Is it too early for 2024 advice?
Season 6 FINALE!
Hola Mehketeers and welcome to the last Mehdeeka issue of season 6, and the last “proper” issue of 2023!
For the newer subscribers, I take breaks between seasons to keep the quality high and the takes steaming hot, but seeing as the season is wrapping up at the end of November, it would be silly to restart in late December, so I’ll just squirrel away until we’re back in the full swing of things in 2024.
Which also means this is the last pep talk you’ll get from me before you do your end of year retro/start of year final planning.
I got some feedback recently that was basically along the lines of “Mehdeeka is great because it gives me tactical knowledge, but where I’m really struggling is getting buy in on the things I want to do.”
I’ve been thinking about that a lot ever since and really want to put some effort into answering that (which, spoiler, I’ve been writing my methodology into a guide which will come out hopefully early next year and will include this as a section), but also want to give some pointers on addressing this before I disappear for 8+ weeks.
Before that, I do have a major favour to ask - the Season 6 Reader Survey. I’ve made it as short as possible, so please do me a solid and fill it out!
A special thanks
A big thanks to Gina who has been silently editing all of this season’s Mehdeekas!!!
I really appreciate your input, questions, and sense checking when I’m being vague or confusing.
Getting buy-in to the things you want to do
There’s a lot of reasons we, as marketers, don’t get the things we want. Budget and headcount are big, obvious ones. We can’t start there, it’s asking for too much. But then sometimes we start too small. I once was in a position where the messaging I wanted to run in paid ads was constantly questioned and challenged, and yet every time we ran an A/B test of my messaging vs my boss’s… ya gal came up the winner.
It got super frustrating and I kept thinking, I’ve proved over and over again that I know what resonates. I’ve driven all the financial metrics associated with paid ads down through increasingly better messaging… and yet you’re still here nit picking shit that honestly just isn’t that important — why don’t you trust me?
So how do we find the middle ground?
I’ve written many times that:
Marketing is an enablement function and, yes we get leads, but we also serve other functions within the business
Sales is our customer (and other teams too)
We need to give value before we ask for things
And guess what, I’m repeating it now. We need to go to the highest level of leadership we can get to and ask what the business priorities are. Then we repeat with sales (and customer succes/product/whoever else your stakeholders are.)
Then we ask “how can marketing contribute to this?” and prioritise based on 1. how much impact we can have and 2. how much effort it’s going to take.
If this sounds familiar, it’s the advice I gave in this recent issue:
What I’ll add here that I didn’t write there is speaking other teams’ languages. When you’re presenting your goals back, don’t use marketing metrics (although definitely track them for yourself), use the business goals or the sales goals language.
The Pavillion report
Recently this report came out from Pavillion and Crossbeam. They’re a sales platform for managing channel partners and ecosystems, so the report is really geared towards that which I don’t think many Mehdeeka subscribers sell through, so take all of this with a big grain of salt; the results are heavily biased towards companies that use this sales motion.
What I do want to focus on is the graph above, Why do you think your company’s sales strategy is generally not successful? This is a follow up question to one about whether or not the sales strategy was meeting sales goals, and only 5% said yes it’s meeting the targets and there’s no intention to change it.
This is a bit misleading because only 27% said they were unsuccessful and needed change while the remaining % basically said they’re always looking at new things to try.
Anyway, back to this graph. How can marketing contribute to these challenges? Here are some really specific ways I’d personally go about this, to give you a very clear idea on what I mean when I ask this question.
Struggling to get high quality leads
Run an analysis of high performing and low performing cohorts - what do they have in common amongst each other and compared between high and low performing? Check for messaging, time of year and seasonality, creative, channel, and what their follow up sequence was.
Sometimes I’ve gone back to old messaging, because it becomes stronger at specific times of years, and performs poorer at other times.
Review your definition of “marketing qualified”, and what behaviours you as a marketing team are rewarding your leads for exhibiting.
It might be time to run some high risk experiments to get that jump in leads and find something that out performs your “business as usual” campaigns, like testing out a new channel, changing the messaging, or running a limited promotion.
The key here is to have first reviewed what the sales team defines as “high quality” and test doing more of what brought those in and see if repeating it works, or if that strategy has past its best-by date.
Lack of alignment with the marketing team
I mean, in a way, see above. The part I’d focus on more for this is the communication between sales and marketing.
Run a feedback session, and get sales to give you their definition of “high quality”. Put aside all your “yeah, but” excuses and just listen to what they have to say. They’re your customer, listen to them.
Here’s more on aligning sales and marketing from the archives:
Prospect’s budget constraints
I’ve got a good story for this. I have a current client who sells exclusively through channel partners, and so I was doing a review of the support and enablement the partners get, which included interviewing a handful of them.
To the question “what’s the hardest thing about selling [product]” every single one of them said “the price”.
It’s a premium product with a premium price tag, so I expected this and had already been warned about it. Eventually though, I got sick of hearing the same answer so we dug into it.
What specifically is it about the price that customers aren’t happy with? Options include:
The value perception doesn’t match the price
The customer doesn’t have budget or authority to get budget
The customer doesn’t think they’d be able to get their boss to sign off on it
The customer has already spent their budget, and the timing isn’t right
The answer we came to was SO interesting.
Basically, two teams will be in the product, but only one team attends the demo. They see how they’ll use it and how it’ll improve their workflows and are super bought in. They don’t see the other team’s value because they aren’t that team and don’t get to have that team’s a-ha moment.
But when the price rolls round, it represents the value both teams would get out of the product.
When only one team (either of them) is present, price becomes a problem. If both teams attend the demo, it is not brought up as an issue because they see how they’d share the product and the cost.
The question now is, how can marketing encourage both teams to attend the demo. Or, in another circumstance how can marketing equip the sales team with a strong argument for why the team they have contact with should invite the other team to the demo with them.
Solution is in the works, so I’ll report back on this one if I crack it.
TL;DR, dig deeper, then think bigger.
Sales cycles are longer
Shortening a sales cycle is hard work and marketing only has so much influence over it. I would run some feedback sessions with the sales team to check:
Is anything in the marketing materials misleading, and forcing the sales team to correct that misunderstanding (setting them back, timewise)
Do they have enough case studies and other sales enablement materials for the bottom of the funnel
What is the biggest objection they’re currently getting, and is there any way marketing could address that objection higher up in the funnel
You then can reflect on your skillset, the tools you have available, and create sales enablement assets, marketing materials, content, and so on, to try and influences the challenges they’re facing.
Losing to the status quo
AKA, losing to “doing nothing” in a lot of cases. For SaaS, it’s often losing to a horrific Excel spreadsheet.
Here, I’d review if the marketing is leading with value propositions, use cases, and ask whether or not we really understood the persona pain points, from the perspective of the user and the economic buyer.
Are we clearly explaining how we’re going to provide value? Are we showing that we deeply understand the issue they’re facing?
I recently gave feedback to someone who has built a platform to address a specific pain point for product marketers, and my feedback to them was along the lines of this:
You’ve captured the pain of doing this task, but you haven’t capture the pain of how this task is one of many I need to complete, and actually if I’m not currently doing this, then buying this product is adding more work to my plate, not less.
I don’t want to be too specific because it wasn’t the happiest of feedback sessions, but you hopefully get the idea, they understood the task but not how it fit into the whole job.
As marketing ramps down for the holidays, it’s a great time to work on your weaknesses
Ok, anyone who works in B2C ignore the “ramp down for the holidays” and best wishes you survive.
For us B2B folks, it gets really quiet, and it’s a great time to spend your learning and development budget, do some online courses, strengthen your weak spots (lots of YouTube series and free courses available!!) and have a think about what you want to invest your time into that will pay off next year.
Read that marketing book you bought and never opened, during work hours.
All of this is still work so do it during work hours while it’s quiet, especially if you’re not taking time off during Christmas to New Years.
A Season 7 sneak peek?!
I can neither confirm nor deny that I’ve got a lot of ideas swirling for 2024. As you might know, I’m a full time contractor, and I treat this newsletter as a client. With some of my clients ramping down in December, it’s giving me more time to do some more involved Mehdeeka projects.
The mention of a physical volume of Mehdeeka issues in last week’s newsletter was better received than I expected, and as I already gave away earlier in this issue I’m working on a methodology to help with larger scale marketing challenges.
I’m also brainstorming a YouTube mini course, and in true Kayla fashion am going a bit overboard with the ideas.
Basically I’m developing the Mehdeeka Cinematic Universe and moving into more than just the newsletter format, testing a few channels out and seeing what works (and importantly, what I enjoy!)
To help me make all of those dreams come true, don’t forget to take the reader survey!!!!!!
Much appreciated!
A single link, floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat
I’ve snuck some really obscure references into Mehdeeka, so I’m hoping someone gets this one because it’s on the easier side.
The single link: LinkedIn is now letting (limited to beta testers) you use Sales Navigator audiences in the ads platform!
Before I say goodbye for the year (!!), I’ll caveat by saying I will send out an Intermission issue if I find a link that’s too good to share, or there’s something very topical and timely I want to jump on, so maybe? See you? Sometime?
If not, have a great holiday season!
Kayla