Episode 170: Balance and planning always-on and strategic marketing programs with Ashley Lewin

Vlad and Andrei were joined by special guest Ashley Lewin to break down a practical framework for building a marketing plan that drives consistent results and launches award-winning campaigns.

Tune in to learn:
•⁠ ⁠How to leverage GTM Focus Cycles in marketing planning?
•⁠ ⁠How do you balance and plan always-on and strategic programs?
•⁠ ⁠How do you budget and forecast them?
•⁠ ⁠How do you distribute tasks across your small marketing team?
•⁠ ⁠How do you involve sales in any of these programs?
•⁠ ⁠How do you measure the efficiency of long-term marketing programs and report on them?

RESOURCES

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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/
Ashley on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleylewin/

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 start.
Hey everyone, as welcomes to the new episode of Full
Final Life. As always every Wednesday, usually there are two
bold guys chatting about to the marketing.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
But today we have a.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Wonderful guest, so we'll just differentiate a little bit our hosts.
So today I'm co hosting this episode actually head of
marketing at Alliance.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Our partners, and.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
I'm super excited about this because we're going to talk
about marketing planning, UH and balance and always on programs
with experiments and with short term RI programs and I
couldn't think about a better guests. Actually, thanks a lot
for joining me.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
Absolutely, thank you for having me. I'm excited to chat
with everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
So before we'll dive deeper, guys, let us know please
in the chat, what's your role in your organization? Write
something like demand gen ABM, head of marketing, CMO, VP
of marketing.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
As they are. Just let us know.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
So during the chat will maybe share examples that would
be more relevant for your specific roll. So let us
know please, and what we're going to chat about today,
and by the way. Thanks everybody for sharing some questions
upfront that helped us to create the narrative and the

(01:40):
questionnaire for today's chat. So what we're going to chat about?
GM focus cycles? I know you mentioned once that you
are not a big fan of creating trademarks for the frameworks,
but I think this is a cool one and it
will be definitely create to learn from you about about

(02:00):
this framework. Balancing always on strategic programs Badget Him podcast.
That's my different and let's start and it with this
GTM focus cycles.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Uh, what you creative? We can explain the concept?

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Yeah, absolutely, so go to market focus cycles or GTM
focused cycles. It's something I just kind of coined while
writing a LinkedIn post. I love frameworks and I love
as a marketer. I love branding things and making things
feel unique, and so I joked, maybe I need to
train mark this, But really what it is is it's

(02:37):
just a way to focus on a certain subset of
your revenue plan. So tis the season right now for
market or planning across the org and across the business.
I personally love this time of year and I love planning,
So I'm so excited to peek out with all of
you on this, but this could happen at any time

(02:57):
in the year where you do what I call these
GTMS focus cycles, and so it's taking your revenue plan.
So most people are gonna have the traditional Excel spreadsheet
where you're breaking down from a business perspective of we
need to hit X in revenue, and obviously you'll have
your new business, your expansion sales if you're doing KLG

(03:18):
or self serve like, these are all gonna be broken
out right, and then you're gonna have variables that will
go into making that up. You know, so you start
from the you're kind of doing it from a top
down where you're taking it from the revenue and you're
gonna have your conversion rates or you're gonna have your
inputs like our ACV equals X, our sales cycle is X,
our OP to closed one is x, or your win

(03:41):
rate and then even like lead to OP conversion rate,
things like that, and so typically when you come to
planning this this is a way that I like to
approach planning as well, which I can get into is
what I have seen with a lot of companies and
I've helped Gosh, I've it's been over thirty plus companies
at this point, but in thirty plus different salesforce instances

(04:05):
as well. Working in an agency setting, but I'm in
house where basically we come to planning and we expect
everything to increase all at once, like almost overnight. Like
you're doing this plan in Q four and Q one,
all of a sudden you have a much higher win rate.
Your ACV magically is much higher, your conversion rates are higher,

(04:25):
et cetera. And so it's really hard to create focus
and impact one a metric when you're trying to impact
them all because something like an ACV is not an
easy fix like that takes a lot of strategic work
to really impact. Same with decreasing your sales cycle or
improving your conversion rate. So it's really hard to improve

(04:46):
everything at once when it comes to go to market
focused cycles. Let's say you're in Q four. I'm sure
most of us that are having these conversations of hey,
we have a month plus left that's depending on if
you're on fiscal cycle, are not. How do we bridge
the gap of where we want to be and where
we are currently, And instead of all of us just focusing,

(05:07):
you have your CS team, you have your sales team,
you have your marketing team, et cetera. Instead of us
all focusing on our individual inputs, is there a way
to rally the go to market team and focus on
one piece in general? Let's say that you noticed that expansion, like,
we have some opportunity, like sales is forecasting lower this
this quarter. Like, let's be realistic. There's the opportunity, like

(05:30):
you're you should be opportunistic and excited and look for
the positive in it. But then there's the realism. You know,
we're forecasting that there's going to be a delta here
where else in the business. Could we do a bigger lift?
Maybe that's on expansion. Okay, well, let's let's rally the
troops and let's focus on expansion here. Okay, when it
comes to expansion, is there a certain metric in here

(05:53):
that we can all impact. Is it that we need
to decrease the sales cycle? You know, from we have
a lot that's maybe forecasted for Q one. Is there
anything we can do to bring it in? Here? Really
is just tining like a spotlight on something that you
could really focus on as a go to market team
to really impact that. You could also run like many campaigns.

(06:14):
As what I have said as well, Let's say it's
not Q four. Let's say you're going into Q one
and you're noticing this opportunity, opportunity I would say a
way to flag this is you're doing your forecasts. You're
looking at all the different places you are betting that
you know in order to when I when I like
to do planning, there's the goal spreadsheet, and that's where

(06:38):
you need to go. And then I like to do
a forecast one where if everything remained the same, where
would you end up at the end of the year.
And then you're going to have the delta between the two.
And then you could even do a couple of simulations
of here's my best case scenario and here's maybe my
realist scenario, and here's the worst case scenario. But you

(06:59):
need to know what that delta is. And then you
could say, Okay, we have a pretty big delta. We're
going to take a bet and focus on one of
these inputs. And let's say that we have FLAG expansion.
I'm just going to keep picking on expansion. Right now
we have FLAG, that expansion could be great. Great. Maybe
you're Avangen Marketer you're coming in or you're in the campaigns.

(07:20):
In marketing you own the campaign piece of it. You're
flagging different campaigns that you could do to drive that up.
So there's just different ways. I think to sum this
all up, it's really just about creating focus and alignment
on certain areas of the forecast and the revenue model
to really make an impact.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Just wander and when you say we as a GTM team,
who should be a part of that GTM team? Because
the trust is right in many organizations, I think the
alignment is way far from what you have at Alliance, right,
So lots of teams working in silas and it's not

(08:00):
that easy to bring let's say different stake called the
client face and teams. So from your from your experience,
let's say, what is the squad of this GTM team?

Speaker 2 (08:11):
Who should be a part of it?

Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah? Absolutely so it should be on your executive team,
so your CEO, for instance, if you have a CRO
obviously you're head of sales, head of marketing, head of
CS depending on what the titles are. But anyone who
owns the attract the convert and then they expand part
of your revenue model. So I think those three along

(08:36):
with an executive sponsor like your CEO, who should be
driving that GTM alignment is critical to have that conversation. Now,
depending on your org structure and the size of your company,
it'll waiver on who's in that room. Maybe it's you know,
maybe it's is a little bit lower or higher. It
truly just depends on the org structure.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
Yeah, it makes sense, thank you. From that perspective. Who,
let's say, who should own the process? Who should initiate
the conversation, because again, sometimes that could be a person
who is the loudest person in the room, right that

(09:16):
the person who has I know, I'll explain it, maybe
a high credibility, or a person who is more egocentic
and is just pushing himself herself far. Let's say just
share sharing the opinions as the ultimated as the ultimate truth. Right,

(09:37):
So from your experience, who should own this and what
data should be in place just to have the meaningful discussion.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
Yeah, so it depends I hate giving that answer, but
the truth kind of depends on the uniqueness of your org.
Typically I've seen the marketing leader really own this mostly
because they're the most exceptional internal communicator and my opinion,
if if you're marketing, you should be exceptional communication. And
also marketing has a stake in it more than you know,

(10:08):
Like obviously sales has a piece of the stake, a
CS has a piece of it, but marketing will truly
impact all pieces of it, especially if you have a
complex makeup of sales plus self service. So I would
say not to give marketers more work, but I would
say the marketing leader should definitely have maybebe the driving

(10:30):
force here, but that you're not doing it alone. It
should be a collaborative effort between all of your counterparts
to really build this consensus together.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
Let's then stick to this notive. Let's say you mentioned
a couple of times, so we want to focus on expansion, right,
this would be our prioritic emotion, So let's let's stick
to this example. Now, Let's say if we want to
focus on expansion, but start plan on marketing and we
have print campaigns, right, Let's say prem building programs, we

(11:01):
have always on programs like you said, we might have
strategic programs, and we might have some experiments as well,
something new that we want to try, and maybe some
short term auto programs.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
So what's your approach to balance and all of this.

Speaker 3 (11:22):
Yeah, so when it comes to planning for the new year,
how do you balance? Like you're always on programs, your experiments,
like how do you put that? Okay, cool, this is
a fun one. This is like figuring out the puzzle
pieces to your beautiful puzzle. So you have I look
at it as like, okay, so I break it into
foundations and programs and then experiments. So your foundational work

(11:46):
is things that you should always be doing to fuel
your programs. I'd be like your content strategy would be
product marketing. It could be your brand building, so design, brand, voice,
et cetera. As you have all these foundations and content
will be probably the biggest one here, and that's what
fuels your programs. And your programs are where essentially you're

(12:09):
distributing all of this. So I look at LinkedIn as
a singualar program. Now you could have tactics with our initiatives,
and then tactics within that program. So initiative could be
executive thought, leadership, employee advocacy, influencers, paid your company page,
and then you could have many little tactics underneath there

(12:32):
as well. So for instance, influencers, you could have multiple tactics,
like we have very tactical influencers we're gonna use, and
then we have like entertaining, we call it we'll see
if I can say it correctly ed utainment like educational entertainment.
That could be another tactic underneath there. But you truly
need to know what is your programs that are always delivering.

(12:54):
And let's say like if you have a self reported
how did you hear about us? Field? On your forms,
You're going to most likely see it at a program
level like LinkedIn. You may see some of the initiatives
come in there like oh I saw you know Ashley's
post or someone else's post, but typically you're going to
bucket it all underneath LinkedIn. You'll want to grow that

(13:15):
program and then you can make small bets underneath of
there from an initiative and tactic standpoint, but keep investing
in the programs that are already delivering. These are you're
always on programs, right, You could have some experiments nestled
underneath of them, and then I like to budget at
least twenty It depends like ten to twenty percent of
your budget and your time on experiments. So let's say

(13:39):
like an experiment for us right now has been events
and webinars, So ten to twenty percent of our time
and budget has been dedicated to that. You need to
have a set amount of time that you're running this experiment.
For us, it's been about six months. Deem if it
is worthy to be like an always on program, and
then you would move it into that category. So it's

(14:01):
something that we're doing currently. And so it started off
as like that ten to twenty percent experiment then moves
into the ongoing programs, and then within those ongoing programs
you have ways to expand them as well. So when
I'm looking at how we're going to be doing this,
you obviously start with your goal, so we need to
deliver X and revenue that means x from self service,

(14:23):
x from sales, et cetera. And then attribution does come
into this of how do we walk to that number?
Knowing that attribution is just more of a compass your
It's not like telling you exactly what you need to do,
but it helps you walk to that number. And we
can see that where it comes to the programs, and
we can say, you know, usually our program LinkedIn delivers

(14:46):
sixty percent of that goal. Okay, well, that means that
we need to deliver X from this program, and that's
how you can start backing into it. But also knowing
that attribution is flawed in so many different ways, but
it just kind of gives you that compass to get there.
Would you like me to go into any of the specifics.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Or the first question, one of them you have already
addressed was how much time and budget you should allocate
to experiments and always on programs. Another one that I
would love to ask you is about planning the capacity,
because I think it's especially I mean, marketing teams are

(15:25):
usually under resource. Let's be honest, right, there's not enough
bandwidth to execute everything that we actually would love to
execute as marketers. So with that in mind, we have
always on programs, right, and then how to plan realistically

(15:47):
how many let's say experiments, how many new tactics can
we deployed not to overwhelm our team and also avoid
the situation when everybody does just the bare minimum.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
But way I noted the full playbook.

Speaker 3 (16:02):
Oh my gosh, this is one of the hardest pieces
of the job in my opinion, and I feel like
maybe this is exclusive to marketers that I have worked with,
but we always like to say yes to too many
things or overload our plates. I joke that, you know,
if you're stressed in marketing, why not just have more
to your plate. But this is something that I'm constantly

(16:22):
getting better trying to get better at. I don't know
if I have the perfect example or explanation for it,
and it's something that I'm trying to figure out. One
thing that I have typically had a philosophy on is
before you hire for a program or a need, you
first need to prove it out for yourself first. So

(16:43):
that means maybe maybe you're not the expert at LinkedIn
or whatever it may be, or webinars, et cetera, but
could you do an MVP experiment to test it? Because
the last thing you would like to do is hire
someone that's an expert to run the program, and it
doesn't work for your brand or your company, et cetera,
or your audience, and so you need to prove it first.

(17:04):
Once you have seen that MVP has started to deliver
some of the results, then that's when it comes into oh,
like I think we need a hire for this so
that we have the capacity to keep supporting this program.
Now that could also look like you're hiring freelancers agencies.
There's obviously multiple ways to staff a program. It truly depends.

(17:25):
I have been doing heavier on the outsourcing on freelancers
and agencies for certain programs because to be honest, it's
actually I think easier and a little bit more cost
effective to have like really really really experts, good experts
to run these that are off on their own now,
like for instance, paid media is something that we continuously

(17:49):
outsource and get some of the best out there. But
so all this is say, you first need to prove
it out in an experiment plan. I have been toying
with like sprints with my team right now, where we
have our weekly department meetings and we use a sauna
and we go through the work and we look at

(18:10):
out of all this the work we have one, does
it seem doable, do we feel like we can do it?
And who could add more to their plate. I feel like,
especially in a small startup, you may have a specialty,
like you may run the influencer program, you have to
be able to roll up your sleeves and do other
work as well as just the nature of being a
part of a startup is that you wear many hats,

(18:30):
and I think that's the beautiful part about it. So
it's for instance, we're doing a huge video launch soon
with a really nice announcement coming soon TVB and our
head of influencers in social is helping us with the video.
He's helping us scout locations, write the video script, etc.
That's what I would say as rolling up the sleeves.

(18:50):
As we approached it as a marketing team, we said,
this big launch is coming, how do we divv out
the work? Knowing that we'll all have to do something
that's outside of our job description. But we're having those
conversations and we're saying, Okay, if we say yes to this,
what do we say no to instead? So that no
one is being overworked either, everyone should leave the meeting

(19:12):
feeling like they agree to the work. So it's all
of us looking at what the current work is that
we have, what work we would like to bring in,
Like there's a couple of experiments that are slated for
December that we have on our plate. One of them
is expanding our webinars. Another one is bringing in a
newsletter and so we'll bring that in. We had the
conversation when we did quarterly planning up these are the

(19:33):
experiments we would like to agree to as a team
because of X data, X intuition, whatever it may be.
And then we try and plan out Okay, well, this
is all the work that we have in the quarter.
We can't get to that until December, and it's a
little bit of gut. You're just trying to figure out
when you can bring it in and then we'll all
bring it in in December, or when that time comes,

(19:54):
divvy out the work that way, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
It's actually mind smell a lot about this crumb methodology,
which a natural about planning on the sprint with clear
deliverables and goals and outcomes, and then having weekly meetings
because it's all about being agile. Right, Sometimes you see
that samthing really works and it seems that you crack

(20:18):
the code right, and it makes perfect sense to double
down on certain activities and maybe postponing a few things
that you had in the plan. Or sometimes you clearly
see that a few things are not working the way
you were expecting right, that it just makes sense to
refocus and maybe a structure the tasks that you have planned,

(20:41):
so being agile, I think it's crucial, and like you said,
it's all about rolling out the sleeves and just making
sure that the team is focused on the ultimate goal, right,
making sure that we achieved the success.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
And not about it's not my job. I think the biggest.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
Take event also maybe the problems that the organizations have
facing is the mindset of it's not my work, right,
it's not my responsibility, it's not my job. So but
it's all also about it. It's another story about management, leadership, culture,
et cetera.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
Yeah, I worked for a company. We were a one
thousand plus employees, so very large company, very specialized roles,
and I remember vividly that if you said that's not
my job here, like we joked, you'd be in trouble
because even at a large thousand plus employee, if it's
not your role, I mean, I think we can always

(21:43):
support the business or find ways to get to the
person who would own it. But yeah, that that's not
my job mindset is can be very troublesome.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah, absolutely right.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
I actually came from enterprise world as well, So after
eight years in our enterprise organizations, it's us the thing
that you learn the hard way. It's just basically figuring
out who can actually do that job.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
And it was it's soundsthing that.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
Yeah, I believe doesn't matter what is the size of
your organization, but if a person leads the department, this
is something that you.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
Need to fix as soon as possible.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
Otherwise making a progress would be really really tough. Coming
back to planning, obviously, well all in B to B,
which means that anyhow.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Do we want this?

Speaker 1 (22:39):
So now we need to involve sales, so to create
the cross functional playbox, right, what's your approach here? How
do you plan the cross functional activities together with sales?
How do you involve them and how do you explain
what would be their role and responsibility and making sure

(23:00):
that put actually execute what has been a creed.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, First of all, making sales one of your one
of your dearest friends in the org is critical to
creating that alignment. I feel like we hear a lot
about what what I call marketing alignments or meetings. Yeah,
and so I think first it comes with building that
relationship over time. It's not like you're just going to

(23:25):
pull up a seat next to them and say we
lot's be best friends. But it's it's building that relationship
together over time. I like to ask whenever I start
in a new org, you know, what are your biggest challenges?
How can marketing support you? And start finding out ways
that way. One of the ways I was able to
bridge that alignment and build a huge initiative or project

(23:48):
I fear I aligned was when I first started, I
heard a problem and that was primarily on the lead
handoff process between marketing and sales. This is a critical
one that I think most orgs actually do have a
pretty big problem with and that can always be optimized.
Like if you're looking for low hanging through, I despise
that saying it, I say it, this is a quick

(24:10):
way to do that. And so we did a cross
functional project where we brought in at Revops Agency and
we were able to fix that lead handoff process. And
then also it impacts you know, that lead to opportunity
conversion rate, which obviously impacts pipeline. So when it comes
to you know, looking that wouldn't be necessary. Like I
was looking at an annual planning views more a little bit.

(24:32):
This was in q Q one looking at the year
and just kind of some ad hoc agile ways to
plan some impact. But you know, if you're looking at
annual planning, it's I think having a conversation with your
sales counterpart of here's what the goal is. I think
first you need that Excel or whatever growth revenue model
to be able to align this conversation of here's our

(24:54):
growth goals, here's where our forecast is. If everything stays
the same, here's the delta. What are your thoughts? Like,
how do we bridge this delta between Usually it's a
really large delta too if you have you're in an
audacious company, which most of us in B to B
marketing or B to B are and so you're having
that conversation of here's the delta, what are your thoughts,

(25:15):
and then just starting that conversation there and then aligning
on what that big bet is. Okay, well we need
to bring a revops agency in to fix the lead
handoff process. Great, what does that look like in terms
of champions between the two teams, Like do I need
your sales enablement or sales ops person to help with this,
how do we factor that into their time? Does my
marketing ops person need to be a part of this

(25:37):
or whatever it looks like you just need to agree
to what that huge initiative is and why why it's
important when you're looking at that annual plan. And I
think it just starts with having, you know, looking at
the delta and then having the conversation of what do
you think the biggest impact is and how do we
make it work between the two teams.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
I love it and as thoughts on the case that
potentially lots of teams might be faced and you, let's
say you co create the plan. You have to find
the key initiade of syntactics and then how to make

(26:17):
sure that sales actually execute what has been planned let's
say the part that you distributed to them or assigned
to them.

Speaker 3 (26:29):
Yeah. Absolutely. Before I go into that, there was a
comment in the chat that I think is critical and
I did not touch from Adrian KPIs and shared metrics.
I think this is super important because my belief in
marketing is that marketing and sales should always have the
same similar KPIs like, obviously you're going to have a
division between it. But when I look at the impact

(26:49):
of marketing, I look at revenue first, like that's the
lagging indicator, right, But I like to back up against
them qualified pipeline. So if I'm doing my job well
in marketing, our qualified pipeline should increase. And so that's
music to their ears as well because that impacts their quotas,
their their their goals as well. So having shared metrics

(27:11):
and KPIs is critical for the alignment. And if you
have competing KPIs, you're going to butt heads. And this
is where a lot of orgs, I think, have this
issue of how do you align to the two departments.
You need to be on the share on the shared
metrics and KPIs because unless the metrics change, your behaviors

(27:33):
in your work support whatever metric that you're trying to impact.
So I think that's critical in terms of making sure
accountability from the two departments is realized. I think this
is helpful just from like an operational standpoint, like for instance,
let's say you're doing a lead handoff project, Like that's
the initiative that you agree to between the two teams.

(27:56):
Often that's a really fuzzy great area. I like to,
you know, create an owner for the project, like just
like simple things like owner for the project, the project management,
Like maybe you're just working out esparcially maybe you work
out of asana. Who knows a shared Slack channel. I
feel like it's super helpful, you know, if you do
need a weekly cadence of just you know, stand ups

(28:18):
or whatever it may be. But creating that Slack channel
and just like the rituals that you would normally do
in any type of project marketing project campaign, I think
is super helpful for anything cross collaborative as well, because
it just keeps everybody aligned but also accountable as well.
So it's just like simple operational things that I think

(28:39):
can really help keep everybody on track.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
And out of curiosity. You mentioned that you have weekly
meetings with marketing team. The invite sales for these meetings,
you just stick to let's say monthly and quote alignment meetings.

Speaker 3 (28:55):
Yeah, so this is only for the marketing team. At
the current moment, marketing meetings have been just kind of
like a work in progress to figure out the right cadence.
I've been in orgs where the sales and marketing leaders
meet once a week and it's just like a quick
touch base. I know that we don't always want more meetings,
but sometimes these are helpful just to have that accountability

(29:16):
as well and it's a shared agenda, you have set metrics,
a set topic that you're always talking about. You're checking
in on a core project because as leaders sometimes having
that meeting is helpful just for accountability too. So I've
had where it's like weekly with the sales and marketing leaders.
It's a set agenda, set metrics that you're looking at

(29:36):
monthly with could be like more of like the cute
or the monthly performance reviews where you're meeting with the
sales and marketing team and then also bringing in cus
when applicable to depending on what the topic is, where
you're looking over the results from the month and then
you're saying, Okay, what do we do with this? You know,

(29:57):
I think weekly it's like a small pulse check. Monthly
you're getting a bigger pull check. Quartersly is when you're
making the bigger strategic decisions. I would never make anything
off of a monthly one. You need to see something
at trend at least three months, and then quarterly is
typically when I would see the greater sales and marketing

(30:18):
org have a shared meeting and it needs to have
a very set topic otherwise post can go off the
rails a little bit. I've also seen the monthly too.
It just really depends on your org. And then been
part of organizations too where marketing is invited to sales
weekly calls as well if we have a campaign that's upcoming,

(30:41):
So if we're launching a huge ABM campaign, brand campaign,
whatever it may be, getting that invite to the sales
weekly call so that they can see what their prospects
may be seeing in the market. I have found those
just kind of like ad hoc opportunities super helpful too.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
Love it, thank too.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
You mentioned a couple of times different channel tactics let's
say LinkedIn, working with influencers, executives at leadership, paid, etc.
So as we spoke, there are long term programs and
also some experiments you mentioned could be six months experiments.

(31:22):
So what I'm wondering is how do you measure the
efficiency of long term programs, especially the new ones, and
how do you report on them?

Speaker 3 (31:34):
Yeah, such a great question and always a fun one
to try to figure out. So experiments, I always like
to have a goal signed them before you kick them off. So,
for instance, we recently did a pretty big brand LinkedIn
campaign called Ghosted Hotline. The goal was truly we saw
an opportunity for more brand awareness and LinkedIn. We had

(31:56):
gone a little quiet and so we wanted the goal
was to be as loud as possible and to drive
reach on LinkedIn. Great, that's the goal of the campaigns.
Then you always need to assign your KPIs or how
you will measure success and where you're measuring that success
from as well. So for this one, it could be impressions,
it could be reach, it could be self reported mentions

(32:19):
of the campaign. It could be influenced pipeline. I think
sometimes influenced metrics to get a bad rap, but they
do have a place in certain pieces of it. So
that's how we define something that technically is very long
term focused, like a brand campaign. You do a run
at it, right, but the overall goal for a brand
campaign is to drive results six months a year plus

(32:43):
from now, because that's how the buying journey works. You
can't just someone knows about you for the first time
and they're going to purchase. It's a longer term one.
But we knew that that's the goal of it. Brand
should always be something that's enticing long term results, but
we need to balance it like you have or like
those historical ways of saying like create demand, capture demand.

(33:04):
You need to have a split there. If you're only
working on optimizing capturing your demand and nothing on creating
your demand, you're going to see the pain of that eventually.
And so that's just kind of how I run marketing
as well as that, you should have a brand play
and you should have a conversion play. So this was
the brand play. Let's say, let's use another one as example,

(33:26):
LinkedIn Executive thought leadership. So you want to get your
CEO posting on LinkedIn. Our CEO currently posts on LinkedIn.
He's a huge lead driver for us. I feel very
thankful to be part of an org where the CEO
is bringing in a lot of leads. Growth makes it
fun and definitely helps. But I'll give you a spoiler.
He's been at this for I think a year and
a half, maybe two years. I was looking at the impact.

(33:48):
It took a couple of quarters to see impact and
now it's insane, but it took multiple quarters to see
those results. And so if you're bringing out a campaign,
you need to know that you can see the results
of it right away, and you need to know what
that time window is before you rip the band aid
and say this wasn't a good experiment. You need to
have those parameters in place ahead of time and understanding

(34:11):
what these channel tactics like how long they may take.
Executive thought leadership will probably take six months to a
year to see initial results. Then you'll start to see
those initial results and then the bigger results that come
from it. So I think it all just depends on
what you're trying to do, identifying the goal of it,
identifying how you're going to measuring it, and then how
you're going to see it long term. But it is

(34:33):
hard because I think a lot of times a lot
of marketers want to do these big creative brand plays,
but if you look at it in your revenue model,
it could technically if you're measuring in period cap or roi,
it could throw that off hypothetically because you're investing so
much higher here that you're not going to see the
realization of that performance for six months to a year,

(34:56):
and if you're measuring it in quarterly views, it's going
to throw it off. So I think that's part of
the planning process as well, is you know, typically let's
say you're going to have to double triple whatever it
may be. In a year, goals always get higher, right,
and what you're doing now isn't going to be You're
not going to be able to reach that goal later on.

(35:16):
So I always say marketing should be focus multiple quarters,
if not a year, on the performance that you want
to get. So wherever we want to be in twenty
twenty six, we should be doing now, right, And so
you're having those conversations of in order to reach that
goal that we want in twenty twenty six, we need
to have a higher CAC or whatever your ROI maybe
like it's going to raise right now, but it will

(35:38):
even out over time as we right size it. But
we do need to raise that or decrease the efficiency
right now in order to reach our goals long term
as well.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Love it.

Speaker 1 (35:50):
So I think that leads us to the protacast and budgeting. Ultimately,
what's what's your approach to forecast the efficients of these programs?
And I remember you mentioned that you have let's say
two spreadsheets and trying to see the delta. So the

(36:15):
most important question is how to forecast how efficiently our
progress will perform so other assets.

Speaker 3 (36:23):
This is the hardest one. Possibly I was gonna say fun,
but I would be sarcastic there. It's really hard, and
so I like to look at marketing as an ecosystem
and a collective engine, versus if we were to only
look at LinkedIn. Let's look, I'm just going to keep
picking on LinkedIn here. Let's say LinkedIn is how we want, like,

(36:45):
how should we invest over here? We if you only
look at attribution, you're missing the beauty of that channel
as well and all the untrackable attributions. So if you're saying, okay,
we need to drive x amount of leads or opportunities.
Typically our cost per acquisition if you have your lead
source of it from LinkedIn is x, that's not the

(37:08):
whole picture. And so instead I like to look at
marketing holistically. First of let's back into the budget from
a CAC perspective, Like let's say the marketing CAC where
the program CAC is X. Okay, well, we need to
drive x amount of customers with XACV to reach our

(37:29):
revenue target. That's the first step, right. That means we
need to spend x amount on programs. Okay. Then from
there it's a different conversation of how you spread that out.
I don't know if it gets as scientific at this
level then, because it's a little bit more of taking
your attribution information as more of that compass and understanding

(37:50):
directional insights you're getting. And I would say a little
bit of it is intuition and gut feel. A little
too is knowing the goals of we have an awareness
issue that means we need to spend a little bit
more over here, or we want to reserve twenty percent
for experiments, or we know that we see a correlation
that when we scale LinkedIn ads by acts that we

(38:12):
see a increase in ops of acts. So it's a
little bit of like puzzle pieces to get to the
program split then and also ensuring that you have a
healthy balance between the awareness and then also the conversion.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
We have a couple of questions from our community to
people share at them upfront, so I would love just
to go through them. That was a good question from young.
What's whether SUTs on zero based planning or continue and
improving of what you have been doing.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Let's say this year.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
So basically are you started from scratch or you just
built on what you have been writing?

Speaker 3 (38:58):
Yeah, So, so making sure I understand this like when
it comes to planning, is it like I'm starting from scratch,
like rethinking everything or do I just keep compounding? Okay, yeah,
I like to compound. So it's a continuation with additional
bets that I placed on top of it. So, looking

(39:18):
again at that forecast model of what our targets are,
what our current programs are, you're going to see a
point of diminishing a return on some of these programs
or spend as well, so knowing a rough estimate of
when you might see that, and so that you can
invest in other areas as well. So I would say
it's a continuation of these ongoing always on programs that

(39:41):
are delivering you your results, knowing if you're getting close
to the point of diminishing returns in that cap and
then also then layering on top the new piece of it,
which would be the new bets or experiments that you
would like to place to be able to reach the
additional growth that you need to get to.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
It's another question from Javier. I would like to set
up the kepis and OKRs across the team for a
specific channel. So let's pick LinkedIn. You mentioned it a
couple of times, So what would be what would be
your approach? And you have different programs, right, influencer, executives,

(40:20):
SAD leadership, paid media, obviously the KPI should be different.
So how how how do you manage this?

Speaker 3 (40:26):
Yeah? So I like to do a rolling effect or
like a waterfall when it comes to goal setting. So
you first need to start with your company okayrs. Everything
should ladder up to the company OKRs and you have
your department OKRs, then you have your team OKRs, then
you have your individual OKRs. So they all ladder up
to that big OKR system that you have at the

(40:47):
company level. Maybe it's not okays, maybe it's just goal setting,
But I find this really important because then it aligns
everybody and aligns these programs into it as well. So
let's say, you know, we we want to be the
number one in our category, Like maybe that's an OKR
we have, and then we're choosing the programs and how

(41:07):
they support that as well. So maybe it's you know,
reaching a scale on LinkedIn or whatever it may be.
Otherwise I've approached this as well, is saying LinkedIn has
delivered X, we need to deliver X in the new year. Okay, great,
that has a number attached to it. I think goals
are always very critical to have the way that you're

(41:28):
going to measure it with. So let's say we need
to get increase or double the amount of either direct
attribution or how did you hear about atoos mentions from
LinkedIn in the next year. Great's that's the way we're
going to measure it, and then we have the individual

(41:48):
tactics that would ladder up into that. So it could
be we want to explore influencers and scale to x
influencer base. It could just be execution focus. I think
execution focused goals often get overlooked, but sometimes you just
need to build the muscle. Let's say you want to
build webinars, we need to execute fifteen webinars in the
new year, whatever that could be, because you also need

(42:10):
to sometimes just execute and build the muscle. Not everything
needs to have like it's going to drive x amount
and revenue or whatever it could be, but we know
that it does. It's part of that marketing ecosystem and
it's the content strategy as well.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
Perfect. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
Another question from Burial how to get approval for the experiments?

Speaker 3 (42:33):
Yeah, this is another really really good one. Oh, I
have been very fortunate. I will just I will admit
that I've been very fortunate to be part of words
where they also believe in this. But if you are not,
or even if you are, it's still a tricky one,
right because I everybody likes to see, Okay, I'm going
to give you twenty thousand dollars or whatever the percentage

(42:54):
or amount is, what do I get with this? You
could also you could. I think it comes a little
bit with some education. When you are pitching it. I
think you need to have a really strong business case
ready to go on hand for this. I look at
growth as like a stair step approach, Like you get
onto one step and then you hit a plateau, and

(43:15):
then you need to go up, and then you're going
to hit another plateau. As much as we would love
it to be the beautiful up into the right graph,
it just isn't. And so you can explain that in
order to get to that next stair step of growth,
we need to do something new, and in order to
get find out what that next stair step of growth is,
we need to do experimentation to figure out what it is.

(43:35):
Because you just have no idea what that next stair
step of growth is I think usually when you put
a percentage on it, like ten to twenty percent, it
seems less daunting as well. But I think you just
need to have that business case explain and the education
I think is critical to get that buy in. And
it depends on what your role is. You know, if
you are more on the manager, not the director, head, VP,

(43:57):
et cetera, then you're having that conversation with your direct manager.
If you're on the leadership level, it's with the executive team,
whatever it looks like. But I think I think it
truly just comes down to effective like persuasion of an
education of why this is needed. I think oftentimes we
just kind of skip that piece of it and understanding

(44:17):
who you're pitching it to. You need to understand who
you're communicating with. If it's a CFO, know what they
care about, what questions they're going to have and speak
to them. If it's the CEO, know what questions they're
going to have, what you know what may fire them up,
et cetera. But I think just explaining that you need
to find that next stair step of growth because there's
this act of delta in your forecast and goal and

(44:39):
this is how we're going to figure out how to
achieve that.

Speaker 1 (44:43):
We have a great question from Rebecca, but before we'll
call this one, I would love to ask you a
follow up question. You mentioned that it's essential to prepare
internal business cases just to get the buy in to
run the program and get the budget ANDRS sources approved. Right,
So I'm just wondering, what's Uh, let's say, what's how

(45:06):
do you see the structure of this business case? So
what are the most important let's say parts? What do
you need to present your mentions, the delta, the reason
why we want to launch it?

Speaker 2 (45:18):
Right? What else? What's what's do you put into this
business case?

Speaker 3 (45:24):
Yeah? I just opened one in the background as we
were talking of one that I recently drafted up for
my chief product officer, and I know what's important to him,
and so I have I always like to start with
them with contexts like why this matters, what it is like,
give that information that they might not be aware of.
So it's like the overview section you could call it.

(45:46):
And then I have an objective, a hypothesis, I even
have experiment design and this risks and mitigations, expected outcomes,
a decision framework in a summary, this one, I would
say is a little bit more lengthy than most needed.
I think the most important thing is to put a
monetary estimate on these of Like, for instance, we were

(46:06):
trying to move a meeting. This is this is completely different,
but we try we were trying to move a meeting
or a structure, and we calculated, Okay, of all the
people involved in this meeting, it's costing us X in
company revenue. We could be doing Y instead. So always
backing up to that monetary amount I think is critical.
But I think with the business case, you need to
know who you're who you're presenting to because it should

(46:27):
change all the time. But the overview why now, the
implication of not doing anything, the monetary amount, your hypothesis,
how you're going to measure results, the time frame, resources needed,
anything like that. I think all of those are critical
inputs into that business case.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
I love it, and I think this question from Rebecca
is a creat fallop as well. So do you find
that if you make a bit, put a source on
budget behind it, and the experiment as a deliver it
as also as expected, it damages credibility of future approviles
on how do you navigate.

Speaker 3 (47:06):
That well, Rebecca, this is such a good question, by
the way, thank you for asking this. I think most
of us marketers have us in the back of our
mind when we are doing this, right, I would say,
I think it's like ninety percent of your experiments are
not going to work, and that's that's that's expected because
it's an experiment. At the end of the day, as
much as we would beat like to bat ten out

(47:28):
of ten, it just doesn't happen. So I think it
comes with framing the experiment too like an experiment truly
is we are experimenting with us. We don't know if
it's going to work. This is our best guess, and
so I think you need to preface this when you
are pitching it that this is an experiment. I'm not
sure if it's going to work. This is my this
is my hypothesis. If anything in business, we're all taking

(47:51):
calculated bets. No matter where you're at, you're at in
the org, you're taking calculated bets. This is another calculated bet, right,
and just letting them know, you know, this may work,
this may not work, and here's what we'll do with
the lessons. I think if you fail at it, and
it's not even fail. I would say if it did
not work, that's a better way to put it. You
need to learn from it and then apply it for

(48:12):
the next experiment. But making sure that you're also when
you're pitching an experiment, also pitching an experimentation mindset is
critical of in order to find that next step of growth,
we have to try a lot of different things. One
out of ten of these experiments may work. But when
we hit that one out of ten, that's when you're
going to see that nice spike and growth and figure

(48:34):
out how to scale us to the next level. I
think that's critical.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
I love it, and I think I left this question
just to call it at the end of how I chat.
And it's a sad one for me because I hate
when marketing is perceived as sales or the takers arts
of crafts or costs center or whatever a definition you'll

(49:01):
put to marketing. But anyhow, so we got this question
from Karent. How do you avoid marketing being seen as
order takers from both sales and product marketing? And how
do you speak to issue software source capacity to with
the executives?

Speaker 3 (49:17):
Oof? I mean, I feel like we all have felt
this at some point in our career. If not, even
if you're at a beautiful, amazing word, you still feel it. Right. So, Karen,
this is a really great question. It's a work in progress.
I think one thing is I think you need to
have I think marketing and an org needs to have
a seat at the table with all the leaders to

(49:39):
be able to be an equal first and foremost. So
I think it starts with the executive culture of making
sure that you're not just an order taker. The other
one that I have noticed is marketing could do a
better job coming up with the plan and their recommendations
proactively quicker, because if you do not give that recommendation,

(50:00):
someone will give it to you. They'll give the plan
to you if you are not coactively giving that to them.
I think another one is setting the norms for the
culture within your org and your company of how you
take inputs. I think sales and product sales, let's just
use sales is critical. Like I want all the feedback

(50:22):
from sales, but I think it can become overwhelming when
you're constantly getting asked for a one sheeter or a
case study or whatever it may be. It can start
to feel overwhelming if the feedback is coming in so frequently.
So I have found that creating an intake form or
feedback form is super helpful and then following up with

(50:45):
them and then if you tell them no, you tell
them why you're not bringing it in. I think it's
critical to give them that inside view of hey, if
we were to bring this in, that means we have
to say no to this, which has the impact of X,
y Z. But always making sure they feel welcomed with
giving input is critical. I think it's actually more worrisome
if your sales is not giving you requests or feedback

(51:07):
because it means that they're not as open. And I
think them having that direct line to your customers and
your prospects so so important because they understand what's resonating,
how the customer is speaking. Like this is all super
important aspects to deliver into your marketing. But I think
it comes down to the norm that you have of

(51:31):
how you intake requests and feedback. So I think a
form is always super helpful. Make it as simple as possible,
Like there's so many different way AI ways to do
this to make it super simple too, and to sort
through it. Historically, we had a marketing channel, and then
the feedback went into a form that was pinned in
there and that fed into ASANA, and then we reviewed

(51:51):
all the inputs on our weekly project management cadence and
then now it's more ad hoc. Right now, I get
a lot of requests and I either say like absolutely,
we'll bring this in in the next month, or I
will say, hear you, that's super important. However, that's not
on our current road map of work because of x

(52:12):
y Z. I think if you're ever going to tell
them no, you need to tell them why. And I
think the other important piece is to have your plan
ahead of time so that you're not given a plan,
and then making sure that it's very transparent and visible
and communicated to all the stakeholders. So I like to
showcase the marketing plan in a public channel like this
is hey, it's Q four. This is our Q four

(52:33):
plan as a marketing team. Because of x y Z,
I think that's super important. I think a lot of
times this comes down to visibility and communication as well.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
I love it, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
Just to wrap it up, if you could give your
best advice, because I have covered it a lot, what
would be the one thing that would make from your
point a few make your market and plan and much
better and much more efficient in next year.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
Ooh okay, good question to end on. I think that
you need to understand your delta and all the inputs
and all the ways to that these inputs affect the goal,
so like understanding your conversion rates and how much that
can affect it. I think having models that you can
play with to factor that is super important because it's

(53:27):
not always a black and white way to plan. At
the end of the day, your top line revenue is
the end goal, right, All these inputs are just wayte
to ladder up to that bigger goal. So if you
know how to kind of like dial up certain inputs,
I think it can lead to some really interesting planning
and information and also understand how your work can impact

(53:50):
those variables or inputs to dial up or down something.
And then I think also understanding the so that's that's
a huge piece of it. And then all knowing what
you're always on ongoing programs and campaigns are and then
how you're going to be utilizing that, and then reserving
time and budget for the experiments quarterly I think is

(54:13):
also a way to make it less painful throughout the year.

Speaker 2 (54:17):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
Thank you so much so that being said, thanks a
lot for coming and sharing you know wisdom with us.
I think about tons of great examples, and thanks a
lot for being open and Sharon, how you actually do it.

(54:38):
And thanks a lot for everybody for joining this episode
and asking fantastic questions. This helps us to make this
episode actionable and helpful for you. Thank you, guys, Thank
you Ashley, and see you in the next episodes. Guys,
take care. Everybody cheers.

Speaker 3 (54:57):
Thank you,