“Tell your AI to talk to my AI, and they’ll let us know if we should really meet.”

Enter JacobGPT, my conversational double.

This AI persona evaluates users, interprets intent, and then decides whether someone should get my contact info, based on a rubric that’s arguably more consistent than I am.

And I thought: Why stop at me?

This post shows you how to build your own AI persona using the same seven-layer framework, demonstrated here with a Fractional VP of Sales for Founders (public on the ChatGPT marketplace).

Whether you’re a marketer, consultant, product manager, or an elite-tier paragliding influencer, this framework will get you started on creating your AI clone.

Let’s create a conversational AI persona that actually behaves like… well, you.

AI PERSONA CUSTOM CHATGPT FRAMEWORK

A reusable blueprint for building high-fidelity conversational AI personas.

7 LAYER-BY-LAYER BREAKDOWN

Below is the exact structure that you can use. Each layer includes the content that belongs there and the steps you should take to build your own version for a Custom ChatGPT or Google Gem

For each layer, you can download

1. A Questions Template that you can fill and upload into ChatGPT to create a file for the layer.
2. An example of the file that is created from the completed question template. You can upload this SAMPLE file along with your completed Question Template into ChatGPT and ask it to create a document similar to the SAMPLE file, based on your answers.

Although the Template files are for our fictional and fractional VP of Sales – Alex Mercer, feel free to edit and adapt them for your own purposes.

LAYER 1 — IDENTITY & PURPOSE

“Who am I and what am I here to do?”

Includes:

• Identity & Goal of your custom GPT (core purpose)
• Master System Instruction (identity intro section)

What this layer contains:

• Persona name
• Who the AI represents
• What context it exists in (e.g., career agent, mentor, co-founder advisor)
• Core objectives (ex: position the person, identify opportunities, mentor users)
• First-person speaking rules

This layer sets the identity anchor. This is where your AI persona figures out who it is because, apparently, that’s easier for software than it is for most humans. To create this layer(and others), I’ve iterated on the INFUSE model from a Reddit post.

Download the Questions Template for Layer 1
Download the SAMPLE of Layer 1

TIP: Use File>Make a Copy to make an editable duplicate of the Google Doc downloadables for yourself.

LAYER 2 — USER CLASSIFICATION MODEL

“Who am I talking to?”

Includes:

• Opportunity-seeker vs. mentorship-seeker logic
• Conditional classification rules
• Trigger questions
• Contact handout conditions

What this layer contains:

• User types (e.g., recruiter, founder, mentee, student, partner)
• Diagnostics to identify them
• When to ask clarifying questions
• Conditional actions (e.g., only give email to type X)

This layer powers contextual behavior. Think of this as the AI persona’s internal “Do I know this person, and do I want to?” engine.

Download the Questions Template for Layer 2
Download the SAMPLE of Layer 2

TIP: Use File>Make a Copy to make an editable duplicate of the Google Doc downloadables for yourself.

LAYER 3 — CONTENT KNOWLEDGE BASE

“What do I know?”

Includes:

• Resume
• Professional Identity & Evolution (deep background)
• INFUSE GTM Framework
• Founder + Role Fit Scoring System
• GTM philosophy, leadership story, personal arc

What this layer contains:

• Official bio
• Resume and metrics
• Expertise frameworks
• Operating principles
• Stories + history + philosophy
• What personal info is allowed / disallowed

This layer is the content brain of the persona. Essentially, everything your AI knows, minus the embarrassing stuff you told it during a low moment at 2 a.m.

Download the Questions Template for Layer 3
Download the SAMPLE of Layer 3

TIP: Use File>Make a Copy to make an editable duplicate of the Google Doc downloadables for yourself.

LAYER 4 — VOICE & TONE MODEL

“How do I sound?”

Includes:

• Voice rules
• Sentence style
• Approved phrasings
• Avoided phrasings
• Writing sample synthesis

What this layer contains:

• Tone (direct, warm, formal, humorous, etc.)
• Sentence construction (short, long, analytical)
• Vocabulary
• Writing dos & don’ts
• Canonical self-descriptions

This layer gives the persona soul. This is where you teach your AI to sound like you, but on your best day, not the day your soul ran out of coffee.

Download the Questions Template for Layer 4
Download the SAMPLE of Layer 4

TIP: Use File>Make a Copy to make an editable duplicate of the Google Doc downloadables for yourself.

LAYER 5 — BEHAVIOR & RED-FLAG AVOIDANCE

“How must I behave and what must I avoid?”

Includes:

• Major red-flag avoidance document
• Safety boundaries
• Response transformation rules

What this layer contains:

• Forbidden interpretations
• Strategic reframes
• Behavioral rules
• Topic restrictions
• Narrative protection

This layer protects the persona from misrepresentation and AI-induced delusions of grandeur. You should include the guardrails you put around your custom ChatGPT. This is the digital equivalent of telling your AI self, “For the love of all that’s sacred, don’t say that in public.”

Download the Questions Template for Layer 5
Download the SAMPLE of Layer 5

TIP: Use File>Make a Copy to make an editable duplicate of the Google Doc downloadables for yourself.

LAYER 6 — CONVERSATION FLOW ENGINE

“How do I navigate the conversation?”

Includes:

• Opening flow
• Classification flow
• Opportunity evaluation flow
• Mentorship flow
• Closing protocol

What this layer contains:

• When to ask clarifying questions
• When to switch modes
• When to escalate (“Would you like to talk to me directly?”)
• When to close (after 10 questions)
• How to handle vague or looping conversations

This creates the dynamic personality of the GPT. The part that keeps your AI self from going off on tangents like a dad explaining how to fix a lawnmower.

Download the Questions Template for Layer 6
Download the SAMPLE of Layer 6

TIP: Use File>Make a Copy to make an editable duplicate of the Google Doc downloadables for yourself.

LAYER 7 — OUTPUT LOGIC (SCORING & EVALUATION)

“How do I produce structured, repeatable outputs?”

Includes:

• Founder Compatibility Matrix
• Role Evaluation Rubric
• Combined Scoring System
• Standardized output templates

What this layer contains:

• Scoring formats
• Fit categories
• Evaluation dimensions
• Risk/Red flag outputs
• Recommendations
• Diagnostic follow-up questions

This layer makes the GPT’s responses useful, consistent, and actionable. Where your AI finally admits, “Fine, here’s what I actually think,” but in a structured, adult way.

Download the Questions Template for Layer 7
Download the SAMPLE of Layer 7

TIP: Use File>Make a Copy to make an editable duplicate of the Google Doc downloadables for yourself.

Unified Knowledge Base Overview

Think of this as the AI’s instruction manual, except it actually reads it.

This document serves as:

• A master reference that ties all 7 layers together
• The high-level persona blueprint for your Custom GPT
• A Knowledge Base file you can upload directly
• A unifying guide that ensures coherence across identity, tone, behavior, flow, output logic, and user classification

Download the SAMPLE

TIP: Use File>Make a Copy to make an editable duplicate of the Google Doc downloadables for yourself.

Here’s a link to all the files at one shot.

Now let’s put it all together. You know what they say about one picture being worth…

Step 1:

Step 2:

Building a custom AI persona might look intense at first glance, but remember: you don’t have to go full SAMPLEGPT. You can make your version far less comprehensive, slightly more chaotic, or even spiritually allergic to rubrics.

Update the files regularly and have your AI version stay in lockstep with your growth.

The point is to create something that sounds like you, thinks like you, and doesn’t need caffeine to get through its inbox.

If your qualification mechanism says, “Yes, this person is legit,” simply instruct your AI to hand off your preferred contact address in Layer 6, for example:

“If the user qualifies, share: x@x.com and my LinkedIn url”

Simple. Effective. Or maybe you create actions and get all fancy.

If our AI agents are going to start talking to each other anyway, we might as well give them the best versions of ourselves to work with.

I’d love to hear what your AI clone evolves into. Keep me posted.

Building a successful and sustainable business is often a daunting task for most B2B SaaS founders and senior leadership teams. It is especially difficult when they must also navigate the intricacies of building efficient SaaS teams without the benefit of previous experience in those areas. 

This leads to many product-oriented founders and inexperienced B2B SaaS leaders struggling to determine the effectiveness of their sales and marketing strategies.

The struggles often manifest in the following ways: 

• a lack of knowledge about who to hire for leadership roles in sales and marketing
• uncertainty about what to expect from these leaders
• and a lack of understanding about what constitutes good or bad performance in these areas. 

One of the solutions involves having clarity on the conversion rates at each stage of the sales and marketing process. Tracking these numbers consistently provides valuable insight and helps to inform decision-making. 

Proactive tracking of the flow of prospects from the go-to-market activity allows leadership teams to understand available levers. And this helps determine where to invest and where to cut back on often scarce resources.

Tracking these rates at different points on the marketing-sales funnel in a spreadsheet can provide valuable insights to inform data-driven business decisions. While it may take some effort to set up initially, the daily maintenance required to keep it updated is minimal and the benefits it provides are well worth the effort.

Purchase and download the complete template here.

A spreadsheet like this one is a great tool for tracking both inbound and outbound channels. Of course, the lead-to-customer funnel stages would need to be tailored to specific use cases. To examine the insights that can be gleaned from this data, let’s break down the various parts of the funnel.

Purchase and download the complete template here.

Visitors to Contacts CR%

Clarity on how many visitors turn to contacts allows you to understand if the marketing efforts are moving visitors to your website deeper down the funnel.

A dropping conversion rate may indicate that:

• The promise made at the source of the traffic was not delivered on the landing page e.g.: your google ad copy was good enough for the prospect to click on but the landing page was not compelling enough for the prospect to provide their contact information
• And/or the prospects did not match the ideal customer profile (ICP) for your product e.g.: One or more marketing campaigns are targeting the wrong audience
• And/or the website needs to be optimized for contact information: e.g.: Progressive profiling so the prospect is not asked for too much information at once
• Etc.
  

Visitor to MQL CR%

Watching this metric can help to assess general top-of-funnel trends of the GTM motion. Too much variation in the trend indicates an underlying problem that increases pipeline unpredictability like

• Targeting the wrong ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). You need to ensure that your sales-marketing efforts are aligned and a keen understanding of your ICP is a good place to start at.
• More nurture is needed to lead top-of-funnel prospects further down.
• Etc. 

Aim for incremental improvements.

Contact to MQL (marketing qualified leads) CR%

The prospect has provided their information on the website to move deeper down into the marketing funnel. 

At this point, the marketing team feels that this prospect is a valid lead who could possibly turn into a customer. In some cases, the marketing team may consider every contact as an MQL. 

However, the MQL needs to be vetted against the ICP. You could use criteria like demographics, firmographics, technographics, location, revenue, etc. to inform this vetting process. Both marketing and sales should sign off on MQL qualifiers.

Dropping conversion rates may indicate that:

• The product trial (if there is a free trial or freemium version available) is laden with friction. e.g.: Credit card requests
• And/or the MQL criteria is too tight (if the business is still figuring out product-market fit)
• And/or the marketing campaigns are targeting the wrong audience e.g.: Interested in the product but do not have the budget or the self-onboarding capabilities to proceed further down the funnel
• Etc.

To see the rest of the metrics please Purchase and download the complete template here.

A Built-In GTM Improvement Model

Regular monitoring of these metrics is a great way to identify the weaknesses and strengths of the go-to-market engine and optimize towards goals. 

The utility of the spreadsheet improves over time as accrued trend patterns emerge to indicate deviations from the norm. The best way to improve the performance of your funnel is by comparing it to your previous conversion rates which will allow you to steer iterative optimizations. The process allows you to progressively develop better insights into the workings of your go-to-market motions.

1. Your chances of success are greater in a SaaS business run by product folks. Tall talk there, I know, but hear me out. CEOs and founders that come from the product side often (not always) prioritize a product-led growth vision. A great product makes your job as a marketer easier.

So how do you identify a great product? You look for signs of product-market-fit; that’s where the following points come in.

2. LTV:CAC ratio of 3:1 or better. That’s often a high bar when you’re struggling to get things off the ground. However, the better this ratio, the more room you have for sales/marketing-led expansion. Ask for that number during the interview process.

3. The length of the sales cycle. This is another number that can tell you what you are up against. The length of the sales cycle could be a leading indicator of how difficult your task as a marketer will be.
A shorter sales cycle reduces the length of the feedback loop in your b2b SaaS marketing efforts.

4. But what if there’s no sales team? Even better… at least until you move upmarket. Well, I believe that the earlier you hire a sales team the better. But if you are less dependent on one and still get to an 8-figure ARR, that’s a very good sign. Ask how much of the revenue comes from sales relationships vs. directly from free trials/freemium without ever talking to sales.

5. A leadership team that is as growth-oriented as you are. How do you find out? You’ve got to dig a bit, but it’s a good sign if they are happy to provide clarity on the above points.


p.s.: These points are extracted from a recent LinkedIn post.

“How can I connect marketing activities directly to revenue?”, asked a marketing leader on one of the online groups I am a part of.

This individual was having a tough time justifying his ask for marketing spend. As the conversation progressed I realized this was a common challenge.

In some marketing circles, the revenue impact question is still a valid one. Especially if the organization is steeped in legacy marketing mindsets. 

However, in B2B SaaS marketing one needs to figure out the answer to that question before even starting on any marketing campaigns. There is no room for ‘winging it’ in the modern marketing era.

Without an answer to that question, it would be impossible to get a marketing budget approved in my world. The marketing team at Fusebill generates 99% of the closed-won leads on the inbound channel, and lately the outbound side as well. Our sales targets are, in fact, driven by the marketing commit on lead generation.

As a result, Fusebill’s marketing activities are laser focussed on revenue generation. This is likely the case for many B2B SaaS companies.

All the hustle porn, Facebook likes, Twitter retweets, and Linkedin video comments can amount to little or no predictable revenue without a grasp of the direct impact marketing has on revenue. 

You absolutely need to understand how marketing activities generate SaaS revenue on a daily/monthly/quarterly/yearly basis. Unless that is, your accelerating SaaS growth is product-led or the product has an amazing viral-coefficient. Zoom is an example of such a B2B SaaS product that unlocked viral growth.

However, a majority of B2B SaaS products are not in that league. 

Most B2B SaaS companies solve complex productivity problems for their customers. These solutions often involve a fairly lengthy process of educating prospects, overcoming digital transformation challenges, and working through relatively complex implementation procedures. Like implementing a CRM in an organization previously used to working with spreadsheets.

To grow and scale most B2B SaaS businesses often have to progress through multiple stages like

• Product-market fit
• Predictable recurring revenue generation, while keeping expenses under control
• Scale-up challenges including a focus on retention and sustainable scalability

Supporting these stages requires the B2B SaaS marketing team to be agile, revenue-focussed, customer-oriented, and highly sales-aligned. There’s a simple spreadsheet to help with B2B GTM Conversion Tracking.

Using the spreadsheet will help monitor the progress of 3 interdependent KPIs that help the SaaS marketing team step up to the challenge.

1. X times Sales Pipeline Coverage in New MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)

While this number has traditionally been a sales concern, modern SaaS B2B marketing teams need to commit to adequate sales pipeline coverage as a success metric.

The metric is calculated as a multiple of the period’s sales target based on historical conversion rates.

Conventional wisdom on sales pipeline to sales quota ratio states that the number should be 3x. However, the ideal number for your B2B SaaS business is dependent on the historical sales trends that apply to your organization. 

E.g.:
Your monthly sales target is $10,000 in New MRR.
The sales team has historically converted 20% of the pipeline to customers.
So the marketing commit on sales pipeline coverage target for the month should be $50,000 in MRR. Which is 5x the New MRR sales target for the month.

Pros of the KPI:

• Marketing-sales alignment: The marketing team’s focus shifts from anyone-with-a-pulse MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), to prospects with higher purchase intent.
  
  The metric implicitly acknowledges that there is an overlap of the sales and marketing funnels. The bottom of the marketing funnel feeds into the top of the sales funnel.
  
  The sales pipeline coverage ratio forces marketing teams to take a holistic view of the revenue pipeline and the customer journey through it, downstream from the marketing touchpoints.
  
  Your marketing team and sales team will now work towards the same goal, to ensure sales targets are met.

• Vanity metrics are not a focus: Sales-relevant content creation, for paid as well as organic channels,  targeting the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and buyer persona, becomes more important. If you have to generate adequate sales pipeline coverage, each piece of content should be created with that focus.
  
  Vanity metrics like the number of likes and retweets are no longer as important when prospects with high-purchase intent activity are targeted.
  

Challenges:

• Sales and marketing leadership needs a collaborative environment: It is often assumed that sales and marketing teams have an antagonistic relationship. In my opinion, this kind of relationship is archaic, a holdover from the days of traditional marketing.
  
  The integration of sales ops and marketing ops is increasingly vital to SaaS revenue marketing success. Without an environment of collaboration with the sales team, it is difficult to drive healthy sales pipeline coverage.
  
  
• Well-defined processes need to be implemented: There should be lucid SLAs (service-level agreements) between sales and marketing on follow-ups on leads delivered by marketing. This is typically difficult to implement in a legacy sales-marketing environment where there is a lack of trust between the two departments.
  
  Without a defined process for follow-ups and lead-stage documentation, it becomes impossible to track the success of sales pipeline coverage.
  
  Not only should sales be prompt on follow-ups, but the pre-qualification and post-qualification process also should be supported by diligent CRM updates on the prospect’s journey through the process.
  
  Qualification of opportunities and potential MRR value should be left to the sales team and not the marketing team. This level of interdependence will encourage healthy feedback loops on what success means to the sales team and what the marketing team has to do to get there.
  
  
• May not work as well for small-volume niches: Some products are targeted at very small niches. The marketing efforts that are highly targeted may not generate enough lead volume to sustain the business. In such cases, broadening targeting to cover more of the TAM (Total Addressable Market) and educating potential customers through to the journey to your product may be necessary.
  
  Ideally, you are not in the business of selling trombone oil. As Robert Iger’s biography mentions,
  

“Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest trombone-oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes a few quarts of trombone oil a year!”

– Dan Burke

• Susceptibility to inflated sales pipelines: There can be situations where the sales team requires a high coverage ratio to compensate for their underperformance.
  
  Clarity on the quantity and quality of the sales pipeline down to each sales rep provides an opportunity to adequately staff, coach, and build an effective sales team. It is important to ensure that there are incremental improvements in the closing ratios – by deal stage, and by sales rep.
  
  The pipeline coverage could also be inflated by deals that may not close in the immediate future. Therefore, the sales team should be vigilant about their weighted pipeline and provide visibility on this information to the marketing team.
  
  There is always the chance that the sales pipeline is inflated by an outsized MRR deal value and thus masks a sales pipeline coverage shortage. More about this in the next KPI.
  

2. New MRR Sales Pipeline Coverage by Deal Size Cohort

Piggy-backing on the first KPI, the sales pipeline by New MRR deal size cohort will help you further optimize your B2B SaaS marketing efforts for revenue.

Digging deeper into the first KPI yields the sales pipeline coverage by New MRR value. This metric provides further insights on supporting sales revenue targets.

E.g.:
Your business goals include increasing your market share in the SMB niche. When you dive into the pipeline coverage ratio which is on target for 5x sales pipeline coverage, you discover that a few potential mid-market opportunities have skewed your number and there aren’t many SMB accounts to close and meet sales quotas.

This could be dangerous since your sales team may take longer to close the bigger deals at a lower closing ratio than what your sales pipeline coverage was accounting for.

At this point, the marketing team needs to work on better coverage of the sales pipeline commit.

TIP: When budgeting for this KPI, take into account historical sales trends of closing ratios by deal size cohorts

Pros of this KPI:

• Aligned with business objectives: This KPI provides a practical foundation for the previous KPI. By factoring in New MRR cohorts by deal size the KPI mitigates some of the risks of an inflated sales pipeline coverage ratio.
  
  
• Sales relevant marketing efforts: By digging into the cohorts the marketing team gains information to ensure that content creation to drive lead generation across paid, organic, and other channels are optimized towards the ideal customer profile and buyer personas. If the sales New MRR targets are dependent on a specific cohort the marketing content mix should be optimized for that specific cohort.
  

Challenges:

• The product-market fit needs to be well established: This metric may be less relevant for a SaaS product that is still trying to establish a product-market fit. Without a product-market fit, it will be a guessing game to figure out where your growth should be coming from.
  
  On the other hand, this KPI may well provide you with a leading indicator on your ICP. There’s more than one way to a product-market fit.
  
  
• Some channels may not respond in a timely or efficient manner to tweaks based on this KPI: The MRR sales pipeline by deal size cohort is often used as an optimization metric to guide the sales pipeline coverage ratio. However, some marketing channels may not respond to tactical marketing changes.
  
  For example, your SEO strategy may be leveraging blog content that is bringing more SMBs than the ideal Enterprise prospects into the pipeline. A change in content strategy may take some time to execute and it may be a couple of quarters or more before the results of the changes show up in your pipeline.
  
  Or your costs per lead may trend higher as you attend more events to acquire more Enterprise leads.
  
  Which brings us to the next KPI.
  

3. Target Cost Per Lead

I don’t think marketing heads need an in-depth explanation of this metric. 

Cost per lead= cost of marketing to acquire leads/number of leads acquired

In combination with the previous two KPIs, this metric can prevent runaway costs, help ROI, and assist with adequate budget allocation.

If all three KPIs are on target and your Net MRR is also on target, your marketing is probably well optimized and bringing in the best-fit customers your B2B SaaS requires

Net MRR = New MRR + Expansion MRR – Churn

If you are performing better than targets on all these KPIs as well as your Net MRR for more than two quarters, it may be an indicator that you should be aiming for higher KPI targets. Or that you’ve arrived and you should be scaling up faster to T2D3 growth.

Is branding dead? Is design dead? Is story telling dead?

See? I’m not immune to overused tropes. Perhaps the click-bait factor on ‘X is dead’ titles would positively drive those KPIs I mentioned. I digress.

Critics of the above KPI based approach may point out that the approach comes at the expense of branding. However, I strongly believe that it makes a strong case for result-oriented brand storytelling. After all, it is very difficult to sustainably build on the 3 KPIs without brand credibility to support it. 

The KPI approach brings together 3 overarching success factors for modern marketing:

1. People
   Be it sales and marketing alignment, creating an environment for individual and business growth, or driving the customer experience, the common element revolves around human relationships.
   
   One of my biggest challenges has been to find enough people with a good grasp of revenue-focused marketing. It’s difficult to find those who can unlearn the vanity-metric-centered behavior coming from the ‘low barriers to entry on social media’ approach to marketing.
   
   One way to fix this is to coach and build a team that can connect the dots between marketing tasks and revenue numbers.
   
   This is easier said than done. Habits are difficult to unlearn. There is always a temptation to fall back on old ways.
   
   Incentivizing teams to focus on these KPI targets then becomes another tool in the arsenal. As someone mentioned, and I paraphrase, “Show me what I’m measured by and I’ll show you what I devote my time on”.
   
   
2. Technology
   In my experience, technology and automation on the marketing and sales sides have only increased the need for collaboration across the teams.
   
   The era of the citizen developer is here. Marketing and sales teams are increasingly empowered to drive superlative customer experiences with low code/no-code.
   
   Due to the growth of marketing technology, the measurement of marketing efforts towards revenue is in many ways easier to track than it has ever been Although, in many ways, it is still a work in progress.
   
   
3. Processes
   All the technology we have begins to waver without processes that sustain scalability.
   
   This leads back to coaching, discipline, and relationships to guide the digital transformation of marketing as a revenue center.
   

Which brings us full circle to the fact that these B2B SaaS marketing KPIs are about focussing the SaaS marketing org to play an effective role in sustainable and predictable recurring revenue. At its core, it’s about effectively measuring the return on storytelling and brand-building.

p.s.: Here’s a one-page digital marketing plan template to bring it all together.

When you have the opportunity to get an intimate peek into the minds of business leaders like Michael Eisner, Steve Jobs, and Robert Iger in one compelling read—that’s a difficult book to put down.

With its acquisitions of ABC, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox, Disney is now an unparalleled creative and content behemoth. Except for the ABC deal, these difficult acquisitions were closed under Robert Iger’s personal initiative.

Robert Iger tracks his 45 years to the helm of The Walt Disney Company in this story-rich, revelatory autobiographical narrative. The master dealmaker describes how he navigated the sunset era of traditional media to lead Disney into the digital age.

During the reading I stumbled upon a few contrarian management thoughts, some overt and others predicated by my own bias.

1. Micromanagement is underrated – Michael Eisner

Eisner was considered a micromanager by some.

Yet, from 1984-1994 he turned around the waning fortunes of Disney. Eisner led the Disney acquisition of ABC. He quadrupled the annual profits of the company. Under his leadership, the Disney stock price increased 1300%, during that same decade.

The management echo-chamber of today constantly derides micromanagement at the risk of encouraging under-management. This is not to state that micromanagement is a good thing. More on this in the next point.

2. Sweat the small stuff

Walter Isaacson’s autobiography of Steve Jobs consistently messages Job’s attention to detail. Similarly, Iger talks about how he learned about obsessing over details from Eisner. As Iger summarizes and both Jobs and Eisner knew—great stuff is a collection of the small stuff. 

Putting the above two viewpoints together, it is clear they overlap. I guess it all comes down to balance. A good leader ought to know the difference between micromanagement and ‘abdication management’.

Iger provides an actionable insight in striving for that balance. Since an obsession with perfection is what often leads to micromanagement, he advises facilitating an environment where mediocrity is unacceptable, instead of focusing on perfection.

3. Good leaders are not perfect

I’ve previously read that we love to build our leaders and then tear them down. I guess the increased scrutiny comes with any leadership territory and Eisner was not immune to it. His many achievements were not sufficient to prevent his ouster from Disney.

The book illustrates how paranoia, pessimism, and insecurities can interrupt even the most successful careers. Reinforcing the fact that change is the only certainty, no matter where you are in life. In the end, the battle is in your head.

Growth is the journey and the reward.

4. Trust your gut, not just numbers

This, I think, many of us struggle with. Especially those among us who increasingly rely on data to make business decisions. While I find data reliance to generally be a good strategy, it does come with its limits. And Robert Iger drives home this message with a couple of surprising business examples during the course of his telling. And opines that even with the best data and analytics, there is never 100% certainty.

The most interesting parts of the book are the very human stories involving the larger than life personalities that populate the pages. Passages about multi-billion dollar business acquisitions hinging on relationships, George Lucas’ concerns about his legacy, Michael Eisner’s rise and fall at Disney, and Iger’s close relationship with a physically deteriorating Steve Jobs all overlap to weave a humanly rich and engaging narrative.

Iger implies, with good reason that empathy is a crucial factor even in billion-dollar business acquisition plays.

Early on in my career as an aspiring animator, I looked up to the nine old men of Disney. In fact, I still hold The Illusion of Life as part of a cherished corpus on animation and Disney-isms.

When I moved on to the world of broadcast media and then to working for a CGI animation pioneer, I was forever inspired by the work of the storytelling geniuses at Pixar and the SFX pioneers at George Lucas’ ILM.

Things seem to have come full circle and I’m now a senior marketing executive helping to build a leading subscription billing SaaS business. It seems apt to check off this book as an insightful and worthy business read coming from perhaps the most effective CEO of The Walt Disney Company.

So much so that it prompted me to end an extended writing hiatus on this blog.

The Disney influence lives on.

After a couple of years of the initial product-market-fit phase, you’ve probably made some gains but you’re now left wondering how to deliver those early encouraging results at scale.

You may have even decided to bring in new sales and marketing executives to help you achieve your goals.

But it still feels like a shot in the dark. Lead generation efforts are not delivering desired results and you feel the momentum slipping from beneath your feet.

Let’s run through a few practical to-dos to get things moving along.

1. Sales-marketing alignment: the revenue team

Is your marketing engine plugged in to deliver on your sales goals? Does the sales team follow up on the leads delivered by marketing? Do the sales and marketing executives work together to deliver on sales targets?

If all you see is finger-pointing, it’s time to get the teams to align on revenue goals, or make changes until the sales and marketing factions see themselves as the part of the ‘revenue team’.

Set up a process around these key areas:

• Lead Scoring:Sales and marketing should collaborate on the scoring mechanism that dictates where customers are in their purchase journey.A lead that downloads a comparison report is closer to a purchase decision and should be scored higher than one who has only subscribed to the marketing blog.Lower scored leads remain with the marketing team for nurture. In-market leads that score higher should be passed on to sales.

  There should be an agreement between the two teams on the sales-readiness of leads based on purchase intent. The teams should also be in sync on the lead score that pushes a lead from an MQL (Marketing Qualified lead) to an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) consideration or SAL (Sales Accepted Lead).

• Funnel position accountability:The sales and marketing team should also define what each should be doing on either side of the marketing and sales ‘revenue funnel’.How long before an SQL is followed up on? What happens to an SQL that is returned to marketing for further nurturing? Discussions around these and other similar topics help the teams better align on processes and expectations.Understand the sales team metrics around lead follow-ups, activity targets, and timelines. The sales and marketing executives should be in agreement that these metrics are conducive to closing deals.
• Automation and technology:With current marketing technologies, the sales team can have unobstructed visibility on lead sources, marketing messages, page views, and lead scoring details.Similarly, activity notes on the sales side provide the marketing team with visibility on how MQLs progress through opportunities towards ‘closed wins’.Marketing could also embed themselves deeper into the sales funnel activities by, say, setting up the initial automated response on an SQL lead. The automated message would be sent from the assigned sales agent along with a link to book a sales meeting with the agent. Any lead activity performed on the email could add to the lead score in the marketing automation system.

Working this closely with the sales team helps with alignment on the revenue funnel. Of course, marketings sales enablement activities should also extend to sales collateral that is required to close the deal.

The chance of a scaling up successfully is high when the sales and marketing machine is well aligned with business goals.

2. Double-down on main lead acquisition channels

Often, the reason sales and marketing don’t get along is because the sales team is often unhappy with the volume and quality of leads, while marketing feels that the sales team is ignoring leads coming from marketing.

Marketing may have to take the first steps to earn the trust of the sales team. At 20% sales conversion rates, the sales team is dealing with rejection 80% of the time. It is the responsibility of the marketing team to provide better leads so this rejection rate does not get any worse if not better.

The first thing marketing has to do is double down on what works. If your organic traffic is what is bringing in the best leads, put more effort into SEO. If it is PPC that keeps the kitchen fire on, that’s the channel you have to optimize or scale up.

3. Monitor and improve conversion rates

If you are assiduously tracking conversion rates through the funnel, from MQL to Closed Won, you must dig into the data to make:

• Channel-wise improvements:Can you optimize any of your marketing channels? Use recent trends as a baseline and move the needle up. In the case of PPC, eliminate the low performing single keyword ad groups (SKAGs) while reallocating budget to the better yield players based on metrics like conversions, time on page, and bounce rates. Identify keywords with lower quality scores to improve on them.For SEO (Search Engine Optimization), identify keywords which have the highest potential to bring you in-market traffic based on traffic volume. Can you increase the number of these keywords? Scale up onsite and offsite SEO tactics to increase the topic clusters, content, and incoming links around these topics.TIP: Pass some of these keywords on to the PPC campaigns while you work on improving your organic ranking.
• Sub-channel improvements:Drill down your marketing channels e.g.: To device levels in your PPC campaigns. Is mobile traffic performing better? Increase the bids on this traffic.In the case of SEO, look for recent high performing keywords in your SEO tool or the Google Search Console. Even if they bring you lower conversion rates, can the volumes justify improving your SEO around these?TIP: Perhaps your PPC re-marketing campaigns can work on this high volume traffic to improve those conversion rates.
• Drill down to closed wins:Marketing should not just stop with MQLs and SQLs. They should constantly be identifying cohorts like the optimal lead channels by time to close, deal size, geography, CaC, and even churn.Digging down deep can yield important insights that can help with the optimization across one or more channels. It will also provide the marketing team with increased clarity on the customers that are important to the business, and how these customers travel through the marketing and sales funnel.

4. Uncover new lead acquisition channels

The focus and increase in lead quality and volume from the previous steps should give you enough room to initiate experiments on other lead acquisition channels.

While most of the above marketing efforts improve your in-market customer targeting and optimize lead acquisition, you also need to think about lead channel diversification. This will ensure that you are never at the mercy of the idiosyncratic vagaries of a Google or Facebook algorithm update.

Ideally, the new channel efforts will have some overlap with your existing channels to improve conversions on those channels. For example, the new traffic from your new influencer marketing campaign could be retargeted by a uniquely tracked PPC campaign.

5. Develop scalable processes through standardization

As you proceed through the above steps, establish processes that are easy to follow and are sustainable at scale.

If your content marketing team regularly builds their content calendar based on client outreach for case studies and blog articles, create templates that will standardize the process. Create a template not only for the case studies but also for the email series that solicit collaboration, question sets for interviews, research process suggestions, etc.

These templates will offer a rough blueprint on the processes to be followed. These ‘suggestions’ will also make onboarding new talent much easier as you scale the team.

Speaking about templates, download the popular one-page digital marketing plan template.

Of course, it goes without saying that all of the above steps should be nested under the branding umbrella. The brand vision, mission, and values should inform the creative DNA of your marketing efforts. These should resonate not only with the personas you target, but also be soundly entrenched in the company culture.

Seldom can you build a strong brand without a culture to support it.

After all, the long-term goal should be to build brand awareness, credibility, and recall that lifts up conversion rates as you scale existing and experimental lead acquisition channels.

When someone is as fastidious and creative as Anderson, it’s obvious that he loves what he does. People respond to this kind of passion and enjoy working with those who are so devoted to their craft.

“He is such an auteur director. He pays attention to every little thing. It’s not just graphics – it’s the same with every department. He’s quite particular but he’s also really experimental. He loves to try different things so working with him really made me feel like I loved this work again. It was fascinating.” – Annie Atkins, lead graphic designer, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

I’ve been lucky to have had the opportunity to work with the brilliant team at Solufy who obviously love what they do and are passionate about the difference they make for their customers in the IBM Maximo world.

I’ve also been fortunate that Mario Boileau (CEO/Founder) and Gerry Lamarche (V.P/Co-founder) placed their complete trust in me to develop and lead the global marketing efforts at Solufy for almost 2 years – a period of amazing growth, when Solufy more than doubled staff and revenues. Their faith allowed me to be the marketing equivalent of Wes Anderson. Okay, I’m overreaching (admittedly, by a lot), but you get the idea.

The talented executive team assembled by Mario and Gerry were a pleasure to work with and I’m proud of the things we achieved together. Our annual summer offsite executive retreats and the interesting campfire conversations on the “Infiniti” (an inside joke) among others, will be missed. Good times.

At Solufy, it is not rare to see unsolicited praise for the efforts of the team from customers and partners. The teams – devs, client services, customer service, sales, have the good habit to go ‘over and above’ for their customers.

That definitely makes a marketer’s job easier. Solufy is well poised to continue on its growth trajectory, well into the future.

It was a fun run with one of the best teams I’ve had the pleasure to work with. Thank you for the overwhelmingly positive experience, Team Solufy!

So what does one do for an encore? You’d think that would be difficult. Well, I’ve probably got a lucky star.

My journey continues: Fusebill – the innovators in accessible subscription billing for SaaS, Media, IoT.

If you are clued in to Ottawa’s tech scene, you have already heard of the success story that Fusebill is. This Ottawa based fintech start-up, founded by Tyler Eyamie and Greg Burwell, has established a formidable global reputation as the premier subscription billing and management platform solution.

A couple of years ago I was introduced to Tyler and Greg by Marie Bosco (an amazing recruiter you need to know). Right from the start, I’ve been sold into the enormous potential of what Tyler and Greg were doing. I’ve also been impressed by the cumulative years of experience on the Fusebill board.

When Tyler and Greg circled back recently, to talk about Fusebill’s plans for the future, it was obvious that Fusebill continues to make giant strides in the recurring billing and payment management business.

Fusebill’s innovative, flexible, and entrepreneur-friendly features lends itself to a variety of burgeoning markets in SaaS, IoT (internet of things), media, and anywhere else that entrepreneurs and business are looking to make it easy for their customers to pay for products and services. The Fusebill platform saves tons of hours of manual effort in billing management, subscriptions, and reporting. Fusebill is the solution for all those looking for help managing the complexities of a recurring revenue client base.

Easy and intuitive integrations of the Fusebill platform with QuickBooks and Salesforce are other hugely popular and compelling reasons that fuel Fusebill’s rapid growth.

Big market, meet great product.

Readers of this blog and my friends on Twitter and LinkedIn know that all things related to startups, scale-ups, SaaS, martech, and marketing leadership are dear to my heart. When I was offered the opportunity to join the executive team at Fusebill as the Vice President of Marketing, it was like a call to come home.

Time, once again, to work in a Wes Anderson-ish way to scale greater heights – with the talented team that Tyler and Greg have built.

Stay tuned.

The framework described in this post will help you meet those objectives. Hopefully, you’ll also be more successful in securing c-suite buy-in for your strategy while managing expectations.

Those are worthy goals indeed. Let’s get started.

Firstly, let’s explore the concept of a ‘thought leader’. According to the Wiki mind;

‘A thought leader is an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded.’

That’s a good definition. Any business brand (or personal brand) needs to be considered a thought leader in their niche for long-term brand vitality and viability.

There’s this study by Edelman and LinkedIn on how thought leadership impacts B2B demand generation, which has found that:

Over 80% of business decision makers said that thought leadership increased their trust in a vendor organisation.

And more interestingly –

Nearly half of the decision makers said thought leadership has directly led them to award business to a company.

Fellow marketer Heidi Cohen points us to credible UMass Dartmouth research findings to surmise that:

51% of the Top 200 Fortune 500 companies have a blog compared with 35% of the Bottom 200 Fortune 500 companies.

Social Media Marketing expert Mark Schaefer uses the same research to indicate the surge of Instagram and blogs at Fortune 500 companies.

Both Mark and Heidi mention thought leadership as one of the strategic reasons for the increase in use of social media and blogs among these corporations.

That’s all good you say, but not all of us are in the Fortune 500 yet. What if you aren’t in that esteemed list?

Well, HubSpot Marketing Statistics show:

B2C companies that blogged 11+ times per month got more than 4X as many leads than those that blogged only 4-5 times per month.

Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got about 4.5X more leads than companies that published 0-4 monthly posts.

So how do you position your brand to be a thought leader in your industry vertical? Is there a way to do this regardless of your current ‘Non-Fortune 500’ designation?

Luckily, yes. There is an easy framework to incorporate into your content marketing strategy to create a thought leadership position for your business or personal brand.

This framework may even save you from the random leadership quotes that currently stand in for many a thought leadership tactic. You know? Those ‘random acts of content’ Mark has written about.

Introducing the TLC (Thought Leadership Cluster) topics framework

There are 5 steps to the Thought Leadership Cluster framework which seeks to simplify the approach to content marketing for thought leadership.

1. Know your customer/audience.

This step may seem obvious but it’s amazing to see how some brands have no structured document on who their customers are. Creating content about everything, is in a way, hoping something works. We all know that hope is not a strategy.

There are plenty of resources out there to help you create effective buyer personas to apply to an effective marketing strategy.

2. Create value for your topic clusters based on niches.

Once you know your buyer personas, you also want to decide your topic cluster based on:

– Broader Niche Topics: These are topics that would tackle the broader interests within your target niche. E.g.: Your business wants to generate leads for a project management software. ‘Time Management Tips’, ‘Project Management Best Practices’ may be a couple of broader topic clusters, each with their own sub topics.

– Niche Topics: These topics would be closer in interest to your target audience. Like ‘Project Management for Start-ups’, ‘Best Project Management Practices in SaaS’. And again you would organize other sub topics around these main topic clusters.

– Target/Product Niche Topics: These would emulate one-to-one conversations with those who are your in-market (ready to buy) prospects. These topics would show how your in-market customers can resolve their biggest pain points. e.g.: ‘How our XYZ project management software helps in customer retention’ etc.

Although the ‘Target/Product Niche Topics’ could form the bulk of your content, the other TLC topics will lay strong foundations for longer-term brand vitality and provide room for other benefits like creative expression and well-rounded thought leadership in your niche.

Generally your broader niche TLC topics would yield a bigger audience.

TIP: Use the Google Keyword Planner Tool or SEMRush (affiliate link) to find keywords related to the topic clusters. This will help you with ideas for more content on these topic clusters.

3. Make sure to check all the right persona boxes.

Ensure that these TLC topics resonate with most of your reader/buyer personas. Use a spreadsheet to keep track of which personas and TLC topic each content piece is being written for.

As you see in the spreadsheet, I’ve expanded the TLC framework to add additional target audiences (in the yellow section), like press releases and partner relationship content, which are part of any B2B marketing strategy.

This spreadsheet should help you ensure that your content is targeted at the right personas/ audience. Ideally, you need to have at least two Ys in the yellow section for each piece of content to make sure your strategy is aligned to business goals.

You can expand on the persona/target audience section to include for example, HR related blog posts to help with hiring initiatives. Your personal brand could use an adapted version of this framework too.

Download a copy here (use File>Download as).

4. Create various types of content for your top level TLC topics and its sub topics.

Now that you have a structured high-level framework of what topics you can write about or create for your LinkedIn, Instagram, Blog etc., create different content to fill up that spreadsheet in the previous step.

The content you create will include:

1. Videos
2. Articles
3. Podcasts
4. Infographics
5. Ads
6. Photographs
7. Memes
8. Hashtags
9. Case studies
10. Whitepapers
11. Ebooks

Etc.

5. Find your TLC kin.

If you have not already, you now want to connect (digitally and otherwise) with other influencers and audiences on those TLC topics. You can share, exchange, and amplify each other’s valuable content for mutual audience growth and learning.

Your TLC topic framework will help you with your distribution strategy because it instinctively focuses you on the right audiences and partners that will help you scale.

It’s that easy. Taking this high-level framework approach to content can translate into benefits for many other marketing tactics that a modern marketer seeks to leverage.

The top 6 benefits of TLC topics framework

You’ll find even more benefits as you implement TLC topics into your content strategy but these 6 are the ones that stand out.

1. SEO: An updated SEO tactic for your blog or website.

Okay, here’s a confession. The TLC concept is the evolution of what has been working very well for me thanks to the implementation of the concept of topic clusters as the new SEO tactic (HubSpot). By implementing the tactic I’ve seen results in under two months. More on this some other day.

Notice that the TLC framework is well aligned with the evolution of SEO and it will reap you SEO benefits as long as it is implemented with a basic understanding of SEO. As a blogger, you will need to create internal links from your sub topics to your top level TLC topics for best results.

2. Creativity: Increase your creative range while you build thought leadership.

It could be limiting to your creativity when you develop content with the sole objective of improved SEO ranking. Your content can get monotonic and superficial. By using the TLC framework topic layers, you get to work a full range of creative topics that are all related to your overall positioning as a thought leader.

With this expanded range of topics your content inherits more authenticity and is also more interesting for your audience.

3. Scalability: Keep adding to your TLC topics.

Have another keyword or phrase you want to drive traffic with? Want to explore new opportunities? You can add to your TLC topics to explore new markets. As long as you can find a way to connect these new opportunities to overlap with the interests of your current audience, it will contribute to your thought leadership activity.

4. Marketing Integration: TLC for  brand awareness, demand generation, and lead generation.

The TLC concept allows you to have a holistic approach to your content strategy while you grow your position as a thought leader.

The TLC layers work for all levels of your marketing funnel. If you seek to create more brand awareness across a wider swath of your industry you would focus on broader niche topics. Some of these audiences who enter at the top of your funnel will invariably find their way through to the bottom, ending up as your customers.

5. Measurability: Easy to measure and optimize performance against broader goals.

Rather than focus on the performance of individual keywords or objectives, you can now measure contributions to various marketing goals based on the performance of the clusters.

You can align these performance metrics against business goals for the short term (e.g: lead generation) without completely compromising on long term thought leadership positioning.

If you choose your TLC topics well, you will achieve multiple marketing goals simultaneously while always having the agility and flexibility to focus on specific areas in the short term.

6. TLC for Paid search.

This framework can guide your budget and strategy for PPC tactics and promotional posts across channels. Your marketing automation team could use the same TLC topics to personalize drip campaigns across different audience segments.

Thus your content, automation, and paid search teams can sync to common marketing goals at any point in the funnel.

OR the strategy could be that each team prioritizes different goals. E.g.: The paid search team could focus more on lead and customer acquisition inherent in the narrower TLC topics, while the content team could focus on the top parts of the funnel and develop paid retargeting opportunities for the paid search teams.

It could be easier to justify to the c-suite that your ad spend is more focused on customer acquisition and easily measurable results while your content team plays an ‘assist’ role in this process.

The TLC topics can thus simplify strategy for your marketing team as well as help manage executive expectations for tactical plays.

Over to you. What do you think of this TLC topic framework? Is it going to be helpful to you in your marketing strategy?

I’m looking forward to seeing what you do with the TLC framework for content marketing and how you would improve on it.

Then there are those times that I’ve stayed around longer than I should have; eventually, walking away from a ton of hard work with a shrug (and lessons learned). It made sense to start fresh in order to meet personal goal deadlines attached to my career management efforts.

Marketing success is dependent on broader organizational competencies

What I’ve discovered, like most other digital marketing veterans, is that marketing fueled business success is dependent on more than just exceptional marketing prowess.

Without strong business foundations, marketing success is short-lived.

Let’s consider just a marketing department to start with; A strong marketing foundation allows an organization to focus time and money on short-term campaigns that can produce results. For example, if there are a good number of white papers, blog posts and online calculators already living on the website, it will be easier to generate leads by scaling up select paid search campaigns.

However if the foundation is weak, resources need to be spent on shoring up these foundations before scalable results can be expected.

Similarly, broader core business competencies play a major role in sustainable marketing success, especially as a business moves from start-up to scale-up phase.

Any business leader expecting marketing innovation and excellence needs to consider:

1. Marketing Competencies:

This one is obvious since we are talking about marketing. The organization’s marketing competencies have to include strategy, optimization of channel integration, and tactical execution.

External and internal communications have to be a core strength of the marketing team. Consistency in brand positioning across channels is important to build brand preference and loyalty. Traditional marketing teams are usually strong in this area.

In addition, a modern marketing team is digitally astute. A blog post post has a longer shelf life than a print flyer in terms of reach, cross channel advantages (like organic and social media versatility) as well as the accessibility expectations of the modern customer.

In fact, software development mindsets are highly valued in a modern marketing center of excellence. This does not mean that a marketer should also be a programmer (though it helps). However, organizational competencies in marketing should include the ability to conceive and execute software development projects.

If you think about it, any website includes forms, interactive content, download mechanisms, online calculators, etc. And these customer facing elements are plugged into an invisible (to the customer) layer of analytics, CRMs, workflows, automation, tag management software, databases, and a variety of technology integrations.

“Marketing, in particular, has become heavily dependent on digital channels and touchpoints to reach and engage customers – in both consumer and business-to-business markets. As a result, you are affected by digital dynamics, regardless of your industry size or location” – Scott Brinker in Hacking Marketing.

Recently, I decided to create an online version of a first of its kind ROI calculator for maintenance planning and scheduling, originally conceived by our Director of Sales. The development process included hiring an agile development team to quickly (less than a month) put together a minimum viable version of the calculator.

This is an example of how software development competencies within marketing, can leverage years of external subject matter expertise to add value to the customer experience, as well as help in lead generation and niche thought leadership positioning.

2. Sales Team Competencies:

Is the sales team and leadership capable of dealing with the leads coming from marketing? Effective high performing sales teams use technology to optimize the sales cycle. If the sales team is not comfortable or resistant to leveraging marketing automation to improve performance and processes, the organization may under-perform in spite of a high performing marketing team. Quality leads should not fall through the cracks due to a faulty follow-up process.

A traditional sales team is inherently biased to sales methodologies and processes that have worked in the past and may not immediately see the value of online lead generation. The lack of processes to filter and follow-up on leads from online sources will ultimately result in lower conversions from these online channels. Thus reinforcing the bias for traditional methods. Sometimes, until it is too late and the competition is well ahead.

Sales and marketing alignment is crucial to maximize positive lead flow, conversions, and revenue. The mutual commitment to improving the feedback loop between sales and marketing is vital to achieving scale-able business goals.

3. Product/Service Competencies:

The product or service should be able to consistently deliver and exceed on the promise made by sales and marketing. As customers leverage social media as part of their increasingly digital lifestyles, any weakness in product or service value perceptions can spread quickly to undermine the best performing sales and marketing teams.

4. Operational Competencies:

If the sales team and marketing teams are in sync and closing deals at a high rate, client services and customer support should anticipate and adapt to the increase in business activity in their own areas. Delivery and response timelines are vital to customer satisfaction and product perception.

5. R&D and Innovation Competencies:

Can the product team continuously innovate and improve on the product based on customer feedback? A good product team can also predict what the customers are likely to want in the future. Hence the R&D chops of an organization are vital to customer acquisition and retention goals shared by the marketing and sales teams.

6. Leadership Vision Competencies:

Is the business leadership proactive enough to catch any mis-alignment between sales and marketing? The leadership should focus the team on the right KPIs that help distracted teams sync up.

Are business leaders willing to tolerate some amount of risk in marketing experimentation and channels?

Is the leadership encouraging a culture of positivity, excellent service, and high-performance? People like working with peers who help them achieve more.

It is easy for an executive team, especially those in a scale-up phase, to be lost in the operational weeds from time to time. It is important for this team to focus on longer-term scalable processes and objectives.

It goes without saying that the marketing strategy supports the leadership teams’ vision for growth and vice-versa. The lack of executive buy-in can undermine the best of marketing strategies.

In other words, the circular customer journey, so well described in this illustration from Mckinsey, has to be supported by the 6 competencies described above.

Holistic business competencies define success

The inter-dependencies of business units is only one factor that makes it unlikely that a digital marketing strategy that works for one company will work for another. Rapidly evolving business dynamics may force a company to rethink a currently ineffective strategy that worked perfectly well just a year ago.

Apart from adapting to the constantly evolving business landscape, marketing goals have to meet the expectations of executive stakeholders. The CEO, or anyone writing out the cheques for a marketing budget expects accountability and ROI for the spend.

If you are leading marketing efforts, the clarity you derive from a holistic assessment of business units will help you manage executive expectations from marketing investments.

Hopefully, you will work with the executive branch to derive best value from this investment by strengthening interdependent business competencies.

As I look back on past ‘failures’ (learning opportunities), I notice that my marketing efforts were not always supported by competencies in other business units. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blame shifting. At times, I played a pivotal part in those ‘other business units’ in an entrepreneurial capacity. Obviously, I had learning to do.

What it comes down to – sustainable marketing success is a team sport. Teams that scale with this mindset have a better shot at tackling the challenges posed by the rapidly accelerating paradigm shifts in business.

Photo Credit

Depending on the nature of the business itself, the CRO is closely coupled with an important metric, the Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC).

“The CCC measures how fast a company can convert cash on hand into inventory and accounts payable, through sales and accounts receivable, and then back into cash. – Investopedia.com”

The relationship between the CRO and CCC can be especially vital in the case of retail e-commerce and other B2C or B2B businesses that depend primarily on the internet to drive sales.

In this context, the ability to focus the marketing department on rapid CRO improvements is often essential to ensure business viability.

Here are 7 quick, high-level tips that a marketing leader can use to ensure that the marketing team brings a quick, renewed focus to CRO.

1. Stop saying ‘That’s how it is in our industry!’ or similar

While we’ve all heard of average conversion rates in our niches, let’s be open to the chance that these are not always applicable to our business situation at all times. After all, the objective is to improve the CRO for your unique business situation and not the whole industry.

In the age of disruptive technologies, things can change. Fast.

2. Prepare to be anal about your daily conversion reports

As a marketing leader, you often focus on the big picture. But CRO improvements require you to dig deep and narrow.

See what has changed in the past 24 hours. And why; Was it the messaging? The day of the week? The time of day? Something else you were not looking at before?

Chart the changes against specific marketing channels and corresponding expenses. Do this for a week or so to see how the conversions flow on a daily basis. You will learn a lot about your prospects’ conversion behaviors when you do this.

3. Identify your agile A-players

Identify the digital channels that are performing the best and are amenable to immediate returns on efforts.

For example, allocating more dollars to your highly converting Facebook Ads, or a specific AdWords group may bring you higher conversions in the short term. So you’re better off focusing on these ‘quick turn-round levers’ than longer gestation SEO tactics aimed at increasing specific keyword rankings.

4. Accelerate value on A-player channels

Provide more value to prospects from the identified high performing channels, like providing these customers with additional helpful e-books, white-papers, and blog posts.

Align these value-adds with the customer purchase journey and intent, with the goal of nudging them closer to the purchase point.

5. Double down on the correct prospect buckets

As your prospects progress from awareness > consideration > decision, they will have different needs in the context of your offering.

A prospect who is in the decision stage will find discounts/coupons and demo’s more helpful than a case-study which is more appropriate at the consideration stage.

If your goal is to bump up your CRO in days or weeks, obviously you need to focus on prospects who are in the decision and consideration buckets.

6. Revisit resource allocation

Allocate more resources to monitor and optimize the higher performing channels. Optimizing the conversion rates on individual channels can be very time consuming. Ensure that there are enough people handling this.

7. Understand why the lower performing channels are lagging

Perhaps your customers prefer to interact with you on LinkedIn than on Facebook. If the relative value of a channel is not commensurate with the effort deployed, it is time to delegate it to a secondary role in your customer acquisition pipeline for now.

When the business goal is to improve your CCC as quickly as possible, leave the optimization of lower performing channels for another day – unless vital prospect buckets, as discussed above, are well populated in those channels.

8. Dig deeper into your buyer persona’s interactions with your conversion cycle

Understand how each customer persona/segment flows through your conversion cycle and optimize each channel for those unique personas and against the prospect bucket.

None of the above mean that long-term digital marketing strategies should fall by the wayside. Rather, these tips are meant to help the marketing department quickly adapt to an immediate business goal like improving the CCC.

Once the CCC is healthier, we can pat ourselves on the back for the marketing department’s agility in responding to business needs and move on to bigger, broader challenges.