Richard Jones

A new category is emerging... Revenue Orchestration Platforms. If you want to know more about them, Salesloft created this great guide 'The Blueprint for Revenue Orchestration.' Worth the read: https://lnkd.in/en7GXynp

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Can vouch for Steve's strategic acumen and guidance!

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Some interesting thoughts about #GTM from Nicky Briggs from Forrester. It has been peculiar to me to see agencies and software vendors who went all in on #ABM have a sudden departure and now become GTM Platforms and laud this approach as new or groundbreaking. It is not to say that it is not sound business, just an observation of the quick pivots to get in on the latest buzz word. And, as she rightly states, if we do not learn from the past, we will be doomed to repeat it. Another side note, ABM is still effective, but like all other marketing and sales strategies it must be executed properly. https://lnkd.in/gjuGBwaJ #b2b #growth #makegrowthsimple #value

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Matt Heinz makes a great case for further marketing investment post purchase I used to be solely focused on net new pipeline & revenue Now I also think a lot about NRR and expanding current customers Almost all public SaaS companies (the growing ones, anyways) have NRR > 100% I think marketing criminally under-invested in post purchase activities. Too much advocacy and not enough demand gen mentality. If you are spending more time on content download nurture paths than you are on customer onboarding, adoption, and expansion paths, then I think you have a lot of improvement to make. And maybe inflection.io can help.

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Did a mini workshop today with a SaaS facing a few challenges with hitting the sales numbers. It was a most interesting subject matter, unlocking hidden revenue potential at enterprise-level accounts. We chatted a while about the sales function and a few symptomatic problems, but ultimately came to the view that two things are amis. 1) Alignment and true clarity of the big five (Vision Mission Values Culture and Values) and consequently led to ... 2) a disconnect in understanding why the product needed to exist and why, so that wasn't communicated enough to the end user. Of course, there is more to it but this disconnect was the root cause of a sales underperformance. Connected Growth for the win! Something Other: Growth Architects

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This month on the Let's talk ABM Podcast - Marcelo Fernandes, Global Head of Adoption & ABM at SAP, talks to our own Declan Mulkeen 🎯🎯🎯 about his view on all things ABM. Personalisation is always a hot topic in B2C, B2B and particularly #ABM. Watch the full episode - link in the comments 👇 Already watched it - what was your key takeaway? #AccountBasedMarketing

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Deal approvals in HubSpot are a clear sign that HubSpot is moving further upmarket. In small organisations, managing deal approvals is straightforward, often handled via email or instant message by a handful of sales reps and their manager or CEO. However, as companies grow, the complexity increases with different levels of authority and approval needed. --- In larger organisations, deal approvals can become intricate, with team leads approving small discounts, sales directors larger ones, and VPs even more significant discounts. This complexity scales with the size of the sales team, making the process cumbersome as the team grows. For the first time, HubSpot has introduced a deal approval feature, simplifying this process significantly. Previously, achieving the same result required tasks and custom solutions, but now it’s streamlined into a point-and-click feature. --- TLDR: HubSpot’s new deal approval feature brings efficiency to large sales teams, making the approval process easier and more manageable as organisations scale. It’s a testament to HubSpot’s capability to grow with your business needs. #SalesManagement #DealApprovals #HubSpot #SalesTeam #SeekEvolution P.S. While deal approvals were possible before, HubSpot’s new feature makes it effortless. HubSpot can always meet your needs, now with even greater efficiency.

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🎉 Reflecting on a busy month for us at Staffbase... 👇 🏆 We've been shortlisted for a B2B Marketing Award for Best Omnichannel Programme for our 'This Is Not Your '90s Intranet' campaign. It's the first time we've received this type of recognition for our campaigns. https://lnkd.in/dA3XZhU7 🚀 We landed in the Sifted 50: Germany - a ranking of the 50 German startups with the strongest revenue growth over the past 3 years! https://bit.ly/3NuRirH 📰 We're receiving more media coverage than ever... 🎯 Forbes: "4 Reasons Why It’s Getting Harder To Be A Successful Manager" mentioned our landmark study with the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism https://lnkd.in/d8vXi6Z5 🎯 PRWeek: "61% of employees leave jobs due to poor internal comms" https://staffba.se/PRWeek 🎯 Die Welt: "Die Top-50 beim Umsatz – diese deutschen Unternehmen wachsen am stärksten" https://staffba.se/DieWelt 🎯 Business Punk: "Oh Gott, ich will nicht nach Berlin“ covering our journey as a start up in the former East Germany in an interview with our Founder and CEO, Martin https://lnkd.in/d5Z6gyfn 🎯 HR Brew: "Internal comms is huge for employee retention—but only if you do it well" https://staffba.se/HRBrew 🎯 manager magazin: "Warum das Chemnitzer Start-up Staffbase an die Börse will" about our IPO plans... https://lnkd.in/dHHSPxDy 🚀 Most importantly of all... we're winning great customers all over the world including another of Germany's biggest supermarkets, a major charity in Australia and we're now partnering with seven of the ten biggest automotive manufacturers. We're so excited to working with all of these new customers to achieve success together and up level the whole internal communications sector! 📈 And looking at our plans for 2025... we're just getting started. 📈 There are few things more gratifying than working with great people and then seeing them achieve success. And this team is one of the very best I've had the pleasure of working with... Thank you to my fantastic leaders Fabian Liebig, Lara Dobson, Melanie Bochmann, Athena Koutsonikolas, Dr. Juliane Kiesenbauer, Tee O., Giovanni Picone, Luke Pheasey, Jenny Köhler, Brian Tomlinson, Álvaro Andrés Carrillo and the whole Marketing & Communications team for everything you do each day to make this journey such a fun one! :) #employeecomms #internalcomms #internalcommunications #marketing #b2bmarketing #CMO

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I encourage you to check out my newest venture — it is very exciting: Go-to-Market Maven (TM) The Maven creates an enterprise-grade GTM campaign playbook in a day for less than $1000. It sounds too good to be true, like a lot of this #AI stuff. As a brand and go-to-market professional, I know what "good" looks like. And it is. Who benefits? 1 Comprehensive GTM strategy is now affordable for startups and small businesses 2 Independents and freelancers can now lift their game with strong strategy. 3 In-house marketers can accelerate their speed to value and speed to market. 4 Agencies and consultants can use it as a compelling basis for spec work for pitches and proposals. 5 Brand consultants can use it as a sanity check / insurance policy before they present their work to important clients. Learn more at gotomarketmaven.com

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Knowing customer pain points and goals can make or break your SaaS. Brands like Pipedrive and Gong excel by resonating with customer challenges. Use B2B buyer intelligence surveys for quick, actionable insights. Key questions include: - What are your audience's top pain points? - Their goals? - How do they view the problems you solve? - and what are their main objections? Prioritize and address these points to craft compelling, customer-focused messaging. This can be used for all your marketing collateral, including Product videos 😉 #SaaSMessaging #Storytelling #BrandPositioning

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When you have simple frameworks, it allows you to easily create compelling messages and content… Steve Plummer’s TMS framework of Transformation, Mechanise and Speed is one I will be definitely committing to memory. #ReferitDaily #B2Bleadgeneration #ReferralMarketing #BusinessCoaching #B2Bsales

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I really enjoyed the talk from Adam Ryan and Jacob Donnelly at the #OX7 Idea Exchange, brought to you by Omeda. Pretty forceful CTA from those two for B2B media owners to create better content, with more unique voices. Easier said than done, of course — but crucially important. I also wonder: so what if your content is awesome if it's packaged in a way that is hard to access (e.g. slow website, poor design, poor experiences on different devices). That perspective has to be a part of the conversation. Come see us at the conference if you want to talk shop — I'm here with my Organic colleagues: Tom Imboden Justin DeMaris, and kendra gauntlett. Next up: using Zapier to improve lead scoring.

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B2B companies have been struggling with lead quality issues for years and years and years... They've tried to address it with: → Increasing lead volume (didn’t work) → Introducing more and edgier tools (didn’t work) → Implementing complex attribution models and tools (didn’t work) → Adopting demandgen methodologies (didn’t work) B2B companies often attempt to solve lead quality problems with quick fixes (let’s get more aggressive with our selling) or technology (let’s buy need tech). They do this because it’s easy but doesn’t address the real problem. It’s a surface-level fix. But the real root cause of these issues is much more fundamental. It’s deeply rooted & invisible. The real root cause is the misalignment between the lead generation process and the needs of the buyers and the target market. Here are the core issues: 1️⃣Leads are generated based on quantity, not quality, leading to a high volume of unqualified leads. 2️⃣Marketing and sales teams have different definitions of what constitutes a "quality lead," resulting in miscommunication and wasted resources. 3️⃣Lack of feedback loops between sales and marketing 4️⃣Over-reliance on automated tools and processes that don't capture the nuances of a high-quality lead. 5️⃣No understanding of the target audience, leading to poor targeting and irrelevant leads. 6️⃣Misalignment of incentives, with marketing rewarded for lead volume rather than lead quality and conversion rates. 7️⃣Failure to segment leads based on their readiness to buy, resulting in premature hand-offs to sales. 8️⃣Over-focusing on short-term metrics (like cost per lead) instead of long-term success indicators (like customer lifetime value). 9️⃣Not doing a proper GTM diagnosis before going all in on a methodology (ABM, demandgen, leadgen..) and a specific mix of channels It's time to address the root cause of lead quality issues. No quick fixes. Just real work! What did I miss? PS. I am participating in a webinar with Antoine Fadlallah from N.Rich next Monday on how to ditch the old leadgen machine. No quick fixes! Just 100% actionable tips! Join our webinar here ▶️https://lnkd.in/d-HjqZgy ⬡ ⬡ ⬡ If your lead generation machine is broken. You are just 1 DM away to ditch terrible quick fixes. If you are a CMO or CEO, just DM me 'No more quick fixes'

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Top reasons a #dtc business should run, not walk, from that ads agency: (sourced in large part from agency leaders themselves 😉) 1️⃣ They don't ask about your financial fundamentals. It's tempting to give clients benchmark performance figures to 'close the deal.' But before setting any targets, the agency should be asking *you*, the brand owner, about your own business financials. At minimum, they should seek to understand your unit economics (e.g. gross margin) and, ideally, customer LTV to inform just how much they can spend to acquire a customer *profitably* for your business. So yeah, if your agency is 'telling' more than they're 'asking' in this regard: 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️ Big shout to folks like Adam Pivko, MBA, Rahi Jain & others who stay plugged into these key metrics (and clients' resulting profitability) from day 1. 2️⃣ They cite attributed ROAS. Equally problematic are agencies that share success stories based on ROAS. The attributed ROAS achieved for another brand tells you *nothing* about the profitability of those efforts, and scaling 'high ROAS' marketing without knowing contribution margin (revenue minus all variable costs) can accelerate losses, not profits. Not to mention attributed ROAS is an incredibly oversimplified way of looking at the customer journey. So if an agency is crediting itself with single-handedly driving X ROAS on their campaigns, and saying they can do the same for you: 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️ Kudos to Colson Myers ("ROAS is a vanity metric"), Dennis A. ("ROAS is a myth"), and Rob McKenzie ("data-driven attribution = 'trust me bro'") for some of the best attribution & ROAS analogies I've seen thus far. I'm still waiting on t-shirts. 3️⃣ They guarantee you *anything*. If an agency offers you a money-back guarantee or similar gimmicks ('achieve X or we'll work for FREE until you do!') you're going to pay for it elsewhere. Agencies with lasting customer relationships - profitable for both parties - don't need to resort to mechanisms like this to close more clients. In fact, some of the best agencies say 'no' to more clients than they say 'yes' to if they're doing the diligence of number 1 above. So if that that sign-on offer sounds too good to be true: 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️ Cheers to Veena Gandhi 🔥 & others for saying 'no' to gimmicks & 'yes' to well-vetted customer relationships. So... what did I miss? #agency #ecomm

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MMM / econometrics can make a powerful case for investment with your finance team. If you are relying on digital attribution look at the image below. Could you be under-valuing the impact of your ad spend in a similar way? To perhaps state the obvious digital attribution alone won’t capture the impact across your sales channels. What neither your web analytics or digital ad platforms can determine is someone being exposed to an ad and then going on to purchase through a different sales channel. For example, imagine a prospect sees your ad on Instagram directing them to your DTC site but they then go on to search on Amazon for the product and purchase it there instead. That means any sales through Amazon won’t be attributed correctly. And if you are running Amazon ads you might be giving them the credit. The issue compounds over time as people repeat purchase. MMM can give you the return of your media across your sales channels. In addition, it can also tell you if your sales on other channels vs your DTC are incremental or not. This blind-spot of digital attribution is relevant for anyone with more than one sales channel. It is particularly relevant for those selling on Amazon alongside a DTC site. The impact is also likely to be more pronounced if you are running more upper funnel media. If you want to find out more about MMM follow the link in the comments.

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Marketing agency green flags [Part 1 of 2] 👏 👏 1️⃣ They charge a retainer. Charging based on a % of managed spend can be incredibly risky if the agency doesn't have a direct line of sight into a brand's (real-time) unit economics. Without knowing ongoing contribution margin, there's no way for an agency to understand whether scaling ad spend at any point in time will accelerate profits, or losses. If the agency has (and/or asks for) this real-time visibility, that's ideal! If they don't, a flat fee is best especially in the beginning stages of a partnership. 2️⃣ They manage as many digital channels as possible. The customer journey is so multifaceted across both paid and non-paid channels. An agency that aims to manage as many of these touchpoints as possible (so they can leverage the interaction effects between different channels) isn't just looking for more money, they're looking to get you the most out of *your* money. If an agency can only manage a handful of your channels - make sure they're asking about the spend managed outside of their team, as well as any organic or offline activity you're running (this isn't invasive, it's responsible). 3️⃣ They bring up incrementality. For many of the reasons above, agencies should understand that their paid efforts don't exist in a vacuum. Not only are other paid efforts influencing the performance of a certain channel, organic demand also plays a large role especially for agencies running on more intent-driven channels like Google. If an agency brings up lift-testing, that's the gold standard - but not a possibility for everyone. At bare minimum, agencies should be able to explain how incrementality influences their channel mix and how they look beyond attribution to understand the true value of marketing. Part 2 coming tomorrow... But in the meantime - What did I miss?! #agency #dtc #fbads #ecomm #ecommmarketing

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surely not again.... This is what I said to my team when they looped me in to an account review of a client who was asking why we were materially different from their Stripe numbers. What did we find? Baremetrics was showing around 25% less MRR than Stripe Where was the discrepency? 6%- discounted subs and coupons not taken off Stripe MRR 11%- scheduled to cancel still contributing to current MRR 9% (and in my mind probably the most egregious)- marked as active customers THAT HAVE NEVER PAID! This was for a total of around $37k MRR. They were using this Stripe figure to fuel hiring decisions, investments, growth initiatives, marketing campaigns. Yes, we calculate metrics different to Stripe... and for good reason DM me if you want a complimentary account review

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“Gripped with indecision.” Gartner is reporting that nearly half of all B2B buying decisions end in NO DECISION. Why? In the latest episode of Growth Driver, April Dunford says it’s because B2B buyers get to the end of the buying process and often just freeze: “What if I pick the wrong approach?”  “What if I pick the wrong product/vendor?” “What if this thing fails?” “What if nobody likes it and it doesn’t get adopted and used?” It’s easier to push the decision down the road. Why? Because in B2B, most companies and most solutions all look and sound the same. "Sea of sameness" is the cliche. But it's true. THIS is why your positioning and messaging is so crucial. It's even more important now that buyers are putting their purchase decisions under a stronger, mroe stringent microscope. Your positioning has to be CREDIBLE and DIFFERENTIATING. Your messaging has to TEACH AND ENABLE YOUR BUYERS about their problem and all of the ways they COULD choose to solve it. In words and ways THEY understand. You have to LOWER THE RISK OF A BAD DECISION by showing how your approach, your solution and your company is actually, factually, the best way for them to solve their problem. And along the way, bonus points if you educate them about the pain and missed opportunity they have been needlessly putting up with by clinging to their current status quo. It's a great episode. I had a blast talking shop with April. She's a hoot. See the link below to check it out. Be sure to follow, subscribe, and share with your team. What have you learned along the way about positioning and messaging? Intelligent Demand #B2BGrowth #B2BGTM

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