Good day PROs!
Welcome to this week's GTM Short. Today's B2B Buyer has more choice than ever, so it is time to rethink the Marketing Org. This short provides a bottoms-up blueprint for how to do this by avoiding the most common mistakes.
What Is Marketing?
Ask 10 people to define "Marketing" and you will get 10 related, but notably different answers.
It gets worse when we ask people to define related sub-terms like:
Performance Marketing
Demand Gen
Product Marketing
Content Marketing
Brand
Yet despite this ambiguity, we still build our Marketing Orgs on this basis.
"You need a Product Marketer."
"We need a Demand Gen wiz."
This issue is particularly acute in the Lower Middle Market because the entire function (product marketing, demand gen, etc.) is frequently managed and executed by one person.
Just look at the job descriptions for some of these roles. We will see requirements for skills and experiences that can only be found from a 25-year veteran, yet our comp is for someone with less than 10-years experience. Good luck with that.
So rather than build our Marketing Org with a collection of ambiguously defined roles, let's take a Zero-Based approach and build it based on the outputs that are required and the capabilities necessary to deliver those outputs, THEN determine the roles.
Fuel and Engine
One of the better "First Principles" descriptions of the Marketing function that we've seen is from MKT1 (earlier stage VC firm founded by former B2B marketers).
To build a successful marketing function you need to produce great fuel and craft a well-running engine. Your fuel needs to be custom made for your engine and your engine needs to be custom made for your fuel.
"Fuel" is our content (in all forms) and "Engine" is the channels, tools and processes to get that content out to our audience.
With this heuristic as our guide, let's now outline what is needed from Marketing, starting with Fuel.
Mapping the Buyer Journey Through "Zones"
We covered the concept of the Buyer Zones in a previous post, so we will provide a summary here.
Every company has built a process, with or without intention, through which our Buyers navigate. This process can be divided into "Zones" that, to varying degrees, can be measured (basically a digital footprint).
A fairly common set of Zones for a sales-led motion would include the following experiences for the Buyer:
Start the Relationship
Deepen the Relationship
Enable the Buyer to Buy
Talk to Sales (request a demo)
Pre-Call Experience
Discovery + Demo Experience
Post-Call (Stakeholder) Experience
Contract Experience
Activation
Expansion (usage, features, products)
Advocacy
Unlike the Buyer's awareness journey, the journey through the Zones is fairly linear (with obvious exceptions at the beginning).
Having said that, the information needed within in each Zone is indeed non-linear, because a Buyer can enter our process at any one of many stages of awareness.
Fuel (content) is the thing our Buyer consumes in these Zones. Content is everything.
Content with a capital "C"
"Content" is another one of those seemingly understood, but polluted terms.
When a Marketer says Content, we often think of the asset; post, email, video, page, audio clip, webinar, etc.
But before we set out to make content (little 'c') we need to first have a comprehensive, democratized understanding of our Buyer's:
core challenges
the dynamics that creates these challenges (market, structure, etc.)
the alternatives used to address these challenges
the process to assess these alternatives
and more
We are essentially building institutional knowledge of our Buyer. This requires "always on" research of interviews, call recordings, competitive messaging, community conversations, marketplace reviews, search trends and more.
All content (little 'c') is based on the Core Pillar Content (big 'C') that is a result of this research.
This is not a part time job. It is core to the success of everything we do in Go-to-Market. It therefore requires an experienced, intellectually curious, dedicated resource. We often refer to this role as the "Problem Marketer," but also as the Investigative Journalist.
Problem Meets Product
The other pillar of Content is Product. We need to be able to effectively communicate how our product solves the identified problems, within the context of the Buyer's ecosystem.
This is most often owned by the proverbial Product Marketer, with one caveat. It's not about feature launches. It's about connecting to business impact.
This is done when Problem and Product work together to connect the dots.
Visual Engineer
A picture says a thousand words.
In a world where our Buyer's attention span is that of a gold fish, visual communication has never been more important.
Graphics, diagrams, frameworks, images, etc. are all part of "content."
In our opinion, the core of visual identity is hard to outsource. The problem is the person responsible for creative spends all of their time on random acts of design vs "engineering" a design system around which everything else is built, in modular form.
Distribution
Distribution is broad and includes all the vehicles by which content leaves our 4 walls and gets in front of our audience (prospects and customers).
This includes "Outbound," most recently the domain of SDRs and/or AEs (sales).
The form a piece of content takes is a function of the channel on which it is shared, so the Distribution team is part of the decision making process when we take a core content pillar and develop assets.
Success in distribution is heavily reliant on a well-documented, comprehensive process that maps the stages of the Buyer Zones, well orchestrated tech, clean data (the other fuel) and a process to keep it clean and analysis that provides insight on what's working.
Tech & Process
Tech is a tool. But it needs an operating manual. Not for the tool itself, but for the process. Documentation, therefore, is critical so that the Buyer's journey through our system is well understood and the "digital footprint" of that journey is tracked.
A key example of where tech cannot replace sound process is in the data function, where we start with an unknown visitor or raw lead record, and foster their experience through all possible stages of their journey. A sound system will balance granularity of this data with comprehensiveness and utility.
Frequently this "Marketing Ops" role is within the Marketing Org. We believe (based on experience) that the company is better served if the role is instead in an independent RevOps team. Marketing is a customer, but because the objective is a well orchestrated system, a direct connection to sales, cs, product, etc. is vital.
Analysis & Insight
The flow of content consumption for the entire buying journey does not follow a consistent timeline nor happen within pre-defined periods. It can also jump all over the place based on what we might consider their own journey. So measuring things within a snapshot of time does not work to truly understand this.
This function must look at this from an input and output perspective. The inputs are based on buyers' exposure to content that serves a specific purpose. This can happen in a prompted or unprompted manner, but the key is understanding engagement (output), and whether exposure to subsequent content (input) is engaged with. This cycle repeats (and can bounce around) based on where a buyer might "be".
The goal is to understand the content and distribution mechanisms that maximize the throughput of those consuming information that is useful to them based on where they are.
Success is finding ways to understand those content consumption patterns, starting with those with whom we initiated a relationship to those that we deepened that relationship and so on.
The Marketing Nucleus for the Lower Middle Market
In summary, this is what we see as the nucleus for Marketing for B2B companies in the Lower Middle Market.
Problem Marketer
Product Marketer
Visual Engineer
Distribution (aka Demand Gen)
Tech & Process
Analysis & Insight
These are not specific roles, but capabilities. If we start with this core, we can be much more intentional about how we build the Marketing Org.
For example, if a company has a large customer portfolio with expansion opportunities, then "Distribution" may include Demand Gen and "Lifecycle" roles.
CEOs of companies in the Lower Middle Market typically look at this list and think, "that's a lot; more than we have. I don't think we have budget for this."
That is not an uncommon response, but it also reveals something we see all the time; Companies are frequently under-invested in marketing (and RevOps) and over-invested in sales and customer success.
Do your Marketing roles map to this nucleus? Anything you would add? Reply and let us know! We read and respond to everything.
Until next week,
Gary & Andy
