Thoughts on Marketing

Finding the Right Lever

‘I need more leads’ isn’t always the right answer…

[Originally published as The Marketing Mix newsletter on Substack. Please subscribe for the latest, every 2 weeks]

Most founders and CEOs will tell you their biggest marketing challenge is getting more leads.

Makes sense, right? More interest, more demos, gives you more wins.

But what if your close rate is only 10%?

Boosting that to 20% (which is not unusual for B2B) has the same effect as 2X’ing the number of leads. Without doubling your ad budget or adding to your SDR team.

I spoke to a founder recently: 30 calls booked via inbound per day.

  • 30% are no-shows.
  • He can close about 25%; his sales associate closes 10-15%.
  • So, on average, his company is converting about 3 of those 30 calls

Rather than try to bring in more leads, we talked about building up that close rate.

  1. Reduce the no-shows. A good pre-call email strategy could reduce this by half
  2. Run call recordings through AI, identify differences between the Founder calls and the Associate. Is the discovery process different; how do they handle objections; how do they confirm next steps….
  3. Look for common objections, and work on the responses
  4. Strengthen the post-call process. Review the email cadence and style; consider using video in the follow-ups.

It takes a bit of time, a bit of elbow grease. But it’s probably the quickest way to boost your pipeline.

If you’re facing this problem, we should talk. Book some time to chat here.

What I’m Reading

On Working with Wizards – Ethan Mollick [One Useful Thing]

tl;dr – AI is shifting from being a Co-pilot to a Wizard; in which case, how do we verify the inner workings? Bonus: he uses one of my favorite, but generally unappreciated, AI tools, NotebookLM, to make the point.

Favorite Quote “Co-intelligence is still important but …the nature of AI is starting to point in a different direction. We’re moving from partners to audience, from collaboration to conjuring.”

______

The Death of the Corporate Job – Alex McCann [Still Wandering]

tl;dr – A sobering breakdown of how many non-productive jobs exist in the corporate world. It reminded me why I changed course to help small, growing companies get stuff done, instead of continuing with the endless meetings and internal politics.

Favorite Quote “They’re in back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They’re managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They’re creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn’t need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.”

Drink of the Week

When I order a good steak, I’m normally going with red wine. But at the Butchers Block a few weeks ago, I couldn’t resist their cocktail list.

Their “Legendary Moments” – a boozy Old Fashioned with Widow Jane Bourbon, Vecchio Amaro and a Lemon demerara syrup – was as amazing as their ribeye.

Cheers! 🥃

P.S If you know you need to take marketing seriously, but don’t know where to start, let’s chat. I help growing B2B tech companies build their marketing muscles.

P.P.S If you’ve enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to The Marketing Mix newsletter – my thoughts on B2B marketing, sent out every 2 weeks.