Hey ,

We recently conducted a survey within our Trenches community, asking seasoned B2B marketers the top issues they are dealing with.

Among other things, we surprisingly had answers like:

• we have issues nailing our unique value proposition;
• we have a hard time defining our ideal customer profile;
• we don't understand what market segments we should focus on as we can serve multiple industries;
• we don't know the most appropriate channels to use for prospecting…and the list goes on.

All these concerns boil down to this: lack of a clear go-to-market strategy.

That’s why in today’s newsletter, we’ve decided to share with you the step-by-step framework that Vlad and Andrei have been using for their clients at Fulfunnel.io.

Specifically, you’ll learn:

• The Boiler Room strategy 
• The starting point for developing your go-to-market strategy
• The core elements of a marketing strategy 

Before we dive in, here are 03 job openings from our Job Board that might interest you or someone around you. 

TRENCHES JOB BOARD

Proofpoint Marketing is hiring a Performance Marketing Specialist

Job responsibilities: 

• Strategize, build, and manage campaigns across paid search, paid social, and display channels. 
• Create media plans and performance forecasts, and then analyze, interpret and act upon performance data to effectively manage campaign budgets to meet forecasted targets.
• Educate clients on how paid media affect relationship velocity efforts

Learn more about the job and apply here.

Firstbase.io is hiring a Performance Marketing Specialist

About the role: Reporting to the Head of Marketing, this role will be responsible for the execution of paid marketing initiatives for Firstbase.

Learn more about the job and apply here.

Firstbase.io is hiring a Content Marketing Specialist

Job responsibilities: 

• Help produce excellent content that attracts and retains customers across various channels. 
• This role will be responsible for the ideation and execution of content marketing efforts and measurement.
• This is a high visibility role with product, sales, engineering, and CX exposure. 

Learn more about the job and apply here.

Now, let's get to the meat of the matter.

THE BOILER ROOM STRATEGY

1. THE BOILER ROOM SALES

If you haven't watched the BOILER ROOM movie, I highly recommend you do (and thank me later). 

This movie illustrates in the best way possible the common mistake most B2B companies make: having a company-centric mindset. 

Here’s what they mistakenly think: 

“We have the best-in-class product and we've worked hard to reach maturity as a company. Therefore, all we need to do is make our target market know that our product exists, PERIOD. We literally don't need to do any marketing, branding, or positioning stuff. We got this.”

As such, they do massive outreach and then send the prospects to account executives. Result? FIASCO.

1. THE BOILER ROOM MARKETING

The boiler room marketing is all about fulfilling the expectations of sales by means of gated content, content promotion, and the promotion of webinars that are packaged as value events but are no more or less than product demos.

People sign up to learn but find themselves being pitched a product they’ve never opted for. 

It doesn’t stop there.

The marketing team passes the so-called “leads” to the sales team which starts sending out generic sales emails automatically after the event. 

Result? A BIGGER FIASCO.

Here’s an example.

Now let's look at the B2B marketing reality. 

The state of B2B marketing, as reported by Hubspot, revealed that 68% of marketers do not drive revenue (47% of them have a hard time generating traffic and leads, and 21% of them struggle with ROI on their marketing activities).

As stated above, the main reason behind this is that many B2B marketers have a company-centric mindset and lack a proven go-to-market strategy. 

But what is a go-to-market strategy and how can you develop one?

WHAT IS A GTM STRATEGY?

If you ask 10 different people what a marketing strategy is, chances are you will get 10 different responses. 

But in its simplest form, a marketing strategy is a clear path from a point A (where you are now) to a point B (desired outcome) with required resources (people, tech stack, funds, etc.). 

More details on this image.

What is the starting point for developing your go-to-market strategy?

You can jump into tactics and list down the best practices but until everybody (execs, sales, and marketing) is aligned with your goals, your GTM strategy is likely to fail.

To avoid such, here are 03 important questions to get the ball rolling:

• What do we want to achieve?
• How can we achieve it?
• What are the potential challenges we might face and how can we possibly overcome them all?

The reason why the last question is important is that you’ll definitely come across a number of setbacks, no matter how well-detailed your plan is. Therefore, it must be clear to everyone from the outset so that none of you wears pink glasses and thinks that everything will be linear and seamless.

Furthermore, this will help you create a plan A, B, and even C.

The core elements of a marketing strategy

You don't need a +40-page document listing out your mission, values, and corporate fluff, to grow your company. From our perspective at FullFunnel.io, here are the core elements of our GTM strategy that delivered tremendous results. 

1. Market segmentation

All segments have different needs, different goals, and definitely tons of different reasons to buy from you. Plus, not all segments are created equal. Some might generate 10x-20x more revenue than others.

Therefore, it is up to you to identify the segments you want to prioritize based on your set goals. 

To do that, you can analyze your customers and the segments you are currently selling to. Then you can score them based on a number of criteria including: 

• how much revenue they are making 
• how easy it is for you to get in touch with them 
• how much track record you have in that segment 
• how profitable they are, etc.

One of the reasons why you want to segment your addressable market is because, in a specific segment, you’ll have a better client message fit and ultimately more conversion rates.

2. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

You can't sell to "all startups from New Jersey that raised money recently".

The higher your product price, the more specific and personalized your targeting and marketing message should be.

When developing an ICP for a B2B company, you need to work on two things:

1. Ideal Account Description: including things like the revenue, the team size, and the location you’ll use for qualification and prospecting.

2. The Buying Committee: this includes 4 roles:

• The Champions: CEO, Marketer
• The Decision-makers: CEO
• The Influencers: Co-founder, partner, head of marketing, head of sales, investor, board member
• The Blockers: sales or marketing

In a recent HBR report, the average size of a buying committee is about 07 people, which means that 07 different people have an influence on your deal. 

Then, if you want to successfully close deals, you need to address and impress each of them. But the truth is -every buying committee member has their own needs, their own KPI, their own goals, their own challenges, and their own reasons to buy or not. 

But the good news is not all customers are created equal. Therefore, if one customer can generate 20x more revenue than other customers, there’s no way they should be treated similarly. 

And that’s what most companies fail to understand. They set up one Cost Per Lead Target and approach everybody the same way. 

It doesn’t work that way. You should learn to divide your ICPs into 3 tiers. 

• Tier One: the companies with the highest revenue potential -which you should serve individually by running 101 campaigns.
• Tier Two: here you personalize per role. 
• Tier Three: this is your mass-market campaign. It can be ads, general content marketing, or general outreach.

More on the image below.

3. Positioning and unique value proposition (UVP)

Positioning is important in the sense that we now live in a world of infinite supply.  In the martech space only, there are now more than 8000 startups while there were about 150 back in 2011. 

That's a 5200% increase, which is crazy.

The underlying message here is crystal clear: it's no longer possible to position solely based on features, product, or technology. 

Instead, you need to adapt your message to your target segment and ICP.  

If you fail to make ICPs see your UVP, they will base their selection on features, customer reviews, and pricing.

And the truth is, the moment you start competing based on pricing, chances are you will lose, BIG.

So, the bottom line is you need to start communicating how you’re different from all the other solutions out there. Once you do that, you’ll start having fewer calls and more closed deals. 

Pro tip: after defining your positioning and developing your UVP, you need to have them validated. You don't want to base any of these on your assumptions or plain research. So, conduct a survey and interview your customers. 

Next up, keep in mind that positioning is not worth much if it's not implemented. 

That said, you can start adapting and communicating your message to your target segments and ICP. You can use all your marketing assets:

• email signature, 
• proposals, 
• slide decks, 
• website, 
• LinkedIn or any other social media profile or company page. 

4. Buying process

You must adapt your marketing and prospecting to the way your customers are buying. Only 3% of prospects in any given B2B market are actively buying. And if you are going to focus on those while you are not on their evaluation list, you are already late.

5. Full-funnel marketing plan

The final element is a list of campaigns and activities you are going to launch to achieve your set goals.

This includes:

• Awareness campaigns
• Demand generation.
• Demand capturing.
• Activation programs
• Client success.
• Expansion.

NOTE: This webinar has been condensed and edited for clarity. You can watch the full webinar here and see all the questions that were answered live.

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina D. Odjo,

Content Editor @Trenches