Directive

I am HIRING a Head of Client Services to lead the account services team at Directive. My goal is for you to transform our client services strategy. We have the brands I always dreamed of working with as customers and we need someone to steward their growth. In this pursuit, we have an exceptional team of both account directors and client sales professionals, but we lack the infrastructure of our new competition in B2B - PE backed agencies and hold co’s. To lead this vision, you will have a multi-million dollar annual budget and a team that has gone >100% NRR for the last 4 months in a row. While I consider this success and am proud of our groups accomplishments, we still have plenty of work to be done. The right person for this role leads by example. They realize that true client relationships are formed in-person and not behind a spreadsheet or screen. You live in an airplane, brag about your Marriott points, and believe that you should have a personal relationship with every CMO we service. Experience is where you shine. You have spent the last 15+ years in client services for independently owned shops doing greater than $20m in revenue or were a true impact player in a hold co or PE-backed shop. When it comes to your core skillsets, I am looking for someone who is also deeply talented at building a team and creating “relational-scale”: - Strategic marketing chops - Strong Salesforce + forecasting ability - Exceptional values. Someone people want to be friends with, trust, and share with intimately. - Deep sense of accountability in their management style Directive is poised to explode in 2025. We are the largest player in the SaaS category and have now tripled our TAM after expanding into B2B. This is a hard job and only the sharpest client services execs in the world thrive at performance agencies. We have 4.3/5 CSATS and exceptional retention, this is a growth position and a true low-hanging fruit opportunity. If you're interested, DM me or please repost if you’d like to support me!

A simple form field could wipe out every attribution tool in the industry. “How did you hear about us?” If I have to debate the pros and cons of first touch or last touch attribution one more time I will lose my mind. Both methodologies are victim to a weak spine. Push a first touch attribution lover on how they evaluate email marketing and they crumble. Challenge a last touch lover on branded paid search and they vomit excuses. What if we just stopped playing the game and chose a different path? Introducing, self-reported attribution. Simple. Make “How did you hear about us?” a required field. The horror. I can hear the excuses already: - What if conversion rates go down? Asking TRULY interested buyers how they heard about you will not sway them in a statistically significant way. Are we really still overly worried about form conversion rate? - People will just say Google and then we wont know if it’s paid or organic. Okay, cool. Who cares? Is this not a reflection of our own problems as performance marketers? You can keep arguing semantics or you can ask a simple question: “How did you hear about us?”

Small audiences on LinkedIn Ads don’t work. Marketers love to segment + personalize, but here’s the truth: the smaller your audience and the more segmentation the worse you perform. SaaS marketers segment campaigns by title (CMO, VP, Director, etc.) And, it makes a ton of sense…until you need to do the creative and copy. Because what are you going to tell a CMO that is so compelling that they will respond at a higher rate than the increase in CPMs caused by over segmenting your audience? Is your message to CMOs so relevant that you couldn’t say the same thing to the VP or the Director? I’d argue no. And, if you are thinking, what about Managers? I’d tell you to exclude them from all targeting right now. We saw lead>proposal rate improved 2.6 points (from 5.6% to 8.2%) when we excluded managers in Directive’s campaigns. That’s why very time you segment an audience ask yourself one thing… “Can I increase my conversion rate by a greater amount than the increase in cost-pers caused by segmenting this audience?” The answer is often no. That’s why lazy advertisers outperform technical advertisers with good intentions. If you really want to improve performance: Write better copy, design better ads, and come up with a more compelling offer.

Marketing and finance should meet every 2 weeks and dynamically adjust ad spend. Sound like you’d pivot too much? I’d argue you aren’t pivoting ad spend enough. Lifecycle stage conversion rates are some of the most statistically consistent parts of marketing. And with proper data, systems and evaluation criteria, you can identify waste and underinvestment every 15 days. If you have an above average sales process, I guarantee you also have very consistent close rates + ACV’s. And it’s more likely that last ad campaign is underperforming because LinkedIn maxed out on the audience segment than your sales team forgot how to sell. For example, over the last 11+ years Directive has closed 30-40% of proposals presented. And, our ACV has never moved far from our forecast. Why is this important? Because without dynamically adjusting your ad spend, you are underinvested and leaving millions of dollars of bookings on the table. Here’s how to fix your capital allocation and improve bookings performance in the next 30 days: 1. Calculate your two most important KPIs: Cost per Demo/Proposal and Cost per Customer. If you know these targets you can begin to optimize your budget across both a leading KPI (demo/proposal) and lagging (CAC). If you don’t know how to do this, hire Directive. We do this for the biggest brands in SaaS.? 2. Schedule Two Recurring Meetings with Finance The head of marketing and the head of finance should meet twice a month. Once after books close (ideally a 5 day close) and again after the flash report comes out (ideally mid-month). The goal of the meeting is to scale up or down spend across campaigns that are hitting your leading KPIs. The length of your sales cycle is irrelevant. If you are driving demos/proposals at your target cost you need to invest until the point of diminishing returns… if you are serious about growth. Remember, close rate + acv are statistically significant in every organization. TAKEAWAYS: Trust your product + sales org and push the budget. The line between underinvestment and waste is so minute that I will always choose to over invest and know that I didn’t leave one ounce of opportunity on the table. Finance is on your team, stop being scared and build a real partnership.

I’ve reviewed dozens of failed LinkedIn campaigns in the last 3 years. Why did they fail? Poor targeting. Here are 3 steps to fix your LinkedIn ad targeting: The problem: Too often, LinkedIn Ads are seen as a quick-build solution to target ICPs, and marketers aren’t able to take the time to build out their LI Ads for success. As a result, campaigns rely on broad, generic targeting. They end up serving ads to non-decision makers with one-size-fits-all messaging. How to fix it: Step 1: Narrow your LinkedIn targeting to highly specific audiences LinkedIn will recommend expanding your audience to at least 10,000 individuals, but the TRUE minimum is 300. Don’t be fooled. A tried-and-true practice at Directive is to develop a list of companies from a third-party software like ZoomInfo, manually verify each company as a fit for our client’s product, then upload that list into LinkedIn for targeting. From there, layer on job titles ONLY. Industries, member skills, seniority levels, etc. are irrelevant and inaccurate. Create different campaigns for different types of job titles that are in your ICP list. Step 2: Tailor messaging and creative to those users directly The needs, pain points, and goals of the individuals in your target audience can vary wildly, so set yourself up to say the right thing to the right people. Speak to each subset of your audience with a specific message. This allows you to curate a highly meaningful message that cuts through the noise your audience is already sifting through. Step 3: Don’t give LinkedIn wiggle room to add in extra audience members The easy wins here are opting out of the LinkedIn Audience Network and Audience Expansion for your campaigns. You will also need to regularly check on the job titles, seniorities, etc. your campaign is actually targeting. You’ll still find some bad matches, which you can add into audience exclusions over time. Follow these steps and you’ll have laser-focused campaigns that speak to the right people with the right message, leading to better performance and ROI.

If you think your old content is dead…think again. Here's the step-by-step playbook we used to revive a client’s underperforming content to achieve an 836% lift in conversions. 1) Identify the buried content. We targeted pages with zero organic traffic over the past year and identified related pages with content gaps or weak performance. (TIP: Crawl your site and sort URLs by related topics to find overlaps.) 2) Refresh and rewrite for performance. We created engaging, long-form content designed to drive bookings by targeting high-conversion keywords. (TIP: Build topic authority around commercial-intent terms.) 3) Redirect and restructure. We sunset duplicate and weak pages buried more than 8 subdirectories deep. Internal linking and structural updates made the refreshed content easier to find—for both users and search engines. Altogether, these efforts drove a 38% increase in YoY traffic, resulting in an 863% increase in quality lead conversions. The craziest part about this project? Even after the initial cleanup, a whopping 52% of the client’s site content was still buried. So, this was just the start of the gold rush. We struck gold with this approach. Now, go King Midas on your own buried content. Tell me what you uncover!

Most marketing teams think about generating results in siloes—paid media campaigns over here, CRO experiments over there. Here’s how thinking holistically helped us increase MQLs by 118% in a single quarter: The first step is uncovering major roadblocks. - Tracking & Attribution. GA4 and paid platform conversions were not configured correctly leading to a misattribution of leads. - High Barrier of Entry. Many of the conversion stages involved additional forms to fill out in order to get to the next stage, increasing drop off. - Limited Audience Differentiation Consolidating audiences and segmenting by persona only would allow for more useful data and better use of budget. - The Human Connection. Updating messaging on demo pages to offer an in-person demo and encourage more meetings would be key to success. The quick turnaround speaks volumes: - Landing Page CVR +62% - Leads +111% - MQLs +118% Why did it work? Because it focused on the entire customer journey. ? Focused Keyword Targeting Increasing traffic with new and refreshed content pieces supporting better keyword rankings, effectively driving higher lead volume. ? Methodical Campaign Restructure Driving down costs with lower CPCs through a revised campaign structure, messaging and stronger keyword targeting. ? Essential CRO Improvements Better campaign structure, more direct messaging, and shorter sign-up forms attracted more qualified leads, driving much better conversion rates from Ads to Landing Pages. The takeaway? To maximize performance, focus on the connection points of each channel, taking into account the entire customer journey—from search, through to Paid Media Ad sets, through to relevant ICP-tailored Landing Pages.

“It’s hard to prove video ROI.” Not really. Here’s how it drove a 7x increase in pipeline in 10 weeks: If you’re in a demand gen role and need to show pipeline, don’t consign video to the realm of “brand building.” You’d be leaving money on the table.?Adding video amplifies your customer generation motion. Here’s a clear Point A → Point B example. Directive has great success with detailed TAM + conversation ads. We talk about it all the time. We rolled it out with a client, saw early success, and then volumes tapered off over the course of a month.?CTRs dropped to 2%. What came to the rescue??Video. We put 15% of our LinkedIn budget behind a video targeting the same audiences as the conversation ads. CTRs lifted to 3.37%, and in the following 10 weeks we generated 7x more pipeline than running just the conversation ads alone. Crazy to think people are more likely to take meetings if they know who you are and why they should care, right? Video is a great way to do that, and as AI tools become more and more prevalent, it will become more accessible to everyone. Don’t sleep on it, though - I’d rather have pipeline now than in a year. #DirectiveDrilldown is where we share portfolio insights and results that we get for our customers to drive the best CSATs in the industry. Want to get an extension of your team that gives you insights like this? Talk with my team >>> https://lnkd.in/g8jN4mXG

95% Pipeline Growth. 33% ROAS Boost. Same Budget. It wasn't about more leads—it was about better leads: the kind that drive enterprise revenue, making sure our marketing dollars are working for us. With Gong we threw the rulebook out and went all-in with value-based bidding—prioritizing quality over quantity. The result? ?? 95% growth in their enterprise pipeline ?? 33% ROAS increase YoY ?? 32% more pipeline value—without spending a dime more This is what happens when you stop guessing and start scaling. We’re incredibly proud of the results we achieved and the partnership we’ve built with Google and Gong. As a group, and with our in-house experts, Mike Matta and Andrew Finkenbinder at the helm, we’ve redefined what’s possible for enterprise marketing.

New week, new Drilldown We're back this week to dive deeper into everything from product overview videos and optimized sitemaps to the scalability of CRO and the dangers of treating your TAM like a monolith. ?? Why Product Overview Videos Are a Must-Have → 69% more clicks. → 950% increase in leads. → 7x pipeline growth. ?? The Power of a Sitemap Refresh → 27% increase in sessions from deindexing duplicate pages. → 836% more conversions with reoptimized content. ?? Paid Media Drive Growth. CRO Scales It. → +62% LP CVR → +111% leads → +118% MQLs ??Your TAM isn't a Monolith → smarter tactics for targeting → better messaging → optimizing for interested audiences only The Directive Drilldown gives you and your Marketing team actionable insights straight from the trenches of B2B SaaS world. No fluff, just proven strategies you can use to drive real results. #DirectiveDrilldown