Chris Walker

Thinking about changing jobs for a $10k salary bump? Think again.

That's only $129 extra per week after taxes.

It's time to considering changing jobs when:

(1) You're consistently unhappy.

(2) You stop learning.

(3) There's no upward mobility.

(4) You no longer believe in the company & leadership you work for.

A great company should never let any of these things happen.

#career #careeradvice #marketing #linkedin #life

Marketing should be pure OFFENSE. 
 
The problem is that B2B marketing has become increasingly systematic over the past 2 decades filled with so much technology & no common sense. 
 
When you work for a company that doesn’t get Marketing, it’s obvious. Because you spend all your time playing defense, not offense -
 
1. You stop doing any real Marketing and instead spend all your time trying to prove things are working with attribution that 100% shouldn’t need to be proven & are totally common sense. 
 
2. Most of your activities aren’t actually Marketing. It’s Digital Sales using “marketing channels”. Because the company mindset about Marketing is completely broken - they see Marketing as “Sales Assistant“ or “Lead Gen“.
 
3. You are always behind on your goals (because you have the wrong goals) so you spend all your time trying to keep your head above water. There is zero opportunity to innovate. 
 
4. Companies are so tech & data & metrics obsessed that Marketers never spend time with customers, prospects, or the market, which ironically is the foundation of effective Marketing. 
 
5. They only think about making changes in Marketing when things are going wrong, not to capitalize on new opportunities. 
 
6. They obsess about performance over the next 90 days at the expense of all long-term Marketing innovation & success. 
 
But here’s the truth: 
 
Marketing should be pure OFFENSE. 
 
Marketing should be all about understanding customers.
 
Marketing should be all about deeply respecting how buyers want to buy. 
 
Marketing should be all about being agile & responding to customer behavior changes. 
 
Marketing should be all about creativity & trying new things & innovation. 
 
Marketing should be about setting the right targets & exceeding those targets EVERY. SINGLE. QUARTER.
 
Marketing should be all about capitalizing on major opportunities that change the trajectory of your company. 
 
Marketing should be pure OFFENSE when executed properly. 
 
#marketing #demandgen #b2b

*Wishing everyone a strong start to 2022 💪

**This is the clip to send to executives that don't get Marketing.

Just so you know, you don’t need a fancy tech stack, a huge team, or tons of money to do marketing well.

We grew to over $1MM ARR in 10 months with no funding, no cold calls, no outbound emails, no advertising. Here’s how we did it:

2 Full-time employees (1 of them is me)
Hubspot Professional ($800/mo)
Zoom ($40/mo)
PandaDoc ($49/mo)
Freelance video editor ($80/hour)
Rev. com Captions ($1/min)
LinkedIn (free)
YouTube (free)
Anchor. fm (free)

More people and more tech and more budget is often not the answer. Better TALENT & better STRATEGY usually is.

#marketing #b2b

Here’s how our 3-person Marketing team puts out more content every day than most $100MM companies put out in a month:

1. Commit

You must be committed to executing on the right activities for a sustained period of time. Most companies fail at this because they do 3 podcasts & give up when they don’t get any “leads”.

2. Identify Your Subject Matter Expert(s)

Provide forward-thinking, relevant information that your buyers *want*. Most B2B marketing content doesn’t hit because the person creating the content isn't an expert and doesn’t deeply understand the buyer.

3. Content Creation Framework

Put pillars in the ground that help you create content on a recurring basis. Example: we host Tik Tok Live every Tuesday and bi-weekly live Revenue Strategy events. These pillars create raw content. We have 3 total recurring pillars.

4. Post-Production framework

Create a framework to *quickly* edit raw long-form content & optimize it for each distribution channel. We publish recorded content within 24 hours, while big companies take 3 months to do the same thing.

5. *Effective* Multi-Channel Distribution

Content makes ZERO impact if your buyers don’t *consume* it. You must spend a lot of time in the DETAILS on each channel listening & engaging.

__

Strategize -> Create -> Post-Produce -> Distribute -> Listen -> Repeat

#marketing #b2b #demand #revenue #content

Every year, companies build their old MQL demand waterfall model where Marketing teams over-project and under-deliver. Here’s why:
 
The Blended Funnel. 
 
Companies blend all their “leads” or MQLs together into one singular (outdated) demand waterfall model that assumes conversion rates for all MQLs will be exactly the same from lead-to-customer. Which is totally not how it works in the real World. 
 
They miss a critical factor: Not All MQLs Are Created Equal. 
 
Here’s an example of *lead-to-win* rates for a $100MM ARR B2B SaaS company:
 
Content Syndication - 0.2% (1 of every 500 “leads” your Sales team wins)
 
Demo Request - 7.9% (1 of every 12 leads your Sales team wins)
 
Display - 0% (Your Sales team never wins these leads)
 
Tradeshow / Conference - 2% (1 of every 50 leads your Sales team wins)
 
Paid Social Lead Gen - 0.2% (1 of every 500 “leads” your Sales team wins)
 
Paid Search Lead Gen - 0.1% (1 of every 1,000 “leads” your Sales team wins)
 
Webinar - 5.2% (1 of every 20 leads your Sales team wins)
 
___
 
Then they spend all their effort on programs collecting “leads” from the lowest performing sources - Content Syndication, Paid Search Lead Gen, Paid Social Lead Gen, etc. - because it’s the easiest way to collect cheap leads that don’t close. 
 
So they end up crushing their “lead” or MQL target. But conversion rates through the Sales funnel end up significantly lower than projected. 
 
Marketing hits their “lead” or SQL or “pipeline” target but Sales misses quota by 30-50% because nothing from Marketing actually closes. 
 
And here’s the (now obvious) insight: NOT ALL MQLs ARE CREATED EQUAL. 
 
In this example, compare Paid Search Lead Gen (0.1%) to a Demo Request (7.9%)....
 
A demo request “lead” has 80X better conversion rates to CUSTOMER.

Run this analysis to see this effect in your own data and use it for your 2023 planning.
 
Marketing teams that are measured on METRICS THAT MATTER - qualified pipeline & revenue - should recognize this reality immediately because it’s the fastest path to hitting your goals.

#revenue #sales #marketing #b2b

Should we publish our pricing on our website?

B2B companies come up with a million excuses and objections about why not to do it:

“We need our rep to talk to the customer to ‘provide value’ first before we tell them the price.”

“If we publish pricing on our website, our competitors will find out and undercut us.” (lol as if your competitors can’t figure out your pricing on their own)

“Our pricing is way too complicated. If we publish it, our customers will get confused and won’t talk to our Sales team.”

And a million different iterations of these objections and excuses that are all about the company and nothing about the customer. Every excuse has everything to do with what you want and zero to do with what the customer wants.

__

The most black & white way to address this at your company - which is exactly what I did in 2017 - was I ran a survey to all the decision makers at our Tier 1 & Tier 2 accounts.

One of the questions was: When buying XYZ technology, what steps in your buying process would you like to accomplish *before* you talk to a Sales representative?

More than 600 total accounts responded.

93% of the respondents said they want to know the price before they talk with a Sales rep.

There it is. Simple. 600 decision makers at target accounts telling you exactly how they want to buy. Are you going to listen to your customers or are you going to be selfish and only think about what you want?

It’s black and white. If you ask your target customers the exact same question, you would get the exact same answer.

If you’re customer-centric, it’s obvious you would publish pricing on your website.

#marketing #b2b #sales #gtm

p.s. Bulk procurement companies like Vendr continue to gain market traction because B2B companies are so selfish in their direct Sales motion.

Buyers would rather just go to a company like this than go through the dog & pony show of BANT qualification with a 22-year old, then see a canned demo 2 weeks later, then need to haggle with a rep for 15% off list price. By the time they’re done, it’s been 10 weeks to buy a $40k/year SaaS tool.

Instead, they’ll go to Vendr and get the best price w/o any of the nonsense. And the B2B company will take a 30-45% cut on margin between discounting & referral fees, all because they refuse to be customer-centric in their Sales process.

The traditional “best practices” for B2B go-to-market motions is completely misaligned with what a modern B2B buyer wants today.

Here are 5 tenets to enhance your 2022 go-to-market strategy:
 
1. Marketing is not Sales. 
 
Most B2B marketing isn’t actually Marketing. It’s Digital Sales using “marketing channels”. Because the company mindset about Marketing is completely broken - they see Marketing as “Sales Assistant“ or “Lead Gen“.
 
Until you change how you measure marketing, you will always be stuck running single channel lead gen to appease your attribution models. 
 
2. We Must Execute & Evaluate Marketing in a Long-Term Window. 
 
Companies look at Marketing in such a short term window that they kill programs before they ever had a shot of being successful. 
 
And they change strategies when they should actually stay the course, creating a pinball effect where the marketing team is running around chasing shiny objects, pivoting every 2 months. Or reverting back to classic lead gen because they don’t give any new program enough time to actually work. 
 
We need to listen to customers, have conviction & alignment in the strategy, and execute marketing with a long-term view. And funny enough, when you think long term, you actually get better short-term results, too. 
 
3. Marketing’s primary job is to CREATE DEMAND. And the best way to create demand is in dark social. 
 
The rapid evolution of dark social is undeniable. This is a massive opportunity for the few companies that recognize this reality and move on it. 
 
84% of our pipeline currently comes from the 4 core dark social categories - social media, content platforms (podcast), communities, and word of mouth. 
 
4. The Attribution Mirage leads marketers astray while they think they're being data-driven.
 
All of the most important touch points in a modern B2B buying journey aren’t getting measured by attribution software. 
 
Winners acknowledge that there are plenty of other ways to measure attribution besides using software products. 
 
5. The best opportunity in all of Marketing in 2022 is to collect customer insights through a community that you built. 
 
Marketing teams need to open up direct access to customers & future customers to get the real insights needed to drive strategy. Not listening to Gong calls. Not asking the Sales team what they think. Not looking at attribution reports. Marketing teams need to execute *primary* market research. 
 
Building a community is the # 1 way to get this done in 2022. 
 
___
 
There are certainly more tenets that teams need to consider, but these 5 are critical because they are undeniably true and most go-to-market teams don’t follow them. 
 
If you want to execute marketing differently, you need to abandon the outdated principles that are holding you back. 
 
It’s going to be a BIG year. Let’s get it 👊
 
#marketing #b2b #demandgen #gotomarket

Here’s how our 3-person Marketing team puts out more content every day than most $100MM companies put out in a month:

1. Commit

You must be committed to executing on the right activities for a sustained period of time. Most companies fail at this because they do 3 podcasts & give up when they don’t get any “leads”.

2. Identify Your Subject Matter Expert(s)

Provide forward-thinking, relevant information that your buyers *want*. Most B2B marketing content doesn’t hit because the person creating the content isn't an expert and doesn’t deeply understand the buyer.

3. Content Creation Framework

Put pillars in the ground that help you create content on a recurring basis. Example: we host Tik Tok Live every Tuesday and bi-weekly live Revenue Strategy events. These pillars create raw content. We have 3 total recurring pillars.

4. Post-Production framework

Create a framework to *quickly* edit raw long-form content & optimize it for each distribution channel. We publish recorded content within 24 hours, while big companies take 3 months to do the same thing.

5. *Effective* Multi-Channel Distribution

Content makes ZERO impact if your buyers don’t *consume* it. You must spend a lot of time in the DETAILS on each channel listening & engaging.

__

Strategize -> Create -> Post-Produce -> Distribute -> Listen -> Repeat

#marketing #b2b #demand #gtm #content

Old Way = Look at the Sales funnel by department
New Way = Look at the Sales funnel by buyer intent (how the buyer entered the sales funnel) 
 
Historically, each department is measured by the blended performance of the “leads” they source with direct software-based attribution.

This model incentives getting the most “leads” and the lowest cost, not to drive *revenue* & and sales productivity. 
 
Marketing runs lead gen to create first-touch attribution on as many contacts as possible to game attribution. It doesn’t actually drive customers to want to buy but appeases their outdated attribution models circa 2012. 
 
Planning and forecasting breaks down because they blend content syndication leads that close at 0.1% (sales wins 1 deal from 1,000 “leads“) with declared intent demo requests that win at 8% (sales wins 1 deal from 12 “leads“). Their old school “demand waterfall” model breaks like cheap glass. 
 
Departments (Sales, Marketing, SDRs) fight over credit instead of working together because that’s how teams are measured and budgets are set. 
 
It’s such an outdated model and a core driver of sales/marketing misalignment and other overall GTM problems. 
 
Smart companies want to adopt an “All-Bound” model because they see this clear problem in their business, but need a new framework to measure success & make strategy adjustments. 
 
Here’s how to make it happen:
 
1. Look at what GTM motion CAPTURED the demand (what was the trigger for how the buyer entered the pipeline). These are called “pipeline sources”.

2. This pipeline source (where demand is captured) is a clear surrogate for **buyer intent** and will much better predict sales efficiency metrics like win rate, sales cycle length, and pipeline velocity.

3. Build a separate attribution model (e.g. self-reported attribution) to characterize what programs are CREATING the demand.

4. Use this data to OPTIMIZE your entire revenue strategy, not determine binary credit to teams, departments, and budgets. 
 
Implementing this framework will:
 
1. Drive significantly better alignment between all GTM teams

2. Have all teams WORKING TOGETHER, not fighting each other for “credit”

3. Create an entirely new view for Revenue leaders and strategists to make far better decisions & strategy improvements

4. Dramatically improve your revenue planning and forecasting accuracy.

5. Clearly show you where to FOCUS and clearly show you what to STOP doing. 
 
It’s 2023. Every department (Sales, Marketing, SDRs, Customer Success, etc.) contributes to every closed won customer. 
 
Time to update your mindset and measurement frameworks for how customers buy and how the World actually works today. 
 
#b2b #revenue #sales #marketing #gtm

Eileen Gu just gave a masterclass in elite performance.

6 Olympic medals. 22 years old. And she trains her mindset as intentionally as she trains her body.

Here's what stood out:

1. "I spend a lot of time in my head. But it's a nice place to be."
-Metacognition (thinking about thinking) is a true human superpower, and can be used to fundamentally shift our emotions, actions, and results, leading to sustained peak performance.

2. "I journal a lot."
-Physical handwriting is the most effective way to train your mindset, like a workout for your brain.
-Studies show intentional handwriting increases clarity, reduces stress, increases self-trust, and improves performance.

3. "With neuroplasticity on my side."
-Our brains have the innate capability to rewire our identity, beliefs, emotions, and behavior patterns through intentional training and repetition.
-When used intentionally, you can use this to become the person you want to be. It might be the most powerful and under-appreciated skill for humans.

4. "You can control what you think, therefore you can control who you are."
-Thoughts and beliefs shape and reinforce identity
-You can intentionally choose what you think about who you are, what you're capable of, and what's possible. When trained consistently, creativity, motivation, and performance all rise.

5. "How cool and empowering is that?"
-This is the part that's often misunderstood. Mindset training isn't for fixing problems - it's for becoming elite and living the life of your dreams.

__

Top performers train their mindset as much as they train their skills.

Everything she described - metacognition, journaling, neuroplasticity, identity training, and belief reappraisal - is exactly what we built ENCODED to do. Simple daily training routines for your mindset, identity, and beliefs.

The best in the world already train this way. Now everyone can.

#frequency #athlete #performance #training #mindset