How to align marketing in the post-apocalypse of 2024

One simple step to accelerate your marketing leadership career in the post-apocalypse of 2024.  All you need to do is think like a CEO.

Every tech company’s magic number now needs to approach 1.5 to 2.0.  That is, booking $2 in ARR with a sales and marketing spend of $1.  That’s the efficiency you need to hit Rule of 40, and not burn cash as a business.

In companies with a sales-led motion, two-thirds of that spending needs to be in sales, one-third marketing.  Marketers that don’t realize this new equation will flounder.  The ones that do recognize this, will excel in their careers as they will be seen as strategic thinkers at the leadership table. How you do it is easy and it starts with an analysis of the business.

How to divide up your marketing budget in 2024 based on a 2.0 sales magic number

Find your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Segment your customers by industry, size, region, product.  Do the same math for your funnel.  There is a good chance of a misalignment between the funnel you are building and the customers you have won. Pick one or two ICP segments and ditch the rest.  This recorded webinar might give you some ideas.

Figure out Attribution

Analyze the last 50 deals in the ICP segment.  How did they get into your database?  How many touches did it take to move them to funnel?  How long did it take?  What was the conversion?  What was the source of conversion?  From that point what was the sales win rate.  This is important math.  You need to stop spending money that isn’t impacting deal flow.  You can still do testing and brand building with good content that doesn’t cost a lot of money.

Know your Sales Velocity going into 2024

Make sure you are entering the year with the deal flow that will support your booking targets in Q1 and Q2.  Calculating Sales Velocity is the best way to figure out if you have the funnel and momentum to hit the Q1 and Q2 targets going on the board right now.

Sales Velocity is a key metric for B2B Software companies

Now its time to get busy

Meet with your sellers who found success in that ICP.  Ask them what they need to take the win rate up 10 points.  This alone will make a massive improvement in your numbers.  Sure the sellers will have some dumb ideas, but most will be amazing.  You’ll hear things like more “give me more customer evidence, more industry events, better sales tools, better messaging, better landing pages, more leads”, that kind of stuff.

Meet with the ICP customers you have and ask them why they bought you and what value they got from their relationship with you.  Their language and words are important.  You need to parrot those words in your marketing. Also ask them what they read, listen to, and how they make decisions.

Call some lost deals and do an informal loss analysis.  Ask them what they are thinking about in 2024, what are their priorities.

Build a winning marketing program

Throw out all your playbooks.  They are too expensive to run.  Get back to basics with all your new found ICP understanding.  Build a marketing program that is right sized.  If your New Logo ARR target is $2M, based on the numbers above, your all up marketing budget should be $340K.  This is the scary part.  How do you build a marketing program for $340K when you are burning $700K.  Its possible.  First, rationalize the spend between programs and team.  In 2024, a software company booking $2M in New Logo ARR shouldn’t need more than two marketers.  Anything more is a luxury. You can outsource most technical and graphical skills for low costs these days.  So call that 50% of your budget.  You have $170K to spend.

Here is how I would spend $170K to get $2M new logo ARR

$10K – Better data.  And not service like ZoomInfo.  I’d get every single company in your ICP into your CRM.  To hit $2M ARR you probably don’t need more than 5000 companies and 10,000 contacts. I’d then research every single buyer.  Human curation is the best approach.  It shouldn’t cost more than $1 per contact.  So $10K is 10,000 perfect contacts.  Don’t worry about opt-in legislation, you’ll start hitting them with outbound which is well within spam rules.

$20K – Technology Stack.  That number includes CRM, Outbound Sequencing, Marketing Automation, and other data automation hacking tools like Phantombuster, Hunter.io, LinkedIn Navigator, and Walaxxy.  You don’t need to spend much more than this on sales and marketing tools.

$0 – Monitor Account Level Intent.  You don’t need to buy intent data.  Its garbage anyways.  But you can measure intent from the marketing work you do.  Most of this within your marketing automation and outbound sequencing tools.

$0 – Build Solid Outbound Sequences.  Write sequences for multiple buyer personas.  Sales typically needs a little help here.  There is a lot marketing can do to build great sequences.

$0 – Brand recognition awards.  Scour the “top company” awards out there.  Deloitte Fast 500, Inc 5000, Top this or that.  Submit for your CEO, CFO, and other roles in the company.  This stuff will never find you a lead, but will validate your company to would-be buyers, and also fills some of the communication gaps between your social and email programs.

$0 – Email marketing programs.  Package up your content into monthly newsletters for each buyer in each ICP.

$20K – Content.  Become a content machine.  Case Studies, Guides, Blog articles, participate in podcasts, Social posts, videos, weekly webinars, newsletters.  Anything you can come up with.  With limited team, even with ChatGPT and tools like Canva, there is only so much you can do so try to crowdsource as much of the SME type content as you can.  Your service, product, and support organizations are a wealth of knowledge.  Scour the support surveys to look for gems.

$20K – Overhaul your SEO.  Its not free.  Most companies don’t have the skills required to build out an SEO approach.  There are countless experts out there who can do the work for you.   Think $2K per page, one page per month.

$50K – Retargeting Ads.  Setup you audiences for retargeting.  Invest $5K per month across LinkedIn and Google platforms.

$10K – ABM Ad Strategy.  Load your engaged accounts and contacts into a targeted LinkedIn audience.  Pummel them with ads.  Use a low intent CTA so that we can double down on the retargeting as well.

$30K – Event or Partner programs. Build your own breakfast series, attend a big show, do whatever it takes to press flesh.  Buyers are sick of buying digitally, the future is 1998 all over again.

$10K – SWAG.  The team needs it more than ever right now.

Conclusion

We’ve been living in a dream world these past eight years.  Its not sustainable.  You have a job that needs to get done, but it needs to get done within the constraints that allow your company to survive.  This plan is a common sense approach.