaaS Organization

The Foolproof 7-Step Process for Hiring the Best Software Developer

Introduction The line between the phrases “Taking your business online” and “Setting up a business on Facebook” is getting blurred. Source With more than of the world’s population (approximately 2.41 billion people) active every month on Facebook, there is no reason why your brand should not have a Facebook page of its own. To further support this claim, Americans alone spend approximately of their day on Facebook or other platforms that Facebook owns. 30% 20% So, sit back and think of the enormity of the market you would be able to reach with just a few clicks on the keyboard. But therein lie a few problems: How can you cater to the massive audience when queries start to arise? How can you leverage Facebook for marketing without denting your cash reserves? How can you ensure that all your fans and followers get a personalized experience when interacting with your brand? By now, you already know the answer from the title – get a ! Facebook Chatbot In this article, you will learn how a Messenger bot will help your business in 15 different ways, supported with rich examples, statistics, and use cases. 1. Lower Operational Costs Speaking from a pure business point of view, chatbots significantly lower your operational costs. When you use a Facebook chatbot, you get the following advantages: Hire fewer people Build smaller infrastructure Accelerate automation Acquire leads on auto-pilot According to the tech giant IBM, chatbots can help businesses cut down on service costs by In India, Kolkata Metro booked 11.5M+ tickets & saved , at the same time minimising Covid-19 spread with the help of chatbots. 30%. $3.2 Million This solution became a hot topic in a lot of news publications including the likes of the University of Berkeley. Here are some staggering statistics on how the bot helped Kolkata Metro: 11.25M+ travel tickets generated 125K requests handled per day 375K+ man-hours saved 90% improvement CSAT ratings $3.2M cost savings 2. Hyper-Personalization The difference between a brand and a business is one connects while the other only transacts. The key to a successful business model is to deliver an unparalleled experience to the audience regardless of the market size or audience base. Since each person is unique, brands need to personalize the experience at a microscopic level. Large businesses have a lot of capital to carry this out, but how can small businesses catch up? There are several chatbots for small businesses that help them stand tall among large competitors without shelling out many monetary resources. These allow smaller businesses to interact with customers in an imperceptible way, from a human-to-human conversation to a formal text-only conversation setup. conversational AI chatbots Facebook Chatbots have been picking up pace lately, so much so that even platforms like Spotify have begun to incorporate it into their marketing mix to recommend music and albums unique to each individual. 3. Provide 24x7 Customer Support Hiring a customer service representative is highly capital intensive. Add to that their limitation to work only about 8 hours a day, the cost keeps increasing. Moreover, like all humans, customer service reps are subjected to fatigue and mental stress upon working tirelessly for long hours. Facebook Chatbots leverage conversational marketing to provide users with unparalleled customer service with the same speed and efficiency throughout the day, every day, without breaking even for a second. To outperform its competitor Domino’s, took customer support using Messenger chatbots to another level by integrating the ability to order within the chatbot. Pizza Hut In another report, a media-based startup called Slush saw a 55% increase in the number of conversations after incorporating 24x7 chatbots into customer support requests. 4. Leverage the AIDA Model Funnels and KPIs are unique to each business. However, most sales and marketing funnels are based on the AIDA model. A Messenger chatbot can navigate the audience throughout the funnel and convert them, like Pizza Hut, or it can qualify them up to a certain stage, after which the executives can take over. AIDA stands for: A – Awareness/Attention I – Interest D – Decision A – Action Source Here's what each of those terms means for your brand when you are trying to drive sales: Awareness/Attention Awareness is when the customer is made aware of a particular product, service, or your company's offer. Interest This is when the leads start indicating that they are interested in a product. It could be through watching your videos, following on social media, or asking queries. Decision This is the stage where a lead decides to engage with the brand and make a purchase. However, they might still back out due to payment gateway issues or poor site load speed. Action The action is when the lead executes what the campaign intended them to do. It could be something as simple as visiting a site or opting for a free product trial. 5. Lead Customers Through Sales Funnels The key to closing more sales is to optimize your funnels continually. Navigating the customer from one stage to another through the sales funnel takes a lot of effort. To begin with, the customer first has to become aware of your brand and build interest before proceeding to take action. Automating even a small part of this process unloads a considerable burden, and the returns compound over time. A conversational marketing chatbot can effortlessly navigate your potential customers through the funnel and automate a huge part of your lead generation process. As a result, 8 out of 10 companies are willing to use chatbots, according to a report by . Business Insider 6. Qualify Leads Drawing the line between Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) is critical to optimize a conversion funnel. MQLs are those leads that can be converted at any time in the present or future as long as the proper strategic steps are taken. However, once a Marketing Qualified Lead is converted into a Sales Qualified Lead, no time should be spent procrastinating further steps and should be tended to immediately. With that said, it is still essential to address an MQL as early as possible. According to Lead Connect, almost leads convert into customers of brands that reply the earliest. 8 out of 10 A Facebook Chatbot can effectively qualify an MQL into SQL without the need for human intervention. The conversion becomes even easier if or when the lead explicitly indicates an intent to convert or buy. Furthermore, conversational AI chatbots can naturally segue a marketing lead into a sales lead – the goal of many marketing campaigns. 7. Improves Conversion Rates According to a survey, half of all American teens use Facebook Messenger, and more than of Facebook users use the app. 60% With Facebook Messenger being so popular, it is an excellent way for brands to market themselves on it through conversational marketing. If done right, your conversion rates could even touch There are several reasons why a Facebook chatbot is so influential over targeted ads or other marketing techniques. 100%. The biggest reason is the degree of personalization it allows and at a level that is extremely close to the audience. It forms a one-to-one bridge between the brand and the customer, making them feel special and significant. Naturally, reciprocity kicks in, and the customers feel the need to buy from the business. 8. Helps with Conversational Marketing If the customer support does not sound natural, then there are high chances of losing the lead. In fact, only of customers feel confident about starting a live chat conversation with the support team. Hence, having an effective conversational marketing strategy is the way forward for small and medium businesses. 60% Using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, a Facebook chatbot can make conversational marketing a breeze for your business. Source Using chatbots, you can build meaningful relationships with potential customers and build a loyal community for your brand. Moreover, conversational marketing also lets you gather data on auto-pilot rather than constantly nudge the customers to fill out forms or take surveys. For example, when National Geographic launched the TV show titled 'Genius', it sought Facebook Messenger to attract an audience. Users who texted NatGeo on Messenger received piquant replies as though Albert Einstein himself replied 9. Helps Repurpose Old Content The internet is like a fast-moving river; new content comes in, and the old ones fade away quickly. Sometimes, the content fades away before it serves the intended purpose. Conversational AI chatbots can help resurrect your old content by displaying it to customers. Your old how-to video may be of help to a customer. So, when a customer query triggers content similar to your video content, the chatbot can send out a link to the video or the video itself. leveraged this aspect of chatbots for his cooking recipes and built his brand rapidly. Jamie Oliver 10. Improves Message Open Rates With the help of Facebook chatbots, one of the campaigns of a digital marketing and advertising agency, NP Digital (with millions of monthly website visitors) achieved a staggering message open rate. 88% That is particularly effective because of the first-mover's advantage. Many businesses have not incorporated Messenger chatbots into their funnel optimization efforts. As a result, their competitors can quickly get ahead of them in this space. For the same reason, a higher percentage of people would open messages sent from brands to their inboxes today than in the future. Below are a few ways of getting high open rates: Answers queries in the comments by sending messages on Messenger Send messages to people who trigger potential sales keywords on your Facebook posts Include light humor within your chatbot scripts 11. Helps with Driving Traffic to Blogs and Video Content A Facebook chatbot is an excellent way to drive traffic to blogs on your website or video content on your YouTube channel. For example, if a follower has a query about your brand or business, the chances are that you already addressed it in one of your blogs or YouTube videos. So, if they trigger keywords related to that content, the AI chatbot can point them towards the content rather than have a tiring conversation. That way, your old content comes back to life, and engagement increases. 12. Makes it Easier for Customers to Purchase The ease of use and the experience of interacting with the brand as a whole send out strong social signals to social media platforms and search engines, which in turn help to increase organic reach and word-of-mouth. Hence, optimizing the user experience and simplifying the buying processes are critical in optimizing the conversion funnel. For example, , a Denmark-based company that makes toys for children, deployed a Messenger bot in the United Kingdom, United States, France, Canada, Poland, and Germany to make it easy for customers to choose a gifting product. It first asks a series of questions starting with location, age of the child, and more, to gather data and gain insight into the customer. Then, the bot effectively segments the audience and provides personalized recommendations to the user. Lego 13. Speeds Up Business Automation We live in a world of rapid digital transformation and automation. The days of carrying out rudimentary and repetitive tasks by humans are coming to an end and for the better. Today, Machine Learning algorithms and Artificial Intelligence software systems embedded in SaaS products or hardware systems are speeding up automation across several industries, including FMCG, automobile, and more. That is particularly beneficial for small businesses or teams that do not have the workforce or capital like large corporations. The NBA team, Golden State Warriors, used a to communicate with their fans and keep them updated with information about the game like scores, highlights, and more. The result of this was staggering as more than 4 million messages were exchanged in just the first two months of the launch. Facebook chatbot 14. Faster Sales with Embedded Payment Gateway Source Facebook claimed the title of the in the second half of 2020, followed by YouTube and WhatsApp. world’s most used social media platform Hence, embedding the payment gateway within the Messenger bot and making the checkout process much more convenient, seamless, and hassle-free for the users helps businesses skyrocket their sales. The Messenger chatbot offers two types of payment: Native payment Messenger web-view payment You can choose the kind of payment methods you would want to provide to your followers. Some choose groups to prefer the native payment type for the added convenience, while others might opt for the second type if they are concerned about security. Lego and PVR Cinemas have made an example of this by tightly integrating payment gateway in the chatbot. 15. Saves Time and Improves Efficiency Your office might close in the evening, but social media and e-commerce never sleep. If a business needs to gain visibility and traction on social media, it cannot simply put outposts or drop links and expect to grow. Contributing to the community by interacting and responding to all queries as frequently and quickly as possible is a critical aspect. Unfortunately, it is not humanly possible for your company’s customer service representatives to tend to your customers' needs 24 hours a day, every day. To do so, you have two options: Hire more people Automate the process The first option is probably not the best way forward as it would dilute profits. On the other hand, the second option can get the job done at lightning-fast speeds and a fraction of the cost. Using a Facebook Chatbot, you can automate the process and potentially save thousands or even millions of dollars every year. The finance company , for example, saves over 360,000 hours every year using their bot. JPMorgan Chase & Co. Conclusion If you want your business to stay active 24x7x365 on social media and tend to the customers without spending large sums of money, then deploying a Facebook chatbot for is the way forward. conversational marketing

1​5 Reasons For Business To Get Facebook Chatbot

Sales 101 for Engineers: A Functional Introduction

From : Marketing 103 for Engineers: Roughing Out a Funnel How do you know whether marketing is doing anything? What’s our model for marketing activity and whether it’s generating a return? IMO, the only way to do this is to know what the funnel looks like — or what we want it to look like. In this post we’ll focus on Demand Generation: the top of the funnel and what it takes to fill it. Programming notes: this post is n in a series of indeterminate length on GTM topics mainly for startup people, mainly leadership, mainly coming from non-GTM backgrounds. There’s a list at the end. I strongly recommend reading Marketing 103 as a complement to this post. All About That ToFu The top of the funnel is essentially when anyone your brand, company, or product in any setting and to make the effort to figure out what you do and whether it might solve a problem they have — even if they didn’t know they had it. first encounters becomes sufficiently interested Getting people “into” the funnel starts at the “top”. The discipline and work that goes into this are called all kinds of things: Demand Generation Lead Generation Acquisition Marketing Performance Marketing Growth Marketing Growth Hacking ProbablyOtherThingsToo Pre-SaaS / pre-app / pre-cloud, marketing in tech is broken down into two or three broad functional areas: Demand Gen [DG], Product Marketing [PMM], and Communications/PR [Comms/MarComms]. These lines are completely blurred today. You’ll find that the scope of any given role is almost random from company to company, with a few different strains prevalent in specific sub-sectors of the tech world. From the perspective of building and operating a marketing function, I still find this distinction extremely useful. Marcomms vs DG vs PMM — even when used to execute a single go to market strategy — involve different tactics and disciplines. Which usually means different people with distinct differences in finding, hiring, evaluating, setting goals for, and measuring results of, the roles. Demand Gen Exists Within a Go To Market Context All demand gen exists within some go to market [GTM] context. Who are you selling to? What industry are you selling in to? How much do they have to spend on you? How many deals do you need to close in a month, a quarter, a year? What is your (real and desired) sales motion? If you can answer these questions, you can go about figuring out how to find the right people and get yourself in front of them. Example! If you’re selling enterprise software that costs $250k a year at its cheapest, sponsoring the free-to-attend AWS Summits will get you precisely nowhere in terms of acquiring qualified leads who might have — or be within reach of someone with — that kind of budget authority. This is what DG is all about. Demand Gen Strategies In my brutally honest opinion, talking about demand gen strategy is usually a waste of time. Most discussions about DG amount to “how do we get more leads?”. The only differences between them are about budget, ranging from “at the lowest cost possible” to “at any cost.” But if you’re doing DG work, or building and running the team that does, you need strategy. Here are examples of minimally viable DG strategies: some Inbound, organic Events, paid Outbound, field marketing Inbound, organic paid + events, paid (sponsorships) and Why? Because, for example, the people you hire (or contract) to create compelling content and optimize it for SEO typically the same people who know how to run a global events program that creates compelling presence and “activations” a dozen times a year. are not Advice In the long run, you will account for CAC and Payback Period. have to Depending on the business you’re in and the kinds of investors you have, the long run might be next year or it might be “not until many years after an IPO”. You should know roughly where your business lies on this spectrum and act accordingly. More Advice Every successful acquisition strategy is subject to failure when your go to market changes. Or when the conditions under which it was conceived change. This includes things like: a new pricing model, change in buyer persona, emerging competitors, ramped revenue goals from the board to meet the benchmarks set by a new funding round. Even More Advice No one can tell the difference between strategy and tactics, so you will receive pressure to abandon a given strategy when you hit the point of diminishing returns for a particular . Whether you choose to die on this hill is.. up to you. :) tactic Demand Gen Tactics Tactics are the specific things you do to execute your strategy. Let’s build out one of the strategies above with tactics to see what this might look like. Strategy: Inbound, organic and paid + events, paid Inbound tactics: SEO optimization across marketing site against search terms: aaaaa, bbbbb, ccccc Weekly cadence of blog posts (2–3) about aaaaa, bbbbb, ccccc interleaving the following: 1) commentary on industry development, 2) how-to or expert guide of a specific and practical aspect of the topic, 3) something that pitches the product, like a customer testimonial or case study or announcement or demo SEM inventory analysis, testing, and campaigns against aaaaa, bbbbb, ccccc primarily but also long tail adjacencies such as “aaaaa products” and “bbbbb as a service” leading to Landing Pages run on a marketing automation platform specifically for lead capture All inbound suspects are presented with one of two CTAs: 1) get a personalized demo or 2) start a 14 day free trial Event tactics: Sponsor 6 relevant conferences a year: 1 large per half, 1 smaller per quarter Where possible, pick booth position directly next to or across from competitor X OR directly next to or across from partner Y Submit one talk by each founder at each event, send whichever founder gets accepted (if any) Use end of founder talks to drive traffic to booth through on stage statement and by activity of staff in talk Position staff in each relevant talk throughout the agenda to engage with participants and speakers to drive traffic to the booth Use contributions to the instead of swag at the booth to draw and engage walk-bys, supplying branded evidence of donation like a badge sticker or flag Flint Water Fund Maximize demo-giving at the booths by having 1–2 large screens to give concurrent demos in a one-to-many format at the edges while maintaining 1–2 interior spots for custom/private demos Advice . Every tactic has a half-life Many have long tails. Always be looking for signals that you’ve hit the point of for a marketing tactic and have in mind how that it needs to evolve or how it will be replaced. diminishing returns Next level tactitioning would be to think about a tactic is losing efficacy. why For example: if SEM against j oriented search terms in your primary market aren’t working well anymore.. obs-to-be-done Maybe your brand has achieved maximal power and people are searching for it directly because that’s how they talk about the JTBD […congrats, you’re the “Kleenex of ___”!] Maybe you’ve hit inventory limits and it’s time to [additionally?] run ads against competitors Maybe you’ve acquired (or burned) all the leads there are to acquire but only in NA and this tactic should get deployed in LATAM More Advice A tactic that has leveled off is as one that’s on a downslope. not the same A flatlined tactic may represent something that generates run-rate [but not growing] business. It’s the thing which enables you to try other things, like a first product that provides the revenue base for your next product or round of funding. And a tactic that’s on the downslope a tactic that’s useless. It may still generate incremental lead volume for a long time to come. is not Think about your tactics as a portfolio of investments. Rebalance your portfolio in proportion to results. Demand Gen Metrics Demand gen is generally measured in leads driven into the funnel [ ] or delivered to sales [volume x ]. As a business becomes more sophisticated, what really matters are things that show the . volume coversion contribution of marketing spend to revenue Some key metrics that will help you understand the dollars-in-marketing to dollars-out-revenue: Raw leads, Marketing Qualified Leads, Sales Qualified Leads, Closed/Won [C/W], Closed/Lost [C/L] The conversion rates between stages above The change in those conversion rates over time The proportion of C/W to C/L Pipeline/Lead , PIpeline/MQL, Pipeline/SQL, Revenue/Lead, Revenue/MQL, Revenue/SQL, LTV Cost/Lead [CPL], Cost/MQL, Cost/SQL, Customer Acquisition Cost [CAC] The change in the above $ numbers over time Payback Period The change in the above number over time Some heuristics for making sense of the numbers: The higher the conversion rates between lead types and sales stages, the more qualified [better!] the leads The higher the C/W to C/L ratio for any cohort, the more qualified [better!] the leads The lower the CPL and CAC, the more efficient your marketing spend is in generated leads and revenue (respectively) The lower the Payback Period, the better the business is at paying off your CPL and CAC and the more efficient marketing spend is in generating revenue Funnel Template [Fork at will!] Advice You probably noticed that you don’t have control over a great many of those metrics and/or what you do only has a fractional impact on the ultimate business metric that matters. You need to be conversant and interested in everything that happens of demand gen to make sure that you are 1) getting adequate feedback on lead volumes and quality and 2) able to see when the problem is actually due to a strategic or tactical issue further down the funnel. downstream For example: sales development reps [SDRs] getting better at qualification and account execs [AEs] getting better at pipeline forecasting a function of more/better leads. is not More Advice Measure as much as you can Do it on a fixed schedule consistently Be about assumptions and methodology explicit Report than you collect much less Demand Gen Levers The way you model and measure the funnel should tell you how to improve it. Let’s sketch out a simple example: very If we have a five stage funnel with 10000 leads a month coming in the top and 10% conversion rates between each stage with a 30 day sales cycle, then for each cohort starting at day 0 and ending at day 30 we only end up with 1 paying customer [10000 → 1000 → 100 → 10 → 1]. How do you think about improving this funnel? There is only one goal: . increase the numbers There are only two ways to do that: or . more volume higher conversion More volume at the top should result in more customers and revenue at the bottom. If it doesn’t, you have a capacity or efficacy or execution problem somewhere downstream. A better conversion rate at any stage should result in more volume at the next stage, which should result in more customers and revenue at the bottom. If it doesn’t, you have a capacity or efficacy or execution problem somewhere downstream. Note: Bits of the above are repeated from Marketing 103 for Engineers: Roughing Out a Funnel . If you’re really interested in this topic, go read it. Posts in this series (and templates) Marketing 101 for Engineers: A Functional Introduction Marketing 102 for Engineers: Roughing Out a Funnel Marketing 201 for Engineers: Messaging & Positioning Marketing 202 for Engineers: Launching Marketing 203 for Engineers: Sales Enablement Marketing 204 for Engineers: Generating Demand Marketing 301 for Engineers: Strategy & Planning Marketing 302 for Engineers: Hiring Marketers Marketing 303 for Engineers: Pricing Frame Marketing 401 for Engineers: Stages of GTM Sales 101 for Engineers: A Functional Introduction PR 101 for Engineers Analyst Relations 101 for Engineers Basic Messaging Template [Google Doc] Basic Funnel Metrics Template [Google Sheet] Basic Launch Timeline Template [Google Doc] Basic Battlecard Template [Google Doc] Detailed Battlecard Template [Google Doc] Basic Marketing Calendar Template [Google Sheet] Basic Marketing Ladders Template [Google Sheet] Reading List and Resources Bob Tinker’s GTM Fit and Talk Slides Tomasz Tunguz’s Blog Growth Hackers Community Kissmetrics’ Blog HubSpot’s Blog Optimizely’s Blog Startup Marketing Playbook Aha! Marketing Strategy Templates Aha! Marketing Plan Templates Shot the Curl Marketing Templates Ogilvy on Advertising

Marketing 204 for Engineers: Generating Demand

How to figure out what matters Programming notes: this post is n in a series of indeterminate length on GTM topics mainly for startup people, mainly leadership, mainly coming from non-GTM backgrounds. There’s a list at the end. How do you know whether is What’s our model for marketing activity and whether it’s generating a return? marketing doing anything? IMO, the only way to do this is to know what the funnel looks like — or what we want it to look like. There is a bit of the chicken and egg about it, as any funnel will co-evolve with where we have sales success (or failure) and it will also co-evolve with the core components of the product and messaging — things like: the user is, the buyer is, the value prop is, the differentiation is. who who what what GTM Every funnel exists within the context of some go to market (GTM). Literally, how we . We have a thing that we want to trade. We need to… go to the market Decide who it’s for Find the market(s) that has those people Figure out how they will know we exist and are in the market Get them to stop by our stall Convince them of the value Get them to try it or buy it Price the thing such that we make some money (staying in business is good) such that customers feel like they’re getting they’re money’s worth and Decide if there will be haggling Decide if customers who pay more get more, different, or better things and/or service Package the thing(s) in a way that’s and easy to understand and maybe easy to compare.. or not (with intent) appealing Figure out to do the sale, like with someone who’s job it is to sell or maybe customers just put money into a box and take the right amount how Actually the sale, ask for the money, take the money, hand over the product do Figure out how to get customers to come back for more Learn the things that make for satisfied, or dissatisfied, customers Find the next market and the next customers The Funnel This is how GTM people — sales & marketing (& “growth”) — model the process of customer acquisition from the “top” (awareness) to the “bottom” (paying customer). Note that in recurring revenue, subscription services the bottom might be further down at retention/renewal. In other kinds of businesses, what you have may not be a funnel at all, but rather a flywheel or something else. [Hint: It’s still a funnel.] There are as many models as there are pundits. Every single one is wrong and also useful. We have to find the one that works best for our specific business competing in its specific market for its specific customer base and its specific state of maturity and development. Examples! SImple Funnel Outbound Sales-Led Funnel Inbound Self-Service Funnel AARRR Funnel Inbound Self-Service + Inbound Sales Funnel [Yes, I drew that.. sorry] The exact terminology we use for each stage doesn’t matter too much, as long as everyone knows what we’re talking about. As we scale, we’ll get driven towards common language used in the industry. If we zoom in to a particular stage, there are plenty of substages. Sales teams, especially, have their own sub-funnel that they work against that specifies sales qualification and opportunity development stages and comes with its own terminology. This is generally not reflected in top-level funnel views. But, it is used by sales leaders (along with compensation and playbooks) to understand and tune the performance of the sales organization. To be really effective at marketing, we should understand exactly how the sales team operates so we can tune upstream activities and diagnose failure modes. Advice Reject models that do not work mercilessly the ones that do to fit Customize Measure frequently and consistently Take confirmatory evidence lightly Take evidence.. heavily disconfirmatory Have ideas about the next models that might work the one you’re using now stops working before Metrics Here’s what we to measure to have any idea of what’s going on: have Absolute numbers of people in each stage Conversion rates from each stage to the next The change in those metrics week over week (WoW), month over month (MoM), quarter over quarter (QoQ), and year over year (YoY) Generally speaking, you would expect that the numbers go down as people move through the funnel. [That’s why it’s a funnel!] In order to actually see this, we need some minimal viable cohort to measure. That is usually done on a time boundary. Weekly and monthly are common for campaigns, tactics, and day-to-day operation of the marketing function. Monthly, quarterly, and yearly are typical for reporting and board meetings. But we might also run special cohorts for testing (A/B or otherwise) campaigns, tactics, and assets that are on much shorter time boundaries.. or even just something like “the 100 site visitors who were sent to this landing page”. In addition to the above, we should look for proxies to the upstream quality-of-leads-generated and revenue-mechanics: Conversion rates between: MQL -> C/W and MQL -> Churn Pipeline per MQL Cost Per (unqualified) Lead (CPL) and/or CPMQL Actual revenue per Unqualified Lead and/or MQL MQL -> disqualified-by-Sales or DQ-by-self for self-service funnels And [counter]indicators that can factor into our evaluation of both our chosen GTM and our sales motion: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Payback Period Average Selling Price (ASP) Annual Contract Value (ACV) Sales Cycle Conversion rate from Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) -> C/W Ratio of ASP to Pipeline per SQL Example — Zoom! Want to see what an incredibly successful business looks like? Read Tom Tunguz’s post on Zoom’s S-1. Zoom turns $1 of marketing & sales → of gross margin. That’s what actual value creation looks like. We should all be so lucky and skilled! $1.80 Measurement I am a proponent of magic metrics. Optimizing for a single metric will blind you to evidence that some part of our marketing and sales machine isn’t working (or losing efficacy, which is normal)… until in the game. Maybe too late! not very late Advice Measure as much as you can Do it on a fixed schedule consistently Be about assumptions and methodology explicit Report much less than you collect Minimum Viable Reporting Things to watch out for: Confusing sales effectiveness for anything that is not controlled by sales effectiveness — sales development reps (SDRs) getting better at qualification and account execs (AEs) getting better at forecasting revenue-per-deal is a function of more/better leads not A change in any upstream metric that does not result in changes in downstream metrics in the same direction — if this happens, figure out where the propagation stops and solve from there OR realize that the change in the upstream metric was a failure/bullshit A change in any downstream metric that happens independent of upstream metrics — if this happens , figure out how and scale (if positive) or stop the bleeding (if negative) unintentionally Levers The way we model and measure the funnel should tell us how to improve it. Let’s sketch out a simple example: very If we have a five stage funnel with 10000 leads a month coming in the top and 10% conversion rates between each stage with a 30 day sales cycle, then for each cohort starting at day 0 and ending at day 30 we only end up with 1 paying customer [10000 → 1000 → 100 → 10 → 1]. How do we think about improving this funnel? There is only one goal: . increase the numbers There are only two ways to do that: more or higher . volume conversion More volume at the top should result in more customers at the bottom. If it doesn’t, we have a capacity or efficacy or execution problem somewhere below. A better conversion rate at any stage should result in more volume at the next stage, which should result in more customers at the bottom. If it doesn’t, we have a capacity or efficacy or execution problem somewhere below. There are only two ways to increase the sales and marketing numbers: 1) add more volume to the funnel and 2) increase the conversion rates. If we can’t break down even the most complicated funnel or flywheel or whatever to these levers — volumes and conversion rates — we’ve lost our way and should reconsider this whole building a business thing. :) Note: arguably a third lever is decreasing the sales cycle and a fourth lever is changing pricing. Pricing’s impact is on volume and conversion rates, so it’s really doing those things. Sales cycle is way more complicated and generally the not-necessarily-intended result of something else rather than an engineered thing. In any case, where we can successfully shorten the sales cycle, we create upstream demand for more volume for the funnel and end up having to do that. Things Left Out The of a lead, or customer, includes more than is described in a typical funnel. We should develop a complete model for that lifecycle, even if it’s not reported on regularly or shown in a funnel diagram. lifecycle Example! If a lead does not become a customer, they are Closed/Lost (C/L). There are reasons for that which would typically be recorded in some way in a CRM or marketing automation platform. Many of those reasons will be… reasonable: bad time, interested but no budget, love it but just bought something else. In that case, those leads should enter a stage that’s not shown on a typical funnel called “remarket” or “delay lead nurture” or something. This is a long running stage that sits between MQL and whatever comes next where we’ll stay in touch with that lead until they are ready, or conditions change, or they move on to their next company and give us a shot there. Example! For subscription businesses, post-becoming-customer is also a funnel that tracks customer-to-churn stages which we might want to look at separately as part of the operation of a Customer Success function. Funnel Template [Fork at will!] Basic Funnel Template — Fork at will! Informal Definitions and Explanations These are taken from the Sales 101 : someone who arrives on your website or you encounter in the course of marketing/selling, like at a booth at a conference Suspect : someone who might possibly have some interest in buying. Prospect : someone who might definitely have some interesting in buying (note the increase in probability). Lead An unqualified Lead, i.e. Suspect or Prospect Raw Lead: : The act of progressively determining the likelihood of a given Prospect/Lead being willing, able, and likely to buy Qualification : The act of determining that a given Prospect/Lead is willing, able, and likely to buy Disqualification not : someone who might definitely have some interest in buying and is also from the right kind of organization, or has the right title, or has demonstrated active interest by doing something like looking at the docs and clicking around the pricing page and filing out a form, etc. MQLs is a common metric used to measure the efficacy of demand gen activities run by the marketing team (“programs, campaigns, tactics”). Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) : In the world of self-service sales, someone who becomes qualified through their behavior in interacting with the product during a free trial, in the freemium version, or even after becoming a customer in whatever tier they’re in (e.g. “PQL-ed for an upgrade offer”). Product Qualified Lead (PQL) : MQLs that have been validated as having sufficient probability to buy to be actively worked on by a sales rep — SAL qualification is a point of contention between marketing and sales teams regarding the of leads being brought in by marketing activities and the of the process used by sales orgs to validate them. Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) quality rigor : SALs that have been qualified to the extent of the rep being able to say with surity that the lead has a problem that the product solves, the desire to solve that problem, and the budgetary/authority means to do it by buying the product — SQL qualification can be a point of contention within a sales team and frequently very strict, formal definitions are used (and ignored). Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) : some level of qualification beyond SAL and possibly beyond SQL — opportunities are generally broken up into stages, e.g. “Stage 2 Opportunity”, which are related to the formal definitions of lead types, e.g. SQL == Stage 2 Opportunity. Opportunity (Opp or Op) : state that a lead is unqualified. Disqualify (DQ) : total sales & marketing cost to acquire a paying customer Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) : how long it takes for a customer to pay off CAC before they become profitable (which is kind of naive because there is an ongoing cost to maintain/support a customer which should be factored in but is rarely done at the level of customers, instead being more of a bottom line overall COGS balance sheet item) Payback Period : the total expected revenue a customer is expected to generate over their time as a customer with you (with the assumption that all customers eventually churn) [Customer] Lifetime Value (LTV) : exactly what it sounds like Annual Contract Value (ACV) : exactly what it sounds like Average Selling Price (ASP) : the amount of time it takes to close a deal from when it enters the pipeline. Sales Cycle : inverse of , a measure of how effective sales (and marketing) are at generating revenue. Sales Efficiency Payback Period : the $ of all the deals forecasted at any level fo the sales org — i.e. each rep has a pipeline, but so does their team, and so does the entire sales org. Pipeline : trial period, sometimes paid for by the prospective customer (Paid POC). POCs are often long or especially customized for the account. Usually involves the account using the product in real life for a specific use case and committing to any associated integration work. These are typically intended to have well defined outcomes and commitments. Paid POCs are frequently marketed as “customers” by startups, what I would call “standard bullshit”. Proof of Concept (POC) [aka Trial] Posts in this series (and templates) Marketing 101 for Engineers: A Functional Introduction Marketing 102 for Engineers: Roughing Out a Funnel Marketing 201 for Engineers: Messaging & Positioning Marketing 202 for Engineers: Launching Marketing 203 for Engineers: Sales Enablement Marketing 204 for Engineers: Generating Demand Marketing 301 for Engineers: Strategy & Planning Sales 101 for Engineers: A Functional Introduction PR 101 for Engineers Analyst Relations 101 for Engineers Basic Messaging Template [Google Doc] Basic Funnel Metrics Template [Google Sheet] Basic Launch Timeline Template [Google Doc] Basic Battlecard Template [Google Doc] Detailed Battlecard Template [Google Doc] Basic Marketing Calendar Template [Google Sheet] Reading List and Resources Bob Tinker’s GTM Fit and Talk Slides Tomasz Tunguz’s Blog Tren Griffin’s Blog Growth Hackers Community Kissmetrics’ Blog HubSpot’s Blog Optimizely’s Blog Reify’s Blog Startups ❤ Customers Startup Marketing Playbook Aha! Marketing Strategy Templates GrokSpark Product Messaging Template Shot the Curl Marketing Templates Aha! Marketing Plan Templates

Marketing 102 for Engineers: Roughing Out a Funnel

Business owners rely on a lot of metrics to evaluate whether their business is growing or taking a toll down the hill. Monthly active users, month-by-month growth rate, user retention rate and what not? But at the end of the day, what matters is how your overall revenue is fairing against the cost of acquiring customers. , the pioneer of Lean Startup movement, coined a term for all these secondary metrics — Vanity metrics. If you are not filling in your pockets by the end of the day; the number of active users, number of leads and other Vanity metrics can serve as a false pretense of growth. Eric Ries (If you have not read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, I would highly recommend you do so, especially if you are running a startup or managing a team) I am not saying that these metrics should not be tracked and be optimized by your team’s effort. Tracking and optimizing these metrics is absolutely necessary. But they should be aligned with the end goal of your business — revenue. Suppose your user base is growing 100% month on month, the right question to ask would be how much revenue do this 100% month on month growth is bringing. What matters is how you optimize your efforts which in turn will help you grow your revenue, eventually growing the overall business. With more revenue, you can push back money in to accelerate your marketing efforts, hire quality engineers and sustain an accountable growth. Marketing, sales and customer support are integral pathways which weave path for revenue growth. A modern marketer is accountable for revenue(which is primarily a sales metric) and a modern sales guy has to be market and technology aware. Similarly, the support team should have basic qualities of tech, marketing, and sales. Though usually far seated; marketing, sales, and support need to work together for the greater good of the business. A strong alignment of these three parts will help you formulate and act upon your end goals more clearly. In the end, the revenue growth will happen if you keep prospects aware of your platform (Marketing), make them customers (Sales) and retain them to keep on adding revenue (Support). Marketing and Sales Coordination “The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales needs to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our customers.” , Chief Growth Officer, Marketo Jill Rowley Marketing and sales are the customer-facing sides of your business. Marketing brings in potential customers which sales team can turn in to paying customers. It is an utmost necessity that these teams collaborate to meet end goals of the company — the revenue target. The marketing team present the company to the outside world and are responsible for building the desired perception of your brand or product. How they do it, is not the topic of this post. The job is to get leads which salespeople can then convert into customers. In a lot of business vertical, and especially SaaS, a good chunk of leads coming in are junk. The number increases more if your business runs on a freemium model. Hence, it is important for the marketing team to bring quality leads so that your sales teams do not waste precious time on engaging with the wrong ones. This is done through lead scoring. There are majorly two types of lead that marketing qualifies: An MQL is a lead which is nurtured by the marketing team to make it ready for human interaction. The basic criteria for a lead to be qualified as MQL are to match the demographics, job/role description, business type, company size of your ideal customer persona. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) An SQL is a lead which is ready for human interaction and is passed on to the sales team. Marketing team generally uses drip email campaigns to convert an MQL to SQL. As per your website navigation and business type, you can decide a par score for MQL to be considered as SQL. Sales Qualified Leads(SQL) Please note that, before putting efforts in building a framework for lead scoring, you need to decide whether you actually need lead scoring or not. A great article about this decision making can be found here . On the other hand, the sales team needs to give feedback to marketing on the quality of leads. Sales team should find trends and hypothesis about the quality of leads. The sales team needs to answer question such which leads converted fast and are high paying? They belong to which demographic, company size or product use case? Our sales peers at Applozic constantly collate this data to give feedback to the marketing team. Based on the data provided by the sales team, the marketing team can optimize their efforts to bring in similar quality leads and build a better user persona to target effectively. These activities can lower the cost of customer acquisition by concentrating on getting leads which have a higher chance of conversion. Depending on the sales team’s feedback marketing team can improve a number of things such as messaging, content strategy, landing pages, use cases etc. The feedback can even help in bringing ideas for product roadmap if a sufficient number of customers are asking for a similar feature. This is a virtuous circle of sales-marketing coordination, which becomes more efficient with every iteration. Sales and Support Coordination Sales and support team have to often work very closely for customer success and service. In many small teams, where there is no dedicated support team, it often drops down to sales (or marketing) to handle customer support. As quality customer support can be the prime reason for customer retention, it is important to have sales and support team to collaborate for making it better. Bonus: If you are looking for an intelligent customer support software for improving your customer support efficiency, we can help . Once a deal is closed and the customer starts paying, sales team should clearly lay out what kind of support is been promised to the customer. The best way to do it is to make tiered support programs that resonate with your pricing plans. The sales team should clearly handover the customer to support team with the designated level of support promised. This helps support team to optimize their efforts accordingly. Sales and support coordination is also required while the customer is integrating your product into theirs. This is a major uphold in SaaS sales cycles. Multiple sales calls, delayed integration and unsatisfied trial might result in longer sales cycles. Which in-turn can hamper the revenue goals. The best way is to have the sales and support team collaborate efficiently to help the customer make most out of the product during the trial period. The support team can be a medium for sales team to upsell or cross-sell the product to customers. If a customer is overall happy with your product or services (This can be done by evaluating Net Promoter Score(NPS) of each customer), the support team can pitch in ideas to customers about additional features and upgradable plans. Marketing and Support Coordination Marketing and support teams, at times, are regarded as miles apart with less frequent interaction. Since major marketing involvement happens at the first touchpoint of the customer and the support team comes in when they already have been using the product for some time. Believe me, a good coordination of the two will help in making both their jobs easier. Marketing can help build an efficient self-serve content bundle to take the load off the customer support. The customer support team can collate the data such as what kind of technical and generic issues customers are facing and what is the frequency of each such question. The marketing team can then act upon the aforementioned data. The marketing team can include repetitive tech queries received by customer support teams in their documentation or product use instructions page. They can make self-help, support articles, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). This will help in reducing the workload on customer support team so that they can efficiently invest their time in handling more complex queries. Also, once a prospect becomes a customer, the customer support team becomes the point of contact. Hence, they can easily collect information such as feedback on the product and feature requirements. The customer support teams can thus forward this data to marketing and product teams to work upon. Customer support teams help in referral marketing as well. As mentioned, support team becomes the point of contact for customers, they can essentially help in getting more customer through existing customer’s referral. The customer support team can help the marketing team in defining the NPS for each customer and marketing team can ask this customer to refer the product to their network depending upon the NPS of that particular customer. Three is the charm! Efficiently aligning your marketing, sales, and support can help your company tremendously. You can always find more ways for these teams to collaborate depending on your business model. The ideas of collaboration might be different for a SaaS business in comparison with a social media application or an on-demand services company. But in the end, it boils down to a impeccable coordination between marketing, sales, and support teams. These collaborations should be done keeping the end goal in mind, which is the revenue you get. I just got off a call with a leading entrepreneur who told me if we are not meeting our revenue goals perpetually, we should shut down the company. Harsh, but true. There are companies who are excellent in marketing, there are the ones with charming salespeople who make you believe in their product and the ones with fall-in-love customer support. But the winning ones are where these three teams perform really well together. Have you heard them saying jack of all trades and master of none? This doesn’t mean being brilliant in any aspect of the business is not beneficial for you. It certainly is. But, for the home run, you need to make sure that all the three customer-facing team collaborate exceptionally. How to facilitate these collaborations? For handling collaboration between teams, you need to put efforts in making a transparent framework which is easily understood by all the stakeholders involved. You can use a number of tools to facilitate these collaborations. For marketing and sales collaboration and lead scoring, we use (a marketing automation tool) and (a sales CRM). ActiveCampaign Pipedrive We use our own product for customer support — which handles our support team’s collaboration with sales and marketing team. Using Kommunicate, the support team can make FAQs to facilitate a self-serve platform. Kommunicate Also, the marketing team can see customer queries and understand if there is a need for change in product messaging or positioning. Similarly, using Kommunicate, the sales team can collaborate with support teams to assist customers in during trial and integration period to reduce the length of sales cycle and fasten the onboarding process. Some would argue to build their own systems from ground zero. I would certainly not recommend this. Putting efforts in building these tools might hamper the progress of your own product. SaaS businesses are thriving miraculously because they help businesses reduce workload in building tools to support their main business. You may choose a number of tools which help you achieve these effective collaborations. In the end, it matters the most to have marketing, sales and support teams collaborating efficiently with each other for the end goal of the company — revenue growth. I work for Kommunicate , an intelligent customer support platform. This article was originally published here .

Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Support for Revenue Growth

Successful SaaS businesses are driven by three things: customer acquisition, customer retention, and monetization. If we know that’s the case, why do so many companies focus so much on customer acquisition, and spend significantly less on retention and growth? Growth without retention is not growth. A Flawed Business Model The business model is flawed for the reality of SaaS today. It’s time to usher in a new era of product, sales, and . Go-to-market strategy is still relevant, but without a you will not succeed. marketing strategy go-to-customer strategy The SaaS world has left it’s awkward teen years. SaaS 1.0 was cost effective service delivery, replacing on-premise apps. SaaS 2.0 was about interoperability with existing solutions, while still delivering high value at low cost. As , and every organization worth anything takes an API-driven approach, what’s next for SaaS? SaaS has largely become the defacto delivery model Business model evolution. Product, sales, and marketing changes will be abundant in this era. Jason Green, Founder and general partner at , writes: Emergence Capital Partners “Today, with the ability for end users to easily search, try and buy applications independently, the amount spent on the front of the sales process has been reduced dramatically. Sales now plays less of a role convincing end users and more of a role in satisfying IT on security, compliance and administrative control and in supporting early customer success and adoption. In this new product-driven era, finding ways to simplify the value proposition and enable customers to get up and running quickly and easily and reducing any friction involved in the purchase is critical.” So how does a SaaS company drive growth in this new era? Product-driven experiences Re-calibrating the sales & marketing model Go-to-customer strategy Product-driven experiences throw out the old marketing-qualified lead (MQL) model, and usher in (PQLs). The rub? The freemium experience has to be awesome. Sales does not touch these people until they’re actively using the product for free. The product has to do all the work: show business value to and qualify the leads. product-qualified leads The re-calibration of the sales and marketing model is a natural extension in the product-driven world. Atlassian went from $0 to $100M without sales people. Sales teams should be kept lean in early days, and utilized for larger deals with longer sales cycles that involve getting buy-in from multiple stakeholders. How competitive your market is also affects the timing of hiring a sales rep. As the marketing model moves to optimize for PQLs, we’re seeing the rise of the . Growth Marketers don’t just care about prospects, they care about following prospects straight through the funnel to renewal. When building the Top of the Funnel (TOFU) they need to have a killer content strategy that flanks the product experience with helpful, credible content. As the prospect comes into the free program, they are driving and measuring conversion to paid. They are then focused on driving product usage, cross-sell/upsell, and hitting retention & customer growth targets. growth marketer They are 100% data-driven on metrics for the TOFU → PQL → Customer → Renewal → Customer Growth. That’s the ideal, but we’re not quite there, and growth marketers need a framework for how to better focus on customers, because is here to stay. Growing through customers is lower cost and higher impact. relationship marketing Enter the Go-To-Customer (GTC) Strategy Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy is still important, but it’s missing customers. It’s about new customer acquisition. Whether that’s momentum-selling by industry, targeting a net new roles, geographic expanstion, etc.; It’s about acquiring net new customers. PS. We’re actively researching the state of go-to-customer strategy if you want to . participate in the survey What is the Go-To-Customer Strategy? It’s a focused product, marketing, and sales strategy that drives product usage, measures satisfaction, ensures renewals, and growth from within the customer base. It’s a net new approach to being highly relevant with every customer at every point in time, and scaling customer intimacy. It puts the relationship first, removes the ability to have irrelevant conversations, and removes the ability to build bad products. Check out for a much more thorough explanation, along with recommendations for the team, framework, and how to measure success. the full deck on SlideShare This is new and exciting territory for SaaS companies, and we’d love your help shaping the future of the go-to-customer strategy. . Take this quick survey

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