Recently, I had the pleasure of guest-hosting a Dux-Soup webinar to share B2B strategies for engaging and converting C-level executives using semi-automated LinkedIn-based outreach. A YouTube video recording of my conversation with Scott Wright and Jo Henderson is at this link.

It was a combination of clear explanations of the needed strategies for tight “ideal customer profile” (ICP) targeting and messaging, followed by live demonstrations of practical, real-life examples of how a collection of unique, innovative apps can work together to effectively target, engage, and reach new C-level prospects.

A) KEY MESSAGING AND TARGETING STRATEGIES

Understanding Your Target Audience

To effectively target your audience, it’s essential to understand your ICP deeply. For example, although at Premonio we initially focused on targeting CFOs, we discovered that our primary buyers were actually CROs preparing for board meetings. This insight allowed us to tailor our approach more accurately to their needs and challenges.

Differentiation and Quick Engagement

A clear and emotionally compelling value proposition is important. Using ourselves as an illustrative example again, one of our unique selling points is that we don’t require prior data, unlike typical analytic apps. Those typically require months of clean and accurate data to make precise enough predictions, which the rare startup actually has available.

Also, in today’s fast-paced environment, especially with the buyer-behavioral shifts accelerated by COVID and apps like TikTok (see here, for example), capturing your audience’s attention within the first 20 seconds is vital. If you can’t convey “why us” and “why then” compellingly and quickly, you’ll lose their interest. Successfully securing these initial moments can lead to longer engagement periods, ultimately leading to more substantial buyer involvement.

Customer Journey

Optimizing the customer journey from initial lead to closed deal involves viewing it from the customer’s perspective. Consider their entire experience: visiting your website, filling out a form, receiving an email, getting a LinkedIn invite, etc. This process often becomes overly complicated and lengthy, increasing the chances of drop-off at each step. Simplifying the journey and clearly offering something valuable to the customer is essential for maintaining their engagement and smoothly moving them through the sales funnel. It’s also important to address their personal expectations or anxieties, such as career concerns, rather than just focusing on broader corporate goals.

B) ALIGNING SALES AND MARKETING PIPELINES

Aligning your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) with investor expectations is critical. This involves translating activity goals into revenue goals, which can be tracked and measured using simple spreadsheets or cloud apps, such as Premonio’s own “GOALS” application. Ensuring that these goals are realistic and aligned across departments helps in maintaining a coherent strategy and achieving your financial targets.

EFFECTIVE ENGAGEMENT

Compelling Messaging

Avoid generic messages, especially ones peppered with Calendly links – that’s too much selling too soon. Instead, use personalized and compelling messages that capture a recipient’s interest. Tailoring your communication to address their specific needs and pains can significantly improve engagement rates.

Workflows and Training

Develop tight workflows for different lead sources and ensure that respective teams (marketing, BDRs, sales, etc.) are well-trained in are skilled in driving pipeline from each of the to-be-utilized lead sources. Clear demand generation processes and well-defined roles help in efficiently managing leads and improving conversion rates.

Accountability and Monitoring

Implement an early warning system to track progress and ensure accountability. Regularly monitoring goals on a weekly or monthly basis helps in identifying issues early and making necessary adjustments to stay on track. This system not only tracks performance but also fosters a culture of accountability within the team.

C) PREMONIO’S APPROACH 

Our approach flips the traditional analytics model upside down. Instead of letting individual departments set disconnected goals, we set unified goals across finance, customer service, sales, and marketing. And then we align and integrate these goals, and then regularly monitor progress against them, either weekly or monthly.

Here’s how it works: We perform a growth simulation based on a revenue target, be that $1M, $5M, $10M, or $400K. For instance, to hit goal, customer success might need to complete X tasks per week, sales might need to make 500 calls a day and 30 demos a week, or marketing might need to generate a set number of inbound and outbound leads. 

Ensure these targets align; if sales expects 50 leads but marketing can only generate 20 with their budget, there’s a mismatch. Similarly, if marketing needs a $1.5M budget but finance allocates only $600K, there’s a problem.

Our tool helps align these goals, avoiding the complications of implementing numerous analytics apps in your tech stack, thus ensuring all departments work cohesively towards the same objectives.

Most people manage this entire system using simple spreadsheets. While we offer a cloud app for this purpose, spreadsheets are better than nothing for organizations just starting out. The key is to mathematically link your activity goals to corresponding revenue goals and measure them effectively.

On the right side of the next figure you can see a visualization known as a Sankey diagram. This diagram illustrates our revenue goal ($7M here) and the sources of that revenue, such as inbound organic traffic, LinkedIn invites, affiliate programs, or partnerships, which are shown on the left side. This example, based on an actual customer, clearly and intuitively breaks down year-one net new revenue by lead source. For instance, flow number 6, which involves LinkedIn invites through Dux-Soup, is divided into two parts.

Our system effectively translates revenue goals into associated activity KPIs by lead source, demonstrating how to proactively warrant downstream revenue success for a practical go-to-market implementation. The next figure is a snapshot of how it works: The vertical columns represent various lead sources like SEO, form fills, and cold emails, while the first horizontal row tracks early funnel activities, such as sending 4,000 emails weekly or generating 6 leads from events. 

The next two rows track mid-funnel metrics like MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads), and at the bottom, we track opportunities by number and dollar pipeline, along with closed won deals (CW). By setting clear revenue goals by lead source and correlating the associated activity metrics with their revenue targets, this approach provides a comprehensive, proactive view for managing revenue progress from the beginning.

This system includes an early warning mechanism to identify what’s working and what’s not, enhancing accountability to customers. For example, to achieve $3M in October, we might need 50 emails sent daily and 80 LinkedIn invites weekly in March. Monitoring these metrics ensures we stay on track and have a high likelihood of meeting our goals.

D) ADVANCED TOOLS – PRACTICAL EXAMPLES & TECH STACK

To see a suite of applications in action that deliver against the above objectives, we provided live demonstrations during the webinar, showcasing how these applications work together to speed up our marketing and sales processes, ensuring maximum effectiveness and alignment with your goals. Here are the tools we mentioned: 

Teamfluence & SparkToro – We utilize two apps to engage influencers, helping us gain traction in specific areas. These tools allow us to interact with influencers by encouraging them to comment on our work or share interesting content, thus amplifying our reach and impact within targeted communities.

CrystalKnows – is a powerful personality assessment tool that analyzes LinkedIn profiles to provide recommendations on effective communication with a particular prospect.

Apollo.io – is a versatile tool combining functionality you would otherwise have to combine manually from these apps: Crunchbase, LinkedIn Navigator, and MailChimp. We use Apollo for two main purposes:

• Search Functionality: Apollo offers robust search capabilities, providing comprehensive data on prospects, including websites, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook pages, product information, employee trends, and technologies used. This data is sourced from Crunchbase, allowing more detailed insights into potential targets.

• Email Functionality: Apollo facilitates email campaigns, enabling combination campaigns between email and LinkedIn. It also supports A/B testing for optimizing messaging.

For instance, when I pretended in the webinar to target Dux-Soup as a prospect, Apollo provided all necessary information, which could have been added to a list and included in outbound campaigns. We typically use Apollo for staged campaigns, such as CEO campaigns, and monitor stats for optimization.

Clay.run – functions like a spreadsheet where each cell can make API calls, allowing for highly customized messaging at scale.

Dux-Soup – is a key part of our tech stack, enabling efficient LinkedIn outreach and robust engagement with our target audience.

This next figure is a compendium of demand generation apps we often implement for our customers (for more detail on this tech stack, please read our earlier blog here). The apps we discussed during the Dux-Soup webinar are highlighted by red boxes around them:

Personal Strategy and Implementation

From my experience, I sent out about 1,000 to 1,500 invites a month with a 50% accept rate and a 30% response rate. Initially, these rates were lower, but refining our messaging and targeting significantly improved them. This underscores the importance of investing time in getting these elements right.

We also utilize AMPED for automated outbound campaigns, running both invitation and first-connect follow-up campaigns using Slack as our single pane of glass to communicate through. This ensures seamless communication and tracking, allowing for efficient engagement with prospects.

In conclusion, by understanding your target audience, differentiating your messaging, aligning sales and marketing pipelines, and leveraging advanced tools like Crystal Knows, Apollo, Clay.run, and Dux-Soup, you can significantly enhance your marketing and sales strategies. Regularly monitoring progress and being accountable ensures that your efforts are effective and aligned with your overall goals.

We hope these insights and tools help you refine your strategies and achieve greater success in your marketing and sales efforts.