What to do when leadership wants “more experiments”

✍️ What to do when leadership wants “more experiments”

People generally have good intentions when they throw around the word experiment in the B2B marketing world.

Wanting people to innovate and try new things makes sense—especially when other channels and tactics have grown stale.

What doesn’t make sense is experimentation without realistic expectations. And a plan.

So when our co-founders, Evan and Ray, approached me about experimenting with new channels and motions to generate pipeline more efficiently, I put together a pitch deck.

My goal with this approach was to:

• Propose a mix of ideas: some that could potentially generate immediate pipeline, and others that might take a bit longer to see results
  

• Make it clear that exploring new approaches wouldn’t be just a task for the marketing team: some would require more resources and a whole organizational shift

To my surprise, they loved all of it—the structure, the ideas. Maybe a little too much? More on that later.

But first, the deck.

My pipeline 2.0 marketing plan

At the end of the day, I was being asked to come up with ideas that’d help generate pipeline.

That was a crucial piece to hone in on and ladder our experiments up to.

If you’re being asked to do something, understanding the why goes a long way in making good on that ask.

I broke down ideas into categories: demand generation, influencer marketing, product marketing, and content marketing. 

Each of the experimental ideas were then dissected further on their own individual slides with:

• A hypothesis: what I believed would be achieved by the experiment, tying back to the overarching goal of generating more pipeline

• Activity/output: actions we’d need to take to make the experiment successful

• Resources needed: people we'd need to make the experiment successful

• Success metrics: how we’d measure success

• Timeline: when the experiment would start and how long it’d take

• Cost: the financial resources needed, if known

Here’s an example idea from the deck (on the house, of course):

At the top of each page, I then noted my “conviction” since not all ideas in the brainstorming phase are created equal.

Also, I come up with every excuse I can find to use Dali in our marketing.

Setting expectations

Outside of taking a scientific approach to how the experiments were presented, one of the most important things I did with this presentation was at the end.

I left time for talking about my concerns. Because let’s be real:

As an already-swamped marketing-team-of-two, I had plenty of ‘em.

Mostly time and capacity. But also, you want to make sure that when people green light experiments, they actually want to see them through.

Especially if you’re going prioritize them over existing plans and goals.

Trade-offs need be made and everyone needs to agree on them upfront before veering from what you were already planning to do.

What to do when leadership says “let’s do all of the experiments”

Remember when I said that Evan and Ray liked my presentation a little too much? Yeah.

They pretty much said yes to all of my ideas. It was flattering but overwhelming.

In response, I created another presentation for a revised six-month marketing plan.

It took into account the plan we’d already been executing on and how it’d need to look moving forward with a bunch of new experiment ideas on our plate.

More on that follow-up meeting next time.

🤓 Stuff I’m learning (and digging) right now

• Our full platform interactive demo—Huge shoutout to Alex Eaton and Jason Oakley on this one. We've started adding more interactive demos to our site (thanks to our friends at Navattic) with plenty more on the way.

• The Marketing Scientists —I try to avoid listening to too many B2B marketing podcasts by design. It helps me get out of the echo chamber. I've been loving Paramark's new show. The format is great and the branding is even better.

• The Gap and The Gain—I tell myself every year this is going to be THE year I read more books. I buy a bunch and never get around to reading them all. This is one of the books I actually read recently and loved it.

💰Opinions are cheap and proof is gold

In episode 11 of The Proof Point, Andy McCotter-Bicknell, Clara Smyth, and UserEvidence's very own Alex Eaton schooled me on competitive intelligence and why CI is so much more than battle cards.

My biggest takeaways:

• It's crazy to me that so many B2B companies think a single function (product marketing or CI) can own such a big, cross-functional metric like win rate.

• Product marketers and CI practitioners don't have much control over how deals are won or lost. But they can impact how confident internal teams are.

• The best CI practitioners think bigger. They spend time just as much time on customer intelligence as they do researching direct competitors.

Listen to it on Spotify or Apple, or watch it on YouTube.

UserEvidence, who?

UserEvidence is a customer evidence platform that helps B2B marketing teams generate verified proof points that credibly prove the value of your product.

Using custom surveys at key moments throughout the customer journey, you can capture case studies and testimonials, as well as competitive intelligence, product stats, and ROI data.

Turn happy customers into your best sellers with UserEvidence.