B2B Software Company - Ready to Step on the Gas
Yield’s client is a Software company that sells its SaaS and payments solution to SMBs. The company had raised a total of $20MM in 3 rounds and was experiencing solid, but slowing growth. They were exploring options to explore their digital marketing efforts to complement their sales efforts, but were frustrated with the “off the shelf” solutions presented to them by traditional digital marketing agencies.
The client engaged Yield because of our holistic approach to growth, starting with an “outside in,” data-driven foundation that helps prioritize segments and actions. They also had a strong desire to develop internally the technical foundation and processes and were attracted to Yield’s “build to own” philosophy.
“Pop the hood, let’s take a look”
Like all of Yield’s client engagements, our relationship with this client began with our GTM Diagnostic, which consisted of the following:
- Customer segmentation and unit-level economics by cohort
- Comparison to market-wide data and growth attributes
- Competitor and customer search analysis
- Review of the Buyer Persona and the related journey with marketing, sales and product
- Gap analysis of revenue tech stack and related data flows
- Attribution structure and related reporting
Because Yield is given direct access to data and systems, we were able to execute a significant amount of work with little disruption to the small marketing team and completed this stage in less than 45 days.
Yield used the results of the Diagnostic to build a prioritized sprint plan for the next 90-day project; which included the following:
- End-to-end focus on the “lower-middle” tier - our analysis revealed that the ICP in terms of sales velocity, product fit and size of market was the “lower middle” tier (based on employee size). Rather than spread efforts across multiple segments, we advised going end-to-end with an integrated marketing and sales effort on this segment.
- Buyer-driven and search powered website - in this industry, search is a powerful driver of exposure. The next sprint therefore included a revised website architecture and content that was repositioned for buyer problems/solutions v. product features, especially for the targeted segment.
- Testing across various paid digital channels - we incorporated a marketing sprint planning process to clearly define each test and the measurements of success. We outlined the elements required for attribution and a prototype measurement system to track performance.
Phase 1: Building the Prototype
In order to ramp up testing messaging across channels and buyer stages, we developed an attribution tagging model that was simple to use but scalable. We also utilized existing technology to construct a prototype reporting structure to quickly deliver multi-channel and down-funnel performance reports to enable the team to iterate quickly.
Tested channels included Google Ads, various social channels and several software advice sites. Thanks to our rigor on attribution and performance reporting, we discovered that one of our most promising sources was an under utilized industry channel partnership.
Phase 2: Expanding Marketing and Sales Automation
The pivot to the channel required an expanded set of competencies and integration of marketing and sales automation, as this channel consisted of thousands for semi-independent representatives, each requiring their own landing page and client follow-up. To do this effectively at scale, we needed to design an integrated system.
Marketing Automation - utilizing Pardot by Salesforce (their existing tool), we developed landing pages that could be populated dynamically with information relevant for each territory rep, enabling us to properly tag and attribute submissions. We also designed a triggered drip campaign based on variables associated with our ideal customer profile.
Sales Automation - the influx of higher quality, later-stage leads from the channel partner was going to create a responsiveness issue, so we needed a way to effectively qualify best-fit candidates. We worked closely with the client to build out a small sales development function, utilizing software and telephony tools to automate the routine functions.
Warehouse-Driven BI Reporting - in order to deliver a full-funnel view of performance, we needed to pull and join data from multiple systems. We therefore designed a “lite” version of a reporting stack that eliminated the need for the teams to export data and build spreadsheet-based reports, enabling much more timely responses to the market based on data.
Results
The combination of bottoms-up, market-based segmentation and accelerated test and learn cycles for marketing and sales delivered results. In no more than six months, our Client saw one record sales month after another, realizing the benefits of focus, integration, alignment and transparency across the funnel.
To see some of the frameworks and tools we used in our work, check out our Go-to-Market Resources section.
