SaaS Marketing Simplified Shiv Narayanan

Table of Contents

Section 1: Pitfalls and Mistakes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..3

Section 2: Marketing’s Accountability……………………………………..……………………………………………………14

Section 3: Customers and Market……………………………………………………………………………………………………22

Section 4: Growth Strategy………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..36

Section 5: Demand Generation……………………………………….………………………………………………………………..52

Section 6: Content…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..64

Section 7: Sales………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..85

Section 8: Revenue Operations……………………………………………………….……………………………………………..…98

Section 9: Financials, Boards and CEOs…………………………………………………………..…………………………111

Section 10: Progressing in your Marketing Career……………………………………………..………………..123

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SaaS Marketing Simplified Shiv Narayanan

Section 1:
Pitfalls and Mistakes

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1. Delayed Marketing Investment

There is often a gap between when companies need to invest in Marketing and when they
actually do it. This puts Sales projections at significant risk.

If you need a certain amount of Marketing support to hit your projections for the year,
that investment needs to be made likely in the previous year so buyers have time to make
it through their sales cycle.

That means that if you start scaling up your marketing spend at the end of Q1 or the
middle of Q2, you're already likely to miss your targets.

This includes doing the following ahead of time:

1. Hiring people: A hire you make in Q1 won't be fully ramped up to contribute until Q2
at the earliest. An open job posting in Q1 is even further out from contribution.
2. Ramping up ad spend: To generate more deals, you need to generate more
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), which likely means you should have ramped up
ad spend a long time ago.
3. Scaling content production: To publish more content that generates demand with
meaningful pipeline contribution, you need to have a content roadmap and a team
executing against it in place months before.

All of the above means securing budget well ahead of a December board meeting or a
January sales kickoff. The sooner you get going, the higher your odds of success. ‘Sooner’
often means ‘a quarter earlier’ if you’re going to achieve the ultimate goal of scaling
Marketing efforts: driving revenue.

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2. Mistakes of Fired VPs of Marketing

The most common reason VPs of Marketing/CMOs are fired in their first 12-18 months is
that they blow their political capital on things like:
● Building a new website
● Changing the Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) they use
● Adding more tech to their marketing stack

None of these things actually do what the marketing leader is hired for: grow demand.

What VPs of Marketing should focus on in their first few quarters on the job:
1. Nailing doing messaging and positioning
2. Creating more high quality content
3. Ramping up demand gen across all platforms

The end goal of all of these is to generate more pipeline and close more deals.

For bonus marks: improve data tracking and board reporting (this doesn't matter if
there isn't more pipeline to report on).

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3. Air Cover

"Our campaigns provide air cover" is one of the most commonly-used marketing excuses
in the book.

It's also the excuse that Sales and the rest of the organization rolls their eyes at —
especially at times when the company is missing targets.

Air cover is used as a shield by marketing organizations that aren’t accountable to

revenue. While air cover is important, it’s not the only thing Marketing is responsible for.

A marketing function that washes its hands clean of revenue accountability is not a true
marketing function. It’s closer to a corporate marketing sub-function of a bigger
marketing need inside an organization. If Marketing isn’t revenue accountable, it’s almost
impossible to work in alignment with Sales, and you can expect valuable potential deals to
fall through the cracks.

Instead, leverage air cover to get your sales team more support when they enter a sales
conversation. But you should also leverage other marketing activities like content,
demand gen, social and more to build trust with buyers and generate more sales.

When Sales and the rest of the organization notices you taking full accountability of
revenue, they also take Marketing more seriously.

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4. Stop Spending on Bad Channels

Marketers often complain about a lack of budget, yet the same marketers invest
significant portions of their limited resources into things that don't work.

These include:
● Content syndication
● Overpaying Gartner
● Press releases
● Buying lists

Instead, look at how much of your marketing budget is going into these kinds of activities
that produce virtually no impact on revenue.

Sure, things like content syndication raise awareness on broad channels, but in most
companies the impact on revenue is small (with or even without attribution).

Instead:
1. Create a strong point-of-view for your business, prospects, customers and market.
2. Produce phenomenal content to become the go-to resource your customers and
market learn from.
3. Increase distribution to your ideal customers through targeted efforts.

Same marketing budget, entirely different impact on revenue, profitability and enterprise
value creation.

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5. High ROI Marketing Activities

The marketing budgets of

so many companies are
shockingly upside down.

In many cases, activities

like events and trade
shows that have huge
upfront investments and
low return on investment
(ROI) get more than half
the marketing budget. The
same companies will put
out a press release (that
no one really reads in
today's world anymore)
every time something
happens.

Meanwhile, areas like paid media and content are heavily under-funded, despite their
potential to deliver high ROI.

The result? Marketer leaders often end up standing in front of the board, trying to ask for
more budget, even though they’re underdelivering on revenue targets.

Granted, low effort/high ROI paid media campaigns will likely attract many competitors
as well. But they're a heck of a lot better than spending $25,000 on a booth + travel and
expenses for 10 people to go to an event where every competitor has a booth as well.

Content is the blue ocean opportunity — most competitors don't venture here because of
the effort required. To consistently produce useful content, you need to be willing to invest
time and resources. It isn’t easy — it takes talent and expertise to emerge as the winner
when publishing content in your industry. But it’s also where the asymmetric returns exist
for most companies.

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6. Tech Stack vs. CMO Tenure

There is an inherent mismatch between implementing a new Marketing tech stack and
how much time you have as a Marketing leader.

While the latest account based marketing (ABM) or attribution or content (etc.) platform
may sound like a phenomenal idea, it is more than likely setting up Marketing leaders
everywhere to fail in the long run.

The reason? Tech stack implementations take a lot of time, effort and energy. Meanwhile,
the company still needs to hit sales targets and likely isn’t generating enough pipeline.

These Marketing leaders find themselves in board meetings for several quarters in a row
talking about the new programs they’re "going to launch" once the platform is live. Over
time, this erodes trust with CEOs and boards until they change marketing leadership

Instead, Marketing would be much better served by focusing on executing plays that
generate pipeline and revenue. This builds enough political capital to buy you the time it
takes to implement a new technology.

This is something Martech vendors will never tell you:

● You can run a good enough ABM program without Terminus/6sense.
● You can run good enough attribution without Snowflake, Tableau or a data
warehouse project.
● You can run good enough paid media without Acquisio, Wordstream or AdRoll.

Focus on the execution and you'll go a lot farther.

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7. Marketing-Led Budgets

Looking at marketing budget splits by activity tells you a lot about marketing
organizations.

Sales-led organizations put a heavy focus on traditional marketing activities like events,
sales enablement, PR and comms. These activities are often resource-intensive, and
usually focus on objectives like brand awareness or relationship building.

Marketing-led organizations put a heavy focus on demand generation and content.

There's still room for the traditional marketing functions, but the focus on revenue is clear.

Shifting from a Sales-led function to a Marketing-led function does not imply adding
additional budget. It can simply involve refocusing the same budget and allocating it
towards revenue-driving activities.

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8. Expensive SKOs

Sales-led companies are notorious for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on

expensive sales kickoffs (SKOs) to start the year.

SKOs certainly serve a purpose to educate and enable sales reps to sell more/better. But
the messaging inside these events often resorts to old school sales platitudes like:
● "Pound the pavement"
● "You can crush your targets"
● "Keep dialing for dollars"

Meanwhile, the company's Go-To-Market is weak. The overall company narrative and story
don't resonate with customers and prospects. There isn't enough content to educate
prospects along their journey. There aren't enough demand generation programs in place
to produce inbound MQLs.

Even if the SKO helps make Sales more effective, that doesn’t count for much if Marketing
isn’t in a position to be able to deliver more MQLs or support the sales process.

As a growth leader, your job is to build a better Go-To-Market that shapes the SKO —
rather than the other way around.

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9. Marketing Reporting to CRO

Marketing reporting to the Chief Revenue

Officer (CRO) is one of the worst ideas
generated inside the hierarchy of so many
organizations.

"By having marketing report to the CRO, we

have one revenue organization" — this is the
most common reason cited for the blunder.

The big error in this thinking is that the CRO is

often a sales leader who defaults to sales
thinking when it comes to critical marketing
decisions. This is a recipe for disaster.

What would a sales-leaning CRO choose: hire

one more sales rep or increase the marketing
budget? The likely answer is a sales rep.

Having Marketing report to a CRO also creates a layer of bureaucracy between Marketing
and the CEO — the person who you ultimately need to increase marketing impact.

By having Marketing report to a CRO or VP of Sales, the CEO foregoes:

● Taking charge of the brand narrative and story
● Connecting to the market and customers
● Understanding and balancing the investment in Sales and Marketing
● Giving Marketing the right budget

There are a few rockstar CROs out there who can lead both. But they are in the minority
by a country mile.

Marketing needs to report to the CEO. Otherwise, Marketing doesn't have a seat at the
table and the organization continues to be sales-led. Be wary of any org structures that
obstruct this.

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10. Raw Marketing Skills

Too many companies pass up

on high-potential marketing
candidates due to a lack of
experience.

Over-indexing on experience
can lead to a lot of expensive
hiring mistakes. Sure, a
candidate might have worked
on high-profile campaigns with
a big-name employer, but if
they don’t have great
communication skills, you’ll
likely be going through the
hassle and expense of replacing
them within six months.

There’s just not enough marketing talent out there to supply the demand / need from
companies looking to hire for those roles. Instead, focusing on raw skill sets and
committing to leveling up those individuals so they can eventually fill the shoes of a bigger
role can lead to enormous success.

Raw skills to look for:

1. Communication: Written, verbal, presentation skills, ability to manage
expectations.
2. Creativity: Thinking outside the box, being able to bring personality — to the brand,
to programs, and the team culture.
3. Data-driven: Inclination to look at metrics and performance as positive feedback
loops.
4. Speed: High rate of quality output and an ability to pick things up about the
industry / technical skills

This applies whether you’re a startup looking to attract a talented Director of Marketing or
if you’re a well-established company looking for a Marketing Manager. Think of your
company like a sports franchise drafting young players.

Hire for potential. Then invest in the talent to reach its potential. That’s how everybody
wins.

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Section 2:
Marketing’s
Accountability

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11. CMO’s most important metric

When polling CMOs on their most important accountability metric, Gartner found that 12%
listed brand awareness, while only 7% listed ROI and 1% listed customer lifetime value
(LTV).

It's not that brand is not important. It's that the lack of focus on ROI by marketers is
heavily impacting how much budget they receive and how much impact they make on an
organization.

This is why data needs to be at the heart of how Marketing measures itself. The right data
is a tool to succeed. The wrong data, insufficient data, or (worst of all) no data at all puts
a ceiling on what marketing can do.

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12. Lack of Accountability

Too many marketers spend time defending Marketing efforts and their impact on the
business when asked about their contribution. This is where conversations shift to:
● How many badges you scanned at a conference
● How many registrations and attendees a webinar has
● How many contacts you uploaded and contacted via cold outreach
● How many views and impressions the blog/videos/other content had
● How much pipeline you influenced that the sales team ultimately closed

Discussing these numbers overlooks an important truth: none of it matters if there is no

revenue to show for it. This is why mature marketers focus their efforts on being revenue
accountable. They talk about:
● Marketing-sourced pipeline
● Closed Won revenue
● ROI
● Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
● Payback Period

These are scary metrics to hold yourself accountable to, but doing so shows maturity,
experience and capability. It also builds incredible amounts of trust with your CEO and
board because you’re aligned with them on expectations.

That's how you get more room to operate as a marketing leader and make a much bigger
impact.

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13. Continuum of Marketing Accountability

The quickest way to measure the maturity of Marketing within an organization is to look
at its core accountability metric.

In less mature organizations, marketing teams report on leads generated, MQLs and even
influenced pipeline as their ultimate accountability. These metrics stop short of connecting
Marketing’s efforts to actual sales success. You could be spending thousands of dollars on
a campaign that delivers dozens of MQLs but zero dollars from Closed Won deals.

In more mature organizations, sourced pipeline and revenue are the ultimate
accountability metrics.

A good way to figure out where on the continuum a company's marketing team sits is to
ask what reporting they have.

If they have:
1. Connected marketing spend at the top of funnel to sourced pipeline and revenue
2. Analyzed ROI by channel, campaign and cohort
3. Established baselines for acceptable cost per lead (ACL) by channel and campaign,
based on conversion to opportunity dollars and pipeline

Then they are on the more mature side of the spectrum.

If they don’t have this level of reporting, the organization likely needs a cultural
transformation to shift revenue accountability from just Sales to both Marketing and
Sales.

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14. Marketing’s Credibility

Each time Marketing brings in a lead that is a bad fit or a waste of time, Marketing loses
credibility with Sales.

When Marketing doesn’t adjust its spend away from campaigns and channels that bring
in those bad leads, Sales begins to assume this is the norm, and that Marketing can only
do so much.

Over time, this creates a culture where Sales feels like it needs to carry the revenue load.
This is how Sales-led organizations emerge where Marketing doesn't have a seat at the
table.

To change this, marketers need to stop worrying about vanity metrics like the number of
MQLs they brought in and look at the quality of those leads instead. An effective
Marketing organization can bring in fewer leads but impact revenue more.

That's the shift that needs to happen. The accountability needs to change.

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15. Marketing Generated Pipeline Maturity

Most B2B companies find themselves relying on Sales to generate the bulk of their
pipeline.

In such companies, Marketing doesn't have enough budget and doesn’t provide nearly
enough coverage to drive revenue.

These are the companies where cold calling, events, relationships are what grow the
business. These are also the companies where Sales reps miss quota more often than not.

The key is to get marketing generated pipeline into a healthy range (at least at 30%). In
some cases, this number can be as high as 70-80%.

That's how you know buyers are coming inbound to your company when they need to
solve a specific pain point. They're aware of you, they've read your content and they trust
you as an authority and resource.

It's also how you know your brand has enough value in the marketplace to win business
that doesn’t depend on you dialing for dollars.

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16. Marketing vs. Sales Quota

Over 50% of sales reps miss quota.

What companies don't realize is that this number is not just an indicator of how good a
sales team is.

Yes, a better sales team will hit quota more. But show me a better sales team and I can
show you a better marketing engine that has:
● Better brand
● Better positioning
● Better demand gen
● Better content

If your sales investment outweighs your marketing investment by 4:1 or 5:1 (which it does
in a lot of companies), expecting sales reps to always hit quota is unfair.

Hitting quota and marketing investment go hand in hand.

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17. Marketing Pyramid to Sophistication

Revenue growth is the ultimate

objective for Marketing.

Lots of marketing departments

try to skip straight to the
demand gen campaigns that
they hope will get new leads
into the pipeline. But without
the right structure and
resources to support them,
those campaigns are unlikely to
be successful.

In order to make revenue

growth possible, several
elements need to come together:
1. Foundational
○ Understand your market, customers and competitors.
○ Build the right story, positioning and message.
○ Analyze the historical context and performance of the business.
2. Infrastructure
○ Create the right data ops model for marketing and sales.
○ Have the right tech stack in place.
○ Build a website that converts.
○ Have a Sales process that successfully converts leads.
3. Planning
○ Build the right Marketing strategy and mix of channels.
○ Hire and onboard a team capable of executing on the strategy.
○ Secure the right amount of Marketing budget.
4. Programs
○ Create compelling content that resonates with your audience.
○ Launch demand gen programs to scale outreach.

The ultimate goal of all this is to drive revenue growth. Given how many components are
involved, growth leaders need the patience to build all the building blocks and not just
rush to lead gen campaigns.

Time is critical to building a marketing engine that drives revenue growth.

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Section 3:
Customers and Market

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18. How customers buy

There is a big disconnect

between how companies want
to sell to customers and how
customers actually want to buy.

No customer wakes up wanting

to go through your perfectly
crafted, straight line buyer
journey.

Meanwhile, companies are

trying to push you through so
many hoops, gates and forms
just to trigger the right lead scoring. These companies also avoid talking about
competitors because they assume you won't find them for yourself.

Best case scenario: a customer somehow makes it through your digital assault course and
lands in a sales conversation, but they’re frustrated and not inclined to give you their
money.

The more likely scenario: they give up on trying to find what they need and go with a
competitor.

Here's the thing: your customers don't care about the journey you made them. They'll:
● Find pricing on Google
● Look up competitors on Capterra
● Watch your pre-recorded demo on YouTube
● Read a bunch of reviews on TrustPilot
● Ask people they already know

All of this is happening without your lead scoring being triggered.

Change the internal company dynamic. Focus on helping the customer at every step with
as much content as possible.

B2B marketing would be a heck of a lot better if marketers approached it the same way
they themselves do when they buy headphones from Amazon.

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19. Pains vs. Dreams

Marketing and sales become a whole lot easier when you know your product can move
people further away from their pains and closer to their aspirations.

Customer pain points and how to solve them should:

● Inform your product roadmap
● Be part of all the content you produce
● Be one of the first things people notice on your website
● Instruct key decisions on growth strategy
● Be front and center in your sales conversations

If you build a culture where people are obsessed with helping your ideal customer
navigate this journey, you will build a winning company.

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20. Solve for One Customer

To drastically increase the odds

of success, focus your company
efforts around resolving the
pain points of one customer.

When you’re dealing with huge

generalizations (e.g. everyone
who works in HR, all content
producers), it’s almost
impossible to speak to
individuals in a way that
resonates with them.

At the end of the day, buying decisions usually come down to an individual who either
makes the call themselves or promotes the product to their team. And if that individual
doesn’t feel seen or spoken to, they won’t be convinced.

The best way to really get to the core of why your product matters, why someone would
spend money on it, and why they would advocate for you is to understand what it means
for people on a personal level.

This is why some of the biggest companies started by people trying to scratch their own
itch (e.g. Basecamp).

An effort like this involves:

1. Product teams clearly defining the person they need to solve problems for with all
existing and roadmapped features.
2. Service teams clearly identify how to support new and existing customers on their
journey.
3. Sales teams clearly mapping out the ideal buying persona and targeting them with
focused outreach.
4. Marketing teams clearly outlining the messaging, content and distribution required
to reach that ideal persona.

Focusing on one specific person may seem like it has a huge opportunity cost. But the
market size of solving a very specific problem for one specific person is almost always a
lot larger than you think. This exercise also opens up adjacencies that were previously
invisible.

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21. Customer Obsession

Too many companies obsess over what their competitors are doing, which feature they've
released, what their product looks like and how they're marketing it.

This obsession inevitably leads to the commoditization of products and businesses, neither of
which has a real differentiator.

What if you focus on your customers and what they're telling you instead? What if you think
about how you want to serve them differently?

Notice I said ‘differently’, not ‘better’.

Everyone wants to be better than their competition. That's how the obsession with competition
begins. But in an infinite game, ‘better’ is irrelevant.

As a marketer, you need to obsess over your unique way of serving customers. They’ll see the
value your solution brings, and you'll get farther than you ever have.

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22. Customers Lead Content and Demand Gen

Marketers who over-index on search

engine optimization (SEO) or paid
search often (incorrectly) rely on
‘search volumes’ and ‘keyword
difficulty’ as their guide on what to
prioritize.

This leads to companies fighting for

market share like a commodity,
inevitably inflating CAC and Payback
Period metrics.

Instead, starting with differentiation as

the goal changes how you go to
market:

1. You invest heavily into understanding market dynamics and customer pain points.
2. You build a strategic narrative to educate the market on how to resolve those pain
points while separating yourself from the noise.
3. You create content to educate buyers on the strategic narrative at every stage of
their journey.
4. You leverage demand generation channels and campaigns to scale content
distribution to your ideal buyers.

This approach focuses on the customers and the message, rather than search volumes or
keyword difficulty.

It brings down CAC and improves your Payback Period.

It also opens up infinite scale because you can take the message to any channel — not just
channels where search volumes are the focus.

Ironically, this approach also leads to far more uptake from the market, which helps improve
SEO and paid search performance over time anyway.

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23. NPS Promoters

Identifying who loves your product is critical to directing where you invest marketing dollars.
What good is a Closed Won deal if the customer you bring in hates using your solution or
churns in 120 days?

This is why marketers need to make a conscious effort to connect with their product teams.

You need to:

1. Understand who ends up being an NPS (Net Promoter Score) promoter for what you
sell.
2. Understand their characteristics. Are there underlying themes in industry, vertical, role,
region, size, pricing plan, etc.?
3. Refine your Total Addressable Market (TAM) — maybe some of your identified markets
aren’t ideal for your solution after all.
4. Go back to your marketing efforts and adjust to focus on the best fit customers.
5. Repeat.

This is how Marketing shifts from a one-size-fits-all approach that tries to please everyone to
focusing on people you know you can serve — and serve well.

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24. Best Fit vs. Bad Fit Customers

Your best fit customers

are significantly more
valuable than bad fit
customers. They are
also more valuable
than your overall
customer base
(including those who
are a good fit).

If you spend enough

money and resources,
you can convince even
bad fit customers to
buy. But because the
product isn’t right for
them, those customers will likely have a negative experience, leave after a few months,
and share that negative experience with anyone who will listen.

Good fit customers, on the other hand, will:

● Cost less to acquire
● Stay with the business for longer
● Use the product more effectively
● Advocate on your behalf

That's why you need to tailor the following to your best fit customers:
● Product roadmap
● Demand gen
● Sales
● Content
● Onboarding

...and more

The more you focus on your best fit customers, the more easily you’ll build a differentiated
position in the marketplace with super fans and power users.

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25. Engagement of good fit vs. bad fit

Good fit customers will

increase their engagement
over time. Bad fit
customers’ engagement will
fall off a cliff.

This is why you should not

worry about decreased
engagement as you scale
your content and
distribution.

Content or ad "fatigue" is
often used as the argument
against scaling to deliver
more content, more emails,
more touch points.

But your best fit customers want to hear more from you. You are solving a very real pain
in their lives.

The more content you put out, the more helpful they will find you in resolving that pain.
The more helpful you are, the more likely they are to buy from you.

This is why scaling content to infinite distribution works.

The trick is to leverage personalization and customization whenever possible. That

increases engagement because you have dedicated streams for different segments of
your market.

If you focus too much on the bad fit customers and their engagement, you'll get caught
trying to be everything to everyone. Inevitably, you’ll end up wasting your budget on
vague campaigns that don’t attract high-value customers.

Instead, focus on your best fit customers and don't worry about fatigue.

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26. Market vs. ICP Growth

Focusing on a broader
set of customers
inevitably leads to an
increase in the
customers that fit your
ICP.

Segmentation theory
argues that you should
segment your best fit
prospects/customers
and customize your
messaging to those
people.

While there is truth to this — especially in enterprise B2B environments where ABM is a
lever — broader awareness marketing still has massive benefits:
1. You inevitably reach your ideal customer profile (ICP) as you increase awareness of
your business in a broader category. For example, Trello captures all types of
organizations and functions by going after the broader project management
space.
2. You enable customers to identify additional expansion ICPs for the business — e.g.
verticals and markets who your perfect segmentation strategy ignored.
3. You grow the brand as more people know about you and refer you as a solution.
The downside is that your CAC increases as you go after a broader market, so this
needs to be managed.

Even in environments where the TAM is super small, there needs to be an element of your
marketing that goes broad to increase your market presence.

If you limit your marketing to ABM efforts simply because your TAM is small, Marketing's
impact on revenue will also be limited.

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27. ICP vs. Search Volume

Too many companies start their GTM planning based on search volume instead of their
ideal customer profile.

If a term receives 10
searches a month,
search-driven marketers
will put off creating content
assets around that term.
This is the classic hammer looking for a nail scenario.

In a world drive by Google Search, this approach has some validity. But we don't live in a
search-driven world.

When you start with ICP, you build content based on what will help your ICP resolve their
biggest pain points. Only then can you think about distribution. And when I say ICP, I
mean all variations of your ICP.

Internal customer profile and journey work uses generalizations that put customers into
buckets that don't exactly fit who they are. This is how companies end up finding
customers who are using their products for completely different purposes than initially
forecasted.

Some of those use cases end up being a massive growth lever for businesses, if only the
business takes the time to understand the subset of the ICP that needs that problem
solved

This is why analyzing all the true variations of your ICPs is important. Each variation has
differences in terms of:
● How big the market is
● Where they can be acquired
● What the margin on landing the customer is
● What their LTV is

Once you understand these variations, you can unlock the growth potential of a business.
And in a social-driven world where search volume is not the north star, GTM planning can
then focus on finding the right channel/platform where you can find the ICP with the right
message.

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28. Positioning Feedback Loop

The best companies don’t treat positioning as a one-time exercise with an end point.
Products develop and buyer pain points change, so if your positioning is stagnant, it won’t
continue reaching the right people with the right messaging.

Instead, the best companies treat positioning as an ongoing, ever-evolving loop

influenced by their market and customers.

Each time you tell your company's story, you find more prospects and close more deals.
Each cohort of customers reveals additional information about:
● Which types of customers are an ideal fit
● Who has most success with the product
● What type of messaging resonates with those customers
● Which pain points the product still fails to address
● What other solutions those customers are looking for

As you uncover more information, you need to feed it back into positioning to change the
overarching story around the company/brand.

With every cycle, you’ll find more scale because you uncover more opportunity — e.g. a
greater TAM or higher LTV.

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29. Secret Sauce

Marketers often confuse

what their company’s
intellectual property really
is.

In the context of
marketing, intellectual
property refers to the
intangible creations you
generate through original
thought.

This includes:
● A blog post (as a
content format) is not intellectual property, it is a commodity.
● A video is not intellectual property, it is a commodity.
● A drawing — like this one :) — is not intellectual property, it is a commodity.

This is why as things start to work, people notice and start to make similar things — why
wouldn’t they imitate something that’s working? But the medium and format are not your
secret sauce.

Instead, here are things that actually create differentiation:

● Positioning and messaging
● How you solve a specific pain point
● True expertise and value provided to the customer
● Your audience and customers, and the affinity they have for the business
● Strategic advantages at the business’s disposal (e.g. supply chain, partnerships,
cost efficiencies etc.)
● How effectively you execute on a bigger vision for the market or category

Anyone can imitate a portion of the whole. But it’s impossible to duplicate the sum of all
the strategic pillars that make up a business.

As you better understand your secret sauce, scaling becomes easier, and competition
becomes less relevant.

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30. Website messaging

Your homepage and website are

not a self-promotional tool to talk
about how great you and your
company are.

Your customers and prospects will

encounter your website as they try
to resolve a particular pain point.

Don’t waste that opportunity by

talking about:
● Awards you've won, e.g.
fastest growing company or
local business of the year
● Companies you've acquired
● New branding you just launched

None of these things focus on what's really important: helping the customer achieve a
goal — whether that’s stated or unstated. If you don’t show them how you can help within
their first few seconds on the website, chances are that they won’t stick around to learn
more.

Do this instead:
1. Nail down your positioning and messaging, including who you help.
2. Showcase the benefits of your solution and the transformation you help customers
achieve.
3. Include success stories and proof points to highlight how others have found
success in a similar position.

Wasting the first 10 seconds you have with a prospect on anything else is wasting some of
the most precious sales and marketing real estate.

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Section 4:
Growth Strategy

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31. Growth Levers

Every business has hidden

growth levers.

Your job as a marketing

leader is to find them and
help the business capture
them over time.

These include:
● New revenue
● Expanding existing
accounts
● Cross-selling /
Upsell
● Increase pricing
● New products
● New markets
● New business
● New customer segments
● Lower attrition
● Mergers and acquisition (M&A)

This is not an exhaustive list.

Lots of companies have tunnel vision and see new revenue as the only lever available to
them. But ignoring all the other possibilities limits your growth and puts targets at risk.

The more growth levers you capture, the more enterprise value you create.

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32. Stacking Growth

It's not one thing. It's several

things.

The most popular stories around

startups involve founders having
a "big idea" that finally moved
the needle for a business. This is
usually not the case.

Usually, businesses succeed by

stacking multiple, smaller
building blocks on top of each
other that compound growth
together.

So, you need to:

● Drive awareness with
content, paid media and
social.
● Nurture customers as they enter your funnel with education, sales enablement and
resources.
● Engage customers with an efficient and effective sales process.
● Empower customers to get to value faster with better onboarding experiences.
● Enable customers to get more value from your platform as time goes on, including
bringing additional people from their orgs onto the platform.
● Expand customer value as they increase usage on the platform with more effective
pricing.
● Find additional products and services to offer more value to customers.

…and much more.

You need to do it all.

It's not one thing. It's several things. Don’t get so caught up waiting for that mythical ‘big
idea’ that you miss all the growth opportunities that are in front of you.

This is why it takes time to build an enterprise.

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33. Strategic Pillars

Not every good idea is worth pursuing.

Each business has core strategic pillars that are deeply interconnected and intertwined
into the fabric of the organization. Can you imagine if Ikea started selling high-end,
customized furniture?

This is why filtering your ideas through your strategic pillars is critical. When you go
through this exercise, you realize most ideas aren't a good fit for your business.

Where companies get caught is when they start with the dollar value in certain ideas. They
work backwards from there to figure out how to make it happen.

Along the way, these companies lose their strategy and forget what business they're in.
This outside-in strategy also jeopardizes the core business.

Instead, start with your strategic pillars and build from the inside out. Don't chase after
every shiny revenue opportunity.

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34. Focus on Your Core Business

Too many companies fail because they overextend themselves beyond their core business.
This is why so many companies raise money, expand (e.g. with a hiring spree) and then
contract (e.g. with layoffs).

Here's a sustainable way to expand instead:

1. Define your core business, competitive advantage and differentiators.
2. Strengthen your core business and maximize returns here.
3. Expand to one adjacency away — e.g. new products, new business, new supply
chain steps, new geographies etc. Ensure the adjacency you bet on leverages your
core business strengths and advantages.
4. Reset and redefine your new business in light of the adjacency.
5. Repeat.

Avoid jumping two steps away with the delusion of trying to conquer the world. If you're
jumping two steps away, you're likely entering an adjacency that is the core business or
just one step away for someone else, and that’s a recipe for disaster.

As a marketing leader, it’s part of your role to advocate for a growth strategy that is
sustainable and makes sense for the core business.

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35. GTM vs. CAC vs. Price

There's a reason why two products that bring roughly the same value are often priced very
differently.

Your chosen Go-To-Market model drastically impacts your Customer Acquisition Costs.

If you have an expensive enterprise sales team, you inevitably have to charge more for
your product to keep your CAC in check, and you may be pricing yourself out of the reach
of some customers.

Conversely, if your Go-To-Market can be a low-touch (or even no-touch) model, you bring
those acquisition costs down significantly. You can then pass along those savings to your
customers in the form of a lower price.

That's the key: customers win when you have a more efficient Go-To-Market.

Better marketing -> Better unit economics -> Lower price -> Customers win -> Higher
satisfaction -> Larger market to capture.

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36. Bottom-Up Enterprise B2B GTM

Taking a top-down approach to Enterprise B2B accounts limits possibilities on Go-To-Market

because TAM is often limited to a small set of very valuable accounts.

You need to expend an incredible number of acquisition dollars to land $100K-$1M+ deals.
Often, this work is led by Sales since 1-to-1 outreach is required.

Marketing ends up focusing on ABM to drive demand, supporting the 1-to-1 outreach with
1-to-1 content and messaging.

While this is required in a lot of cases, you can solve the problem of limited TAM by expanding
the universe of people who drive decision-marketing for an enterprise account.

This means:
1. Marketing to buyers, users, influencers and stakeholders of your solution, so you can
target a far larger audience to drive demand more efficiently.
2. Building a product that individual users can adopt and then collectively influence the
buying decision of the overall enterprise organization.
3. Targeting individual users via inbound demand gen campaigns, then mining user data
to identify larger enterprise accounts in the limited TAM that are ready for a bigger
purchase.

Very few companies have mastered this bottom-up approach (e.g. Expensify, 1Password).
When it’s rolled out effectively, growth can scale much faster in enterprise B2B models.

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37. Price vs. TAM

Your price point and Total Addressable Market play a huge role in your Go-To-Market.

Large TAM, low price -> Take a one-to-many approach, drive volume and focus on
efficiency. Inbound marketing should be at the core.

Small TAM, high price -> Be super customized and personalized in your marketing. ABM
should be at the core.

Somewhere in between -> Mix both approaches for a happy medium.

This is why it’s important to start with your company's specifics. Don't just buy an ABM
solution because you watched a video from a martech vendor. Companies spend a lot of
time and energy on campaigns that were never a good fit for their business reality.

Truly understand your business and figure out which approach best fits your reality.

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38. Payback Period

CAC Payback Periods should guide marketing decisions a lot more than they currently do.

If you’re not keeping your CAC Payback Period top of mind, you could be overspending on
bad channels that take years to break even on acquisition. Alternatively, you could be
missing out on more deals by spending a fraction of what you can afford to.

At the micro level: if channel X is breaking even in 6 months, while channel Y is breaking
even in 18 months, it's clear where you should allocate and scale spend.

At the macro level: if Marketing as a function is breaking even in less than 12 months, then
you should scale spend aggressively. You can then drill down into channels and
campaigns to see where you can scale spend within marketing.

While you can’t measure the performance of some marketing activities, looking at
Payback Periods can unlock significant growth levers for marketing teams.

In order to make decisions at this level, you need to create the right data infrastructure to
measure Payback Periods at both the micro and macro levels.

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39. Equilibrium of Optimal Marketing Investment

LTV to CAC ratios are incredibly high in many B2B companies. Yet the same companies
hold back on ramping up marketing spend — and miss out on marketing-generated
revenue as a result.

If your LTV:CAC ratio is well above 3 (in many companies, it’s north of 10) and your
Payback Period is less than 12 months, ramping up sales and marketing spend
aggressively can create a tremendous amount of enterprise value.

Why hold back any spend when you'll recover your investment in less than a year and
generate returns for 10+ years?

If your break-even point on marketing spend is at the 18-24 month mark and your
LTV:CAC ratio is still above 10, it's time to optimize and analyze what's working and where
spend is being wasted. Once optimized, scale aggressively again.

If LTV:CAC is below 3 and the Payback Period is north of 12 months, it's time to go back to
product and customer feedback before you think about investing more into acquisition.

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40. True Value of ARR and EBITDA

Understanding the true value of revenue and profit generated is key to knowing how much
to invest in Marketing.

If your client LTV is 10 years and you’re not cash strapped, increasing your CAC Payback
Period to 18-24 months can drastically increase your speed to acquire customers.

While financial stewardship is critical to scale, knowing when to step on the gas can lead
to significant gains.

This is when Marketing can do things like:

● Build more brand awareness at the top of the funnel
● Invest heavily in content to generate long-term returns
● Scale paid media to outbid the competition that has more stringent cash
constraints

Similarly, realizing that generating EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation
and interest) has a 15x (likely more) multiple on exit or in fundraising rounds can change
how you (and the entire C-suite) view Marketing investment.

Short-term thinking may view this as conserving EBITDA for higher valuations. Long-term
thinking looks at long-term EBITDA creation instead.

If you expand Payback Periods to 18-24 months but you can win a much larger
percentage of the market, inevitably EBITDA will increase significantly more than if you
kept Payback Periods under 12 months.

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41. Price vs. Service Load

Every business should aspire to be in the top left quadrant, where price is high but service
load is low. This is where margins are the highest and you can reinvest them into building
an even better product and business.

This is why some of the biggest companies in the world are B2SMB SaaS companies.
Shopify, Hubspot and Atlassian all fit in that quadrant.

It’s also why Product-Led Growth companies with price points around $1K eventually end
up trying to move upmarket. And why B2B enterprise companies try to lower their service
load with better software that needs less customizations.

That quadrant is where the most value is created for the customer as fast as possible.
There is more automation, better self-service, more transparency, better outcomes, and
better experiences.

It’s a win-win situation.

Marketers need to understand which quadrant the business is in and build your strategy
accordingly. A high price, low service load product will have a different audience and
different Go-To-Market than a low price, low service load product.

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42. Better marketing leads to higher margins

Better marketing leads to higher pricing and improved margins.

The more you invest into your messaging, positioning, content, education and thought
leadership, the more your perceived value in the marketplace increases.

If your business is built to consistently deliver on this increased perceived value, it

translates to increased actual value experienced by customers. This can come in the form
of specific solutions, verticalized offerings, purpose-built products and much more.

The combination of the two creates a unique and differentiated position in the
marketplace, where customers are willing to pay a premium because they expect a higher
value to be delivered by your offerings.

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43. Total Customer Value

Understanding the core

drivers of Total Customer
Value (TCV) is critical to
building your business’s
growth engine.

Companies constantly
underestimate what a
customer is truly worth
by not capturing all the
value acquiring a
customer brings. If
you’re underestimating
customer value, you’re
probably underinvesting
in acquisition, which
drastically reduces your chance of hitting targets.

Common drivers of TCV:

● Higher annual contract values (ACVs)/average deal sizes
● Increased usage/functionality which drives expansion revenue
● Lower churn, higher retention and higher LTV
● More upsells
● More cross-sells
● Increasing pricing
● Driving more referrals through higher NPS/satisfaction
● Better onboarding to increase conversion rates and usage

Correctly understanding Total Customer Value is key to scaling sales and marketing. It
tells you how much you can truly spend to acquire a customer.

The higher the Total Customer Value, the more you can spend. The more you can spend,
the more of the market you can capture.

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44. Growing Your Brand vs. Rebranding

Rebranding is more expensive

than companies and their
marketing teams realize.

Every year, Marketing teams

invest hundreds of thousands
of dollars into changing the
brand, logo, website, tagline
etc. for companies that likely
don’t need the change to begin
with.

Along the way, political capital is wasted, VPs of Marketing get fired and current brand equity
is squandered. Most importantly, revenue does not go up.

The bigger the company, the more the waste. E.g. A rebrand for a Fortune 500 company can
cost millions of dollars in new marketing collateral, website changes, building signs, retraining
of sales teams etc. At the same time, smaller companies can waste limited resources on a
rebrand that doesn’t meet the ultimate goal of driving growth. Reasons cited for these brand
overhauls include:
● Increased M&A activity and needing to tell a bigger story
● Current branding not matching what the company really does / offers
● Needing to differentiate from competitors
● And much more

While these reasons are valid, there is a painful truth most companies miss: the customer
doesn’t care about cosmetic changes. What the customer cares most about is the real value
your company brings. This means that, regardless of your brand name, colors or taglines,
customers want to know how you will make a real difference in their lives.

So, unless it's absolutely necessary, take the same dollars that would be wasted on a rebrand
and invest it into growing your brand. What this work looks like:
● Educating the market on your brand story and differentiated position
● Creating exceptional content that resonates and generates true engagement
● Ramping up demand generation across all channels from your ideal customers
● Increasing awareness from the broader market so that more prospects are aware of
your offering
● Building loyalty from your existing customers by continuing to deliver value

This is the really hard work of building a brand. Anyone can change some logos and colors.

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45. Fix churn before demand gen

Focusing on demand gen is a mistake when other fundamental pieces of your growth engine
are broken.

The 4 essential areas to focus on:

1. Fix Churn: Improve metrics like 90-day retention, LTV and net retention.
2. Drive Expansion: Scale revenue from your existing customer base with cross-sell and
upsells.
3. Improve Adoption: Increase usage from customers with better onboarding as they try
or buy your product.
4. Increase Close Rates: Ensure your SQL to Close Rates are above 30%, ideally above
40%.

Once the above 4 are handled, focusing on improving demand gen becomes a lot easier.

You can spend a lot more money to acquire customers because your ACV/LTV is higher and
you need fewer leads to reach CAC Payback Period.

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Section 5:
Demand Generation

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46. Hot Warm Cold

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to start writing random blog posts before
they put in place the core pillars of the marketing engine.

This can be a huge waste of your resources.

When you have a limited marketing budget, starting with people who are ready to buy
today is the best way to generate quick wins. This might mean creating a competitor
comparison guide or a pricing page.

Then, you can work backwards to people who are trying to solve a problem and need
nurturing. Provide them with the resources they need to help make their decision, like an
email nurture sequence or some case studies.

Only then should you finally arrive at people who have never heard of you and are not in a
buying window. This is when it makes sense to create educational blog posts and social
content.

This process takes time and patience. Over time, however, you end up building an engine
that compounds upon itself and lets you go after cold audiences in a much more
convincing way.

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47. ROI vs. Effort

Mapping marketing opportunities against effort/investment tells you where you should
really be focusing.

The key to success is balancing activities that are easy and have low barriers to entry (e.g.
paid media) and activities that require more effort and have high barriers to entry (e.g.
content).

You need to do both as you scale a business.

High ROI/low effort avenues often buy internal political capital. That's why doing them
first is usually a good place to start — they help you get internal buy-in to do high
ROI/high effort activities.

As the business matures, most of the enterprise value is created by high effort activities
that generate high ROI because that's how you close more deals, grow faster and win
over a market.

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48. Demand Generation Across Marketing

A common misconception inside

companies is that demand gen
purely refers to one subdomain
of marketing — for example, paid
media or ABM.

Some mistakes we see inside

these companies:
● Content and demand gen
teams are separated
inside marketing and
operate almost
independently.
● Some activities get way
more funding than others.
This is why some
companies over-index on events while spending nothing on paid media.
● The team lacks the skill sets to deliver on other areas of demand gen — e.g. SEO,
customer marketing or product marketing.
● The team is not revenue-driven. It’s constantly distracted by the organization’s
needs for other activities (e.g. sales enablement or corporate comms) that do
anything but drive demand.

What this way of thinking misses is that demand gen is the overall outcome of all kinds of
marketing activities coming together.

ABM alone is not demand gen.

Paid media alone is not demand gen.
SEO alone is not demand gen.
Nurture content alone is not demand gen

Demand gen holistically brings the sub-functions of Marketing together to drive buying
interest and intent from the market, prospects and customers.

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49. Dividends From Marketing Assets

Build marketing assets that pay dividends in perpetuity. One-off programs require
repeated effort to sustain and just don't scale.

That's how you keep your marketing spend, CAC and team small and your contribution to
revenue big.

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50. Budget vs. Performance

One of the most common complaints from marketers is that their CEO/board won't give
them more budget.

While it is true that some CEOs don't value marketing as much as others, all CEOs would
happily allocate more budget to an area that is helping the business grow faster.

If you're starting with a small budget, as a marketer, it is on you to figure out how to
deliver value from that budget.

More than that — it’s on you to show the impact on the business of that limited budget.

Then, ask the CEO/board for more budget by pointing to the potential to scale
performance even more.

There’s virtually a 100% success rate if you follow the above process.

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51. Pipeline Growth Over Time

Most marketing
campaigns stop getting
funding well before their
true pipeline value is
understood.

Why?

Because marketing
leaders are constantly
being asked for an
immediate return on
their efforts.

Unrealistic pipeline
growth expectations
from CEOs and boards lead to the exact opposite result of what they’re hoping to achieve.

Pipeline growth takes time. You need to:

1. Develop marketing assets
2. Build ongoing processes to scale
3. Get the right people to execute on the plan

Meanwhile, the potential of channels and campaigns is judged on their first iteration.

This is why you hear things like:

● "Facebook ads don't work for us"
● "This is a relationship-based business, so we have to go to events"
● "Why would I give more money to Marketing when I can hire two more sales reps?"
● Etc.

Similarly to how sales reps become more valuable after a full ramp up, training and
pipeline building, marketing becomes more valuable after experimentation, better
distribution and better messaging.

Giving Marketing less than a quarter or two to prove out its full value is setting the
function up for failure. It's also setting up the business to fail to meet bookings projections
long term.

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52. Your Market is Not Just on One Channel

Your market is not just on one channel. Too many companies over-index on one channel
and one set of activities — e.g. SEO, LinkedIn, or Google Ads. While these are all good
standalone channels, they are also just one place to find your ideal customer.

If you fixate on one channel, you’ll miss out on reaching all the variations of your ICP. You
will find different subsets of your customers in different channels. Having a presence in
each of those channels is more than half the battle.

So:
● Go to trade shows
● Invest in paid search
● Rank for your SEO terms
● Create thought leadership content
● Host webinars
● Create ABM plays to your target accounts
● Run ads on Facebook/LinkedIn
● Do PR/comms

The companies that are best at marketing do it all. They also have higher marketing
budgets for this reason.

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53. Creative Demand Gen

Companies often mistake technical paid media work for creative demand gen work.
Here's the difference.

Technical paid media work focuses on platform knowledge. This includes things like:
● Knowing the technical ins and outs of a platform
● Being able to set up a correct structure for campaigns
● Optimizing issues inside platforms

This is what most agencies/partners/internal resources focus on. While this work has
value, it is not the core of where demand is generated.

Instead, creative demand gen focuses on:

● Audience pain points and frustrations
● Building compelling content and the right offers to attract the right audience
● Growing a community/building an audience
● Creating a strategic and narrative position in the marketplace to differentiate from
competitors

This is the work most marketers fail to do in a lot of markets. That presents a blue ocean
opportunity for the marketers that choose to focus on it.

This is also the work that creates the most enterprise value for a business.

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54. Content Demand Cycle

Content and demand are deeply intertwined. That’s why both need investment.

Content builds the brand over time and can create entirely new categories. As you
produce more content, demand inevitably increases.

Either there’s more overall demand in the category because of the content or the content
positions you to capture more of the existing demand.

As you generate more demand, you can be more cash-flow positive. Each additional deal
increases the ROI of content and demand gen campaigns. And each deal impacted by
content lowers your CAC.

This gives you the ability to reinvest dollars more efficiently and confidently into content,
and to grow the category and brand over time.

This is the flywheel of good marketing. The best companies in the world understand it.

You only need to be patient enough to start investing in it.

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55. Content vs. Brand Value vs. Demand

Struggling with low demand? A low level of content investment could be to blame.

There is a direct correlation between how much you invest in content, your brand value
and how much demand you create.

More content that gives value to your audience/ICP/TAM leads to more brand value
with that audience/ICP/TAM. In turn, that leads to more demand gen overall because
more people search for your brand or choose your brand over others.

Show me a company with a great demand gen engine and I guarantee the company
has a significant content engine as well.

It’s a simple concept, yet grossly underestimated by many companies.

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56. Inelastic Demand

Pricing is one of the biggest growth levers inside any business. It adds significant
expansion revenue and grows total customer value without additional costs to acquire
that revenue.

In terms of economics, demand for most products is elastic: most businesses can only
increase their price a limited amount before demand begins to decline.

One of the major benefits of building a brand is that it makes demand more inelastic, so
even as pricing increases, demand remains the same.

This is where Marketing builds tremendous enterprise value: it enables inelasticity in

demand for your business.

Stronger brand = higher price for same demand = higher margins.

This is why brand-building activities like content can't be just measured by things like the
number of page views, emails captured, MQLs or even pipeline.

The full business value is much greater.

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Section 6:
Content

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57. Content is part of the product

Your content is a part of your product. It is not just something you:

● Use to sell your product
● Create to rank for SEO purposes only
● Publish on your blog

Viewing content in this limited way almost guarantees you won’t invest enough resources
and budget to harness its full potential. You’ll also likely focus on areas that don’t enhance
customer experience.

Your content is a critical part of how your prospects and customers experience your
brand, business and what you're selling.

Treat it as such and invest in it more.

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58. Content Trust Curve

A lack of content
creates a major
objection for you to
overcome during the
sales cycle: should
the customer trust
that you will deliver?

The more content

you create, the more
trust you build. As
the trust barrier is
lowered, deals
become a lot easier
to close because you
no longer have to
convince customers
that you can help
them.

Instead, they find you because they have a pain point and your content signals that you
likely have the antidote.

When organizations cross this trust barrier, they shift from being primarily sales-led to
being marketing-led. They see:
● More referrals
● More inbound appointments
● Higher conversion rates at every funnel stage

When this shift happens, customer satisfaction increases. The organization has to spend
far less time convincing more people to buy, so they can invest those additional resources
into improving end solutions for the client and creating even more content at scale.

Over time, more leads come inbound and close at impressive rates because buyers are
standing on a strong foundation of trust built with content.

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59. Authority Content

Most companies focus on

creating content for the
funnel. This includes:
● Awareness content to
bring in more leads
● Nurture content to turn
more leads into MQLs
or MQLs into SQLs.
● Sales enablement
content to close more
MQLs

Very few companies focus on

authority content. This is
content that transcends the
sales funnel — it has no
interest in selling anything.

The primary purpose of authority content is to serve the audience and market by giving
them solutions to pain they experience.

Authority content is not a "10 ways to do X" article. It is not a "Buyers guide for Y".

Authority content is true thought leadership. It builds a connection with the audience
because they can see how much you understand them.

Types of content that create this effect:

● Podcasts
● Educational videos
● Books
● Speaking

It's the hardest kind of content to create because the barrier to entry is deep expertise
and empathy.

The companies that succeed at creating this content end up greasing all stages of the
funnel. Authority content grows the brand, and buyers gravitate towards brands that
understand them.

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60. Value-First Content

Too many companies out there are

producing self-serving content — the
kind of content that says “Look at
me”. You’ve likely seen content like
this.

This kind of content often talks about:

● How wonderful the company is
● How they recently won an
award
● How their founder struggled
and came out a better human
being (LinkedIn is full of these
stories)
● How fast the company is growing
● How revolutionary their technology is
● How much better their solution is than the competition

This kind of content can feel like brand-building work. But it’s not. It builds little affinity
with customers for one big reason: it’s not about helping them.

Customers relate to brands that understand them — brands that use their content to fulfill
the mission of helping them.

Companies that understand this create servant content that is all about the audience. This
content instead focuses on:
● Talking in the second person
● Showing a deep understanding for the problem a person/group is facing
● Resolving real pain points with real solutions
● Educating customers and empowering them to achieve their objectives

Servant content is hard to come by because writing self-serving content is a lot easier.
Servant content means taking a lot of time, effort and empathy to produce. This kind of
content inevitably ends up building the brand.

It’s not a bait-and-switch either. There isn’t always a sales pitch to buy a software or
product at the end. Those outcomes end up happening anyway.

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61. Always be Helping

Always helping your prospect

get closer to their stated and
unstated goals has to be the
simplest, most effective sales
advice.

It means adopting principles

like:
● Make it about them, not
you.
● Act as a fiduciary in
their best interests, even
if it doesn't help you.
● Give them free content
and advice to get them
closer to their goals,
even if they don't buy from you.
● Generate awareness around how customers with a specific pain point can alleviate
that pain.

All four of these involve having Marketing play a major role. Marketing needs to:
● Position the customer as the hero. Showcase how the solution helps them on their
hero's journey.
● Clearly articulate who the solution is best suited for. Also who it is not a fit for, so
the organization knows who not to sell to.
● Build content that helps customers and prospects self-serve their way to a solution
and establishes authority and trust within a market.
● Disseminate the message so more people with a specific pain can reach a
resolution.

Marketing functions that understand this are best positioned to help effectively drive
sales.

It’s also important to evangelize for this principle within your company. Organizations that
understand this key role for Marketing will continue to fund Marketing's efforts as a sales
necessity, not as a cost center.

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62. Consistent Audience Building

Building an audience takes time. Here are the biggest audience-building lessons I’ve
learned through creating and sharing the SaaS Marketing Simplified drawings:
1. Have something valuable to say. Don't just spew more bad content into the
universe.
2. Have a unique voice. Say it in a way that only you can say it.
3. Always seek to add value. Make it about the audience, never about yourself.
4. Produce evergreen content. Create content that can create long-term enterprise
value. Otherwise, you'll be creating topical content forever.
5. Create content that creates leverage. We use drawings from this series for our paid
advertising to our ideal customer profiles.
6. Build your own list with unique value. The SaaS Marketing Simplified newsletter has
an open rate of over 50% at email number 70.
7. Nurture with education. Consistent content will help your sales pipeline grow
because you have pre-built trust.
8. Don't take shortcuts. I've rejected multiple offers to join "engagement" groups etc.
to boost the engagement on my posts.
9. Build a relationship with your audience. Get to know the people who are actively
supporting your content. A community is even better.
10. Scale up your content as the audience grows. How To SaaS is working on more
books, a podcast and a course.

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63. Videos vs. Website Visitors

In a social-first world, driving everyone to your website by default is a big mistake.

A video view on YouTube/LinkedIn/Facebook is just as valuable as having someone read

your blog post — or maybe even more so. A download of your podcast episode is just as
valuable as a webinar attendee.

If your top of funnel metrics exclude the reach of your content on social platforms, you’ll
get a distorted understanding of how Marketing is driving pipeline for the business.

The obsession with website funnel metrics leads to loads of missed opportunities. In many
cases, your audience wants to see your content — just not on your website.

Distribute the content in the channel that has your audience's attention. You will generate
more demand, which is the goal of increasing website traffic anyway.

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64. How Content Scales

Content scales over time. On its own, each asset may not move the needle. But the great
thing about content is that once you’ve created it, you can move on to create the next
asset.

Meanwhile, the previous asset continues to generate returns. Each time you produce an
asset, you layer on additional recurring value.

This process takes time and patience — two things most companies are not willing to give.
If you give up on content too soon, you miss out on opportunities to generate, nurture
and convert leads.

But, if a company is patient enough, a 12-month content strategy can build multiple
assets that produce ongoing value for the business.

Oftentimes, this work produces enterprise value in a way other channels never can.

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65. Good vs. Great Content

The difference between good content and great content is that great content continues to
pay dividends as time goes on.

Some factors that impact long-term dividends on content:

1. Quality
2. Distribution
3. Consistency

Producing more great content creates long-term enterprise value.

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66. Content Across the Customer Journey

Content plays a role across the customer journey.

Content is not just an SEO post to rank on Google. That’s like defining sales as making
some phone calls.

Too many companies view content as a one-dimensional activity. As a result, they

over-index on one funnel stage or channel and leave huge gaps in other areas of the
customer journey.

Content is a key part of how your customers move through their journey from Awareness
to Activation to Adoption through to Advocacy.

Content needs to:

● Help prospects discover you
● Nurture prospects and customers
● Enable the sales team to have better conversations
● Help customers get on-boarded onto your platform
● Increase usage of your product
● Provide education to your customers to build loyalty, retention and advocacy
● Build your brand as a publisher and thought leader in the marketplace

Each of these pillars represents a huge opportunity for content to create value. You can
invest infinitely in content because your market, prospects and customers will always want
more.

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67. Old Nurture vs. New Nurture

Nurture assets like gated content, newsletters, webinars and drip sequences do still have
some value. But customers don't pay attention to these mediums like they used to.

Instead, customers will:

● Come to your website
● Watch a video on your YouTube channel
● Listen to a podcast with someone from your team
● Read a post on social that mentions your company/solution

All of these are nurture touch points that most companies don’t try to orchestrate enough.

Instead, the obsession with attribution leads marketers to create gated ebooks and
downloads. These mediums make it easy to source a lead to a particular channel and add
lead scoring as prospects take certain steps.

You may have better attribution metrics, but you lose the overall picture of what's actually
driving revenue.

Your prospects want to be nurtured across multiple channels, mediums and formats. The
brands that do that are the brands they end up trusting more.

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68. Educational vs. Sales Nurture

The problem with most nurture sequences is that they are linear.

A customer fills out a form for an educational asset and enters an indefinite nurture across
email, social and paid channels.

Does a whitepaper download really warrant a 10-email sequence on all your features and
benefits? Should a sales rep really follow up with anyone who attends a webinar?

This is where segmentation and context is critical. You need to meet customers where they are
not where you want them to be. Nothing is more annoying than receiving sales emails when all
you did was read an educational piece of content.

If someone only engaged with you at an educational level, keep your nurture educational. If
someone engages with you at a sales level, only then should your cadences be sales-oriented.

This form of respect for the customer’s needs often breeds far more trust in a brand and
product than non-contextual messaging. With this approach, customers are also far more
likely to self-select into sales cadences.

To get it right, you need to commit to producing enough content to engage with customers
when they are not ready to buy from you.

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69. Order of Content

Too many companies get caught in producing content in the wrong order.

For example: what good is SEO content if you don’t have your core messaging and
product marketing pillars figured out?

The right order of doing things:

1. Sort out your product marketing (e.g. core messaging, value props).
2. Enable and empower the Sales team with the right materials and assets.
3. Run customer marketing campaigns to capture expansion opportunities from your
existing base.
4. Set up nurture campaigns to help prospects make their way through their buyer
journey.
5. Build thought leadership content with a unique perspective and story to
differentiate yourself in the marketplace.
6. Create content to rank for organic search.

Obsessing about number 6 when you haven’t figured out numbers 1-5 is a recipe for
disaster. The visitors you draw to your website will be dropped there without any way to
be nurtured or converted.

Don’t put all your efforts into top of funnel work before you have a way for it to generate
a return.

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70. Creation vs.

Distribution

There's a school of thought that suggests

creating a high volume of content is the
key to building an audience.

There is some truth to that, but it also sets

a false bar.

Creating unlimited content is valuable if

you can find unlimited distribution.

You need to look beyond just posting 10

times a day on LinkedIn or Instagram. That
approach will surely lead to burn out
because you constantly have to create
more content to stay relevant. You’ll also be
hoping the algorithm helps you find more
people who view your content — and hoping those people are your ideal customers.

This kind of strategy is pumped by proponents of hustle culture. “Post 10 times a day till
someone notices you. Keep posting. Keep grinding. (Forget your mental health. Don't
spend time with family. Over-index on content vs. other areas of the business like services
or product, etc…)”

Instead, creating the right pieces of content and finding distribution at scale is the key.

There's a reason why platforms like LinkedIn sometimes sound like echo chambers of
people in the industry sharing the same platitudes. Everyone is sharing content with the
same audience.

Not enough people are distributing content to their audience. This is where the magic
happens.

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71. Scaling Content to Infinite Distribution

Here's how to scale content to infinite distribution:

1. Create an anchor piece of content.
2. Tailor it by persona, vertical, industry etc. that you want to target.
3. Create audiences based on the same personas, verticals and industries.
4. Run paid social campaigns to those audiences on Facebook, Instagram and
LinkedIn.

Paid social gives you something Google Ads never can: unlimited distribution with
customized content for the long tail because it's not based on how many people are
searching for something.

Even better: the ad creative is a barrier to entry. It takes investment to create so many
variations and most companies just aren't willing to invest.

You can actually run hundreds of pieces of the same content to different audiences at the
same time, based on factors such as geography and language.

Paid social is not just for retargeting and lookalike audiences — it’s one of the most
overlooked opportunities inside most B2B companies. Too many companies are missing
out on a low effort, high ROI channel here.

The scale is there, you just have to build the content muscle to capture the value.

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72. Scaling Paid Media vs. Content

Paid media and content scale differently. That's the main reason why companies jump to
invest in paid media while hesitating to invest in content. But if you’re doubling down on ads
without the right content to support them, you’ll quickly find you’re having to spend more and
more to outbid competitors.

One has a low-barrier to entry — money. The other has a high-barrier to entry — time, effort
and creativity.

Building the content engine for a company takes patience — you have to play the long-game.

Content is also how you scale paid media faster. All kinds of possibilities open up beyond the
usual campaigns that everyone else in your market is competing for.

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73. Paid Media + Content

The room to spend on paid

media is finite in most
industries. You always hit a
ceiling on spend after a while.

Similarly, if you’re creating

content purely for SEO, you will
hit a limit on how much traffic
your content can drive.

It’s not that these plays are

ineffective. They work, and most
companies need to implement
them.

But the real value available is

when content and paid media work hand in hand to target ideal customers and create
demand.

This kind of marketing takes a true understanding of customers, a belief in the power of
content and a willingness to invest in paid media to build longer-term affinity within an
industry.

In a demand engine driven by paid social, content + paid is how you get to infinite
distribution. It’s also how you scale revenue significantly faster.

With content + paid, your competitors can’t just bid up in the same places you’re investing
(like they can on finite, zero-sum channels like search) because you’re never playing the
same game.

This also brings CAC down because the barrier to entry is creativity, not dollars.

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74. Product Roadmap vs. Thought Leadership

Your thought leadership content and your positioning/messaging should directly connect
to your product roadmap.

What good is it to talk about the leading edge if your product can't deliver on that
promise? You’ll surely only leave a potential customer frustrated and looking for a
competitor who can deliver.

This is where Marketing and Product working together can create a significant amount of
value for the business.

Marketers often don't spend enough time on this because near-term pipeline generation is
always a priority.

But the more time that you spend aligning Product/Delivery and what the customer
receives with what you promise/communicate on the front-end, the stronger the
company's ability to scale.

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75. Content Roadmap

Too often, content marketing teams are reactive (responding to requests from the
organization) or one-dimensional (e.g. only focused on SEO). Meanwhile, they’re working
with limited resources.

Content plays a role across the customer journey and you need to produce it for multiple
scenarios.

Requests come from all kinds of sources (salespeople, exec team, campaigns etc.) and
content teams often have no way to prioritize. The team gets swamped, and the content
that would actually make a difference to your customers and bottom line gets pushed to
the bottom of the list.

Content leaders need to act like Product Managers and run a content roadmap process.

Prioritize the highest ROI items for the business against the limited resources available to
produce content.

Don't just produce random content: build a content roadmap according to your priorities,
then execute on that.

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76. Thought Leadership Impact on Hiring

One of the most understated benefits of thought leadership content is its impact on
hiring.

Yes, thought leadership content with a unique perspective can evangelize a new category
and ramp up pipeline/sales.

But a secondary (and almost more important) benefit is that it helps grow the employer
brand beyond just winning another "best place to work" or "fastest growing company"
award.

The right kind of content signals to potential candidates what kind of world you are trying
to build.

The more candidates that vision and perspective aligns with, the bigger the hiring pipeline
it builds to help scale the company.

Your educational/thought leadership/category evangelism content doesn’t just help your

market and customers to transform their lives. It also brings people into the mission and
onto the team to help the market even more.

In a market where everyone is raising millions of dollars, more companies are hiring than
ever before and compensation for roles has climbed 20-50%, using thought leadership
content to attract the right candidates is a business priority that is critical to finding scale.

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Section 7:
Sales

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77. When Buyers Want to Talk to Sales

Buyers prefer to talk to Sales as late in their journey as possible. So what's happening in
the time up until they fill out that demo form?

They are:
● Trying to understand their pain points and what their possible alternatives are
● Exploring solutions — yours and your competitors
● Building their requirements for an ideal solution
● Reading reviews and customer feedback of your product
● Trying to find as much content as possible to help them make their decision

In fact, 79% of buyers consume 3+ pieces of content before ever talking to a salesperson.

This is why Marketing needs to be focused on creating as much helpful content as

possible, not just self-serving product marketing content.

The more content you create to help your buyer on their journey, the more likely you are to
get them to a point where they know, like and trust you before they ever talk to a
salesperson. If you try to force that sales conversation too early, you’re more likely to
scare a potential buyer away.

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78. Parallel Organization

When you realize marketing needs to be revenue-accountable, you realize marketing

needs to be involved at every stage of the sales process — not just until the hand-off.

Hand-offs are where Go-To-Market strategies break down. They’re why marketing
organizations can hide behind MQLs or Leads as their core accountability when they are
really accountable to revenue.

Did scanning 500 badges at that conference really matter? Ask a marketer in a hand-off
environment and their answer will be very different from a marketer who is revenue
accountable.

Revenue accountability is the only way to scale marketing's impact.

And, by the way, buyers want marketing to be more involved too. They want more content
at every stage of their journey — and fewer interactions with sales people.

Listen to your buyers.

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79. Sales With Content

Content is heavily underutilized when it comes to improving sales results.

To equip sales to have better conversations, create content that helps:

1. Educate the prospect (never a bad thing)
2. Showcase that you understand their pain
3. Build trust and credibility

When you do these three things, you earn the right to contact your prospect again. Plus,
they look forward to hearing from you because you provide them with value. If you don’t
educate, understand and build trust with customers, sales outreach can quickly start to
feel like a nuisance.

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80. CX vs. 1 Rep

Your Customer’s Experience is only as good as the weakest link in their interactions with
your company. One bad interaction with a poorly-trained team member can change how
a customer perceives a business.

This is why Marketing is so interconnected to Sales, Product and Customer Success.

If you bring in a good- fit, qualified prospect through demand gen, it’s your responsibility
as a marketer to ensure the other functions deliver a great experience to that customer.

That is not to say that you need to own those efforts.

It’s more to say that Marketing’s accountability extends beyond bringing in the lead and
washing its hands clean.

Even if the leads are converting at a high rate, customer experience improvements can be
huge growth levers because they drive loyalty, retention, expansion and referrals.

As stewards of the business, Marketers need to think more about loyalty, retention,
expansion and referrals.

That’s how you connect Marketing to the bigger picture of the overall business.

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81. Sales Response Time

Your sales response time is critical to the effectiveness of your marketing programs.
In many instances, prospects book a demo with you and your competitors at the same
time (especially if they did research online).

The person who contacts the prospect the fastest has a huge opportunity to set the right
frame for the sales conversation.

Not only that but you get a chance to speak to the person while they’re actually trying to
resolve their pain.

Each hour/day that passes before the first contact lowers your odds of closing the deal.

If you take a week, you're likely putting that lead into the "No response" category.

Bad follow-up can be the reason why a good growth channel is overlooked.

Act accordingly.

Take a look at the next drawing, Demand Gen Efficiency vs. Sales Call, to learn how
marketers need to get involved with the sales process.

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82. Demand Gen Efficiency vs. Sales Call

The first sales call can

make or break your
demand gen efforts. Even
great-fit leads will drop
away if they have a
negative experience with
Sales.

That's why marketers need

to pay attention to how
good the sales process is:
● Did Sales call the
prospect in 10
minutes? 10 hours?
10 days?
● Did the call break
the experience of the buyer in any way?
● How was the quality of the interaction?
● Was the sales rep adequately prepared to handle the call?

Good marketers do this work: they extend their efforts to fine tune conversions beyond
what happens on a webpage.

This means doing things like:

● Listening to recordings of sales calls.
● Being a part of how sales reps are on-boarded and trained.
● Communicating with sales reps on the importance of logging sales call info into the
CRM. This intel can help you to improve campaigns.
● Changing broken processes to improve the experience. For example, why is the
prospect called by an SDR who is not allowed to answer basic questions?

This requires a paradigm shift and putting an end to the Marketing vs. Sales battle.
Marketing is Sales. Sales is Marketing.

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83. SDR Demo

Somewhere along their journey, companies decide to treat buyers like mice in a maze.
Want a demo? Sure, you just have to:
1. Fill out a form.
2. Schedule a call with a Sales Development Representative (SDR).
3. Wait.
4. Talk to the SDR. They won't give you a demo but will ask you all their BANT
(budget, authority, need and talent) questions and then book you call with an AE
5. Wait.
6. Talk to an AE — or just go jump off a cliff

Before you know it, 2-3 weeks have passed. The buyer has lost their urgency or has found
someone else who engaged them more quickly in solving their problem.

This type of workflow also kills some demand gen programs. It might take a lot of effort
to get the right prospect in the door, only to have them end up as Closed Lost due to a
bad sales process.

Start with the buyer. Remove the hard lines between SDRs and AEs.

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84. Types of Reps

One of the most common ways companies ruin customers' experiences is by categorizing
reps and limiting their ability to handle certain questions.
● Want a demo? SDRs can't help you. Talk to the AE.
● Want to be onboarded? AEs can't help you. Talk to the Customer Support (CS)
team.
● Want support? Sales Engineers can't help you. Talk to the support team.
● Want to buy another product? Support reps can't help you. Talk to the farmers.

To your customer, one rep is an entry point to everything your company has to offer.

Each time you create an internal gate based on a job title, the customer has to jump
through a hoop to get where they want to go.

You can create much better outcomes by empowering reps to address more inquiries at
the first point of contact and deliver better experiences.

All your marketing efforts will be for nothing if the leads you generate leave out of
frustration in the closing stages of the deal. First call resolution should be a sales metric
just as much as it is a support metric.

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85. Price Transparency

Increased price transparency helps everyone win.

● Customers win because they can self-serve and identify if a solution is a good fit
for them.
● Sales wins because they have conversations with more qualified prospects who
understand what they're in for.
● Marketing wins because all MQL thresholds include price education earlier in the
buyer journey.

Most importantly, efficiency increases because you spend far less time having customers
jump through hoops to get a pricing 1-pager they can’t afford.

Boldly put your starting price point on a pricing page for the world to see — even if you're
a B2B enterprise company with a $100K offering.

Your whole Go-To-Market motion will improve and your buyers will trust you more.

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86. Discount vs. Close Rate

Discounts can be helpful when it comes to closing deals, but they're not nearly as helpful
as a lot of salespeople think.

Your customer has a pain point that’s significant enough for them to look for a solution in
the first place. Their willingness to pay for a solution is connected more to your ability to
solve that problem and less to how much of a deal they can get.

Beyond a certain percentage, a discount destroys work done by Marketing and Sales to
communicate the value of your solution.

Even if the customer ends up buying, the operating model around the deal will break over
a certain threshold. The costs to deliver are the same — the margin just decreases.

Lower margin = lower access to resources = lower ability to deliver to customers.

This is why Marketing and Sales need to hold firm on pricing.

Discounts are fine as a small give. They should not be the reason deals close.

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87. Increased Sales Reveal Broken Processes

Increased sales volume breaks internal

processes. As you close more deals, your
organization has to figure out a way to
deal with increased complexity.

Otherwise, internal mechanisms start

breaking down and customers start
having negative experiences. Maybe
customer service wait times increase, or
the Product team can’t keep pace with
the updates customers are requesting.
Some customers might leave; others
might share their negative experience
and warn people off.

To prevent this, questions like the following become increasingly important as your sales
volume increases:
1. How can we deliver faster?
2. How can we increase automation across the business?
3. How many people do we need to scale?
4. What will our margin be as we scale?
5. What is the core business we are in?
6. Which opportunities should we say no to?
7. What kind of operational framework will help us scale to the next level?
8. What should our product focus on to help us scale even more?
9. What are the bottlenecks to our scaling?
10. Who do we need in which seats to scale?

These kinds of questions only become relevant and evident as sales volume crosses
certain thresholds. This is one of the most undervalued contributions of sales. As you close
more deals, the organization has an opportunity to examine key strategic questions that
would otherwise remain unaddressed.

As you answer those questions, sales increase even further and the process repeats all
over again.

Better pipeline closes more often and doesn't churn as quickly. It has lower acquisition costs
and is more efficient. It's also how Marketing helps the business grow faster

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88. Voice of Market

One of the biggest ways Sales and Marketing can make an impact on the business is by
collecting feedback from the market and by communicating/championing that feedback
to product teams.

Product teams working in isolation can easily slip into focusing on the features they are
excited about, rather than what the market wants. The result? A product that can’t match
up to competitors and falls short of customer expectations.

By connecting Product teams to market feedback, marketing leaders can help:

1. Overcome major roadblocks in the sales process.
2. Uncover critical missing features that impact close rates.
3. Create ideal pricing structures in alignment with customer interests.
4. Find growth opportunities, e.g. additional products and services requested by
customers.

Having a formalized feedback mechanism that channels this input to product teams can
create significant ROI on Marketing and Sales — well beyond the ROI on standard
Go-To-Market activities.

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Section 8:
Revenue Operations

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89. Revenue Ops

Separating out Sales Ops and Marketing Ops makes little sense when you realize that
Sales and Marketing are both accountable for revenue.

Separating these ops functions means Sales and Marketing won’t be speaking the same
language. Not only is this inefficient in terms of your tech stack and spend, it also makes
it harder to track performance through your funnel and to ensure leads don’t fall between
the cracks.

Every company needs an overarching Revenue Ops plan that covers:

● Architecture
● Systems and technology stack
● Process
● Data governance
● Definitions and routing
● Feedback loops

Both Sales and Marketing should speak the same language on all of these. When it’s time
to make budgeting decisions, Sales and Marketing should be referencing the same data
models and outputs.

Thinking about ops and data together is one of the key ways to align Sales and Marketing.

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90. Marketing Operations

One of the most underrated roles on Marketing teams is the Ops person. In many
companies, this role isn’t even filled (which is crazy).

If you don’t have someone overseeing your marketing ops, chances are that you’re not
using data to its full potential. For example, how much more accurate would your
forecasts be if you had instant access to detailed historical data?

Marketing Ops is an enablement role. It enables Marketers to spend money while giving
them the insights they need to make better decisions.

To get those insights, however, there is a whole lot of data collection, infrastructure and
integration work that needs to happen. These are skills that marketing teams usually lack.

Find yourself a marketing ops person if you don’t have one already. And if you have a
good one, do everything you can to hold on to them.

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91. Attribution Complexity

Obsessing over attribution eventually

becomes counterproductive.

There are marketing departments that

won't invest in channels because the
ROI isn’t obvious. They can't sell the
merit of the activity internally to get
buy-in from other stakeholders
(especially the CEO).

This is a huge mistake: you are

certainly losing out on the chance to
reach more of your market.

When you're going from 0 (where

you’re not tracking anything) to 1
(where Marketing is tracking
contribution to revenue), attribution can be incredibly valuable.

Yes, you want to know how the marketing dollars you invest are leading to a return in
Closed Won bookings.

It's just that some marketing activities create an environment that buyers make their way
through to buy your product. A lot of these activities cannot be measured.

Content is a lot like that. Social media is a lot like that. Building a brand is a lot like that.

You can measure some of the metrics around these activities, but you can't measure them
all.

But if you stop those activities simply because you can't measure the revenue impact, you
stop creating an environment that helps customers.

Instead, use data and attribution models to help you triangulate the truth. From there, just
have some trust in the environment you've created for your customers.

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92. Attribution vs. Value

Just because a
channel is easier to
track does not mean it
is the more valuable
channel.

Some companies
over-index on channels
like paid media simply
because it’s a lot
easier to connect
investment to ROI.

Meanwhile, channels
that are equally
valuable (such as
content) don’t get as
much investment
because the attribution is unclear at times.

It’s the same reason why some companies ignore more traditional channels (e.g. TV,
radio), channels that don't have clean attribution (e.g. podcast advertising, influencers) or
building a brand through thought leadership (e.g. books, podcasts, YouTube).

A lot of this pressure to track is driven by management, who want clean reports on all
marketing activities.

The solution? Educate internally on the value of a model that blends channels that are
easy to track with ones that aren't, so you're building the best marketing engine.

If you become obsessed with marketing reporting, you'll eventually be limited to paid
search and paid social as your only channels.

Don't over-index on reporting.

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93. Correlation vs. Attribution

The problem with

marketing is that some
channels are easy to
attribute through to
revenue, while others are
not. Some marketers,
under pressure from their
CEO to produce a dollar
value for everything they
do, end up avoiding
high-value channels
because they don’t have
clear attribution.

This is why "correlation"

is, in many cases, more important than "attribution".

To understand this concept, you need to understand how buyers are really behaving.

If you think your buyers are making decisions only by searching on Google, a lot of your
marketing activity will seem irrelevant. This is why attribution tools don't tell the full story
for non-linear channels.

It's easy to say if a lead from Google Ads became an opportunity. It's hard to talk about
the value of a Facebook video view or a podcast download or a YouTube channel
subscriber.

This is why correlation is more important than attribution — especially for activities
related to content.

The environment you create for buyers across all marketing activities is what impacts
conversions. If you pull one thread at the channel level, you may end up impacting
revenue on the other end.

You just won't be able to directly attribute it.

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94. Pipeline Sources

Breakdowns of pipeline sources reveal a lot about a company's marketing maturity.

Companies at earlier stages of maturity:

● Have an abnormal proportion of pipeline sourced to the (None) category.
● Do not get enough pipeline coming in via Direct/Organic sources (indicating that
not enough people know about the brand).

Companies with some maturity:

● Have better distribution across sources.
● Still don’t have enough contribution from Direct/Organic/Paid.
● Have a contribution from email that’s too high as most marketing efforts are
focused on emailing existing customers/traditional activities.

Companies at a good level of maturity:

● Generate significantly higher pipeline from Direct/Organic/Paid sources.
● Have far better data tracking in place to avoid large numbers in the (None)
category.

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95. Data Integration Between Platforms

Without connecting the data in your marketing platform and CRM, it's impossible to know
where to invest marketing dollars with confidence going forward.

You need to know the impact of your marketing spend, by campaign and channel, all the
way through to Closed Won.

When you do that, some of the data will surprise you. For example, you may find that 20
of the 50 trade shows you go to every year don't generate any revenue at all. Or you may
find that half your $1.5M paid media budget is going to campaigns with a CAC Payback
Period of 2.5 years.

The only way to get insights like this is if you connect the data.

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96. PQL Milestones

Product Qualified Leads are one of

the most under-leveraged marketing
data points, especially in low-touch
sales models.

If you identify 4-5 key milestones,

you can then track whether
Marketing is bringing in people who
take those actions.

Identifying the right milestones is

critical.

For example: by analyzing product

metrics, Shopify may know that
people who connect their Stripe
account are 200% more likely to become a paid customer (this is just a guess).

Some other examples:

● Freshbooks: Sending your first invoice
● Wix: Setting up a custom domain
● Mailchimp: Sending your first email
● Hootsuite: Scheduling 3 posts
● Hubspot: Uploading your customer list

It could be that one milestone supersedes all others. It could also be a combination of
milestones that causes a prospect to cross the PQL threshold.

These milestones highlight Marketing’s role beyond just interacting with Sales.

Marketing needs to connect with Product teams to gather these metrics and connect
them to top of funnel activities. This allows you to target and find more prospects with a
high likelihood of buying.

In blended models where the customer is in the product and there’s a sales team as well,
Marketing can be a huge asset to the Sales team by adding product qualification to the
sales pipeline stages.

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97. Closed Won and Lost Data

Not sure why your demand gen efforts are delivering plenty of leads but falling short on
Closed Won deals? There is a gold mine of information for demand gen inside Closed Won
and Closed Lost data.

Closed Won:
● Which verticals are you winning deals with?
● What are the average deal sizes for your different segments/markets/verticals?
● How long was the sales cycle and what touches were involved?

Closed Lost:
● Was your product too expensive for the right or wrong type of customer?
● Did they go with a competitor? Which one and why?
● Was the timing off or was your pitch not right for the stage they were at?

You need to feed the answers to all of these questions back into the demand gen engine.
This data will help you refine and improve programs to generate better pipeline.

The key word there is: better pipeline.

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98. Operational Framework

Even if you have the best growth

strategy, the structure and processes
behind it will limit how much the
business can really grow. Your growth
engine is only as good as the
operational framework of your
business. Key components of an
operational framework:

1. Objectives
● What is the overall strategic
direction of the business?
● What financial/revenue
targets are you working
towards?

2. People
● Who are the right people to get the business where it wants to go?
● What's the right organizational structure to achieve objectives?

3. Process
● What are the repeatable systems and frameworks you need to execute on the
strategy?
● Who will do what?

4. Metrics
● How will you measure performance of key initiatives and activities?
● What's working and what's not working?

5. Accountability
● What do you need to adjust in terms of objectives, people, process and metrics to
deliver going forward?
● What feedback loop needs to inform future objectives?

Marketing leaders should constantly be looking out for limitations and potential
improvements in the operational framework of their function. The ongoing culture of
deploying this operational framework is how teams continue to deliver and scale past
ambitious expectations.

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99. Connecting Marketing to Business Results

If your team is focused on creating great copy above all else, you need to hear this.

Copywriting is not as important as everyone will tell you.

Copy is not what separates good marketers from great ones. Things that are far more
important:
1. Connecting Marketing's efforts to the overall business strategy and results.
2. Interfacing with other functions and roles, e.g. product, sales, customer success,
engineering.
3. Being finance-literate. It would help a lot of marketers to look at an income
statement and balance sheet or know what EBITDA means.
4. Understanding the strategic growth levers of the business and how Marketing
plugs into those levers.

A lot of people will try to sell you on the idea that copy is your biggest growth opportunity
as a marketer. While it will help you get an entry level job, you will eventually hit a ceiling.

Understand the above 4 opportunities and your career as a Marketer has no limits.

Don't miss the forest for the trees.

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100. Data-Centric Leadership

Alignment (or lack of it) is talked about a lot. As it should be: misalignment between
departments is responsible for far more missed revenue opportunities than it should be.

The great thing about data is it can unify an organization objectively, without politics,
power dynamics or cultural biases.

You have to start by making data a priority:

1. Capture it from all entry points.
2. Track and measure all activities with KPIs.
3. Establish internal agreements on which metrics are core accountabilities of each
department.
4. Report on performance of each department based on those internal agreements.
5. Adjust spend, focus and strategies based on what the data tells you.

It's not easy. It requires people, systems and tools to make it all work.

It's also the only way to build a data-centric organization.

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Section 9:
Financials, Boards and
CEOs

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101. CMO Financial Stewardship

As a marketing leader, you are a financial steward for the business. This means you have
a fiduciary responsibility to invest your marketing dollars wisely. Spending that money
unwisely can be a quick way to run the business into the ground — if they don’t fire you
first.

Dealing with your marketing budget should follow the same principles as when you deal
with your own money.

Some obvious rules:

1. Don't spend money on things that are purely cost centers with no ROI.
2. Don't be too prudent or careful and miss opportunities to capture value.
3. Always be actively thinking about where to invest your limited resources more
effectively.

Too many marketing budgets burn cash/capital from founders or investors because it
doesn't feel like your own money.

But it really is your own money. It's the capital at your disposal to grow the company and
the team. Plus, better managing your budget will allow you to help more customers.

Treat it as such and operate this way. Your CFO and CEO will become your biggest fans
and supporters.

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102. CMO and CFO Alignment

Alignment with the CFO is one of the most important relationships for marketing leaders.
Why?
1. The biggest roadblock to scaling marketing is budget.
2. The way to get more budget is to have data that shows the impact marketing is
making.
3. The CEO and board are the people you need to sell that story to.
4. Your odds of success dramatically increase if you and your CFO are aligned on
those numbers and the right-sized budget.

If you're a marketing leader and you haven't spent enough time on the P&L (profit and
loss statement), balance sheet, cash flow statement or financial projections, start
spending a lot more time there.

You will become a far better marketing leader and executive.

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103. Financial Model

Knowing the financial model for

your business is critical to your
success as a leader. It’s pretty
much impossible to make smart
decisions about marketing
budget allocation if you can’t
see the full financial picture of
the business.

Things you should have a

thorough understanding of:
1. Your revenue/gross
margins: how much cash
does each sale generate?
2. Your acquisition costs
(CAC): how much cash
are you investing into
acquiring the sale?
3. Your
overhead/operational costs: how much cash do you need to cover your operating
expenses each month?
4. Your EBITDA/profit margin: how much free cash flow is the business generating by
continuing to operate?

These are the questions your CEO, CFO and board think about every single day.

As you answer these questions, you begin to understand how your role/team/department
fits into the bigger financial picture of the organization.

The better you understand that financial picture, the better you can figure out how to
deploy the budget at your disposal to make the organization more successful.

It's also how you can lobby for more budget to grow your impact on the organization.

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104. Budget to Revenue Disconnect

At some point, budgets

agreed upon with finance
teams must show ROI in
the form of revenue.

It is important to play the

patient game with
marketing and
understand that you
can’t measure everything.
But results are important
too.

If Finance doesn’t ask

why revenue hasn’t gone
up then Finance isn’t doing its job. If the CEO doesn’t put Marketing, Sales and Finance in
the same room and ask the question, then the CEO isn’t doing their job.

While it’s true that the right channels might not get attribution because of how customers
behave, hiding behind brand/comms work is equivalent to hiding behind attribution
metrics.

Your overall revenue metrics should trend upwards as you:

● Invest more in content
● Spend more on paid channels
● Add more headcount
● Bring in more marketing tools
● Hire more agencies

This means marketing-sourced pipeline goes up, sales cycles decrease, and
marketing-sourced revenue goes up.

If they’re not improving over a long period of time, maybe your brand/content/demand
gen work isn’t working after all.

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105. Step Function Expenses

Revenue increases gradually

while expenses increase like a
step function. Whether you're
the CEO or a team member, this
is a key dynamic to understand.

Every time you ramp up

expenses, it cuts into your
profitability. This is why ramping
up expenses in the right areas is
critical.

The right expenses are better

framed as investments. They
ramp up revenue as well so your
profitability curve smoothes
out.

Every time you bring the CEO or board a budget proposal for an expense that doesn't
ramp up revenue, the likelihood of getting that budget drops to 0.

There are so many places they can invest additional dollars that investing in a place with
no ROI has a high opportunity cost as well.

This is why companies view many functions, including marketing, as cost centers.

Marketing costs look more like expenses than investments if the marketing leader can’t
explain how added costs, programs or headcount will ultimately grow the business in a
reasonable time horizon.

For example: asking for $10k to spend on a content freelancer looks like an expense.
Asking for $10k to build 10 bottom of funnel assets that will increase conversion rates by
20% looks like an investment. Same dollar value — different perspective.

Tie your step function to a gradual increase in revenue and your odds of getting
additional funding increase dramatically.

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106. At Risk vs. Healthy Pipeline

Organizations that over rely on Sales and Events for pipeline put their sales targets at risk.

We see this most often inside Sales-led organizations where Marketing has a limited
budget.

How can you expect to hit aggressive sales projections when you aren't engaging with
buyers on channels where they spend most of their time?

Instead, investing into digital and buyer-centric channels increases the odds of hitting
pipeline targets.

Growing Marketing-generated pipeline is the key to hitting aggressive sales projections.

When Marketing stops over-relying on events and builds new customer acquisition
channels, it forces the organization to be less Sales-led.

This takes time. It’s why marketing leaders need to lobby CEOs and boards with budget
recommendations to invest in the right channels to become more Marketing-led.

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107. Marketing Spend Breakdown

Marketing program spend and headcount should almost never be equivalent.

In most companies where these numbers are equivalent, it's not that the team is too large:
it's that the program and campaign spend is too little.

You can have an incredible marketing team, but if they don’t have enough budget to back
their campaigns, their success will be seriously limited.

Key questions marketing leaders need to answer in these organizations:

1. Where would additional spend go?
2. What is the potential impact to the business?
3. How can our existing team amplify its efforts with more spend?
4. Who will we need to hire as we spend more?

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108. Marketing Underfunded

Many marketing functions are underfunded. Many marketing functions are also
underperforming. This isn’t a coincidence.

Marketing isn’t underfunded because it can't make an impact on the business. It's
because marketing, as a culture, has taken so long to bring self-awareness to its function.

Spotting a marketer who admits that a campaign they invested time, effort and money
into didn’t work is like spotting a unicorn. It doesn’t happen often, if at all.

Counterintuitively, Marketing’s best means for gaining credibility is to share the initiatives
that didn’t work and then share a plan for how they will better reallocate that spend.

The best way to overcome this budget barrier is with data. Having the right data helps
you shift the conversation to the value marketing is driving. That makes it easier to get
more budget — you can say how effective marketing is and the ROI you can expect with
increased spend.

The data also brings self-awareness to the marketing organization so it can tell the rest of
the organization when something isn’t working.

That's when everyone else in the organization starts taking marketing more seriously.

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109. Scale-Ready Characteristics

Is your company in the right position to scale marketing aggressively?

Scale-ready companies have certain characteristics that show they've reached an

advanced stage of Product-Market Fit:
● Close Rates > 25%: When a deal enters the pipeline, there’s an efficient sales
process behind the engine to convert it to Closed Won.
● Net Revenue Retention > 100%: Your customer base's value grows over time despite
the attrition you experience.
● YoY Growth + EBITDA > 40%: This is the rule of 40. It means the business has
enough growth, profitability or both to keep growing the enterprise value of the
business.
● CAC Payback < 18 months: The cash you invest into growth is returned within a
reasonable period. This number should normally be below 12, but when you’re
growing aggressively, a CAC payback period below 18 is fine.

Marketing needs to be aware of how the company is performing against these

benchmarks. Be ready to advocate for scaling marketing efforts at the moment the
business is scale-ready.

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110. Bottom-Up Forecasting

Forecasting is not just a math exercise. But in a lot of companies, it is treated as one.

If Finance puts together aggressive projections without properly understanding the

business’s specific growth levers, it is setting up the organization to fail.

Without proper input from Marketing and Sales, the organization is far less likely to meet
its sales projections.

To use a bottom-up approach, you need to understand all the different inputs of your
revenue model. This is where questions like the following become important:
● How much pipeline does each channel generate?
● What are the close rates on pipeline by region?
● How much can you upsell the existing customer base?

Functions like Marketing and Sales need to have the right data points to inform
forecasting decisions and actively push Finance to involve them more in budgeting cycles.

Unrealistic, uninformed expectations are a big reason why companies miss their sales
projections.

And the better the forecast, the more accountability there is for everyone involved.

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111. Marketing Budget Needed

There's a far too prevalent paradox of expectations in some companies when sales
projections are made by boards and executive teams. They set ambitious sales targets,
but the marketing budget stays the same.

Ambitious sales targets = more pipeline needed = more marketing support needed = more
marketing budget needed.

On one hand, we all want to close more deals. We also know that to close more deals, we
need more good fit customers to walk in the door.

On the other hand, most companies are not willing to invest the time, effort and resources
it takes to bring those people in the door.

This is how some companies put Marketing in a position to fail. It is also how some
companies strand salespeople with quotas they can never hit.

What Marketing can do better here is to explain how its budget is currently performing.
Then, bring that data to the board level and explain why more budget is needed before
they set those ambitious sales targets. The marketers who can't do this are left feeling like
second-class citizens constantly fighting an uphill battle internally.

MQLs aren't free. It's time everyone (including marketers) understood that.

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Section 10:
Progressing in Your
Marketing Career

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112. Value of Strategy vs. Tactics

Tactics lose value as you progress in your career. Strategy gains value as you progress in
your career.

Tactics peak in value at a certain stage and even begin to lose value as you move to
higher-level conversations.

Meanwhile, strategy continues to gain momentum. Its value accelerates as you begin to
see the matrix in what you do.

This is why at some point in your career you have to transition from obsessing over tactics
towards obsessing over strategy and the big picture.

It’s not easy to do. But big picture work almost always moves the needle a lot more than
individual plays.

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113. T-Shaped vs. C-Level

For people starting a career in marketing, it can be helpful to become a T-Shaped

Marketer. But it can be destructive to marketers later in their careers.

T-Shaped marketers have a high-level understanding of multiple areas within the

marketing function, but in-depth expertise in only one or two.

Being T-Shaped will help you get promoted to the level of specialist or manager. But then
you will hit a wall.

On the flip side, if you begin connecting the dots between marketing and the other
business functions right away, you dramatically increase your odds of getting to a much
bigger marketing role in your career.

I call this type of marketer a "C-Level" marketer. It’s difficult to find these marketers
because it’s difficult to see the full picture and understand Marketing's role across the
business.

These C-Level marketers understand:

1. How Marketing connects to Sales, Product, Support, Client Success, and
Engineering
2. Financials, and how to build a relationship with the CFO
3. How to manage up in conversations with the CEO
4. How to communicate expectations and connect the dots for the team

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114. The New CMO

The best CMOs aren’t fixated on only working on traditional marketing activities. To really
help the business succeed, there are 8 roles all new CMOs need to play:
1. Be revenue accountable and tie all activities to revenue impact.
2. Be a key leader on the sales side to understand how to impact revenue even more.
3. Be the designer of customer experiences throughout the full journey.
4. Be a brand builder and category creator.
5. Be a member/leader of the pricing committee.
6. Be a driver of strategic growth initiatives, which includes involvement in product
management.
7. Be a corporate development officer to support the company’s M&A activities.
8. Be a financial steward who ensures delivery of growth and EBITDA.

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115. Marketing as PM

Marketers can be some of the best Product Managers inside organizations. They have
unique context and understanding about Product Management’s most valuable asset:
what customers and the market want.

Marketing is not just about net new acquisition. Sadly, this is the only role marketers play
in some organizations.

If Marketing isn’t involved at the product level, the solution is much less likely to match up
to customer needs. Perhaps the pricing structure can’t compete with other options on the
market, or maybe the product is missing a key feature that would improve retention.

This is where it's on marketers to beat the drum. You have to be a real evangelist for
customers to get a seat at the product management table.

This is also where some of the biggest growth levers inside a company exist.

The better marketers understand each of these levers and how they can contribute to it,
the faster they can help grow the organization.

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116. CMO Communication

Communication is the single biggest skill set a marketing leader can possess. You have to:
1. Lead your team, set goals and objectives, and bring people together.
2. Talk to the market about the problem they're facing and how you solve it.
3. Manage people above you (the CEO, the board) and set expectations on marketing
performance.
4. Educate the rest of the organization on Marketing's plan and how other functions
are critical to that plan.

Communicate up, down, inward, and outward.

Do all four effectively and you’ll become a rockstar marketing leader.

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117. Growth Leader

Product, Marketing and Sales

collectively bring the overall
growth plans of a company
together.

None of these functions can lead

growth for a business by
themselves. They require
alignment and orchestration to
capture the value from the
company's biggest growth levers.

In many cases, the CEO plays this

role. But as companies get bigger,
this orchestration role gets lost
because the CEO's role also
evolves.

Eventually, there are VPs and C-Level execs for all functions except Growth (!). Each
function area works in a siloed way, and, inevitably, they end up missing critical
opportunities to build on each other’s efforts and find scale.

This is why these companies require a growth team or growth leader. The role of this
function is to bring Marketing, Sales and Product into alignment.

By the way, having a Chief Revenue Officer who primarily focuses on Sales doesn't count
either.

The growth function requires a leader who understands data, UX, engineering, product
and strategy, on top of marketing and sales.

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118. Immature vs. Mature Growth Org

Immature organizations
view growth as a
Sales-only problem.
These are the
organizations where:
● VPs of Sales get
fired constantly
● SKOs put all the
pressure of
growth on sales
reps
● Marketing and
Product have no
revenue
accountability

Mature organizations, by contrast, view growth as a holistic problem, owned by everyone

in the organization. In order to scale, they ask themselves questions like:
1. What value does our product need to provide the customer so we can increase
conversions to Closed Won?
2. How much budget does Marketing need to drive the pipeline required to ensure
Sales is successful?
3. What kind of onboarding and retention programs do we need to increase LTV and
lower attrition?
4. What is the optimal pricing strategy to maximize expansion revenue and net
retention?

Immature organizations miss all these growth avenues because their conversations have
a one-dimensional focus on Sales just working harder.

What these organizations don't realize is that putting less pressure on Sales and building a
shared accountability structure for revenue growth increases the odds of closing more
deals.

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119. CGO Career Path

The most natural career path for marketers is to move from Director of Marketing to VP or
a CMO position. This is the obvious path. Less obvious is what comes next. Where do you
go from CMO?

The most natural path from here is to evolve into the Chief Growth Officer (Note: a Chief
Growth Officer is not the same as a CRO).

Chief Growth Officers bring together Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success to
work on the biggest growth levers of a business.

You could argue this is the role of the CEO. But as organizations grow, the CEO transitions
to leading bigger picture items like vision, culture, M&A, investor relations and more. This
typically happens as companies cross the $10M ARR mark.

This leaves a gap in the organization: whose responsibility is it to lead the overall growth
strategy of the organization? The answer should be “the CGO”.

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120. CEO Buy-In

CEO buy-in is a very underrated variable when measuring marketing effectiveness.

There is a reason why some companies bet big on marketing: their CEO is willing to bet
their job on investing in marketing.

If, on the other hand, the CEO dismisses marketing as a cost center, this becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Marketing gets limited resources, so they can only generate limited
results, and the CEO justifies giving them even fewer resources.

Marketing leaders have a huge role to play here. You need to get your CEO on board by
making the right case for why the CEO should invest more in Marketing.

Once you’ve made that case, however, it’s up to the CEO to take that recommendation
and give marketing the support it needs in the form of money and time — including
setting the right expectations with the board.

This is why the CMO-CEO relationship is so important. You partner together to invest in
building the marketing engine and the business’s brand.

If you find a CEO who gets marketing, hang on to them.

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