Marketing Leaders: Avoid costly errors when starting a new opportunity

You’ve joined a new company; they’re expecting you to grow the biz fast. You’ve got a great team and an exciting business model. It seems like a dream come true! Use your honeymoon period wisely to get the ship pointed in the right direction and aligned with the stars so you can harness the wind and start sailing fast. Easy, right?

Leaky ships do not travel quickly. Stuff comes in that shouldn’t, stuff flows out that you want to keep. There is a danger that you’ll be steering the course with your crew paddling as fast as they can, but you can’t get to where you want to go fast enough. Not a great situation for a newly minted C-suite leader.

A boat can feel like a money pit. And a fledgling business can’t afford to be in that situation for long. Until you find and patch those leaks, you won’t know how fast you can go. Streamlined craft cut through the water easily, pivot as the winds shift, and glide toward their destination with the breeze from behind. This is the situation you want your company to be in if you’re an entrepreneur.

Lately, the concept of “Flipping the Funnel” has led to new ways of thinking about customer acquisition and a greater focus on retention and viral marketing. I, too, would like to suggest a focus on a flipped funnel, but for a different reason: a flipped funnel can show a new marketing leader where to place their focus during their first 100 days of tenure.

Priority #1

Fix leaks in the bottom of the funnel first. Address abandoned shopping carts, increase conversion rates, implement retargeting or “sales offer saves” and exit surveys to ensure that you reel in as many customers as possible, to maximize the revenue yield at the bottom. If you don’t do this, every dollar spent on customer acquisition will be just a bit more expensive than it needs to be; if you fix the leaks at the bottom, you’ll get greater returns on your customer acquisition efforts when you dial them up later. The result will be a lower cost of customer acquisition in the long run.

Priority #2

Accelerate conversion as much as possible. To do this might take some trial and error, and you may not get this part completely fine-tuned in the first 100 days, but you can at least gain some momentum and build your marketing infrastructure to support ongoing testing and optimization.

There are 4 steps to figuring out the “big wins” that will have the biggest impact on accelerating conversion.

A. Know what your customer journey looks like (from awareness to conversion). If you don’t know this, do some customer 1:1 interviews. After about 10 of them, with different types of customers, you may be able to figure out how to segment your base and identify 1–3 customer journeys that you can make a positive impact on.

B. Identify each touchpoint that can lead a prospect closer to conversion. If you are analyzing a digital funnel, what is the CTR? Bounce rate? Abandoned shopping cart rate? Conversion rate? How long does it take to get a prospect from awareness to conversion? What is the retention rate (or cancels), or renewal rates? This is where you start identifying more “leaks” you can fix. If you are analyzing a B2B sales pipeline or a hard goods purchase at retail, or SAAS subscription, the same principles apply — instead of CTR, it might be the site or blog visits, webinars, content downloads, email opens or chatbot inquiries.

C. Once you have baseline metrics for each touchpoint, hypothesize improvements and prioritize the ones that will make the biggest positive impact on your conversion rate. You can also consider business optimizations — can you shift the purchasing mix toward your more profitable, higher revenue products to increase average order value? Or can you shift focus on higher velocity products (that may be lower revenue and profitability), and make up the lower AOV with higher conversion rates and purchase transactions?

D. Experiment with marketing campaigns that optimize touchpoints and accelerate conversion — content or email nurturing, promotions, retargeting, social influencers, webinars, events, free trials, retargeting, responsive emails, push notifications. Measure results and pick winners. This will help you develop your superpower — a marketing dashboard — the bellwether compass by which you can steer with confidence. Over time, you can refine your marketing mix to focus on what works most cost-effectively, and continually add new programs to the mix to test and learn.

Priority #3

Ramp up customer acquisition and scale. Now that you’ve navigated your ship on the right course with the right crew (marketing mix) and the right compass (marketing dashboard) to succeed, with greater efficiency (fewer leaks), it’s time to let out the sails and start cruising. Pump in new prospects by spending money on advertising, content, social and PR and more, and fill the funnel faster. You can ramp up the spend knowing that you have a more efficient marketing machine to convert and retain new leads quickly.

In summary as a new marketing leader in an organization, advocate a “flipped funnel focus” as you work backward toward success:

1. Shore up the core — no leaky funnels. Strive to minimize leaks that will slow speed or progress, and squander future acquisition investments.
2. Accelerate conversion, by finding nurturing tactics that convert cost-effectively.
3. Then, fill the funnel scalably and cruise to success.

Good luck!