Jeremy Epperson’s Post

Silos between marketing and customer success hurt your demand gen metrics You can leverage insights from different phases of the customer journey for marketing optimization. Any customer success manager has touch points that are likely blindspots for you, but when you start sharing insights you will unlock growth that never existed before. 1 - Top Features: What are the features of the product that customers love? Use this for ad copy and landing page copy. 2 - Top Pain Points: What do customers struggle with or dislike? You can use organic content to explain these issues or alleviate concerns earlier in the journey while driving traffic. 3 - Early Churn Factors: What causes customer complaints or churn in the first 90 days? Better set expectations with marketing messaging and ensure you target the right ideal clients. 4 - Renewal Factors: What causes customers to renew or not renew an annual contract? Translate the voice of customers into marketing and sales enablement materials. 5 - Case Studies: What hidden success stories are being collected in QBRs that must be surfaced with the marketing team? Leverage these for video content, concepts for ad copy/ad creative for paid channels, website optimization, podcast content, and even PR opportunities. 6 - Audience Targeting Conditions: Combine insights from customer success with win/loss analysis from sales to refine how you target ideal customers. These are quick and easy tactics you can start implementing this week to be more data-driven with your marketing strategy. The vast majority of startups are not doing these things regularly. Startups hitting triple-digit growth rates are taking action on collecting customer data, conducting research, and sharing insights between teams to optimize the customer journey. Only you get to decide if you want to take action or let silos slow your growth. #customerjourney #tripledigitgrowth

6 factors differentiate high-performing GTM teams from mediocre Translating Data into Decisions - All startups have an overwhelming amount of data. A GTM team that can take data sources and synthesize them into rapid decision-making will have an advantage. Breaking Down Silos - There is a natural tendency for silos to form within startups during the growth phase. Executive-level leadership is needed to identify and prevent the breakdown in communication between marketing, sales, product, and customer success. Vendor Management - A Series C-D funded startup will have 4-7 agencies involved in their marketing and sales strategy. Getting the most out of those agencies and more importantly, fostering collaboration and insights sharing will help optimize the customer journey. Market Research - Too few GTM teams have deep expertise in how to conduct and use market research. Finding the right positioning, differentiation, and value propositions comes from getting actionable insights about how you fit into the market landscape. Experimentation - The vast majority of GTM teams are guessing. The best way to unlock additional leads and revenue is to iteratively test your marketing channels, website experience, and sales tactics. This will bring immediate results, but will also accelerate your growth rate over many years. Managing Cross-Functional Growth Teams - There are 14 discrete skills needed on a growth team and even 3-4 people do not have all those capabilities. Therefore it is necessary to hire, train, manage, and lead a dedicated team that solely focuses on driving measurable growth every quarter. If you want to achieve triple-digit growth rates, then you need a high-performing GTM team that can strategically add these forms of value within your startup. #gtm #marketresearch #tripledigitgrowth

Why are silos bad for startup growth? Here are some examples: 1) The lack of information and insights sharing causes fragmented customer journeys 2) Differences in messaging across teams and touchpoints result in inconsistencies for customers 3) Sales has blindspots about how to pitch in discovery and demo calls 4) Product teams don't understand what features to prioritize 5) Customer Success has to guess at what issues will arise with customers 6) Marketing metrics underperform when messaging is siloed across channels 7) The lack of transparency creates confusion and frustration for everyone 8) Teams are forced to fight over resources amongst each other instead of working together to drive growth 9) Silos evolve into competing factions that are hard to reign back in 10) Gaining alignment on projects becomes slow and difficult 11) Focusing on results becomes secondary to focusing on completing tasks 12) Office politics take priority over strategically collaborating 13) The overall company's ability to execute rapidly disintegrates 14) Employee turnover increases due to team friction 15) Quality of professional life is suppressed Is it possible to shift this trend in a better direction? If it's well entrenched, then it’s not simple or easy but possible. The best option is to prevent it from happening in the first place. Keep an eye on these while you are scaling your startup. #startups #tripledigitgrowth

“How do you share insights to break down silos between marketing and sales?” The first step is what we call stakeholder interviews. Choose from two options: 1 - Provide links to a quick survey through Google Forms (fast & effective) 2 - Schedule calls to transcribe and analyze meeting recordings (in-depth) Sales insights for marketing: Top 3-5 buying criteria Top 3-5 objections Top 3-5 unanswered questions Most liked features Commonly mentioned competitors Marketing insights for sales:  Audience targeting conditions generating leads Test results and insights from highest performing ad copy/ad creative User behavior from analytics data Website abandonment factors Top competitors across ad channels These are a few quick ideas that would be easy for anyone to share this week. If you are anything like the hundreds of other Series C-D startups I have consulted for, you'll instantly realize there is hidden gold. You have to take action to mine the gold for yourself. This takes very little time, focus, or effort. It also takes zero budget. Try it out! Ask me questions or get guidance if you need it. #tripledigitgrowth Hat tip to Kaylee Edmondson for asking the question on LinkedIn yesterday

Let’s analyze silos based on consulting with 250+ Series C startups. Here’s a 50,000-foot view: – you raise your series C round of funding – it’s time to spend your budget to hit your aggressive revenue benchmarks – each exec and manager is tasked with prioritizing roadmaps, allocating budget, and hiring – hiring is accelerated across marketing, sales, product, and customer success – new hires are specialists with narrowly defined roles that only think about their specific tasks – each team member is held accountable on their metric without context  – new team members are added who didn't grind through PMF – the context of how all of the pieces fit together vanishes rapidly – founder’s customer centricity, insights from pivoting, and learnings from GTM strategy get lost – the close connection to customers becomes less of a priority in a fast-paced environment – customer journey understanding from early-stage employees disappears with normal turnover – each team focuses on growing and accomplishing their quarterly milestones – the sheer speed and workload require a focus on your tasks without considering other teams – each team builds its own culture, language, processes, workflows without providing transparency – teams start to debate over priorities and fall out of alignment – disagreements form over what is best for the startup’s growth – teams compete for budget to fund their projects and new hires – there is no sharing insights across teams to help optimize for customers 18-24 months after Series C funding, the company is almost unrecognizable compared to its previous state. This is how customer journeys become fragmented. Fragmented customer journeys cause a 26-42% underperformance in annual growth rate. You may be asking, “How do you have such a specific number to calculate this?” I’ve spent 16 years tracking and databasing metrics while solving these problems for startups, so we can measure the impact across different product categories at this business phase. The interesting fact: these issues can be avoided or fixed with proactivity, but you need the expertise to get it done. If you want to accelerate your growth rate by 26-42% in the next year, then you may want to take this seriously. #tripledigitgrowth

3 myths about customer research prevent people from getting started. Let’s clear these up so you can accelerate your growth rate. 1 - Expensive Tools are Required It doesn't have to be expensive and I regularly argue that taking a cost-effective approach is significantly more valuable. Skip the expensive enterprise tools and avoid buying multiple tools to get started. You can add more features and sophistication later, but you can’t get your budget back. Also, please don’t hire some overpriced branding agency that will make up customer personas without backing them with research and data. 2 - It’s Time-Consuming There is a basic way to get started, which I will outline to prove how simple this can be initially. This research method will be more focused on marketing than product or sales. Note, this is one research method of 44 our team conducts. Exit Intent Polling: – Get a free plan with Hotjar [2 minutes] – Tag it on your site [3 minutes] – Create an exit intent poll on key pages [5 minutes] – Collect a minimum of 100 responses (250 is an even better sample size) – Analyze results by bucketing the responses into categories [20-30 minutes] – Create hypotheses based on the insights you have collected [30-60 minutes] – Create an initial doc of how you will get started with testing the insights [20-30 minutes] Here is how to set this up to save you more time. – Setup the exit intent poll with Hotjar using these criteria – Collect open-ended voice of customer responses – Use the question “What, if anything prevented you from (enter your conversion event) today?”  – Trigger it on exit intent in the platform  – Use URL targeting for key conversion pages (homepage, product/solutions, LPs, demo) – Push it live to collect data That’s a little over 2 hours of work. We have SOPS, templates, presentation slides, checklists, and training videos of exactly how to do each of these research methods step by step to make sure its quick, affordable, easy and most importantly impactful for revenue. 3 - It’s Complex As you read in the previous example, this isn’t exactly brain surgery. Done is better than perfect. More value is created by SIMPLIFYING than over-complicating. The intention is to extract insights that help you optimize marketing, sales, product, and customer success. This is an ongoing process with customer research. It should not be viewed as a one-time event. You also don’t need to get it all done at once to ensure it's not overwhelming. Get started with the minimum effective dose and follow the step-by-step processes we have used across hundreds of the fastest-growing startups. The focus needs to be on actionable insights, not contextual information. Data-driven hypotheses need to be the purpose. If you collect insights, they need to be tested across the customer journey. Activating insights through testing is what creates growth. #tripledigitgrowth

10 contrarian insights that will shatter your view of startup growth: 1 - The biggest issue for growth-stage startups is silos across marketing, sales, product, and CS. Nobody wants to talk about solving it, but ignoring it doesn’t work. It measurably creates suboptimal growth rates. 2 - Changing growth strategy is like steering the Titanic. If you can’t get it done, you will sink. Getting all execs and managers aligned is challenging but possible. Most issues can be prevented more easily than fixing them after everything is broken. 3 - Customer journeys are fragmented. This is the result of internal silos and an ecosystem of agencies that don’t work cohesively to share insights. Dozens of people work diligently on their tiny part of growth but each part is done in a black box. Customers catch the brunt of this when they struggle to buy. 4 - We have the same data collection and data analysis issues from a decade ago. Many expensive tools hit the market, but the team skills and processes are at a standstill. Being data-driven is more lip service than a priority. Building step-by-step processes and getting resources to be data-driven haven’t been readily available in the marketplace until now. 5 - The top roadblocks to growth are usually blind spots. If an executive's career has been built around solving known problems, then unknown problems don’t go on the roadmap. You need an objective way to assess growth issues to build a 12-month growth roadmap broken into 90-day growth plans. 6 - While 2023 created an external factor for budgeting accountability, there is still rampant waste. Budgeting is done by line item per tool, service, ad channel, sales hire, etc. This misses the point of budgeting based on growth strategy vs ROI. It doesn’t fit the current model, so it isn’t done.  7 - Decision-making is done on the fly by smart and capable executives using experience, instinct, and guessing. Decision-making should be based on customer data, analytics, research, and experimentation to validate what works. 8 - Everyone in the industry wants to talk about positioning and differentiation, but where's the proof it’s being worked on? Analyze the websites of the top few players in any category. Step into a demo call with competitors. Look at messaging across ad channels. Everyone sounds the same, which makes it hard for customers to choose. It doesn’t have to be the case. 9 - There is little accountability on how much time is tracked per team member and what percentage is tied to growth-related activities. The picture of how it's measurably tied to revenue isn’t considered. Too much busy work and not enough focus on growth equals slower growth. 10 - The rise of Chief Revenue Officers hasn’t solved the issues with growth planning and executive alignment. I have been a vocal advocate since 2014 about the need for a unified role to solve GTM issues. I believe the industry is headed in the right direction, but some gaps still exist. 

As a revenue leader for a startup scaling to 10M in ARR, here are big wins from optimizing our customer journey over the past year: Marketing: 3x more leads – Conducted market research to pivot our positioning – Leveraged customer interviews to pinpoint our differentiation – Used various customer research methods to alter our messaging – A/b tested our website to improve lead conversions – Improved analytics for better insights for marketing decisions – Tested new paid channels and iterated on messaging to drive SQLs – Built and monitored financial models to target LTV:CAC ratio – Created efficiencies in sourcing partnership leads – Advanced from only 3 to 8 different marketing channels Sales: Improved pipeline metrics by 8-25% at every stage – Increased number of sales touchpoints – Incorporated multi-threading – Developed new sales enablement materials – Reduced time for each follow-up email or booked meeting – Created multiple pricing tiers to offer options for price-sensitive buyers – Altered contract terms, invoicing, and scoping language – Customized scoping to fit the startup phase – Implemented growth maturity assessments – Leveraged data and development team members during the sales process Customer Success/Retention: Increased retention from 9 to 15.5 months – Conducted monthly exec-level syncs – Made strategic improvements to Quarterly Business Review (QBR) structure  – Improved revenue attribution and financial modeling to prove our results – Set better expectations during the handoff from sales to onboarding on 12-month roadmaps – Tested dozens of changes in our onboarding process – Used upsells and cross-sells to get clients excited about the next quarter – Offered “free deliverables” with high perceived value that also improved results There are many more, but I wanted to showcase some strategies startups often miss. Scaling a startup is a never-ending game of continual improvement and incremental wins. Achieving triple-digit growth is about optimizing the customer journey at every touchpoint. #startups #tripledigitgrowth

10 GTM issues based on a detailed analysis of 350+ Series C startups: -- Silos across marketing, sales, product, and customer success -- Fragmented customer journeys due to business and agency silos -- Decisions based on guessing not research, analytics, and experimentation -- Lack of differentiation & positioning aligned with customer buying criteria -- Poor data collection, management, and activation -- GTM process, documentation, workflows, communication, rapid execution with iteration -- Struggle with growth planning and executive alignment -- Blindspots in identifying growth roadblocks -- Wasted budget reducing profit margins and slowing growth -- Distractions from maximizing focus, time, and effort on what drives measurable growth We conduct growth maturity assessments based on a 33-factor framework to pinpoint the biggest growth roadblocks for VC-funded startups. Getting into the weeds with executive teams across marketing, sales, product, and customer success is eye-opening. You start to observe patterns that can be translated into solutions to these recurring problems. Our services have evolved to solve these problems for fast-growth startups and the results are dramatic. Accelerating your growth rate by 25-40% is possible within a quarter, but only if you can assess the current state and build a 90-day growth plan that gets executed. #tripledigitgrowth

Never buy software on an annual contract when you can a/b test the functionality for free and measure the results. I have personally run over 5400 tests for clients over the last 16 years and one thing is clear… 75-90% of tools, softwares, features don’t actually increase leads or revenue. Here are a few examples: — search functionality — chat tools — website pop ups and modals — recorded demos — product recommendations — product filtering — discount codes — email capture — sticky banners — user generated content — reviews and testimonials — literally anything injected by JavaScript onto a website The software or app company has one primary purpose, which is to sell you a product. Their revenue and profit is ALWAYS going to be prioritized over your revenue and profit. This is apparent when we observe their behavior around how they market, sell, create pricing and structure contracts. Most things can be a/b tested quickly and easily. You can measure the impact and attribute leads and revenue, with a level of statistical rigor. The first step is to test, then analyze the impact before committing to paying. I have hundreds of examples of having clients sign up for free trials, adding the tool to a website and then a/b testing it during the free trial. If we prove positive ROI, then we decide if it’s more profitable to buy the tool or build it. This can save you tons of wasted budget and has various other strategic and technical benefits as well. It’s not intuitive and you won’t hear anyone else talk about these subjects in the experimentation space because they are too focused on copying competitors, best practices, and other silly notions. Most of the experimentation industry is out of alignment with you making the right decisions for your business and your customers. There’s a different way to approach experimentation. Achieving triple digit growth revolves around thinking holistically about your business strategy and comprehensively about the customer journey. #experimentation #tripledigitgrowth