The timing couldn’t be better — with 2024 planning underway, we gathered our community in a safe space for inspiration, learning, and frank conversations about common challenges.

I started the day rallying our attendees around three actions for the day, and every day:

• Aspire to change at least one behavior based on what you learn today
• Instill more wonder and rigor into your work (our keynote speaker Natalie Nixon touches on this in her book, “The Creativity Leap”)
• Lead with humility and courage in a more expansive way than you’re already doing

Each speaker brought their most authentic, vulnerable selves forward during their presentations in service of helping others be better. Some of our attendees called the conference a goldmine of marketing information and in this recap I’m delighted to surface the best insights from the content shared, starting with the keynote session, followed by the B2B and B2C tracks.

1. Work and Think Like a Jazz Band (Not a Symphony Orchestra)

To optimize creativity, consider functioning like a jazz band — embracing both orchestration and improvisation. Acknowledge that work doesn’t always need to resemble a finely tuned orchestra; instead, allow for flexibility and spontaneity, thinking and acting like a jazz musician. Balance chaos and order, using constraints to drive creativity; this way of thinking is particularly relevant in today’s market.

This perspective from Creative Strategist Natalie Nixon, our keynote speaker, was the perfect note to start our day on. I highly recommend picking up a copy of her book The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work.

2. Presenting to Your Board of Directors? Stay Strategic and Remember They’re People, Too.

Our partners sit on a number of boards — and they can tell you exactly what an effective board presentation from a CMO looks like. During our ‘How to Gain the Trust of Your Board’ panel, Norwest partners Ran Ding, Priti Youssef Choksi, and Parker Barrile shared their insight.

Arrive with a well-prepared plan, along with the background and data to defend your point of view, and be sure to highlight the outcomes that you expect your plan to drive. Don’t be afraid to lean in to their experience for guidance; your board members can provide insight into what other companies in their portfolio are doing to drive success. Remember, you’re on the same team and they want you to be successful, so let’s reframe board meetings from a one-way reporting session to a two-way exchange of value.

For sharing data, it’s critical to have consistent key performance indicators (KPIs). Rather than selectively showcasing favorable metrics that fluctuate each quarter, stick to a set of reliable north star KPIs. This steadfastness will go a long way in fostering trust and credibility with the board.

“The thing that kills your confidence as a board member is when someone changes their story all the time. Consistency is important.”

– Priti Youssef Choksi, Partner, Norwest

3. Look to Benchmarks to Evaluate Your Marketing Investments

Evaluating your marketing spend against benchmarks can be a useful exercise to see how effectively you wield your budget compared to your peers. And while it’s helpful to know how other marketers are approaching their investments and program priorities, you don’t always have to play it by the book. Stand ready to staunchly defend a different approach if conventional methods fail to align with your strategy or prove futile.

Norwest Marketing Operating Executive Renée Cohen gave a sneak peek into our 2023 B2B Marketing & Sales Benchmark Survey results during her panel. Here’s a quick look at some of the data we collected on marketing tech stacks (full results coming soon!).

If you’ve spent most of your marketing career at mid- to late-stage companies, you might be used to having more tools, tech, and resources available to you. Here’s the thing: tech doesn’t solve your problems if you don’t have a sound strategy and resourcing plan. You don’t want to over-invest in your tech stack if you haven’t validated the value of your programs. Tech is best used to scale your initiative after you have a proof of concept.

4. Attribution to One Source Will Always Be Misleading

Ditch the tunnel vision when it comes to attribution. Pinning success or failure on a single source oversimplifies the marketing journey. Embrace the complexity, understanding that it’s an intricate dance of interconnected touchpoints.

“The best strategy we have is to work off of benchmarks. You still want to measure the impact of individual touches, but that’s different than attributing a won deal to one thing.”

– Jon Miller, CMO, Demandbase

In Jon’s session, “Mastering the New Playbook for Account-Based Marketing,” he said the biggest problem with the traditional playbook is that it under-invests in brand. Simply put: when a brand is strong, everything else becomes easier.

He also shared his framework for the new ABM playbook, which I’ve detailed in a previous blog, How to Fast Track Your Path to ABM Maturity.

5. Dark Social Is a Stealthy Ally in Creating Super Fans

When someone says ‘dark social’ they’re often referring to links shared via messaging apps, email, or other private communication platforms where referrals aren’t explicitly tagged. Even though dark social might be hard to track, it can be a breeding ground for strong brand advocates. Harnessing the power of one-on-one shares can extend your brand’s visibility, even if it’s hard to quantify. Good content — not just marketing content — is powerful in dark social because it’s relatable or it provides a clear solution in an otherwise unexpected channel.

Looking for inspiration? Check out:

• Lavender Co-founder Todd Clouser’s Video Content Program
• Qualified’s Pipeline Visionaries Podcast, started by CMO Maura Rivera
• SourceDay CMO Sarah Scudder’s LinkedIn Live Series

6. B2B Marketers, Hug Your Sales Leaders More

Yes, harmonizing your organization’s sales and marketing efforts requires effective collaboration, but it won’t last if you don’t have each other’s backs. This piece of advice shined through Spiff CMO’s Anna Fisher’s session.

As with any good relationship, you need to “marry” clear communication with shared goals around pipeline creation. When everyone has skin in the same game, they’re incentivized to work together — to win together. Beyond goals, sales and marketing need to be aligned on campaigns, process, and the data. Getting there might be tough, but worth the payout in the end.

7. Predict Pipeline Better With the Failsafe Waterfall Method

The failsafe waterfall method helps organizations better predict pipeline by combining empirical data with a strategic framework. It anchors your model to a clear bookings plan, establishing it as the cornerstone for all subsequent stages.

Nani Shaffer, CMO at Channel99, shared in-depth worksheets for getting started during her session. Leveraging the power of historical pipeline data and close rates shapes and refines your tailored waterfall model strategically. This meticulous approach culminates in setting actionable pipeline goals, ensuring a harmonized integration of data-backed insights and a comprehensive understanding of your sales process.

“You’ll likely need multiple waterfalls, but too much granularity puts you at risk of too small numbers. Don’t be afraid to adjust numbers manually.”

– Nani Shaffer, CMO, Channel99

8. Brand Is Everyone’s Responsibility, Not Just Marketing

Marketing cannot create a brand. Creating a brand is a commitment that starts with the CEO and trickles down to every last person in the company. It’s everyone’s job, not just marketing. At best, marketing is just the steward of your company’s brand identity.

That’s what Gong Chief Evangelist Udi Ledergor made clear during his session on Building an Iconic B2B Brand. In the early days, the Gong marketing team gathered everyone at the company and came up with a set of principles to guide the culture. Those principles then helped set the brand direction on a path that was authentic to the business and that each person at the company could uphold. Gong’s scrappy roots and strong vision even led Udi to unconventional advertising tactics for a B2B company: two Super Bowl ads and a billboard in Times Square.

9. Tap Into Partnerships to Help Your Brand Punch Above Its Weight

Give your brand heavyweight status through strategic partnerships. Teaming up with other businesses, organizations, or influencers who align with your brand’s values will amplify its reach and impact. It’s the one-two punch your brand needs to reach new heights.

We were honored to have Talkspace CMO Katelyn Watson and Birdies Co-Founder and President Marisa Sharkey join us and share their insight into leveraging partnerships. Good partnerships are authentic, based on shared values, and tell a story about the brand. As Marisa put it, “There’s no substitute to on-the-ground creativity and pounding the pavement to find new ways to do it.”

Check out Talkspace’s collaboration with Olympian Michael Phelps for inspiration!

10. Confirm Product-Market Fit Before Expanding to More Channels

Before spreading your wings to new channels, make sure your product is winning in its current market. Validate its appeal by listening to your customers and closely tracking their behavior. You can’t build a second story if you have a shaky foundation.

We were joined by two of Ritual’s leaders, President Liz Reifnsyder and VP of Customer Retail Marketing Laura Brodie, who are seasoned experts in omni-channel expansion.

When Ritual first launched it was a DTC, subscription-only company, and the team focused on creating a product that catered to their tribe — the small number of people who loved the brand. They got their feedback and built more reasons for that subset of consumers to love them, which helped them build unparalleled brand trust.

After five years of DTC, the company had achieved $100M in subscription revenue. They knew they’d found their product-market fit in a single channel — and that they could scale that market. They were able to drive adoption, LTV growth and ultimately scale the company into an essentials platform.

Norwest Partner and lead investor in Ritual, Lisa Wu, recently sat down with Ritual founder and CEO Katerina Schneider, to talk more about the company’s brand evolution.

11. Measure Content With Your Heart and Mind

Acknowledge the qualitative impact of content alongside quantitative metrics, recognizing the emotional and brand-building aspects of content creation.

During her session, Babylist Chief Growth Officer Lee Anne Grant shared that the company looks at typical metrics for judging the success of their content, but they try to always look at the full picture of how customers are reacting.

Babylist’s impressive content engine drives commerce, brand, and growth for the company. They’ve built a content flywheel that spans the entirety of their customer journey — and can drive new business and vertical streams. For example, Babylist created a step-by-step guide on getting a free breast pump through insurance that performs well in SEO. That same guide then has played a role in driving business in their newest revenue stream, Babylist Health.

“We wanted to launch a new service that helps women get their breast pump through insurance. Because we had the guide, we could put paid behind it and put it in our emails. The guide now drives about 15% of orders through Babylist Health.”

– Lee Anne Grant, Chief Growth Officer, Babylist

12. Social Shopping and Tele-Shopping Are the Next Big Movement

As the boundaries between entertainment and commerce blur, brands that embrace this trend are well-positioned to tap into a new era of consumer engagement, where seamless, real-time interactions drive the shopping experience.

Two Norwest portfolio companies are heavily leaning into TikTok as an e-commerce platform. Pair Eyewear co-founder and CEO Sophia Edelstein and Wyze’s Head of e-commerce Logan Dunn shared their experiences using TikTok to grow their sales.

Both companies use TikTok, yet in different ways: Wyze uses TikTok Shop and Pair Eyewear does organic posting and TikTok Ads. Both companies also partner with micro influencers to expand their reach. In the last two years, Pair Eyewear has partnered with more than 950 unique influencers, leading to 50-60k new customers that they can attribute to the platform. In a single week, Wyze received 16k orders on TikTok Shop. And, Logan noted, TikTok expects to lose half a billion dollars in order to financially incentive creators to sell through the platform.

13. Think TV Ads Can’t Be Tracked and Optimized? Think Again.

If you still believe that TV doesn’t have the trackability and optimization benefits of your standard digital marketing channels, you may have fallen prey to some outdated myths. TV has huge potential as a performance marketing channel — and it’s not as expensive as you might think. TvScientific’s VP of Marketing Emily Robinson shared 5 myths about performance TV.

Top myths about Performance TV:

• You need to spend $100k to produce a great TV ad
• Buying a TV ad spot is too expensive to test out
• You can’t buy and optimize TV like your digital channels
• You can’t track or optimize toward outcomes like website visits, sales, ROAs
• It’s too hard to prove the values of performance TV

14. Get to Know Customers As If They’re Your Friends

Treat your customers like cherished friends, not just transactions. Personalize interactions, empathize with their needs, and build relationships that last. A customer-centric approach is the secret sauce for lasting loyalty according to Abodu brand marketing leader Tom Roche.

15. Not New, But Worth Repeating: Spending Time With Other Marketers is Priceless

Spending time with other marketers isn’t just networking; it’s a breeding ground for fresh ideas. Heard throughout the day at the Summit: I’m going through the same thing. How did you solve it? That sentiment of shared experience and knowledge exchange is what the Growth Marketing Summit is all about. We brought together marketers across the diverse Norwest marketing community, embracing the rich blend of perspectives from both B2B and B2C spectrums. The convergence allowed each of us to borrow great ideas and principles from each other. It’s an important reminder to be brave and experiment with new channels and tactics, to forge a path towards innovation and growth.

Thank you to all the speakers, attendees, and Norwest team members who made it such a fruitful community event. See you next year!

The post 15 Pieces of Marketing Gold From the 2023 Norwest Growth Marketing Summit appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

In May 2023, we fielded an online survey, Generative AI in Marketing, to find out how marketers view the benefits, challenges, and potential of generative AI. The goal was to understand how leaders are currently using this technology and to share those findings with marketers so they can ground themselves in the latest thinking and best practices of their peers.

Despite headlines that AI could replace jobs, the survey respondents overwhelmingly rejected the idea that marketing teams will be reduced by generative AI. In fact, they see the technology as a tool for productivity and creativity. I was heartened to see that reaction — and surprised at a few of the other findings. Let’s walk through the takeaways.

Marketers Are Embracing Generative AI, Dispelling Concerns Over Reducing Team Size

A whopping 93 percent of marketers are already using generative AI. Only a few (7 percent) reported having not used a single gen AI tool. Over half consider themselves active or advanced users, and nearly one in five report using gen AI tools five days a week or more. This is remarkable given the short time frame that most marketers would have adopted gen AI into their processes. And for the marketers who haven’t used gen AI, most cited it’s because “hadn’t gotten around to it yet.”

ChatGPT is the most popular, but marketers aren’t ready to commit to just one tool. ChatGPT’s free and paid versions are currently the most-used tools, but half of all respondents who use gen AI report using multiple tools, including Jasper, Bard and Writer. Maybe it’s early exploration to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each platform, or it’s a glimpse into the future of our tech stacks. Time will tell.

Generative AI is a value-add — not a threat. Despite understandable concern that gen AI could replace workers, 81 percent of marketing leaders say gen AI won’t reduce team size. Nearly one in five respondents expect to hire more people to take advantage of gen AI capabilities. This is particularly interesting when you consider that 62 percent of respondents are senior marketing decision makers (directors, VPs, CMOs, and CGOs) with hiring authority.

The data suggests marketers understand that gen AI is a tool to help them work more efficiently and effectively, rather than a replacement for human creativity and critical thinking. One respondent said, “I view generative AI as an intern. Provide it with detailed instructions. Let it work. Then review and edit everything to ensure it is accurate, professional, plagiarism-free, and on-brand.”

“I view generative AI as an intern. Let it work. Then review and edit everything to ensure it is accurate, professional, plagiarism-free, and on-brand.”

As such, gen AI is likely to be embraced as a valuable asset to marketing teams rather than a threat to job security. As my Norwest colleague Rama Sekhar put it in a recent interview “AI isn’t coming for your job. Someone using AI is coming for your job.”

Download the full survey ›

Goodbye, Writer’s Block. Hello, AI-Generated Content.

Marketers primarily use generative AI for text generation, search and editing. A large majority (77 percent) of respondents said they use the technology to generate text or content in their jobs, followed closely by search (63 percent). One respondent even called gen AI the “best search engine” they’ve ever used. While the results often help users get over writer’s block, we urge caution with blindly accepting the outputs.

My friend Barak Turovsky, who led AI efforts at Google for a decade, created a helpful framework for evaluating potential use cases. He assesses two dimensions: fluency and accuracy. He cautions that fluency often mimics confidence — similar to charismatic people who can convincingly talk about any topic, we may get carried away by their demeanor and believe what they say, whether it’s true or not. In an April 2023 sitdown with Norwest marketing leaders and Barak, we discussed the importance of fact-checking with reliable resources. We also encouraged folks to draw a distinction between real-time web search and querying against a gen AI tool’s dated training data.

Marketers are slower to adopt generative AI for images or videos. Only about seven percent of marketers report use of Stable Diffusion for text-to-image generation. It’s not surprising to see fewer marketers using gen AI to create images or videos. Image and video content require large amounts of data to train AI models effectively, making it more challenging to produce reliable results. Legal risks may be another barrier to adoption of the image generation use case. Litigation around gen AI is rapidly evolving, particularly around the implications for copyright and intellectual property infringement.

Nonetheless, as new tools emerge and the technology advances, there is a huge opportunity for marketers to tap into capabilities for image and video creation, along with presentation design. Google Bard already announced a partnership with Adobe Firefly to bring image generation to the once text-only tool. There’s little doubt we’ll see more partnerships like this in the future.

Nearly half of marketers believe generative AI has the power to supercharge content creation. They recognize the potential of generative AI in transforming content creation processes across marketing functions. For example, a white paper – which could take weeks to research and write – can be generated in minutes. (Of course, we must also budget editing time into this equation!) The same goes for blog posts, emails, social media posts and other content.

Marketers also see how the technology could augment demand generation and product marketing, particularly with messaging frameworks and customer profile development. A recent McKinsey reports details the opportunities for teams to hyper-personalize content throughout the customer journey using gen AI.

Most marketers believe generative AI will positively impact their brands. Two out of three respondents think the technology will free up time for creativity, whereas less than 8 percent fear losing uniqueness in their marketing messaging. And while we’ve only just begun to see how gen AI will transform brands and teams, the value marketers see in leveraging all that gen AI has to offer is a promising sign of what the future may hold.

Generative AI Helps Marketers Save Time

Sixty percent of marketers estimate generative AI has saved them time. When asked to estimate how much time they’ve saved by using gen AI tools, most respondents said the technology had improved their output by at least 25 percent. One respondent said gen AI’s “power of summarizing” was the real time saver. “From a marketing messaging guide in PDF, I was able to create a table with a script for a series of 8x 60-second social videos and accompanying posts for LinkedIn. All in a single prompt.”

Prompt experimentation and editing outputs are barriers to time savings. Nearly a quarter of marketers (24 percent) report no time savings or that they spend even more time than they would normally. They tell us they need the additional time to edit responses into something usable — or, they get caught up in experimenting with different prompts. This could suggest that training is necessary to help teams use these tools to their full potential and to understand the specific use cases where gen AI is most helpful. It’s also a good reminder that gen AI is not a magic solution for all use cases, and human input is often necessary to achieve the desired results. But anything is better than staring at a blank screen and I like how gen AI opens my mind to ideas and angles that I would not have otherwise considered.

“Anything is better than staring at a blank screen. I like how gen AI opens my mind to ideas and angles that I would not have otherwise considered.”

Pro tip: Use prompt marketplaces, such as PromptBase, PromptHero, ChatX, AIPRM and FlowGPT, to produce better results.

The 5 Biggest Risks for Marketers Using Generative AI

Interestingly, the survey results mirror the concerns we’ve heard from the marketing leaders in the Norwest portfolio. How do I know my data is safe? What might be considered plagiarism? How can I make it sound like my brand?

Our survey found the top five concerns for marketers regarding gen AI are:

• Accuracy (55 percent)
• Quality control (44 percent)
• Data privacy (31 percent)
• Legal and copyright issues (30 percent)
• Plagiarism (29 percent)

One thing’s clear: generative AI policy is lagging adoption. According to our survey, fewer than 20 percent of marketing leaders have a policy in place to mitigate potential security, legal or copyright issues with generative AI. However, about 26 percent are currently creating such policies. Perhaps that is why marketers are more concerned about accuracy and quality control than being replaced by AI.

The Dos and Don’ts of Using Generative AI, According to Early Adopters

In the same sit down with Norwest marketing leaders and Barak Turovsky that I mentioned earlier, we discussed best practices and solutions to some of these concerns:

Have a “human in the loop” system. Generative AI hallucinations are real. Keep in mind that gen AI is trained to give you an answer, whether it’s right or wrong. There is no substantive understanding beneath the thin layer of words, so occasionally AI can state something as fact without any supporting reality — what’s called an AI hallucination. Even though ChatGPT is getting better and better at listening and synthesizing multiple sources of content, it’s less optimized to process contradictory content and provide both sides. It may decide to spit out one viewpoint and that decision could be wrong, which is why human involvement and review is so critical.

Train the model with existing content. As for making your AI-generated outputs “sound” like you or your brand, we recommend feeding the model your existing content, then asking it to extract your voice and tone. You can also use a good source of internal data to train the model. For example, some companies have used AI to analyze historical consumer behavior data to predict the likelihood of a customer responding favorably to a marketing campaign.

Combine generative AI with other tools. To make gen AI more powerful for your marketing organization, try combining it with tools that analyze performance. Say you’re sending hundreds of AI-generated emails that are all different from one another — adding a plugin or API that can A/B test will help you understand what converts better, so you can replicate that in the future. New plugins and integrations are released daily it seems, including on Zapier and ChatGPT Marketplace, which are more robust than others I’ve seen. If you’re interested in joining a community of other AI enthusiasts in marketing, we found this Slack community to be helpful.

Keep experimenting with prompts. It’s only a matter of time before gen AI finds its way into all our workflows — and even personal lives. In February, I tried to use ChatGPT to write valentines cards for my friends and family… and it didn’t quite produce the results I was looking for. (Alas, I was forced to drum up my own words of affirmation!). Another reason to continue experimenting with different use cases.

Have more thought starters or questions about gen AI in marketing? Feel free to reach out and let me know what’s on your mind.

Download the full survey ›

About the Survey

The Norwest Quick Pulse Survey: Generative AI in Marketing was conducted online between April 28 and May 5, 2023. The survey solicited opinions and beliefs about the role of generative AI in marketing from 257 self-described marketing professionals.

The post What Marketers Really Think About Generative AI, According to Norwest Survey appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

To look at cash preservation from a marketing perspective, I facilitated a discussion with more than a dozen GTM leaders in B2B SaaS. The event was hosted by Norwest portfolio company, Workato, the leader in enterprise integration platform as a service (iPaaS). Thank you to Workato’s head of marketing, Bhaskar Roy, for inviting me. The cool thing: the gathering was held at the Chase Center in San Francisco. So, after we talked shop for an hour, we watched the game from a private suite. (The Warriors beat the Pelicans that evening 120-109.)

To frame the discussion, I shared the top five money-saving marketing trends we’re seeing across the Norwest portfolio (and one bonus idea!) that can help companies extend their financial runways during challenging times.

1. Generative AI Boosts Your Creative Horsepower

Generative AI applies artificial intelligence to content creation, such as ad copy, blog posts, emails, images, and other marketing materials. It can save time, boost efficiency, and free up talent for higher-value tasks. It’s a tool to supplement (not replace) humans. Using generative AI can accelerate and amplify an individual’s work, as in these oft-cited analogies: it’s like a digital camera for photographers or Excel for accountants. You still need people to provide a deep understanding of the audiences you are trying to reach, the competitive differentiation you have, the marketing strategies you employ and your unique voice in the market.

Generative AI accelerates and amplifies an individual’s work—like a digital camera does for photographers or Excel for accountants.

Keep in mind that generative AI is trained to give you an answer, even if it’s wrong—thus the term “AI hallucinations.” AI has no actual knowledge or sense of context, which is why human involvement and review is so critical. Getting an answer is one reason why generative AI is good for content creation—since it’s always easier to edit something than ideate from a blank screen—but can be dangerous for research, education, and search.

To use it effectively in your work, identify the areas of marketing strategy where you see friction—such as content that isn’t generating the desired interest level from the target audience, or bottlenecks in the content-creation process—and then look for the right AI tool to reduce that friction. Always lead with strategy, not tools.

2. Self-Reported Attribution Demystifies Business Drivers

Marketers are leaning away from expensive and sometimes inaccurate attribution tools by investing in self-reported attribution, which is generally defined as direct feedback from prospects on how they learned about your company. This information is often collected via an open-text “how did you hear about us?” question on forms. (Beware of using drop-down picklist choices, as those can bias the data.)

Self-reported attribution will demonstrate to your CEO and CFO that your best leads may be coming from your investments in content and channels that are hard to measure—think about videos, podcasts, LinkedIn posts, and other brand and community channels … the so-called “dark funnel.” My friends Sarah Scudder and Will Allred, marketing leaders at Norwest portfolio companies SourceDay and Lavender, respectively, swear by self-reported attribution to understand where to place their marketing investment bets. True, the dataset might be small if your volume of form submissions is low, but I have it on good authority that the data clusters around key channels such as word of mouth and social.

3. Owned Channels Fuel Upstream Demand

As paid budgets get squeezed, scrappy companies are leaning into brand-building, activating their teams and customers as influencers to drive awareness and demand without paying for every impression. This means leveraging channels like your website, social, podcast, communities and other owned properties where you have an audience and create content worth sharing (pro tip: most viral B2B content is entertaining—maybe even tongue-in-cheek or controversial—and motivates your audience with its usefulness or timely insights). To expand reach, consider collaborating with your ecosystem, much like my friend Udi Ledergor at portfolio company Gong does so successfully.

Scrappy companies will lean into brand-building, activating their teams and customers as influencers to drive awareness and demand without paying for every impression.

Udi talks about how to get members of your team to become social evangelists by sending them calendar invites with pre-written social posts that they can cut and paste into their favorite platforms. Remind them what’s in it for them: by regularly posting valuable content, they will score points with the algorithm and gain more impressions while adding followers.

We also pursue this approach at Norwest where we engage our senior advisors, portfolio leaders, and ecosystem partners to share their invaluable perspectives through blogs, short videos, and social posts.

4. New MQL Definitions put the “Gate Debate” to Rest

Gating whitepapers and ebooks used to be a surefire way to produce qualified leads, but many believe those days are gone forever. We see more and more portfolio companies ungating educational content, only passing high-intent inbound MQLs to sales, such as contact-us and demo request forms. For companies that want to continue gating, consider guarding only the highest-value content and/or holding back those leads until you can gather more data about intent, or the prospect takes additional actions. Remember: one webinar signup does not an MQL make! . As lead volume decreases, that frees your team and budget to focus on driving higher-quality engagements with target buyers in your ICP.

We see more and more portfolio companies ungating educational content, only passing high-intent inbound MQLs to sales.

To make your hard-earned MQLs even more effective, research the buying-committee contacts within your target accounts and arm your SDRs with the information—along with intent data from sources such as ZoomInfo, Bombora or Lusha—to inform their outbound and follow-up approaches. The name of the game is to arm your SDRs with as much contextual information as possible. Along with behavioral queries and intent data, your sellers must also be well-informed about how the accounts have engaged with your brand.

When this data is operationalized, sellers can multithread their outbound efforts with confidence, reaching several influencers and decision makers in an account that’s signaling they have “need” and to improve opportunity creation and win rates.

5. Fractional Talent Plugs Holes in Your Marketing Org

A prominent trend we’re seeing in our portfolio—especially among early-stage companies—is a move toward fractional marketing talent, especially at the senior leadership level. Companies with smaller budgets that are still trying to gain product-market fit often don’t have the budget (nor do they need) a CMO yet, but they still want the benefit of higher-level strategic thinking.

With an abundance of senior-level talent available due to layoffs or late-career pivots away from operating roles, hiring fractional resources is an attractive option. Companies can hire a CMO-level contractor two days a week and then surround that person with people that can execute the strategies. At Norwest, we recommend resources like Right Side Up and 621 Consulting for sourcing fractional marketing leaders.

Bonus: Lead with Love to Drive Increased Employee Engagement and Retention

Laila Tarraf is an executive coach, board member, and people leader who believes that exceptional organizations are created when people connect to their common humanity and bring heart into the workplace. One of our portfolio companies, Simpplr, invited her to speak on this topic—read the full summary of her talk. Her core messages were insightful:

1. 1. There’s a new definition of power in the workplace: a skillful blend of tenderness, nurture, and compassion that is every bit as powerful as the more forceful approaches of the past.
   2. Honoring people, celebrating diversity, and focusing on employee engagement and retention have a profound impact on creating a positive workplace culture.
   3. Active listening is an essential part of employee communication. Let others feel heard, cared for, and valued. If you can’t provide an answer right away, that’s OK. People usually just want a bit of empathy or a chance to brainstorm.

Parting Thoughts and Considerations

Cash preservation tactics are likely to evolve and remain fixtures in our 2023 marketing strategies and beyond. To navigate the uncertain economic environment, we’re leaning into the power of our community. Creating space for the marketing leaders in our portfolio to discuss shared challenges is a small, but mighty way we’re supporting our companies.

This year, Norwest has started to host “huddles” for our marketing leaders to talk about what’s top of mind for them. It’s been inspiring and validating thus far and I’m looking forward to sharing their collective insights in future blogs. Whether you’re a current or future marketing leader in our portfolio, I’d love to hear from you to shape the topics of future huddles. What’s on your mind?

The post 5 Low-Cost Ways to Optimize Your Marketing for Challenging Times appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Founders and CEOs from Norwest portfolio companies joined the conversation. (You can see the full discussion at this link or below.)

Following are highlights from the discussion, which focused on three topics:

1) Building your marketing foundations to prepare for launch
2) Starting your first demand generation activities after launch
3) Resourcing your team and budget

1. Building the Marketing Foundations to Prepare for Launch.

Renée: During our discussion about launching a company, we talked about the potential for disappointment when the initial rush of attention created by the launch dies away. This often leaves founders wondering, “What’s next? Where are the sales leads?” What can founders do to avoid this disappointment and continue building momentum? (7:40 on the recording)

Ranjeet: Preparing for your post-launch phase is as important as preparing for the launch itself, especially if the goal is to start driving inquiries, evaluation and eventually sales. Revenue generated from demand gen programs is ultimately the metric by which marketers are measured. But before you task someone with creating and executing demand generation programs, there are some foundational steps that are critical.

Before you do anything, you must define your ideal customer profile (ICP). We like to think of demand generation as part of a virtuous cycle with the ideal customer profile (ICP) as the crucial first step. Who are we targeting? That involves understanding the characteristics of those target customers. Moreover, the foundation of the messaging we send to those targets’ rests on a positioning platform. That’s the process of describing the pain points your target buyers are feeling and how we solve problems they face. You’ve got to have these elements in place before launching demand generation, so you’re targeting the right people with the right message to convince them of their need for your offerings. Once you launch your first programs, you must analyze the results and determine if you need to revisit or revise your ICP and messaging. It’s a dynamic, continuous cycle.

Most of us are familiar with at least the concept of an ideal customer profile—geography, industry, company size. But you need to go deeper than just those basics. If you’re selling security, for example, you want to know what identity-management tool they are using; what enterprise identity directory. If you’re selling learning and development solutions, you want to know how big the HR department is and whether there is a learning department. What software tools are already being used by the companies? Who are their customers?

Once you have the ICP defined, you then want to know the persona of who you want to talk to in that company. You may have two or three personas that are relevant—the economic buyer, end-users, and possibly influencers. For each of those, you want to understand what they’re trying to solve. What are their pain points? As a starting point, we use an excellent template from HubSpot:

It’s not just their title and how large their team and budget are. It’s how they like to consume content. What conferences do they attend? What are their career objectives? How do they use social media? One common thing we hear is that LinkedIn is great for professional interaction, but Facebook is how they interact with friends and family.

You need to have clarity on what this person is responsible for and what part of their day-to-day job you help with. There are also several things this person cares about that you most likely cannot help them with. It’s important to know that because you get a better sense for how much of their mind share you can capture.

2. Starting Your First Demand Generation Activities After Launch.

Renée: To the point Ranjeet was just making, any PR expert will tell you it’s hard to pitch a story if you don’t have a clear message on your target market and buyer, the problem you’re solving for them, and your competitive differentiation. So now we want to call out some low-cost ways to start building awareness and credibility for your company, because you want to look bigger than you really are. (17:40)

Ranjeet: We want to break down some of the key pillars of awareness and demand gen. Where should you focus at this stage of your company? There are several levers you can pull on and most of these should be familiar.

The one you control the most is your own SEO and content strategy—what you say on your website and blogs. Further on, you can reach out to industry analysts and to the press and invest more in events and complex content creation like videos and podcasts

All these can take up an inordinate amount of time and budget, so where does a seed or Series A company focus? At the seed stage, you want to focus on the left side. Make sure you are blogging; do all the organic things you can control. Go back to your ICP and target personas: write about their problems and pain points and how you help them solve them. As you progress from seed to Series A, you want to start ramping the frequency with which you blog, and possibly supplement it with outsourcing. This is what you should be focused on, not only because it raises awareness, but is a useful way to test your messaging. Did some topics resonate? Is there a particular phrase that’s driving traffic?

Even as a seed company, you may have some opportunities to start building relationships with the market analysts. Forrester and Gartner let non-client vendors brief them once or twice a year because they want to stay up on developments. And Gartner has its “Cool Vendor” program, which highlights new companies with innovative products or approaches. Later on, you may want to consider a subscription to some analysts. These are not cheap; they can run $50,000 to $100,000 a year. And if you buy a subscription, make sure you designate someone to work with those analysts. Allocate a quarter of someone’s time for regular analyst briefings and to see what they’re publishing and tweeting. Let them know what you’re doing so they can be best informed when briefing their corporate clients (your buyers).

When it comes to PR, you may have something important early on that you want to publicize – such as early customer wins or partnerships. If you have launched and have a generally available product, that’s newsworthy. You also can take some of the blogs you have written and turn them into contributed articles. At this stage, you may not have a formal editorial calendar, but you should have a roadmap of what might be happening in the next two quarters that may be opportunities to engage with press, analysts, and outlets for contributed articles.

And now’s the time to start thinking about marquee sponsorships for some of the bigger events in your target industry. Be aware, though, that these are not just hard-dollar expenses; they require a lot of effort for planning, staffing and execution.

Finally, you get into much richer, demand gen focused forms of content—a regular webinar, for instance, or an animated explainer video or a podcast series.

3. Resourcing Your Team and Budget

Renée: Let’s talk about who’s going to do all this work and what it will cost. (27:00)

Ranjeet: We know that each company is going to be a little bit different. So, this is going to be general guidance.

At seed stage, you either have no customers or you have a handful of early adopters, your first few customers (logos). It’s mostly or exclusively founder-led selling and on the marketing side what you typically want is a fractional CMO—someone with seniority and expertise that won’t take a big chunk of budget. This person will help you pick the right combination of contractors or small agencies to do the work. Budget, at this stage, is as-needed.

A fractional CMO is useful to get experienced help but on a pay-as-you-go basis depending on what you need. The fractional CMO will help with a lot of the things we talked about at the beginning: determining the ICP, target personas, and your messaging platform; putting together a plan and budget; finding outside resources to do the work; helping you with those early analyst pitches; things of this nature.

As you progress to Series A, you have more than a handful of customer logos. You’re building some repeatability and starting to scale. At this point, you should have both sales and marketing leaders. They will not be “C” executives; they may be VPs or even directors punching above their weight. They will be FTEs who have teams under them that are a combination of FTEs and contractors or consultants. Depending on what you’re selling, you may have sales engineers. You should have your arms around a budget, but it will be loosely defined.

As you mature to Series B, you’ve got repeatability. You’ve got some data that can help you predict what sales and marketing resources you need to hit your revenue targets. At this point, you have VP-level, if not C-level leaders for sales and marketing. You may still have agencies but now you’re using them for expertise and scale, not just as staff augmentation. And you have a well-defined marketing budget.

Renée: A question we often get is, how much should I be budgeting for marketing? (34:00)

What we’re presenting here is not necessarily meant to be prescriptive but are numbers we tend to see for companies at seed or Series A stage. Under a million in revenue, perhaps even up to $2 million, it’s going to be as needed. Think about what you need for your launch and for activities to keep that momentum going. Once you are beyond $2 million and start firming up annual revenue targets, we tend to see a ratio of revenue to marketing budget is your new ARR target is about 3x to 5x your marketing budget, with about 40 to 50 percent of that going for headcount. (For example, if your new ARR target is $10 million for the coming year, the total marketing budget is about $2-3.3 million.)

As you grow, you may have an aggressive revenue target for the next year, but our advice is to not unlock all that budget right away. Instead, unlock a little bit, see what’s working, and then have the confidence to move forward. Think about how you want to break up your budget quarter to quarter and what milestones you want to hit along the way.

We often are asked what’s a good return on ad spend for B2B SaaS companies. I always have to say it depends, and we can talk about your specific sales cycle. For example, the return on ad spend is going to be different for a self-service product (where a ratio of 2:1 to 3:1 is where you want to be) versus a longer enterprise sale, where it’s going to be more of a blended ROI because it’s not a direct-response type of digital program. You’re pulling people through the funnel.

Ultimately, the goal is to tie marketing activity back to revenue creation. But it takes time to determine hard KPIs, so you must look at some leading indicators. Is your branded search traffic increasing over time? Are you seeing more visitors to your site, and can you analyze the traffic to understand if you are targeting the right people. How do you know the message is resonating?

The thing I want to highlight is the need to look at the ICP and target personas you developed and see if you are engaging with those accounts. Maybe they have clicked on an email or downloaded a piece of content. Or you can track accounts that are engaging with your LinkedIn ads. These are some of the KPIs I would pay attention to, at least as leading indicators, to see if you are on the right track of moving activity along the funnel and eventually into revenue.

Key Takeaways

Renée: Ranjeet, can you wrap up with some of the key takeaways from today’s session? (43:10)

Ranjeet: Here are three key takeaways.

1) The virtuous cycle we presented at the beginning is so important. Before anything else, understand who you’re targeting, how you’re improving their life, what they care about. Why should they trust you and what are your proof points? Doing so will require time and it’s a lot harder than you think it’s going to be. But when you do, it will give you much greater leverage on the things you spend hard dollars on later.

2) Know who you’re talking to. Understand what their life looks like with and without you and without your competitors. What keeps them up at night? Where do they see themselves in five years? What are their career ambitions? How can you help them solve bigger problems that will give them a win in their organization and help them get where they want to go? This should come through in the content you create and the blogs you write, even in the way your sales pitch decks and demos work.

3) Write two articles a month. Start this well before your first launch or funding announcement. This is a way to crystallize your own thoughts: here’s the problem I’m solving; here’s why my approach is different; here’s how this could revolutionize things that matter to my target persona. I am a big proponent on writing one’s own blog, then syndicating it. Do a digest version of it for LinkedIn, or a month later repost it somewhere with appropriate backlinks so you don’t get dinged by Google. This starts building your SEO authority and is a great way to test your message. You can see what’s resonating and where you got more visits and more engagement.

Watch the Webinar Recording for the Entire Discussion

The post Marketing Your Way to Series B appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Hi, I’m Lisa Ames with a Norwest Nowcast about the one question every marketer should be able to answer off the top of their head.

So the question is: if your CEO or board member came to you and gave you an extra $100,000 that you weren’t expecting, how would you deploy those dollars? What would you spend it on? And why?

In these times when budgets are getting squeezed, the question can actually be flipped. And what you’re probably hearing right now is, ‘hey, if we were to reduce your budget by $100,000 (or fill in the blank on the amount), how would you save?’

If your CEO or board member came to you and gave you an extra $100,000 that you weren’t expecting, how would you deploy those dollars?

And so let’s ground our answer in a couple of things. First, clearly, we need to know our data. We need to know what channels are underperforming and performing. We need to know our conversion rates to the funnel, our close rates, because that’s going to inform our decision first and foremost.

Maybe what’s less obvious is our relationships with the sales team and even the CFO. The sales team, those SDRs that are calling on your leads, you want to know what gets them excited, what can they convert the fastest and the best?

And the relationship with the CFO is important because they can help model certain outcomes. They have line of sight on where the business is headed. And so having a trusted relationship with them is gonna go a long way too.

And then finally, trust your gut as a marketer. You probably have been doing this for a while. You’ve seen the patterns over a number of years, and you know where your investments are best spent and where you can cut.

And so what I want to know from you is what questions do you feel like you should know off the top of your head as a marketer? And can you share them in the comments so we can help other companies and other marketers succeed?

Thank you.

The post The Pop Quiz Every Marketing Leader Should Ace appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

After three months in the marketing operating executive role at Norwest, here are three tips I found myself sharing more than once with Norwest portfolio companies. (And by the way, these enterprise marketing tips are applicable to both early and later-stage companies.)

First tip: investing in RevOps and marketing ops will improve your pipeline efficiency.

Does any of this sound familiar?

• Your teams disagree on the definition of an MQL. So, for example, your marketing team is sending leads to sales and sales has no idea why they’re getting them and they don’t think that the leads are any good.
• Or maybe your marketing org has no way of measuring in the aggregate what percentage of leads are being accepted by your SDR and your AEs.
• Or maybe your sales team is developing their target account list in a silo, and they’re not being given data that shows an account heatmap to measure things like firmographic information of the account and previous engagement within that account.

These are all often symptoms that your marketing and your sales teams’ efforts could be better integrated. And RevOps can help with that. So where do you start? You can start with mapping the entire lead lifecycle, and the lead criteria from first touch and awareness through to a closed deal. And then you map what data needs to be passed along to each team along the way so that each function can work more efficiently to produce better outcomes and progressing leads through the funnel.

Second tip: ABM is probably right for you if you’re an enterprise marketer, but don’t buy the technology just yet.

Before you purchase an ABM platform, you can document your strategy and you can get started without adding another piece of tech.

So, for starters, you can get really clear on your ideal customer profile and make sure that your demand gen, your SDR teams, and your AEs all understand who that ICP is and agree to it. And you can build your target account list from there.

Then you can align on your KPIs. Why are you doing ABM? It could be to improve velocity through your sales funnel. So maybe you want to accelerate how quickly deals close and shorten that window. Or maybe you want to increase the number of the percentage of deals that are closed-won. Or maybe you need to improve the number of net new logos that are coming into your pipeline. So, whatever those KPIs are, that’s going to help you with developing your plan to prosecute into those accounts.

And when you develop that plan, you need to do it hand in hand with your sales team. And you can start to operationalize all of this in your CRM without buying any new technology to start with.

And third: don’t underestimate the power of marketing and SDR alignment.

I’m going to end here on a little story. One of our portfolio companies saw a 50 percent month-over-month lift in new sales-qualified meetings during the month of August. And if you have been around the block with demand gen for a while, you know that August is typically a really slow month – usually the second slowest month of the year outside of December. And how did they do this?

They did this with the marketing team working really closely with the SDR team and surfacing warm accounts to the SDRs during their campaigns and then working with the SDRs on the outreach messaging to those accounts. So, it’s never a bad idea to coordinate your demand gen and your SDR teams’ efforts and I promise you it will always result in better outcomes.

So if any of this sounds familiar, tell me what you think in the comments and I look forward to hearing from you.

The post 3 Enterprise Marketing Hacks for Startups appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Maybe it’s time to work with a PR professional. One of the best ways to sabotage your launch or funding news is to issue a press release and call it a day. Or try to guess the media appetite for your news. The media landscape has been tricky to read for the past two years. But who do you hire? A consultant? A small agency? A big brand agency? It can be a daunting and time-intensive search if you haven’t gone down this road before.

First things first, think about your options:

• The big connected network. A larger agency has bigger teams of people who can support various aspects of your digital marketing, advertising and PR strategy—from analyst and media relations to social media and graphic design to influencer marketing and ad buys. The added convenience of the “one-stop-shop” and access to expertise also means more overhead and usually higher prices for the people staffing your account. This is usually a better option for companies that have a big consumer story to tell across multiple platforms, or are farther along in their journey and may be thinking about going public. There are some other considerations when choosing an agency, and more specifically your account team. Although the agency may have worked with a client in the same or similar industry, that doesn’t mean the people on your account team will be that team. Also try to get a feel for agency turnover and how they will handle shifts in the account team if a key member leaves.
• The expert team. A boutique agency may have more specialty in your industry, a more senior team with the experience to hit the ground running and get you across the finish line. Plus, billing rates may not be as high for the top talent as they would be in a big agency. However, boutique agencies still have some drawbacks. If you are looking for that “one-stop-shop,” size can be a limiting factor. Similar to a larger agency, you’ll want to understand who is assigned to your account, the rate of employee turnover as well as how they will handle changes to your team. If you are comparing a boutique agency with a consultant, you may be looking at a higher price point to support a team of people working on your business.
• The team of one. Consultants tend to be more cost-effective than agency partners and a smart route for early-stage companies just forming their baseline PR program. A more senior consultant can offer strategy and guidance while an executer can jump in and provide tactical arms and legs until you are ready to hire an agency. But with consultants, you are limited to one person’s time and talent. As a result, it may take longer to get a program off the ground, unless they are able to bring in other consultants to complement the work they are doing. Keep in mind, with that approach comes more people that you will be responsible for managing.

Bottom Line: If you don’t have the time, budget or human capital to devote to managing an agency, then a consultant or small boutique with a strong account lead may be your best choice. If you are running a later stage venture or one that is about to take off, then a mid-size or larger agency may be a better choice—particularly if you are going to be managing broad digital efforts and want everything under one umbrella.

Here are a few more questions to ask yourself before hiring a PR partner:

• What is my budget? For first-time founders especially, budgeting for PR—whether it’s one announcement or a longer-term engagement––can feel overwhelming. If you already know what your budget is, share it with your potential partner so they can cater the program to your needs. If you do not know your budget, ask a trusted peer in your network or advisor to get a ballpark range. You can also ask your prospective PR partner to propose a budget based on the scope of your project or overall PR needs. If you go this route, keep in mind that different interpretations of your needs could result in vastly different proposals. Be as clear and precise as possible in creating a scope of work so that your partner can put together an accurate proposal.
• Do I need a specialty firm? Not necessarily. Find a partner who knows your business, but remember that when you are defining a new market you may need a partner who understands the industry and can connect the dots to help reporters and analysts see why they should cover you. For example, someone who understands AI or data science may be enough—they don’t necessarily need experience in your particular application of the technology. Ask who their relevant clients are—whether it’s by industry or stage of company. Get a feel for their level of experience and authenticity. And most important, make sure there is chemistry and mutual respect between you and the team working on your account.
• What if I don’t think I’m ready for an agency? Sometimes, especially if you are not well versed in PR, it may make sense to bring on a professional who can help you with your messaging, strategy and execution—even before you hire an agency. This doesn’t make your story less desirable; in fact, most journalists care more about the pitch they receive than the agency that pitched them. Consultants can go a long way for an early-stage company that may not have a steady cadence of news. Ideally you will find someone who is willing to work with you on a project basis, or by campaign, and doesn’t require an ongoing retainer.
• What if we’re about to go raise a new round of funding or file on an exchange? If you’re fundraising or staring down an IPO and haven’t done PR before, always check with your legal counsel to make sure you aren’t overstepping solicitation boundaries. But if you’ve been out in the media, and as long as legal approves, then a few thought leadership pieces could go a long way. New customer announcements, milestone roundups on the past year’s events and even data insights pulled from your customers’ experiences can demonstrate company momentum.
• We have a series of new customers to announce, is now the time to bring on an agency? You may be ready to hire a boutique or mid-size firm if you’re seeing a steady flow of news on a consistent basis (even quarterly is worth consideration), your PR projects are timed closer together, and you have the budget and/or team in place to afford and manage outsourcing some of your activity. As your news funnel expands, you may need assistance getting through the approval cycles with your customers, and a seasoned PR partner can help you with that. They can also help you craft a bigger story with your announcement series, rather than launching a barrage of individual releases. Look for a strategic partner who will give you the most personalized attention, even on a smaller budget. You want someone strategic, who doesn’t just check boxes and who can see the bigger picture without you having to paint the landscape.

At some point, every company needs help with their communications program. Maybe it’s your first announcement, or maybe the rhythm of news is becoming more regular and you’re ready to invest in a PR partner for the long haul. Once you find the partner you’re looking for, you can watch your company take off.

Next installment: how to set goals and expectations with your new PR partner (coming soon)

About the author

Theresa Maloney has managed public relations campaigns through highs and lows for more than two decades, including Ebay’s infamous IPO, WebMD’s acquisition spree, the rise of eHealth during the Great Recession, and pivoting Engine Yard to address market consolidation. She founded and runs Cogenta Communications, a boutique agency that works with early-stage startups and high-growth ventures on company introductions, pivots and strategic initiatives to get noticed in a dynamic news environment.

The post How to Hire Your First PR Consultant or Agency appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

It’s also an exciting decision! Selecting the right marketing leader can rapidly propel your business forward. No matter your funding stage or how big your org is now, the principles outlined here will prepare you to evaluate marketing talent and make your match.

1) Learn the 5 marketing skills and 4 leadership styles.

Several years back, I worked at a rapidly growing company that hired an eager, but inexperienced operations manager. He frequently misrepresented engineering capacity. The mistake? He looked at every engineer on the team as interchangeable. The R&D leadership had to teach him that a devops engineer could not do the same work as a front-end UX developer!

Similarly, marketing is not a monolith. The function spans a nuanced set of skills. And knowing and demonstrating marketing expertise is not as binary as programming languages (which you either know or you don’t), making it harder to distinguish the difference in what you need in that “head of marketing” seat. Don’t worry, we’re going to break it down for you.

Marketing acumen can be grouped into 5 distinct functions. Most seasoned marketing leaders “major” in one of these skill sets and “minor” in a couple of others:

In addition to the technical know-how, every leader brings their own leadership style to the role:

Think of the above like cards where you pick a couple cards from the “skills” pile and one card from the “leadership style” pile.

Skill Sets + Leadership Style = Candidate Persona

As you select and pair cards from each pile, you get a “mix-and-match” matrix of personas. There’s no one pairing that’s always “the best choice.” You have to pick the right marketing persona for what you need at this stage in your business.

2) Establish what your business needs in a marketing leader.

Now that you know the various marketing skill sets and leadership styles, it’s time to “pick and choose” cards from each pile. Do you need a Hands-On Demand Gen Marketer? Or a Team-Building Product Marketer? Or maybe a Cross-Functional Content Marketer?

You may be thinking, “Why do I have to choose? I need a well-rounded leader who can do all these things!” I promise you, even if the terms “guru,” “ninja,” or “wizard” appear in their CV, there is no magical marketer who can put a strong checkmark next to each of those boxes above.

So—much like dating—self-awareness is key to creating a successful match! Answering these questions can help you document the type of marketing leadership your org needs at this stage of your growth:

1. 1. Who will the marketing hire report into?
   2. What talent and skills are represented on your team today?
   3. How mature is your business, and where are you going next?
   4. How well defined is your go-to-market strategy?
   5. What are the most pressing initiatives you need them to lead?

Let’s look at a few examples to see how the answers to these questions can influence the persona your business needs:

Scenario A: Early-Stage Companies

Norwest’s portfolio services team has had the honor of working with many founders on their first marketing hire. We often hear they’re ready for marketing because they need to start filling pipeline. A demand gen marketer is naturally the profile they need, right? Not necessarily. We work together to take stock of how well established their go-to-market strategy is first.

Ramping up demand gen will fail if you haven’t demonstrated success in onboarding a few customers already. Or if you haven’t clearly documented your market segments, your core value prop, and your positioning in the market and against competitors. To get that right, you need a leader experienced in product marketing.

Think you need a demand-gen marketer? Not so fast! If you have no messaging & positioning platform, personas, ideal customer profile, demo script, or enablement collateral, you need a leader experienced in product marketing to build these foundations first.

And at these earliest stages, you need a candidate who’s comfortable rolling up their sleeves and doing the work solo or with the help of one or two others. They need to be resourceful.

For this type of company you may need: Product Marketing + Hands-On Doer

Scenario B: Positioning for Scale

Or maybe you’re further along. You may be $15 million in ARR and targeting 75-100% YoY growth over the next couple years to reach $50 million. At this stage, many companies realize that what they need out of marketing has grown beyond a scrappy leader and skeleton team.

Sometimes the hands-on head of marketing who you hired early on can grow with you and become more of a team-builder. But it may be time to evaluate bringing in new talent who has the gravitas from experience with this stage of growth.

One of the trickiest considerations here is leveling. Do you bring in a VP or CMO? Reporting structure impacts this decision, as does the type of leadership persona you’re going to hire. At this stage, you may need a gregarious, vision-casting, experienced marketing leader. Many who fit this mold will expect the CMO title, reporting into the CEO.

Don’t expect a 2x CMO to join a team where they won’t have a seat at the table with executive leadership.

And a visionary marketing leader with a successful record of scaling companies of your size should be part of the strategic fabric of your executive team. They won’t be content reporting to a CRO who has never done the job of marketing. So if you currently have marketing reporting into your CRO, or are exploring this reporting structure, you have a couple of choices:

1. Reevaluate the profile of candidate you need. If your CRO is capable of developing the go-to-market strategy across the end-to-end customer acquisition and lifecycle, then a vision-casting marketing leader may not be the best fit.

Or

2. Adjust your expectations about team structure. If your CRO isn’t able to set the vision for the marketing org, maybe this is time to change the executive team structure to bring in the marketing talent at the C-Level.

If you find yourself in position 1) above, which persona should you consider? At $15 million in ARR, you’ve found repeat success in revenue generation and are looking to scale. There may be friction to overcome in how pipeline is created, whether that’s in the process that exists today or needing to enter into new markets.

In this scenario, you might need a VP-level leader who can dig in to understand what has been working, the opportunities to create efficiency across teams, and how to generate ideas for new growth tactics.

For this type of company, you may need: Demand Gen/Acquisition (with Marketing Operations secondary) + Cross-Functional Collaborator

Scenario C: Preparing for Exit

As a later stage company, you probably already have experience hiring marketing leaders. At this point, maybe you’ve had CMOs previously, and you’re looking for the next candidate to join the team. Or maybe this is your first C-Level marketing hire. You need someone who will help build and execute a plan for IPO in 2-3 years. You also expect to fundraise once more before then.

A strong content marketer may also have deep experience in branding. But they may not. Be mindful of what you need before you start interviewing candidates. Rank what’s important to you and identify the problems you need to solve now.

Here you need a leader with executive presence. This leader will help you master the story you want to tell to the market and investors. Maybe the market perceives you too narrowly, and you need to change that perception. Here branding and communications are both important, but you need someone who can work industry and media relations to disrupt the narrative.

For this type of company, you may need:
Content & Communications (with Branding secondary) + Vision Caster

3) Evaluate the fit of your candidates.

You’ve looked in the mirror and done some soul searching. You know what you need. Now it’s time to build the candidate spec and start interviewing.

Here are some interview questions that can help you evaluate the candidate:

Interview Questions to Determine Leadership Style

Hands-On Leader:

• • When was the last time you were on a team of fewer than 3 people?
  • Talk me through the process you went through when…creating your content calendar and writing, setting up a campaign, building a demo script, etc. (Here you want to see what steps and details they can speak to. Did they do the research, discovery, technical pieces themselves?)
  • Have you ever decided to let go of an agency and take the work on yourself instead? Tell me about it. (I’ve found multiple hands-on leaders who have experiences like this. They realize it’s more efficient and higher quality for them to learn the skill in-house. They enjoy the challenge of teaching themselves new systems and skills.)

Visionary Leader:

• • What experience do you have with category-creation?
  • Have you ever taken a company from $50 million to $100 million? How do you do it?
  • Tell me about a time you had to make a risky decision that did not pan out? (We all want to hear the success stories, but willingness to take risks that are not sure bets can show comfort with ambiguity, creativity, and entrepreneurship.)

Team-Builder & Coach:

• • Have you ever taken a company from $5 million to $50 million? How did you know who to hire when?
  • Can you tell me about someone who reported to you that has moved up into expanded roles?
  • Tell me about a time when you had the wrong fit on your team, whether org structure or someone in a role that didn’t suit what you needed? What did you do about it?

Cross-Functional Collaborator:

• • Describe your process for developing…messaging, campaigns, a new brand, etc. (It can be anything. Here you want to hear if they include internal research with stakeholders in their answer.
  • Do they talk to sales, product, customer success, other leaders?)
  • Tell me about a time where you were met with disagreement to a proposed plan. What did you do, and what was the outcome?
  • Have you ever led an initiative that required you to manage a project team of people who did not report to you? Tell me about that experience.
  • How have you built trust and collaboration with sales teams?

Interview Questions to Determine Marketing Skills Fit

Product Marketing:

• • Show examples of messaging, positioning, market analysis. Talk me through the process that went into developing them?
  • Do you have examples of where your positioning missed the mark? How did you know? How did you fix it?
  • Tell me what you think of the messaging on our website.
  • What does a successful product launch look like? How do you know it was successful?

Demand Generation:

• • How do you measure success? (Is it just leads? Or are they specifically tying their answers back to revenue creation?)
  • Tell me about a time you executed a failed campaign? Why did it fail?
  • How has demand generation changed in the last 5-10 years? How did you adapt to that change?
  • What are your thoughts on marketing attribution?

Content Marketing & Communications:

• • How do you build your content marketing strategy? (You want to hear how plugged in they are to your audience, how they identify topics that matter, and if they are KPI-driven.)
  • Tell me about a PR campaign you’re really proud of. Why do you think it was so successful?
  • Tell me about a PR campaign that flopped. What could have been done differently?
  • What new content formats are gaining traction? Do you think it’s relevant to our audience? (Here you want to see if they have a pulse on trends, but that they’re not going to apply fads without a strategy.)

Branding:

• • On resume pre-screen, you want to see if they have worked for enviable, well-known brands before and what their role was in establishing them. Many brand marketers will also have a mix of agency and in-house experience.
  • Tell me about the process of making XYZ brand into what it is today?
  • How would you help us identify our brand essence and establish it?
  • How should we think about measuring the impact of our brand? How do we know what we’re doing is working?

Marketing Operations:

• • What tech stack have you worked with in the past?
  • Tell me about a time you’ve had to cut the budget. What adjustments did you make to systems and processes? Why?
  • Tell me about a time when you led an initiative that brought two or more functions together. What did that look like?

4) Lean on your marketing advisors.

Trust your marketing experts! Even before you get to the interview stage, reach out to your portfolio services team or your own advisory network, and start a conversation about what you need. An experienced marketer can act as your “matchmaker.” Because there is no one-size-fits-all typecast you should hire, an advisor will help you with the process of self-reflection, writing the job spec, and pulling sample profiles of candidates to give your recruiting team.

And give yourself enough time! The process of finding the right candidate is going to take months, not weeks. If you rush and compromise, you’re likely to end up disappointed. You may lose months or even years if you hire a marketing leader who isn’t the fit for what you need right now. Taking the time to find the right match is worth the payoff in performance.

The post How to Hire a Marketing Leader (When You’re Not a Marketer) appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Marketing and sales executives from the Norwest portfolio joined the conversation, adding insightful comments and posing pertinent questions.

Our discussion focused on the emerging practice of RevOps (revenue operations) and three ways it can be leveraged to build an integrated marketing function:

1. Owning the customer journey
2. Creating an analytics framework
3. Driving operational efficiency

Following are highlights and key takeaways from the discussion. You can watch my entire conversation with Crissy at the bottom of this post.

Crissy’s insights and advice can also be heard regularly on her podcast fwd:thinking.

Owning the customer journey

(Beginning at 07:14 in the recording)

LA: What do you mean by owning the customer journey, and why is it important?

CS: The customer journey simply means the experience a customer or prospect has during the process of researching, evaluating, purchasing, and using your product or service. The customer journey today is very different from what it was in the past. Sales calls, telemarketing, direct mail, and trade shows have been replaced – in whole or in part – by email, webinars, on-line ordering, and self-administered product trials.

As the tools of marketing and sales change, it’s essential that we understand what the journey through this process looks like from the customer’s perspective. Once you have captured a person’s interest, it’s important that the journey is a seamless one, because that will increase your conversion rates.

LA: That makes sense. So, who owns the journey?

CS: That’s precisely the problem in many companies. Various teams and individuals are involved in different aspects of the journey – sales reps, SDRs, campaign planners, content creators, etc. On top of that is the alphabet soup of frameworks and tools that are used, such as ABM, PLG, CRM and the like. But seldom is there any one person or team that takes ownership for ensuring that all these parts comprise a coherent, strategic whole. That’s one of the roles played by RevOps (aka revenue operations).

While it’s possible for RevOps to be an identifiable team or function, it’s primarily a best practice – a shared commitment by marketing, sales, and other involved parties to coordinate their strategies and tactics in pursuit of delivering a seamless customer journey that efficiently increases close rates and grows revenue. Think of RevOps as air traffic control – monitoring and coordinating the activities of multiple teams to ensure they don’t collide and that they reach their destinations.

Think of RevOps as air traffic control – monitoring and coordinating the activities of multiple teams to ensure they don’t collide and that they reach their destinations.

LA: What’s a simple first step that someone can take to begin implementing RevOps?

CS: It’s simple: documentation. We often find that people don’t even know what the customer journey looks like today, because they’re only involved in one or two steps of a multi-stage process. It’s a common problem of people working in silos. So, a helpful first step is for someone to start the process of documenting the journey as it exists today, including the people and technology that are involved at every step. Meet with your colleagues in other functions, learn how their processes work, and document your findings in a visual roadmap of the customer journey. Then, gather round the table together to uncover the opportunities for tighter integration.

If your company is like many we see, this roadmap will have multiple paths, some of which intersect with others, reach dead ends, or circle back to a place the customer has already visited. These are warning signs that the journey isn’t the seamless one you want which not only creates inefficiencies throughout the funnel, but ultimately reflects negatively on your brand in the eyes of your prospects and customers.

Creating this map can be a strong first step toward closer collaboration between multiple teams. We saw this recently when we helped a client create a customer journey map. Seeing it laid out visually, the client quickly grasped where the problems lay.

Creating an analytics framework

(Beginning at 21:10 in the recording)

LA: What’s an analytics framework, and how does it fit with RevOps?

CS: An analytics framework is a shared set of reports that everyone can use to answer 80 percent of the routine questions that arise. Everyone agrees that what’s important must be measured. So far, so good. But things start to break down when you must identify the specific measurements to be tracked. When everyone has their own metrics, silos form quickly. And when the inevitable time arises that the CEO or a board member asks a basic question about the business, they will get two or three different answers, depending on who they’re talking to. [Raise your hand if this has happened to you…my hand is up!]

This doesn’t have to be complicated. Typically, we’re talking about familiar dashboards available from Salesforce, HubSpot or whatever CRM/MAS system you use. It can even be a simple spreadsheet. Most of the fields are going to be related in some way to revenue. The point is: everyone across sales and marketing should have a single set of goals and metrics – drawn from a single data source based on a unified set of criteria. Then, teams can collaborate on what steps can be taken to accelerate progress. This can and should be in addition to any function-specific reports you generate within sales and marketing.

The more teams rely on these shared metrics, the more often common questions can be answered on a self-serve basis. Lots of queries arise near quarter-end, and almost always they can be answered by looking at an existing piece of data. The key is to map metrics to the customer journey and make the measurements relevant to the teams that can help create a seamless journey.

Everyone across sales and marketing should have a single set of goals and metrics – drawn from a single data source based on a unified set of criteria.

Driving operational efficiency

(Beginning at 35:40 in the recording)

LA: If growing revenue is on everyone’s mind, controlling expenses is also a high priority. How does your approach address this need?

CS: Working in silos and at cross-purposes are enemies of efficiency. So, the steps we have already talked about – breaking down silos, eliminating program overlaps, sharing a common set of goals and metrics, focusing on the customer journey – will also contribute to efficiency.

Being strategic and cautious about hiring is also important. Startup companies are first going to have a CRM system; that’s foundational. And then probably a sales operations person, followed by marketing ops. In-house resources can be supplemented by agencies as well.

Another avenue to pursue is marketing automation. With much of the sales process moving online, there are opportunities to remove the human element from certain steps without disrupting the customer journey. For example, if a prospect wants to sign up for a webinar, or a product trial, or obtain certain information, all of those can be done on a self-serve basis.

Any assessment of efficiency, of course, requires measurement. And measurement leads to a very tricky subject: attribution. Who or what is responsible for the success (or failure) of a sales effort?

LA: This is huge. I’ve been grappling with questions around attribution my entire career.

CS: So have I. You hear the same arguments over and over: “Marketing is trying to take credit for sales wins.” “Marketing has to prove its worth, so measure everything.”

These debates ignore one critical fact: a successful sales motion does not have a single success factor. It’s a collaborative process that involves several steps, several decisions by the customer, and several forks in the road.

LA: But companies become obsessed with identifying the one thing that won the deal, because they assume that if you can isolate that factor, then you can throw more dollars and people to replicate it, thus guaranteeing more success.

CS: Which of course is a fallacy. It takes multiple teams to move from opportunity to close. And no two customers are identical. The danger of an infatuation with attribution is that it can quickly deteriorate into finger-pointing and blame. Which is the antithesis of what we want: marketing and sales working in alignment.

The danger of an infatuation with attribution is that it can quickly deteriorate into finger-pointing and blame.

I like to say that RevOps is about improving, not proving. We’re trying to learn what to do better, not prove that any one step in the process was responsible for success.

Key takeaways

LA: Those are great insights, Crissy. Many of the comments and questions we received during this webinar have focused on the question: what can I do today; how can I start?

CS: I’d point to three things:

1. Start documenting the customer journey, which will identify areas where immediate improvements can be made and will foster collaboration with other stakeholders.
2. Identify the core set of metrics – based on a single data source and unified criteria – that every sales and marketing function can use to track progress.
3. Recalibrate your expectations about the role of marketing attribution and increase your understanding of its opportunities and limitations. It’s about accuracy, not precision.

About the Author

Lisa Ames is Norwest’s CMO and Operating Executive. She leverages her more than 20 years of B2B SaaS marketing experience working shoulder-to-shoulder with portfolio companies to help them thrive.

The post Three Ways to Integrate Marketing and Sales with RevOps appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

“If the board gave you an extra $1 million today, how would you spend it?”

This is a go-to thought exercise that Norwest Chief Marketing Officer and Operating Executive Lisa Ames uses to evaluate how well marketing leaders understand their marketing programs. Any marketer should be able to answer this question off the top of their head if they’re close to their data and attuned to their key drivers.

For many marketing leaders today, that hypothetical scenario has morphed into a very real challenge as boards instead ask: “What would you do if you suddenly had to reduce spend by 25% or more?”

In a short time, SaaS-modeled businesses of all sizes and growth stages have faced a massive market shift. Imperatives have changed from ‘grow-at-all-costs’ to a new focus on ‘capital efficiency’ that can create durability in the business and avoid retraction in valuations. A more potent ‘Re-‘ word—recession—is also top-of-mind as companies look to decrease burn rates and extend the runway of their current reserves.

History has shown that most companies’ knee-jerk reaction is to decimate marketing spend when facing economic uncertainty. One recent survey had 68% of SaaS investor respondents recommending cuts to marketing as a priority. But, just as you can’t spend your way to growth, you also can’t cut your way to resilience and long-term success.

Just as you can’t spend your way to growth, you also can’t cut your way to resilience and long-term success.

So what can marketing leaders do NOW to adjust their marketing efforts to support and drive the future of their business in a balanced way? Put the following three marketing budget optimization strategies into practice:

Reduce

Very few companies can continue investing at 2021 levels. Even if you are in that minority, there’s always room for improvement in bottom-line results. Marketers need to embrace the fact that spending reductions are a reality. Now is the time to protect your growth-critical budgets and assess where you can trim out activities that aren’t yielding results.

Every marketer should have a handle on metrics and be able to quickly assess their strategies and programs to identify the winners and the losers. If you don’t, clear your calendar for a couple of days until you do. Make that honest assessment, even if it means cutting out passion projects. If you don’t make the decision to cut, someone else will make it for you. And you don’t want to leave that decision to someone who doesn’t know your data and program priorities as well as you do.

By proactively reducing spend on activities that are not driving results, it will also demonstrate your understanding of the current market situation and reinforce your commitment and role in supporting the viability of the company.

Reuse

Content and inbound marketing can be game-changers in terms of business scalability. However, depending on the competitiveness of your market and how long you’ve been building your program, you may still be far off from the inflection point that has a reliable stream of qualified leads moving from marketing into your sales pipeline.

Because of the long-tail nature of inbound, marketers will get pressure to cut investment in content, which can be time and resource intensive to develop. Even worse, if you’ve been surviving off traffic and low quality leads from paid efforts while you build your inbound program, pressure to cut both paid programs and content will practically eliminate your top-of-funnel activity. When that happens, it has a cascading effect through your funnel, fly-wheel or any growth model you’ve been working to get in place.

Marketing is often a practice of creating momentum. We like to think that our prospects and customers clamor for our content. The reality is that each touchpoint we execute only engages a fraction of our market. That is why reach and frequency are so critical to marketing and sales success. We can’t expect that our prospects see every email or social post. And your previous investment in these areas represent highly cost-effective ways to sustain your marketing efforts.

Here are some top ways to resuscitate your existing content:

• Email Marketing: Re-deploy emails to those who didn’t open it the first time, or net-new contacts that have been added to your list since the first send.
• Social Media: Social media is another efficient place to reuse previous efforts. High performing social posts can be reused to engage a different set of followers scrolling through their feeds.
• Blog Posts: One overlooked strategy is to update old blog posts, which can elevate your SEO profile for search and give content new life that attracts new eyeballs when shared across channels. Other cost-effective ways to repurpose content is to chunk premium content out into blog posts, create blog post versions of case studies or repurpose webinars into Q&A content.

Reinforce

GTM has been the acronym du jour for revenue teams for the last couple of years. Appropriately, the right emphasis is being placed on go-to-market as a cross-functional endeavor for business. It’s about coordination of activities across the revenue roadmap from marketing to sales and post-sales customer success teams. When considering current pressures to cut spending, it is critical to understand the impacts across the revenue continuum.

As marketers consider where they can make the most impact with a reduced budget, they need to consider ways to fortify the other critical components of their GTM. One example includes supporting sales with enablement tools or equipping them with nurture content to keep prospects engaged.

Another important strategy is customer marketing. Growth through expansion and wallet share of current customers has a lower cost and barrier to entry. Demonstrating how you are retooling marketing spend to support and amplify success of the company’s other departments will help that marketing budget be seen as more essential, and, in the end, it will be more effective.

Marketing Budget Optimization Can Improve Your Efforts

Don’t view the current economic pressure as a reduction in effort. Instead, view it as an opportunity to optimize your efforts. Every healthy business searches for continuous improvement. That point is really at the heart of the current ask. At some point, every business will have an expectation for sustainable and profitable growth. Balancing marketing investment with the needs of the business—while letting marketing shine in the critical brand- and sales-building role it plays in that equation—should always be a focus.

Don’t view the current economic pressure as a reduction in effort. Instead, view it as an opportunity to optimize your efforts.

Complacency is the enemy of growth. Now is your chance to make the strategic moves that solidify how and where marketing will contribute to enduring growth for your business.

About the author: Matt Hensler is an executive consultant and principal at inswing, a management consulting firm specializing in ‘unparking’ high potential projects that have been stalled or put off due to bandwidth and resource constraints. Matt’s extensive background in branding, marketing, and customer experience helps organizations strike a balance between the interests of their business and their customers in order to create growth for everyone. Matt has worked with global brands like GE Healthcare, Gainsight, The Toro Company, Praxair, and more.

The post How Marketing Teams Can Get Ahead of Budget Cuts to Build Resilience appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Despite the slow down, startups are still taking life, and people are still writing about them. After all, some of the most iconic businesses—Oracle, Ebay and Airbnb—were conceived during down cycles. Unfortunately, the media doesn’t only cover success stories. Startup launches and funding news is now competing with layoffs, lowered valuations, company shutdowns and quarterly slumps for precious real estate in the top business outlets. Still, amid all this doom and gloom, companies like ChiselStrike, with just $7 million in seed funding, and Nanopath, with a $10 million Series A, found themselves in SiliconANGLE and TechCrunch.

How did they make that happen? Thoughtfully and with the utmost intention. Because your chances of getting a solid story at launch are compromised by every misstep you take along the way—especially when there is so much catastrophic news to cover.

Here are tips to avoid four of the most common missteps founders take when launching in an uncertain or pessimistic market:

1. Don’t do the announcement yourself, or ask an engineer or developer to get the news out on a wire only.

There’s power in knowing what you don’t know. You may have a few media contacts from a previous company or want one of your engineers or developers to handle marketing, but unless you work with the media daily, your announcement is best left to an expert. In today’s complex media environment, I wouldn’t ask an engineer or developer to issue an announcement any more than I’d want the responsibility of writing a line of code. It’s not that they can’t do it; but their time could certainly be better spent on development rather than figuring out how a wire service operates and which reporters are going to take interest in your news. If you don’t have someone on your team with that insight, start looking for a partner four to six weeks before you announce.

Tip if you’re short on time: The less time you have to find someone, the more important it is to ask around and work with someone you can trust. Referrals are a great way to find a right-fit agency or consultant. Take a week to talk to a few people and hire the one you have good chemistry with and who has handled similar recent announcements and understands how the media is working.

2. Don’t set an arbitrary date for your news, and get it out there as soon as you can.

The fact is news is only as good as the story you tell, and if you can’t find someone to tell your story then your audience is limited to the small ecosystem that surrounds your company. Give yourself, and the PR partner you choose, time to determine the best media targets, a solid description of your company and position in the market, a press release that includes all the important information, and a concise way to tell your story to a reporter who will care. It’s an anomaly to pull all of this together in a week and get the result you are looking for.

3. Don’t expect a story from the same reporter who covered your friend’s fintech startup when your company is in the developer tech space.

Most reporters tend to have a beat or general industry they cover. You’ll want to do your homework and understand which reporters cover your industry. Many news organizations have had high turnover this year, so navigating virtual newsrooms is harder than ever. The right PR partner can help you reach the right person for the story.

4. Don’t give the reporter news under embargo two days before you plan to put your press release on the wire.

Even with fewer companies getting funded than in months past, we’re still seeing a record-breaking number of new companies come to market. Today’s news environment is dynamic, and it’s also more cynical than in past quarters, often focusing on uncertainty—after all, people flock to headlines announcing which stocks to sell, which companies to back, and where not to work if they just got laid off.

Today you’re competing against other companies for both good and bad news. Give the reporter enough time to consider your story and understand your angle. Is there a macrotrend driving demand for your solution? Why does your company matter now? The worst thing you can do is tell a reporter they have 24 hours to consider your story or you’re moving on because the news goes on the wire in two days. Instead, give yourself at least eight to 10 business days to “sell your story.” Some high-demand outlets may want as many as three or more weeks to settle on an exclusive if news volume is high, and even non-exclusive embargo pitches should allow more than a few days advance notice when possible. Factor in more time if your story is a harder sell (e.g., first-time founders, small seed round, no customer traction or product availability).

The media landscape has changed, but that’s not a surprise. News is cyclical. Follow these tips and you’ll avoid some of the common launch-time foibles that impede success.

If you’re thinking about hiring a PR partner, we’ll be diving into discovering when the time is right for an agency or consultant, and which is right for you in another blog. 

About the author

Theresa Maloney has managed public relations campaigns through highs and lows for more than two decades, including Ebay’s infamous IPO, WebMD’s acquisition spree, the rise of eHealth during the Great Recession, and pivoting Engine Yard to address market consolidation. She founded and runs Cogenta Communications, a boutique agency that works with early-stage startups and high-growth ventures on company introductions, pivots and strategic initiatives to get noticed in a dynamic news environment.

The post 4 Tips to Get Your Launch Attention When Gloomy Headlines Are the New Clickbait appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

We sat down with Lisa to learn more about her business philosophy, how she views Norwest’s brand, and her passion for mentorship.

How did you come to Norwest?

The opportunity to join the firm as an operating executive came to me at a time in my career when I was ready to switch gears, to use my years of marketing experience to help companies be more successful. I have worked with venture- and PE-backed B2B technology companies for more than 20 years, so I am very familiar with the dynamics and challenges of high-growth environments. Plus, I find so much satisfaction in being able to mentor people. At the same time, Norwest wanted to add to its ability to help portfolio companies build their brands and scale their businesses. So, my focus on demand generation and account-based marketing was very relevant.

Initially, it was the role of operating executive that got me to the door, so to speak. As I began collaborating with the people at Norwest, I was drawn into what I experienced as an extremely supportive, uncommonly kind, human-connected culture that also employed the smartest group of folks I’ve ever met. Those were the things that got me to walk through the door.

What are your top priorities as CMO?

I want to give Norwest the powerful brand it deserves. One of the things that struck me as I got to know everyone at the firm is that this is a group of people that achieves great things, yet they are humble and understated because they believe in doing the hard work more than getting credit for it.

I want to find a way to honor that humility while highlighting the stories of value we provide to our portfolio companies. Founders are our first priority, and we work together with them, side by side, throughout their journey. They can count on empathy, collaboration and unwavering commitment through the ups and downs of company building when interacting with Norwest.

Building trust is job one. At Norwest, we invest first in people, then in ideas and companies.

What excites you most about your dual role as CMO and operating executive?

The two roles are super integrated. As an operating executive, I work with numerous companies at once, with the goal of helping them optimize their marketing organizations, strategies, day-to-day practices, and resources. Although I’m there to mentor and guide them, I learn as much from them as they learn from me. So, every day I get the opportunity to take those insights and share them with other companies across the portfolio to help them succeed while bringing back the lessons and applying them to our marketing motion at Norwest. It’s all about making connections. I’m like a little bee, carrying pollen from plant to plant and allowing the ecosystem to flourish.

What are the key elements in Norwest’s brand?

In speaking with Norwest partners and leaders of portfolio companies to gather insights, the most consistent theme reflected back to us was this: in addition to providing capital, Norwest really leans in; we are known for our work ethic and dedication to helping our portfolio companies.

Norwest is a partner to the founders and other portfolio company leaders. We are in it together for the long haul, working side by side. We offer advice, apply our operating experience, serve as a sounding board, and make collaborative decisions at crucial junctures. I like to say that we let founders keep their hands on the reins while we join them in doing what they do best: growing their companies.

We use the term “invited guest” to describe our role, and it’s a fitting analogy. We don’t just show up with a bottle of wine for the dinner party. We are guests that help clear the table and do the dishes afterwards.

We work hard as advisors and board members, and we approach that work with quiet confidence. Think of us an Obi-Wan Kenobi, a Steve Kerr, or a Ruth Bader Ginsberg – more hustle, less hype.

Building trust is job one. At Norwest, we invest first in people, then in ideas and companies.

You also help drive Norwest’s ESG and DEI steering committee. What does that entail?

I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time focused on developing and measuring our ESG and DEI initiatives, which are high priorities for Norwest, and for me personally. As I got to know the firm and its rich legacy, it was clear that we’ve always believed in doing well by doing good. Now, we have formalized our commitment and are holding ourselves accountable to driving real change. We started to share our journey more publicly with the launch of our three DEI subgroups and Pledge to Action in June 2020 and our ESG policy in December 2021.

We are also investing in educating ourselves and our portfolio companies on how to develop ESG practices in their own businesses while embracing the reality that their number-one priority is building their products and finding a market. I want to help companies understand and believe that they can do both. Investing in ESG and DEI helps build more future-proof companies.

The most important thing we can do as a firm in this area is to start and maintain a conversation on these critical topics. There’s a lot of work still to be done; some of our companies are just now gaining an understanding of what ESG means while others are making everyday business decisions that create positive impact or minimize harm. So, we need to meet our audiences where they are.

Big change happens as a result of small, yet consistent turns of the dial. We started with baby steps and are still early in our maturity as a leader in ESG and DEI. We now have a set of accomplishments that we’re proud of and that we want to continue building on, both internally at Norwest and with our portfolio companies. For instance, we are incorporating language into our term sheets that speaks to our hope for continued values alignment with our companies.

This commitment to ESG and DEI is an example of the value we put on partnering with like-minded founders and CEOs. Ensuring that alignment from the start means we’re not demanding that they adopt certain ESG and DEI actions but supporting them on their journeys.

Tell us about your role as a mentor for Women in Revenue and Santa Clara University Bronco Venture Accelerator.

Both organizations hold values that align with mine and they generously offered me the opportunity to mentor their members. I have always been an advocate for women in business so it’s a natural fit for me to collaborate with Women in Revenue. With Santa Clara University, I work with entrepreneurs who are developing their ideas and turning them into viable products. I get so much energy from their enthusiasm, curiosity, and thirst for possibilities. Working with them gets me in the mindset of our target audience and helps me understand what founders and CEOs care about.

Ultimately, I think of any mentor relationship as a two-way exchange of value. I might bring more experience to the table, but they bring rookie smarts and fresh ideas that inspire me and open my mind to new perspectives. These are my formal channels for mentorship, and I also work one-on-one with several folks in my network, simply because they asked, and I’m motivated to help as many people as I can.

You call yourself a “business therapist” – how do you define that?

The cliche about leadership being a lonely job exists for a reason. Leadership can be messy. You’ve got people underneath you that expect you to have all the answers, and people above you that want the same. So, who can you talk to? Can’t go to your team to help you problem-solve since you are their leader and need to motivate and inspire them. Can’t ask your boss because sometimes your boss is part of the problem. Your therapist doesn’t have the broader business context; and your family is likely to see only your side. What you need is a business therapist.

Even though I coined the phrase partly tongue-in-cheek, it has struck a chord with people. Many of the leaders in our companies use me as that sounding board to bounce ideas around. I help them see situations from a different perspective. And I reassure them that they’re not crazy!

The value for companies is in having a thought partner, someone who understands the broader business context, but isn’t living the business day-to-day and thus can come at situations from a different altitude, without biases or emotional overlay. This is an aspect of my job that I find deeply gratifying and where I feel I can add value.

The post Meet Lisa Ames, Norwest Venture Partners’ First Chief Marketing Officer – a Consummate Connector appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

A significant factor driving rising CAC is the changes in privacy rules that have wreaked havoc on marketing departments everywhere. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), enacted in 2020 to protect privacy and consumer rights in the United States and GDPR in Europe, have limited marketers’ access to consumer databases and changed the rules on how they can identify and target potential new customers using their personal data.

Three weeks into 2022, there’s no let-up; and yet another new bill, the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, has been introduced to place greater restrictions on targeted ads.

These regulations, coupled with Apple’s privacy updates in April of 2021, have changed the game for marketers. Tools to reach targeted audiences are being taken away or are no longer effective. You can no longer allocate your budget to Facebook or Instagram and let the algorithm do the rest. This makes it very difficult for brands to land on a win-win CAC model.

We recently hosted a roundtable with our portfolio companies to help them walk the line between complying with new privacy rules and controlling CAC. Below we share our findings and advice for anyone reevaluating their digital marketing strategy in 2022.

Nobody’s Opting In

Marketers are already well aware, but it’s worth spelling out: The most significant event in digital advertising in years has been the roll-out of Apple iOS 14.5 in April of 2021. The updated iOS provided Apple users the option to block activity tracking from widely used apps like Facebook and Instagram.

It should be no surprise that only 5-15% of iPhone’s total global users opted in. This meant that the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) was no longer available to advertisers. As a result, they can no longer track the data required to deliver customized advertising with any precision. And with IDFA no longer accessible by apps and websites, clicks are only remembered for seven days.

A lot of this is taking place in the context of a broader privacy battle between Facebook and Apple. Apple is making privacy its core strategy, so they essentially have no incentive to make advertising driven by user data work well in the iOS ecosystem. Facebook’s model is exactly the reverse. Without access to user information, mobile apps like Facebook can’t gather crucial data they need to build customer profiles and sell advertising.

As a result of this change, marketing teams are virtually blind – unable to qualify, target, and convert the best leads. So how can they react?

The Challenges of Ad Spending

Let’s go channel by channel. What are the unique challenges with the various social media platforms?

Facebook

Today it’s a lot harder to be an advertiser on Facebook. Previously, marketers were content with allocating a budget to Facebook and letting the algorithm handle the rest, and the same approach applied to Instagram. But after 14.5, that strategy is completely outdated.

Without the IDFA data, Facebook is basically guessing about mobile users. The company can no longer target specific users that are clicking and converting. There is no real-time reporting or optimization. In other words, on Facebook, attribution is getting messy. They are forced to simply speculate about which advertising, campaigns, and audiences will work.

With little to no user information to work with, mobile ad targeting via Facebook is also less accurate. This means more ads need more impressions driving up CPMs for marketers. Moreover, retargeting pools have become smaller. All of this compounds the challenges of Facebook / Instagram advertising in the post-opt-in era.

Instagram has taken steps to combat the decline in ad attribution by bringing more purchasing to the platform via Instagram Shops.

Google

As Facebook and Instagram’s effectiveness has declined, many advertisers have shifted ad budgets to search, benefiting Google. So far, privacy restrictions have yet to be implemented within Google’s Android and Chrome browser ecosystems so attribution and targeting are unaffected. The optimal word here is YET.

In 2021, Google signaled that they too would be getting more serious about privacy this year and in 2023. Its approach sounds a lot like Apple. After announcing that it will ban third-party cookies, Google proposed a number of technologies within its Privacy Sandbox that would allow marketers and partners operating on their behalf to measure campaign performance without cookies or detailed user data. It’s unclear, though, how Google’s proposed tracking model, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FloC), will perform relative to cookies or device-specific identifiers. But we could be on the verge of similar challenges as those on iOS.

TikTok

TikTok has followed Instagram by launching its own on-platform check-out in partnership with Shopify: TikTok Shopping. However, advertisers generally agree that TikTok is a nightmare.

Although TikTok’s audience size is promising, the ad tools are still in their infancy, and it’s challenging to grow your success. Ads are often disapproved for unclear policy violations, which can disable entire advertising accounts. Additionally, many Norwest portfolio companies report very fast ad creative wearout on TikTok, requiring a high volume of new ad creative, which can be difficult for many brands to sustain. Even if you can keep churning out fresh content on a regular basis, the TikTok auction and performance can be extremely volatile week over week. It’s super difficult to establish, sustain, and scale performance on TikTok.

When it comes to privacy, TikTok doesn’t have end-to-end encryption and has been involved in several geopolitical privacy disputes. This makes it hard for advertisers to be sure that any frameworks or approaches won’t fall foul of future regulations or platform changes.

Maximizing Your CAC Dollar in Today’s World

Despite these challenges, digital advertising still works. Even with the spike in CAC, companies that shifted their customer acquisition strategies to digital platforms during the pandemic managed to improve their acquisition efficiency by 30%. With this in mind, how can companies continue to capitalize? How can they navigate rising customer acquisition costs while meeting new privacy regulations?

• Isolate iOS campaigns. For the time being, it’s best to separate iOS and non-iOS campaigns. Creative testing can be done on platforms with better attribution and then moved into iOS once winners are identified. Creative testing should be done at the ad-level and in-house using dynamic Urchin Tracking Modules (UTM).
• If your business allows, keep your attention on 24-hour, first-click conversions. These are fast enough for optimization. Also, these immediate conversions make attribution simple.
• Diversify out of Facebook and Instagram on mobile and actively manage CPMs. Many portfolio companies have found success on Snapchat, Pinterest, Spotify, etc. after rising CPMs priced them out of Instagram and Facebook.
• Focus more on self-attribution and incrementality testing. Gather high-quality first-party data by leveraging more unique landing pages and conducting post-conversion surveys, geo-holdout tests, and iOS vs. Android tests.
• Optimize conversion rates more often. Enhance your landing pages and email flows to get more conversions. This will help offset higher CPMs and improve the effectiveness of your lead ads.
• Leverage a video-first approach. Generate organic traffic and attract potential leads through video-driven platforms like TikTok.

More Questions?

Have more questions? Contact us directly on LinkedIn: Jeff Crowe and Rick Silvestrini. You can also tell us what other topics you’d like to see us cover in future events or blogs.

Rick Silvestrini is a marketing executive and advisor to several Norwest portfolio companies, helping them to build their teams, scale, and increase revenue.

The post How to Respond to Rising Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) in a Privacy-First World appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Yet why do I so often receive communications from companies selling their wares that lead with product or solution messaging? Product pitches are about THEM, not ME! It’s one of the great ironies of our times.

As I thought about how I could help companies solve this conundrum, I reached out to one of my favorite positioning experts, Bob Wright – managing director at Firebrick Consulting – for guidance. He generously agreed to share what he knows over a coffee chat. So I decided to invite a few hundred other marketers to join us!

Watch the full session here and see the highlights below.

Are we thinking big enough?

If you check out Bob’s profile on LinkedIn, you’ll see that he calls himself a “Possibilitarian”. It’s a lofty label, for sure, but appropriate when you consider the way he looks at the art of positioning. His goal for clients is to create a positioning story that’s big enough for the company to live into. Bob says he knows he’s done his job when the executive team (at the client company) says in response to proposed new positioning: “I guess we could be that.” Meaning: that the company is at the edge of itself….you’d still recognize the company at its core, but the vision is large enough for the company to aspire to.

I think so many of us, myself included, tend to anchor our view of positioning in what our company is today – including the buyers and customers we have now – than in what the company could be and will be.

Good Positioning = Storytelling

What do companies that have established themselves as leaders in their respective categories – such as Salesforce, VMware, Calendly, GitLab, and Chainlink – all have in common? Bob contends that all these enterprises have great positioning strategies.

As any seasoned marketing or company leader reading this knows, positioning pertains to your ability to sway consumer perception about your products, services, or brand relative to the competition. When executed right, positioning helps your company and brand thrive – enabling you to command premium pricing, lead your category, and ultimately drive a higher valuation.

However, traditional positioning strategies where brands start with their product’s features, price, and capabilities don’t work anymore. By contrast, the positioning tactics employed by market-leading companies are successful because they deviated from the standard positioning approaches.

“They all have stories, stories that have a viewpoint,” said Bob. “These companies don’t lead with their product features and functions they have.”

Bob stressed that positioning strategies that focus on buyers, their problems, and their needs, is now the way to go moving forward. Today, successful positioning is about storytelling.

Five Hard Truths

(6:44-8:57 in the recording)

Storytelling – sounds easy, right? However, before you get too excited and decide to jump in and start overhauling your positioning strategy, Bob notes that there are five hard truths you must first acknowledge and accept:

• No company wants another tech vendor. Executive buyers, in particular, feel like their organization has all the technology they need to operate and achieve desired results. They aren’t open to new technologies, thus, don’t want to hear from a tech vendor.
• Executive buyers don’t care how your product works. When executive buyers don’t have a need for your product, they won’t give it their time and attention. You need to communicate the “why”.
• The superior product rarely wins. Positioning, when executed right, can help lesser products dominate their categories and beat out superior products.
• Most companies are organized for yesterday’s buyers. Forward-looking companies tend to be more successful because they look at the next set of buyers, not at their current or previous customers.
• Positioning is not a marketing-only initiative. A positioning exercise should include active support and buy-in at the leadership level, particularly the CEO. My friend Udi Ledergor, CMO of Gong, shared a similar sentiment during our 2021 discussion on building your brand. Positioning should be sponsored by the top but marketing should manage it, making it a cross-functional activity.

“If you get positioning right, it can be the North Star for your company,’ said Bob. “Positioning can fuel your marketing investments.”

Buyers Want Problems Solved

For Bob, a good positioning story in the modern B2B marketing landscape is built on this simple question:

“What’s the big hairy problem you solve for your buyer?”

He then broke this down to three additional questions. The success of any positioning effort lies in how well the story answers these questions when you imagine a prospect is asking them:

• Why your product, why now?
• What are the unique capabilities that allow you to uniquely solve my problem?
• How are you going to make my life better?

Looking at the questions, Bob pointed out that the positioning is all centered on the buyer, their needs, their problems. This is a crucial key to achieving category leadership in a saturated market: “There is no conversation here about how the product works. Again, it’s all about why you matter.”

Seven Successful Principles for Building Category Leadership

So, in concrete terms, how do you create a buyer-centric – rather than a product-centric – positioning story? For Bob, the following seven principles should help you make the shift.

1. Fortune 500 or SMB is not a market.

One of the biggest mistakes B2B companies make, says Bob, is targeting companies using outdated segmentation techniques. Bob emphasized that “Fortune 500” and “SMB” are not markets and B2B marketers should concentrate their attention on the businesses that need their products.

Accuracy in targeting market segmentation is crucial to positioning success.

“The more precise you can get your positioning on the market segmentation size and the buyer, the stronger your position is going to be.”

2. Who are your target buyers?

It’s vital for B2B marketers to identify specific individuals that have the final say as well as influencers that can sway decisions. It may sound complex, but it all boils down to one person.

“The problem with B2B tech is that we have multiple buyers and influencers and sales cycles. So again, it’s not as black and white as this, but generally, it’s about determining the one person that if they said ‘yes’, and everybody else said ‘no’, they’d still go with your solution.”

3. Own a big, strategic multi-million-dollar problem.

“Every significant technology company, every significant category leader owns a multi-million-dollar problem, Bob pointed out.”

It’s imperative for B2B companies to demonstrate a big problem that only their product or tech can solve. The key to owning that problem is articulating it to potential B2B buyers in a way they can understand and appreciate.

4. Have a strong viewpoint and follow through.

It’s also important for B2B companies to take a stand on important issues and actually walk the talk. Consumers expect brands to be champions and advocates of prevailing causes and issues like diversity, social equality, environmental sustainability, and more.

Taking a stand is an effective way of standing out from the competition. More importantly, enterprises must be able to connect their stand to that multi-million-dollar problem they solve.

5. Make the fight about your unique IP.

This is where you connect your customer’s multi-million dollar problem to what you actually do. What do you want to make the fight about, and why does it matter? Part of building your position after taking a stand is to make the case or argument that only your technology and product have the capabilities to solve their critical and immediate pain points in addition to addressing what’s ahead.

6. Take a corner of the room.

Assert your organization’s position by making a clear distinction about your brand, what you do that your competitors don’t. Highlight features and capabilities that you have, the problems that you can address, and other things that elevate your brand over the competition.

“If you and all the other competitors are bunched in the middle of the room, what’s the buyer going to do?” asked Bob. “If they can’t tell the difference between you and anybody else, they’re not going to make a decision, or they’re going to go with the brand name company.”

7. Take your buyers on a journey.

Help your buyers manage their expectations by providing them a clear picture of how your product or technology will evolve and how this evolution will impact them.

“In the old days of B2B tech, a lot of companies got in trouble because they were selling vision and could never deliver on it,” said Bob. “It’s really important to properly manage the expectations about what your solution or product can deliver today, but can also lay the groundwork for the future.”

Lean Back and Watch the Entire Discussion

Want to hear more, straight from the horse’s mouth? Watch the complete webinar here.

Got more questions? Message Bob directly via LinkedIn. I also invite you to connect with me and share what topics you’d like for us to explore in the future.

Lisa Ames is Norwest’s CMO and Operating Executive. She leverages her more than 20 years of B2B SaaS marketing experience working shoulder-to-shoulder with portfolio companies to help them thrive.

The post Differentiate or Die: 7 Rules for Category Leadership appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Gong, the leading revenue intelligence platform for B2B sales teams and one of our companies in the Norwest portfolio, is part of the 25%.

I sat down in September with Gong’s CMO Udi Ledergor, to see if he’d be willing to share some nuggets of branding and marketing wisdom with our community.

Take a listen to our conversation here and enjoy a few highlights below!

Don’t Confuse Being an Authority with Being Boring

So many B2B companies today lose sight of the fact that they’re communicating with humans. I’ve certainly been guilty of this in the past, and I think it was born out of Imposter Syndrome. In an effort to be seen as an authority in our space, we sometimes take an overly formal approach, adopting what we perceive as a safe, corporate tone of voice that fails to wow the audience.

Remember: John, the procurement guy, for example, is also a human being. So talk to him like you would a friend. Get to the point, capture his attention, and give him something of value.

“If you open a magazine or your TV or see a billboard from a company like Coca-Cola, Adidas, or Lego, they’re actually acknowledging that you’re a human being. That you’re busy, you have a sense of humor, and you have a very short attention span. They talk to you in a way that recognizes that.”

Recent studies give credibility to Udi’s perspective. Deloitte reports that customers want to be treated like humans and escape the homogenous customer experience. In a PwC survey, 59% of customers believe brands struggle to provide that distinctive human element of customer experience.

If there’s a part of you saying to yourself right now “Nah, we got this,” I dare you to share one of your content pieces with a friend and seek their (brutally honest) opinion. Would they want to read this? Would they even pay to read this? Their answer may surprise you. Hear how Udi’s team knows they’ve produced a winning piece of content starting at 10:19 in the recording.

Optimize for Reach, Without Sacrificing Leads

(12:00-16:05 in the recording)

As I listened to Udi share stories of his team’s success in generating impactful content, I wondered: do you give all this great stuff away? As marketers, we always want to optimize for eyeballs and get our content in front of as many readers as we can. But then, how do we know what’s working? How do we capture leads if we’re allowing free access to the content we so lovingly, and painstakingly, created?

So I asked Udi his perspective on gating and he shared his hedge strategy. Meaning, people can access, without a gate, any content on Gong’s website. But, with certain pieces of high-value, longer-form content, his team includes a CTA about one-third of the way through the piece (and again at the end), that directs them to a related asset. And that second piece is the one they gate.

For example, an article called 7 Cold Email Stats To Write Killer Cold Emails is a free piece of content promoted via social or on the website. Within that piece, Udi’s team incorporates a link to a premium piece of content that contains even more tips on the same topic which sits behind a form. Gong’s results with this strategy speak for themselves.

“When people click that CTA, we see conversion rates of up to 72% on those landing pages. That’s how we convert anonymous public readers into known contacts on the website.”

Hook Your Audience With Their Favorite Topic (Hint: Themselves)

(18:14-19:50 in the recording)

It’s no secret that relevance is a pillar of content marketing success. We all strive to craft content with topics that matter most to our audience, not only to capture their attention, but to increase the likelihood that they’ll consume it.

Relevance can be difficult to achieve because it requires you to speak to the buyer’s role, prevailing issues at work, business requirements, pain points, and more. Some of these insights are harder to come by than others, so why not start with the low-hanging fruit?

One of Udi’s tried-and-true tricks is to frame content in terms of the role of the target audience.

If you were a CMO, which one of these titles would appeal most to you?

• Seven Budget Planning Tips for 2022
• Seven Budget Planning Tips Every CMO Needs to Know

You’re more likely to choose the second one. And the data proves this out, according to Udi. He took this principle a step further when he developed a Super Bowl commercial to promote Gong. With such a high-stakes investment, he had to engage the audience quickly, so he announced the intended target right off the bat, just as he had done in emails and on content headlines for years. The first few seconds of the ad zoomed into a nameplate on a desk in an empty office that said “VP of Sales.”

“Our formula for creating content that people can’t resist: it has to be highly relevant and specific to your audience; add value to their day; and easy to consume.”

Udi reasoned that if this simple strategy of creating relevance for the audience works on LinkedIn and in email, why wouldn’t it work on a TV screen? (His bet paid off; he told me in a separate conversation that the company saw a dramatic increase in web traffic and conversions immediately following the Super Bowl ad).

Create Content Using Your Audience’s Perspective

Any piece of B2B content can be relevant and interesting, but does it add value? To craft content that delivers benefit to the audience, marketers must be able to adopt the point of view of their reader. When you put yourself in their shoes and genuinely feel for them, Udi explained, you are able to explore and discover topics that they find useful.

“Open your eyes and ears to what your audience is concerned about today. And give them content that helps them. That’s how you add value to their day.”

During the webinar, Udi delved deeper into this topic. In April of 2020, Gong’s salespeople found it difficult to close larger deals with their clients. That’s because CFOs were clutching their wallets tightly, reserving them for crucial purchases only.

The situation wasn’t restricted to Gong’s customers; it also affected other organizations and industries as a result of the unfolding pandemic. The scenario provided Gong with an opportunity to create content for the people they were talking to called the CFO Cheat Sheet: How to Get Past Your Buyer CFO.

Within 72 hours, this became one of Gong’s three most downloaded content assets. It was a success because it provided its intended audience a solution to their current challenges. This was proof that the more we seek to understand the needs of our audience, the more opportunities will present themselves to deliver value.

Stay Attuned to Who’s in Charge (It May Not be Who You Think It Is)

(22:30-24:52 in the recording)

Marketers need to ditch long-form whitepapers (with some exceptions) in favor of pithy, easy-to-consume content that can be accessed without a gate and on the go.

The B2B landscape is changing and millennials are taking over the decision-making and buying in their organizations. According to TrustRadius, 60% of today’s B2B tech customers are millennials. In addition, 51% of lead buyers and financial approvers in B2B buying organizations are millennials.

Another study found that 73% of those who participate directly in B2B research and decision-making are millennials, with over one-third of those being the ultimate decision maker.

“We post a lot of content that literally takes 10 seconds to read. That’s what brings people back. Once you make enough of those that are easy to consume, you buy people’s attention and trust to download something that might take them a little bit longer.”

The notion of trust is critical here. And part of gaining the trust of your audience is knowing them. If we know that millennials prefer bite-size content in formats such as videos or memes, let’s give it to them. If we know that they spend time on social media to consume this content, let’s deliver it there.

But don’t forget to test! Monitor your social feed, read the comments, see what people respond to. Experimentation and creativity are your friends. And you don’t have to break the bank to appeal to people. One thing I’ve noticed during Covid is how much expectations for production value have shifted. People no longer expect high concept, slick videos, for example. In fact, investing in such formats could work against you. People are more open to Zoom recordings, videos shot in iPhones and other Covid-friendly formats.

Catch More Key Insights in the Full Webinar

I can’t thank Udi enough for his gift of time and expert insights. There were so many great takeaways from our conversation. If you missed the original broadcast, or want to watch it again, please check out the entire recording here.

Got more questions? Feel free to contact Udi via his LinkedIn. Udi is generous in sharing his marketing experience and expertise as well as continuing to learn through engaging with others. You can also connect with me and share what topics you’d like for us to explore in the future.

Lisa Ames is Norwest’s CMO and Operating Executive. She leverages her more than 20 years of B2B SaaS marketing experience working shoulder-to-shoulder with portfolio companies to help them thrive.

The post How to Build an Iconic B2B Brand: The Gong Case Study appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Regardless of where you are in your ABM journey, you’ve probably come to realize that it’s not just a program or a tactic; some would say that it’s not even an isolated strategy. Instead, it’s good marketing overall. It’s the best way to focus your efforts and surround accounts in an increasingly noisy B2B market.

When I joined Demandbase in 2015 as the head of demand gen, I became part of a marketing team that was already executing ABM at scale, using its own technology. We used to call it ‘drinking our own champagne’. I learned a lot in those heady days, yet I still feel like there’s a world of ABM knowledge for me to absorb. That’s why I love surrounding myself with experts like Lisa Sharapata, VP of Marketing at MindTickle, and Jon Miller, CMO of Demandbase.

Big thanks to Lisa and Jon who joined me at our recent community event to share their ABM insights, which you can take in via the session recording and/or slides.

Is ABM the Right Strategy for Your Company and Stage?

Although the ABM groundswell developed over the past several years, sellers have been surrounding key accounts for decades. They’ve long understood that closing complex, high annual contract value (ACV) deals at large enterprises requires reaching and engaging multiple buyers with a sustained effort. 

Before ABM got its name, sales and marketing teams would come together to execute what we now call 1:1 ABM (vs 1:Few and 1:Many). It was a curated approach that involved account planning, high-touch treatment strategies such as VIP events, and personalized outbound programming.    

I’m sure seasoned sales execs have been doing a collective eye roll since ABM became mainstream because, from their point of view, ABM is old news (sellers, do you consider yourselves the OG of ABM?). But there are now various forms of ABM that have brought sales and marketing together in a more powerful way than ever before. In fact, I love that Jon has evolved the name to ABX to acknowledge that our goal is to create an account-based experience throughout the full customer lifecycle.

As much as we all want to feel the magic of the ABM pixie dust, it’s worth taking a moment to ask yourself whether it’s the right strategy for you. 

When ABM Fits, When It Doesn’t

• Defined TAM – ABM requires engagement and personalization with target accounts, so doing it well requires focus. Think thousands of accounts tops, such as enterprises in key verticals, vs tens or hundreds of thousands of accounts. The latter situation is most appropriate for traditional lead gen.
  
• Multiple stakeholders – Lisa hit on this critical point in her opening slide, noting how ABM fits well in complex environments with a lot of influencers in various roles to surround. ABM is particularly effective for reaching senior decision-makers who may be difficult to engage with content offers such as ebooks.
• Lower velocity sales motion – Because of the high-touch, personalized nature of ABM, it works best in environments with a longer, non-transactional sales cycle where marketing can educate the audience with content appropriate for each stage of the buyer’s journey. In this scenario, ACV and lifetime value (LTV) will tend to be higher as well.
• Internal readiness – Because of the growing popularity of ABM, there’s a temptation to purchase a solution right away to demonstrate that you’ve checked the box. Too often I’ve seen companies fail with this approach and the solution becomes underutilized; or worse, the sales team and executives conclude that ABM isn’t a fit for your business. It’s critical to first establish alignment at all levels of the organization and agree that you’re going to shift away from a volume-based leads model to ABM, even with a hybrid approach. It’s also important to agree on your metrics and KPIs and unify sales and marketing on the same set of goals. In sum, start with alignment and strategy, follow with a solution.

Once you decide to pursue an ABM strategy, it’s important to identify which style you want to adopt to match your go-to-market strategy and ACVs for key segments. Will it be 1:1, 1:Few or 1:Many? There’s no one right style, but it’s important to understand when to apply each. Most companies take a hybrid approach where, for example, they use 1:1 to bring in whale deals in their enterprise segment, while using 1:Few to engage mid-market accounts and 1:Many for SMB. Hear Jon explain the differences starting at 13:12 in the recording.

Getting Sales to Trust Intent Data

For those of you that have been doing B2B marketing for a while, like me, you understand the value of intent data. Whether we realized it or not, we actually developed rudimentary intent data from the time we launched our first form on a landing page. If a lead fit our ideal customer profile (ICP) and took the time to read our ebooks, then bingo, they were deemed to have intent by our lead scoring model and passed to sales for follow-up. This was a breakthrough at the time because we lacked other options, but we quickly realized that driving results with complex B2B sales motions — where the buyer’s journey is long and involves multiple stakeholders — requires a more holistic account view.

Intent Data Helps Us Create an Ideal Customer Experience

We know that buyers today prefer a self-directed education journey. They want to engage with sales much later than they ever did before. So, if we consider an ebook download as an intent signal for sales readiness, how do we know whether that buyer is at the beginning, middle, or end of their journey? We don’t. And that’s a problem. If we’re too early, that ruins the customer experience. And if we’re too late, we lose the deal to a competitor. (Learn more about the dangers of a transactional, MQL mindset in my blog The New Rules of Digital Advertising.)

Intent data today is more sophisticated. We can key off a variety of predictive behaviors, such as what websites our prospects or customers are visiting, what competitors they are looking at, what keywords or subjects they are searching for, and more. This gives us an indication not only of interest but of their stage in the buyer’s journey. Better still, we can know our accounts in a deeper way and use that information to improve segmentation and create a meaningful experience that resonates with our target audience. This is something Lisa talks about at 7:34 in the session recording and Jon delves into at 29:40.

MQAs convert to pipeline at a rate of 6x over non-MQAs

But as Lisa pointed out, intent data is not perfect. (And let’s hope it never becomes flawless, lest marketers everywhere face underemployment.) The point is that it’s much more effective than lead scoring, as proven by her data. Lisa shared that her MQAs (Marketing Qualified Accounts) convert to pipeline at a rate 6x greater than non-MQAs. This “A/B test” has helped her gain the confidence of her sales team because the question becomes: if we don’t trust the intent data, what other options do we have? If the results show that intent data outperforms lead scoring, that’s your answer until you have something better.

The Importance of a Blended Account Selection Strategy

That being said, I think part of gaining the confidence of the sales team is giving them a voice in the process. The “machine” does great things, but it can’t replace the value of human knowledge of your target accounts. That’s why I recommend a blended strategy for account selection. During my four years at Demandbase, we went through various iterations of account selection, from hand-picked lists, to using predictive solutions like Lattice Engines, to eventually using our own intent data (once it became available) within the Demandbase platform. We measured the effectiveness of each approach in driving pipeline, meaning the proportion of accounts that converted to pipeline within a fixed period of time. 

Not surprisingly, the list selected with intent data performed the best, which gave us confidence not only in our product, but in our ability to drive the business more effectively. Still, we believed that sales could add value to the process with their human touch and pursued a hybrid account selection strategy. I was heartened to hear from Jon during his section that Demandbase still uses this approach, which he articulated as FIRE. He also emphasized the value of intent data beyond target account list selection because it provides an indication of when sales should pay closer attention to certain accounts over others. Hear more on this starting at 15:58 of the session recording.

The FIRE Methodology for Account Selection

Fit – accounts in your ICP

Intent – interest in your products and/or competitors

Relationship – context and history with the account

Engagement – time spent with your company 

The Number of Accounts You Target Depends on Several Factors

One of the questions I get asked most often when I engage with portfolio companies that are kicking off an ABM strategy is, “What’s the right number of accounts to target?” As a starting point, I like to share a TAL (Target Account List) Calculator, like this one from Demandbase. It takes inputs such as the number of sales reps, quota per rep, average deal size, and so on, then spits out a number of accounts to target for your business. The caveat here is that this should serve as an indicator of where you’ll land, rather than the final number. That’s because there are several things to take into account as you determine the right number.

Maturity Stage with ABM

Most important is to consider where you are in your ABM journey. If you’re early, it’s better to start small while you learn to operationalize ABM and measure results. You want to set yourself up for success and enable the marketing team to dedicate precious resources to targeting the list. There’s no need to spread the peanut butter too thinly at the get-go. It’s not like you will ignore other accounts; it’s more a matter of where you will focus. And even on a good day, about 75% of bookings will come from TAL, so you can’t focus exclusively on the list anyway.

Size of Your TAM

The size of the possible universe is a key factor in determining list size. Obviously, the TAL has to be smaller than the number of accounts you could possibly sell to; a lot smaller, depending on conversion rates. If you sell into SMB or mid-market, your TAM is likely to be on the large side since there are always more small accounts in the universe than large. In any case, I still suggest starting small when it comes to list size, showing success, and then fanning out from there.

Entitlements

One of the most important themes in Jon’s talk track was the idea that success with ABM comes from relevance. Meaning, you have to focus your efforts to maximize personalization and impact with the accounts you’re chasing. As he said, the number of accounts you could be going after is always more than what you actually should go after. 

Tactically speaking, this is your opportunity to sit down with sales and determine what treatment strategies, or entitlements, you’re going to deliver to accounts in various tiers. And the tiering system you select depends on your ACVs. For example, a small number of Enterprise accounts that are expected to yield deals valued at $2M would get the proverbial royal treatment in a 1:1 ABM motion, while dozens of mid-market accounts yielding smaller deals would receive a less bespoke, yet still personalized experience. Hear more from Jon on this starting at 12:30 in the recording and take inspiration from this chart below that represents Demandbase’s entitlements. 

Getting Deeper – More Opportunities to Learn

Jon and Lisa covered a lot of ground in the session, so don’t stop here. Catch the session recording here, and take a copy of the slides. So many questions still to answer and I’m already keen to plan our next ABM session. What ABM topics would you like to hear? I’d love to hear your burning questions so we can curate the most useful insights. Let’s connect via LinkedIn to keep the conversation going.

Lisa Ames is Norwest’s CMO and Operating Executive. She leverages her more than 20 years of B2B SaaS marketing experience working shoulder-to-shoulder with portfolio companies to help them thrive.

The post How to Fast-Track Your Path to ABM Maturity appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

When I started to notice that more and more companies wanted to improve their conversion rates through the funnel and drive more efficiencies out of their marketing investments, I saw an opportunity to answer a lot of questions at once. So I reached out to my favorite podcaster, Chris Walker, CEO of Refine Labs and host of “The State of Demand Gen” to see if he’d join one of our events.

Recording of our Community Event for Marketers

I was thrilled to welcome Chris as the featured speaker at our June 22 virtual event on digital advertising. Take a listen to the recording here, and enjoy a summary of the highlights below. These are the big ideas shared by Chris in the session, with a few of my thoughts layered in.

Huge thanks to Chris and his amazing team for the opportunity to understand his provocative point of view and learn some of his battle-tested digital strategies. His generosity in sharing success “secrets” is proof that delivering value goes beyond driving direct, attributable revenue. For example, I never provided — nor did his team ask me for — the registration list for this event. In all my years as an operator, I can’t say that I ever took such a long view in my approach. I’m excited to be learning a new way of thinking and to share it here with you.

The Benefit of Unifying Brand and Demand Under One Leader

When we talk about brand, most people think of things like visual identity, PR & AR, organic social and blogs… maybe a podcast or Clubhouse session. Basically, the things marketers know they should do to drive awareness, affinity, and overall value for the business but that are not easily measured.

Then there’s demand gen, which people often think of as performance marketing. Demand marketers drive net new leads and MQLs, then track the conversion of those records through the funnel to drive revenue. If I think about the conversations I have with companies, both inside and outside of our portfolio, I see leadership leaning more into demand gen. It has become the sexier function of the two because there’s comfort in knowing you can invest in programs and measure the specific outcomes they drive. You put money in, you get money out. Or do you? 

There are flaws in this thinking that Chris touched on throughout the session. First, conversion rates to revenue are tiny. Something like one in a thousand B2B “leads” will result in closed business, so the math quickly becomes unsustainable as you scale. Before you know it, you’ll need to put more than your total addressable market in the top of the funnel to achieve your ever-increasing revenue goal at the bottom of the funnel. Second, buying behavior has changed over the past several years, driven by the fact that people now have access to most of the information they need to make a buying decision and thus have less desire to engage with sales. 

Marketing has an opportunity to play a bigger role than ever in generating demand by facilitating the education of buyers in third-party social channels that aren’t trackable using traditional attribution.

As I’ve heard Chris say several times on his podcast, let’s work to CREATE demand by investing in brand vs. relying on our ability to CAPTURE demand in a transactional way with performance marketing. By unifying brand and demand, we put ourselves in a position to scale faster and ultimately drive more business at a lower CAC.

The Danger of a Performance Marketing Mindset in Awareness Channels

There’s an alarming trend occurring today in digital advertising that is affecting B2B marketers, hitting them where it hurts. Chris sees it with the companies he works with and so do I. That is: spending is increasing in trackable, paid digital channels such as Google search and LinkedIn where marketers seek to generate MQLs with gated content. CPLs are going up because of intensified competition while conversion rates are going down as savvy buyers resist being chased by mercenary SDRs. 

This is putting marketers in a tough spot. We try to solve it by applying the performance marketing approach that we ‘grew up with’ buying intent-based ads (on Google for example) and carrying that into non-intent social channels, such as Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit. We know that our buyers are spending an increasing amount of time on these channels, so we find them there and do what we’ve been taught.  

That is, we adopt a transactional mindset, convincing ourselves that we can pull someone in with an ebook download or demo request and kick off a buying process as fast as possible. So we offer gated content on landing pages, not realizing that success in these ‘Web 2.0’ channels requires a different approach. This is particularly problematic in lower velocity, high ACV sales motions where the buyer’s journey is longer and requires deeper education.

How B2B Marketers are Handcuffed by Attribution

Intellectually, we know that buyers don’t want to get their education from sales folks; they want to gather information on their terms from people they trust. Yet we persist in our quest to drive leads down the funnel because we’re trained to drive business in ways that can be tracked and measured. 

Marketers know they won’t get more budget unless they can say they generated X number of leads at a cost of Y and those leads converted to opportunity at an acceptable rate. Even if few or none of the leads turn into a closed-won business, we continue to focus on the upstream portion of the funnel that we’re accountable for. 

Don’t get me wrong, reader. I’m not suggesting, nor is Chris, that we do away with the funnel and place all our bets on untrackable brand investments. Performance marketing certainly has a place in the mix. And I’m heartened that B2B marketers have become more focused in recent years on downstream metrics such as pipeline and revenue instead of vanity metrics like net new leads and MQLs. But I do think a shift needs to occur where we embrace brand as a driver of overall enterprise value and get comfortable with our inability to track it using traditional attribution. 

An Uncommon Approach Reveals the Secret to Advertising Success

One of the most compelling stories Chris shared in his session was an experience in 2017 when he worked for a venture-backed company called Vapotherm. He was selling to ER physicians and nurses and discovered that many of them were spending time on Facebook and Instagram. 

To engage buyers on these platforms, he started running content, not ads, such as videos and clinical trials highlighting the company’s products that people could consume without leaving the social feed. He discovered a correlation between well-targeted content on these platforms and increased (high-converting) demo requests on Vapotherm’s website. His hypothesis was that the ads were driving the boost in demos but he couldn’t prove it since he wasn’t capturing leads via forms. 

Fast forward to 2020 when his team at Refine Labs started using custom conversions on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. With this approach, he was able to prove the effectiveness of ads in driving high-converting leads that drove closed-won business. 

Here’s the clincher: he found that 80% of the people that eventually converted on the demo from the ad, never actually clicked on the ad. Or they clicked and converted later from a different device. It proved that when more people are consuming content by remaining in the social feed vs leaving to view a landing page, marketers win. As Chris said, “you’re knocking it out of the park if you have 1% click rate, but I’d rather deliver content to 100% of people in the feed vs the 1% that go to my landing page.” 

Attribution in the Wake of iOS 14

The best part is: Chris and his team now have valuable data that gives them confidence in the viability of their social strategy over time. Even though they now have reduced visibility into user behavior due to iOS 14, he and his team have run their experiments and have the data to prove that their approach is working. The desired outcomes are still being driven despite the reduced attribution from the deprecation of IDFA.

In Chris’ view, attribution is about understanding how people actually discover, get information, and make purchase decisions. (Psst: it’s not by being forced into a sales funnel while still in the education phase of their journey). As marketers, we sometimes cling to a desire and an old belief that people buy this way — and sometimes it works — but to create a long-term competitive advantage we have to lean into the way people want to buy and change our behavior accordingly by investing in brand. Again, this doesn’t mean we invest in brand at the exclusion of demand gen; it’s more about making the two functions work together. 

Why a Decrease in MQL Volume Can Be a Good Thing

Last week I interviewed a candidate for a VP of Marketing role at one of our Growth Equity portfolio companies. When I asked her to walk me through her KPIs, I was impressed that she pulled out a chart showing metrics and trends over time. Imagine my surprise when she pointed out a declining volume of MQLs with a hint of pride in her voice. “Notice how our MQLs are falling, while our conversion rates are rising down-funnel and velocity is increasing…and I’m happy with this trend.” 

Um, excuse me, I don’t think I’ve ever had a candidate celebrate a decrease in MQLs, and I appreciated her willingness to shift out of a volume mentality to focus on business drivers. Needless to say, I voted to hire her.

In his talk, Chris touched on the concept of decreasing MQLs and referred to analysis showing that many of the investments his clients were making before he engaged with them were a waste of money. If you look at the path between leads and revenue — conversion rates, win rates, sales cycle length, ACV — the data will tell you which of your investments are paying off and rarely does a volume play drive desired outcomes. The trick is to find ways to scale the high-converting leads because quality wins the day and also earns you the trust and respect of your sales team. 

Trust and respect will take you far. You also need empathy. I loved hearing how Chris used to call leads himself to gauge their quality and gain insight into what motivates buyers to move forward in a sales cycle. 

How Brand Greases the Skids for Sales and Drives Measurable Outcomes

One of the important insights that came out of the time Chris spent calling leads himself was understanding the interdependence of demand gen and brand. He had been running ads promoting gated ebooks at the time and when he would get ahold of people that had submitted forms, he invariably got responses along the lines of “I’ve never heard of you, I don’t remember downloading anything, and I don’t want to talk to you.”

He needed to figure out what lead sources were most likely to generate sales-ready leads. He wondered, what are the lead sources that will bring higher conversion, better win rates, and shorter sales cycles. Turns out he identified three — demo, pricing, and “contact us” CTAs — and he realized the one thing they all have in common: declared buying intent that aligns with how people want to buy. When you see that 80% of revenue is coming from 4% of leads, you realize that your volume-based demand model is wrong. 

And Chris provided the proof by sharing a case study of one of his clients, a series E company in B2B SaaS. After deciding to work with Refine Labs, the company saw these results:

• MQLs went down 96% YOY, from 36,000 to 1,200
• SQOs generated by marketing went up by 181%, from 180 to 506 
• Qualified pipeline increased by 180% (near equivalent to SQO increase, indicating deal sizes had remained steady)
• Sales cycle length went down by 60% 
• Win rates increased from 22% to 31%
• Marketing CAC decreased by 34%

And Now for the Audience Questions

Check out what was on the minds of attendees by catching the Q&A session that begins at 38:22 in the recording. In a generous, post-event gesture, Chris included in his podcast answers to the remaining questions that we didn’t have time for. You can get those answers by listening to episode 157 of The State of Demand Gen. 

Have more questions? Chris welcomes ongoing engagement because it deepens his understanding of what buyers want and helps him deliver that to his audience. Message him on LinkedIn with whatever’s on your mind. And connect with me to share what additional topics you’d like to hear at future events. 

Lisa Ames is Norwest’s CMO and Operating Executive. She leverages her more than 20 years of B2B SaaS marketing experience working shoulder-to-shoulder with portfolio companies to help them thrive.

The post The New Rules of Digital Advertising appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Why We Sometimes Dread Board Meetings

For one, preparing for board meetings is a lot of work. Even the most seasoned slide jockeys understand the pressure of crafting a compelling story, coupled with data to support it, and just the right talk track. I had a day job, after all, so the hours spent on my board deck took me away from driving the outcomes I was on the hook for in the first place.

Then there’s the anxiety that comes with uncertainty. As marketers, we don’t always know what the board wants to hear. Should we ask them? Should we guess? What if the story I tell fails to hit the right notes or worse, exposes weakness in my org that I should have blown the whistle about months ago?  

“Marketers Always Need Good Ideas From the Board,” Said Nobody Ever

As marketers, we have it even harder than most members of the executive leadership team (ELT) when we walk into board meetings. That’s because everyone fancies themselves a marketer in some way. Here’s the thing: we make hard things look easy, so everyone thinks they can do it. 

I can guarantee you that the CTO and CFO don’t have folks coming to them saying “I have an idea…” So we have the added pressure of knowing that a board member may offer the brilliant marketing idea they had in the shower that day and wonder if we can execute it next week.

If I’m being honest, these are all valid reasons to dread board meetings, but I started to wonder whether we should dread them. 

Are Board Meetings Friend or Foe?

After joining Norwest last year as an operating executive and gaining exposure to so many companies in the growth equity and venture portfolios, I began attending board meetings as an observer. My motivation was simple: to gain a deeper understanding of the businesses I was helping and to provide support to their marketing teams. 

My support spanned from working with marketers on their decks and preparation, to just being the friendly face on the Zoom channeling “Go You!” energy. I also thought I might pick up a few insights along the way that would be worthy of sharing. What a learning experience it was! So much that I ended up culling my insights into a playbook, of sorts, and later socialized it with several CMOs in the portfolio as well as multiple board members. 

Allow me to give a shout out to my top contributors, including Rob Arditi, Co-Head of Growth Equity at Norwest; Scott Beechuk, Partner (Venture) at Norwest; David Garcia, CEO of ScoutLogic and Senior Advisor at Norwest; and Wynn White, independent CMO advisor and former CMO at FloQast.

Enjoy these highlights below and view the slides from my recent webinar on this topic. Take note of the B2B metrics in the “bonus material” portion of the appendix!

Creating a Two-Way Exchange of Value

One of the things that stood out the most during my research was the degree to which most marketers (and extended ELT members) approach board meetings like a reporting session. I get it. The board is technically your boss’s boss, so it’s only natural that you think of them as superior to you. 

But consider this: board members are also people. People that have invested in your company and are motivated to make it successful. They’ve got major skin in the game and have a job to do when they turn up for board meetings. So why let them off the hook when you can turn the meeting into a roll-up-your sleeves working session?

Since you’re likely sending a pre-read of the materials in advance, assume the board has absorbed the details ahead of time. Once you get into the session, you can cover the highlights while leaving plenty of time to have a meaty discussion with the great minds in the room. This is the forum to leverage their experience and knowledge to jointly challenge assumptions, consider alternative paths and together come to the best decisions for the business. 

If we can reframe board meetings from a one-way reporting session to a two-way exchange of value, we’ll go a long way toward making board meetings our friend. Remember, you’re in this together, so put the board to work and hold them accountable. 

Pro Tips for Gaining the Board’s Confidence

Zoom Out

As we prepare for board meetings, we as marketers sometimes feel like we’re guessing what people want to hear, so we compensate by throwing everything but the kitchen sink into our decks. We go into KPI overdrive. Or worse, we share a marketing to-do list. 

One of the ways to combat this is to get clear on what story you want to tell and ask yourself for every slide: is there a “so what” here? It’s easy to get lost in the weeds and before you know it, you’re droning on slide by slide, using your data as a crutch for your talk track instead of telling a crisp story. 

At a high level, your deck should cover:

• Objectives/Strategies
• Progress against them
• What’s working well, what’s not
• Where you need help

A word of caution: resist the temptation to over-rotate on demand gen and pipeline. Even though that’s important, it’s not the only thing. Be prepared to address category, brand, and awareness as drivers of enterprise value.

Finally, don’t conflate board materials with board discussion. You’ll send all your materials in advance, so by the time you get in the room, challenge yourself to distill it down so that the headline on every slide is clear to a lean-back audience.

Be Candid

It goes without saying that honesty rules the day in any professional situation; that’s table stakes. What I mean by being candid is that you’re better off getting ahead of potential roadblocks and surfacing them to the board early and often. Two reasons for this. 

One, nobody likes surprises, especially negative ones. The worst thing that could happen is that challenges get swept under the rug or obscured, only to reveal themselves in the numbers two quarters later. (Gulp). If you hit challenges head-on, the board can provide you with resources and support to help you tackle them before they become major success blockers.

Second, I think candor is also important in the context of presenting a united story across functions in the company. I’ve observed board meetings where the marketer highlights green light statuses on things like SQLs, press coverage, and share of voice while the sales and CS leaders lament flagging close rates and retention. This not only shows a lack of alignment, but it also shows a gap in awareness of the broader business landscape.

Ask for Help

Of all functions in an org, dare I say that marketing is one of the most multifaceted. We wear ten hats on any given day and traverse strategic, visionary thinking with tactical execution. Because of this, it’s sometimes difficult for us to see the forest from the trees. 

This is where the board can help. Remember, they’re not living your reality. While you may have had a challenge rolling around in your head for weeks, they have not. So this makes them uniquely qualified to bring an open mind and a fresh perspective. Not to mention that they likely sit on multiple other boards and therefore have access to strategies, best practices, and data from other companies that can benefit you. 

This isn’t to say you should dump your challenges onto the board and expect them to tell you what to do. But if you come forth with what’s not working, and you present a POV, you’re in a powerful position to seek inputs, ask for resources, and leverage the board’s connections. They might not have all the answers, but they can find someone who does. 

Anticipating Questions: What the Board Might Ask You

As you can imagine, every company is different, every board meeting is different; so it’s impossible to predict specific questions. But, I have found that there are certain high-level themes that tend to pop up time and time again. And these aren’t just themes that I see in board meetings, these are common questions our partners ask of companies they are considering investing in. So, it’s good to think about these things as a marketer, even if you’re not yet getting in front of the board. 

• What are the drivers of growth or underperformance?
• What are the opportunities for improvement/risks?
• Where should we be investing more dollars and what outcomes would that drive?
• What are competitors doing better than we are?
• What’s the plan, timeline, and expected outcomes?

Expanding Your Audience

There’s a certain mystique about board meetings among rank-and-file workers inside of companies. Everyone wants to know what goes on behind closed doors. So even if they don’t ask, your marketing team is dying to know how it went. I recommend making a practice of sharing your deck in a separate session following the board meeting.

Walk your team through the slides, review the narrative, and share the appropriate level of detail about the discussion with the board. This level of transparency will help them understand the bigger picture and how marketing fits into that. They’ll also find inspiration in seeing how the work they do every day contributes to the business. As leaders, we not only answer to the board, we work in service to our teams too. Then everyone wins!

Lisa Ames is Norwest’s CMO and Operating Executive. She leverages her more than 20 years of B2B SaaS marketing experience working shoulder-to-shoulder with portfolio companies to help them thrive.

The post How to Gain the Confidence of Your Board appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

The Norwest Healthcare Team invested behind Kyo in mid-2019 with the goal of helping management expand their model to new regions in California and additional states with pressing needs for high-quality autism therapy. Children with autism were at that time, and remain, significantly under-served throughout the US. In 2020, the CDC reported that approximately 1 in 54 children in the US is diagnosed with autism, up from their 2018 estimate of 1 in 59. Prevalence has increased in this manner consistently over the last 10+ years. Meanwhile, the supply of autism therapy has also grown, but at a slower pace. In California, an early mover in autism therapy, significant wait times persist for families seeking services. Outside of California, many regions are much further from meeting demand. We expect that Covid-19 has only exacerbated this access deficiency nationally.

Through our initial meetings with Colin and Melissa in 2019, our team learned that Kyo had been providing autism therapy to families in California well before it was covered broadly by insurance. Since then, Kyo had served as an industry leader by growing healthily throughout the state and providing ever-greater access to care. We were compelled by Colin and Melissa’s extraordinary dedication to their clients and staff, data-driven approach to delivering therapy, and consistent track record in new regions. We came to believe that a partnership with Kyo would epitomize our central goal of investing behind healthcare businesses that “do well and do good”.

Following our investment, we have witnessed Kyo make crucial additions to their clinical and operational leadership teams, expand services to six new states, and launch powerful scheduling software tools developed in-house. Amid Covid-19, Kyo’s leadership adapted swiftly to telehealth-based services, doubled-down on the excellence of their staff, and charged ahead with their growth plans. In December, Kyo welcomed virtually the first graduates of their Autism Leadership Academy, an innovative training program preparing high-performing BCBAs for regional leadership. Meanwhile, the team at Norwest has helped recruit energetic Scientific Advisors and Board Members to the platform who have added value both commercially and clinically.

With this rebrand, Kyo celebrates these successes and communicates to clients and other stakeholders its mission with greater clarity. Kyo’s services are effective, convenient, and child-centric. Kyo’s staff works to deliver powerful results for families via personalized therapy designed with empathy, innovation, and passion. Kyo’s ultimate goal is to make every moment count, as demonstrated by its industry-leading commitments to quality and outcomes. The Company enters 2021 poised to continue delivering on its mission, serving clients across 12 metropolitan areas in the West and Southwest US.

We are extremely proud of Kyo’s progress to date and congratulate Colin, Melissa, and the entire Kyo team on their brand launch. We eagerly look forward to their successes to come.

To read Kyo’s press release and learn more about their programs and approach, please visit kyocare.com

The post Gateway Learning Group becomes Kyo, Expands Services Nationally appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Great minds dotted the panel, representing Galvanize, Udemy, FloQast, Gong, and YipitData. There were plenty of insights, pieces of advice, and success stories shared. As such, we thought we’d give you a glimpse of some highlights. Our take-away was that with adaptable strategy, adjusted expectation, bold and in-touch marketing messaging, and empathetic leadership, B2B companies are finding new and even stronger footholds amid it all.

Our own Norwest Senior Advisor David Garcia led the virtual event and kicked it off with an analogy we feel a lot of us could benefit from remembering at this time: “There are a lot of lemons out there right now, but lemonade can be made.”

Udi Ledergor, CMO at Gong, began his contributions to the webinar with a tip. He advised that employers sell to the companies who are still buying and focus on selling them what they need most at this time. He broke this down into a few steps:

• Evaluate your list of target accounts. Understand which ones will need to take a step back right now due to the nature of their industry and demographics and then to take a look at what’s left. You might find there are accounts that were once peripheral targets, but now should have more priority. Maybe what you’re offering has shifted. Maybe what you offer is more relevant for those accounts now. In any case, taking a realistic inventory of the target accounts and making pragmatic and time-sensitive edits is key.
• Brainstorm on the types of product enhancements you might be able to make. With remote work now more common than it’s ever been before, you might find you can tweak certain product offerings to reflect that. Or perhaps you can make adjustments that are a response to a different aspect of this era. Add all the relevant bells and whistles you can to what you’re selling.
• Update your messaging. In Gong’s case, conversion rates improved once the homepage marketing messaging was overhauled. Think about what your company’s core messaging was pre-COVID-19 and how it might be modified or fundamentally redefined in this time.

James Hart of YipitData also emphasized the importance of strategy shifts in the B2B world.

“We realized we needed to change the way in which we were delivering our product.” Hart went on to add that adjustment in times of uncertainty is a natural necessity.

And adjusting is exactly what Wynn White, CMO of FloQast, found they had to do, as well.

“Instead of doing annual pricing, we’re considering doing quarterly and even monthly,” White stated.

In the current climate, you might find that your company can benefit from free trials or ramped-up free content. You might need to embrace flexible invoicing and analytical customer data while revisiting product and revenue strategies. But strategy shifts are just the beginning of figuring out how to float (and maybe even surf) in waves like these. Just as critical are company-wide expectations. Those need to be swiftly reevaluated if they haven’t already been. These expectations might regard internal goals, client needs, communication, physical constraints, client retention, budget, workflow, and even employee performance.

Pascal Van Dooren, CRO of Galvanize, pointed out that some people will immediately stabilize or even flourish in a work-from-home setting while others really feed off of the office climate and will struggle more when working remotely.

“We had to really adapt and we really had to change how we operate, frankly,” Van Dooren said. “This whole crisis really kind of demonstrated how important communication is and the various aspects of it.”

Yvonne Chen, Marketing VP at Udemy, agreed that expectations across the board might have some fundamental differences now versus before the pandemic. While virtual events were once treated as possibly bland fillers, they’re now central to everything. In light of this, she says companies need to put more effort into their virtual worlds now. “How can we make a virtual event a little more personable?” And, beyond that, she noted that one major expectation that needs recalibration in this time is employee performance. “The productivity metrics have changed,” she said.

And it’s true. We can’t fairly expect the same kind of productivity we’re used to. That doesn’t mean that our companies will be less productive, per se, but they might be differently productive now. Companies need to adjust their expectations on when and how their team members work, among other things. With schools closed and a lingering virus at the root of this upheaval, a number of variables impact what any given employee can realistically achieve. Leading with hope and compassion here is the key – not just for internal measures of success, but also for every scrap of marketing messaging.

Whatever your marketing model is, it should be adjusted for this unique moment in time. You might find that you need to speed up planning cycles while prioritizing the avoidance of tone-deaf blunders. Finding a way to cut through the COVID buzz is crucial and, for many, hitting that mark requires they develop longer-lasting and more personalized messaging. Chen broke this process down into three stages:

• triage messaging (where we were)
• transitional messaging (where many of us still are)
• transformational messaging (where we want to go and what we’re planning for)

At this juncture, marketing messaging shouldn’t be all about COVID – in fact, that topic should be infrequent for most companies, unless it’s an integral part of what they do.

Garcia stated what many of us may have already observed by now: “We have all been inundated with a lot of COVID content and clearly some companies are doing it better than others.”

Ledergor added: “People are sick and tired of the doom and gloom and negativity.”

Chen seemed to agree, adding that addressing the topic of the pandemic was important for many companies in the triage stage of marketing redevelopment, but that it’s now time to question, dig in, and find a deeper brand identity and move forward with that.

As White of FloQast said: “We feel strongly that our solution works and we’ll be better on the other side of this.”

This can be an opportunity to grow and develop more meaningful relationships with colleagues and clients. Many of us need to accept and embrace that our respective companies might never go back to the way they were before.

People have a way of detecting authenticity in brands. This pandemic is a chance to remember that a business is nothing without the individual humans who make it tick. Cultivating empathy and real connections within your company will reflect outwardly. Not only are people drawn to a caring and honest stance right now – a company that can lay its values bare – but taking that approach will strengthen brand trust now and for the long-term.

As Chen stated: “The future of work is here and now. It has arrived. So what does a return-to-work world look like? The hypothesis is that it will not be the same as it was before.”

Indeed, it is unlikely things will ever look exactly the way they did before, but this could be positive in many ways.

The post Practical Advice for B2B Sales & Marketing Post COVID appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

The good news is, having a documented integrated demand generation (demand gen) plan can help your marketing team overcome those obstacles, and enable a top-performing sales team.

At the Norwest Venture Partners Demand Generation Summit, we brought together a group of seasoned marketing and sales professionals to share how they’ve fine-tuned their demand gen efforts.

During the event, Heidi Bullock, VP of Demand Generation at Marketo gave her five top tips for driving a successful demand generation program:

1. Agree on demand gen definitions across the organization
2. Set specific goals upfront
3. Evaluate all marketing programs through a demand gen lens
4. Institute checks and balances
5. Testing should be like brushing your teeth

We’ve expanded on these tips in the below SlideShare.

Norwest Venture Partners Demand Generation Success Secrets from Norwest Venture Partners

The post 5 Demand Generation Success Secrets from the Experts appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

This question was the center of debate at the Churchill Club’s 21st annual “Top Ten Tech Trends” event last month in Santa Clara, California. A panel of five notable Silicon Valley investors each presented two key predictions, discussed and rated the potential impact of each trend, then welcomed the audience to weigh in with their votes.

This year’s event featured Jeff Crowe of Norwest Venture Partners, Brian Ascher of Venrock, Navin Chaddha of Mayfield, Lauren Kolodny of Aspect Ventures, and Rebecca Lynn of Canvas Ventures.

Forbes CEO Mike Federle and publisher Rich Karlgaard co-moderated the lively forward-looking discussion that covered predictions ranging from the rise of VR-AI-bioelectronic wearables to the renaissance of silicon. 

Norwest Managing Partner, Jeff Crowe shared the following predictions with the audience:

Digital Technology Makes Positive (!) Inroads on Mental Health

Over the last 5 years, heavy use of smartphones and our “always-on” culture have been cited as causing increases in depression, anxiety, and isolation. Digital technology fights back. From texting with your remote therapist to machine learning unique combinations of therapeutic problem/response, digital technology will democratize access to effective mental health treatment.

Physical Space: the Final Frontier

Real estate is often listed as one of the last sectors to be impacted by technology. Get ready for some major changes: the ways that we buy, sell, lease, build, move to, live in, furnish and secure our physical spaces are becoming faster, simpler, and cheaper – for both our homes and offices. How we utilize space will continue to dramatically change in the next few years due to macroeconomic shifts, on-demand preferences, and lack of space in urban areas.

Norwest has invested in several companies that are focused on improving health outcomes through digital technology, such as Talkspace and Omada Health. We have also made investments in companies that are reinventing living spaces and real estate including Opendoor, Common, and Bumblebee Spaces.

Curious to hear what the other investors predicted as well as what they thought of Jeff’s emerging trends? The Churchill Club has the full video below.

The post Highlights from the 21st Annual “Top Tech Trends” Churchill Club’s Event appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

That’s why we recently hosted a branding fireside chat moderated by Emily Heyward, co-founder of startup branding agency Red Antler in conversation with Philip Krim, the co-founder and CEO of Casper and Tim Brown, the co-founder and CEO of Allbirds.

Over the course of the conversation, the three shared insights they’ve learned over the course of building these brands. Here are the highlights.

Your Brand is More Than Just a Logo

When many entrepreneurs initially think about their brand, it’s in the context of needing a name and a logo to market their product. But as our panelists noted, your brand goes a lot farther than that.

“The brand is not always just a physical output. It’s not just a poster or a piece of packaging,” said Brown. “It can be the way that someone greets you in a store or it could be just the tone of something as well which has to touch every part of the organization. It can’t just be three guys behind Apple Mac laptops designing pretty pictures. It has to run much, much deeper than that, and that thing therefore has to touch every part of the organization so it’s a complex piece to manage.”

“You’ve got so many competing priorities and you think that you sort of checked the box on brand and you can go about your business,” said Heyward. “’Great, we’ve got our logo now let’s get back to the real stuff.’ I think when you look at these companies that have really transformed the categories that they’re in, and the companies that everybody aspires to be like, the common denominator is executing flawlessly and not having those missteps, and that’s really hard to do. There needs to be a commitment to investing in that not just from a monetary perspective but from a team perspective, from a time perspective and from prioritizing that at a leadership level. You know I think people want the magic without putting in the work.”

What’s in a Compelling Brand Name? Risk

Your brand name becomes your brand’s calling card. Seeing your brand name and logo is often the first experience a customer has with you. This makes finding the right name critical. So how do you start the naming process? Our panelists shared their experiences.

“We had a short list of names, it was the first thing we had to define,” said Brown. “We had a product that we loved. We had a strategy for entering a market that we loved. We didn’t have a name. So we got down to a shortlist of four and one that we were gravitating around — and we ended up choosing — was Allbirds, and not everyone liked it. My wife hated it. But we chose this name.’”

For Brown, the somewhat edgy, unusual name has become core to the Allbirds vision. “The Allbirds name provoked different reactions in different people, but it provoked reaction, and I’m so glad that we went with something that was a little kind of weird,” he said. Because I think that laid the foundation for our larger vision.”

Krim also found that taking a calculated risk with the naming process paid off.

“It was great that we worked with Red Antler and had a process,” he said. “Because it is something that we had never been through before and as emotional as it is you just have to kind of commit to the process. I think a lot of the same things. We took a risk. Everyone was like Casper the ghost — what does that mean? Aren’t you worried that? And it was similar like it always provoked reaction and that was something that we liked.

Brand definition is one of the biggest initial challenges faced by entrepreneurs. Heyward noted that it takes a willingness to be OK with not everyone getting or liking the name.

“I think naming is one of the things that founders struggle with the most,” said Heyward. “I know I get tons of questions from people needing advice around naming. The one thing I always say is don’t shop it around. It’s like if you’re naming a kid everyone’s got an opinion, everyone has an association. You just have to move forward.”

Build the Brand From Day One

When many young companies are starting out, there’s a significant focus on the product. And while that focus is important, without a strong brand behind it, it’s difficult for the brand to really take off. Often, the brand becomes an afterthought, something the company feels they can’t afford to do early on. But our panelists concur that it’s one of the most valuable investments to initially make.

“You have to do it from the beginning,” said Brown. The thing is you can’t afford not to. We certainly couldn’t. But, you get what you pay for. It’s like anything else. This is something you can’t take shortcuts on. You’ve got to go find the best — and I would put Red Antler out there as the best. You have to do that from the beginning and lean into it with everything that you have knowing that it’s pretty important.”

For Casper, branding was one of their first significant investments, even before their funding. Why? Because Krim was disrupting the $16 billion mattress industry and understood the importance of building a new, modern brand that consumers would love and not just focusing on creating a better product.

“The brand has to be one of the first things you think about — and one of the things you always think about — because don’t get a second chance to have that customer love you, and have the brand love, and tell her friends and family about it,” said Krim. “You really have to commit early to making sure you’re going to deliver a perfect experience, an incredible product, and then from there you can build on that.”

Your Brand is Never Finished

Let’s say your logo and brand identity is finished. Your messaging is defined. So now all your branding activities are done and you can move on to other things, right? Not so, according to our panelists. A vibrant brand is something you work on every day, with every customer interaction.

“On the one hand I think you need to deeply understand the DNA of what you’re about,” said Brown. “When you think about Casper, you think about sleep. I think there’s something really powerful about that idea and the consistency of that idea. Then on the other hand, I think it’s constantly changing, and the great brands need to continually reinvent themselves. Nike stands for the athlete and then the storytelling and the product and everything is moving so fast, if you look away for a second it’s gone. I think that tension between those two competing ideas is really what you have to nail. I think you need to sign up for the fact that this thing is never finished.”

Krim agreed and went on to share how brand becomes a touchstone for every aspect of the organization’s activities.

“Brand can’t be siloed,” said Krim. “You can’t say ‘oh that’s the brand department, they’re going to think about it.’ For us, everyone thinks about brand. And everyone thinks about ‘What are the impacts to the brand based on what we’re doing?’ Even when it comes to customer service and supply chain. Lack of consistency on delivery impacts your experience, impacts your brand. So, for us, we’re always talking about how everyone needs to think about the brand.

This article was originally published on Thrive Global’s Medium page. 

The post What It Takes To Build An Enduring Brand: Insights from Casper, Allbirds and Red Antler appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

Recurring revenue can be a minefield for CFOs who are trying to figure out how to compensate their sales forces, however. One false step can explode the ambitions of a company trying to establish itself in the market.

So what are the best practices for CFOs in establishing a sales and commission model for a recurring revenue company? Two experts from Accenture Consulting grasped this thorny topic at a recent Norwest Venture Partners conference on sales operations and commissions in a SaaS business. Leading the roundtable of Norwest portfolio company CFOs were Kevin Dobbs, Everything-as-a-Service Practice Lead, and Mark Wachter, Managing Director of Sales Strategy. The gathering produced keen insights to best practices for creating successful sales and compensation plans.

The session kicked off with a discussion of the enlightening results of a recent Norwest Portfolio Sales Commission survey. They pinpointed some of the problems most commonly encountered by both young and mature companies. Understanding the full implications of their sales compensation and commission plans is critical to CFOs, and when they don’t, their companies can end up unwittingly with sales and commission plans that negatively impact their bottom line and their long-term prospects for growth and success. Many of the pain points of the survey and the discussion focused on the best commission rates for new bookings, upsells, and renewals.

Three Key Pieces of Advice

What can these CFOs do better? Put simply, they need to strike a balance. “It’s important to focus on the mechanics, such as what are the measures and how to weight them,” Dobbs said. When it comes to SaaS business models, Dobbs and Wachter laid out three key pieces of advice for CFOs who are trying to establish a successful sales and commission formula:

1. Align incentive and strategy. This sounds easy but can be tricky because it’s complex. The complexity comes from defining your key success metrics, how they are tracked, setting goals, what success looks like and then how do you want to pay for these results. And it’s very important because it has serious implications for companies that plan to raise money. Dobbs Business Model Framework around key SaaS business dimensions (Strategy, Finance, Org & Culture, Products, Sales & Marketing, Service Delivery, Customer Success) highlighted the business areas impacted by sales compensation, including growth strategy, finance and accounting, talent strategy, sales strategy, and account management.

2. Divide salespeople into two categories according to their talents: “hunters” and “farmers.” It’s important not to confuse the two. You must recognize who they are, how they are different and incentivize them appropriately to ensure they succeed. This becomes very important as a company scales and there are different teams responsible for new bookings, upselling, and renewals. Our survey found that 37% of companies had a separate customer success team while 25% were still relying on outside reps for renewals. Data also revealed that none of the companies were paying reps or account managers for renewals. However, most companies pay their renewals agents some small type of bonus or commission for renewals somewhere in the range of one to two percent.

3. Establish quotas. Pay mix and quotas may not affect company performance, but it does affect retention. A longer sales cycle should have a lower pay mix (more base, less variable), and a quota strategy is typically implemented, when pay mix goes up (lower base, higher variable) and the sales rep has control and influence in the sale. When it comes to setting quotas, however, most organizations don’t set sales quotas correctly. Quotas have to make sense in terms of the fundamentals of your business. Done right, they help level the playing field. Done wrong, they can undermine your sales effort and create unnecessary conflicts in the areas of:

• Strategic direction
• Timing
• Sales coverage
• Sales skills

Optimizing Sales Organization Structure and Commission Plans

Growing pains discussed by the CFOs centered around the hunter versus farmer dilemma and structuring the sales organization and commission plans to optimize performance around new bookings, upselling, and renewals. One CFO mentioned that their sales people are at the renewal point with decent sized contracts, and the debate was around whether they should get full payment for those renewals. When a person upsells, what credit do they get, particularly when the upsell happens in the mid-term of an annual contract? When an organization starts to face these types of questions, it is generally a sign that is it time to set up a separate account management team, also known as a customer success function, to focus on upselling and renewals so that their inside and outside sales teams can focus on new bookings. This can actually help the commission plans to be less complex and can help reduce churn. As Dobbs pointed out, if you get more than 10% churn a year, you won’t make money; you need a strong upsell and cross sell opportunity.

Pain around how to pay out commissions was also discussed. For example, some companies pay commissions monthly instead of quarterly. Portfolio CFOs gathered around the table generally agreed that it’s “insane” to try and track commissions monthly. Nevertheless, companies need to wrestle with commission payouts, whether they’re annual or quarterly, as well as assessing the overall impact of accelerators on the company. Most CFOs said they do quarterly payouts while some do half year and others use a hybrid model of quarterly payouts with a one-year kicker. The consensus around best practice was an annual plan with quarterly quotas, payouts and accelerators. Sales compensation tools can be helpful as well. Organizations with fewer than 15 employees in their sales organization can get away with Excel, the Accenture experts said, but when the company grows, they need more powerful tools like sales comp platforms such as Callidus, Varicent, or Xactly. One CFO said they have hired a person to focus on managing their sales compensation platform.

Designing Incentives for the Curve and Other Best Practices

Another commission consideration discussed focused on the length of contracts. The majority of the portfolio companies surveyed had a mix of annual and multi-year contracts, and this can make commission plans more complex. For contracts longer than one year, Dobbs and Wachter suggested using Sales Promotion Incentive Fund (SPIF) as incentives for sales people. They also said it’s important to design for the sales performance curve, since there is no such thing as an “average sales person.” Wachter shared some statistics suggesting the top 20% of sales reps drive 62% of the revenue while the remaining 80% of the sales reps drive only 38%. “You need to design sales incentives so you’re not overpaying, rather you need to pay at or above market for top performers, but fairly to core performers so they’d become top performers,” Wachter said. What’s more, the sales management spends most of their time with the top and bottom performers while the middle 70% is the “forgotten core.” This middle segment also typically proves to possess the talent capable of delivering top performing sales. He suggested having a draw program that helps protect those who will develop into top performers.

Other suggested best practices include putting limits around non-recoverable draws for three to six months for new hires, but much depends on the stage of the company. Most CFOs agreed with a best practice of not paying 100% in the draw. Finally, it’s important to determine who owns the bulk of new bookings and renewals. In summary, a good compensation plan depends on getting the fundamentals correct and properly aligned.

Is There a Smooth Path to Success?

Of course there’s no magic recipe for building a successful company, although these days it seems recurring revenue comes pretty close. If you want your own recurring revenue business to drive a smooth path to success, you must set up a sales and commission plan that works in synchromesh with your strategy and goals.

The post Sales Compensation Leading Practices: Tips for Entrepreneurs Building Recurring Revenue Businesses appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.

The Digital Healthcare Innovation Summit 2016 is tomorrow, November 2nd, at the Mandarin Hotel in Boston. Our complete agenda and (sold-out) registered attendee group promises to make this a great event for all involved. As in past years, all content from the conference is digitized and will be available post-conference for those unable to attend at the conference website.

We are witness to the maturation of digital health in a number of areas at a time of political change.

We are less than a week from a critical Presidential election and are honored to have Governor Charlie Baker with us to be interviewed by Todd Cozzens on the “state of the state” of US healthcare. For those of us in the industry, healthcare policy and the transformation of the “rules of the game” for the American system are held in the balance. Regardless of political leanings, the US is still working through the PPACA, and markets, providers, and patients alike await the outcomes of Presidential, Congressional, and Senate elections. Our agenda includes a keynote from Dr. David Blumenthal, President of the Commonwealth Fund and former ONC HCIT head for President Obama. Years ago, David authored a tour de force titled ” The Heart of Power” detailing the complete political history of healthcare policy in the US. Professor Jonathan Gruber from MIT, one of the architects of the PPACA, joins us for an afternoon keynote. John has been forthright in his accounts of where the PPACA has been successful and where it has been challenged. Amidst this backdrop of healthcare policy transformation, digital health has begun to mature into a proven field with clinical and economic value, valid business models, and continued exits.

As co-chair, I am pleased with our lineup this year as evidence that the field of digital health is reaching the status of an established investment sector. Our distinguished keynotes and panel members will provide us the opportunity to engage with the issues as a group at a key checkpoint for the field. We are on track for $4B of sector investment in the space in 2016, which equates to about 10% of total venture funding. This $4B is in the ballpark of the sector investment in 2014 and 2015. We have seen $10B in M&A exits (up from $6B) so far in more than 80 companies. Although the IPO markets have been much slower in 2016, we witnessed NantHealth and iRhythm earn their stock tickers (NH and IRTC respectively). We have also witnessed the maturation of a cadre of venture and private equity firms that are investing more thematically in HealthTech, Tech Enabled Healthcare Services and Digital Health. These investment firms are accumulating the networks, knowledge and scar tissue to support their CEOs and executive teams in driving growth, evidence, and exits. The evidence to support the clinical and economic value of these investments is growing and starting to look more like what we have expected previously from more established sectors in healthcare. Strategics continue to take notice and have continued to acquire, with IBM and McKesson leading the 2016 charge.

Analytics are moving from retrospective to prospective, prescriptive, and real time, with ROI within 3- 6 months, making the experimental a practical reality. Health systems are using retrospective analytics to understand where costs lie, where practice patterns should be changed, and how care pathways actually affect outcomes. The winner of this year’s award for Most Innovative Company of 2016 is Health Catalyst, a pioneer in the space. Health Catalyst has become a leader in the space of analytics and healthcare data warehouse technology, and has forged strong relationships with key enterprise customers like Allina, Stanford, Kaiser, and Partners healthcare. Client level evidence has buttressed the case for the use of analytics in catalyzing change in the clinical, financial, and operational aspects of health systems.

Although ACOs experienced a difficult start, we see maturation of the model, and find that physician led ACOs offer a unique approach to the management of population level risk. Brandon Hull from Cardinal Partners will seek to answer the question of whether 2016 is the year of the Physician ACO. His panel includes the CEOs from VillageMD, Privia, and Iora Health, all of whom are pioneers in building systems and practices to allow physicians to successfully take risk, arguably one of the most challenging parts of the PPACA. For those of us partial to physician leadership of clinical operations, the hope that tools and systems can be built to empower providers to take on risk successfully is paramount to making these organizations successful as a fixture in the US healthcare system.

Digital therapeutics and digital diagnostics are proving their clinical and economic value and are maturing into unique classes of interventions. The combination of persuasive design with smart approaches to clinical coaching for behavioral modification is leading to results. A 2015 meta-analysis by Amanda Hull, et al. concluded that evidence exists to support the statement that digital health interventions can positively modify behavior in weight loss, smoking cessation, and in the management of diabetes. In fact, this year, as a result of such evidence, the AHA developed approaches and recommendations to support the use of digital interventions in specific clinical circumstances. In the digital diagnostics arena, the 2016 IPO of iRhythm (IRTC) supports the tenet that using semi-automatic methods of processing biosignals has the potential to lead to important changes in clinical decisions and earlier detection of life threatening arrhythmias. Physicians are armed with better data, more impactful conclusions, and a more streamlined workflow with faster results.

We are quickly seeing real applications for the use of deep learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in healthcare. We are rapidly moving from a retrospective approach to data to a real time approach using sophisticated technologies to categorize, support decisions, and even interact with patients in conversation using AI. In the afternoon, we will hear from GE’s President & CEO, Charles Koontz, GE Healthcare IT & Chief Digital Officer describe how machine learning, AI and other technologies are being used in fields like image processing and image analysis and cardiology. Our afternoon includes a panel focused on AI and machine learning led by Noah Lewis from GE Ventures. With big Strategics and more than 90 funded companies in healthcare alone powered by AI including our panel members OPTUM, AnalyticsMD, Evidation Health, and Apervita, AI in healthcare has become one of the hottest investment trends of 2016. We will all see in 2017 how and where these bets bear fruit.

Telehealth continues its march to become a ubiquitous new care model and has established its utility in several applications from direct to patient to teleconsultation. Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, commented in Fortune this year that half of Kaiser’s visits are virtual. In less than the time it takes to train a new internist, Telehealth has blossomed, leading to improved access to patients and the potential to improve outcomes. The results are coming in – from both the patient facing and teleconsult sectors. Kepplinger, et al. published this year a review of the evidence on the utility of telemedicine to improve stroke care. TeleMental and TeleBehavioral health have also arrived, and the evidence to support their therapeutic use is being developed. Ann Lamont of Oak will take us through the tour of leading companies in the space with Quartet, TalkSpace and Lantern, with the added perspectives on behavioral health from the Steward Health Systems.

Dr. Gary Gottleib, CEO of Partners Healthcare and a leader in the US healthcare system, will be interviewed by co-chair Bill Geary of Flare Capital in the afternoon. Gary’s career has spanned clinician, hospital CEO, and health system executive and CEO. He has devoted his career to the leadership of a complex, cutting edge health system associated with Harvard Medical School.

The consumer continues to mature as a force that is central to the US healthcare system, under the post PPACA constructs. With deductibles rising, with exchanges functioning but teetering, and with consumer expectations rising as their non healthcare consumer experiences create even more delight, we see this theme expanding. The Consumer and Retailization of Healthcare panel led by Steve Kraus promises to provide us to some answers. Leaders from Docent, Bright Health, Dignity, and Centura will focus on the role of the consumer, opportunities for greater engagement and involvement, and the effects on traditional models and disruptive models of innovation.

Paul Wallace will lead a panel featuring leaders in providers and payors in the afternoon focusing on how these institutions think about strategic investments in innovations. In a time when more innovation is occurring through more than a transactional relationship with vendors and firms, strategic innovation has become a priority for leading health plans and provider systems.

We will hear a markets update from the public perspective by analyst George Hill at Deutche Bank, and from the private perspective by Katya Hancock at StartupHealth. In a year with few IPOs and consistent private sector activity, I look forward to comparing and contrasting the views on either sides of the ticker tape.

I want to thank my co-chair Bill Geary, and our amazing Advisory Board for their incredible leadership this year in bringing this great program to fruition. Our advisory board (in alphabetical order) includes Carl Byers from F Prime Capital, Lynne Chou from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Todd Cozzens from Leerink Transformation Partners, Doug Greenberg from Korn Ferry, Katya Hancock from Startup Health, Michael Hanewich from SVB, Brandon Hull from Cardinal Partners, Lucian Iancovici, MD from dRx Capital, Steve Kraus from Bessemer, Steve Krupa from Psilos, Ann Lamont from Oak HC/FT, Noah Lewis from GE Ventures, Ali Satvat from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Don Trigg from Cerner, Paul Wallace from Heritage, Michael Weintraub from OPTUM, Lawrence Wittenberg from Goodwin, and Krishna Yeshwant, MD from Google Ventures.

We have incredible sponsors with GE, Goodwin, Korn Ferry, OPTUM, Silicon Valley Bank, Athenahealth, Norwest Venture Partners, dRx Capital, Amazon, Deloitte, Psilos Ventures, and Startup Nation that make this summit possible. We are fortunate to have them and hope that they benefit from this event as much as the speakers and attendees will.

See you at the Summit.

Robert Mittendorff, MD, MBA, Partner
Norwest Venture Partners

The post Digital Healthcare Innovation Summit: The Maturation of a Space appeared first on Norwest Venture Partners.