This is a topic called Good to Great. I, Sangram, gave a talk about this at several different events, but one of the events in Phoenix, Arizona, B2BMX, sent me a recording of it and I thought it’d be a really cool idea to play it on our podcast.
In this talk, I help you take your marketing from good to great.
Here’s what we’re unpacking today:
- Focusing on the right things
- Cutting marketing efforts that aren’t working
- Why you need to stop buying more marketing tools
- One Team and why it’s the most important value you can have
This blog post is based on episode 373 of the #FlipMyFunnel podcast. If you’d like to listen to the full episode, you can check it out here and below.
These are two books I highly recommend every marketing, sales leader read: “Good to Great” and “Twenty-Two Immutable Laws of Marketing.”
It is one of the best books I’ve ever read, the Immutable Laws of Marketing because it talks about things that don’t change. Remember, things are changing all the time: social media was big, blogs were big, content is big, ABM is big. Five years from now, ABM won’t be big, right? There will be something else. But what is not changing?
So either we keep up with trying to do what others are doing, or we try to focus on the things that don’t change. For example, how many of you would like to have things delivered to you late? How many of you like for prices to go up on the things that you want to buy cheap? There are things that are immutable, that don’t change and that’s where companies like Amazon, and Uber, and all of these companies have tapped into. So I want you to think about things that don’t change, because that might be an easier problem to tackle then things that do change.
All right, so what is greatness?
There was a great question posed in the book. And, I had tons of different thoughts around it. But the definition of greatness was that it literally is a choice. Its 100% choice. And that is the question I want you to wrestle with. What is the choice that you want to make, because without choice, you’re not going to go from good to great. It is 100% choice.
So, what are you focusing on today? If what you focus on is not the most important thing, then I would challenge you to think again, should you be focusing on that?
T-E-A-M
Target, engage, activate, and measure.
It’s team, it’s simple, it brings sales and marketing together, it brings alignment between your organization together. Its creates conversation going in your organization. Call it team, one team, you’re one team, you’re all about doing things together, one team. This became such a big deal in our own company, that one team is actually one of our core values.
Target. Let me ask you this, how many of you have target accounts in your company? If your target list is wrong, you are screwed. Royally. You are going to lose all the sales credibility, you going to lose the CFO, CEO credibility, if the target list is wrong you have lost it. So don’t get that wrong, don’t rush it. That is one area where I’ve seen the majority of the companies, so if you’re going to start ABM, don’t get this thing wrong. This one area, you don’t want to mess that up. Take as much time as you want. And here’s what I’ve learned. No customer ever got upset when you focused on their needs. And the immutable law was, if you focused on it, it gets better.
Engage. How many of you have more than 20 tools to do marketing technology? All right, more than 10? More than five? I think the average is like 20 to 22 tools out there in the marketplace for in most B2B marketing tech. But in reality, it’s not the technology that’s going to help you at all.
As a co-founder of Terminus I’m telling you straight up: Terminus is not going to be the technology to do ABM. It’s not going to help you be incredible at ABM at all. If the strategy is not there. If the team framework is not there. If the targeting is not there. If that’s not there, do not buy a tool or a platform. Because it’s not going to help you drive revenue at all. Instead, do some manual testing, do ABM testing, get alignment with your sales and marketing and then go find a product or a platform that can help you do that. But do not buy it if that’s what everybody is saying because that’s not what ABM is going to be all about.
Activate. Let’s talk about sales. I heard sales and marketing was a big issue. I guarantee you that no salesperson will ever be upset with you because you said I’m going to focus on your top accounts. And I’m going to give them a lot of love, they’re going to do direct mail, advertising, all the things, just for those 10 accounts that you focus on. No salesperson would ever get upset. And also, if you think about it, the title of your salespeople is what? Account executive. Not lead executive. They don’t care about our shitty leads. They care about the accounts that are going to drive revenue for them. So if you work on their accounts and give leads in those accounts, they’re going to love you. Right? So that is a big part of it.
Measure. How many times have you heard from a salesperson, hey you know what? That deal was ready to close, but it went dark. I don’t know what happened. So what are you able to do with analytics? You are able to say because we focused on these 50 accounts, I can tell you that only five of these accounts is spending time on the website. Only five of these accounts have more than three people engaged in this account. So guess what? We’re going to focus on these five accounts, and that’s what your forecast should be. So as a marketer, you can help your sales team forecast better than they’ve ever done. Not only on the front end where you can help your marketing and sales and executive team with what to focus on and which region, but also, you can help your leadership team and your sales team figure out what their true pipeline look is.
Sangram’s Summary:
Sangram: Here are my top takeaways:
- Don’t buy tools. Think strategy first, get that right, and when you get that right have great partners that can help you do that, then the tools is going to be just an enabler, that’s going to make you do amazing things.
- You don’t need tools to do canvass marketing, you need strategy to do canvass marketing. Tools are only going to help you get to the next level a little bit faster.
- You have to act as one team, that’s why the team idea’s so important. With the idea of focusing not on technology, not on the teams, individual teams or silos, but sales and marketing one team.
Sangram’s Challenge:
Here is the question that I want you to wrestle with: What matters to you? Does it matter to go from good to great? Does it matter that nobody opens your newsletter? Does it matter that the right accounts are actually not moving through the pipeline, or the sales team is working on accounts that marketing is not giving you a curve for? Does it actually matter to you?
