Are you struggling to acquire new customers profitably? Do you have a bloated sales team that are trying to find the needle in the haystack? Are customers churning after being sold a dream you can't deliver on?
You may have been setup to fail with a sales-led model that just won't work for your business as you scale.
To answer your prayers for a 'better way', we've teamed up with 7x ex Head of Sales, Adem Manderovic, to bring you a combined marketing and sales system that will completely align your business. It will help you build a growth engine that allows you to win more customers for less, and reduce churn.
It gets sales, marketing and customer success to all play on the same team.
Tune in and learn:
+ The end-to-end process for building a growth engine
+ Why the predictable revenue model has set you up to fail
+ Why marketing aren't able to do real marketing
If you're struggling to hit targets and are feeling the pain of churning and burning the market, make sure you check out this mini-series where we detail our 5-step framework.
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00:00 Introducing the Mini-Series on Business Growth
01:10 Meet Adam Manderovic: 7x Head of Sales
02:10 The Gap in B2B Go-to-Market Strategies
03:40 Revolutionizing Sales Proposals with Animations
05:00 Aligning Marketing and Sales for Revenue Growth
06:40 What is a Business Growth Engine?
08:10 The Impact of Venture Capital on Marketing Metrics
09:50 The MQL Trap: Why Traditional Lead Gen Fails
11:30 Lost Marketing Fundamentals in B2B
13:10 The 5 Stages of Buyer Awareness
14:30 Targeting the 97%: Beyond Active Buyers
15:40 The Reality of Your Addressable Market
16:50 Why Only 0.6% of Your Market is Accessible
17:50 The Loss of Key Business Development Skills
18:40 Bringing Back Commercial Acumen to Marketing and Sales
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👥 Are you a B2B marketer in a small team??
💰 Need to bring in more revenue for your company (so sales and your boss love you??)
Get the:
🔹 strategy
🔹 templates
🔹 tools
So you have everything you need to drive more revenue for your brand.
See why other B2B marketers like you love The B2B Incubator
Check out: https://theb2bplaybook.com/demand-generation-course
S06 E144 - The B2B Playbook
#b2b #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen
#b2bsaas #revenuemarketing #MarketingStrategy #leadgeneration #b2bcontentmarketing #salesandmarketing
(soft music) If you need to start generating revenue from your marketing, check out our demand generation course, the B2B incubator. It is built for in-house B2B marketers who need to build their demand gen engine for the first time, or to supercharge their existing one. In the course over 12 weeks, we give you everything that you need to create a demand generation program that drives revenue. Now that includes the strategy, the templates and the tools. We also keep you accountable with live Q&A sessions to make sure you keep on track and have every question answered. The program is designed for in-house marketing teams with limited time and budget. We've had B2B marketing managers, CMOs, marketers in demand gen roles, content leads, growth marketers, marketing consultants and more all go through this program and then all now executing the demand generation strategy that they created in this program. Some are now even contributing as much as 80% of the pipeline to their business after applying the principles from the program. So if you're stuck on the activity hamster wheel and you're ready to be a more effective marketer that contributes to the business, next time you take that first sip of coffee in the morning, head to the B2B incubator.com. Apply now, there's only 10 spots available per cohort. The B2B incubator.com applications are now open for our next cohort, check it out. Okay, back to the show. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the B2B Playbook Podcast. Each week we discuss strategies and tactics to help B2B businesses grow online. - We're your host, Kevin and George, a couple of digital marketing professionals. We've waited through the noise and made the mistakes so you don't have to. - The B2B world has changed and you need to put your customers at the heart of your marketing. - We'll cover how you can use our framework, the five Bs, to create a brand that customers are ready to buy from, love and advocate for. - We'll get insights from successful people in the industry and cover the latest trends to keep you on the cutting edge of the B2B world. - If you're interested in B2B marketing strategies and tactics that work, then this podcast is for you. - Subscribe to get the latest from the B2B Playbook first. - Remember, successful B2B marketing starts with the buyer. (upbeat music) - Welcome back to the B2B Playbook. Today we are kicking off a mini series on how to create an end-to-end business growth engine to drive better commercial outcomes. We're branding it down under demand and that's because we're doing this in partnership with my good friend from Australia, Adam Mandirovich. He's the founder of Disruptor and closed circuit selling. As a seven times ex-header sales, Adam is a go-to market specialist who helps businesses win across the full funnel end-to-end. Over the next five episodes, Adam and I are gonna share our frameworks and if you're in leadership, sales or marketing and you need more efficient process for acquiring new customers, then this series is absolutely for you. So just a couple of things that we're gonna be covering is we're gonna be first looking at when you're building your business growth engine, how do you first set yourself up for success? Then we're gonna look at then, how do you build relationships of trust and overcome objections with really helpful content and permission-based creative? We're then gonna look at, how do you then distribute this key content so it builds relationships of trust with your target customers? And finally, we're gonna look at how to execute all of this in real life. And today, we're gonna set the same for this mini series, introduce Adam's framework and our framework and show you where your business can get to if you implement these systems. Adam, let's go into why we're doing this mini series and who it's for. It all starts with probably how we came to the first realization of what you and I came to be, those moments in time where we realized there was a gap in how companies went to market, but we both got to the same conclusion with how to create educational content to create demand. Myself, having been ahead of sales so many times, I long story short for the listeners that haven't heard our other podcasts, I started looking at bid contracts and 10 proposals in formal RFPs and I was wondering, okay, so if we're the best player in the market, we've got the best price and we've got open book and we've got the best product, why we're not winning these proposals? That was the moment in time that I realized that marketing was no longer allowed to actually market and create demand because they were too caught up doing what the leadership were telling them to do to meet their measurements, not what would actually get customers further into the funnel because those proposals themselves were all about 34 more professional pages about us and not what it got the customer and where it's gonna get them. So what I did was through this journey of discovery is I pulled apart those documents, I wrote them into two pages of sales copy on butcher paper, this is how long ago this was, of what I would wanna hear if I was the customer and what would really push the needle for me to go, hang on, I should be doing business with these guys because they get it. From there, I took that and I made that into animations like cartoons and I asked my new business team to send it to people. Now, what this did was is really aligned with the companies that possibly should have bought from us but changed the messaging of why they should buy from us and what it actually got them and not why they should buy from us because we're telling them to do it. What that did was enable us to speak to a larger portion of the market that we're possibly able to be persuaded because instead of just aiming for the top 3% that are ready to buy, we're able to possibly educate the bottom 20% of the remaining 97% and convince them that we were the right recipe for success, if that makes sense. Why are we doing this? Because we came to the same conclusions in terms of the recipe of that sales copy that got turned into an animation was one part educational content, second part, known objections, that together is basically the recipe for demand. Whereas you and your 5B framework came to the same conclusion from the ad side, I've come to the same conclusion by building that by permission from the sales side and where we come together is agreeing, if we don't educate the market with those types of the recipes for success, we're really only going after the same type of, as everybody else. So yeah, hopefully that answers your question, George. - Yeah, definitely. And look, I think you touched on a few things there. The first is companies by only focusing on that 3% who are ready to buy right now, they're really suffering from an inability to scale. And we're gonna get into why that is. They also normally have their marketing team and sales teams at loggerheads with each other. I think something that we've both experienced and they're disagreeing and it's because they're not really aligned on driving revenue together and some of that comes down to the KPIs that they're handed. And that's really why this conversation, this mini series that we're doing, it's for leadership, it is for marketing and it is for sales. Because ultimately what we're doing is we are giving you a business growth engine that you can put internally, so those teams work together to drive more revenue for your business so everyone is playing on the same team. And I think a core thing that Adam and I always say is you, like every single business, have limited time and limited resources and you have to use those to win over your next set of customers and the information out there currently on how to do that just isn't available because so much of that has been lost in the noise. Now, before we go into those problems further, I think I just wanna show people what an end-to-end business growth engine even really looks like and then we'll look at a few more of the problems that come from people failing to implement one. So first of all, a business growth engine is it's not hiring more sales people to do more outbound, it's not hiring more marketers to make pretty content or to create e-books. It is marketing and sales working together in tandem to achieve the revenue goals of the business. It is winning customers for a sustainable acquisition cost. It is reducing the likelihood of churn and it's all about how do you put in place the strategy, the people and the tools in a really simple way to go ahead and execute this. So for those of you who are watching this, I've just pulled up on my whiteboard, a graph which really shows two axes. And on the y-axies, we have our cost per acquisition and on the x we have time. And it simply shows really the difference in your cost per acquisition cost, how much it costs you to get a customer before you have alignment between your sales, marketing and leadership teams and afterwards. And in the before state, typically you see your cost per acquisition being really at or around the break even point, tends to hover there often starts a little lower and then as you start to scale, we really see it start to blow out and that's when people really start to hit the panic button. Once you have your teams aligned, once you are really focusing your resources on people who are gonna be great fit for your business moving forward, that's where we start to see your customer acquisition costs come down over time. And so that's really ultimately what we're working towards as you implement our frameworks in your own business. - Awesome, but George, before you move on, should we possibly address that we understand and acknowledge that how we got here was through generally either how your CMO and your chief sales officer were both being measured to basically how many could they actually hit in terms of an MQL target to hit the hypothetical conversion for meetings. But further than that, if the company itself has gone through a venture capital race, how they're measured to either that executive board function or where that's measured to by the venture capitalist is generally how much pipeline they have, not how effective the pipeline is. So we need to call out the fact that there would still be marketers and CROs out there right now, chief of sales or whatever you wanna call those people in those positions that would completely understand what we're saying, but they know from the environment of how they're currently measured. If they do some of these actions, even though that it will have a result in complete commercial alignment and building bank revenue, how they're measured right now is actually the contributing factor of why that they can't take the punch to do it. - Sorry to interrupt guys, but if you need to start generating revenue from your marketing, check out our demand generation course, the B2B incubator. It is built for in-house B2B marketers who need to build their demand gen engine for the first time or to supercharge their existing one. In the course over 12 weeks, we give you everything that you need to create a demand generation program that drives revenue. Now that includes the strategy, the templates and the tools. We also keep you accountable with live Q&A sessions to make sure you keep on track and have every question answered. The program is designed for in-house marketing teams with limited time and budget. We've had B2B marketing managers, CMOs, marketers in demand gen roles, content leads, growth marketers, marketing consultants and more, all go through this program and then all now executing the demand generation strategy that they created in this program. Some are now even contributing as much as 80% of the pipeline to their business after applying the principles from the program. So if you're stuck on the activity hamster wheel and you're ready to be a more effective marketer that contributes to the business, next time you take that first sip of coffee in the morning, head to the B2B incubator.com, apply now, there's only 10 spots available per cohort. The B2B incubator.com applications are now open for our next cohort, check it out. Okay, back to the show. Yeah, I think that's an important point to raise and that's why it all comes down to those KPIs and what people are working towards. And I think that's why, Adam, we've seen so many marketers tasked with really chasing poorly defined MQLs just run this same play, which really drives marketing and sales apart. And again, I've got it up on my whiteboard for anyone who's listening. And really what that looks like is the marketers being tasked with the KPI to hit a certain number of MQLs. The easiest way for them to do that is they put together an ebook, but it'll say something about trends in your industry or whatever it might be. It's normally that great, not that great a resource to begin with. That's then gated. They then send that out to their potential customers or an audience that looks like their potential customers. They try and get to fill out their name in their email in exchange for the piece of information. Those MQLs then get shoveled onto sales who are hungry for leads to start dialing, to start moving the business forward. Very often when they make or try to make contact with these so-called leads, they don't pick up the phone, they don't answer your emails. If they do, they have no idea who you are, they have really no brand awareness, they're not ready to buy, and it's a huge waste of everyone's time. There's really no result there. And then this angry person is really what Adam used to look like when he was on the sell side, and this confused person is what I used to look like on the marketing side. And that's really what has ended up happening with so many marketers. And so we're not really driving any business outcomes. We're just collecting a bunch of details that we could have bought if a database anyway. The other thing that marketers end up doing, if they're not doing this, is they just turn into the make it pretty department, where they're just making things look good for sales, they're just doing sales and appletment content, but they're really not putting their foot forward to help drive revenue for the business. And I'll tell you what, that's okay for now, but when times get tough, when a company needs to downsize, guess who's gonna be the first to go? It's marketing. It's the people who aren't revenue generating assets. - So yes, in all, it really meant that marketing wasn't making an impact on the business and when times were tough, they were the first to let go. And it sucks, it's happened to so many marketers that I know it's happened to myself too. And if you go out there and you look for frameworks to help you, you just don't find many. What you find is mostly tactics out there. And it's really those marketing fundamentals that are based around human behavior and building trust, which is the essence in core of B2B, that have been completely lost. And that's why we ended up creating our five beats framework for demand generation. And it's all about building trust with your dream customers so they buy from you, not the competition. Adam, I'd love to hear from your side about how you arrived at a very similar conclusion, but from the sales side. - Yeah, yeah, thanks George. It's super interesting that we came to the same conclusion because the recipe for educating more of the market was a piece of educational content mixed with known objections, which creates the demand. Whereas if you look at it at a high level, that's what all of the marketing should have been allowed to do from the start. But in the organizations that I was at, they weren't allowed to do that, which is why I stumbled across doing it for my new business teams and indirectly possibly getting in trouble along the way, but after we got the result. - So I guess marketing weren't really allowed to do marketing. Sales weren't really allowed to be aligned with what marketing were doing. And the two were just contradicting each other and they weren't working together. And that really meant that the two teams struggle to push the business forward. And if I can pull up one graph on my whiteboard again, it's really what we talk about the five stages of awareness, which is really the five stages anyone goes through from being totally unaware that they want to buy from you or totally unaware that they even have a problem in the first place to being led to the logical conclusion that you're the perfect fit and solution for their business and they need you right now. So most of the marketing is done trying to capture those people who are product aware or most aware, sometimes solution aware, meaning that they're actively trying to solve their problem now. Research shows that's roughly 3% of the market is actually in that buying mode right now. And the issue that we all come up against is marketers, salespeople, they're trying to capture that demand, they're trying to capture that 3%. But guess what? That 3% isn't really getting bigger and you and your competitors are trying to take a bigger and bigger market share of it. Of course, that means that basically your costs are gonna go up as you try and expand to capture more of that 3%. And that's why businesses really struggle to scale in a sustainable way. And so what we're talking about is we're talking about also, let's go to that other 97% of the market, people who are unaware, problem aware, someone who is starting to become solution aware, let's start to educate them, let's start to build relationships of trust with them, but let's not guess how we're going to do it. And Adam and I are gonna share with you our framework and how we can deeply understand a particular set of future customers to give them exactly what they need to guide them through this buying process or when they are ready to buy, they come to you first. And Adam, there's one more important set of distinctions that I wanna run through, which is why I think so many marketers, salespeople and leadership have an issue with this and aren't able to do this properly. And it's really the difference between your total addressable market, your ICP, those that are in market and those that are in market and would actually consider buying from your company. So we know that your total addressable market is pretty large, right? It's everyone who could buy your product or service. Normally, leadership early on, if they don't know about this stuff, they think that anyone can buy their product or solution. But if you need to get 10 touch points in front of someone to build that relationship before they're ready to buy from you, it's kind of costing an insane amount of money to reach this total addressable market. You can't possibly do it. That's actually the same for your ideal customers. So even if you take a segment of the market, you still probably don't have the funds to build a relationship with every single one of those in there. So then you look at those that are in market ready to buy right now. And of the 100% of your ICP, that is roughly 3%. We've already spoken about that. But then there's actually more research which says that number of people even isn't fully accessible to you right now. Research shows that eight out of 10 people will not buy from you unless they've heard about you before they've started looking for a solution that you offer. And so if eight out of 10 will not consider buying from you, if they haven't heard about you before they started searching, that means only 20% will buy from you. So that's 20% off those 3% who are in market, which is something like 0.6%, which is why it's like finding a nail in a haystack and it's why this stuff feels so, so hard. So what Adam and I are suggesting with our frameworks is let's do everything we can to understand these people and these people and make this little dot here and this bigger dot here accessible to us so we can sell to them and make it very obvious to them that we are the perfect business to solve the problem that they have. Adam, do you have anything else to add from your side? - Yeah, and I guess the other component of that George is that since all of these split outs, a lot of the skill set applicable to what would have been your senior marketing person that may have been doing market research or your key business development or even senior business development people, head of growth, whereas in the past they would have looked at deal sizes in terms of annual contract value margin. Will this pass credit? Will this pass legal? What clauses are we gonna use? Who pros formers are we gonna use? What will this look like at customer success? Do they use our communication plan? Do we feed into theirs? Can we service this at customer success? With all of the split outs, that's no longer part of the SDRAE function for people listening, which is now only a portion of what the previous business development managers or even your hands on marketers would have done in the past. That's like a downstream repercussion for following that model. We've actually lost all those skill sets from the market. Whereas George and I are talking about hang on, if we go backwards to go forwards with reliving some of those skills, it actually makes things not only more commercially viable, but it just makes things easier for your organizational success. - Yeah, and that's what we're doing. We're going backwards to go forwards, as Adam loves to say. We're bringing the fundamentals back. We're bringing commercial acumen back to marketing and sales. We're getting everyone aligned on the same team, and that's what you're gonna learn how to do for your own business, for your team, if you continue to listen to this mini series. So again, coming up next episode, we're gonna go into really how to define those key targets to set yourself up for success by defining who your next best market is, how to deeply understand them and everything that you need, before we then go about setting our plan to build relationships with them and accelerate that demand and look at close that business. Adam, thank you very much for your time. Listeners and viewers, thank you for yours, and we're really, really looking forward to catching up next week and taking you through that. - Thanks George. - A quick note before you go listeners, you can find more great content and get in touch with us at the B2BPlayBook.com. - Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and our newsletter while you're there to get the latest news tips and resources from our playbook. - We'll be back the same day and same time with another episode next week. - Thanks for tuning in to the B2B PlayBook. Remember, successful B2B marketing starts with a buyer. 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