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In this week's newsletter: How To Start Building a Less Complex Marketing Machine 
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Weekly Briefing No. 179
by Edwin Abl

Hey — It's Ed. Welcome to my weekly briefing. 

Quick Reminder: You are receiving this email because you subscribed to my weekly newsletter. It's not a link dump of "hey, here's what I'm listening to and reading." It's 7+ articles, with summaries, notes, views, and commentary, spanning topics on leadership, B2B SaaS marketing, SaaS GTM, sales, well-being, or other interesting finds from around the web. Occasionally, I send long-form articles on leadership, marketing, and personal growth.

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==> In this week's briefing: 

  • A new idea: Customer-Led Growth
  • Top tips for building reliance and motivation  
  • The biggest impact areas for new CMOs
Thank you for subscribing 🙏. 
 

IDEAS FROM ME  📈

1. One of the most intriguing concepts I came across this week was: Customer Led Growth. We all know that being Product Led, Sales Led, or Marketing Led are common approaches to strategy. Never customer-led. Which on face value seems an obvious one because the customer is the core of your business. So designing your GTM around the customer seems a great framework to think about implementing. 

The core components of customer-led fall into: 

• Audiences
• Awesomeness
• Accessibility
• Amplification
• Acquisition
• Activation
• Adoption
• Advocacy

In the coming weeks, I’ll flesh out the meaning and strategy behind each area in a more extended form. 

2. How to remember what you read

> Summary: 

✅ Quality matters more than quantity. If you read one book a month but fully appreciate and absorb it, you’ll be better off than someone who skims half the library without paying attention.
✅ Speed-reading is bullshit. Getting the rough gist and absorbing the lessons are two different things. Confuse them at your peril.
✅ Book summary services miss the point. Many companies charge ridiculous prices for access to vague summaries bearing only the faintest resemblance to anything in the book. Summaries can be a useful jumping-off point to explore your curiosity, but you cannot learn from them the way you can from the original text.*
✅ Fancy apps and tools are not needed. A notebook, index cards, and a pen will do just fine.
✅ We shouldn’t read stuff we find boring. Life is far too short.
✅ Finishing the book is optional.  

3. How to leverage the power of teaching for better learning

The steps are as follows:

✅ Pretend to teach a concept you want to learn about to a student in the sixth grade.
✅ Identify gaps in your explanation. Go back to the source material to understand it better.
✅ Organise and simplify.
✅ Transmit (optional).
https://fs.blog/feynman-learning-technique/ 

 

SAAS GTM  📈

4. I’m getting deeper and deeper into the simplicity of how if you sort out your value proposition, everything becomes much easier, especially when thinking about scaling. Here are ten questions for assessing your value proposition

5. Key trends that will matter most as Demand and ABM leaders embrace buying groups in 2022

6. These are the three critical pieces of product marketing work that are crucial for success pre-scaling. 

1. Train the team on your positioning and messaging
2. Create your most critical sales enablement tools
3. Ensure feedback loops are in place

Here are the most crucial product marketing activities

 

WELL-BEING  🧠 

7. Top tips for building resilient daily habits and motivation. 

Here is a super simple checklist to follow during the day: 

• Compliment one person
• Think two positive thoughts
• Meditate for one minute
• Name three things you’re thankful for
• Do one push-up
• Write 50 words
• Read two pages
• Do ten jumping jacks
• Go outside and take 100 steps
• Drink one glass of water

OR V2:  

Ideas that work for me:

• Limit phone time
• Do not check email first thing
• Turn off all phone notifications
• Read more
• Workout
• Have a routine
• Use email blocker apps
• Do walking meetings
• Think of solving challenges rather than having goals
• Get up when works for you

Give it a go!
 

 
 

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One more thing...Thanks for reading.

Enjoy your day. And if you like this newsletter and want to support it, forward it to a friend 🤝, tweet me 👏, or if you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here.

Thanks, 
Ed 

 

 🤔 Here's one short tip on improving marketing execution — How To Start Building a Less Complex Marketing Machine

Building a marketing machine to deliver repeatable revenue is really hard. 

One reason is that the whole thought process is obsessed with scale without thinking of the journey before scaling.  

But it's much easier when you break it down.

Here's one way to look at it:

£500,000 in pipeline per annum (say average ACV £25,000 and working on averages of 25% conversions) :

- 20 opportunities per annum 
- 1.67 opportunities per month 
- 6.67 SQLs per month <--- Focus marketing and sales efforts on here. 
- 26.67 well-defined MQLs or leads into the pipeline 

If you know your audience, ICP and value proposition, you should convert much better than at 25%. 

Mind you, none of the above is easy. But it can't be too hard for marketing and sales to devise a plan to reach six SQLs per month. 

And it's easier than thinking about designing this big complex marketing machine with a million channels that forget the simple basics. 

I call this ANTI-SCALING. 

Break your plan down next week. 

And come out firing with a more straightforward approach the following. 

 

PRODUCT RECOMMENDATION

Coefficient.io - Make data work for you. Automate your spreadsheets.

Pitch: I wish I had found this tool five years ago. Especially when I was having trouble looking at how to understand our funnel data! Make life easy. Start automatically syncing Google Sheets with your business systems.

Take it for a test drive.

 

CAN WE WORK TOGETHER?

This newsletter is my passion project. I hope it helps you gain deeper insight and equips you to learn at the pace needed to keep up. Many readers have asked about how we can work together. In case you’re interested, I do three things.

(1) DUE DILIGENCE FOR INVESTORS & CEOs: A bespoke framework and capability model ‘DEMAND KARMA’ that delivers DD services to investors, VC firms and CEOs. 

(2) ADVISORY: Retained advisory at funded scale-ups. A simple monthly fee. Helping CEOs build a scalable marketing machine.

(3) MENTORING: Designed for people looking to get to the next level — Director, VP and new CxO. My sweet spot is helping to mentor developing VPs / "Head of"  / aspiring leaders to step into the CxO role.

If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit. 

Click here to schedule a call.
 
Copyright © 2020 Edwin Abl, All rights reserved.

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Edwin Abl · 32 Lavender Sweep · London, London SW11 1HA · United Kingdom