Sam Clarke

As a Demand Gen Marketer, you need to make sure that your 30/60/90 day plan is skewed towards learning about the company/space. The more time you can devote to understanding the business/space/customer, the better you'll be at your job in the long run. That said, I do sprinkle these "quick wins" into my 30/60/90 plan to ensure I'm moving performance in the right direction. I find the campaigns below to be low-effort yet impactful. 1. Run an a/b test on your website's pricing page. Chances are this is one of your best-performing pages when it comes to traffic and impact on conversion. Test something above the fold and you should come to statistical significance within ~45 days. 2. Send out a closed-lost/expired MQL survey. Ask every MQL that didn't convert in the last 3 months to complete a survey in exchange for a $20 Amazon/Starbucks gift card. The questions should be geared towards learning what initially made them interested in your product and why they didn't end up purchasing. Make sure you ask them if they went with a competitor and if so who. If they didn't purchase another product, re-route them to the sales team with their survey answers. If they did, tag them in your CRM to follow up in 9 months. 3. Run an email campaign that generates new reviews. Determine your business's most important keyword that you currently don't rank on page 1 for. Identify the review site (G2, Sofware Advice, etc) that is ranking the highest for that term and ask your customers to write a review on that site. Pull a list of customers with NPS scores of 9/10 and send them an email prompting them to review in exchange for a gift card. While you might not currently rank for that important search term, you can be visible on the website that ranks for it. 

Your first month should be 80% focused on learning the business and 20% focused on finalizing your 30/60/90 plan. For the remaining two months of the quarter, you should be 40% focused on continuing to learn the business and 60% focused on executing your plan. In the first 3 months... 1. Schedule one-on-ones with every team member you will interact with weekly. 2. Map out your existing funnel by taking the steps a prospect would. Make sure you complete every funnel step yourself, from landing on your website to demoing with sales to putting in an actual credit card. This will help you identify areas that need fixing. 3. Hop on 5-10 sales calls with actual prospects. Record the questions they ask and the responses by your sales team. Ask to be bcc'd on all emails to those prospects. 4. At least once a week, get into the support ticket queue and answer questions. Leverage your existing help center to see if you can come up with the answer yourself, before relying on a team member. In the first quarter... 1. Set KPIs by month for the rest of the year. 2. Deliver a "what's working" and "what's broken" presentation to senior management. Ensure that the team has visibility into how the current funnel is performing and where the opportunity is. 3. Identify one channel that is underperforming and launch a campaign to turn it around. 4. Identify a channel the company hasn't yet experimented with and kick off a test. 5. Kick off a campaign that will improve the lead-to-closed won conversion rate. 

If you are the first demand generation hire at a company, chances are you are going to need to advocate for some immediate changes to your funnel. They probably hired a demand generator because something needs to be addressed. However, question everything and confirm what needs to be addressed yourself. Start by mapping out the funnel in detail. Figure out every entrance into your website and then map out each following step. In addition to the mapping, record the conversion rates for each one of those steps. Then schedule a meeting with senior leadership across the company and walk them through the funnel. Highlight all the areas where the conversion drops the most and then recommend process changes, fixes, and tests to address them. This exercise not only helps you work out your 30/60/90-day plan but also generates unanimous buy-in from the team. 

Scheduling one-on-ones with your new colleagues is one of the first steps to tackle in your 30/60/90 day plan. In fact, those conversations should influence what makes it into your final draft. You should lean on the team that has seen it firsthand versus thinking you have all the answers. When I first join a company, I make sure that I schedule meetings with at least one representative from sales, customer success, finance, business intelligence, product, and engineering. I also ask these very same questions to every single direct report. Finally, I make sure to interview the longest-tenured employee at the company. 1. What is the best thing that the demand generation team is doing right now? 2. What is something that the demand generation team is not currently doing that you think we should be? 3. Are there any challenges currently facing the organization that the demand generation team should know about? 4. If you had to choose three thought leaders in our industry, who would you choose and why? 5. What are the top three publications/websites in our industry that are frequently read by our target audience? 6. What are the three most common problems customers are trying to solve with our product? 7. What are the three most common objections we face when selling to prospects? 8. Who do you think I should talk to next at this company and why?

The most effective way to scale a demand generation team after hire #1#1 is by partnering with freelancers and/or agencies. When you first join a company, understand its best and worst-performing channels. Then, compare that performance to your competitors. If your competitors are all benefiting from channels you are underperforming in, those are the areas to experiment in. First, I will run a pilot test in each one of those channels myself. Then, whichever channels show promise, I will look for external support to help scale them further. For example, if I am experimenting with paid search, I will create the first branded and non-branded campaigns just to see if there's any ROI. If the answer is yes, I will then transition into a strategic role and find an agency to help with the execution of it.

I would prioritize paid search and co-marketing. Here's why: 1. While paid search can get very expensive, you can learn a lot from this channel that can then help you optimize other channels. I love paid because it's very easy to measure performance. I can see what prospects are clicking on, how many are converting to leads, and then what the overall CAC is (spend divided by customer sign ups). In addition to this, I can learn a lot about how to optimize my funnel. Ad copy can be optimized, landing page design can be optimized, even form fields can be optimized. Best thing is all of this CRO improvement will raise the performance of the other channels I've invested in. 2. The reason why I like co-marketing is because it's the opposite of paid advertising: it's cheap! Co-marketing is a fantastic way to generate net new leads cost effectively. Co-host a webinar with a company that serves your target customer. Then in exchange for you promoting it to your mailing list, ask them to promote it to theirs. After the event, agree to share the registration and attendee lists. You will have a lot of net new leads to nurture and work.

Here at Second Nature, we've been investing a lot in identifying our TAM. We've been able to identify our target accounts through a backlinking audit from a couple of softwares that our ideal customers use. But when it comes to enriching those accounts with useful information, we are using the tool Clay. Initially I thought there was no way this tool could do a better job than enrichment platforms like Zoominfo and Clearbit but I was wrong. It's been incredible and definitely worth checking out. One thing I've been extremely impressed with is it's ability to scrape copy from websites you enter. If you are finding that Zoominfo or Clearbit are coming back empty for certain fields that are critical for you to know, try asking Clay to find that information recorded somewhere on their websites.

I incorporate online review sites into my overall organic strategy. Online review sites typically rank very well for non-branded terms in search engines like Google. So well actually that they are particularly difficult to leapfrog. What I'll do is list out the most important non-branded search terms for my company and then identify the review sites that rank in positions #1, #2, or #3 for those terms. I then pick the top two review sites that make up the most amount of this search real estate. Then because review sites typically rank the listed businesses in order of highest grading and most reviews, I will drive reviews to those two sites. I will ask all of our customers who have given us NPS scores of 9 and 10 to review us on those sites. I'll continue to invest in this strategy until I'm in position #1 on these review sites. So even if I can't get my company's branded website to rank in position #1, #2, or #3 for a certain term, I can make sure I am visible on the websites that are in those positions.

Here’s what I think are the first three steps in identifying the best channels to drive the right demand: 1. Audit the lead source/channel for every closed-won customer from the past quarter. While other channels might drive more demand, this report will show you the channels that are bringing in the highest quality prospects. You are going to want to invest in these channels first. 2. Compare your current channel mix to your competitor channel mixes. This might show you key channels that your company has yet to invest in. I usually find that every industry is unique in terms of what works and what doesn’t. Taking a look at where your competitors spend their time and money might lead you down the right path quicker. 3. Survey your sales reps. They have had numerous conversations with prospective customers and usually the first question they ask is “how did you find our company?” Their feedback will help you identify the offline or hard to attribute channels that drive demand for your business. For instance, you might think a lead came in through a branded search term but that branded search was actually prompted by a third party podcast listen. 

If you find that volume is sparse in digital channels like organic and paid, here are a couple suggestions: 1. Conferences Your prospects will always try to be leveling up. If they aren't using the world wide web for this, then they are attending their industry specific conferences. Experiment with trying a few different conferences in a calendar year just to determine if it's worthwhile to fish there. 2. Referrals Spin up a referral program and use the network of your existing customer base to spread the word on your behalf. Make sure you incentivize both the referrer and the referee. 3. Co-marketing webinars This is a very economical way to grow your audience. Find non-competitor companies that are also serving your prospects and ask them to do a co-marketing webinar with you. Set the precedent that you and they will promote the webinar to your own audiences and then share the registration and attendee lists afterwards. 4. Invest in building out your TAM (total addressable market) If they aren't using digital channels, chances are you are going to need to invest in ABM and sales outbound. Prior to doing this, put a lot of effort into identifying your TAM. Not only identifying the companies, but then enriching the accounts with useful information. Your going to need tools and resources like Zoominfo, Clearbit, Clay, and Virtual Assistants to get this done.