Are Your Marketing Needs Defined?
Something to Think About
Three meditations: something to think about, a “how-to” resource, and a marketing deep dive. Ommmmmm.
Whatever your area of expertise… master it.
"How To"
Should messaging be standardized for SDRs/BDRs?
Recently a client asked us about managing messaging for their BDR team.
How much should this be standardized and how much should the team be free to say whatever they thought was best? Was requiring certain language protecting the brand? Or was it needless micromanaging?
I’d like to share the advice from CMO Zen cofounder, Jordan Harris:
Okay here are my thoughts.
The BDR/SDR role should be expected to be your highest turnover sales job. Either from promoting within if you are growing, or from your BDR/SDRs outgrowing the role and looking for opportunities elsewhere.
This is often the position in the sales team you are onboarding most frequently.
The problem with not standardizing the message is that your BDR team is as good as the people, and not as good as the process. Meaning when your good BDRs leave, they take their ability to run the engine with them.
From that point of view, I want the BDR team to have some level of standardization around them. That standardization should probably look like
- Typical cadence of outreach
- Templates for different standard emails (Prospecting sequences that are pre-made, meeting reminders, missed meeting emails, leads that have gone cold follow up, event follow up, webinar follow up etc)
- Standard KPIs that we have benchmarked from multiple BDRS (Calls per days, emails per day, expected reply rates, meetings book rates etc).
If you have those things it gives you the ability to drop a new BDR into the process and significantly shorten their ramp time.
When it comes to protecting the brand, I agree the (BDR) email snippet you shared is off-brand.
Part of the BDR standardization needs to be onboarding and training and a big part of that is how to talk in the [Company’s] voice. You’d like the interactions to be more professional when speaking to customers.
BUT (and it’s a big but) you want to strike a balance of protecting the brand yet not killing their creativity and personality. Sometimes a BDR can bring their own creativity and strike a chord in a way that hasn’t happened before, and you don’t want them to just be robots. You want to encourage that creativity within an acceptable box.
A good place to start is having them read the website, social media, and maybe a few emails. They will get familiar with the brand voice and start to internalize that we are friendly, approachable, but professional.
To sum it up, you want your BDRs starting from a standard playbook then adding creativity and customization from that starting point.
If you aren’t already, I would connect with and follow John Rosar on LinkedIn. I’ve worked with him in the past and he is awesome on the “Science” of the SDR/BDR team. Sam Nelson from Outreach is also great.
A Marketing Deep Dive
Understanding Your Marketing Needs
As companies come looking for marketing help, I’ve noticed some patterns.
At CMO Zen we address these needs with different types of engagement.
Whether you’re considering solving your marketing problems externally, internally, or some mix of the two, I think these are helpful.
And you may think you already know all about your needs.
But MANY clients come to me with one type of engagement in mind, and later realize they need something different.
Here are the five categories I’m seeing most often.
- Advisor/Consultant. They’re missing strategic advice, guidance, or coaching OR they are looking for access to resources, frameworks, or connections to providers in their network. They don’t need help with implementation and execution
- Project/Assessment. Typically a short-term engagement for a specific project or objective. It can lead to a longer-term arrangement, but doesn’t need to. It’s commonly a diagnostic project such as a go-to-market assessment, a tech stack or content audit, or even a generic marketing effectiveness assessment. The goal is to discover or deliver a specific thing. A few examples are: a branding workshop, a messaging exercise, or building a marketing plan.
- Go-To-Market (GTM). Often this is what companies need, but don’t know it. In the past GTM was code for sales. Today, GTM is a cross-departmental exercise in nailing down the fundamentals of getting a company or a product launched into the market. It often includes validating the customer, product, message, and channels as a prerequisite to building a repeatable marketing motion. Because it’s foundational, gaps here often hamper marketing efforts until they are resolved.
- Demand Generation. Gimme the leads, baby! If you have moved beyond founder-led sales and hired sales reps, you’ve got mouths to feed. Attempting this if your GTM isn’t buttoned up will only lead to pain and frustration, so make sure your core is validated. If you need funnels mapped, conversion improved, and qualified prospects for your sales team, this is you. Managing a paid ad budget, fully fledged content programs, event strategies, and workflow automation are typical here as well as scaling the repeatable motion you defined in the GTM stage.
- Interim CMO. Maybe more of an fCMO thing, when a full-time CMO has left or been fired, companies need an Interim CMO to step in and keep the wheels on the bus until a full-time replacement can be hired. It’s common for this engagement to include reporting relationships with junior team members and insertion into the senior management team.
It helps to be self-aware about a few things here.
What is your appetite for experimentation? Marketing is almost always a process of discovery. Experience helps remove the risk that experiments will yield poor or unhelpful results, but it can’t eliminate it.
Does the budget include room for additional vendors, resources, and service providers?
If the marketing team or outsourced fractional CMO and the CEO and internal leadership are on the same page about these variables… everything gets easier.
Until next time… namaste.
Chad Jardine, CEO
CMO Zen
