Unify your team around the same revenue goals (📈 MTN #23)

In this edition

• 📊 LinkedIn Ads benchmarks for B2B companies
• 💡 How high-performing agencies market themselves
• 📈 Driving growth by improving revenue alignment across your GTM teams

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📊 Featured Benchmark Data (from Benchmark Groups)

LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks for B2B

Median performance from October, 2023:

• Impressions: 62.6k
• Avg CPC: $2.91
• Avg CPM: $25.61

Use Benchmark Explorer to search and find thousands of benchmarks in seconds. Try it free, no signup required.

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💡 Trends & Insights (from Reports & Surveys)

How high-performing Agencies market themselves

You’ve probably heard the expression, “The cobbler’s children have no shoes”. An expert performs services for others, but doesn’t do the same for themselves.

This seems especially true of marketing agencies. You’ve probably seen it yourself. Social media agencies that have no followers. Demand Gen consultants that have no inbound, except word of mouth.

It’s a problem faced by many agencies. Maybe by yours. But the truth is, if you want to truly grow your agency, then at some point you’ll need to prioritize your own marketing and sales efforts.

And our latest research article is designed to help you do just that. We partnered with Agency advisor Karl Sakas, to survey 200+ agency leaders to understand how agencies market themselves and find best practices that help agencies get more clients and revenue.

Here are some of the insights:

• Two-thirds of agencies have fewer than 25 Clients
• Agencies favor specializing by Client industries
• Agencies typically grew less than 30% of revenue in 2022
• Most agencies had less than 25% Net Profit Margin
• Client referrals produce the highest ROI… and cold outreach produces a negative ROI
• Most agencies reinvest at least 3% of their annual revenue into their own marketing efforts
• Most agencies budget less than $100k a year for self-marketing… and nearly one-third have no marketing budget
• A quarter of agencies would invest in additional personnel for self-marketing
• Agencies aren’t confident about their own self-marketing

Get all the insights and summaries in the full article: 

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📈 Drive Predictable Performance (from Metrics & Chill)

Driving growth by improving revenue alignment across your GTM teams

Kyle Lacy is the CMO of Jellyfish and strategic advisor to a handful of other companies. Before that, he served as CMO at Lessonly through its acquisition by Seismic. 

I asked him what single thing he’d recommend to companies who want to drive more predictable performance. His answer was, “Alignment”. Specifically, having your go-to-market (GTM) teams aligned on improving revenue.

He recently came on Metrics & Chill to share the exact framework he uses to do this. He calls it “CREM” (aka the CREM de la Creme of marketing 👩‍🍳), and it’s designed to help your team drive revenue alignment in 4 critical areas: Communication, Revenue, Enablement, and Metrics.

Communication

Communication includes a few different components: being empathetic, building a “pipeline council”, and drafting a “revenue handbook” so your entire GTM team is talking and thinking the same way about your revenue goals. Let’s dig into each one…

Empathetic leadership

It may seem disconnected from revenue, but Kyle strongly believes that fostering empathetic leadership is crucial to building a good revenue team. Specifically, being empathetic to your peers and understanding their goals and needs.

Managers tend to come to the table thinking, “I have a point I want to get across, and it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks, because I know what’s best, and I’m going to do it my way.” It’s easy to walk around with blinders on, and only focus on your team’s goals and problems, and not be sensitive to what your peers are trying to accomplish.

This attitude and approach ruins communication and alignment. The better approach is empathetic communication, where you hear out your peers, and work to understand their needs and goals.

Building a “Pipeline Council”

The next aspect of good communication is building a  “Pipeline Review” or “Pipeline Council”: a cross-functional meeting with all the managers that are focused on creating revenue (cross-sell, upsell, renewal, new business, services, etc.).

It should be hosted weekly by Sales Ops or Rev Ops, and you should discuss your current numbers and forecast model.

Drafting a “Revenue Handbook”

The final piece to good communication is drafting a sort of service-level agreement on all things GTM, between the members of the Pipeline Council. It includes agreement on things like how you’ll handle handoffs between sales and CS, territory models, driving upgrades from free trials, etc.

Revenue

Alignment is about having shared goals. So it’s crucial for Marketing and Sales to own a shared goal for pipeline and revenue. Kyle firmly believes that marketing will never have a seat at the table until they have a pipeline and revenue number.

Besides that, having a shared number promotes unity and helps avoid finger-pointing that often occurs between the two teams. Sharing the same revenue goal helps marketing focus on driving deals that are more likely to close, and define success the same way the Sales team does. 

Enablement

Kyle calls enablement ‘the hub that supports the GMT spokes’. They’re the team tasked with taking the data and content coming out of things like product marketing, coaching calls, call intelligence platforms (e.g. Gong or Avoma), etc., and creating an enablement platform that helps unify the GTM team’s message, improves the customer experience, and expedites onboarding.

Metrics

All quota-bearing teams should agree on what metrics they’re reporting on, centralize them, and look at them together weekly.

And all managers should be involved in defining each stage of the funnel, and what metrics will be used to track it. Often, this is where things break.

Marketing has a strong opinion on how they should measure the top of the funnel, while the Sales team defines their stages, then they hand things off to CS, who has their own definitions and measurement of the user journey.

There is rarely clear communication on what those stages are, and team-wide alignment on them, because it’s incredibly difficult to do. But there’s a lot of value if you can drive more alignment here.

If you want to learn more about the CREM framework and hear all the details Kyle goes into, check out the full episode…

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Drive predictable growth

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