Baring It All
I’m not sure how any modern marketing leader can deliver results without getting naked on a regular basis with a personal advisory board (PAB).
While on one hand there is too much change happening on a regular basis for any one team to be experts on all of it, on the other hand there’s such a ridiculous level of noise in our space, it can be difficult for even the most experienced amongst us to get to the truth of what is working best today from the marketplace alone.
Inhibiting factors on the path to truth & optimal outcomes:
- The marketplace speaks in averages, and averages are not our friends
- We cannot talk publicly about our internal challenges as no company wants their sales & marketing secrets out in the open
- Advice from the channels is fair to middling at best and certainly biased toward their offer. Ditto for the most pontificate-y pontificators
I love many of the thought leaders out there, but most of them aren’t running client-side teams, with budget constraints, variables in team competencies, working side-by-side with sales compadres, managing inevitable changes in direction — shall I go on? It’s easy to advise when you are free of those constraints and realities.
As a marketing leader, I desperately need my own PAB. If I want the straight scoop on what’s currently working and what isn’t in terms of:
- Messaging
- Personas
- Channels
- Techniques
- Strategies
- Assets
- Paid/Unpaid strategies
- Conversions (1st converters, MQL to SQL, SQL to Opp, Opp to win)
- What % of pipeline is touched by marketing
- Team development
…I’ll be going straight to the people who are in the trenches doing this work every day. And with my personal advisory board, I’ll bare it all: numbers, outcomes, results, what we’re perplexed by, and what we’re thrilled with. It’s only in baring it all that you can get a sanity check from the people you respect most.
I don’t want to know what LinkedIn or Slack or IBM are doing. I admire those companies and they’re fun to watch and doing great work, but they are so out of the league of most companies it’s silly to even try to replicate their strategies at this stage.
As a practice, sellers, marketers — I’m looking at you, we are overly concerned with what the popular kids are doing. And it’s such a waste of time.
Perfect example via Peter Kazanjy tweet:
Tech conferences are weird products. Mass audiences who don’t share the high class problems discussed in fireside chats by outlier winners.
Right?
You know who I care about? Other companies in a very similar space to mine, performing pretty well, who may be 1–4 years ahead of my company in terms of revenue — I want to know what they’re doing.
Here’s roughly what I look for, peers who know this space:
- 1–3 years ahead of us in revenue
- Complex B2B Sale
- Tech
- Similar personas targeted
These are the types of Marketing questions I ask, and what I’m also willing to share:
- What’s your budget for paid
- How’s that influencing unpaid
- What channels are delivering the best quality
- What are your attribution gaps and what are you doing about it?
- What’s going on with MQLs, SQLs, Opps, Wins
- What % of your SQLs is the sales team accepting
- What kind of testing are you doing? How’s that going? What are the variables?
And then I lay bare my own results. Seriously — there are no secrets here. I want them to pick it apart, help me see gaps, and my own observer bias. I want to hear about platforms I’m not considering, cadences that have gone awry — anything.
And I have the same process for Inside Sales, Sales Enablement — any of the functional areas in my remit.
My PAB has helped me and my teams be more productive, reduce wasted effort, and recently even made it rain conversions (umm, thanks Eric).
Not an all-inclusive list, but these are my go-to folks for sure:
Eric Wittlake, Jane Morrin, Suzanne McVey, pretty much the entire team at ITSMA, Tristan Lavendar, Christy Ferguson, Carlos Hidalgo, Erin Paulson, Amy Clausen, Mark Parsons, Zant Chapelo, Reg Van Steen, and Jon Miller.
Who’s on your PAB?
