Shiv Narayanan’s Post

Organizations that over-rely on Sales and Events for pipeline put their sales targets at risk. This is most often seen inside Sales-led organizations where Marketing has a limited budget. How can you expect to hit aggressive sales projections when you aren't engaging with your buyers on channels where they are spending most of their time? Instead, investing into digital and buyer-centric channels increases the odds of hitting pipeline targets. Growing Marketing Generated Pipeline is the key to hitting aggressive sales projections. When Marketing stops over-relying on events and begins building new channels to acquire customers, it forces the organization to be less Sales-led. This takes time, which is why Marketing leaders need to lobby CEOs and Boards for the right budget to invest in the right channels to become more Marketing-led. #marketing #digitalmarketing

When entrepreneurs take the venture capital route, they often find themselves on a relentless treadmill. From seed to Series A and B, each funding round seems to push the goalposts further out, diluting founders’ stakes and filling their boardrooms with more voices that may not align with the original vision. With lofty valuations, the pressure mounts. For founders to see a significant return, their companies might need to achieve a half-billion dollar sale or aim for an IPO—targets that can sometimes be out of reach for the business model they have built. This scenario can leave founders feeling like they’ve lost control and are stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's crucial for founders to critically evaluate their growth avenues and the implications of VC funding. What strategies have you found effective in maintaining control and ensuring alignment with your company's long-term goals? #entrepreneurship #venturecapital #startupchallenges

Your market is not just on one channel. Too many companies over-index on one channel and set of activities (SEO, LinkedIn, Google Ads). While these are all good standalone channels, they are also just one place to find your ideal customer. You will find different subsets of your customers in different channels. Presence in each of those channels is more than half the battle for every company. So: -Go to the trade show -Invest in paid search -Rank for your SEO terms -Create thought leadership content -Host webinars -Create ABM plays to your target accounts -Run ads on FB / LI -Do PR / Comms The best companies at marketing do it all. They also have higher marketing budgets for this reason. #marketing #digitalmarketing

Sharing successful strategies and innovative approaches between portfolio companies can spark creativity and inspire breakthrough ideas. In our discussion with Vinny Prajka of JMI Equity, we discuss how their companies share best practices to unlock growth. Check out episode 7 of the Private Equity Value Creation podcast for more insights from Vinny. Full episode here: https://bit.ly/3xOuTkq #privateequity

Looking at where inefficiencies exist in the funnel is the fastest way to uncover how content can make the biggest impact. By not looking at their own funnel efficiency data, companies misunderstand where the biggest optimization opportunities actually are and also where content can make the biggest impact. Depending on the root cause of your funnel inefficiency, the antidote is different. If your Opportunity to Close rates are weak, you need to create more assets for the sales team to help them close more deals. If your Demo to Opp rates are weak, odds are your nurture programs need to do a better job of converting prospects. If your Traffic to Demo Rates are weak, landing pages and offers on those pages need to be improved. And if your overall traffic is weak, you likely need to produce a lot more content to capture traffic from all sources. #marketing

In most companies, there is often only one main path through the funnel. Prospect comes in through any entry point, fills out a form, is engaged by sales until the deal closes or the prospect enters the Closed Lost column. The problem with this approach is that there is no nuance for where the prospect is on their journey nor is there any consideration for who the prospect is and what makes them different. This is where the Entry Point is actually the critical juncture where all marketing work intersects. Entry Points are heavily dependent on Persona, ICP, Vertical, Industry, Size, Stage and much more. You can cluster certain entry points together but you cannot build uniform journeys for all. At full maturity, Entry Points and the subsequent journeys cascade. Thousands of prospects move through thousands of independent journeys, all seemingly similar yet distinct in their messaging, positioning, content and offers. None of this is to say that the journeys don’t or can’t intersect. Someone in one journey may attend the same webinar as someone in another journey for example. The key point to keep in mind is that companies need to build enough customization into their funnels to speak to their best fit customers. The harsh truth is that there is absolutely no way to build an effective marketing engine for a company without building assets like this. Skipping this work is like not flossing. It will catch up to you. #marketing

I played in the US Poker Open at PokerGo Study at the Aria in Las Vegas this weekend. I sat down after one of my breaks and realized that the great Phil Hellmuth was sitting to my left. Here are a few lessons from my experience: 1) Kindness is the easiest way to deliver an exceptional experience: I shared with Phil how I had read his books growing up and playing poker through university. He was super kind, insisted on taking selfies himself and went out of his way to chat with me about me and my business. 2) Community is one the best retention strategies: While playing, several other legends (Daniel Negreanu, Erik Seidel) were playing / walking around. But what really stood out is that all the other players knew each other, including the pros. I asked Phil about this and he said that the PokerGo studio has really become a community of players who like playing high stakes tournament poker. What's crazy is that these tournaments happen every week and players keep coming back because they get to hang out together. 3) Poker, like business, is the ultimate meritocracy with a healthy dose of variance: Even though Phil has had so much success in poker, at the table, we both started with the same number of chips and information every hand. It's important to remember this when building a business or navigating things like imposter syndrome. 4) Being more authentic with content: I post a lot about business, growth and marketing because that's what we do at HTS. I've come to the conclusion that I need to post about all the other dimensions / lessons from my life (including a post like this which I'd normally only put on Instagram stories for close friends). In the coming months, you'll be seeing a lot more than my usual drawings on LinkedIn and other social platforms.

One of the biggest mistakes made by marketing departments is that they do things in random order (which is often the wrong order), when there are far more qualified prospects to build assets, campaigns, and programs for. To do things better means doing them in the right order: 1) Start with campaigns prospects in-market and ready to make a purchasing decision. 2) Ensure you have the right product marketing, sales enablement and conversion content in place to nurture them to close. 3) Work backwards to prospects who are less ready to buy but looking for a solution of some kind, build more nurture and educational content to get them to a stage where they are ready to make a purchasing decision. 4) Work backwards to prospects who are not even looking for a solution and help them solve pain points with tools and resources. Nurture them to a stage where they understand what kind of solution they should be looking for. 5) Work backwards to prospects who are not even problem-aware and create more thought leadership content to help them understand the scope of how their life can be improved if they start solving certain problems. Starting with number 5 when number 2 is not completed is the quickest way to burn through marketing budget and internal political capital. If you do things in the right order, you will find budget for all of these activities. #marketing

Content teams are too reactive. Too often, they are just responding to needs from across the organization instead of having a deliberate method to prioritize. Content is a lot like Product Management in this way. Product Management constantly faces requests from every part of the organization. Sales wants features that will help it overcome objections and close deals. Customer Success wants features that will help them onboard, expand, and retain accounts. Support wants bug fixes. The list of what Product Management needs to sift through is endless. The only difference is that Product Management has an established process to sift through the noise in order to focus on its core objective of building a better solution for end customers. Content, similarly, needs a process to sift through the noise. The challenge with Content is that it is extremely difficult to be intentional about what it wants to achieve. It is so easy to get distracted and pulled away from strategic initiatives because of the next fire that needs to be put out. The most important inputs into the Content Roadmap should be: 1) Funnel Inefficiency: Which stage has the biggest leaks? 2) Buyer Journey Gaps: Where do we not have content to serve buyers and help them make a better purchasing decision. 3) Sales Needs: What assets does Sales need to convert deals into Closed Won 4) Demand Generation: Which programs are we launching and what content is required to ensure their success? 5) Customer Marketing: How can content be leveraged to capture value from existing customers to expand or retain those accounts? The Content team's role is to take all these inputs and prioritize them against each other so that there is a mechanism to figure out what to work on first. #marketing

In the last 5 years, I've audited over 1000 technology, software and B2B companies and their marketing spend. One of the most common themes across the board is the amount of inefficiency. Each company is different and has different challenges: -CAC Payback Periods more than of 24 months -SQL to Close Rates below 25% (sometimes below 20%) -Inefficient channels receiving the bulk of the marketing budget, while efficient channels receiving limited amounts -Misattributing credit for pipeline and revenue to the wrong channels and activities by just looking at last-touch / first-touch models -Misaligned marketing budgets because there is a fundamental misunderstanding of how much marketing support is needed to hit sales projections Because most companies don’t look at the underlying data of their marketing spend, there is a lot of inefficiency to be found. This inefficiency means that a lot of budget is misallocated to channels and campaigns that are not very good at driving revenue. There is at least 20-50% in additional pipeline and revenue to be found by following the framework below: 1) Audit existing spend and identify / stop investing channels and campaigns driving the most inefficient growth 2) Reallocate that budget to more efficient channels that are working well 3) Find additional budget to scale those channels until you hit an efficient frontier of growth and profitability 4) Explore and test new channels to uncover additional areas to invest. Then repeat the process. #marketing