Have you ever seen the Martech stack 5,000 – impressive stuff? I honestly wonder how some of these companies cut through the noise, more importantly, how marketers and demand generation leaders make heads and tails of all of these tools.
Here are the three topics this week:
1. Far too much tech focused on far too little SQL creation.
2. Low Code / No Code / Cheat Code tools for AE’s are coming next.
3. How sales can partner with marketing to design account-based offers to create SQLs.
Far too much tech focused on far too little SQL creation.
Unfortunately, I see WAY, WAY too many marketing/demand generation leaders over the years get FOMO and buy what everyone else is using. In 2023, we’re seeing customers that literally had 42 tools in the market/sales tech stack, and the CFOs are making everyone rationalize them down to 5-10.
Problem – All these tools are great, but they aren’t creating exponential or even incremental returns concerning their cost. This is known as Marginal Utility. The Total Utility is your total spend, but the extracted value (Marginal Utility) starts to have a decay tool after tool.
Here is what I mean. You’re trying to get to 100 units or 100% of SQL generated from inbound/demand generation marketing efforts to relieve the AE’s of “self-sourcing”.
Tool 1 = 5 units
Tool 2 = 1 unit
Tool 3 = 2 unit
Tool 4 = 3 units
Tool 5 = 1 unit
Tool 6 = 0 units
Tool 7 = 4 units
Tool 8 = 2 units
Tool 9 = 7 units
Tool 10 = 0 units
Total = 25 Units or 25% of SQL’s driven from inbound marketing.
The cost of these 10 tools is $1,000,000’s of dollars annually, more than 12 AE’s on your team… and all your existing AE’s still need to self-source 75% of their lead flow themselves… while you spend $1,000,000’s only to generate 25%!!!
Marginal utility is best told via ice cream. Scoop #1 is delicious = 10/10. Scoop #2 is good = 8/10, and Scoop #10 nearly makes you noxious = 2/10.
You are spending so much on marketing and demand generation tools that they have a detrimental effect / diminishing effectiveness on each other, while the AE’s have nothing. Cell phone, laptop, LinkedIn account, ZoomInfo. That’s the typical AE’s left solo on their island.
According to RepVue, in Q1 2023, only 13% of AE’s made their quota.
A single scoop of ice cream for them could be a home run = 10/10. Go Right when everyone is looking Left.
Low Code / No Code / Cheat Code tools for AE’s are coming next.
The prognosticator in me is seeing a significant opportunity for the “full-cycle” AE / AM from Artificial Intelligence and crazy low code/no code tools that will come down the pike. In transparency, we’re also getting into that game for AE’s.
Why?
Decentralization and ease of use. The creation and distribution of these tools is easier than ever before. They aren’t going to take millions to make and won’t necessarily need DevOps or CFOs to procure them. These will be simple productivity hacks aimed at sellers with little to no experience with tools today (Account Executives / Account Managers).
I see opportunities in:
- Objective account selection/prioritization (reading public domain news, job changes, social media posts – to triangulate intent BEFORE someone has shown actual buying intent)
- Rapid key account plan templates. 1-page account “business plans” for AE’s.
- Storyboarding / Storytelling creators.
- Email / Video / Text / Call message creators.
- Pipeline Coverage nurturing “DRIP” campaigns.
There will be so many I’m not even thinking about – but the future is bright with super simple and cheap productivity tools.
How sales can partner with marketing to design account-based offers to create SQLs.
One of the core tenants of a messaging framework is the “Time-for-Knowledge Exchange”. This requires you (the seller) to provide knowledge to your buyer that is greater than the opportunity cost of missing a future meeting with you. This knowledge can be:
- Competitive benchmarking
- Industry trade secrets
- Product innovation
- Industry prognosticating
Ultimately you are selling the buyer knowledge worth more than their self-perceived time ($500 – $1,000/hour).
The best way to achieve this is with an offer. An offer is:
- Free
- Trackable (buying intent)
- Value-packed
- Needs more context and/or is a slice of the answer (thus the need for the sales call).
To make this real, our marketing team partnered with sales to develop the Fortune 2000 CXO job change tracker. For any prospect that engages the Fortune 2000, we have the “knowledge” of every job change. Now we can discuss:
- How do you ingest this sales intelligence into your CRM to make it actionable?
- What are the best practices to engage these leads?
This allows us to talk about Social Selling Mastery and sales training programs.
We’re launching a 2nd offer that helps sales leaders calculate the “Self-Generated Quota Gap” and recognize the pressure placed on each AE for pipeline creation. This will invoke conversations around:
- What is the benchmark of their ‘Self-Generated Quota Gap’ vs. competitors?
- What are the steps to help relieve pressure from the AE’s?
The goal here is to push the buyer off their status quo.
What doesn’t work? FREE $20 Starbucks Gift Cards. It’s just dumb!
🤦
FREE RESOURCE – Fortune 2000 Executive Job Change Report (every month).
Do you sell into the Fortune 2000?
We are tracking all administrative job changes in these organizations and providing you with that lead list – FREE. Download it here.
Never miss the ‘Window of Change’ ever again. The ‘Window of Change’ is a magical time period between Day 30-Day 100 when new executives are most open to new people, processes, and technology for their new team.
Free Fortune 2000 – Executive Job Change Database
Do you sell into the Fortune 2000?
Immediately launch your Fortune 2000 sales campaign to book meetings / SQL’s. Fill out the form and get your hands on the Free Resource – Fortune 2000 Companies Signals.