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In this week's newsletter: 5 Buckets to Achieve Your Big Marketing Goals (By Focusing on What Matters)

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Weekly Briefing No. 198
by Edwin Abl

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

Quick Reminder: You are receiving this email because you subscribed to my weekly newsletter or downloaded one of my content assets. 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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==> Here’s what I thought was worth sharing ↓

• Why efficiency is the enemy
• Should SDRs sit in marketing or sales
• 5 buckets to achieve your big marketing goals (by focusing on what matters)

Thank you for subscribing 🙏.

IDEAS FROM ME 📈

1. An overview of why your team doesn’t care as much about your purpose as you should care about theirs. I’m glad I found this one. It made me reflect back to many years of being sat in leadership meetings with statements like “why the employees don’t believe in our purpose”.

Even when sometimes the purpose is to get to a revenue number?! Without any real intention of thinking about the culture and people within the business.

👉 Remember:

"Even if your company is genuinely making a meaningful difference in the world on a day-by-day basis, the people who work for you are naturally more concerned about what is happening in their own lives, with their friends and family and at home, than what they do at work."

Watch the video

2. Many organisations are obsessed with efficiency. Here is why efficiency is the enemy. You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something.

The key lesson here: The irony is that we achieve far more in the long run when we have slack. We are more productive when we don’t try to be productive all the time.

3. Tips on how to resolve conflict within a team. Not all conflict is a negative output.

SAAS GTM 📈

4. I’m on the journey of learning more about product build, product-led growth and product marketing. Right now, alignment to product is crucial (as is sales) in driving growth in SaaS.

Everyone is obsessed with sales and marketing alignment but rarely obsessed with marketing-to-product alignment. A guide on shifting from sales-lead to product-led: finding the middle ground between enterprise and self-serve.

5. The age-old question: Should SDRs sit in marketing or sales? The takeaway, it's not as obvious as you think.

6. Your website is your most important marketing asset. Here's how to build it right the 1st time. PS: Don't click this if you see your website as a side project - that misses the point.

WELL-BEING 🧠

7. Over the years, I have experimented with A LOT of productivity systems (you can read about that here). At the same time, I used several frameworks for goal setting, i.e. V2MOM and OKRs.... and always set goals. I would say too many goals. On the one hand, I believe it's good to be ambitious, plan ahead and be clear on what you want to achieve. On the other hand. It actually could slow you down. It actually might make life too complex. It might be setting you up for failure. It's obvious, but it's hard to keep things simple.

An alternate view is downsizing goals.

It made me reflect and wipe the slate clean. Will see if it has the desired effect. You might benefit from this thinking as well.

The takeaway is goal setting is personal to us all; you have to experiment and find what works for you. Good luck!

🙏 🙏 🙏

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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

🤔 5 Buckets to Achieve Your Big Marketing Goals (By Focusing on What Matters)

You need to change your thinking to five things:
‍
1. Shift to program-level CAC
2. Invest in conversion, not just demand
3. Launch new programs iteratively
4. Design an operating cadence (quarterly metrics / weekly tracking)
5. Build a minimum viable audience

No more than 3-4 channels (unless over $5m - $7m ARR).

Plus, it pays to remember.

- Product marketing and positioning are EVERYTHING
- Clarify and know your conversions for each stage of the funnel
- Sales and marketing alignment is crucial for success
- Don’t drown in metrics - focus on the most relevant to YOU
- Success is down to building a connected machine

Having 'One Commercial Engine' is the most effective GTM method (this does not mean marketing reports to CRO).

Let me know if you'd like to discuss that one.

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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: A bespoke framework and capability model ‘DEMAND KARMA’ that delivers DD services to investors, VC firms and CEOs.

(2) GTM COACHING: Retained advising 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 — My sweet spot is helping to mentor CMOs, CROs, VPs, Directors and "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.