Vernacular Architecture Forum - Huddle C: October 2022

Huddle C: October 2022

Topic: Budgeting Nuances

Price Increases Are Sticking

Multiple huddlers shared that they had already or were in the process of raising prices
One reported this driving a revenue increase of 5%
Another noted they had been afraid of taking a price increase and went to their advisory council who chorused, “we were expecting it, all of our vendors are doing it”
“We made sure everybody was comfortable internally delivering it. There were no objections from sales or services and it's been pretty smooth. It's a match to wage increases.”

What’s Working in Event-land

Micro-events: “What is working for us is small, very targeted local events and well-targeted webinars.”
User conferences: “We’re happy with the direction of our upcoming user conference – targeting 1500 people and we have 1100 registered.”
Hybrid user conferences: “We’re having our big user conference next week (in person and virtual) and already at 1600 registrations and it’s also the platform for a big product launch.”
Piggybacking: “We’re not buying booths anymore at big events. We’ll have a dinner offsite and invite prospects (using SDRs) and regional customers – this has helped close late-stage deals.”
“What’s not working for us is big conferences, big Expo halls, things like that.”

Charging for Customer Conferences

Free user conferences: “While there is technically a fee to attend our user conference, our salespeople have discount codes that make it free for customers and any money we do raise goes to charity.”
Charging for attendance: “We found that we had a much better show rate when we charge something because they've made that financial commitment – we’re charging a nominal fee that doesn’t cover our costs.”

Do Customer Events Pay Out?

YES: “We went back to the analytics from three or four years ago and found that the customers who attended our big event have spent 50% more with us over the last three years than those that did not attend.”
YES with Modifications: “We saw more upsell from attendees but a deeper analysis showed we could get a better return by doing small local events rather than one big global event”

When Marketing-Generated Opportunities Get Ignored

One CMO shared how they are measured on actual bookings not on pipeline
“Marketing is one of three sources of business and we literally have a goal sheet for the whole marketing team.”
“Our challenge is that the pipeline that we generate is not converting at the level that we want and we’ve learned that these leads are a lower priority for our salespeople”
“We’re trying to resolve this across our go-to-market in full partnership with our CEO, revenue operations, and head of sales. We have to crack that nut!”
“The good news is that Q4 looks good and we’re expecting marketing bookings to catch up”

Does Outsourcing BDRs Work?

A couple of CMOs mentioned they had not been successful outsourcing BDRs
One mentioned a firm called Superhuman that did not meet expectations
Another noted that the reason outsourcing BDRs didn’t work was that “they didn’t have a liaison internally to manage the outsourced BER function. We wasted more than $1 million at my former company.”

Squeezing Out Spending Inefficiencies

One CMO shared, “my sense is that 20% of our budget is probably just wasted.”
“We’ve been growing so fast (60-70% a year) that we just kept spending and didn’t put a critical eye on all of it. Now it’s time to optimize!”
“We were spending $5 million on a big event and now believe we can get a better return by doing smaller regional events for about $2 million – that’s a $3 million swing!”
“We’re also looking at conversion rates through our funnel and seeing where the better quality leads come from rather than just focusing on volume.”
Another CMO shared, “we’re being ruthless about our paid advertising channels that we’ve been using forever but are much less efficient than search and social for us.”
Another CMO noted, “everything we spend on has to have an ROI of 2:1, ideally 5:1 – we found some tactics work better with SMBs while others work better with Enterprise.”
Watch out for diminishing returns: “We also noticed that leads from Capterra and other review sites were working great early this year but aren’t really producing the same ROI now”

When Leads Are Stuck in Pipeline

One CMO shared, “using Demandbase, we’re able to see where leads are getting stuck so it becomes a joint effort with Sales to get them unstuck.”
“We look at the average time to transition from an MQA (marketing qualified account) to an SAO (sales accepted opportunity), close rate average value, and how that compares against our averages and determine where we're processing more efficiently.”
“This gets us out of the argument ‘you’re not giving us good leads’ and instead we can talk about working through the pipeline with marketing, BDRs, and channel sales.”

Lead Scoring - F.I.R.E.

One CMO recommended the F.I.R.E. lead scoring methodology which tracks Fit, Intent, Recency, and Engagement
“I don’t like talking about MQAs just QAs – everyone needs to engage with accounts including Marketing, Sales and BDRs”
“It’s not about Marketing, it’s about account engagement and the common good!”
Here is an article on the F.I.R.E. approach and we have uploaded a PDF report about it to the resources page on CMOHuddles.com