We’ve had a hell of a kickoff to our video series The Roof.
I don’t think we knew how many marketers were chomping at the bit for some real real talk. Not the scripted-yet-casual “real” talk that we’re being fed right now (come on guys…we’re marketers, we can sniff out a scripted video in milliseconds), but the nitty gritty-real-unedited-unscripted-blooper-filled stuff that we all joke about within the safety of our #marketing-team Slack channels.
Because we’ve had such a great cast of characters join us for our first season of The Roof, we wanted to spend some time reflecting on some of the best lessons we’ve learned from them. We’ve got takes from the C-suite, marketing, sales, product, customer success…across the board. Anybody who cares about customer experience and revenue, they’ve got a place on The Roof. Let’s look up, and dive in.
ABM = Marketing + Sales Working Together, Intentionally
…That’s literally it. It’s not rocket science. It’s not one piece of technology or one hire that can magically make your organization be brilliant at ABM. It’s just marketing and sales aligning, focusing, and executing in lockstep. Honestly, Justin says it best (in under 90 seconds, no less), so we’ll just let him do the talking:
Content Marketing Needs A Makeover
Oof. This one is near and dear to my heart–mostly because it’s a topic I covered on The Roof, too. It’s rough out there for content marketers, pouring their hearts and souls into a piece of content, only to see it get abysmal views because nobody wants to fill out a form anymore. Well, Brad has some great news for you: gating your content is so yesterday. He explained the Terminus marketing team’s philosophy on gated vs. ungated content:
“We don’t think of content as something to drive form fills. It’s fuel for our sales, marketing, and CS teams.”
Ungating the content you work hard to create is a win-win–you’re getting more eyeballs on your content (and therefore your brand), and you’re positioning your brand as educational and helpful rather than desperate for “leads” who honestly just want to find this one stat to show their boss.
Great. We’ve settled The Great Gate Debate. And now that we’re not writing content solely for lead generation, what do we create next? I’ve got a few ideas for you–and they involve checking in with your friends in CS and Sales:
If Data Isn’t Actionable, It’s Useless
As marketers, we hear a lot about data and its importance. And we’ve got tons of tools at our fingertips to collect all-of-the-data–intent data, first-party data, third-party data. But Tim brought up a huge point on The Roof: if your data isn’t actionable, it’s actually useless. What’s the point of collecting all that data unless you have a plan for how to use it? You should have a plan and the right tools in place to make all of your data actionable–especially in real-time situations (like chat on your website) so that you can better know and interact with your customers.
Build A Customer Engagement Marketing Team
Kevin is obsessed with our customers. That’s why he created a whole new team within our organization dedicated to the customer experience and customer retention. And, he thinks you should too. Before you ask: no, this doesn’t mean you need to set aside budget for a whole team of new hires. Kevin built this team at Terminus by bringing together stakeholders from every group at the company who might have an interest in providing the best customer experience possible–AKA, customer success, marketing, sales, product…pretty much every team. Here’s how (and why) he did it, and how you can too:
Leads Are Silly
We love calling leads “silly”, because it’s exactly the type of school-yard taunt they deserve. Organizations that are still holding their marketing teams to a standard set by “leads” are totally missing the point–why would we want to be sending “leads” over to our sales teams just to hit a lead gen goal, when in reality most of those leads aren’t at all who needs our products or services? I’d venture to say that any organization that is still measuring their marketing success based on leads probably has a massive rift between their sales and marketing teams–and rightfully so! Tim got feisty about this topic (and honestly, it’s just fun to hear him say “hot damn”), so we had to share the full video here:
Excellent Marketers Focus On The Entire Funnel
What a perfect way to springboard off of Tim’s above point. Leads should not be a marketer’s sole focus. Instead, marketers need to focus on prospects and customers throughout the entire sales funnel, and their experience throughout their entire journey with their brand. This point was made by Michelle, one of our AEs, who said that in talking to literally hundreds of marketers a year, she realized that truly excellent marketers aren’t the ones who are obsessed with leads at the top of the funnel, but the ones who think holistically about the customer journey and how they can guide prospects through the sales funnel, and into their customer journey post-contract.
I may be a little biased, but I think the first season of The Roof yielded some incredible results. It was almost like a little experiment, gathering people from our C-suite, marketing, sales, and customer success teams, and giving them free rein to rant about whatever they so pleased. The result of this elevated experiment? Everyone wants the customer to succeed. And in order for that to happen, every single one of those people who joined us on The Roof? They have to work together to make that happen.
