Nicole Wojno Smith

Aligning and Prioritizing Partners: 🤝 In the fast-paced world of channel partnerships, alignment is everything. But how do you ensure you're working with the right partners to drive mutual success? It all starts with prioritization. Identify partners who share your company's values, align with your strategic goals, and resonate with your target market. By focusing your efforts on these high-potential partners, you can maximize your resources and cultivate stronger relationships that yield tangible results. Remember, quality over quantity is the name of the game! #PartnershipAlignment #StrategicPartnerships #PrioritizeSuccess

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For those of you starting in a marketing leadership role or have been in it for a hot second, here are my five tips on not getting fired as a marketing leader. 1. Support a top and bottom number: Start with bookings and pipeline. Work with finance, revops, and sales to build a model and forecast for 12 months out. Not enough data? Give an educated guess and adjust over time. Not enough data is NOT a good excuse. 2. Understand the Efficiency of the GTM Channels: This is a harder one because there are many different ways to measure a channel's efficiency. Be sure to align with finance to get the right number for your board meetings. Build the model across the entire GTM team, not just marketing. 3. Lead Alignment Efforts: positive alignment between sales, CS, and marketing as foundational in high-growth SaaS. If you are joining a company, start with sales and the CEO. Move on from there. 4. Over-Prepare for Board Meetings: Add additional time to red-team your slides with your peers and the CEO (the boss). Be sure to reintroduce challenges from last quarter and how you solved them. Must have slides = Quarterly Wins & Challenges, Pipeline/Bookings/Funnel Conversion, Special Topic, Quarterly Look Ahead 5. Be a little irrational: Best version is a quote from Rory Sutherland. “It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative. The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors.” Go forth and prosper.

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How many times in the last week has your team asked if anyone has strong connections to someone at a target account? We marketers get cocky and think we can force people down certain paths or push them faster, “hack” their process — but that’s not how people work. The buying journey is all about relationships. Period. Think about what creates the most friction at every stage of a deal cycle — most of it comes down to forging relationships with the right people in a buying committee. We buy from people we like, trust and respect. To accelerate a deal, GTM teams have to build trust and connect on a human level. Most marketing and sales struggles are related to pipeline and deals getting “stuck.” A potential buyer attends an event, registers for a webinar, clicks on a few ads, comments on some LI posts, responds to an emails, takes a meeting … and then things get stuck and we don’t know how to encourage them to take a next step with us. What’s the most impactful action you can take with: 🎁 all of the booth scans and attendee lists from your events? 🎁 all of the registrants for your amazing webinars on Sequel.io ? 🎁 all of the deals lost in last 9 months or delayed by a competitor? 🎁 the myriad 1st, 2nd, 3rd party signals that tell you it’s a great time to connect and create momentum with in-market buyers? When customer champions change jobs and get promoted, how are you acting on the UserGems 💎 signals to acknowledge them and stay connected? How do you encourage MQLs through the next many steps of the buying cycle and nudge qualified opportunities across the line? In our buyer journey, one direct mail touchpoint = an 8% opportunity conversion rate lift. 🚀 It’s a more powerful pipeline progression touchpoint than an ad, an email, a field event. It’s a pipeline progression strategy that actually works. As AI becomes more prevalent and people use it to summarize emails and help with research, human connection points will become even more powerful. Our team and our customers are using creative direct gifting to boost email response rates, LI connection request acceptance rates, event and webinar attendance, meetings booked, opportunity conversion and win rates. Lindsay Lightheart was just recognized at Arctic Wolf for generating $200M in pipeline and $4M in new ARR through delightful direct mail campaigns. 🔥 Connecting with a thoughtful, memorable (non-transactional!) gift/custom branded experience is one of the best ways to cut through the bs and forge deeper relationships that drive momentum across every touchpoint in your customer journey. Do you know which touchpoints in your buyer journey carry the most weight? If you’re not using direct gifting as part of your marketing strategy in 2024, you’re leaving $ on the table.

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If you want to drive impact and influence with your buyers, you want to surround them with the voices they already trust. That’s the simple explanation for the power of nearbound marketing. Including your partners in your GTM motion is a huge unlock for all parties involved. The power of ecosystem at work. At Vena Solutions, we’re focused on growth through this model and the future is bright. Orchestration for greater impact and scale through a combination of partner specialization and account based engagement, will leave you better prepared to withstand whatever comes in the future. Companies and GTM leaders leveraging these ecosystems at scale are driving: 1️⃣ More revenue 2️⃣ More customer delight 3️⃣ Happier sellers 4️⃣ More productive partners 5️⃣ Stronger bonds, both internally and in the market If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it basically is 😉 If you’re interested in getting into the details, the team at Reveal just released an awesome resource. It’s a blueprint that can help you overlay your account-based segmentation and partner marketing strategy across all GTM teams AND the entire customer journey. Talk about a game changer… You can get a copy (for free!) at the link in the comments. #Nearbound #NearboundMarketing #Partnerships Isaac Morehouse Jessica Fewless Shawnie Hamer

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I couldn't agree more Jon Miller! It's time to rethink the B2B marketing playbook. The old model of collecting leads with gated content doesn't work. And we have over-rotated on attribution, which breaks down rather than builds up the critical partnership between marketing and sales. It is also time to revisit brand! But that's not a simple task. Companies need to dig deep to define a white space that solves a pain point, articulate their right to win, and ensure their brand emotionally resonates and engenders loyalty. #brand #b2bmarketing #outwiththeold

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What most marketers do: - Treat ABM as a siloed target account list motion owned by one person/team. - Focus on a few channels as separate investments (Gifting as an isolated, transactional SDR meeting booker tactic; paid LI isn’t closely connected to outbound or event strategies). What great marketers do: - Define a tight ICP and use fit/intent signals to trigger meaningful connection points across the customer journey to build mindshare and trust with best-fit accounts (everything is ABM). - Obsess over using different channels, tools and tactics *together* to weave a stronger multithreaded story and experience for best-fit accounts (personalized gifting integrated into LI ads and webinar/event touchpoints that reach the same accounts you’re outbounding to with a cohesive message).

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One of my top tips for avoiding firing as a CMO is to support drafting a revenue handbook shared across the GTM teams. Many people asked for the template, so I'm sharing it here. This is a service-level agreement between marketing, sales, CS, and others. This can also be called a sales handbook. Align on segmentation, pricing/packaging, follow-up, feedback loops, etc.

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ABM is on my mind lately - what/who are your go-to tools, playbooks, and people when setting up a new program? When I think ABM, I think: - 🔶🔸Mason Cosby🔸🔶 - Trinity Nguyen💎 - Corrina Owens - Kacie Jenkins Who else should I start following here? And when it comes to your ABM tech stack - what's best for scrappy starts? And what do you graduate to? 🧡 Mason (the Scrappy ABM king) has mentioned starting out with Propensity, Apollo, and Warmly - which all have free versions to test out. 🧡 RB2B is everywhere and very exciting. 🧡 6sense and Demandbase are of course synonymous with ABM. 🧡 ZoomInfo & Cognism are rolling out more and more signals and intent data. 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕'𝒔 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒈𝒐-𝒕𝒐 "𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒆𝒅" 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒚 𝒗𝒔 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒅𝒐 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒅𝒖𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒕𝒐? Drop it below 👇 and/or pls DM me 🙏 🎵 I've got my Mind on ABM, ABM on my Mind 🎵 #abm #gtm #marketing #b2b

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The biggest mistake marketers are making with ABM? Jumping in before the GTM team is tightly aligned on ICP and the fit + intent signals that matter most. This often comes with additional problems: Letting Sales arbitrarily select target account lists —> we make it much harder on ourselves if we don’t use fit and intent signals to prioritize ICP accounts and prospects that are most likely to buy and get immediate value Spray and pray tactics —> high volume, transactional, low quality, generic outreach just results in your whole TAM blocking and unsubscribing ABM without rigorous data standards —> using dirty/outdated data to multi-thread, to show up everywhere for target accounts, to (gulp) automate any part of your ABM workflows = playing with fire Piping in a bunch of signals without a clear plan of action —> just creating distracting noise (results in wasted $$ and muted Slack channels) Teams taking action on random signals without GTM alignment/coordination = total chaos Sendoso is a direct mail and gifting platform, yes. But gifting is so much more than sending swag or gift cards in exchange for a meeting. It’s a high impact ABM art that helps revenue teams take timely personalized actions with the right people to deepen relationships, increase pipeline conversion rates and speed up deal cycles. To do this well, our team uses a variety of signals to select the right accounts and automate thoughtful, personalized engagement touchpoints across the entire customer journey, from segmented outbound marketing to sales interactions with ABM accounts and creative direct mail campaigns that deliver a delightful experience for buying committees. We’re obsessed with data quality/accuracy, and partnering with the best signal providers is crucial for us. I’m so excited about the UserGems 💎 Signal Platform announcement today! We’re loving their signal library and workflows. If you’re also obsessed with data-driven, account-focused marketing and thoughtfully automated workflows, they’re an amazing addition to the marketing stack.

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Few things bring me more joy than the accomplishments of good friends. Highlighting a couple of those amazing accomplishments! Superstar Laura Colagrande GTM leader at Bloomreach just launched her personal project, podcast series Soft Sides 🎤. Soft Sides features top GTM leaders from high-growth organizations, and their inside take on all things building / scaling. You'll find leaders from Meta, Crossbeam, many others. Go give it a listen (see comments)! First episode just launched and it's 🔥. You'll also see an episode from yours truly.. launching soon! Entrepreneur and CEO Allison Lee of Revive secured her $3.5M seed round, and was featured in TechCrunch in the same week highlighting how (Re)vive grew 10x last year helping retailers recycle and sell returned items. Massive market using unique tech to address retailer needs (not wants). Article is a fantastic capture of the incredible journey Allison has been on - linked in comments. Couldn't be more proud of the passion, brilliance and persistence of these two leaders. #leaders #startups #entrepreneurship #retail #womenleaders

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How is PMM *really* supposed to enable sales? If your immediate thought is creating a one pager or writing an email - you're doing GTM wrong The #1 way PMM enables sales is by understanding our prospects/customers PMM shouldn't be focused on creating crappy persona docs that nobody uses because all they tell you is: ❌ Job titles ❌ Cute rhyming name (Accounting Andrea, Mark the Marketer) ❌ Revenue figures Your sales team wants to know: ✅ What's it actually like to be an accountant at an SMB manufacturing company? > Is it miserable? Flexible? Fun? ✅ What are their goals and priorities? > Are there hard numbers tied to their compensation? ✅ What are their pain points? > Is the owner constantly breathing down their necks? > Are they having to educate while simultaneously persuading? Etc. Because once you know that... All your marketing and sales enablement becomes a song with a consistent rhythm throughout Whether it's an ad, website copy, one pager, email, talk track, pitch deck, etc. - it all tells the same story: 👉 Being an accountant at an SMB manufacturing company is thankless work. They're constantly dealing with an uneducated owner, which means they need to educate + persuade. Compensation is tied to increasing margin, they target 10-20%. They don't have any direct reports, which means long nights and 60+ hour weeks. Oh, and they usually use Excel since the owner doesn't want to invest in SaaS. If your entire narrative plays that rhythm and explains how your product can help them tackle those pain points... for both the Accountant & the CEO, *that's* Sales Enablement! #startups #gtm #productmarketing

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The future of NRR: Will CCOs become the new CROs? (...a 7-figure ARR CCO asked me) A CCO recently asked me, "I've seen CCOs reporting to CROs these days and CCOs becoming CROs. What do you think the future holds? Is this going to be a trend to stay?" It's a fascinating question. Here's what I'm seeing: Companies are laser-focused on improving NRR. But who's directly responsible for it? Marketing, support, CS, AMs, strategic account sales...everyone influences NRR, yet no single executive owns it. That's changing. CCOs are emerging as the "Chief NRR Officers." Why? Because the CCO's ultimate goal aligns perfectly with growing NRR. CCOs are under immense pressure to drive new revenue. However, acquiring new customers is far more expensive than retaining and expanding existing accounts. Putting CCOs in charge of NRR makes strategic sense. But there's another strong candidate for owning NRR: The COO. Retention is a team sport. Every customer touchpoint impacts churn, including product, pricing, sales, onboarding, and support. The COO oversees all these critical functions. They're ideally positioned to drive NRR improvements. Mark my words: Having a dedicated NRR executive will soon become the norm. Will it be CCOs or COOs leading the charge? Only time will tell. I break down the full future of NRR in this video:

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"Your ops team is either your superpower or your Achilles heel." - Latané Conant (she/her) @ the Pavilion CMO summit last week. If you're half-assing your RevOps investment, you're going to pay for it eventually. And the price is going up. What an Achilles heel in ops might look like: - A VP of Sales that spends 2 full days before a board meeting "cleaning up the data" - A HubSpot partner that only executes on exactly what you ask them to do and never provides feedback on best practices - An AE that spends 5 hours per week as your Salesforce administrator (in addition to the other 8 admins) because they've been a user for 5 years - A Director of Demand Gen that knows "enough to be dangerous" in Marketo - A CFO that builds a top-down forecast and sets quotas, but has never had a single conversation with a sales rep What other signs of half-assing RevOps did I miss?

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❓ Who is best positioned for the role of CRO? Here are 3 underdogs you might not see in that role today. We've already established that CROs aren't better named Sales Executives, but cross function GTM leaders. While they are seemingly growing into that role from Sales leadership, there is a strong argument for CMOs, CCOs as well as RevOps leaders to snatch that spot in the future. More than ever, we are aiming to bring true alignment to all GTM functions. What becomes a tangible need once your teams outgrow the daily handshake has been amplified in the PEG (Proficient Efficient Growth) era we are finding ourselves in. The CRO is tasked to bring all that together. Here are yay 🙌 and nay 👎 for different commercial leaders in the CRO seat. There are lots of perspectives depending on Product, GTM motion, personal experience and team composition. ➡️ CMO ✅ They are the Market expert and therefore anticipate movements in the ecosystem, trends & bubbles in the best way ✅ They pursue the long term view. Demand Gen & outstanding Marketing teams aren't build in a day. Short term gains need to be sacrificed for long term needs ✅ Especially in PLG motions they are incredibly close to Product. Experimentation, messaging & iterative learning is in their DNA ❌ In Enterprise motions, they have less experience in driving long sales cycles with connected complexities (❌) CMOs might lack Revenue ownership. Not all Marketing leaders have a clear Revenue number attached to their name, yet (❌) They may lack exposure to the post-sales journey. That's also an area which is changing as Marketing should span the whole customer journey ➡️ VP of Sales ✅ Managed larger teams, complexities, regions and motions to make the Revenue number ✅ Has strong stakeholder management & market connect due to pre-and post Sales exposure, work with external partners ✅ Their game seems to be changing every 18 months in order to be successful ❌ Is historically compensated on short term outcomes and may focus less customer loyalty and long-term outcomes ❌ Is furthest away from Customer Impact and outcomes in their accountability ➡️ VP of Success / CCO ✅ Deeply understands the Customer & recurring Impact ✅ Is closest to the challenges Customers go through and accommodate with enablement, commercially or product feedback ❌ Little experience in new customer acquisition ❌ They might be less accustomed to the direct pressure of revenue targets ➡️ VP of Revenue Operations ✅ Deeply understands and builds data driven GTM motions from an unbiased standpoint to either department ✅ Often comes from an earlier role as SDR, Marketer or CSM (leadership) and can tie back their experience ❌ Might lack Soft-GTM skills, which are all things outside of structured tech stacks, processes and procedures ❌ RevOps leaders don't have a seat at the leadership table in most organisations & lack the strategic visibility Who do you think should take that spot? #GTM #revenue #saas

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Does more outbound volume automatically mean more results? The days of random "spray and pray" are gone. Higher productivity requires more smarts. In this chat with GTM advisor and SaaS sales leader Heath Barnett, we discuss his recommended sales metric: The Strike Zone. ⚾ And how it applies to the sales funnel, including outbound productivity. Heath recommends that you look at conversion rates throughout your process. Do your calls convert to connects? Your connects to conversations? Conversations to meetings? And so on. When you know these conversions, you can: 🗺 Plan your day, week, and month to get the results you want. 🏋‍♀️ Identify weaknesses in your process. Maybe your call-to-connect ratio is declining. You might need to look into how you're prioritizing who you call. 🚂 Or, maybe you're a sales manager. The Strike Zone helps because each team member will have different conversion rates throughout the funnel. You might spot that Rep A has a higher-than-average connect-to-conversation ratio. What can you learn from them to apply to the rest of your team? Or, Rep B has a below-average conversation-to-meeting ratio. Is there coaching, process, or tooling that can support them better? #sales #outbound The full interview is in the comments.

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97% of the market isn't actively searching for your tool. Find ways to allow buyers to evaluate and research your category... Without triggering a sales evaluation. The digital sales room category is having its moment. Dimmo 🦖 (a demo marketplace) held its first People's Choice Award to crown the winner of the digital sales room category. Proud to say Aligned finished #1 in the category and was crowned the winner! Aligned has a freemium PLG model (create your first 3 rooms free no credit card required) Still, most buyers are hesitant to sign up. - They want to see how others like them are using it - They want to see how the product works without talking to sales - They want to see and hear success stories of implementing your tool We are moving to a world where buyers want to do as much as the sales process independently of a sales rep. That is why I think something like Dimmo fits under what we like to call buyer enablement: Empowering buyers to do as much of the buying and research process independently while supporting them in their evaluation once they do reach out to your company. Check out our product demo on Dimmo and see why we were crowned #1 in the Digital Sales Room Category => https://lnkd.in/gaj39t5X

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Do you think the buying experience got better or worse in 2024? I think I have a hunch... Shoutout to Navattic and Chili Piper for the launch of their 2024 report! Last year, after booking demos with the top 100 SaaS companies, here's the data they saw: 1️⃣ 35% never got back in touch with us 2️⃣ Average of 2 days for companies to respond 3️⃣ Only 17% of websites had interactive demos 4️⃣ 57% of websites had pricing pages (and 21% of those websites didn’t actually show price) In comparison, this year: ⭐ Average of same-day response time from companies ⭐ 68% of websites had pricing pages ⭐ 31% of websites had interactive demos Why did it get so much better than last year? The improvements reflect a shift towards prioritizing people-first experiences, making it easier and faster for buyers to get the information they need. Read our 2024 B2B Buyer First Best Practices Report to find out more. https://lnkd.in/ejDQsFzF

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It was a dark day. Once upon a time, we realized that we were losing a meaningful number of demo requests into a black hole due to an undiscovered break in our demo request flow. We had many different tools talking to each other, and a leak had sprung at a critical point in the process, delivering a terrible experience for buyers. 💔 One of the first places I dig into when I start a new role is the space between an MQL (for us at Sendoso this is a high intent hand raise; typically a demo request) and a sales qualified opportunity (for us, this means a meeting has taken place and we know the buyer is a good fit for our solution). Go through your own demo request flow regularly. You will almost always discover leaks, unnecessary delays, tools not working properly together, routing issues, and more. It’s a HUGE area of opportunity. Today, Chili Piper is launching their Demand Conversion Platform, which includes everything GTM teams need to convert demand: chat, form routing, lead distribution, and scheduling. This is cool for many reasons, but I love that it simplifies the process and reduces the chance that different tools aren’t playing nicely together. Along with friends like Liam Moroney Jane Serra Sam Levan and many other brilliant minds, I helped define the playbook for Demand Conversion so GTM teams can create, convert, and close more qualified revenue, together. Check out the playbook here: https://lnkd.in/gUD_xgUT

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Great article by Jon Miller on the importance to resist short-term activity instead of long-term effectiveness. This quote below is great. "When we bombard buyers with unwanted emails, gate content that should be freely available, and sic SDRs on anyone who dares to download an eBook, we're not building relationships — we're burning them. It's not the gating itself that's the problem, it's the terrible experience buyers have after they fill out that form. Think about it: how eager are you to buy from a company that's been calling and emailing you repeatedly just because you registered for a webinar? How likely are you to continue engaging with their content or recommending them to your peers? Short-term, these tactics might boost meetings, but long-term, they erode trust, damage our reputations, and make it harder to engage buyers in meaningful ways." https://lnkd.in/g7dDUQCY

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