Compound Growth Marketing

Being a CMO is like playing whack-a-mole, which is why their tenure is short. Why? They need three skills, creative, product marketing & demand gen. And its not just the CMO who struggles with skills. In general, marketing is getting more complicated. A paid media manager needs to understand. > Demand creation and demand capture channels > Creative principles and brand > Key metrics in the sales and marketing process > How to leverage Linkedin Ads, Google Ads, programmatic and more > How to build audiences across all the channels they leverage > Attribution and measurement > Integrating the marketing tech stack with ad networks Its true for other teams to: - SEO needs to balance best practices, analysis, and delivering valuable content - Social needs to understand how to tell a story, their audience, but also analysis This is why we are bullish on agency/consulting. There is just a lot of skill sets needed to be successful in driving demand. So you can hire a generalist or a team of experts. Which would you choose? Do you want to wait for the Revops team to give you the time? Or would you like a team that provides that as a resource and is focused on the success of paid media? Do you want someone to learn how to use a new platform on the fly? Or would you rather have a LInkedin Ads specialist come in, run tests and immediately learn how to effectively leverage the channel? We have seen massive adoption of agencies in the B2C world as its matured as an industry. In B2B, teams are starting to work more with outsourced teams to fill the gaps in a more cost effective way, but also to drive improved performance.

When starting ABM, the gut reaction seems to be to go straight to display advertising. This is the opposite of how we would approach this. Start lower in the funnel. The promise that I saw when we saw a rise in investment in ABM technologies was that the integration between sales and marketing would become tighter. I thought we’d see: 1) Improved contextualization for sales team meaning, in the CRM we’d be able to provide account level information about who the economic buyer is in the organization. 2) Conversation starters for the sales team, by providing feeds of recent news, or topics to bring up with the prospect you are talking to. 3) Increased intelligence about events in the company that could be the reason why they are starting to look for new solutions. 4) Account level tracking out of the box in CRMs. And yes… we got this… kind of. But the best solutions are patched together by folks. Instead of thinking about this, when the strategy switches to ABM, most companies start looking at 6Sense, DemandBase, and Terminus. For whatever reason, people seem to choose Terminus first, which is usually the incorrect choice. When looking at external tools, I’d start with ZoomInfo or similar products that may be a better fit for your industry. Why? Because all ABM strategies should focus on a tighter integration between marketing and sales. Marketers need to give sales a platform of data that they can leverage for conversations. An tight integration means: ✅ Strong customer segmentation ✅ A tight focus on your customer bullseye as Michelle Heath would say (tight focus on ICP) ✅ Systems that recommend the right customers to reach out to and when ✅ Account level intelligence ✅ Getting data the sales reps the right data at the right time We would recommend starting with: Sales and marketing integration Then move to… Low funnel engagement strategies Then move to… Up-funnel awareness strategies. Starting this way allows you to go after low funnel opportunities first so you nail the marketing to sales hand off. You’ll get a better understanding of your customer, when the right time to reach out, which will inform your demand creation activities. Long story short, ABM is not just Display.

This is one of the most overlooked strategies in demand generation. Capturing intent through mid-intent funnels. This funnel should target users who are having a pain, but not quite ready to talk to sales. Why aren't they ready to talk to sales? Because its a good experience when you're ready to purchase, its a bad experience when your still building the case internally. When we worked with Drift, they launched, "Test Drive". Drift had a good sized freemium funnel, but as they moved upstream, that offer didn't work for enterprise companies. Test Drive enabled users to build a bot and see what it looked like on their website. It was a fit for those who couldn't try freemium and weren't quite ready to talk to sales. It: ✅ Helped buyers build a business case to purchase ✅ Deepened their level of engagement with Drift ✅ Showed them to capabilities of the product to build momentum as we got them ready to talk to sales And guess what... 👉 We saw 5X ROAS 👉 And a 300% improvement in conversion

It's crazy to me how many marketing teams still do the following: 💰 Spend massive amounts of money 📈 Focus on CRO, and get results 💻 Care so much about data augmentation  ⚙️ Build amazing workflows ..but then, after all that effort, the sales team can't even view the data inside the CRM. Think through a few of these questions: - Does your sales team know when someone hits your pricing page? - Do they know when your customer hits an inflection point that will lead them to need to purchase your product? - Do they understand how a lead came in and how that means they should approach the conversation? **The solution is quite simple, it just takes time:** - Meet with reps regularly, understand how they use the CRM (just like you would user testing with your product) - Train teams regularly. When you add something new in the CRM, send an email with pictures, post in slack, and show them in your weekly meeting - Follow up, make sure to follow up. Repetition is key. I'm adding a link in the comments with more insights on how you can improve personalization, the buying process, and ABM efforts.

CEOs don’t care about keywords, they care about user intent. They don’t care about clicks, they care about pipeline created. They don’t care about likes, they want insights from your audience. They don’t care about the improvement in conversion rate, they want to know how much revenue that could lead to. They don’t care about your marketing automation workflows, they care about the impact it has on the sales team getting leads. They don't care about one-off projects but will measure you on how you build repeatable success. Focus on building systems that show: ✅ What data you’re working from ✅ Your thought process ✅ How you prioritize this amongst your other projects ✅ What you’re building to grow ✅ How you calculate the potential impact ✅ What resources you need to get it done Speak in their language, not yours.

Your results won't change if you call it a PQL, MQL, MQA, HIQL, or just QL. Whatever it is, it’s the second stage in the sales and marketing process. Marketers get so caught up in acronyms and workflows and automation that we forget what we’re trying to do in the first place. The way I think about these leads is on two axis: X axis: match to ICP Y axis: intent Match to ICP is measured by company size, industry, job title, company revenue, location, and/or other demo/firmo-graphic information. Intent is measured by how ready they are to talk to sales. A demo is raising their hand, a trial is very interested, someone downloaded a high funnel ebook probably isn’t ready for sales and a LinkedIn Lead ad isn’t ready. Call the second stage in your sales process something fun, or make it boring. No one will care. The most important thing is having an agreed upon framework for how and who sales should engage with.

T-minus 3 hours and 16 minutes until our webinar on Global Expansion. Sign up using this link: https://dee.pl/a6jtq Join one of the most brilliant and strategic thinkers CGM has had a chance to work with, Eustachy Bielecki.

We're excited to have been listed on the Inc. 5000 at # 1,234 Over the past three years we have focused on sustainable, predictable growth. We enjoy working in high growth environments with our customers. We've developed the Predictable Demand System to ask the right questions about a companies GTM, customers, and channels in order to identify the best places to invest in order to maximize return. Our growth has been 100% funded by our clients. John Short wrote more on the topic today.