Transcript
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Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Speaker: I'm your host, Michael Millward. In this episode of The Independent Minds, I'm talking to Tamara Chiffman, the practical marketeer, about what marketeers can do when their marketing activities have worked, but sales have plateaued.
Speaker: Tamara is the author of the DIY Marketing Playbook. Tamara is based in Budapest in Hungary. I have visited Budapest in the middle of the winter.
Speaker: It was, I think, what is described as romantically cold. If the opportunity to return in summer is ever presented to me, I will be sure to use my membership of the Ultimate Travel Club to book my trip because Membership of the Ultimate Travel Club gives me access to trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays and all sorts of other travel related purchases.
Speaker: I have added a link with a built-in discount to the description so that you can become a member of the Ultimate Travel Club and just like me travel at trade prices. Now that I have paid some bills it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds. That will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to, and probably good enough to share with your friends, family and work colleagues as well.
Speaker: As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we will not be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think. Hello Tamara. Hi, hello. Thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure and I am looking forward to this conversation because I know that your area of specialty in marketing is software as service providers. And Abusida provides software as a service. So I will be listening very attentively to your answers because I want to learn about this. and Fantastic. thick i appreciate that. Please could we start, though, by you telling us a little bit about your career history and how you ended up becoming the most practical-marketeer.com.
Speaker: Yes, yes, it is. Yes, it is. The practical marketer without the hyphen was taken. actually read a study that mentioned that if you're using two words in your website name, if it's a logical name, like if it's a two words that make sense separately, hyphen actually makes it more memorable. Interesting point.
Speaker: Originally, when I started working in marketing, I was working as a copywriter. It all changed one day when I realized that there's this entire world hidden behind the curtain. And I started learning about what marketing actually is, dropped the copywriting for pursuing something a little bit more meaningful and deep. That was probably 17 years ago. So for the last 17 years, I've been full-time in marketing. For the last year and a half, I have been working as a consultant and as an interim head of marketing for companies that are trying to get out of their growth plateau.
Speaker: Great. Let's talk about like what a growth plateau is. How would we know that we are in a growth plateau? It's a good question. The the growth plateaus are not necessarily one size and there are very ah different types of the growth but those that happen within one company's life cycle. And I know that we constantly talk about interesting statistics, for example, 90 something percent of companies are not going to make it through the first year and the the numbers are even bleaker ah now in the age of ai
Speaker: But we very often forget to look under the hood and and find the reasons why these companies are actually disappearing from the face of the the market. When you say that, are you meaning that a sales plateau, a growth plateau can actually result in the end of an organization, at the end of a company? Absolutely. Absolutely. Because there there are small growth plateaus and there are big growth plateaus.
Speaker: Okay. So let me let me try to to give you a story. Okay. okay we like a story One of the companies that i worked with, they have been spinning in cycles, trying to figure out why they cannot increase the number of sales that they're making through throughout a year.
Speaker: When I joined, the reason that they have told me is that they have hit the plateau. They had a very strong competitor and those things were absolutely true. But once we started looking under the surface, there were certain things that we found are actually misaligned with like reality.
Speaker: So one of the things is, yes, they couldn't necessarily close enough sales, but that wasn't the the primary primary problem that they were facing. They were actually churning more kind customers than they were bringing in.
Speaker: So they had negative growth that was definitely not stemming from just the problem with the intake of new customers. And when we started looking into this further, we actually found that there was a panic at the top of the funnel that expanded the top of the funnel, meaning that the type of the people that the marketing started bringing in, in order to increase the number of leads that that that can be then increased. handed over the sales team, in order to increase that number, they have actually started using channels that turned out to be very bad quality of leads that either didn't convert or have converted but not lasted within the platform.
Speaker: So because they have hit the growth plateau and haven't understood or haven't spent enough time understanding where exactly the growth plateau happened or what kind of plateau they have have been hitting, they had this knee jerk reaction where they, and this is very common, where the first thing that they do is kind of focus on opening the top of the funnel. And that actually diluted the the type of leads, the type of audience, the results, everything down the line, and actually increased the number of churns heavily. in And of course, that led to even more panic because now Plateau has actually started to to be a downturn, not just the Plateau.
Speaker: You can be signing up new customers, but you're losing existing customers. Mm-hmm. So you're actually a sales plateau. That was not what I was thinking a sales plateau would be, but I can see exactly what you mean.
Speaker: And sales plateau could also be that you've expanded the sales team, but you haven't increased your sales as a result of expanding your sales team. And you so your overheads have gone up.
Speaker: Yes. The actual revenue level hasn't. Oh, right. So it's interesting because a lot of these problems are hidden and very often people who are in the seats, right? People who are working with the companies right now, they are so deep in this that they can't necessarily see the obvious sign. So in these cases, where when you're hitting a plateau and can't really figure it out, instead of trying something on your own, um in your own fashion, or the first thing that you think is broken and try to fix it, it's very...
Speaker: much worth your while to bring in an external consultant than it can be anyone from operations to marketing to sales. It really depends on what the the primary instinct is telling you. But it's very common that people who are in the plateau right now are actually not recognizing the the reasons why the plateau is happening.
Speaker: Yeah. So I think we've both got experience with those types of organizations where there are new customers coming in. but And that's what people focus on with one new business rather than, oh, these companies are leaving.
Speaker: And that can be the reason why you your sales plateau or it is just easier to identify, well, we've got no new customers this month. That's easier to identify. But if you've got new customers, it's easier to forget about the ones that you're losing.
Speaker: so Exactly. I'm getting the feeling that the solution to these issues are not necessarily require more um recruit more sales people or do more marketing activities that there's got to be something else up your sleeve about this sort of the solution yes what is what is it what is it go on tell me So I think that this is tied to ah the question that you asked me and I failed to answer is how exactly I became the practical marketer.
Speaker: I think that the switch happened when I stopped working for companies that are predominantly sales led, meaning that their sales motion is the way that they are getting new clients and started working with companies that are predominantly product led or hybrid where the intake is happening mostly through self-serve. And the growth and and the sales is actually happening somewhere after the fact, usually when they have already outgrown the the basic offers of the basic plans, et cetera. So when you start working in this product-led environment where you're very usually with ti button with tight budgets and and luckily a lot data because you' you're working directly with the product teams,
Speaker: you start seeing a very different picture than when you're working with companies that are sales-led alone, unless they have a brilliant CFO who's going to really, really insist on data transparency and actually understand the data infrastructure. And that's when I realized that when you are working with product-led companies, when you do have this ah beautiful, new, fresh set of data data, one of the things that become obvious is the initial sales, the initial purchase,
Speaker: is very far from the end of the story, just the beginning of the story. When you look at, for example, why companies churn, the reasons are very often found in initial sales conversations.
Speaker: That kind of makes you start thinking, okay, so why is this happening? Why is there such a huge discrepancy between how we are selling a product and what the product actually does for the the customer.
Speaker: The truth is that there is no room for fluff in product-led growth. The fluff that I'm mentioning is usually something that is going to come through on sales calls where you People need to convince the buyer to buy the tool versus the buyer is seeking out the tool and already has a conviction and is just window shopping for the right one. So without that ah motion of having a human to convince another human, you have to make sure that your messaging and positioning and but website information, your your entire marketing engine, Needs to be based on facts, needs to be as clear as possible, needs to communicate the end value very clearly and effectively. And it all needs to be done before the person even hits the start the trial button. So because of that, I found this new platform.
Speaker: way to brand myself, which is a practical marketer, because I do truly believe that everything that I'm putting out there is very practical. I'm very anti-fluff, but it also is the reason why I'm good at figuring out these growth plateaus is exactly that because I go in with zero assumptions And I go in with a scout mindset. When I say zero assumptions, it's sure the surface level information is telling us that maybe this channel is producing high number of leads, but I'm not assuming that those leads are good or bad. I need to see the the results down the line. Where I find the problems is typically when you approach with the sco scout mindset, which is I could be wrong.
Speaker: So let's see. yeah Then it it actually leads to really, really meaningful and deep conversations with companies. when When you talked about mindset, then how are we describing the mindset? Scout mindset.
Speaker: A scout mindset. So you're going out and looking. to see where the issues are. Exactly. We also talked about different types of problems as well. What are the types of problems that create this sales plotter? Absolutely. There are four different types of problems that are very, very common.
Speaker: Usually companies fall into one or multiple buckets. So first is that the acquisition channels have just ran out. They dried out, they ran out of steam. So something's happening at the top of the funnel that is preventing more highly qualifie qualified leads to come into the pipeline.
Speaker: The second bucket is that the activation is not really leaking. So I'm in software. Activation is incredibly important. That's essentially what happens after the person signs up when they're starting to use the product. They need to experience the value of the product to have so-called aha moments. It's never one moment. It's multiple moments always that give them the reassurance that this is the right tool for them. If the activation is not happening, the churn is almost imminent.
Speaker: And then the the third bucket is that the retention is all hope and vibes where retention is just left without much love, where there's no education or no effort to surface lesser known features or just keep in touch with the existing user base or customer base.
Speaker: And the fourth and the biggest and the kind of the overarching problem is the problem where ah actually positioning needs to be revisited because the company might have lost completely or slightly has an offset product market fit. That's a very, very big one to to explore.
Speaker: Which of these four issues is the the biggest, the most difficult to actually to actually deal with? It's a good question. it It depends on the scale of the operation and how much internal ah help you have.
Speaker: in terms of how how your teams are structured, who's in the ownership of certain elements of these buckets. So can a marketing team lean on the customer success team, vice versa, to fix some of these issues? so So let's say if the team is actually very well stacked, has very talented people, I would definitely say that the biggest issue, and not not the hardest to...
Speaker: to solve It's not the the most difficult issue, but it is the most impactful issue is definitely the positioning element or loss of the product market fit. It takes time to do well. It requires everybody who's involved in the process to ah shed all of their assumptions as well.
Speaker: It requires people to shed egos before walking into the room where this these conversations are being held because it requires a lot of sometimes painful introspective into where the misalignment is happening and why.
Speaker: The big football team close to where I live is Leeds United. And Leeds United has had a checkered history in terms of results and there have been periods of great success periods of real low real devastating pain real pain must be said now there was the glory years of the don rabbi era when they were lots of trophies all these trophies are in this uh on display at the stadium and
Speaker: the players would walk in past all these these trophies that they had won. Now, those players all went on to other things and retired and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker: And then things didn't work out quite so well. And then a new manager came in and said, you know, took all the players along to where all the, this is the folklore. I do not know whether it happened, but it's the folklore.
Speaker: And took all the players along to this corridor that they walked past. every day and said, you know, there's all the all the the trophies that have been won. But there weren't won by you.
Speaker: So we're going to take them out of these cupboards and you'll walk past empty trophy cupboards. Ah, nice And what you're saying is that you work for a successful business or you did. The reality is that you're no longer the successful business that you thought you were.
Speaker: Exactly. But... you are still operating as if you are the the successful business that you once were and you've got to understand that it's not like it was and you've got to pull things together and there are companies that i've worked in which i now you've made me realize that's what they were and um but that means united's story seems to drive it home a bit powerfully that you can You can look at the trophies when you vote them. Yes, yes, exactly. And I love that, love that analogy. And I think it's very true. And I would say that companies that have hit the plateau, they can very often just remain as successful as they were.
Speaker: But the problem is that the lack of growth is over time going to start creating a gap between them and the competitor in the market. Because if they're not improving or growing at the same rate as it would be expected in that specific market, that's where the problems are going to continue to pile up and to really drive it home with another football analogy, smaller teams can't overspend Manchester United. So Manchester is always going to have a bigger and better and more dangerous team.
Speaker: So that's exactly what happens kind of with small companies there there's ah or companies that have plateaued is that they need to figure out very fast where the issue is and what opportunities they're missing.
Speaker: Otherwise, they are at risk of being outpaced by their competition or an alternative way of doing things in the market forever. So once the gap starts becoming very large, if the other company doesn't or the the main competitor that you have in the market doesn't also run into a similar poto and slows down, it's very, very, very hard to catch up.
Speaker: You're making me think of my HR professionals head on now. I'm thinking another football analogy. Every year in the FA Cup in in England, we have giant killer teams who come from the lower divisions and beat those big teams and go through the various different routes.
Speaker: And that reminds me of the World Cup in Germany when Sven-Jørgen Eriksson was the England manager. and he'd gone off to Germany with a team full of stars.
Speaker: Some of the biggest names in world football were in the England team, but they were beaten by smaller teams. And the analysis at the time was, know, we got all the stars, but we hadn't got a team.
Speaker: the plateau of sales be, well, that idea that the salesperson or the person who developed a product looks back at the product that they developed, looks back at the big order that they brought in, doesn't actually think about the future and starts thinking that they're a little bit bigger and better than other people. So they stop working as a team and that makes it easier for someone, an organization with less money, less resources,
Speaker: to actually come in. Exactly. Because they're all operating on the same in the same way as a team. And you actually just touched up on something super important that I wanted to to highlight. is that very often if you do have a sales team in the company, and and I very often joke about product-led companies being lucky that they're actually sales-free for a while until they establish a lot of the things.
Speaker: When you start off with having a sales team, very often the the actual closure of the sale is always attributed to a salesperson.
Speaker: And the way that it's how things have been done in traditional sales led companies in software and tech in the rest of the world forever. But the problem here is that we still have these very obsolete, really dinosaur type of compensation packages or comps. that are given to salespeople when they're starting the company where they are actually given ah additional bonuses or their salary depends on the size and the type of contracts that they are closing.
Speaker: And they're worried only about the closing part. So they're willing to very often kind of go a little bit outside of the brackets and potentially push a bigger client into into the company than what the company is ready to take. So there's a misalignment between goals of the company and those of a salesperson who is depending on that compensation.
Speaker: One of the the issues that have been the most consistent things that I've been brought in to to fix is actually exactly that. people believing that the sales pipeline has dried up, where in fact, the the way that sales have been pushing, and I love sales, not to to sound like I'm dumping on them. I absolutely love them. you know But the the main problem is very often that sales pushing for certain things to happen is very often the the reason why the baseline misalignment happens deeper within the company, why we lose the site of churn, why we lose the site of activation, et cetera, because the, the composition kind of shadows over it. So in companies where this initial threat of sales kind of murking the water with potentially high tickets, but not necessarily great fit customers, uh, like product-led growth, for example, that area is, is the.
Speaker: the best place to start looking at. If you are a company that's stuck in the growth plateau, you can actually look at it and say like, this is not the sales plateau. This is a growth plateau.
Speaker: And I need to look at not just the acquisition and the cost, the, the, the actual closure of the account, but I need to look at all of the aspects, the the intake, the deal making, the activation, the retention, the prolonged the use usage of the app, the churn, why is churn happening before you make any single decision about where exactly your focus needs to be.
Speaker: There are some very practical steps in everything that you've been describing. It doesn't feel as if it's actually a very easy process. Because I think the first part of that process is involves a lot of self-examination and self-assessment of the situation that you're actually in. Yes. And when you when you' are used to being successful in an organization, i think that isyic that is about a lot easier to say than it is to do.
Speaker: Absolutely. I think that but if if you can't afford or for some reason, compliance reason, can't really bring somebody in to help you look at the growth plateau.
Speaker: you can still do a lot of things that can help you move towards this this resolution. So even if you are not in a decision-making position, which is very often the the case with, for example, marketing teams or product teams or growth teams, you can still do some things to start preparing the grounds for analyzing the growth plateau without getting the egos involved. So the first tip that I would give here is that you can make sure that your tracking is in place.
Speaker: Make sure that you are tracking the the intake, the the channels, the the quality of the activation, the churn. So make sure that the analytics is in place and tracking all of the good stuff. If you don't know where to start, you can start with creating some points ah that you can consider conversion points and you can have like macro conversions that are anything from signing up for a free trial to actually purchasing the product to clicking the the cancel button. So those can be the macro conversions, but you can also pepper a lot of micro conversions throughout the the user interaction or buyer interaction, which could even be as simple as visits to specific pages on the websites or the types of support pages or registering for a webinar or downloading a podcast or whatever it can be. It it can be very, very useful. And once you start ah collecting these, then you can actually look at them over a period of time. Very often when you are just entering a growth plateau, it takes you between a two to three months, I would say, to to get enough data that you can actually start making decisions upon depending on your volumes within the app, on the website, etc. And I would say, look at it for an entire quarter. If you're not sure, if it's not super obvious where the problem is, sit down, look at it or so collect the information for an entire quarter and then very purposefully go through the results and scrutinize everything as this was the data that's coming from a different company and not your own. So no, no emotion, no emotional attachment and no ego involved.
Speaker: Interesting way of summing up. Look at your business as if it's not your business. ah It's a great, great idea. Tamara, it has been really interesting. and i do thank you very much for your time. really great. Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you. Thank you for having me. This was a lovely conversation. Yeah, I've enjoyed it and learned a lot. Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind Tamara Chutman who is the practical-marketeer.
Speaker: You can find out more about both of us by using the links in the description. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me If you have experienced technical challenges whilst listening to this episode of The Independent Minds, you'll want to know that 3.0 has the UK's fastest 5G network with unlimited data.
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Speaker: Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think. Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.
