Shiv Narayanan’s Post

Buyers rarely have a straight line to making a purchasing decision. Before they buy, buyers: - Engage with your top of funnel content (e.g. Articles, Social Media) - Kick the tires on your solution through (e.g. Demos and Trials) - Educate themselves on their options (e.g. Pricing, Competitors, Features) - Learn more about how to buy (e.g. through Sales conversations) And they go in and out of these stages, while trying to figure out the best option for themselves.

One of the largest distinctions between good marketers and great ones is their knowledge of business metrics. Here is a cheat sheet for all the key metrics that matter: Business Metrics: Help you understand the business context and the reality that the business is operating in. Revenue Metrics: Help you understand the business model and how fast the business is growing. Channel Metrics: Help you understand how well initiatives and investment areas are working. Campaign Metrics: Help you understand the details of the biggest investment areas.

When trying to entice prospects to switch over to your solution, having a cheaper / faster / better offering is not nearly enough. The reason is that customers have several other costs they need to factor in: -Migration Costs -Time and Productivity Lost -Internal Disruption -Implementation Costs -Team Training and Learning Curve -Downtime -Other Switching Costs When factoring in all these costs, your offer needs to be several magnitudes better in order to make it compelling enough to switch.

CMOs and Revenue leaders everywhere are missing sales projections right now. Instead of looking at this as a failure, see it as an opportunity to communicate better. When you miss your revenue targets by a large margin and your CEO / board are surprised, it means that you failed to communicate some critical information earlier in the process. Instead of making excuses and gathering data after the fact, prepare your CEO and board well ahead of time. How to do this: 1) Understand how much revenue needs to be generated to hit projections. 2) Do the analysis to understand what kind of contribution is required from all functions in order to get there. 3) Ensure you have enough budget to drive that contribution and enough time when factoring in ramp up times and sales cycles. 4) Partner with your CFO to get aligned on all financial expectations, including cash flow and EBITDA. 5) Put everything on the table with your CEO / board and help them understand why you think there will be a shortfall. Also communicate how you plan to work on this and reset expectations. The better you prepare all stakeholders, the more you will be seen as a partner in the process that can be trusted to lead versus the cause of a poor outcome.

Things your customers don't care about: 1. Which "best place to work" award you just won 2. How you just raised another round 3. Where you are on the Gartner quadrant 4. How proud you are of your rebrand / new logo / new website 5. Anything unrelated to how you can help them solve their pain points While you may think these things matter, they seldom factor into purchasing decisions. What moves the needle on getting deals across the finish line is truly adding value to the customer and helping them relieve a specific pain point they have.

The best companies have healthy conversion rates across the board. 1. They find the right leads at the top of the funnel so they convert at a high rate to MQLs. 2. Because their MQLs are from the right leads, they end up being a good fit for what they're selling and in-market to make a purchasing decision. This makes it more likely for them to get to opportunity status. 3. Because they're good fit opportunities, they close at higher rates. If your business is in a healthy place with some of these numbers but not others, odds are there is a mismatch between who you're targeting, what you're selling and where you are deploying your limited marketing and sales resources. The best companies have numbers much higher than this across the funnel.

One of the biggest revenue opportunities inside companies is the uncaptured revenue from existing customers. Yet most companies never do the analysis required to figure out how much revenue. Good whitespace analysis includes: -Listing out all the top accounts and prioritizing them by total revenue opportunity -Identifying how many more seats can be sold into those accounts (e.g. expanding into additional departments) -Identifying opportunities to cross-sell and upsell (e.g. what other products and services can we sell into those accounts) The analysis can be super simple but the insights are incredibly valuable. They should inform which accounts Sales prioritized and also how much Marketing needs to support outreach to those accounts. We've deployed this simple template across hundreds of B2B SaaS, Tech-Enabled and Business Services companies. If you want access, comment "YES" below and I'll send it to you.

Marketing leaders get too much into the details and lose investors and CEOs during board meetings. One of the biggest gaps we see in Marketing metrics is that leaders do not have the right reporting framework in place to communicate performance at a high level. Things you need to include: - Channel performance, pipeline and revenue (e.g. Paid vs. Events vs. SEO vs. Social) - Overall spend, pipeline and revenue (e.g. Marketing Generated Pipeline and Revenue) - Overall budget allocation and ROI (e.g. program spend vs. overhead) - Core business metrics (e.g. Unit economics) The simpler it is to understand, the more traction you get in board level conversations. We've deployed this simple dashboard below across hundreds of B2B SaaS, Tech-Enabled and Business Services companies. If you want access, comment "YES" below and I'll send it to you.

The biggest competitor most companies face is "Do Nothing" as an option. Inertia is the main hurdle you need to help customers overcome. The way to do this is by spelling out the actual cost of doing nothing in a tangible way that customers understand: 1. Time Lost: how much time could they have saved if they had your solution? 2. Money Lost: how much money is being lost or not saved by not adopting the solution? 3. Uncaptured Value: what is the quantifiable opportunity being missed by not taking action right now? 4. Speed to Outcome: how much longer will it take to get to a desired outcome without your solution? 5. Externalities: what other indirect negative outcomes will be experienced by your prospect by not purchasing today? The more your marketing and sales efforts address these objections, the higher your conversion rates will go.

The marketing budget breakdown of most companies is too evenly distributed across channels. This is not how the best companies operate. The reason for the even distribution is to hedge bets across channels to find the right prospects. Instead, it's much better to double down on activities that work in your specific context. If you're really good at partner marketing, put a bigger chunk of your marketing budget into it. If thought leadership is working really well for you, reallocate budget from other channels to it drive better brand awareness. The more you double down on the strategy that works for your business, the more pipeline and revenue you will generate. It is better to be incredibly proficient in one channel than adequate in several.