Revising your marketing plan on the fly

✍️ Outbound is harder than ever for B2B SaaS companies

UserEvidence relies heavily on a sales-led outbound GTM motion.

So back in May, I got this prompt from Evan and Ray (our two co-founders):

We need more pipeline. How can we generate pipeline more efficiently?

I came up with a list of new pipeline-generating ideas (big and small). In true B2B marketing fashion, I branded the presentation and started calling it Pipeline 2.0.

Every idea was guided by a relevant hypothesis, timeline, and estimated cost (in $$, time, and resources).

To my surprise, every idea was approved by our company’s co-founders. 

This leads us to today’s newsletter on how my ragtag marketing team of two full-time marketers (with agency and freelancer help) managed to execute everything we were already working on, plus ten more unplanned initiatives. 

Kidding.

We’re talking about how I had to speak up and tell our co-founders that the marketing team was already tapped out. It’d be impossible for marketing to execute everything we were already working on, plus ten more unplanned initiatives.

It involved another presentation — one more plainly titled, Q2/Q3 Marketing Plan: Updates, Experiments, and Trade-offs. 

No branding, zero fluff, and straight-to-the-point.

My revised six-month marketing plan

It’s really easy to get caught in a cycle of overpromising and underdelivering when you work in marketing.

Partially, because we’re good (in theory) at marketing the things we promise.

Also, we tend to operate with smaller teams, fewer resources, and leadership that can’t grasp how much time it takes to do what we do.

I’ve been in these situations. It doesn’t feel good, especially when you know that with a little more runway in any direction, outcomes could’ve been different.

That’s why my excitement over our co-founders approving all of the experimental ideas I came up with was short-lived and quickly replaced by overwhelm.

Even if we wanted to do everything that was suggested, we couldn’t — not with a previously agreed upon (and solid) six-month marketing plan already in motion.

So I pushed back and made a case for prioritization.

Starting with the wins

As I built the deck for our revised Q2/Q3 marketing plan, I made a point to open with our wins and the big in-flight projects we were already working on.

Positioning is everything. I felt that showing how we were executing, and that inbound metrics were headed up and to the right, would make it harder to abandon our original plan altogether.

I then laid out all of the original, new, and potential initiatives we were talking about due to the push for experimental ideas.

Visually seeing everything on one slide made it a whole lot easier to drive home the overwhelm and say, “Let’s be honest with ourselves and get clear on what our priorities are.”

Ending with the reality

Something to stress here is that I didn’t want to say no to adding more experiments.

I also didn’t want to move away from the plan we were executing on.

It just wouldn’t have been realistic to put all of our eggs in one basket of shiny objects and expect to hit our goals at the same rate.

In a way, I said, “No, but…”

I took the proposed Q2 OKRs (some revised, some original) and broke each objective down using the new projects.

Some of the initiatives were things we’d already planned for, some were new, and some were experimental. Everything rolled up to one of the Q2 objectives.

“No, we can’t do all of the proposed experiments. But we can do some.”

With a shortened list of experiments to focus on, we still had to make trade-offs — all of which I documented in the deck as well.

But coming from a place of compromise made the conversation more productive, the outcomes more tangible, and the possibilities more promising than originally projected.

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

• What’s Customer Evidence, and Why Your GTM Team Needs It—Customer evidence doesn't end with case studies and testimonials. Customer evidence goes much deeper, comes straight from your end users, and is verified by a third party (UserEvidence).

• Very Good Copy: 207 Micro-Lessons on Thinking and Writing Like a Copywriter—Remember how I said 2024 is going to be the year I read all the books I buy? I picked up Eddie Shleyner's new book over the weekend. Eddie's the best B2B copywriter around and I can't wait to read it.

• James Grant presents Movement Vol. 2—We'll see how much my B2B marketing and music worlds collide with this one. I'm listening to this set while I finish this edition of Evidently. I love listening to James Grant (and the rest of the Anjunadeep label) when I'm in focus or writing mode.

💰Opinions are cheap and proof is gold

In episode 12 of The Proof Point, Peep Laja, Victoria Sakal, and Ryan Sorley discuss why so many B2B companies overlook regular customer research and think it's something they only have to occasionally do.

My biggest takeaways:

• Just because you found a customer insight in the not-so-distant past doesn’t mean it’s still relevant or applicable today. Buyers and marketing conditions are constantly changing, faster than ever before.

• Qualitative research (e.g., customer convos) matters. Don’t over-index on the quality or accuracy of the data in your CRM

• Designing effective customer research starts with the approach. Victoria Sakal and the team at Wonder put together this helpful one-page resource to help you land on the right methodology.

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.