- What happens with most founders
is they hire somebody to do marketing
but they don't have a playbook.
They're not measuring anything.
They're not driving demand.
It's, your business right now is referral based.
(bright upbeat music)
Hey there everybody.
I'm Dan Martell, Sierra entrepreneur, investor
and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this episode, I'm gonna share with you
how to structure your marketing team to produce
massive demand generation results.
Okay, so if you have one marketer, two marketers
three or a whole bunch, I'm gonna show you
the way I think about using an agile approach
to designing a marketing team that can execute, implement
and most importantly, generate qualified leads.
That is the name of the game in marketing,
be sure to stay to the end where I'm gonna share with you
my marketing team designer template.
It's literally the not only the list of
different strategies that you can assign to people
on how to design the org structure
based on the philosophy I'm gonna teach,
but also the list of metrics that you wanna be
asking and reviewing with your marketing team
to know that they're being effective.
So let's get into this.
So I love marketing.
Marketing is one of my favourite departments
because they tell stories.
They use automation, so it's like my nerdy side.
It's metrics driven, it's very quantitative
but it's also got some qualitative aspects to that.
I've personally been involved
in building dozens of different marketing teams
focused on not only the PR, the brand side of things
but specifically the demand gen, the advertising.
The direct response campaigns that really drive,
you know revenue.
I've been responsible for generating,
you know, close to 100 million dollars worth of business
through marketing strategy and campaigns.
And it is different when you're at 10K a month
in reoccurring revenue versus, you know, 100K
or when you're selling a million dollars a month.
The marketing team has to shift.
And what I wanna here with you is the philosophy
of how to think about assigning certain things
and hats to people and measuring the right process
so that you don't,
like what happens with most founders
is they hire somebody to do marketing
but they don't have a playbook.
And then the person starts doing stuff, but they're just
they're executing social media campaigns.
Like they're not measuring anything,
they're not driving demand.
They're, it's your business right now is referral based.
Go away from referral and organic traffic
and it just, whatever it happens by chance
to happens by strategy, by tactic.
And that is my approach.
And that's what I'm gonna double click on
and give you everything I know around that topic
so that you can design a marketing team
that will be effective and productive,
especially when you're investing dollars
into generating opportunities.
Number one, design the tactics.
So what I've discovered is some people call things
marketing that are really not marketing, okay?
So there's this great analogy I'm gonna share with you
is, and I'm gonna try to remember
but it's a circus comes to town, okay?
And you put the sign on,
you put the circus date that is coming
and you put it on a wooden sign
and you stick it in the middle of the intersection.
That's called a advertising.
You take the elephant and you let it loose
in the, you know, in the city and it creates a big problem.
That's called public relations.
You, you know, you get the mayor to talk about it,
that's called a different thing, right?
You have the booth
and you have a person going to the mall
and they're convincing people to go to the circus
and they're buying tickets,
that call that's called sales, okay?
And you have all these different things
that you could do for the circus
and all of that will generate ticket sales,
but that strategy that's called marketing.
And what I feel is some people confuse that word
with the tactics.
And to me, it's about designing the tactics
to actually produce the results.
So marketing is, is more than just,
'cause you can't just hire an agency.
People do this all the time.
They hire an agency and they say like
generate leads for me on Facebook.
That's interesting.
And they can do that if you give them the strategy.
So the marketing strategy is what is our core customer?
What is the problem we're solving for them?
What's the message that we're gonna lead with in the market?
What are the assets involved in that communication stream?
And then what channel are we gonna go put that in
to make the awareness of that, you know,
of the pain that we solve?
And then you can give that to an agency to go run ads.
Okay, but where it always falls down
is when people think that
marketing and tactics are the same thing and they're not.
The tactics are individual, marketing is the strategy.
And if you don't have a strategy for
who you sell to and how you communicate with them
and build the infrastructure
for automation and for monitoring stuff
then you're just gonna have somebody take over an activity
and a tactic and they're gonna fail
because nobody owned the marketing strategy side of things.
So that's number one.
Number two is create the plan, okay?
Create the plan.
Here's what I mean by that.
Marketing is not just a thing, it's the whole stack.
So when I start working with a new coaching client
my private clients, I always do, what's called a growth map.
And we identify not only the
message that we're gonna put in
to kind of get the person to become an opportunity,
we also look at the channel we're gonna put that message in,
then we're gonna look at the conversion tool.
How do we actually sell?
Is it a trial, is it a demo, is it a proof of concept?
And then if they don't buy, what is the follow up structure?
And that is the plan.
That is the complete stack.
If I know the channel I'm putting the message in,
the message that can get person to respond,
how I'm gonna sell them and it's working,
and then what do I do to follow up and it's working?
If I can get all those four things green,
then I actually have a complete plan.
And what I see often in marketing world is people that,
you know, it's kind of like if I'm building a house
all they do is clear a lot and then they start, you know,
getting some wood and start framing up walls.
It's like, okay, you're gonna just frame up walls.
And what do you, you're gonna just,
you're gonna put this here?
They're like, yeah.
So like they launch Facebook ads
and they have no backend automation
to get somebody scheduled.
So they're just like run some ads, get some leads
and then what, they like email the prospects?
They try that, but then it doesn't work
'cause there's not enough volume.
And then there's not enough throughput and it's slow.
And the people that download it
aren't hearing from anybody for weeks
because a person's busy doing other stuff.
And it's just such an interesting concept.
So if you don't design the complete stack and plan
then your marketing strategy will not work.
So it's not even just the tactic
of what channel you're putting in
and what you're your gonna use
to get them to converse with you or respond to you,
it's also what happens after the fact.
And then if somebody doesn't buy what's the follow up?
Because once you build that complete stack,
then you know if you put 100 people in the top
you know how that's gonna produce at the bottom.
But I mean, I see people put 100 people in the top
and then only one person ends up at the bottom.
It's not that you couldn't have got 10
but you didn't look at it through a complete funnel
and people are dropping off at different stages.
Your sales calls were horrible, you didn't have follow up,
you didn't have a great conversion tool,
you didn't have a great lead magnet.
And essentially those 100 people
turn into one instead of 10.
And then you think, oh, this channel doesn't work.
Facebook doesn't work for us.
LinkedIn ads don't work for us.
Twitter doesn't work for us.
Going to events don't work for us.
No, the strategy completely can work, okay?
'Cause if it didn't people wouldn't do it.
If you go to an event and there's a booth there
and people are promoting their business
people wouldn't do that if it was ineffective.
They wouldn't do that if it wastes money.
You didn't figure it out because you didn't design the plan.
You were building the house, you cleared the lot
and you just started framing up walls
and thinking this is how I build a house.
Okay, you need the blueprint.
You need to evaluate it.
You need to get the engineering stamp done.
So the whole thing doesn't fall in on itself.
So you need to design the plan.
Number three is no measure, no growth, okay?
I can tell within 30 seconds
of talking to any software founder that I coach
the maturity of their marketing,
based on the ability for them to answer simple questions.
How many leads you generate?
What does those leads cost?
How many of those convert to opportunities?
What does that cost?
What's the show rate?
What's your conversion rate
from sales calls, et cetera, et cetera?
I can literally ask a handful of questions
and based on how they answer, I can tell.
And it little things 'cause I can,
if they say something like oh I think it's about 36 a month.
I can just tell they don't really know.
About 36 a month.
These are data points that you should be measuring
daily on the marketing team, weekly as a department
and definitely weekly as an executive leadership team.
So if you're the founder
and you can't specifically tell me how many leads,
how much pipeline, what did it cost,
then you don't know what's going on
in the marketing department and you think,
well, I'm just I give that to somebody else.
Aren't they supposed to run it?
You're responsible for revenue generation.
That is a core component of that engine.
And you wanna at least get on a weekly basis those numbers.
So no measurement, no growth.
I see this all the time.
It's like, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it.
So what happens is you have a marketing team
that keeps coming up with the next great idea
and the next great idea.
I think we should do this.
I think, I think we should do an event.
Let's spend 40 grand producing an event.
I think it's gonna sell.
It's like, well, what about the ads
that we're currently running?
How are those producing?
Well, they didn't really work out, let's just turn them off.
Wait a second, why are we turning them off?
Tell me where it fell apart.
What did you try to fix it?
Did you actually like give it two legit tries?
No, well, why don't, that's already running.
We can make something work,
something that's running that's not working,
that's easier to fix
than trying to start something from scratch.
Or like, you know I don't think our YouTube's converting.
Well again, what did you, what did you,
like what are the numbers?
How many leads come from our YouTube channel?
What do those leads do in a sales component point of view?
Okay, it doesn't work right now,
'cause it doesn't have enough volume.
But what if you three X the volume?
So the question is what could you do
without spending any more money or time
to three X the volume of leads coming from YouTube?
Oh, well if you ask it that way
there's actually some really great answers.
This is what I'm trying to share with you guys
is that the questions, once you measure
then you'll understand where the lack of growth is
and then you'll be able to ask questions of your team
that will get them focused on solving the right problems.
Right now most marketing teams
are playing a game of whackamole.
They're just like solving one problem
moving on to the next one.
It creates another problem, solving off the next one.
I mean, it's everything from attribution to,
I mean I've seen literally companies,
their revenue drop and they don't know why.
And it's because they migrated platforms
and some automation didn't get migrated,
so all of a sudden the email nurture
post appointment setting wasn't firing
or the SMS notifications which is another huge,
go check out my YouTube channel and search SMS marketing
or SMS advantage.
You'll find a video where I do
like text messaging will increase
your show rates by 30% and increase your sales.
And if those notifications get turned off
and nobody's paying attention
and they just say, oh, it's not working anymore,
let's go do a different channel, let's go do LinkedIn,
this is where people, they not only have no growth
they just waste money.
So no measurement, no growth.
Number four is assign accountability.
So within my organisation, all of them,
I have an accountability chart.
In the accountability chart
every department has, the department has the people.
And on every one of those spots,
we have these specific area of responsibility
that they are responsible for
which tells everybody else on the team
the decisions that they can make.
And the reason you want this is because
if somebody on your support team
sees something go out on Twitter
they wanna be able to go look at the accountability chart
and send that to the right person, right?
They don't wanna send it to marketing leader.
He's busy with other stuff.
You wanna literally create an accountability chart
that makes it absolutely foolproof
to say who owns YouTube, who owns Facebook,
who owns creating the content production schedule?
Like every major function in your business
should have it tied to a name on the team.
So that way the rest of the team knows who to contact
if there's an issue and the individual knows
what the expectations to be for themselves.
Like, what am I responsible for?
That to me is one of the biggest opportunities
of a marketing team is getting just super clear
on the accountability.
If you own our private Facebook group, you own it.
You own the production, you own the content,
you own the community, you own the building it,
you own the results of it.
We invest in it, what are the results?
What's the ROI?
If we put a dollar amount out to the investment every month
how many leads did it generate every month?
That is the cost per lead.
And it's, it doesn't have to be scientific.
It can be very high level
but then that person can start making better decisions
around that based on the ownership level
of that accountability.
So assign accountability.
So quick recap, four key strategies
for building a world class marketing demand gen team.
Number one is, decide the tactics,
number two, design the plan, the full stack funnel plan.
Number three, no measure, no growth.
If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.
And number four, assign accountability
the responsibility and the decisions, who owns them.
So, as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode
I wanna share with you the marketing team designer workbook.
So essentially in there, there is a chart
and it's got all the different marketing tactics
that you can execute.
It gives you the opportunity to write the role
and the areas of accountability
and what tactics they're responsible for.
Only one tactic per person.
Sure they can collaborate with other people on the team
to get that done.
And then I also have the key metrics
that you should be monitoring for every marketing team.
You can click the link below to download your copy.
It's an exclusive resource just for you.
If you wanna learn how to design your marketing team,
there's a bunch of other stuff in the workbook.
Click the link below to download it with the metrics.
If you like this video, be sure to smash the like button
subscribe to my channel and let me know in the comments
what was the most useful thing for you
in your marketing team, in your marketing efforts?
Leave a comment below, let me know.
As for usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
and a bigger business, I'll see you next Monday.
(bright upbeat music)