SaaS Marketing Team Structure That Builds a Competitive Edge

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The Only Marketing Strategy You’ll Ever Need – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPIhtxbdRCI

Transcript:
(00:00) – 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.
(00:28) 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.
(00:52) 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.
(01:14) 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.
(01:41) 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.
(02:00) 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.
(02:24) 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.
(02:52) 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.
(03:18) 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,
(03:53) 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.
(04:14) 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.
(04:44) 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.
(05:10) 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.
(05:36) 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.
(06:03) 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.
(06:21) 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.
(06:37) 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.
(07:03) 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.
(07:24) 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.
(07:38) 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.
(07:54) 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.
(08:08) 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.
(08:40) 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.
(08:57) 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.
(09:13) 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.
(09:30) 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.
(09:50) 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.
(10:07) 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.
(10:31) 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.
(10:48) 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.
(11:20) 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.
(11:41) 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.
(12:08) 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.
(12:40) 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.
(13:03) 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.
(13:21) 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.
(13:44) 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.
(14:07) 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.
(14:24) 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.
(14:47) 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)