CMOs Discuss Mid-Late Funnel Strategies & Tactics That Work

Modern marketing organizations are spending more time/resources/energy on middle and late funnel strategies than ever before. Last Friday's CMO Coffee Talk session focused on strategies and tactics that are working.

Tools, sales enablement techniques, even a vibrant discussion about those little "For Dummies" books (and the high ROI many CMOs have consistently reported from them).

Here's our video recap , and below are highlights from the chat. If you are a B2B CMO and want to join ~1200 of your peers, I'd love to welcome you into this community.

Mid-funnel tip - don’t turn off nurture when an opportunity is created - if you do mid-funnel nurture right, sales should/will embrace it.

Of course mid-funnel nurture should be more about validation, case studies, differentiation, ROI etc since the prospect is already sold on the initial value

Mediafly is awesome for calculators

We’re looking at DecisionLink for ROI Calc and other stuff

A thing we do is have our inbound SDRs get notified as soon as our target accounts visit our calculator and try and engage and provide some help.

We do “opportunity progression” customer spotlight sessions - webinars with storytelling, and sales nominates the invitees

I think there is value in the journey to starting with your product as well. This is what other people want to see as they are making a decision.

We are offering a limited time free pilot with our SAAS product, and one of the requirements is they agree to a case study which has helped both for webinars, content and increased conversion from free to paid

I have done internal marketing campaigns for our customers to increase adoption and expand opps for our team

RFP templates have been successful for me as well spotting higher internet buyers/shaping RFP

On RFP templates, even better if you can partner with an industry analyst so it gains third-party validation

We're using Highspot and have "rep productivity" metrics we use to track rev increase per rep and can show overtime how it's gone up/rep

I measure our ROI for Highspot by reduction of ‘Hey where is that guide that we used for . . . ?’ questions

Reps "easy find" is a huge win and great for sales/marketing alignment - when we introduced Highspot sales suddenly "found" all the material we'd previously had on intranet

The more Buying Enablement we can provide to Prospects the better.?The stuff that helps unwrap the mystery around integration, installation and adoption.?If you provide it, and a competitor doesn't you have a distinct advantage.

The for dummies book! I thought it was dumb and a colleague convinced me. It was the BEST. And relevant at all stages.

We did tons of offshoots — the for dummies webinar, etc. (obvs not sanctioned by for dummies, but we asked forgiveness, not permission).

One of our best marketing assets in ROI

More than anything it's like having a seal of authority on your content.

We gave a bunch to each SDR with a small budget to send the Dummies book and like a shirt or something to their top prospects.

The quality of the book becomes a surrogate of the quality of the software for prospects before they can use the software - it's an important win.

We have done Security Analytics for Dummies both the book and e-version format. One of our best performing pipeline return.

Just personally speaking - it needs to be at least 3 formats: ebook, physical copy (for RW tradeshows) and an audiobook. That covers most learning styles (visual, tactile, aural) and ensures the broadest reach.

For audio (and video), definitely look into translation services.

This is an example of the Definitive Guide - same format as The Dummies, for about 50% less: https://cyber-edge.com/resources/guide-to-zero-trust-security/

We used Calconic for our ROI calculator after looking at Outgrow.

Everybody is afraid of doing ROI calcs because it’s not “exact,” but remember people are almost always looking to understand the *areas* of value, not the exact value.?And justify to their colleagues.

We don’t gate the calculator, but gate the 11 page, detailed pdf output

Thank you. I always get a ton out of these calls. Have a great weekend!

Great stuff, folks. My first one, but looking forward to future Fridays!