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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Aaron Ross
Read between
November 24 - December 12, 2022
Get narrower. Get to that one thing people really want from you. To whom or when are you most needed? Remove the clutter to make it easier for the right customers to see why they need you. Easier said than done. If it were easy, everyone would do it.
A sexy, fancy, or grandiose message that doesn't click with people is useless.
A tight elevator pitch can tell someone quickly whether they are a prospect or not. You're not trying to engage everyone, just the people to whom you're relevant. Here are a few tips: Avoid jargon. Keep it simple. Simple is better than accurate. It's always frustrating: You'll never be 100% satisfied, so stick to “good enough.”
Notice it's not about the steps you take to help them—it's about the results they want and desire. If it's interesting, they will naturally ask you more questions about how you do it.
People like to buy “things.” Their minds are asking, “What do I get for my investment?” Whether it's a $10 or a $10,000 purchase, they'll want to know exactly what they get. Spell it out as much as you can as “things,” with concrete details.
Focus on those customers with a burning need you can solve—not on the ones that think you're “cool” or who should or could need you.
What kind of person/company most needs what you have to offer?
Most people are afraid to get brutally honest feedback about their offering. Don't hide from the truth that you may not be where you thought you were, and it may take a lot more work and time than you expected or wanted to get it dialed in for growth.
Without predictable ways to fill your pipeline, you're going to struggle.
What's Important: There Are Three Types of Leads “Seeds” are many-to-many leads, created from word-of-mouth, networks, and relationships. Usually grown through creating happy customers who refer others, and who remain as customers for years. Salesforce.com, Google, Facebook, and Slack all ignited initial hypergrowth through Seeds. “Nets” are one-to-many marketing campaigns, including the now-popular approaches of content and inbound marketing as well as outbound marketing. “Spears” are targeted outbound prospecting or business development campaigns. Usually a human is involved, working through
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Too many companies obsess over a single form of lead generation and ignore the others.
Partners aren't a fourth kind of lead. They are a different type of customer. Whether they are channel partners, resellers, marketing partners, or anything else, you're acquiring and supporting them as customers—or should be. Partners can be acquired through Seeds (word of mouth/Partner Success), Nets (mass marketing for partners), and Spears (prospecting into a targeted list of ideal partners).
Seeds are many-to-many campaigns; they're based on word of mouth and relationships. Some companies, like Dropbox, Box, and Slack, have been able to take off by creating products that spread like wildfire through word of mouth. But for most companies, seeds will mostly come through systematizing how you ensure your customers stay happy and get value from your service, and who then generate more referrals and lower attrition rates. All the great work you do to help others succeed, while building relationships and networks, is “planting seeds”—whether they're with employees, partners, investors,
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The best way to methodically grow your seeds is with a repeatable program or with systems that ensure your customers are successful. This field is now commonly called Customer Success Management or just Customer Success. It means systematically reducing customer churn, increasing upsells, increasing referrals, and helping capture more and better case studies and testimonials.
Customer Success is not about increasing customer satisfaction, but creating revenue growth.
By investing in Customer Success, you should see: Lower churn: The easiest revenue comes from keeping the customers you have. More revenue: More referrals to new customers; more willingness to try and buy your other offerings (upselling and cross-selling). Better marketing: You can improve everything in lead generation and sales with detailed case studies (success stories) and testimonials from happy, successful customers.
Remember, a Customer Success person, like a salesperson or a marketing budget, is an investment that should make money (a lot); it's not a cost to be put off.
Here's a 5 + 2 rule on this point for every cofounder, the CEO, plus every Customer Success Manager: Must meet on-site with five customers a month (that's 60 per year). Get two customer badges every year as a bonus (that is, you visit so often they give you your own ID badge).
One bad assumption is that “a great product will automatically create happy customers.”
Rule 6: Evolve Customer Success Goals and Metrics as You Grow For example, SaaS companies experience these phases (courtesy of Gainsight): Traction ($0–$1 million): What do customers want, and what do they do with our product? Adoption ($1–$5 million): Why and how should customers include our product in their daily business? Retention ($5–$20 million): Why do customers need to keep on using our product after the honeymoon? Expansion ($20–$100 million): Why should customers expand to more seats, more features? Optimization ($100 million-plus): Automation and improvements driven by data. Your
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Gild found out if there's successful usage of the product in the first 90 days, usage will be three times higher for the rest of the year.
Team Structure The Gild Customer Success (CS) team has about 10 people across three roles (out of 50 employees!): Inside CS reps train, monitor usage, and run analytics; there's one rep per 70 users. Outside CS reps handle, and are measured on, renewals; there is one rep per 30 users in their relevant customer segment. Executive CS reps are responsible for upselling, and work mostly with large and fast-growing customer segments. The teams have dashboards to help spot earlier both at-risk customers and customers who should buy more product, giving reps a reason to call a customer to talk.
Customer Success owns: 90-day adoption Feeding usage data and customer feedback into the product roadmap Renewals Upsells
Frustrated customer support agents help create frustrated customers.
Customer support typically reacts to fix problems that have happened. On the other hand, Customer Success works best in preventing problems from being created in the first place. They are two sides of the same coin in supporting customers.
Forty hours a week on the phone with frustrated customers can be a recipe for agent burnout.
The support team is the voice of the customer. Some organizations overlook the support team and all their valuable knowledge.
What content is loved by your market and creates measurable results?
Out of a trillion ways to market, inbound marketing (or content marketing) is the most popular kid in school. It works, and it works for every company—unlike, say, outbound prospecting. The idea is creating marketing that customers love or learn from, inspiring them to want more from you, eventually buying your stuff.
If you're passionate about social media—go for it. If you're doing it “because you're supposed to,” don't be afraid to put it on the back burner.
Pros: Often easy-to-generate high volumes of leads; some kinds of marketing programs are scalable; content published online can generate leads forever; highly measurable. Cons: Even free leads aren't “free”—there can be high fixed costs for generating leads (mainly time and salaries); low conversion rates, since most leads aren't a fit; usually works better at reliably generating leads at small/medium businesses than at enterprises—at least for the first few years.
Simply put, Inbound marketing is pull strategies and Outbound marketing is push strategies. With Inbound, customers come to you. With Outbound, you seek out customers. The Inbound funnel is broad, the Outbound funnel is targeted. Inbound builds on existing assets, awareness, and demand. Outbound generates new awareness and demand that Inbound doesn't reach. Yes, there are gray areas, those of you who love to argue, don't overanalyze the edges and miss the big picture!
Account-Based Marketing is a popular example today of Outbound marketing. You choose the companies you want to target, and based on the tier (usually determined by deal size), you are building one-to-one, one-to-a-few, or one-to-many outreach strategies. The greater the deal size, the greater the personalization, the longer the cycle, and the smaller the target list.
When you are firing on all cylinders, Inbound and Outbound marketing working side by side, you will see prospects moving seamlessly between the two funnels. A new segment that you first reached out to via digital advertising, will start to follow your content, subscribe, and eventually become a customer through your inbound funnel. On the other hand, if old inbound prospects have gone cold, you can make them active again through outreach and eventually close through the outbound funnel. These are ideal journeys of push and pull working together.
“For the next 10 years, Outbound marketing will be the biggest driver of growth.”—Meena Sandhu
Goodbye Sales versus Marketing, Hello Revenue Team
Every growing business out there wants to grow their customer base and increase revenue, right? So then why is it that sales and marketing, the two key functions driving customer and revenue growth, are constantly in battle with each other? These teams are structured and measured differently, and each end up with slightly competing objectives: like when marketing is measured on new lead volumes, sales on revenue. Build one, unified Revenue department where sales and marketing are functions within one team. Avoid the mistake of marketing working independently from sales.
Weekly pipeline meetings involve both sales and marketing, and everyone understands how each contributor's efforts are supporting one another
None of these metrics matter on their own and they are not directly connected to the bottom line. Don't make the mistake of choosing marketing goals that aren't tied to sales and the business goals overall. What matters to a business is growth in customers, growth in revenue, minimizing churn and increasing LTV, and accomplishing these goals in the most efficient way possible.
Mistake: Overfocusing on Per-Lead Cost, and Ignoring Quality We've talked about aligning sales and marketing functions and one way to do that is with goals and metrics that make sense for both. Marketing's biggest function is providing bottom of the funnel, marketing qualified leads to sales. This is marketing's direct connection to revenue and customer growth. With a shift in focus from quantity or cost per lead to quality, we are able to leverage conversion rates, linking marketing's performance closer to sales. By keeping an eye on the conversion rate between each stage of the process you
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There are numerous options available for measuring the success of marketing initiatives while also being directly relevant to sales and the bottom line for the business. Unified goals lead to unified teams, which lead to Growth.
First, don't worry about all the ways you can create inbound leads. Because the #1 place to start with improving marketing is to create a Forcing Function for the leader. Your VP Sales has a quota—why doesn't your VP of Marketing? Your sales team has a quota—your marketing team and leader have to have one, too—as a Sales Qualified Lead Commit.
Sales Qualified Lead Commit goals “force” marketers to focus on practices that create quality leads instead of efforts that pump up total lead numbers but don't turn into pipeline.
Marketers: if you believe it’s sales’ job to follow up and qualify your leads… that will never happen consistently. You need an Inbound SDR role that ensures poor leads don’t make it to Sales, and the right leads get Sales Qualified.
Demandgen folks are all about the numbers: Spend X dollars and create Z leads, which should be worth five × X dollars in revenue. Great demandgen marketers can handle the “squishy stuff” (logos, branding, press releases, etc.) well enough until you're ready to get corporate. Their blue pens may not be as pretty as the ones the corporate marketer gets you, but you'll get leads.
You want someone who's shown a passion for areas like inbound/web demand generation programs, lead nurturing, and metrics—but who will also work hand-in-hand with your sales team. And that's not corporate marketing. Demandgen folks can figure out corporate marketing. Corporate marketing cannot figure out demandgen. Ever.
It was simpler to build a content-based brand 10 years ago, before buyers were hyper-saturated in content.
“Companies today need to be focused on pushing your message as well instead of only waiting for customers to come to you.”—Jon Miller
Common Campaign “Build it and they'll come” marketing plan: Deciding what content a company want to share (“how great our new release is!”), then How they plan to distribute it (“let's do a webinar!”), and finally Who should we sent it to (“who do we want to invite?”).
