Top Mistakes CEO/Founders Make on their Marketing and Go-To-Market Strategy

Working with over 30 organizations in a go-to-market and product marketing advisory/consulting role, I’ve seen a few mistakes repeated over and over again regardless of the company stage. I thought I’d document them here, to help short circuit for those on the journey and create a space where we can learn collectively and share our own experiences in helping to evolve companies to create more value vs capture more value.

To be honest, finding undisturbed time to write has been difficult (I know there, are a ton of hacks out there to create more time, thanks Tim Ferris), and I find myself more comfortable creating content on video (I know, I’m a weirdo), so will probably experiment with different form factors.

So, chime in and join the conversation below, on other common mistakes that you see Founders/CEOs make on their growth path.

1.  No measurement on Marketing or a baseline understanding of the Marketing and Sales funnel

A typical hypergrowth organization, VC founded startup may look something like this:

1.    CEO/Founder(s) is/are often extremely product-oriented, a fantastic sense of determination and passion has carved clear product-market fit

2.   Founder hires engineers (recruits past coworkers, buddies) by selling the cutting edge technologies/ ‘real problems’ that they get to work on and they build a minimally viable product (MVP) that eventually scales

3.   Founder iterates on the product, cranking out features at lightning speed, because hey, the buyers clearly want this and are willing to pay…

4.   At some point, growth slows tremendously (100% to 30% MoM) and Founder determines that Marketing and Sales must be the issue.

5.   Founder seeks the advice of Board/VC network and hires in Sales and Marketing leaders that have ‘done it before’

6.   Cue roller coaster ride of ‘is this the right person?’ or ‘are we doing this right?’ or ‘how come I’m not seeing the inbound that I’d like to see when we are creating content?’

Why?

I argue that founders would be more effective and efficient with marketing spend, should they have a baseline understanding of the marketing and sales funnel. I still think Jon Miller does a great job here going over how a funnel looks in an organization and making the transition to 'inbound.'

Ask a few key questions to really understand the fundamentals of the business. We all have imposter syndrome to some degree, but asking (well thought out and intelligent) questions about the state of the Marketing and Sales funnel is as fundamental to any Founder/CEO’s success as understand CAC, LTV, monthly churn, or product adoption metrics.

Often, I see Founders hire a Head of Marketing/Sales and defer to them on budgets, marketing campaigns, tradeshow spend (in the pre COVID world), sponsorships, etc…

Although this level of autonomy is certainly invited for Marketing to focus on execution versus managing the Executive team/Board, there are a few metrics that all CEOs/Founders should understand:

1. Marketing Qualified Lead – What is the definition of a marketing qualified lead for us?

•  Said another way, what’s our ideal customer profile (ICP)?
•  What is their demographic, firmographic, technographic, and psychographic profile?
•  9 out of 10 times, if we get a ‘lead’ that looks like this, we have 100% confidence that we can convert them to a paying customer
• What 'leads' do we say 'no' to and deprioritize (I understand this is a luxury if you are fighting for survival, but otherwise, think of it as an opportunity cost for learning more about a 'better customer' for us)?
• Does this definition sit well with the direction of the company growth we’d like to see? 

2. Opportunity – What is the definition of a sales ‘opportunity’ at our company?

• Said another way, how do we qualify our leads to ensure they are viable and we are creating a relevant experience for them?
•  How many opportunities do we need to hit our monthly/quarterly revenue number? (conversion rate)
•  How can we ‘automate’ more of the qualification process so that we don’t have to use (expensive) humans usher this buyer along? (ie. demo videos, interesting and informative content, free trials, etc..)
• Let’s be honest, most B2B buyers are bombarded with Sales folks reaching out and many of us would probably prefer the luxury of exploring a solution at our own pace (unrelated: kind of why I like voting with a mail-in ballot vs in the poll booth, anxiously making sure I press the correct button)

3. Close Rate & Win Rate – How many opportunities do we close to becoming a paying customer? How many opportunities do we win versus a competitor?

1. Regardless of the stage of the company, we are constantly striving to stay alert to market dynamics – if you’re not innovating, you are dying, right?
2.  Understanding what Opportunities will convert to a paid customer from whitespace as well as how many opportunities convert because we ‘are a better mousetrap’ (competitive swap). Distinguishing between the two helps us to determine how big the market truly is, and if there are additional markets we could/should be going after if not large enough.

2.  Starting with features vs a building a brand narrative

Yes, your product is superior and much needed, and yes, your features are killer. But to be honest, in the no-code, SaaS world that we live in, most of the tech and workflows can be replicated (exceptions do apply). So, how do you appeal to the head and heart in building a brand/product/solution narrative that connotes a bigger problem (and therefore, a bigger wallet ???)

Starting with features or product differentiators is the fastest way to commoditize or create a true ‘race to zero’ for your solution. Any thoughtful buyer, will take your datasheet and compare your features with your competitor (and yes, you have a competitor, even if it’s status quo/do nothing), and ask for a discount by cherry-picking the features that they actually want/need.

At Marketo, we made a conscious decision to move away from ‘marketing automation’ (narrow use case, small problem, small dollars) and move into ‘engagement marketing’ (expanded use cases: B2C, mobile marketing, bigger dollars, etc..). You’ve seen this now with Drift (Revenue Acceleration Platform with Conversational Marketing and Conversational Sales) and Gong (Revenue Intelligence Platform).

So, what’s makes a ‘good’ brand or solution narrative?

1.    Memorable, concise, repeatable.

2.   Simple to understand - Buyers’ language, not yours.

3.   Tangential to your current product/industry jargon, but differentiated, with a different angle

4.   Validated by social proof (customers, analysts, etc.. you may need to seed/engineer this one for a while)

5.   Denotes and connotes a bigger problem, that people higher in the organization care about, backed by facts

This is completely oversimplified and will be completely determined by your market, buyer, and stage (hell, there are entire companies that build their backbone on ‘category creation’ ). Despite investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into 'category creation' (sexy term, means everything and nothing at the same time), few get it right. This list is more meant to be a set of guiding principles to get started.

Net takeaway – don’t lead with features, no one cares and it will drive down your ACV. Build a brand narrative around a problem that your ideal customer profile (ICP) cares about, then show how you can solve this 10x better than anyone else in the market… then dive into features, differentiators, and proof-points.

To be continued…