1. Quantitative Business Analysis
-Identify all the places where marketing investments are objectively wasting money (hint: it’s a lot). Give the money back to the company to hit the bottom line or re-allocate to marketing programs that are already clearly working and have scale potential.
-Close all data & attribution gaps so you have a clean objective view of performance moving forward & start collecting initial data ASAP. Includes things like self-reported attribution, UTM tracking for performance marketing, and full lifecycle tracking using a custom object.
2. Qualitative Customer Analysis
-Run qualitative customer interviews with your 10 best customers and 10 worst customers. Identify the nuances in demographics & psychographics. Develop hypotheses. Adjust segmentation strategy.
-Test the updated segmentation model yourself by running 10+ qualitative customer interviews with *prospective* customers.
3. Figure out how to drive more revenue within the first 90 days with pipeline acceleration and demand capture (hint: it’s definitely not high volume lead gen)
-Optimize the messaging & conversion path on the homepage of your website
-Optimize the handoff process so more customers that request a demo actually sit on a demo (crazy that only ~30% of SaaS prospective customers that ask for a demo actually sit on one - so much waste!)
-Build customer stories and/or a reference list to enable Sales to close late stage deals faster and at a higher rate.
-Run pipeline acceleration events with Sales for key late stage deals
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Lots of early stage companies think they need their marketing leader to go out and get tons of MQLs in the first 30 days. This is effectively always a failure and will set you back 3-6 months while losing a lot of credibility in the company.
These activities like customer research, segmentation, funnel optimization, and sales enablement set the foundation to then go out and CREATE DEMAND in the second/third quarter as a CMO by launching a podcast, organic social content, evangelism, paid social, influencer marketing, etc.
Set the right order of operations first. Then set the right expectations on what metrics you’re moving and on what timeline.
1. Customer Insights, Segmentation, and Targeting
2. Convert More Pipeline
3. Capture More Existing Demand
4. Create More Demand
^^Execute in this order for the best results 💪
#marketing #b2b #gtm #revenue
This post was originally shared by Chris Walker on Linkedin.