Left to me, every new marketer’s ramp period on the team would include a stint in sales. Why? Well, look at it this way - if a joke writer just writes jokes but never attends the gig to see the crowd’s reaction, they’re never going to be good at it. Same with marketing too. If you’re not in the customer feedback loop, you’re never going to get the messaging right.
I started off as a marketer doing SEO and content before moving into ABM and most recently, Product Marketing. Usually, this gets a reaction from people on the lines of “oh that’s a pretty diverse skill set”. It is. But even though I loved being a marketer, I always felt there was a huge gap between what I understood about revenue generation as a marketer and the ground reality. Basically, I needed a salesperson's lens for a 360 degree understanding of how money is made.
Identify what kind of help sales need
In a big chunk of SaaS companies today, Sales teams still do the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to building pipeline and this leads to them missing quotas and not to mention, burning out. While this is the trend and also accepted in the enterprise league, it is not a sustainable engine at the SMB and Mid-Market segments where marketing is expected to bite into a larger chunk of the action.
Enterprise AEs usually have about 10 to 15 focus accounts to go after each year. Marketing’s contribution here would generally be to enable them with resources they need to have deeper conversations like competitor intelligence, product enablement and positioning.
Marketing has a larger play with Mid-Market and SMB accounts. According to Forrester, marketing sources between 15 and 25 percent of leads in Mid-Market and 30 to 45 percent in SMB. The marketing mix is slightly different in these accounts with demand generation taking lead in the Mid Market followed by enablement and then awareness. With SMB accounts, the prospects are not very aware of the problem statement in most cases and hence, awareness is in the forefront followed by demand generation and then enablement.
Where’s the gap?
More often than not, marketers have no clue what sales teams do on a daily basis. As marketers, we’ve all had salespeople come up and be like, “why do we have this feature listed on the landing page? We don’t have that!” Or, “my prospects don’t really care about these value propositions listed on our landing pages”.
I’ve been there as a Product Marketer. My perception of the value proposition and what the prospect actually perceived were completely different. But to me, I was like c’mon, I’ve put in a lot of research and effort into this. Right? Well, yes but not nearly enough. Why? Getting second hand information from sales and customer success is very different from hearing it from the horse’s mouth. And listening in on sales calls doesn’t quite cut it. It’s better than nothing but not enough.
So, the product marketing team builds out an inaccurate value proposition document and passes it on to the demand generation teams to build out campaigns and now, the whole engine is creaky. The ads don't get conversions, emails don't get replies, the CAC is high and everyone’s like what’s going on? Maybe it's the ad copy? The email is off? Maybe we got the wrong audience? No! It’s the base.
Knowing what your customers want
Customers don’t care about your fancy feature set or what your product can do. All they care about is how you are going to solve their problem. Apart from some of the big names in SaaS like Salesforce or Atlassian, most SaaS websites have a one size fits all messaging that is usually targeted towards enterprises, leaving the SMB sellers to fend for themselves. According to an Accenture study, 64% of SMB customers increased spend when enterprises personalized their recommendations for them.
Messaging to SMBs vastly differs from that of enterprise. Usually, at SMB and mid-market levels, the customer's pain is around their business's immediate needs. At the enterprise level, discussions are mostly the company's potential needs in the years to come.
While buying software, the most basic need for an enterprise is if the platform is secure, scalable and powerful. Take Twilio for example. This is their overarching messaging for enterprises. Enterprises want a scalable solution that is secure as well as powerful. Well, here you go. Simple, targeted and to the point.
And this is their theme for startups with the core messaging being enabling growth with a world class product while also providing free guidance and expertise needed to achieve it.
These themes weren’t built on the product marketer’s whims and fancies but rather, through continuous feedback loops with the customer facing teams or through interactions with the customers themselves.
Speaking of feedback loops, while I worked as a product marketer at my previous gig, I often built out battlecards for my sales teams and in it, was a section for objection handling. Although I checked in with sales about the most common objections they got, what do I know about handling objections when I’ve never actually dealt with one? Not much. All I was able to provide were templated answers about why our product was either more expensive or how it helps companies do x better than competitor y.
This was my first epiphany about why every marketer must sell in order to get first hand information and started my pursuit to get this experience. It all paid off during my role as an outbound SDR at Salesforce where I was in the trenches with customers every single day getting objections and questions thrown at me all day long!
Better Marketing and Sales alignment?
If sales drives the business, and marketing drives sales, shouldn’t marketers know what they’re driving? Brings me back to the point about marketers selling during their ramp period just to get the feel of things. It’s a far better introduction to the company than any elaborate onboarding session.
This not just helps in preparing your marketers for the job, but also helps in achieving the mystical word every CRO dreams of - sales and marketing alignment. Misalignment causes multiple issues that usually snowball into revenue loss. A Forrester report states that 65% of marketing content goes unused by sales and this is a tragic waste of resources for any company.
Getting this part right is very hard, but making progress in the right direction creates a cohesive customer experience, higher revenue, and helps you win happy and loyal customers.
Not to say that having your marketing teams sell in the first couple of months will solve the problem completely, but it will definitely help alleviate the symptoms greatly.
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