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Driving ROI and Predictability with Revenue Marketing: Yaagneshwaran Ganesh
53 Plays4 years ago
Every company wants its marketing to drive leads, sales, and ROI.
But marketing can be an up and down situation. Sometimes, marketing works. Sometimes, it doesn't.
On this episode of the podcast, Yaag Ganesh talks about why revenue marketing is an approach that ROI and predictability.
It's about focusing on marketing that works and then developing structures and workflows to "shampoo, rinse, and repeat."
Yaag and I also talked about:
- The rise of Clubhouse and why he's been spending a lot of time on the audio-only platform
- Building a personal brand as an international marketer.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark
00:00:02
Speaker
You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 25 minutes or less. It's funny how you meet people. Yag popped up on LinkedIn last year when I noticed his posts.
00:00:17
Speaker
Then I checked out his profile, which starts with the top 100 marketing technologists. Now that's good marketing. Along the way we connected and commented on each other's posts. And then we both jumped on Clubhouse. Fair to say we've been circling each other for months. Hey, I'm super excited Mark. Thank you for having me here.
Understanding Revenue Marketing
00:00:38
Speaker
One of the places where I wanted to start is the concept of revenue marketing. This is something that you mentioned when we were preparing for the podcast. And to be honest with you, I haven't really heard of revenue marketing. Obviously we hear a lot about ABM, social selling, content marketing, social media. So maybe you can explain what revenue marketing is and why it matters for B2B brands.
00:01:01
Speaker
If you look at it fundamentally, the CEO, the CFO, the COO, and the CRO, they kind of speak the same language. In a sense, everybody's talking about revenue, they're talking about profitability, they're talking about pretty much what happens at the business level. But the issue is when it comes to the marketers,
00:01:24
Speaker
The language is totally different. We are talking about demand gen, we are talking about branding, we are talking about a lot of intangible things that directly don't contribute to the bottom line of the company. With that in context, it doesn't really matter how sophisticated your MarTech stack is, or how many people are there on your marketing team, or how big your budget is, unless you really know what is working for you and what is not, and what is contributing to the revenue, what is contributing to the profitability, etc.
00:01:51
Speaker
So, a lot of companies tend to spend big budgets that don't really contribute to any tangible results. Now, talking of tangibility, I'm not necessarily saying that everything needs to be tangible. This podcast that we are recording right now, it need
The Value of Podcasts in Marketing
00:02:06
Speaker
not be tangible. For example, you cannot measure the results right away, but a few months down the line, somebody might connect with you and say that
00:02:14
Speaker
Hey Mark, the other day you and Yag were having a conversation about revenue marketing and I found that part interesting. That's how I'm connecting with you right now and when I went back to your profile I saw that you are a fractional CMO and you are into this business. Marketing Spark is into this business. So I thought I'll connect with you and today we're having this conversation.
00:02:34
Speaker
That attribution can happen, but it is going to be intuitive. But at the core of revenue marketing, the idea is to move from outputs to outcomes, to be able to build that set of repeatable processes and programs that not only drive customer acquisition, but also more in terms of recurring revenue.
00:02:55
Speaker
The idea basically is to make sure that you are reducing the ratio between CAC, that is your customer acquisition cost, and the customer lifetime value, that is CLV.
Introducing the GAME Model
00:03:08
Speaker
I came up with a framework around this called the game model, which is G-A-M-E, stands for Gather, Agree, Map, and Execute.
00:03:18
Speaker
I've also written a book around this, which is called The Revenue Marketing Book. For the listeners of this podcast, if you're interested, you can hop onto Amazon and check out this book. If you have a Kindle, the ebook version is completely free. This is a broad overview of revenue marketing market.
00:03:36
Speaker
One of the things that I read about revenue marketing is the idea of predictable ROI, and that fascinates me because marketing in many respects is an experiment. You try different things, you leverage different channels, and ideally you get to predictable ROI. You know what's going to work and what's not. Can you talk to that concept and how you can build it into a revenue marketing effort?
00:04:01
Speaker
When it comes to predictability, it's all about running smaller experiments and trying to see what comes out of it. For example, instead of betting on 10 different channels, you look at which channel is working the best for you. For example, in terms of social media,
00:04:17
Speaker
I might have run ads on LinkedIn, I might have run ads on Facebook, I might have tried Google Ads. But if my max ROI is coming from LinkedIn, then I'm going to double down on that channel. So basically trying to see which one works the best and multiplying on that.
00:04:33
Speaker
So predictability is also in terms of once you've identified what is working for you, you go back and map down your strategy according to that. And you can say that, hey, through this channel, I'm going to drive so much contribution to revenue. And then this is going to channel down further into A, B, and C. So it's all about running experiments and finally narrowing it down to what is going to work for you.
Maximizing ROI with Effective Strategies
00:04:58
Speaker
So if somebody were to decide that revenue marketing was something that they wanted to embrace, how do you get started? Is it a completely different way of thinking? Do you have to use different tools? Do you have to use different KPIs and metrics?
00:05:11
Speaker
The fundamental is that you have to stay away from all possible vanity metrics. You don't have to invest in a lot of tools, but you probably have to. So one of the key things that I talk about in the revenue marketing book is also that you need to go back and audit the set of tools that you already have. In the sense, you might have invested in a lot of tools that you are not even using right now. So go back and check that. And say, for example, if you've invested in a lot of events, I mean, I'm talking pre-COVID.
00:05:38
Speaker
If you have invested in a lot of events, you need to actually go back and understand that people who come into these trade shows not necessarily come to visit your booth. They come there to network and they come there to listen to the people, the thought leaders that are there in that particular industry.
00:05:54
Speaker
From there, the point of view is that you don't invest on a separate set of tools, but you kind of streamline whatever you already have and try to map it to what's working. Try to map it to as much tangible outcomes as possible. That's great. And if anybody's interested in learning more about revenue marketing, I would highly recommend that you go to Amazon and get hold of YAG's book for free.
00:06:23
Speaker
So let's turn our sights to podcasting. You and I both have podcasts. I jumped on the podcast bandwagon last June. And one of the things that I kicked myself for is that I should have done it a lot earlier. The benefits of podcasting in terms of meeting people and prospects, the ability to generate new and evergreen content and just have fun in terms of learning new skills has made podcasting
00:06:47
Speaker
probably the best marketing channel that I've embraced in a long time. One of the questions that I wanted to ask you is just your take on how enthusiastically B2B companies are embracing podcasts. You and I obviously have a biased view of the world because we think that podcasts are great. Are B2B companies in fact leveraging podcasts? If they're not, what's the pitch for them to actually start doing a podcast?
00:07:12
Speaker
Two weeks back when I was doing a podcast recording with my good friend Christopher Lockhead, he said a very strong thing. He said, if you are a B2B company and if you don't have a podcast, you're insane. You cannot get more clearer than that.
00:07:27
Speaker
But if I have to break you the context from my viewpoint, see, there are right now about 650,000 active podcasts. I'm talking active podcasts, not just the millions of podcasts out there. What is happening in the podcasting world right now is it is going through the exact stage that blogging went through in and around 2009, 2010, when HubSpot was coming into the scene.
00:07:51
Speaker
So the way I look at it is you need to have a clear sense of purpose as to where podcast contributes to your marketing flywheel, whether it's going to be your top of the funnel and demand generation, or are you using it for brand building?
00:08:06
Speaker
Or is it going to be something that contributes to your ABM, that is, account-based marketing, where the idea is to build relationships with the people in your target account? Like, say, for example, if you always wanted to build a relationship with one of the decision makers in those target accounts, invite them as a guest on your podcast, build relationships, because the focus is on them.
00:08:27
Speaker
and you're talking to them in a non sales atmosphere. So that makes a lot of sense. So the fundamental point of view is you need to have a sense of purpose as to why you're doing your podcast. Otherwise, it becomes yet another channel where you're present and you're going to be one among the millions of podcasts out there. And it's not going to contribute to your bottom line or even your brand or anything in any way.
00:08:54
Speaker
I totally agree with you. And in fact, James Carbarri, who runs sweet fish media, suggested on a LinkedIn post a couple of weeks ago that all B2B companies are going to have a podcast at some point in time, just like all B2B companies have blogs right now. And I totally agree with that view.
00:09:11
Speaker
It's a complete no brainer for lots of different reasons many of them that you've talked about the other thing about podcasts for companies is the ability to take a podcast and repurpose it into lots and lots of different types of content whether it's blog posts ebooks social media snippets social media updates and the list goes on and on given the growing emphasis on content marketing you gotta look at podcast as being the engine for a lot of content and that's why i think
00:09:38
Speaker
most companies will find it impossible to resist having a podcast at some point in time.
00:09:43
Speaker
The opportunity, as you said, to leverage the podcast is way more in the sense like today, right now, we have too many transcript softwares. One of my personal favorites is Descript, which allows you to break down your podcast into a proper blog or a proper transcript. It also helps you in editing the podcast as well. It's a multipurpose there. Right away, you can cut it out into smaller chunks.
00:10:10
Speaker
You can use apps like Headliner and you can put out audiograms. There are multiple ways. If you're shooting it as a video podcast, then you can also put out video snippets. The idea is you need to think about, again, as I said earlier, you need to think about where you're going to use this, how it's going to contribute to your overall marketing plan, which part of the flywheel is it going to contribute to.
00:10:33
Speaker
And you start from the viewpoint of how you're going to distribute and then come down to the topic because you need to know who your audience is. You need to know where they are present and what format of repurposing makes sense in that channel. And then if you can map that to the set of questions and the set of topics that you prepare and the kind of kits that you get into your podcast, I think it all works backwards.
00:10:57
Speaker
That's
The Role of Clubhouse in Modern Marketing
00:10:58
Speaker
great insight. So let's talk about Clubhouse. You know, we've got to talk about Clubhouse. I've been on for about 10 days and spent some time, not a lot, experimenting, dabbling, hosting rooms, just trying to get a feel for the value of Clubhouse. There's a lot of people right now that are totally into it. They spend hours and hours listening and hosting rooms. I don't know where they at the time, personally, I'm busy with work and
00:11:25
Speaker
And when I do try to get on sometimes after work, my wife says to me, what are you doing? Why are you spending more time on the internet? I'm a bit ambiguous about Clubhouse right now because I'm not sure how to fit it into my professional world. To be honest with you, I've gotten so much value from LinkedIn over the last nine months. I'm really reluctant to start to dilute my digital marketing efforts. I'm curious about your experience with Clubhouse and
00:11:55
Speaker
What you're getting from it so far right so i've been into clubhouse for i would say now about ten or twelve days i guess i very recently lost my party hat which means i've completed a week or a little more than that and for me what happened was something that i really love about the way about was promoted was it was all around the form of the fear of missing out and
00:12:19
Speaker
I had one of my friends from Romania reach out to me and say that, yeah, you need to be on Clubhouse. The best of the best people are here. You get access to these people. You know, you can connect with them and it's very authentic and blah, blah, blah. And I came in and I was like, this is totally different. You know, I could not even go and DM anyone or
00:12:36
Speaker
ping anyone. It was all voice. So what I like about Clubhouse is that you cannot come in prepared. Right now, if somebody is into a specific room and they are discussing a specific topic, then whether you're going to ask a question or you're going to answer something, it's going to be on the fly. So it's not going to be rehearsed. It's always going to be authentic. That is something that I really love. And the second part is I see it as an extension to the relationships that I've built on LinkedIn.
00:13:05
Speaker
In the sense, it was a no-brainer for me to connect with the people here on Clubhouse with whom I had already built relationships on LinkedIn. So that helped. And through them, I also got introduced to many other people. But the best part is with certain people whom I've seen on LinkedIn for a long time, like say yourself, you and I have been interacting on each of these posts for a long time.
00:13:29
Speaker
When we came out to clubhouse we could hear each other's voice and you know really put a voice to that opinion and the conversation and the relationships got much deeper so this is one thing that i see as a straightforward advantage because as a person i'm all about building trust and relationships.
00:13:45
Speaker
but the other way around what i see is missing in clubhouse right now is you know they have prioritized instagram and twitter but i would love a direct integration to our connectivity to linkedin because that's where i see the maximum connect i mean what's what's your experience what is that you think you're missing out there.
00:14:07
Speaker
Well i agree with you that clubhouse is a great way to drive new connections and then to extend your relationships with people that you already know so there's a lot of people have migrated or are experimenting with clubhouse who i've connected with on linkedin and that in itself
00:14:26
Speaker
takes it to another dimension where you can actually hear somebody's voice. That's pretty awesome. The problem I have with clubhouse right now is it seems somewhat random. There's no TV guide to tell you that, for example, that a certain speakers will be hosting a room on Thursday at six o'clock so that you can actually set your schedule. Cause part of the problem is that I tend to dip in and dip out. There's something interesting. I listen, if not, then I don't know what's going on. So I think I'm missing out on a lot of conversations.
00:14:55
Speaker
Like I don't know where kleppos is going to go. I don't know where they're going to make money. I don't know where the, what the secret sauce is going to be. But one of the theories that I have, and I wrote about it earlier this week on LinkedIn is that clubhouse could emerge as the next great podcasting platform.
00:15:11
Speaker
right now podcasting is essentially me talking to you or a single person talking and it's a very sort of one dimensional medium we produce this podcast we broadcast it there's no interactivity there's no q&a there's no participation by the audience what i see could happen is that clubhouse could evolve into a podcasting platform where you and i could talk and then somebody from the audience could raise their hand and ask a question
00:15:38
Speaker
And you can create this really dynamic conversation club house would allow you to do two things one is that you could download record and download the conversation and then edited and produce it and publish a podcast or clubhouse could do that all by themselves and i think that would be probably a lot of work and they probably can scale that kind of thing so i think the latter the former is gonna happen people let you record and download a podcast for a fee of course
00:16:04
Speaker
That's how I see Clubhouse really catching fire aside from the conversations. What are your thoughts about that?
00:16:11
Speaker
Right. I totally agree. And the second part here is that when it's a pre-scheduled meeting as well, in the sense that does not work for me the same way it would for a Zoom call. For instance, the way I approach Clubhouse is that, say, for example, I treat it as I'm walking into a trade show. And when I look at the hallway, there are different topics, different rooms where they're discussing different topics.
00:16:36
Speaker
And I look at it and I feel, okay, if this is a topic of my interest, I jump into that room and there are two things that happen. Either the topic has to be relevant to me or the set of people in that room need to be a set of people that I already know or people that I think are relevant to my business.
00:16:53
Speaker
so i get in and then look at the conversation yeah from there on it goes the way it goes but but one thing for sure is that once you get into a room it's like you never know how much time you're losing you know i i plan for about like 15 20 minutes and suddenly i realized that we have lost about like say almost an hour an hour and a half.
00:17:14
Speaker
It's great. I'm in the same boat.
Building Authentic Personal Brands
00:17:16
Speaker
One of the things that I wanted to ask you is about personal branding. I want to talk a little bit about that. As far as your own personal brand on LinkedIn, to be perfectly honest, I don't come across a lot of Indian marketers. There are obviously some amazing Indian software companies, but not so many Indian marketers with your profile. So maybe you can talk a little bit about your own personal branding experience and why we don't see more Indian marketers
00:17:44
Speaker
with a high profile on linkedin and then your general thoughts on on personal branding. Right so you're so right in the sense like you know when i was when i was getting started in the world of marketing in and around two thousand eight two thousand nine i saw that a lot of people look at indians as tech savvy people like you know the the ceo of an adobe or the ceo of microsoft or the ceo of google are all indians
00:18:10
Speaker
We've never noticed somebody who's a star from the marketing side in India. So that was always there at the back of my head, and that's why I started spending more time on social media or trying out a lot of things that were in my area of interest. In a sense, I was never interested in the proper IT management or tech tech side of things, but I was always interested in marketing. So marketing and tech kind of married together. That's how MarTech came into my landscape.
00:18:39
Speaker
But honestly, I never tried to brand myself into something. In fact, the LinkedIn, sorry, the Martek top 100 came in as an effect of what I was doing and say writing books or be speaking around the world. All of those things happen naturally. So, you know, I would say what started as me being a natural person doing the things that I do, it worked out positively.
00:19:05
Speaker
But when it comes to personal branding, I do have a very strong opinions in the sense like how people need to approach it. In the sense, most of the people who are there on LinkedIn, what they do, for example, is their posts are more like a news board of what their company does. For instance, they will be talking about things like, hey, you know what, my company acquired this company or this product, or we are launching this new product.
00:19:31
Speaker
And you just become that bulletin board. You don't come across as a human. You don't come across as a person that people want to connect to.
00:19:38
Speaker
And that said, there's also the totally opposite spectrum. You know, you see this template where everybody goes on to this Racks to Riches story, which goes on something like, I was a shit and I did X and suddenly became a hit. And you can also try this if you see a fit, blah, blah, blah. So that template is kind of boring people to death because almost everyone has started to use that. And that, in my view, is not how personal branding needs to be done.
00:20:07
Speaker
You need to go about developing expertise on a very specific domain that excites you to the extent that you can have opinions about. Be known for a specific domain. Be known for a specific niche. You start owning the niche. And then what happens is if you are a founder,
00:20:23
Speaker
then it helps you in attracting the right kind of audience or probably even the right kind of VCs because they go by, they invest on the people than just on the product or the concept. And similarly, if you are a job seeker, again, it's not about the company, but if you establish a niche or if you carve a niche for yourself, you can start looking at companies that fit your worldview and set up products that you would represent into.
00:20:50
Speaker
For instance, I can never see myself working with an insurance company or working with an IT management firm or anything other than Martek because this is what I relate to. This is what I can have my strong opinions about. This is where I am feeling that this is my home. I think that's what is fundamentally more important when you go about establishing a personal brand.
00:21:12
Speaker
To be honest with you, when it comes to personal branding and I read a lot about the value of personal branding and how to do it, I don't really think about it. I just do what I do. So when it comes to LinkedIn, for example, I post, try to post insightful, useful content on a regular basis. I'm not trying to sell my, my services. I'm not trying to promote my.
00:21:33
Speaker
the successes that I'm had. I'm not there to sell. What I'm there to do is establish a presence to build trust, to create new relationships with people. And that builds my personal brand. That allows me to be more authentic, to be more real and for people to connect with me. And I think that's the key to personal branding is I think people try too hard. They think that there's a method to the madness when in fact, I think it's just a matter of being yourself and trying to offer value to other people.
00:22:02
Speaker
Absolutely. To give you a quick story around this, way back in 2012, I was writing a book called, Is Your Marketing In Sync or Sinking? Every time I write a book, I always strongly believe that it's not just my opinions that matter, but I go about interviewing a lot of people around the world who have been there and done that.
00:22:21
Speaker
cast those stories or lean into their experiences and put it into the book. It so happened that I connected with a guy called Chris in Netherlands who was a CMO of a marketing agency there. He gave me a 20-minute appointment which went on to become a two-hour conversation. Fast forward six months, he hosted me at his home. We became such good friends. He took me to the Chamber of Commerce. We started
00:22:42
Speaker
working together on a lot of projects together. And to this year, I visit him at least once a year and spend about 10 days there, except the 2020 season. So yeah, I really believe that, as you said, it's all about being yourself and building those honest relationships. And don't really look for a transaction while you start. If something happens where you end up working together on something, well and good. But at the end of the day, it's all about building that relationship and that trust.
00:23:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's great insight.
Connecting with Yag and Further Resources
00:23:15
Speaker
So where can people learn more about you and what you do? You know, after my house, I give the most time I spend on is LinkedIn. So people can just my name is little unique. So the moment people type in YAAG, it's a I'm hard to miss.
00:23:30
Speaker
And apart from that, people can also hop onto the ABM Conversations podcast. We are a one-year-old podcast, but we managed to quickly become among the top 1% B2B marketing podcasts in the world. So if you're interested in this domain, catch up with us there as well.
00:23:48
Speaker
Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about YAG, visit marketingspark.co. If you'd like to suggest to guests or learn more about how I help B2B and SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, consultant and advisor, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.