Episode 167: Full-Funnel's Fundamentals with Andrei & Vladimir

In this episode of Full-Funnel Live, Andrei & Vlad are going back to basics with a deep dive into the core principles that power a successful, modern marketing strategy.

💡 Tune in to learn: ⁠


• Full-funnel framework and 6 fundamental pillars
• ⁠How to implement full-funnel strategy
• How to measure full-funnel marketing

RESOURCES:

On-Demand B2B Marketing Courses: https://fullfunnel.io/b2b-marketing-courses/

Full-Funnel Insider - A Marketing Newsletter For B2B Marketers: https://fullfunnel.io/marketing-newsletter/

Join our community for B2B marketers - The Trenches: https://trenches.community/

Upcoming events: https://lu.ma/fullfunnel/events

Full-Funnel Marketing Content Hub: https://fullfunnel.io/blog

Vladimir on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimirblagojevic/
Andrei on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azinkevich/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is the Full Funnel B t B Marketing podcast,
brought to you by full funnel dot Io. Let's starve.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Everyone. I'm good to see everybody on our full final
live new episode. As mentioned last week, we are in
the middle of writing of our first book about full
funnel marketing. So while working on the book, we sided
would be handed just to chef our insights and anyhow.

(00:37):
We're receiveing always questions about full funnel marketing and how
the full funnel strategy can be used to try enterprise pipeline.
So we decided to document our process a few fundamental
principles that might be helpful, but the fabul dive in.
I see people are joining us. Let me know, guys

(00:58):
in the chat where you're all tuning in from. Again,
I'm broadcasting from Solanny and almost it feels like it's
summer here in Spain. Let me know where your all
journey from in the chat and while you are tight
and again just to mention, you can ask any questions
in the chat or in the K and A section
and we are going to cover all of them. Plus

(01:22):
thanks a lot to everybody who has submitted the questions
before the before these episode. So I have collected the
most relevant and the most interesting questions here, so at
the end of this episode we're going to cover them.
Hire rather good to CEO, Hello from Ust and good

(01:43):
to see you, let us know, let us know, guys,
where you're all coming from, and to just maybe to
set up our conversation. I don't know if you have
attended our how to Survive as B two b CMO
in AI era weather or because that maybe three weeks ago.
During that webinar, we have shared the stats from AURA

(02:06):
the state of full funnel marketing research. We've been interviewing
plus minus one hundred eighty B two b cmos and
one of the questions that we were asking them what
are the main challenges you are facing, and the top
three challenges were sixty five percent told us that the

(02:28):
biggest challenge is proven the direct impact of marketing on
pipeline and revenue. The second one was around forty two percent,
was lack of close collaboration with sales, and the last one,

(02:49):
the top sol challenge, was lack of long term prem
programs to create awareness and build trust with the target accounts,
such a nine percent shared with us. One If you
look at the three challenges. They are all intertwined. We
are not trying the let's say long term print campaigns
that are not creating awareness inside the target accounts. We

(03:13):
don't have enough engagement and intend data that could be
used to co create let's say a list of engaged
accounts together with sales and then run joint programs. You
can call it account based market and it could be
even more simpler playbox that you can run together with
sales to activate the engaged accounts. But the entire point
is that we don't have enough of that data and hence,

(03:38):
at the end of the day we end up with
debate and have let's say, internal wars with sales who
should get the credit for the opportunity created right, and
obviously quite often it would be the sales touch, so
sales would claim that this is the credit or quite

(04:01):
often there is another argument, especially inside the teams that
are working in Sillace, that we would anyhow close these deals.
So marketing is always losing right in this game. The
entire problem here is that in these companies there is

(04:22):
a huge pressure revenue creation and pipeline creation, and to
prove it, most teams they are just focusing either on
something that is easy to attribute, you know, the old
school MKL game, or just focusing on the demand capture right,
something that might help to drive the pipeline. Now, I

(04:43):
just wanted to share all of these challenges with you
and to avoid further debates because again we have hosted
the webinarround this topic. The entire point is how to
solve this, and as a first solution, I think this
is a This was the first, let's say, the NAPCIN

(05:03):
version of full Final marketing framework that I probably created
ten I think even both ten or twelve years ago
when I just started as a solo consultant, way before
the company Full Final data was created. And partially the

(05:25):
reason was that the challenges that I shared it with you,
I was here and all the time. They were described
in different ways, but the point was the same, the
eternal problems of marketing and sales miss alignment, not being
able to attribute marketing's impact or showing marketing marketing impact

(05:46):
on pipeline and revenue creation right, and as a result,
all the budget and the programs that should be used
to drive the enterprise pipeline, they were removed from the
marketing plan and not approved by far.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
Right.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
So this was the solution that I wanted to present
as a list framework to influence the entire bar journey. Right.
And as you can see, quite often we think about
the bar journey in terms of the CRM stages. Right,

(06:29):
there is like the fastage when we have the call
and then we have closed one and that's it. But
we all know that the bar journey starts much earlier.
Probably again we have shared with you and you have
seen lots of researchers and bar shot list vendors way
before the bar journey starts and then stick to the
short list, et cetera. Right, And another point was this

(06:51):
framework that we were we wanted to emphasize and highlight
is that the real relationship and the real path the
revenue starts after the deal is closed one. Right, Because
the truth is, lots of companies they are talking about
expansion and Churm prevention and saying that expansion is a
new avenue, which is true, but in most companies there

(07:13):
are simply no processes to drive this. Right. Client success
often is a passive function, completely disconnected from sales and marketing,
mostly acting as kind of on demand function. When client
and the question they're welcome to submit the ticket, and
this function can help maybe run on some basic on
board and get that's it. But this function is not

(07:37):
actively helping clients to shorten the time to value. This
function is not capturing the insights about the buyer journey,
and it's not capturing the insights about what's happening in
this companies that the transfer to the sales and used
for cross selling and up selling and expansion happens in
a completely silent way in most cases. Again, I'm just

(08:01):
sharing our experience what we have absorbed, right, so I'm
just generalizing a little bit here. What happens in many
companies is that account executives they just built a list
of the biggest customers and try, you know, run the
same typical outbound campaigns to different business units, saying, hey,
we're working with you guys, let's have a discovery code. Right.

(08:24):
But what they are completely missing that these other business
units might be absolutely unaware of your existence. And especially
if you're selling to big enterprises. Right, let's say you're
selling to Microsoft. Had the chances that different business units
idea were a few they are miserable and this framework
was an idea of how to fix it. This is

(08:48):
what we started and basically this format framework was the
representation of the approaches that mean Lot we used to
structure and plan marketing when we were working for enterprise corporations.
I was working for Kimber the clerk Lot was working
for Sonia, So that was like, this is where it

(09:11):
all started, right, Awareness, demand generation, demand capture, and activation,
client success expansion all looks as a holistic motion. While
it sounds good and see it, quite often the companies
come to us and say, hey, but how can we
implement it? Were anyhow doing some search, We're doing some

(09:32):
let's say we're right in case status were created block quantam,
then sales are running the sales process, et cetera. So
how all these stages are connected. How the holistic motion
looks like? So this is and if you can't see it,
well you can zoom in. This is the first kind
of diagram that we have created, and basically Lot was

(09:54):
architect in it. So maybe you can just jump in
and share the way how we got match out to
demonstrate how all the stages and full final framework are connected.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
Thank you very much, Andre, Sorry for being late. I
didn't know we were actually starting fifteen minutes earlier, in
fifteen to ten or four. Hello, everybody, So what I
think we'd like to highlight here is that you kind
of see three big parts. You see something on the top,
you see something in the middle, and then you see

(10:30):
some colorful rectangles at the bottom. So kind of let's
address them one by one. We group at the top
brand awareness and demand. Andrew mentioned this already. We know
that a lot of studies that have been run recently
show how the B to B buyers nowadays actually select

(10:52):
the vendors before they start the buying process, or in
other words, they become aware of those vendors, so when
they start the buying process actually already start with a
short list. And if you're basically what that means is
that if you're only trying to capture the existing demands
by for example, running kind of cold outreach or just

(11:19):
for example Google search or other kind of higher intent
channel trying to capture that, you're usually too late. The
B to B buyers, especially enterprise bit to be buyers,
might sometimes take you into their consideration set simply because
they need to have three five vendors whatever their procurement

(11:42):
is asking. But they kind of already have their preferred
vendors short listed. And this is I think one of
the biggest gaps for a lot of companies is not
proactively driving this brand awareness. Although there is obviously, like
a lot of company, you're doing a lot of things,
a lot of things to create the awareness there. Now,

(12:05):
another thing to realize is that because these virus are
not buying when they discover those vendors, it means that
we can't just be in our brand awareness. We can't
just be communicating about our product, right, So if they're
not looking for the product, and usually the product solved

(12:29):
is situated within some sort of a business process or
part of the let's say a larger challenge. So let's
say I'm selling you know, background checking tools for recruitment
managers in large enterprises. Well, the background checking is part
of the process of recruitment that I'm in charge of

(12:50):
or talent acquisition that I'm in charge of, right, but
it is a small part and it's not something that
I think about every day. But I do have top
of mind challenges that I'm thinking involved. So I think
a lot of companies can already benefit from understanding better
the top of mind challenges, strategic challenges and priorities of

(13:10):
the target accounts and driving some of their communication around
those proder challenges, and of course creating an association between
the kind of the challenges and the problems and how
we can improve that. Going back to my example of
the background checks, well, background checks are usually something that

(13:32):
is not perceived as a most friendly part of most
pleasant part of being hired. So it's kind of you
could you could start thinking about it as part of
the candidate experience, which is kind of a broader topic,
you know, candidate experience and having a more frictional ass
hiring process for example, Well, that is something that the

(13:54):
talent position manager will be hearing about, and this is
a broader topic we can talk about and then position
our solution as one of the solutions in that within
that challenge. Another point that I wanted to mention here
when it comes to brand awareness is that we have

(14:15):
kind of like two schools of thought, like go on
as many channels as you can, you know, and market
your product right or kind of double down on whatever
Google LinkedIn email and go there. I think what you
see here on the top of this drawing of this

(14:37):
diagram is that there's different kinds of activities and different
kinds of channels there. And I think the key here
that I wanted to mention is that it's really like
very important to understand where your buyers are hanging out
and learning and discovering a product like yours. And it's
not just necessarily the you know, the usual channels that

(15:02):
we use in our marketing mix, but it is usually
the part that, for example, the so called dark socials,
so they might be active on specific communities or following
some specific people on LinkedIn, tuning into specific podcasts, et cetera,
et cetera. So it's important to consider that and understand

(15:24):
where your buyers are actually hanging out so that while
not buying, that you can reach on them to them
on those channels. And just one last point about the
top of the funds, So basically understanding which are the
channels where your target buyers are buying, Understanding what their
top of mind challenges are, not just as they relate
to your product, not just talking about your product in

(15:48):
other words, and then having that multi channel program where
you're consistently, you know, creating content and showing up on
those channels. And I think also where I portant for
enterprise buyers as well is involving sales, so not just
doing it from a marketing perspective, but also involving sales
earlier in the process. And that means, for example, via

(16:11):
let's say we are doing awareness creation by sharing content
on LinkedIn advertising on sharing content on LinkedIn, we can
involve sales sharing via their profiles. They can be also
engaging with target buyers on LinkedIn or on target communities.
Let's say we are running some events, webinars, podcasts like

(16:32):
this one, we can engage in our sales as well
to connect to buyers who are registering for these events
pre and post event, et cetera. Et So this is
kind of the top of the funnel where we're creating awareness.
And what happens there is that a lot of companies,
like Andrew mentioned, do a bunch of activities on top

(16:53):
of the funnel. And when you look at also the
quotu quo, the bottom of the funnel where you have
the demand and the buyers are maybe reaching out to
you or they're booking the calls. Companies, a lot of
companies have something at the bottom of the funnel. It's
usually the sales process that kind of tries to capture
those buyers. But what a lot of companies miss is

(17:15):
the link between these two link between the brand awareness,
demand generation and actually the bottom of the funnel and
in the middle. And this is where ABM is situated.
And the way that you can think about it is
that a lot of the programs that we run on
top of the funnel to create awareness and start generating

(17:37):
the demand are generating engagement signals. So we start to
understand if these buyers are aware of our brand, if
they're engaging, what their interests are are there, you know,
for example, aware of our brand websites, attending events, et cetera.

(17:58):
We also now now can start identifying accounts that actually
fit our ICP, especially Tier one and Tier two higher
value accounts which deserve a more dedicated attention, which have
a higher revenue potential, where we can now also say, hey,
you know, for those accounts, let's start more proactively engaging

(18:23):
the other members of the buying committee multi threading, multi
threaded engagement, and let's start trying to understand and collect
the information about those accounts. What are directual priorities and challenges,
Why are they now engaging and considering that which is
what we call progressive profiling, together with sales leveraging the

(18:48):
marketing touch points to collect not only public information which
is part of account research, but also the quote unquote
insider information from those buyers through quote unquote progressive profiling
to get some insight into those accounts. And then once
you have enough insight, you can start also driving more

(19:12):
one on one program So I have engaged accounts, we
are aware of our brand, we have those signals, we
have collected some information about those accounts. We know that
they are high revenue potential, they are a good fit.
This is what's happening in the middle of the funnel.
Now I can start driving more one on one with

(19:34):
one on one programs, speaking specifically to their priorities, their challenges,
building relationships with their buying committee, and driving them into
into sales. Now, as Andrew mentioned, this is not the
end of the story, which is this is actually where
the real relationship with that account, it starts with our

(19:58):
customers starts. So the full funnel should then also include
programs to create customer success to actually successful, to facilitate
and enable that successful implementation of the product, to turn
that success into customer advocacy or basically into case studies,

(20:21):
into reference clients, into maybe client events, etc. Like. This
is something that every company should be working on because,
as we all know, a client, a new prospect that
comes from a client referral is five or more times
likely to become a customer than a call prospect. And

(20:43):
then obviously the relationship shoulds evolve because this account is
in a market that keeps on changing. The organization is
changing and evolving, and their needs are changing and evolving,
and you need to also have people and the programs

(21:04):
to kind of be in touch with what is happening
with those accounts and proactively start looking for the new
use cases, new departments within those target accounts where you
might be able to expand to now turn that initial success,
you're turning that maybe in customer advocacy to attract other clients.

(21:26):
But also the biggest opportunity for a lot of companies,
especially for sustainable growth, comes through renewals obviously and expansion,
and for that we really need to know how these
clients are evolving, what are the new business cases, Are
they actually still satisfied with the solutions are they're getting

(21:47):
most what they need out of it. Are they maybe
starting to look for other solutions, because unfortunately, more than
I believe ninety percent, I'm not sure about the exact number,
but it's a very high number. I believe more than
ninety of customers B to B customers are going to
churn silently. They're not going to say anything, They're just

(22:08):
going to churn. So having that proactive relationship is so important.
And one last thing that I wanted to say about
this diagram here about this process. How we think about
full funnel marketing is that whatever how, it doesn't matter
how good your demand gen and your ABM is right,

(22:32):
accounts will fall through the cracks or obviously the majority
of the accounts that are going through this process are
not going to end as a sales qualified opportunity and
a one deal. But that's very frequently not only because
you did something wrong. There's many other reasons, such as
the timing wasn't good. You know, they didn't understand something,

(22:55):
the priorities have changed, whatever is happening in that account.
But very very important is to quote and quote never
stop nurturing. So we want to make sure that we
don't remove those accounts when cold et cetera. From our
demand generation. This is how we close the loop, because
maybe in one quarter, two or three quarters, the opportunity

(23:18):
may come, the timing might become right, and you might
engage them, you know, in another way, with some other messaging,
with some other campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. So this
is an overview of the full fund marketing, how we
think about it, and I.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Think they fulel move forward. I will just bring a
couple of questions that you guys asked us upfront, as
they are highly relevant to what we just presented. Well,
two of them very similar from Michelle and Rob is

(23:54):
what the employment the full final framework differently for a
different stages of startups? And what does the main different runs?
And the same one is is it kind of applicable
only to big companies or could the downfall let's say,
smaller companies. The entire point is that what we were
sharing this uh, this diagram or even this framework right, uh,

(24:18):
this framework represents marketing and sales activities, but what's really
it is aligned piece is the how the demand is
created on the buyer's end, right, how the buyers are
moving from I just want to learn something I just
want to discover somebody's practices right to like I want

(24:38):
to buy your solution. This is the key and the
entire point is that, again, it's never linear, it's never
something that we can control. But can we influence it
with SALVA activities for sure if we do it holistically.
If we're not doing this in silence, marketing is doing something,
product is doing something, demand is doing something cells and

(25:01):
then completely opposite things, right everybody is running into different
directions purchasing the KP price. No, it's it's the entire
point that you map it out to your team, to
your capacity, and you put the buyer journey on the top.
And also the second question here was what are the

(25:21):
top let's say, top activities of best practices to improve
MKL to SCL conversion. As I said, unfortunately, lots of
companies still run let's say broken or obsolete MKL playbook
where we try to report an MKLS and then throw
the MLS to sales. We're not talking about this the
entire point. You can still use these definitions, but you

(25:46):
need to tie MKL SQL to these different stages of
the buyer journey. Right, So when MKL basically what for example,
we say, what could be a good definition of m
KEL MTL could be an engaged account. Right, So when
you have this, what's what was highlighted the engaged criteria

(26:08):
and you define together with sells the engagement threshold. Right
at this stage it's and it's qualified obviously it hits
your qualification creater. It could be called MKL and from
this point you start the ab M play with sales
running specific PLAYBOOKX right to move this account to SQL,

(26:28):
and SQL actually is when you have the discovery call
and the needs confirmed. Right, that could be the best
and the best practice here he's doing this holistically, right,
that's the key. So without like if you there is
no practice, and this is what we try to advocate
and explain for years. There are no best practices to
improve some nortural and automated sequences and expect that your

(26:51):
conversion would restically improve or just improve some outbound and
mails of whatever. No, what actually impacts that conversion from
mt A the SQL is the holistic way of influencing
the barer journey. And to answer Hannah's question, we're able
to access this chart for sure. You can't just send
me of what message and LinkedIn and we'll share it

(27:13):
with you absolutely no problem. Now the core question is
how to implement it, right, We're not going just to
be honest today, we're not going to dive into a
specific timeline, et cetera. But we want to explain the
fundamental principles, right, what you need to have in place
to be able to implement the full funnel marketing strategy.

(27:35):
And as I said, so we're working. It's already in
the middle of the progress. We're working on this full
final marketing book. So hopefully in one once you guys
will be able to pre order this and this is
where I will share the timelines, the specific stages, et cetera.
So for now, we want to focus on the fundamental principles.

(27:58):
What's what's actually they needed to implement full Finnel marketing
for ourselves. We have defined the six fundamental principles that
we are going to present today. One of them is
strong go to market fundamentals. The second one is cross
functional collaboration between client face and teams, market and sales,

(28:18):
client success, product, etc. Next, influencing the entire bar journey
and putting the buyer journey on the top of your priorities,
basically making it as a central as the core of
your marketing strategy. Next one balance and long term and
short term programs and balancing always own programs with the

(28:40):
experiments because you still need to innovate. But you can't
just innovate all the time. You still need to drive
the pipeline. Next, holistically measure marketing and sales performance not
just only by pipeline and revenue, but flipp andersh board.
You start with this metrics, but then you do the
decomposition of the like what different metrics you can apply

(29:03):
to full funnel stages up to the print metrics and
plastly how you can implement it use an OURPOS framework
which stands for Pilot Operasonalization scaling. So these as sex
fundamental principles and will share them one by one. The
first one and will just like spread this presentation between

(29:25):
me and Flat. The first one is having strong go
to market fundamentals IPHO. Now will stop sharing slides and
we'll just open uh the screen share and so you
guys would be able to see this entire scorecard that
we have once created across Flat and again if anybody
wants to get access to the scorecard. Feel free to

(29:46):
send us an message and we're going to share it
with you. This is the scorecard that we use as
an ideation process and also an audit of go to
market strategy. And this is what we recommend to do
forever go to market team, and I mean obviously by

(30:07):
go to market, not only marketing, but again sales product
clients access all clients facing functions. Right, think about this
scorecard as the full body checkup because quite often, right,
lots of people can say, hey, I'm absolutely healthy. But
if you are going to make the whole body check up,
unfortunately some things could pop up, right, and then you

(30:30):
receive specific recommendations. You need to improve this, You need
to improve that, You need to focus on this, and
this would be your priorities, right. And obviously, as human beings,
we can't do multiple things I mean for our organism,
for our body at the same time. Right, you need
to prioritize. You can't at the same time I don't
know builds, muscles, improve, I don't know your health, skin, etc.

(30:55):
You need to prioritize, right. But the entire point also
when you going to improve it, that you need to
do it holistically. It's Also, for example, if you need
to lose weight, it's not about just having a nice diet,
but it's also about doing specific sport activities right and
adjusting your schedule, prioritize, and sleep, et cetera. Multiple factors

(31:17):
impacting on the end goal the same as here. So
that's why when we are doing this audio of our
goal to market strategy, we start looking at goals and challenges.
What are our goals? What are the challenges we are facing? Right?
Why these challenges are happening? Are there any new initiatives

(31:37):
that our board was considered or presented to us, other
new initiatives that were considered by different teams, right? Why? Next? Also,
it's really important question if we want to run new initiatives,
do we have the necessary skill set? Because quite often

(31:58):
this is what we observe and it often happens when
companies want to launch account based marketing. They say, yeah,
I love a b M, let's do it. But the
reality is that there is no skill set and understanding
of what is required to make a b M successful. Right,
So this is this, This is an honors assessment that
you are doing for yourself. Right, Do you need any

(32:21):
help where you can get it. Next assessment of your
marketing team and the skill set of this team. Stack,
what is another stack and who owns that tack? Who
owns specific technology and how we're using it? Are we
using it to the whole potential? For example, when all
many teams are using zoom info and the only usage

(32:41):
of that theom info is just finding emails of people
and that's it. So, but it can obviously prink you
much bigger insights or the same for six sense for example,
we have heard multiple times companies are blaming sixth sense
that they overpaying for it. But the truth is that

(33:02):
just a couple of people who check the intent data
and that's it, right, and not using the maybe eighty
or ninety percent of the platform capabilities. So this is
the entire point you need to evaliate.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Are you.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
Are you using the tools that you already have? Who
owns this right? How can we make maybe the product
adoption and our company for the processes that we are
running ABM readiness. We mentioned that ABM is a breach
between demandsen and sales activities. So this is basically the
playbook that helps to or the strategy that helps to

(33:36):
close the gap between marketing and sales and fix the
misalignment right. But the entire point is, before saying we
want to do ABM, you need to do an assessment.
Are we're ready to do this right? Thinking about the
questions for ABM? Next going through the go to market strategy?
What is our business model? What are our icps for

(33:57):
different products or use cases that we have, who could
be our partners, how the wire journey looks like for
the icps that we have prioritized. What are the core
segments of this icps right? Our differentiation, How competitors are
betting us right? What they are doing better? Where do
we overcome competitors? What is our collaboration with seals from

(34:19):
one to five? And how can we ramp it up?
Report and budgeting right, how our budgets are formed, attribution,
et cetera. And basically not just go and maybe through
the entire scorecard, because I mean, I just explained it
enough what we're doing. Next, we start thinking about the

(34:41):
core processes awareness and demand generation, content creation, demand capture
and seals and activation, client success a BM and two
maybe not so obvious points friction points. Do we have
clear prices? And I know lots of companies would say, yeah,
but we can just show pricings on our website fair enough,

(35:03):
But can we make some estimates? Can we make explanations?
So can we make a good documentation that at least
can set up evaluations for our bars, because I think
the worst experience that sells a face is having discovery
calls with bars that just want to ask about the
budget and then understand that they simply don't have this budget. Right,

(35:24):
waste of time for everybody, So book and call and
book and call. Some lead out. And it's almost twenty
twenty six, but still many companies have like the obsolete
webforms where you submitted and then you wait until somebody
will come to you and book a call with you. Right,
So this is obviously this creates tons of friction and

(35:47):
the simple things product over you and sandbox. To be honest,
I firmly believe that in the AI era, trying to
hiden your product is just playing back or basically firebacks.
It's on contrary when you show how your product and
today you have like interactive damas, you can record product too, videos,

(36:10):
et cetera. It just helps to onboard the customers and
if you highlight the values if you high light different
use cases, et cetera, it will just serve you better. Right,
And a couple of things that are important to also
incorporate in this analysis inter in your subject matter experts. S.
Subject matter experts should be the people who used to

(36:31):
work as your primary buyer persona. This is critical. So
with these people you can discuss who are the power
users of our product, why and how they are using it? Right?
What are their jobs to be done? How frequently they
using it? What are the strengths and weaknesses of our product,
how we can play on them, what our differentiation? And

(36:53):
then you can also and ask like, for example, what
are the typical technical questions our power users asking? Because
and you can create technical documentation especially this is essential
if you sell them to a T teams or a
TA teams are a part of the buying committee. Right,
what are the typical business questions? Because this is something
that you need to include in your buyer and problem

(37:14):
and generally in your content strategies. So I'm seeing your
questions about the score card and the template. Just send
me of what message on linked and we'll send you
a copy. Guys, no problem at all. But again, just
to wrap it up. The entire point is define the

(37:36):
core stages that you want, define the core points of
core elements of your goal to market strategy, define the
core questions, and then sit down with your team and
do this holistic by the check up right organism. This
is the core because this is how you can identify
what should be operationalized, what should be your core programs

(37:59):
that could become You always own programs where you are
not doing well? How can you improve it? And then
what order? What should have higher priority? Right? What should
be the first thing that you need to work on.
This is the key and on the top always you
have goals and challenges. You need to align it with
the goals and the initiatives of your leadership, because if

(38:22):
you try to do assumption that is not aligned with
the leadership vision, with the initiatives that prioritized, your programs
simply won't be approved or budgeted and supported. As simple
as that. So this is the first element. The second
one is the cross functional collaborations. You're okay and this

(38:43):
nice andtographic. Lets please.

Speaker 1 (38:48):
A couple of points without diving too many details. I
think a lot of people who are attending this and
listening are aware that it's really important and really hard
to get sales and marketing working together, and especially in
the way that or even like with best intentions, the

(39:10):
way that organizations allocate assigned KPIs to the different teams
is actually a kind of a root cause of that problem.
So if you have misaligned KPIs, if marketing is in
charge of let's say awareness metrics or mqls, while sales

(39:35):
development let's say representatives SDRs are in charge of booking
the meetings and hitting some activity numbers, while the account
executives are in charge of booking a new pipeline, while
CS the customer's success is in charge of extension expansions

(39:58):
i'm sorry, preventing chairs or renewals. Then you have a
very misaligned organization. It's really difficult to get them aligned.
And I think there's a couple of couple of things,
because like there's also things that are within your control
and the things that are not within your control. So

(40:19):
we can talk all day here about the ideal picture,
but I wanted to just drop two kind of practical
things to consider, and the first one is that even
if you look at the marketing team, often you have
marketing marketing misalignment, you might have you know, separate especially

(40:40):
larger organization organizations, excuse me a separate content from demand generation.
Demand generation usually in charge of running demand capture ads,
usually content producing, maybe SEO content, maybe some sort of
you know, white papers or whatever, quote thought leadership content,

(41:01):
and a lot of product related content. Then you have
you know, your SDRs, et cetera. Now, even just within
the marketing team, we have seen a lot of times
you try to implement a program that is more focused
on a specific ICP ideal customer profile, on specific type

(41:22):
of accounts, which means creating content for that. Well, oh no,
you have to get into the queue of the corporate
content team, which has other completely other priorities. Other KPIs
related maybe to traffic, the number of white papers they
produce and SEO articles on whatnot. And it's almost impossible

(41:44):
to collaborate. One simple thing that we did with one
of the teams when we were trying to address that
was just making very explicit, just creating basically one spreadsheet
the calendar from month to month and making explicit all
the different activities that these different teams are planning to do.

(42:07):
So the field team is running some events, and the
demand gen is running this campaign promoting the new product launch.
I don't know which is what the product marketing is
driving and content is doing that. And then try to
at least connect some of those dots. Okay, we plan
to produce some content, and product marketing wants to put
this new let's say product feature a product launch, so

(42:32):
we need to talk more about that. And sales is
focused on the enterprise customers. Okay, what are the things
that we can do to align those activities? Came in
at least like plan maybe those events to be on
the same topic as the content, as the product marketing,
et cetera, et cetera. Already trying to connect those dots
is going to help. But the other practical suggestion that

(42:55):
we will come back to and I a little bit
more detail, is through cross functional collaboration, because honestly, if
you are trying to go after a specific high value
ideal customer profile, you know, to kind of like high
fit high value customers and accounts, it's really difficult to

(43:19):
do that in any sylo because you want to implement
you want to excuse me, you want to influence their
complete buyer journey from top to bottom. And if your
buyer journey is influenced by different teams, you know, some
content on the top and some demand gen in the middle,
and then sales doing their own thing. They're all working

(43:41):
on a different, different message in different content, different types
of customers. It's extremely difficult to basically implement a process
that is going to influence the complete buyer journey of
those target accounts. There will be a lot of misalignment. Okay,
but how do you solve that? As I said, we'll

(44:03):
dive more into that. But what we like to do
is to define a kind of a minimal viable team,
cross functional team, even if it's not going to be
a real team. You now formed a kind of a
pilot team where we excuse me, somebody, let me take

(44:25):
care of that. Even if for a you know, we
define a pilot and we speak more about it, scope
down on maybe one vertical, one segment, and we pick
one person for the key departments, one person from sales,
one person from marketing, one person from content, and we

(44:47):
enable them to work on the same targets on the
same ICP for a period of you know, a quarter
or two. You're probably going to see and you do
this properly, you're probably going to see wins that. Then
you can present to the organization and show them, hey,
see what we can that we can get much better

(45:10):
results when we work together, when we are aligned. We
have done this pilot, we can show that, hey, this
is working much better now thanks to the marketing awareness,
targeting the same customers, sales is able to get better
response rates. When we have response rates and we booked
the meetings, these meetings are now with better target accounts.

(45:32):
These accounts seem to be more sales ready, they close better,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Once we close an
ICP account, we know that also customer success is happy
because they know that this is a good fit and
we can actually create value for them. They can become
a long term customer. Everything is kind of fixed and

(45:53):
you can create that alignment. I know this is one
of the most difficult points to solve. It requires a
lot of change management. That's why we always and we
will talk more about our BUS framework when we when
we talk about it, but it is a very critical
thing because otherwise it's really really difficult to move the

(46:14):
needle on enterprise accounts.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Your music Yeah, sorry, I was muted. I wanted to
say before we'll move forward. Quite often we're here or
received the question where we can learn about full Finnel marketing,
and so was flat again maybe just sharing a little
bit behind the scenes. We are designer, but we want
to call the Netflix for a Bit to B marketers.

(46:40):
This is the definition one of our full Final Academy
students once gave to us. But jokes aside, what we're
working on is redesign an our full Finnl Academy. I
will drub the link in the chat, and this is
where we built the holistic educational portal of for a

(47:00):
Bit to the marketers for different roles CMOS, healths of Marketing,
demanden and a BM. Marketers basically given access to all
our courses and playbooks, account as market and demand generation,
go to market strategy, et cetera, and all the future updates.
So if this isssumthing that you are looking to learn about,

(47:20):
that would be a good, uh, let's say, place to
dive deeper into the topic. Now moving forward to the
SOT companyent, we already spoke about this, so I will
just very briefly explain a couple of things to about
influencing the entire buyer journey. Right, So on the left
side you see the full final framework. Then in the

(47:43):
middle what you can see is the buying process. Right,
how the buying journey and what are the critical stages
of the buyer journey could be? This is something that
you need to define together again as the cross functional
team and what could be actually very helpful. We highly
recommend you guys at least once run a small experiment

(48:07):
take one, two, three recent deals, and then visualize the
entire buyer journey. We have heard multiple times the teams
tell us, oh, yeah, for sure, we mapped out the
buyar journey and then when we look at it, it's
kind of pigma file or mirror board. And then we see,
you know, the kind of sticking notes with the bar

(48:28):
journey which is linear, and we assume that it's it
looks like this, but we all know that it's never
a linear process. So what is our recommendation. We highly
recommend to those three things. First, run customer research, run
interviews with the champions and maybe with the power users,

(48:49):
with the buying committee group that was involved in the
purchasing decision, and try to understand the buying process, the
key touch points, et cetera, and how the internal process
look like, because this assumption that is absolutely invisible to
all of us, and that's crucial to understand. Right, what
were the main interactions, how they were thinking about buy

(49:09):
an our brand, to whom they compared us, why they
selected us, what were the key questions and discussions happening internally,
et cetera. Next, try to capture all the digital touch points.
If you have analytics like hockey Stack or trim Data,
then you're in a lucky position. But if you don't
have it, no warres. Try to capture all the touch

(49:33):
points from your market and automation systems webinars, CRM, calendars, etc.
And see what were the main interactions at touch points.
And based on this, then try to visualize the journey. Right,
Try to highlight these main interactions and touch points and
map it out to different full final stages. Because when

(49:53):
you'll finish this, what you can do is actually map
out a buyer journey for a specific can create ICP.
One thing though, is that for different icpies the journey
would be completely different, right, Never try to create a
universal one. That's that's essential in this case. Again you

(50:14):
it's presented like a linear journey, but they don't treat
it like this. The entire point here is mapping out
the core stages and then mappen out market and sell
or basically cross functional activities that I aligned with your
bandwads with your capacity. We don't need to kind of

(50:35):
you know, were pink colored glasses and say hey, we
can do a bunch of things. No way, just do
what is realistically possible to be done to influence the
entire Bier journey, and then start start mapping out this
cross cross functional Uh, let's say functions to run and
execute all of these activities. This would be critical. Again,

(50:59):
the next point is and we see this is an
interesting story. I will pass microphone and lot in a second.
We're now lots of marketers who are falling in love
with the concept and then they come to the organization
and try to ignite the revolutions saying, yeah, so we

(51:20):
were doing marketing in the wrong way. From tomorrow, we
are going to do things differently, so we need to
blow it all up right. We are going to invest
time and vi our journey into these new metrics, new activities.
We are going to set up cross functional teams and
you know what happens, It's immediately shut down because nobody

(51:43):
likes revolutions, right, And the truth is that nobody is
going to support something that is not proven. Hence that's
why we always recommend to implement it gradually using this
pos framework. That's what will share a second you stole
my own.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
I was thinking of using the same opening. It's an
evolution and not a revolution. As one of our clients said,
it's a beautiful way to think about it. We know
that it's hard to drive change. We just spoke about
it several times, very hard to change your whole organization.

(52:20):
The ideas would get shut down. And so what you
want to do instead? You want to first of all
reduce the ask, right, so you're not asking to revolutionize
and change your complete way of working. Because while you're changing,
there would be no pipeline, there would be nothing happening,

(52:41):
and it's a very very very risky move for you,
for your career and the organization itself, and they will
very very likely not accept it. The framework that we
use for that is to basically propose a pilot, smaller ask.

(53:02):
And what is a pilot? A pilot is not just
doing a small experiment. It's actually a very structured approach
where you say, hey, you know what, we want to
run this properly. We want to implement a full funnel approach.
We want to definitely address our ICP customers, our best

(53:25):
value customers. We want to prove to the organization that
A we can proactively go after our best customers. B
that when we work together and implement this new way
of working, we can turn more of those potential customers,
more of those target accounts into actual pipeline right and

(53:47):
therefore C we can get better results. Because we all
know it's not about the B to B enterprise B
two B with high dealsis where you're going after very
large organizations. It's not about volume as much about quality
of those customers. So if i can now close several

(54:11):
of those enterprise customers, I'm probably on the long run,
I'm going to more drastically improve our revenue metrics and
our growth than if I'm just doing a kind of
a more volume approach. Okay, so this is kind of
the principle. So does it work in practice? Well, first
of all, you decide, how are we going to sculpe

(54:33):
this down and we usually say, you know what one goal?
Do you want to start with a net new because
that's the highest priority for the organization. The sales is
complained that there is lack of awareness in target accounts,
there is zero new pipeline being generated. The inbound pipeline

(54:55):
is unpredictable, and we are not really getting the ICP
accounts through inbound. The outbound is not working anymore as
it used to work. We definitely need a solution for
the net new accounts, for the new pipeline. That new pipeline, Well, okay,
then this is our goal, or maybe the goal is expansion. Look,

(55:16):
we worked the last few years, We've closed these big
accounts and we know that there is a much much
higher potential be those. Well, then the goal for that
might be expansion. Second, who is going to be in
that team? We said, you can start with a small team.
It's like one market the one salesperson, one person from content,

(55:36):
and a supporting role of an SME subject matter expert.
And you actually don't want to have a large pilot team.
The larger the team, the more chances for this is
to fail. It sounds a little bit counterintuitive, but it's true.

(55:57):
In practice, because you're going to be doing things that
are different, especially for sales. The more salespeople you involve,
the more chance of them actually disengaging and not doing
their part is higher because they are unfortunately, in the

(56:18):
majority of organizations, they're incentivized short term. For you to
make this program work, you need to make sure that
they're also working on future pipeline right. And because of
this misalignment and asking them to do something new right,
the chances that whenever the pressurizes things happen, they're going

(56:42):
to be actually turning away and focusing on what they
always did, what they know from the past. Words. You know,
people are like that when they have a need for safety,
they go back to what they were always doing. So
you basically the best outcome for you, the best approach
is to choose one change age and the champion from
sales who is more engaged, who can help you actually

(57:06):
implement this process properly, and then show to the rest
of the organization based on his or her results, Hey,
look we did these things differently and we were able
to achieve better results than sales. Will start to listen,
So small team very important about I mentioned content several
times the key roles that you definitely want to have.

(57:30):
And I mentioned sales already, So somebody from sales development
as a SDR BDR, somebody who's going to engage with
those target accounts. You want to have a person from
marketing who's kind of in charge of that program. We
call this AB and lead. And you want to have
content and not to have to go on the corporate
content agenda and ask them to create business of content.

(57:54):
Somebody who's going to actually be working at least part
time together with you on that pilot. So these are
kind of the key, key key roles. And having some
support from a subject matter expert for the insights that
you will need about those target accounts. This can be
somebody asked about customer success. There are in a lot

(58:15):
of organizations very knowledgeable and a good candidate to provide
some input. This can be, like under mentioned, anybody who
ideally has worked as a customer in their previous role.
They were, you know, in the role of your customers.
So if you're going after HRS, maybe it's your HR.
If they are you know, technical, maybe somebody from your

(58:36):
from your technical team. But very frequently you will have
either like sales engineers, solutions engineers. They are really good candidates. Uh.
And you might have, like I said, CS, I'm sorry,
can be a good candidate too. When you have your
pilot team, you usually we always advise use the current stack.

(58:59):
Don't invest in a news stack. Just use the current
technology stack that you have. The most important thing is
to focus. When you're focusing, to focus on one geography,
one target segment. We like to define the target account cluster,
which is basically a group of accounts with similar challenges.

(59:21):
This is where the customer research that Andrey was talking
about comes into play, because we know, for example, that
we have studied our best customers. We have discovered that
the majority of them came because they for example I
was talking about, I was taking that example of this

(59:42):
recruitment talented posician solution because they were hiring like remote rolls,
a lot of remote roles. Or maybe this is one
of the criteria that we're going to use companies in tech,
Let's say, who are hiring remote roles. That could be
like a segment that you want to focus on. For
this segment, you want to really nail down the account

(01:00:05):
qualification and prioritization criteria, so you can actually build a
list for your program and then define the full program
a minimal number of activities that you need but across
at least the top and the middle and the bottom
of the funnel. So you need an awareness activity to

(01:00:26):
create awareness in those target accounts around specific challenges. You
need engagement activities. The sales needs to engage with those
buyers to start getting some information. You need to research
those accounts, and then you need to have some activities
to be able to go from the engagement to book
the actual sales calls. We have a separate frame for

(01:00:47):
that and have been diving in various podcast episodes in
our newsletter, etc. We can share more information about how
to create that program. So you scope it down, You
define your program and with a small team, you run
it during a period of a quarter. Typically the advice
to do it for at least one quarter, and then

(01:01:08):
during that quarter you over communicate any positive signals and
wins that you have. You make sure that you're constantly
like like running weekly pipeline review meetings where we bring
together the piloty members on sales and marketing. We review

(01:01:29):
the accounts in our lists, the newly engaged accounts. We
plan the next activities for those accounts. The content needs
to be created, what marketing should do, what sales should do,
so really try to run it in a cross functional manner.
And then towards the end of the pilot, you create
a retrospect. You see what work didn't work, and you

(01:01:51):
basically document the processes that work. You can then also
use that retrospect to show to the organization, hey, look
this is what with it. These were the results We
believe that. You know, if we can do more of
that and fix some of the some of the things
that we believe we can still do better, you know,
with some help maybe from other team members. Now you're

(01:02:14):
starting to basically create a scalable base. Okay, it's working.
We're having better conversion rates. We just didn't do it
on mass. We didn't do it. We didn't try to
do too many accounts, we didn't try to involve too
many people. We just wanted to show that we can
have better conversion rates of those target accounts and more

(01:02:36):
quality conversations, more quality opportunities coming up from this, Now
we can start thinking about operessionalization and scaling. What peressionalization
means documenting these processes creating playbooks. This is also the
moment where you want to deploy AI, maybe some other

(01:02:57):
technologies as well, und proven labok, so you want to
scale what's proven, not just scale broken tactics. That's why
we don't immediately jump on AI and other technology solutions
during the actual pilot and then gradually roll this out
to other regions. Other segments involve more team members and

(01:03:19):
that's actually the third part, which is the scaling. So
this is the approach that we usually take in order
to implement full funnel marketing ABM programs new more full
funnel oriented programs in an organization.

Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
And I know we are lot of time a little bit,
so what I want to do. I will quickly present
two other concepts sort of to other pillars of the framework,
answer Hannah's question because it's aligned with the metrics, and
then we'll cover questions from Ashland and from and from

(01:03:56):
Karen as well, so just to make sure that we'll
do it on time. Now, the pillar number five right,
which is very aligned with what what set and was
what we were sharing with you guys when you map
out this buying let's say your buyer journey and the
core activities when you work on this model, what is

(01:04:16):
essential here It would be essential to define what are
your regular operations. The biggest problem in marketing, to be honest,
what we observe is the random, random acts of marketing.
Marketing is not planned well, it's not structured, et cetera.
And even if you look at ourts TAM right, maybe

(01:04:38):
lots of you are following USK quite for a long time.
We have several pillars that we are breaking down into
regular operations daily sold leadership activities, weekly, this live podcast
and weekly newsletter. Monthly we are hosting either webinar or
any other specific activities of workshops, et ce or that

(01:05:00):
we could be that could be kind of capturing all
of our actives, all of our content that we were
sharing for one month and some quarter major seams that
could be big webinars covering like really big topics like
last months we were hosting this webinar how to survive
as B two, b C m O and AI ERA

(01:05:20):
and our state of full final research. Right, and this
is the entire point. These are the always on programs.
We are doing them constantly all the time. But at
the same time you need to innovate, right, and this
is aligned with despilot operasonalization scaling. We try the new things.
It could be tiny improvements that could come that could
be coming from this go to market scorecard. Right. You

(01:05:43):
have to find something that you want to improve and
the allocay time for it. It could be some new
activities that you want to try linked and thought leadership
ready to add whatever. Right, this could be all the
new experiments. But the entire point is that you need
to allocate some time to do that. You need to
define success criteria, and you need to define the pilot

(01:06:03):
team to run these activities right while at the same
time the core team is moving forward with pipeline creation
using the always on activities. This is essential And the
last one is what we mentioned at the beginning. You
need to holistically measure pipeline and revenue creation when you
define the score stages of the framework, right, the next

(01:06:25):
step would be defining the core metrics that you can
use to evaluate your progress. What we love doing is
basically mapping out ever so and we put revenue on
the top and then move down to print metrics, right,
because then it helps to holistically measure our marketing activities.

(01:06:49):
So basically it covers the revenue as the core stage pipeline,
active focused, future pipeline cluster recipe and print metrics. And
then you define leading and legging indicators. Again, we can
share this score card you can use for the inspiration,
but there are there is no rule of some you
need to define this together with cells and map out

(01:07:11):
the core core metrics. Right. And Hanna's question was what
is the best data to look at to understand past success?
I would do the same, I would evaluate this or
if this data is not available and it's hard to measure.
Another one is very simple. It's the sales pipeline velocity,
which is you can have again template for this or

(01:07:33):
you can google if you want. It's very simple. You
start looking at the number of sales opportunities, create an
average contract value, cell cycle lengths and the wind rate
divided by the celle cycle lengths. Right, and that gives
you a pretty good forecast and overview of your core
revenue metrics. So this this is the key. We have

(01:07:55):
just a couple of questions to wrap it up, so
maybe let's do it very quickly. One I will answer
this one from current Can you talk me about the
text tack you need to measure success across all of
this touch points. To be honest, if you want to
have a simple solution, you can purchase tools like hockey

(01:08:15):
Stack or trim Data. Hockey is Tech. I think it's
myall advanced in terms of dashboards because then you can
basically match all of these digital interactions. You can set
up these dashboards as well. Partially, you can do this
in your CRM as well, if you use on HubSpot
or Salesforce. It requires maybe some premium packages, again depending

(01:08:36):
on what you would like to measure, but that's absolutely possible.
My personal preference would be doing this on hockey Stack.
But also the truth is that you won't be able
to track all let's say leading indicators. This assumption that
you still need to track manually with your team and
two questions from Ashlan, So maybe what you can quickly

(01:08:58):
cover this one side pun about the accounts.

Speaker 1 (01:09:03):
Yeah, I touched upon this, but it's good to wrap
it up. Actually asked about working with customer success to
build your ICP criteria. We have actually worked several times
with our clients with their customer success a subject matter experts.
They are very good candidates subject matter experts because they

(01:09:23):
have in depth understanding, especially in organizations with customer success.
It's kind of like account management or client management depending
on organization how they're called. And they're actually involved in
the implementation and are working together with customers on implementing.
So it's not a reactive role where you have, like you,

(01:09:44):
questions coming in and then supporting them when the customers
have problem, but actually actively working with customers to implement
the product. Usually for more complex products this is the case.
And then they will have a lot of a lot
of knowledge and they can give you really good sites.
I think in any case, they will be able to
give you a lot of insights, so you can take

(01:10:05):
interviewing them and talking to them as part of your
customer research. You can maybe engage them as an SME
subject better expert, but they can definitely provide really valuable
data for your ICP. I think. Also, like I read
recently very good post about actually asking cs like officially

(01:10:28):
and formally in the organization to accept deals. So one
organization actually stopped accepting deals if the cs won't accept them,
which is kind of a drastic move, but it's the reason.
Main reason being is the organization doesn't want to focus
on customers that maybe possible to close but then not

(01:10:51):
retain and having problems afterwards, et cetera. Is what happens
in some organizations when you have a misaligned ICP, even
if you're able to close them initially, but it is
a big waste for the organization in any case to
focus on on on deals like that. And the well,
because I need to jump on an call going to

(01:11:13):
thank everybody for fantastic engagment, great questions and see you soon.

Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
Yeah, and the fu well answer the last question. Let
me know how did you like this session? Guys, just
typen the chat and I will meanwhile cover ashlance questions. So,
do the accounts in your target account cluster share the
same characteristics as your ICP account? Are are looking for
additional criteria that justify selecting them for pilots. So to

(01:11:39):
the conners, we need to dig deep a little bit
on how we orchestrate let's say the pilot programs. But
we usually start with one specific use case, right, and
if you have multiple products, that should be always one
product then one specific use case. The next step is
doing the deal analysis. We look at our fastest deals

(01:12:01):
and highest deals. So let's say five fastest deals, five
biggest deals in the timeframe of the last twelve to
eighteen months, and based on these deals we kind of
map out the account qualification criteria. Potentially we can reduce
some of the information, I mean, some of the exercises
that you have already done for the ICP creation. But

(01:12:23):
this is the process that we always to take. We
want to look at the fresh data and then together
with seals, we define what makes an account a good fit,
what are the account qualification criteria, what should be digits qualification, cretera,
et cetera. So this is the key so to answer shots.
Sometimes it's match and sometimes it's not. It just depends

(01:12:43):
on the use case and the goals that we're setting
up for ourselves. Some anyhow, thank you all for coming
today and for asking fantastic questions. It's been a big pleasure.
And hopefully in a few months we will be able
to publish our first book. So I hope that next

(01:13:05):
month it will be it will be available for pre orders,
but you'll be definitely hearing from us why newsletters LinkedIn,
et cetera, and it will be live and the next
week we are again coming back with full Final Life
will send the announcement next Monday. Thank you so much

(01:13:26):
all again for the fantastic feedback as well, and have
a great rest of the week. Why why