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Brian Graf: Welcome to episode 78 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. Today, Stein and I are joined again by Antoine Vlal, a fractional CMO at Kalungi, who's led marketing for over 20 companies to date, to talk about a question that can be really daunting for a lot of founders and executives. That question is, how can you tell if your marketing team is underperforming?
With the complexity of a lot of today's B2B SaaS marketing motions, attribution and reporting can become a nightmare if they aren't implemented the right way, which can make a lot of leaders blind to whether their marketing dollars are going to the right places. And how effective their marketing team actually is.
As challenging as this can be, there is a path to get you from the nightmare scenario of marketing as a black box to the green pastures of accurate, actionable data, and a clear line of sight on marketing performance. In this episode, we'll give you a few things to look at and some solid initiatives to get you back on the right track.
Enjoy. And welcome back again, Antoine and Stijn for the second episode in a row. I wanted to take this topic to talk about a topic that I feel like a lot of B2B SaaS executives, particularly of startups struggle with. And that's really just how, how can you tell if your marketing team is performing well, or if it's underperforming, right?
If you're not really strong in marketing and it's not something that you. grew your career in, it can be really difficult to see into kind of the black box that is marketing. There can be vague reports, confusing definitions on what a marketing qualified lead is, what a lead is. There can be even more confusing attribution models in terms of how marketing is taking credit for certain parts of the pipeline or for certain pieces of ROI.
And particularly for somebody who's not well versed in marketing, it can feel like there's really no visibility into what's working and what's not. Adding to the confusion, marketing teams are almost never not busy, right? Marketing teams are always overworked, there's always too many priorities on their plate, and it always seems like their hair is on fire running between all the different initiatives that they have to go after that are always super urgent, right?
But at the same time, combined with that lack of reporting, it can feel like they're running in circles, not getting, not adding enough to the bottom line or not, not adding enough impact. So the question is, is your, is your marketing team impacting the bottom line at all? Right. Is it impacting the bottom line enough or are you kind of just throwing money into a pit, right?
With no real outcome. And it can be a really tough position to be in as a B2B SaaS executive. The problem is that it is that. In different cases, you know, they're, they're often true at the same time, right? And so how do you know where you need to dig in versus where you need to let marketing run to, to be successful?
So both of you, again, your careers as fractional CMOs come into this quite a bit, right? You see. You come into underperforming teams, right? It's very rare that, say Antoine, you get brought into a team, a marketing team. That's perfect, right? Because they wouldn't need us at that point, but you see this on a day to day basis.
So maybe we can start with, Antoine, you know, what, what do you look at when you're coming into a team cold, right? That may have been struggling in terms of performance or performance is just unclear. Like, how do you wade through those murky waters and give yourself and the team some clear direction.
Antoine Vial: Yeah, absolutely. I think here there is two dimensions to understanding where the team is and trying to, trying to evaluate what we can improve. There is a, there is a strategic side of things and then there is a tactical side of things. And here we can break it down into Five key metrics at the strategic level: is the team able to explain the go to market strategy that they are currently in place?
What are the motions to get new customers? More importantly, even retain your customers or your pay, are your customers able to, are you able to keep your customers to pay and stay and then what do you do to expand within your existing customer base? It's much more efficient to sell more to people that you already have convinced to sell then and then to to try to find new customers.
So that's one dimension or one element to the strategic level. We try to understand what the GTM motions are? Performing you know with a go to market that is more product led or is it more sales led? Does it align with the size of their ACV or does it not? That's the first one. The second one would really be trying to understand if they are tracking probably the unique lagging indicator that matters.
And it's going to be what is your ACV to CAC ratio or your CAC to LCV ratio, right? What is the unit? Of the economy that you bring in, which is dollars, really, how much does it cost to get a new customer and how long do they stay? What is that ratio? So that's CAC to LTV ratio, or even just your ACV to CAC.
If you want to, you know look at a, at a smaller scale, maybe for an earlier stage startup that is maybe a little earlier in their growth journey. So that's the second, the second side of things. At the strategic level, the third point would be on the big M marketing and really at the strategic level, we often actually run a go to market workshop that really helps define this.
And it is, what do you do and who is it for if they cannot answer that, meaning what are, you know, what are the problems that they solve? What is the tool really? What is the problem? The tool is solving and who is it for? What is the niche that they're going after? What is their bitch head? How are they going to be able to go to market with the smallest viable market and make an impact before they expand?
And then if they've already nailed the niche, which one is the next one? And trying to really go and expand again different priorities depending on where they are in their growth journey so that would be the third one. Then of course there is the team itself. Do you have the right team right? Do you have the right people at the right seat?
Do they have everything that they need in order to perform? Here we're talking about are there do they have, let's use a very concrete example, but is your paid your paid team able to to capture data and and see. The impact of paid media campaigns, which keywords are, are performing best.
How is it moving down the funnel? And these are, these are really important aspects at the strategic level. And finally, how well have you carved that niche and really understanding who it is for? If we think about the different stages of the growth stages of a SaaS company, MVP, PMF, T2, D3, and maybe, you know, the rule of 40 growth at the really early stage.
Have you been able to get people excited to use your tool and maybe, you know, be part of that journey of building that MVP and giving you a recommendation, almost being part of, you know, building that tool. At the PMF level, do you have people, do you have customers that pay, stay, and recommend you?
and happy to pay more. At the T2D3 level, how are you able to scale these motions? How many different, different beachheads can you, can you actually carve into the market and how can you expand? And then at the profitability level, right? Like how can you make this scalable and, and, and of course increase the margins and and, and get revenue.
But of course a good indicator would be the rule of 40 and making sure that it is a sustainable business. So that's at a tactical level, this is very much, very much more something that we implement as we start with, with, with clients, but really you have different things on the weekly basis, on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis.
Something very simple is, okay, what KPIs are you tracking here? We use bowler charts. So that would be something that we'll check. Power chart on a weekly basis. Okay, how many leads, where are they coming from? And kind of like going down from the top of the funnel to the bottom. So contact all the way to the customer.
At a quarterly level, have you been able to really set the right targets? So now that you have your power, baller chart. Now you get to the end of the quarter goal versus actual. Do you, do you meet your goal? Yes, you exceeded them so maybe you didn't set the right goals. You completely missed it again.
Maybe you didn't set the right goals for the next quarter. You can learn, iterate and, and, and continue to improve upon using OKRs as a framework. Then of course, there's the, the, the quality of the data. You have a power chart, but the quality of the data is not here. And you're not able to actually learn from the data because your CRM data is messy.
That's probably like a really urgent thing to fix because without data, you pretty much. Wasting, wasting money and unable to actually use that data to make strategic decisions. You don't know if it's the execution or the actual data that is, that is wrong. So that's a big one. Forecasting accuracy: are you able to predict how much you're going to generate?
Here again, kind of like back to the strategic level, you know, thinking of how much pipeline you have. How do you forecast and how much did you actually hit within that quarter? And then one that is really relevant in our current business and all over, really all over the business world is how is your team empowered and do they use AI?
That's a big one. And how are they using it? And I think these are the five really more tactical, tactical things that we use as we try to evaluate. if a team is really why they are underperforming and how we can help them. And already if you've, if you fix one by one, you get to a much better place.
That's one way, one way to do it. And that's how we do it at Kalungi.
Brian Graf: Yeah. I mean, it makes a lot of sense, right? Because I feel like a lot of people who would come into a team like that can get tempted to just start, got to start making changes, right? We need to spend less on Google or we're being too inefficient, or we need to spend more on Google, right?
To be able to, to increase leads. And it is, you really have to have the patience and honestly, the fortitude to pause, I think, before making a lot of those changes and really just take a step back and say, you know, do we actually have the right strategy for where we are? Do we have, are we saying yes versus no to the right things?
I think that again, going back to the marketing team being kind of overworked and crazy, I think it's so easy for teams to just get distracted by. 20 sales support assets, right? A quarter or something like that, or that, that is helpful, but doesn't accomplish the full goal. And so it is so important to think about things like, what are we doing?
How does this, how does what we're doing right now build up to the strategy that we need to be executing against? And I think the only other thing that I would add. To what you're saying Antoine is the I do want to be careful with especially with this episode I don't want listeners to think that just because like every single marketing initiative has to have a direct tie to Pipeline or two dollars right there are brand initiatives that require That just don't have the attribution in place that you'd need or require that longer term vision, but in order to do that, right, in order for a marketing team to be able to successfully complete those, they need to have the right leading indicators in place and they need to have the direct line of connection.
from a strategic standpoint of those longer term initiatives versus the short term initiatives that should have direct payout. So don't confuse listeners. There's still definitely the long term view in marketing, but we need to be able to tell as marketers, we need to be able to tell the right story with the right path, right.
And the right stepping stones to get, to make sure that those things are successful.
Antoine Vial: And just to bounce on that. Leading indicator versus lagging indicators. You will want to use them in tandem. Some are Must happen the leading indicator must happen before the lagging especially on the early stage startups that really you cannot you cannot drive pipeline if you If you don't have a one pager or sales enablement that can help sell selling or you can actually not even use it If you don't even have leads right now so of course it's it's it's not one or the other but use them in tandem to try to See if you are getting in, in the right direction and achieving your goals.
Brian Graf: Stein, have you seen anything else that you've liked to use, to help identify issues before we get into solutions?
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah. No, the list that Antoine shared is a great checklist that I absolutely use as well. The other thing, when you're brought in as a consultant, I read a really interesting book on this.
At some point there's usually a people problem. You know, you, you get brought in under the disguise or the reasoning being a business need, right? Oh, we need to figure out a strategy or there's this channel that isn't performing well, or we've never done marketing before. We need someone who's done it before.
And all those things are true, but none of those things would be impossible to do for a company themselves, right? They could hire the right people. They could, they could level up the right people. They could put them in the right seats, right? The reason they're bringing in external help, which then often is in the form of a consultant, is usually also because there's a people friction challenge.
There might be people in the leadership team that don't necessarily agree on what the right next steps are, right? Or it's hard for people to get out of their own sort of you know, people like when you're hiring, you hire people that are a bit like you, right? When you solve problems, you do it in the ways that are often aligned with your own superpowers and all those things, right?
So. There might be a conscious decision. I mean, we need some foreign eyes here, right? To get a different perspective there. But all those start with acknowledging if you're, if you're the consultant coming in, that you cannot ignore the people side of the challenge, right? And so that's an important realization.
And then when you ask all these questions that Antoine also talked about, that are partly sometimes coaching and partly you taking a sort of a good, doing an audit almost to the situation before you decide what to do and how to help best, you have to. Always group the answers that you get, almost in three categories.
There will be the answer that is kind of the rational answer, the business answer, right? The answer is really about the data, that hopefully gives you a lot of information about, you know, what's really happening, accurate, etc. The other type of answer you got is someone having an opinion about maybe the problem, right?
A statement that they could give, they could give you the popular answer, the answer that maybe they think others would like to hear, their leadership, others in the team, right? So I call that the social part of the answer, right? That is a really important part of the answer, but you have to kind of put some filter around that, right?
It's all in the eye of the beholder at some point, right? It's the person that you're getting the answer from incented to say certain things a certain way. And then the third part is emotional, right? The emotional part of the answer is really, how does someone actually feel about it, right? Are they really excited, challenged?
A lot of our emotions are about fear and fears and dreams, right? Are they expressing something they would like to happen or something they're really scared of? Something they're insecure about? Right? What are, what do they believe? Right? Believe it to be true today. Believe it can be true tomorrow.
So when you're a consultant, I think you ask a lot of questions. You realize that it's usually not just about the business. It's usually also a people component. And then when you categorize your answers, when you filter them, when you look at what you hear, the people that you interview say, I always like to think about those three sorts of ways to categorize them.
Well, what's the rational part of the answer? What's the social part of the answer? What's the emotional part? Everything is different. You know, measures given the situation.
Brian Graf: And to your point, Stijn, right, the people aspect is what makes business so complex and so interesting, right? But particularly after asking all those questions, I feel like you often find, you know, you have this tough decision to make, particularly as a consultant, right?
It can be easy for a consultant to come in and say, this is, this team is underperforming, I'm going to rip them out, right, and replace and hire a new team or, or. Or something like that, but often, right, sometimes that is the, the, the necessary move often it's, it could be that they have some of the right people that are just in the wrong seats, or they have some of the people with a lot of potential that just haven't been given the coaching or support that they need to be successful.
Right. And I know that you guys have a lot of opinions on coaching, right? Given the topic of your book, but it does pose a really interesting problem of, you know, how can you. How can you unlock the performance of the team in the right way? Because sometimes hiring and refiring just delays the same problem, right?
Maybe it wasn't a people issue after all, it was just a poor utilization of the people. Once you go in and you ask all these questions, Do you guys have a one size fits all is, is never purely right, but, but do you guys have a, some sort of a system of, of implementation, right? Do you start with the strategy piece first, and then everything falls from there?
All the tactics fall from there? Or how do you, or do you start with data accuracy, right? Like, how do you go, go about kind of like unraveling and starting to get the team back on the right track?
Antoine Vial: I think there is like again, there is never a One size fit all but depending on what they are. So at Kalungi we work with a lot of companies with about 20 million ARR 10 million ARR and I think here often in that category you find that you have an existing marketing department that is often like Pretty, pretty small, but you need to focus on both almost at the same time.
So you need to try to figure it out. Okay. Where are we at the strategic level as early as possible? And that is by having a conversation with everyone at the company, not only the C level, but also the people under, especially the client facing roles, really important insights there. And a few of the customers try to understand, try to get the most objective understanding of what, you know, of, of what's happening versus just drinking out of the other founders' holes. And then, and then the other one is really spending time with the mark, the existing marketing team. And here I use one example from, I think it was, yeah, it was one of my first clients at Kalungi.
So it was, it was a great learning experience, but the first two weeks, right. I had set the schedule. I told the founder, I'm going to do, you know, all these interviews. I'm going to do this. I'm going to meet with your team. He told me, yeah, just go do it, which I did, then came back and told me, okay, what do you think, you know, what's your analysis of our team?
I told him, you know, exactly what it was. And there were a couple of people that were, in my opinion, the right people, not in the right seat. And it was. One person that was in the right seat, right, right person and one person that was not. So I told him that and then he told me, okay, go do it. And that was one very interesting experience because, you know, coming in right from the get go, you are expected to make changes and then you're expected to get output of these changes. And here, just in that specific situation, there was data that was allowing me to, to look at, you know, the performance of the ABM department. And, therefore I had some level of confidence in making the claims that I was making. And luckily, I was able to prove that it was, it was the right decision, but these uncomfortable situations where you first, you know, bring in the analysis of the right people, right seat.
And in the meantime, talk about strategy, have all this conversation, where to go to the market workshop really allows you to make these hard decisions early on. So you can maximize your output and impact on the long run, which ultimately is what you, what you've been hired for. It's, it's really it's really how I see it, right?
It's like, okay, where are you at? Where's the company at the growth stage? If they are, you know, if they hire you to improve performance right away, okay, focus on short term wins, but of course plan the long term ones. If it's early on and they need to build the marketing department, okay, what, what do you see work?
What can you make, you know, increase these wins and build the next, you know, longer term flywheel. And then if they're already really well performing. Cut what doesn't perform as well as the other things and double down on what already is working and again focusing on the strategic side, execution, people side at the same time, kind of like a balance in between.
So that's how I, I guess I would, I would go about it.
Brian Graf: Yeah, I like that a lot. I mean, yeah, you have to, you have to back your decisions with data and it is kind of, it's the, the pressure is on you as the newcomer to, to make a. Good decisions as quickly as possible, right? But as educated as possible, right?
And then see them out to make sure that results improve. What's interesting too is that I've seen this a few times where you'll come into marketing departments that it's almost like they've, they've implemented go to market channels and motions because they think they should not necessarily because it's the right thing for the company or the situation or the, the go to market motion.
Right? And so you'll see people who are running Google ads. that where, you know, if you do some diligence, the volumes aren't really that good or the keywords aren't that good, or the competition is way too high for their budget or something like that. Right. And you can kind of see that even if they are pushing on the right or even if from a tactical standpoint, they're doing what they can just from a strategic standpoint, it's just not the right move.
Right. And so it does take you really drilling. Drilling up to be able to kind of see the forest through the trees and make some of those hard decisions at a channel or an initiative level to help prioritize things. Stein, what have you seen from, from your perspective?
Stijn Hendrikse: Oh, there's a couple of things I hear you say that I thought I always encountered that we didn't talk about yet.
So I want to throw those in. So go to market really is usually defined as the sales function, the marketing function, the customer success function. Sometimes the latter is split into more account management and customer service or support. Sometimes marketing is split into kind of more demand gen and things like PR and reputation management.
Product marketing sometimes is also separate. But let's stick to the four, the three core functions, right? Sales, marketing, and, and CS. And there's often also a need to call out friction between those teams as a company grows. That is not necessarily easy to call out by the team themselves, right?
Or the leader or the CEO. And so we come in and we have to kind of do that in a, in a gentle, but. Firm way, , and, and they kind of and never, there's never one like a team at fault or something like that, that happens at every organization that grows. And let me give you a couple of examples and we'll talk about what you can do about it.
So the first one is, you know, the sales organization or maybe the whole leadership team complaining about, you know, the marketing team not driving enough leads in the top of the funnel, right? Usually a function of. Especially when they've had success in the past and those because they got to product market fit, most of our clients, right?
And so they had, they had a way to fill the funnel at some point. And sometimes that's not keeping up with the growth expectations or just, it actually becomes less. And that's usually a function of the market maturing, right? The category that you're in maturing, right? Leads maybe that you could buy the clicks that you could bid on, they become more expensive.
The organic search positions become more competitive and all those things lead you to actually have to. Think about is the job of pipeline generation no longer just about inbound marketing, but does it include some outbound components? Does it include a partner channel? Does it include other new ways of either doing product led growth, right?
So, the worst state you can find yourself in is that it's just frustrating. A lot of back and forth between sales, complaining about not getting leads and feeling that the front is not full enough, not really knowing what to do about that themselves, which, which then creates more anxiety and the marketing team feeling that they're not necessarily set up for success.
In the world. So that's one example. The other one is that the marketing team complains about the sales team not converting leads, right? Not, not following up fast enough, not having the right, you know, sales capabilities or materials to actually do the selling. Right? To, they say, oh, we do all this work to get you this great sort of person who's in the market.
They, they, they typed in the right keyword in the search engine and now they, they knocked on our door and they wanna have the meeting. And we're not following up for three days. So now of course, they were also knocking on two other doors, or they clicked on another link in their Google search result, and now they're having the demo meeting or the first discovery call with our competitor just because we weren't the fastest one.
Right? So there's that type of you know, friction between teams. And, and, and then maybe, you know, the, the, the team not realizing how hard it is to get these leads, right. And the marketing team felt not, not. You know, maybe properly respected for that. See, yes, you know, complaining that maybe they're not necessarily doing customer success management or actually doing the sale because the sales organization is not really selling the full value of the deal.
They just sell a trial or they sell something that's relatively highly discounted under the. Under the cover of, we'll do expansion later, right? We, as long as we land something right, the CS team can do the expansion, which for a lot of sales companies, by the way, is a decent economic model. There's nothing wrong with that, but until it becomes like either delaying or even delegating or, or abdicating your sales responsibility early in the funnel and, and now making CS responsible for things that you really.
Should be capable of a sales team, right? So now CS has to bear maybe a higher cost of sale themselves. They have to hire different types of people, train people in different ways. Right? So the other thing that CS sometimes gets very, you know, get frustrated about is they, maybe things get sold that are harder to deliver on, right?
And then they have to manage unrealistic expectations. It all goes to kind of figuring out what's your real ideal customer profile and making sure that those are the ones that you sell to. And then the other last one, maybe a PR department that is. Or marketing, again, that's asked to drive awareness, right?
Oh, we have this phenomenal solution, right? If people only knew about it, right? They would all stand in line and, and beg us to pay her to pay us to buy it. The reality is that it's very hard if the category gets mature and the product is maybe not as differentiated anymore and competitors can basically copy what you do.
So, so product and engineering and leadership, having also an accountability to make sure that your solution is. It's unique, it's special, right? Before you just start, you know, asking the marketing team or your PR team to just throw a bunch of dollars at awareness and get eyeballs on something that may be not even worth looking at.
And so, I think these are just four examples. There's many more, but one of the other things I just do early and engage to figure out if there's any friction between these teams and And usually the, the, the solution is not about any of these specific topics. It's about realizing that they have to work together, right?
You cannot blame the quarterback back for the dropped passes by the receiver. You can also not blame the receiver for passes that were not thrown, thrown very accurately. The one thing you can blame the first, if they're not practicing together, right? If they're not trying to work on that. So that's kind of one of the other things I look at.
Brian Graf: I mean, properly identifying those issues and then. Forcing in a collaborative way, those teams together, right? To get behind the same incentives. Yeah, does that from your perspective end up being shared goals by those teams or is it just a better cadence of meeting and getting on the same page or some combination?
Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, I think OKRs can help, and using OKRs as a framework to both align on goals and make sure everybody communicates about them, sometimes sharing some of those goals. Totally, yeah, it's a great framework.
Antoine Vial: I think that I just wrote about this on a LinkedIn post not that long ago. It's also the attribution models, right?
Sometimes leaders fall into the trap of trying to use specific multi touch attribution, right? To justify ROI, and I think that's a, that's a, that's a big A big mistake, right? You can use multi touch attribution to try to understand the, you know, the flow of leads and whatnot, but really trying to focus on the lagging indicators here.
We, we talked about CAC to LTV ratios, all these things, how do we capture the right leading indicators from the right team, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales, whether it's CS, and then that go to market lead, whether it is, you know the team is operating and under the CMO the CRO do we set the right goals with the right Leading indicators that will impact the right light indicators and don't mix the two as if they were all you know One thing but rather make sure that you give the right the right KPIs to the right team And of course what stein was mentioning Working as, as one team and is definitely incredibly important putting SLAs in place, making sure that it's not us versus them, but rather us and, and, and retrain to the final outcome, right?
And that like indicator, the dollar amount in the pipeline and close, sorry, is, is the one thing that the entire team is working towards. I think that's yeah, that's one really important portion of this discussion and really central to being successful.
Brian Graf: Yeah, because, you know, at the end of the day, it doesn't do sales any good if marketing brings in a ton of leads that don't fit, right, or that they can't sell to, and it doesn't do CS any good for sales to sell a bunch of customers that will ultimately be unhappy with the product, right?
Like, everything has to be aligned, and we have to Bye. You really do have to kind of all be singing from the same sheet from a go to market strategy perspective. I feel like with all these conversations, if you boil it up enough, it always comes back to strategy. And do we have the right strategy for where we are in the market and our company is mature.
But it really does, because that impacts everything, everything that the team focuses on, everything that the team says no to, all the, all the leading and lagging indicators that we focus on, right? And even a lot of the people friction as well within the organization. So it all kind of boils back to that topic.
Well, thank you both for being here so much. I appreciate the conversation. And I hope this is helpful for listeners.
Antoine Vial: Thank you so much. Thank you, Brian.
Brian Graf: Thank you to Adriano Valerio for producing this episode and the Kalungi team for helping us make this whole thing work. And of course, you for choosing to spend your time with us.
As a reminder, all the links we mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes. And if you want to submit or vote on a question you'd like us to answer, you can do that at kalungi.com/podcast. Every time we record, we take one of the top three topics and jam on it. Thanks again.