Burning Questions, Counterintuitive Insights and Surprising Datapoints to Spark Your Imagination
Pricing & Packaging is such a critical part of every company’s GTM (or go-to-market), you could argue that any company at its very core has two existential imperatives.
First: it needs to be able to deliver value to a group of customers (which implies being able to define and reach them effectively). Second: it needs to be able to extract a portion of that value for itself.
Big Data has been one of the major buzzwords of the last 5 years.
Everyone rushed to build all the required infrastructure to support them: CDP, ETL, reverse ETL, data warehouses, and plugging them across their stacks.
Great companies like Snowflake, Segment, and Fivetran flourished in this period helping customers gather, route, synchronize, and store the huge amounts of data that was being generated all across the funnel, from the first touchpoint with a user down to their whole customer journey.
That’s great. I love data-driven companies and I think, at least in the tech space, it’s time to call the Big Data war won. Most companies nowadays have a horde of data about their prospects and customers.
So…has the time come for celebrations?
Well, no.
One of the conversations I’ve had more frequently in my professional journey is “how do you define what’s a good lead/deal”?
It’s really interesting to observe that most companies struggle in this area, they don’t really have a mental framework for it, tend to use anecdotal information until very late in their lifecycle stage and as a consequence create friction/misalignment that could be very much avoided and that ends up slowing growth down instead, in some cases putting the company as a whole at existential risk even.
Write it down in 250-350 words, fill out the form below, and let us know.
Dun & Bradstreet put out a piece titled “5 Shocking Stats About the State of B2B Marketing Data,” and I wasn’t shocked.
Maybe I’m cynical, or perhaps the years of experience at companies large and small caused me to react with a shoulder shrug and “meh.”
The starting salvo in the article was that only 50% of B2B professionals are confident in the quality of their sales and marketing data. Even though over 80% say, it’s crucial to their success.
Here’s why I don’t care–this will always be the case.
Spoiler alert: this is really what most companies are at.
The “big data” narrative from a few years back introduced the idea that ‘the more data the better’, but today’s companies are most likely drowning in it.
Also: the problem is rather around how to store, organize, and complement the data they have.
TL;DR: It really depends. Also: wrong question.
Conversion rates are interesting, people look at a percentage and take it as an absolute truth, it’s a number after all right?
What most operators miss tho is that every number has a story behind it, a series of assumptions and ideas that were baked into the calculation to get there. Not knowing what that story is more often than not sets you up for failure.
Write it down in 250-350 words, fill out the form below, and let us know.
Operators used to think about *the* conversion funnel: you would move from awareness to consideration to conversion.
Then SaaS came around and it was still about that, but also retention and expansion and advocacy. It would be pretty linear, you would move from being Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) into a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) into being a customer within the purview of Success as a function.
Pretty straightforward right?
Except now Product Qualified Leads (PQL) are a thing… so, ugh, where do they go in the conversion funnel? Do they come before MQLs? After them? Do they replace MQLs? Are they something that should exist in parallel to them? How does one turn into the other? If you’ve been thinking that it’s all very confusing, you’re not alone.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now you will have heard about PLG. It’s literally everywhere on B2Tech Twitter, it’s the hottest topic of the moment when it comes to SaaS companies.
It stands for Product-Led Growth, of course… you might have heard about Product-Led Sales or Product-Led Revenue, slightly different flavors for essentially the same concept.
Most of us have been on a long hiatus from live events but they are back. Despite many prognostications that gathering in large groups will transition permanently to virtual events our primal social instincts seem to be too powerful.
This reality is where the crux of my position lies. Making connections in real life leads to exponentially more value in every way.
I and the team are attending a ton of events this year and are super excited to do so because:
Write it down in 250-350 words, fill out the form below, and let us know.
Marketing has known this for years: out of 1,000 people that visit your pricing page or view your webinar or download an ebook, not everyone is interest-ED in the same way in you, but not everyone is interest-ING in the same way to you either.
Another day, another redesign.
A single day doesn’t go by without a post on my Linkedin feed of some startup announcing a major redesign of their website.
I get it, I’ve run an agency for 13 years, always hearing the same stuff: