Day 1 Marketing: Strategy == Pipeline

This is going to be controversial. Not just “Instagram filters are cool” controversial - am talking “Pineapple on pizza” level...

There’s only one thing your marketing strategy solves for - Pipeline. If it doesn't eventually solve for pipeline, it's just fluff.*

This has always been true. But in the hyper-efficiency focus and dollar level accountability brought on by the Great Startup Winter of 2022, if your marketing strategy doesn’t have a cute curvy line leading to $$$s, it’s worth less than that paper your last shawarma came wrapped in.?

But.. What about the big things? The other things? What about brand? About all those things we do for the greater good? The abstracts, the unmeasurables, the square pegs in the apple shaped holes? What about faith and feelings? Err.. No.?

A decade and half ago, perhaps, I’d have gone to battle for the other camp. Not today.

Strategy >= Pipeline.?

I remember my first board presentation as a marketing leader. We’d shown impressive top funnel growth - delivering over 10X MQLs in under 5 months! We’d made significant strides in content, distribution, and brand, ready to unlock new channels… Impressive, sure. But I walked out of that meeting with a feeling of dread and defeat. In 30 minutes, the board had taken all our accomplishments, my bulletproof plans, and those beautiful line charts climbing high-and-to-the-right, thrown them into a Blendtec blender, and unceremoniously poured the oily effluents into the drain. Along with my pride and confidence…?

Why? Because our head of sales had just demonstrated a rather weak pipeline coverage. At that point I could have solved climate change and shot rainbows and it wouldn't have mattered. There was only one First Order Problem, and if that didn’t get solved, nothing matter.

Strategy isn’t just what you do - it’s Why you do what you do

The long-winding point I’m trying to make is: At the end of the day, every marketing activity you do has to have a (direct or implied) pathway to pipeline. Your marketing strategy comes down to how well you can lay down that path - define how long it runs, how far it banks, and how wide it is. After all, every well-designed marketing activity should predictably result in something that result in something that results in $$$s.?

So why is this such an earth-shattering, clouds-parting realization? Because now my planning my marketing strategy implies planning for pipeline. Along all my marketing magics come down to just two factors: Time, and Orders. ?

The Time Axis: When will this drive pipe?

Quarters. Of course, you could pick any other interval that makes sense to you - but for most marketing activities to walk out the door and walk back in with results, I think it takes at least a quarter…

Some activities like Performance Marketing deliver pipeline in the same quarter. Some, like Search Content, take 2/3 quarters to mature, and top funnel content takes even longer.

Orders: How many “hops” to become pipeline?

Often, the best way to get pipeline is by obsessing over something other than pipeline. Specifically something preceding pipeline up your funnel.(That last novella I wrote on Building Funnels wasn’t for nothing!)

Tighter qualifications and better nurture engagements to get leads sales-ready. Better targeting to get more qualified leads. New channel, campaign, and list exporations to acquire wider leads. More community engagement and search relevance to get the visits that become leads. You get the drift…

In general, the higher an activity lies on the funnel, the lesser its unit conversions downstream (because… that’s how percentages work?!). But also as you go higher up the funnel, you should be able to play wider volumes (because there are more people who think about taking showers than those that are purchasing tea-tree-scented hand made organic soap).?

Of course, this is a wild generalization. You could invest in branding activities up the funnel, like getting your story on a super niche trade publication, and enjoy significantly higher unit conversions than even the status quo. But that takes us to the wonderful world of “Pipeline Pumps, Diverters, and Accelerants” that I wish to write about some day…

The Strategy: Arcs of Time X Orders

Putting these together gives you something that all business strategies eventually hinge on: a 2X2!!!

A good marketing strategy solves for pipeline today, but also sets pathways for future pipeline in motion. It cracks on things that directly result in pipe, but also sets up elaborate domino stacks that cause things that cause things that cause things that… (this is how I make up word counts) that cause pipeline.?

So broad-spectrum Brand investments -?like that podcast series you’ve been meaning to start - are Top Funnel activities. Listeners should eventually become subscribers, get to a point of awareness and interest, realize their pain points, get to a point of “Marketing Qualification” before pulling their hand up to talk to sales. And then get BANT qualified, have a dollar value to the potential sale, to add to the pipeline. And this motion is, as you’d expect, a multi-quarter phenomenon.?

In fact, you’d expect most Higher Order activities to be high up on the time axis, so lets dive into the 2 other interesting buckets:

Lower Order Activities that take time to pipe: Think SEO and bottom funnel content. You want to give the activities in this box 2 P’s - Patience, and Proxies. Yes, these activities should directly impact pipeline, but they take time to spread and grow. Lucky for you, even the most unmeasurable marketing activity always have a proxy that lets you track progress.?

Higher Order Activities that result in immediate pipe: This has recently become my rather favorite box because it feels so contrarian. How could something evolve from ToFu to pipeline in the same quarter? The magic of ABM and targeted outbound lets you front-load the funnel by putting in more intelligence and research into the list building and research phase, so you can get from Awareness to “Cha-Ching” in predictably record time!?

The 2X2 also helps me imagine circles of increasing radii to put down a prioritization framework in my head. Inner circles are Low Order - Low Time activities that should reliably generate pipeline in the immediate quarters. If I had to cut budgets or get into firefighting mode, this would be the focus. Outer circles are either those that take multiple quarters, or multiple hops or both. This is the future investments that marketing as an org is supposed to be working on so you can eventually escape the fiery hell that is the inner circle.?

In the times that we didn’t have our sales funnel quite figured out, we’d focus a majority of our thoughts and efforts - perhaps as much as 90% on the inner circles.?

But some of the greatest achievements I’ve been fortunate to be a part - things that I’m truly proud of as a marketer, were the things in the outer circle. What’s funny though is even in times when we had three truckloads of excess pipeline sitting in our parking lot, times when we really pushed the pedal on the big audacious dreams, we perhaps afforded 40% focus to the outer circles.?

I know braver marketing leaders than me that have perhaps pushed that split to 50%. But in the climes today, and especially if you are a startup trying to find your points of scale, lay out your gameplay on the 2X2. If you find yourself dedicating over half your thought work outside the inner circle, perhaps you want to tighten your plan.?

*Technically marketing strategy should go well beyond pipeline - focusing on closures, and eventually connect to overall revenue. A huge focus on Product Marketing and Sales Enablement is to assist the buyer journey post pipeline, by surfacing objections and designing flows to handle them through messaging, nurturing, automation, sales collateral, and sales training. With a PLG focus, there’s the additional ownership of automating onboarding flows. And for any modern organisation that works on recurring revenue, customer marketing needs to focus on adoption, advocacy, engagement, and retention. However all these are mostly enablement roles, working with Sales, Product, Growth, and Customer Success from the sidelines to get a win. So technically, downstream conversions are things that should be part of your marketing strategy at scale, but that’s assuming you’ve built the engine that pours fuel up top. If you haven’t figured that out yet, let the other functions do their jobs while you focus on yours!