Show notes
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.
From the conversation
What revenue marketing is and why it matters
Yaag Ganesh starts with a language gap. CEOs, CFOs, COOs and CROs talk about revenue and profitability, while marketers talk about demand gen and branding, which are intangible and do not directly contribute to the bottom line. In Yaag's view, a sophisticated MarTech stack, a large team or a big budget matters little unless a company knows what is contributing to revenue and profitability.
He does not say everything has to be tangible. A podcast like this one cannot be measured right away, but months later someone may connect with Mark and mention the conversation. Yaag says that kind of attribution can happen, though it is intuitive.
He also shares a framework called the GAME model, which stands for gather, agree, map and execute. It sits inside his Revenue Marketing Book, and the Kindle ebook is free. The goal is to lower the ratio between customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV).
"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, say, recurring revenue."
Building predictable ROI with small experiments
Mark asked how predictability fits into an approach where marketing is often an experiment. Yaag says predictability comes from running smaller experiments and seeing what comes out of them. His example is a company that has tried ads on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google. If the best return comes from LinkedIn, the company doubles down on that channel.
Once a company knows what works, it maps its strategy around it. It can then say how much contribution to revenue a given channel will drive and how that flows into the next steps.
On getting started, Yaag says to stay away from vanity metrics. A company does not need to buy more tools. Instead, it should audit the tools it already has, since many go unused, and map what it owns to outcomes that are as tangible as possible. He adds that people at trade shows often come to network and hear industry leaders, not to visit a booth.
"instead of betting on 10 different channels, you look at which channel is working the best for you."
Why B2B companies should start a podcast
Yaag cites about 650,000 active podcasts and says podcasting is going through the stage blogging went through between 2002 and 2010, when HubSpot was emerging. A friend of his, Christopher Lockett, told him a B2B company without a podcast is insane.
Yaag says a podcast needs a defined role in the marketing flywheel. It might feed the top of the funnel and demand generation, build the brand, or support account-based marketing. For ABM, a company can invite a decision maker at a target account as a guest and build a relationship in a non-salesy setting.
Mark adds that a podcast can be repurposed into blog posts, ebooks and social updates. Yaag mentions Descript for transcripts and editing, Headliner for audiograms, and video snippets from video recordings. He suggests starting with distribution, meaning who the audience is, where they are and which format suits that channel, and then working back to topics and guests.
"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."
Experiences with Clubhouse
Yaag had been on Clubhouse for ten or twelve days at the time of recording. A friend in Romania urged him to join, and the app's promotion leaned on fear of missing out. What he likes is that it is voice only, so nobody can come in prepared and every question or answer happens on the fly.
He sees it as an extension of his LinkedIn relationships. Connecting with people he already knew from LinkedIn was easy, and those people introduced him to others. He would like direct LinkedIn integration, since the app currently prioritizes Instagram and Twitter.
Mark finds Clubhouse random, with no schedule to plan around, and suggests it could become a podcasting platform where audience members raise a hand and ask questions. Yaag agrees. He treats the app like walking the hallway of a trade show and joining rooms that interest him, though a planned fifteen or twenty minutes can turn into an hour and a half.
"when we came out to Clubhouse, we could hear each of those voices and really put a voice to that opinion, and the conversation and the relationships got much deeper."
Personal branding as an international marketer
Yaag began in marketing around 2008 and 2009. He noticed that Indians were seen as tech leaders but rarely as marketing stars. He never set out to brand himself. The MarTech Top 100 recognition came as a result of his writing, books and speaking around the world.
He has firm views on how not to build a personal brand. One approach turns a LinkedIn profile into a bulletin board of company news, so the person never comes across as human. The other is the rags-to-riches template that so many people now copy.
His alternative is to pick a specific niche and own it. For a founder, that can attract the right audience and even the right investors. For a job seeker, it helps in finding companies that fit their worldview. Yaag says he could not see himself working in anything other than MarTech.
Mark agrees that people try too hard and that being yourself and offering value is enough. Yaag backs this with a story. In 2012, while writing a book called Is Your Marketing in Sync or Sinking?, he asked Chris, a CMO of a marketing agency in the Netherlands, for a 20-minute interview. It ran two hours, and it grew into a friendship and joint projects. Yaag still visits him once a year, except in 2020.
"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."