In some ways, marketing is a simple business. Three in five digital marketers say their biggest challenge is generating traffic and leads. And if you were to ask them the same question a decade from now, they’d probably give you the same answer.

But in other ways, marketing is incredibly tough. Although the objectives may be similar, the means at marketers’ disposal for achieving them are constantly changing. What was innovative last year is standard practice this year; what works today may not work in six months’ time. 

That’s why it’s vital for marketers to keep a finger on the pulse of current and future trends. With that in mind, here’s my rundown of the 12 most important B2B marketing tactics for 2021, and all the reasons you can’t afford to ignore them.

Strategy #1: Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

As a marketer, your natural instinct is to focus on bringing in as many leads as possible by using different lead generation strategies. The bigger the number, the better you’re doing, right?

Not necessarily.

With account-based marketing (ABM), you’ll concentrate instead on targeting a specific set of accounts – say, a group of senior buyers at a company whose business you want.

ABM makes salespeople’s lives much easier, because you’re creating content and campaigns that are specifically targeted to the prospects you’re chasing. No wonder, then, that one in ten marketers who’ve adopted ABM say their primary motivation was to drive closer alignment between sales and marketing

But why should you be so concerned about the relationship between sales and marketing

I can categorically tell you that it’s not just about building a happier office. Companies with aligned sales and marketing teams:

Strategy #2 Customer Pain Point Research

74% of the B2B business buyers spend over half of their research time online, which doesn’t come as a surprise.

Market research is a high growth zone for B2B businesses, and as a seller, you need to actively engage on those platforms and adapt to the buyer’s needs. 

When it comes to researching the pain points, you should aim to answer questions like:

  • What pain points were shared by the prospect?
  • What did the prospect like/dislike about the product?
  • Why did the prospect turn down the product?
  • What can be done to prevent the prospect from turning down the product?
  • Which competitor did the prospect compare our product with?

Sounds overwhelming? Nothing to worry about; it’s quite simple.

One of the best ways to answer all your customer pain points questions is through an online survey. 

Using an online survey tool like Qualaroo, you can easily embed surveys into your website or social media platforms and start collecting valuable data from the B2B buyers about their pain points. You even get the ability to conduct exit-intent surveys where you can survey the leaving visitors through smart pop-ups and probe the reason behind them not completing the purchase. 

Once you identify these pain points, you can easily make necessary changes to your products and services and also tailor your marketing messages for much higher effectiveness.

Even the data from American Express suggests that the business consumers in the US are 17% more likely to do business with a company that delivers excellent services. 

Strategy #3: Word of Mouth

There’s an obvious reason for the longevity of word-of-mouth marketing – it works.

According to McKinsey, it’s the primary factor behind 20 to 50% of all purchasing decisions. That’s huge. What’s more, it has a key role to play at all stages of the user journey – from initial consideration to the moment of purchase – and in both mature and developing markets.

But word-of-mouth marketing isn’t just about doing your job and hoping happy customers will refer you. You need a plan, whether it’s rewarding referring customers or providing a email template that makes it easy for them to do so.

Aside from generating more sales, there are two other compelling reasons to introduce a referral program:

  • It shows you’re confident enough in your product or service to invest in the program in the first place.
  • It’s just good, common sense. After all, some customers will need a nudge to refer you, even if the service you delivered was world-class.

Strategy #4: High-Value Long-Form Content

We all know how effective content marketing can be. According to some estimates, it delivers three times more leads than outbound marketing, and costs 62% less.

But not all content is created equal. Specifically, long-form content delivers much better results than short-form content. In fact, longer posts are nine times more effective at generating leads.

However, that doesn’t mean you should start writing 3,000-word articles and immediately expect to see results. Too often, marketers take a “write it and they will come” mentality to content creation. But up to 70% of B2B content goes unused. That’s a waste of time, effort and money. 

In short, content marketing should be about creating high-value pieces that make a direct contribution to your sales efforts. Think case studies, webinars, product demos, B2B marketing videos and anything else that targets the pain points of specific prospects.

It’s also worth using resource lists and pain-point content (such as service/tool review content related to problems) as a key source of traffic for B2B lead gen.

This approach really works, with the average buyer viewing five or more pieces from the winning vendor before deciding to make a purchase.

If you want your content to keep driving leads over time, make sure to consider SEO. Optimize your long-form content for keywords that have some level of commercial intent. You can use Ahrefs or Semrush to check search volumes and keyword difficulty, or check which search queries your competitors are getting traffic from. Your content efforts can compound over time, and continue generating leads long after you stop working on it.

Strategy #5: Email Marketing

Just a few short years ago, the web was full of articles proclaiming the death of email marketing. But it’s back with a bang. Indeed, it’s been shown to be the most effective digital marketing tactic, with a median ROI of 122%.

But good email marketing is about much more than sending a few messages and waiting for the leads and sales to come pouring in. 

To do it properly, you need to be segmenting your email lists. Segmentation is nothing new, but its adoption is still staggeringly low. In fact, 42% of marketers admit they don’t send targeted email messages, while just 4% use layered targeting.

If you’re one of the many marketers who hasn’t started segmenting their email lists yet, consider the following. Compared to non-segmented campaigns, segmented email campaigns enjoy:

  • 14.3% higher open rates
  • 10.6% higher unique opens
  • 101% more clicks
  • 4.7% lower bounce rate
  • 3.9% lower occurrence of abuse reports
  • 9.4% lower unsubscribe rates

If you want to excel at email marketing, then you should utilize a professional tool like Mailchimp and email marketing automation tools. While it is the most popular tool, remember that there are many Mailchimp alternatives that you can try, depending on your requirements.

In addition, if you are doing B2B email marketing, you might want to consider a more B2B focused tool like Hubspot or alternatives. In any case, using a good email marketing tool like NotifyVisitors can boost your email marketing results multifold.

Strategy #6: Building Authority Through Thought Leadership

Again, thought leadership – in other words, offering expert opinion on issues relevant to your field – is nothing new. But as a marketing technique, it’s more effective than ever. 

Thought leadership is a viable approach for any number of business types and marketing strategies, but it’s particularly powerful for reaching the power brokers within target businesses. 

According to LinkedIn and Edelman, 58% of decision-makers consume between one and four hours of thought leadership content every week. Further, 47% of C-suite executives say they’ve offered up their contact information after reading thought leadership content.

Surprisingly, while buyers clearly engage with and enjoy thought leadership, vendors are yet to be convinced. Indeed, just 39% of sellers say they believe thought leadership can assist with their lead generation efforts.

From a marketing perspective, the sooner brands wake up to the benefits of thought leadership, the better.

Strategy #7: Guest Posting, Speaking and Influencer Marketing

It might seem that these three disciplines are quite different. But they share a common theme – leveraging the authority of third parties to promote your own brand or product.

Done right, all three can be especially effective when it comes to growing your business, because they take advantage of external platforms – whether a website, event, or social account – that already have a bought-in audience. 

For instance: 

Given this final stat, it’s hardly surprising that almost two-thirds of marketers planned to spend more on influencer marketing in 2019. Expect this upward trend to continue next year.

Strategy #8: Employee Activation

I’ve seen countless brands that claim to be doing employee activation, when in reality they aren’t.

Let’s be clear. Employee activation isn’t simply asking your employees to blindly share a bunch of press releases or blogs. That’s better described as employee advocacy.

Employee activation goes far beyond that. It’s about leveraging your engaged workforce to organically create and share content that’s of genuine interest to them.

As with word-of-mouth marketing, employee activation – or at least the full benefits of it – won’t be achieved by sitting back and waiting for it to happen. Instead, you’ve got to create a formal program that actively encourages employees to get involved.

So why should you bother?

Simply put, your employees have the power to seriously amplify your marketing efforts.

On average, a company’s employees have ten times more connections than the company itself. What’s more, employee re-shares have a click through rate that’s 2.1 times higher than the original company post.

You can motivate employees to help marketing and spread the word by offering them simple company merch like t-shirts, custom notebooks, or backpacks.

In other words, if you want your message to reach more people, your employees hold the key.

Strategy #9: Marketing Automation

According to McKinsey, 45% of activities that employees are currently paid to perform could be automated, while 60% of all occupations could see a third of their activities automated.
But let’s be clear: marketing automation isn’t about saving money. By automating repetitive tasks like email marketing and social posting, you can reap real benefits in terms of sales and leads. Check out Finteza for automated funnels. It is also a good idea to remove clutter to make your marketing automation effective and cost efficient.

Perhaps most significantly, automation holds the key to creating personalized customer experiences. Almost half of marketers are using automation to bolster their personalization efforts, second only to customer journey mapping and A/B testing.

So why should you care? Because people love personalization. One in three customers say they wish the buying experience could be more personalized, while just a fifth say they’re satisfied with the level of personalization they currently receive.

Importantly, there are no shortcuts here. Customers are savvy; they can easily differentiate the token gesture from the genuine attempt to improve their buying experience. Just 8% would be encouraged to engage with a brand that addressed them by their first name, and only 7% would be likely to engage with a birthday email.

Strategy #10: Paid Media

Unless you’ve been buried beneath a fallen overhead projector for the past decade, you should be well aware of the benefits of paid media, whether via search or social. But if you still need convincing, consider the following:

Just as importantly, organic – or non-paid – activity is becoming increasingly ineffective. Organic search click-through rates are continuing to decline, while organic impressions on Facebook and LinkedIn have dropped by as much as 90% in recent years.

The message here is clear: you just can’t afford not to be running paid activity in 2021.

And there’s another key component to paid media strategies – retargeting. Brands are already using it for a range of reasons, from customer acquisition to raising brand awareness.

The benefits of retargeting are clear. Retargeted customers are three times more likely to click on an ad, while 26% of customers will return to a website after being retargeted.

Strategy #11: Event Marketing

It might seem like an old-school tactic, but event marketing will be just as relevant in 2021 as it ever has been before.

In an ever-more-digital world, the advantages of building personal, face-to-face connections have never been greater. So it’s hardly surprising that a majority of marketers believe event marketing is the single-most effective channel, according to one source:

Why should event marketing be such an integral part of your promotional efforts? Simply put, it helps businesses to close deals. Indeed, 52% of business leaders believe event marketing delivers greater ROI than any other channel or tactic.

So what sort of events should you be running? According to Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, the most popular types of hosted event are:

  • One-day conferences
  • One-day seminars
  • Product training sessions
  • Business or channel partner events
  • Thought-leadership workshops
  • VIP meals

Start small when it comes to event marketing. Focus on forming relationships and offering value to attendees, and build on your successes as your event marketing skills grow.

Strategy #12: Growth Hacking

Growth Hacking is the process of designing and running experiments to optimize and improve results across the full marketing funnel from acquisition to retention and beyond.

So how to start with these techniques?

Utilizing a combination of marketing tactics, data, creativity, and specific tools to help execute fast is key.

Every tool implemented and every technique developed should be informed by the desire for growth. In terms of the right technology, lots of tools, like Chrome Extensions, or Gmail add-ons can help in executing these growth experiments successfully.

Strategy #13. Deal Scoring

A lot of B2B sales reps use their experience as the guide when negotiating deals. And while the salesperson instinct is an important part of the equation, you should be using deal scoring as well.

Deal scoring involves using data and analytics to better understand the true value of a deal to the business. It creates transparency around effective pricing and negotiation tactics based on previous comparable deals.


By using deal scoring, teams can get 20% better ROI on their deals. It also creates better Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). After all, there is more to a sale than the price. 

You need to take into account:

  • Long Term Business – Does this customer have the need and the budget to use your service for several years, or just a few months? The timeline makes a big difference in bottom line profit.
  • Time Required – There are some accounts that take minimal maintenance whereas others become a service headache. There’s a real price to “problem accounts” that pay the same amount as others while requiring 3x the hassle.
  • Increased Brand Awareness – It goes without saying that earning a “whale” client comes with benefits beside the pure revenue. Being able to promote your partnership with big companies creates huge social proof.

And more.

The good news about deal scoring is that you likely already have the data available somewhere in your records or CRM. It’s just a matter of compiling it and making it available to sales reps in real time situations so they can use it as a guide when negotiating with prospects.

Strategy #14. Educational Selling

Educational selling has become a must in a landscape where information is everywhere but insight is becoming harder to achieve. According to Forrester, 68% of B2B prospects today prefer to research information online by themselves.

That means companies in the B2B industry need to put themselves in an advisory role. Creating meaningful content and sharing data with your customers upfront will go a long way in educating — thus convincing them — on the value of your product.

But educational selling goes a step further. Once you’ve hopped on a sales call with your prospect, you need to keep providing information and value. It’s highly unlikely you’re speaking with the only decision maker on the deal.

Research shows that 63% of purchases involve more than four people. You must view yourself as a trusted advisor — like a doctor or lawyer. Give advice to your prospects and teach them about the benefits and advantages of your product.

This approach of educational selling will help you get buy-in from others in the company. When you finish talking with your prospect, they can take the information you provided and sell their peers on your product as well.

Strategy #15. Follow Up Scheduling

If there’s one thing B2B sales reps hate more than anything, it’s following up. After all, it’s not as exciting as prospecting or sales presentations. But the reality is that most deals are not going to get closed on the first call.

60% of prospects will say no four timesbefore finally saying yes. Yet for some reason most salespeople never follow up with anything more than an email saying “have you thought it over yet?”

The reason is that they don’t have a plan in place. What they need is a schedule. Let’s say you had your sales call on July 1st. In that case, a followup schedule that includes at least five followup attempts could look like this:

  • July 8th – Send followup email
  • July 12th – Make followup call
  • July 15th – Send another followup email with relevant industry statistics
  • July 21st – Send LinkedIn message with a video reviewing key benefits
  • July 28th – Make another followup call, and send a handwritten letter

Having a simple roadmap removes the friction to performing follow up. And it ensures you’re playing the numbers by doing the minimum amount of follow up to close a deal.

Bonus Strategy: Conversational Selling and Live Chat

Live chat is often incorrectly pigeonholed as a way of dealing with complaints. 

There’s no denying that it’s an extremely effective customer service channel. In fact, 92% of customers say they’re satisfied with their live chat experiences – a higher proportion than any other communications channel.

It’s hardly surprising that customers love live chat so much. After all, it’s the fastest and most comfortable way for them to get a response to their queries.

But live chat is so much more than a customer service function.

With a little effort, your live chat function can be one of your most potent and productive sales channels. Visitors who use web chat are 2.8 times more likely to convert than those that don’t. What’s more, they’re likely to spend 60% more on their purchases. You can quickly set up live chat on almost any website or landing page with live chat software. All you need to do is sign up and customize the chat widget and then install the code or plugin the software gives you and the widget will appear.

Conclusion

The B2B industry continues to undergo significant change. As companies move away from in-person sales strategies, leveraging technology and data is the new way forward.

But offering unique value in a sea of competitors has become more challenging than ever. The B2B sales strategies above focus on using personalization, data, and systemization to enhance your sales process at every step.

The end result is clear: creating more brand awareness, education, and value than anyone else in your space. When you can do that, and maintain discipline while executing on the sales fundamentals, you can grow your revenue faster than you think.

What are you hoping to achieve with your marketing efforts in 2021? And how do you plan to do it? Let me know in the comments below:


One thing you learn from running multiple businesses is the importance of people working from the same playbook. 

Too often though, different departments get entrenched in their own goals, methods, and tech. This lack of common direction can negatively impact your business in many ways, and at the very least, it’s probably holding back your revenues. 

If you want your business to achieve more consistent growth, you need to align your go-to-market teams — that’s where where Rev Ops comes in.

What Is Rev Ops?

  • By focusing on Rev Ops, you can align the work of these individual departments to create greater transparency, accountability, and predictability when it comes to revenue. 
  • Concise summary of Rev Ops.

Revenue drives businesses. This simple fact might lead us to think that companies have dedicated teams that deal only with maximizing revenues, but it tends not to work out this way. 

Instead, most businesses have lots of different departments that all take slightly different approaches to generating revenue. The three main ones are sales, marketing, and customer success. Each aims to increase and ensure revenue, but they each do so in a slightly different way. 

Rev Ops is about bringing your revenue-generating teams together in a more efficient way to drive predictable growth. It does this by bridging the gap between these teams and ensuring they’re working in unison to achieve shared goals. 

Too often, sales, marketing, and customer success teams become silos, each with its own methods, goals, and technology. By focusing on Rev Ops, you can align the work of these individual departments to create greater transparency, accountability, and predictability when it comes to revenue. 

As Chilipiper puts it, “RevOps focuses on determining the most important tools and strategies to grow revenue, eliminating silos between departments while prioritizing efficiency and accountability among teams.”

The Goals of Rev Ops

As the name suggests, the end goal of rev ops is all about revenue. And to achieve consistent, predictable growth in revenue, you need to ensure organizational efficiency on a number of levels. 

For example, when businesses achieve proper alignment between marketing and sales, studies show that it can lead to a 208% increase in marketing revenue. To make such a big jump, you’ve got to break things down into smaller chunks, and these goals can help you do that.

High-Level Goals 

Rev Ops aims to inject three key principles into the business structure:

  • Transparency
  • Accountability 
  • Predictability

A business needs to work as a unit. It needs to have an organizational development process in place to guide the growth and efficacy of a business. Each department has its own skills, but they fit into a bigger picture of business success. If there isn’t clear top to bottom communication and a sense of transparency, it’s easy for these departments to become silos — not harmonious cogs in a machine, but unruly appendages.

As Lighter Capital notes in its series on “Silos and Turf Wars,” “different departments fight for budget dollars, headcount, and control over direction, seemingly intent on winning no matter the effect on the overall company.”

When there isn’t oversight and transparency (clearly defined strategies, shared information, etc.), then it’s natural that revenue opportunities are going to be missed. This is why there has to be a level of accountability. 

It’s no use if departments lack accountability to the business as a whole. It’s too easy for sales to blame marketing for not giving them high-quality leads and marketing to say that sales isn’t converting as they should be. Instead, there needs to be a sense that everyone is responsible for all aspects of revenue, and this is where your Rev Ops team can make a big difference.

When you take away these silos, you create predictable revenues through optimized processes and improved collaboration.

Mid-Level Goals

You don’t just put a Rev Ops team in place and magically see improved transparency, accountability, and predictability. Instead, you’ve got to enact change on a more micro-level, and this should center around three areas:

  • People
  • Data
  • Processes

You have to convince your people that they’re on the same side. In worst-case scenarios, employees can become very entrenched in their departments, seeing others as competitors rather than collaborators. 

If you can align people around shared strategies and goals, then it opens the door to greater collaboration, where data can be efficiently shared and processes unified. 

Think about it from the view of the customer: 

  • You see an ad you like so you call the number.
  • You get through to marketing and they take a few details and promise a sales rep will call you back.
  • Marketing and sales don’t use the same software, so the information you told the marketing team hasn’t been properly relayed to the sales rep.
  • You’ve got to repeat the same information again for the sales rep to give you a bit more information. 
  • You buy the product, but because the sales rep wasn’t intricately familiar with how the product worked, it’s not quite right and you have to speak to customer support. 
  • Customer support hasn’t been updated by either marketing or sales, so you’ve got to go through the entire process again. 

It sounds familiar, right? 

That’s because this is something that’s happening all the time and it’s hurting many businesses’ revenues. As Diane Magers, CEO at CXPA states, “organizations will have to rethink how work gets done. Organizational alignment will be most critical – both internally and to the market and customer expectations.”

Organizational change is possible and there are different ways you can get sales and marketing working together in particular.

Why Is Rev Ops Important?

Businesses have been split into distinct departments for as long as you can remember, so why the change all of a sudden? Since the turn of the century, the world – and consequently business – has changed a huge amount in a short space of time. 

The Buyer Journey Has Changed 

The way people make purchasing decisions has changed, and the way businesses operate needs to adapt to reflect this.

You don’t walk into a shop, speak to a salesperson, and walk away with your product anymore. Instead, customers do a lot more research and their customer journey can involve a blend of online and offline touchpoints with your business.

Modern customers also put a greater emphasis on experience. It’s not just about what you sell and how much you sell it for – it’s about how you do it, and this asks different questions of businesses. 

Likewise, the types of products that are sold have evolved. We see many more subscription-based sales today, and this is evidenced in things like SaaS.

All of this has challenged the traditional divisions between sales, marketing, and customer success, and it’s a big reason why there’s been a huge increase in revenue-based roles within businesses.

The Rise of Software 

Software plays a big part in modern life, and businesses can’t function without it. One of the problems is that there’s so much choice out there.

Whether it’s sales, marketing, customer support, employee onboarding or any other area of business, there’s a whole world of different software to choose from. This can be overwhelming for businesses, and can lead to different departments using different (completely disconnected) tech stacks, limiting collaboration.

This is where Rev Ops can play an important role. Taking responsibility for software research and decisions, ensuring each team is working efficiently, but also in unison with one another. 

A World of Data 

It’s said by some that data is the most valuable commodity in the world. It’s certainly very valuable to businesses, but the problem is, if you don’t know how to use it, then it’s just a burden.

One of the problems when your revenue-generating teams become siloed is that they’re each collecting their own data and taking their own insights, but they don’t ever get passed down the line. Each team is looking at different data, getting different insights, and drawing different conclusions, and this generally isn’t beneficial to your business as a whole. 

Your resources might be going into collecting and interpreting the same data three times over, so you need a way of unifying these processes. 

What’s Needed to Implement Change?

Before you begin to implement change, you need to get the buy-in of key stakeholders. Teams can become very entrenched in their silos, and you need to be able to change this way of thinking. They might not seem like big changes, but it does require a shift in mindset throughout your organization. 

Here are some additional steps to take:

  • Get agreement on shared metrics by which you can judge performance.
  • Build trust between teams.
  • Understand what tech stacks offer the most benefits to the business.
  • Create a change management plan.

These changes won’t happen overnight, and people will take time to adjust, but a Rev Ops team will be there to oversee gradual progress.

Rev Ops Areas of Responsibility

To build transparency, accountability, and predictability, Revenue Operations needs to take responsibility in the following areas. While you might have people within these departments who are already responsible for many of these functions, it’s hard for them to take the big picture approach that’s needed in Rev Ops. 

Operation Management

This is most closely related to the processes part of Rev Ops goals. It’s about managing resources to ensure that results are closely aligned to targets, and putting the processes in place that will allow your teams to maximize their efficiency while not losing sight of the overall business goals.

This area includes:

Enablement

This is where Rev Ops relates specifically to people. It helps guide the culture of your business (emphasizing the collaboration between departments) and ensures that employees have the skills and resources they need to get the most out of their work.

This area includes:

  • Onboarding
  • Coaching
  • Professional development
  • Training

Insights 

Insights are all about making sure that data is being maximized to achieve success in all revenue-generating departments. You need to make sure you’re collecting data in the right way, that you’re taking the correct insights from it, and that the information is being shared across the business.

This area includes:

Tools 

Rev Ops should take responsibility for ensuring that you’re using the right technology throughout your business. Your departments may need specialist tools, but it’s important to have a focus on how each one fits into the business as a whole, which a Rev Ops team can help manage.

This area includes:

  • Evaluating tech stacks
  • Integrating technology
  • Systems administration

Benefits of Rev Ops

Putting a Revenue Operations team in place to oversee these responsibilities benefits the whole business. If different departments are all pulling in separate directions, it’s not just going to damage your revenues, but it’s also going to put a strain on the culture of your business. 

As small business expert Keir Thomas-Bryant says, “silos of any kind can destroy businesses from the inside out like a kind of rot.”

Rev Ops can help streamline your company, creating better alignment between departments, allowing you to exceed customer expectations, and facilitating better long-term strategic planning.

Improved Alignment 

When key departments fail to work together, it’s going to lead to inefficiencies at best, and potentially much worse.

Rather than operating as individual silos, Rev Ops allows sales, marketing, and customer success to work more collaboratively to grow revenues. This means there’s an extra layer above these three departments that pulls them all together, taking a wider view to enable them each to function more effectively. 

As a result, the goals and strategies of each department will more accurately reflect the aims of the business as a whole, rather than just individual targets.

Meeting Customer Expectations 

I mentioned changing customer expectations as one of the key drivers of Rev Ops job growth, and this is a big trend with the modern consumer (80% of customers consider experience to be as important as products and services).

Your customers don’t care that someone works in marketing rather than customer service; they just want a solution to their problem. The line between sales and customer support (particularly with SaaS) is becoming increasingly blurred. In some fast-growing businesses such as Zapier, every staff member does customer support, which shows how interconnected these departments are. 

This is a recognition of how important the customer experience is. Every touchpoint needs to be positive, but if your key departments aren’t on the same page or setting the same high standards, this isn’t possible.

Rev Ops doesn’t necessarily call for this level of integration, but it does call for alignment in order to exceed customer expectations.

Better Long-Term Strategic Planning

Long-term strategic planning is essential for any business. Likewise, each department needs a clear idea of how it’s going to achieve its goals and contribute to the overall strategic plan. However, if there’s no coordination, then you end up with four or five plans and everyone working from a slightly different playbook. 

Rev Ops enables businesses to factor in the specialist needs and objectives of each department while aligning them with the long-term strategic plan for the entire business. These departments can’t exist in isolation, and your business planning has to reflect this. 

With a dedicated Rev Ops team, it’s easier to apply strategies across the three departments so that you maximize their individual strengths, but allow them to build off of each other’s work.

Key Metrics

So, Rev Ops sounds like a good idea. Everyone wants predictable revenue growth, and clearly, it’s beneficial for your revenue-growth departments to be working together.  

But how can you show that Rev Ops is actually having the desired effect and driving predictable growth? Revenue Operations has responsibilities in large chunks of your business, so there are a lot of different key metrics it can affect:

  • Forecast accuracy – Actual sales within a specific time compared to forecasted sales
  • Pipeline velocity – The speed at which leads move through the sales pipeline
  • Sales cycle time – The average time taken to close a sale
  • Win rates Percentage of leads turned into customers
  • Cost of customer acquisition – The average cost of acquiring a customer
  • Annual recurring revenue – Total value of subscription revenue
  • Renewals and upsells – Percentage of customers who renew subscription or are upsold
  • Customer churn – Percentage of customers who stopped using the product within a certain timeframe
  • Customer lifetime value – Average value of a customer over the lifetime of the relationship

These are all metrics that should benefit from improved alignment, better customer experience, and long-term strategic planning, so a successful Rev Ops team should be looking at these KPIs at the very least.

When Is It Time for Your Business to Embrace Rev Ops?

Rev Ops is a fairly simple idea. You create a team that’s responsible for uniting sales, marketing, and customer success, and find ways to make each of them more efficient to achieve a unified set of goals. 

But what businesses will this benefit, and when do you know it’s time to embrace Rev Ops?

Unpredictable Revenues 

The most obvious sign is unpredictable revenues. This is a huge problem for businesses because it doesn’t allow them to plan. It’s hard to invest money if you can’t guarantee it’s coming in at the other end. 

Your revenue-generating teams, sales, marketing, and customer success should be working together to provide you with steady streams of revenue, but instead, they each seem to be pointing the finger at each other.

For example, marketing could be giving sales lots of low-quality leads, and sales is showing some success at converting them, but they’re just not customers who are suited to the product, so they cancel their subscription. 

In this case, customer success points at sales, sales points at marketing, and marketing says, well look at all these leads I’m giving you. This is inevitably going to lead to unpredictable revenues.

Targets Aren’t Aligned

Each department’s targets should come together to help you achieve your overall goals. If this isn’t the case, and targets only serve to promote the department itself, then an overhaul might be needed. 

Marketing can generate you a million leads, but if none of them convert, then it’s not useful. The number of leads generated may be a target, but it’s not one that forwards the goals of every department and the business. 

A Rev Ops team can ensure that every department has focused goals that help the business move forward rather than just plugging numbers.

You’re Using Too Many Tools

This is a common problem in businesses today, with 94% of workplaces reporting that  they struggle with their existing software. Every employee seems to be using slightly different tools to get the job done. 

While there are many benefits to using the right tech stack, there are also a lot of drawbacks when everyone’s working slightly differently. This is a problem particularly if the software that sales, marketing, and customer success are using don’t synchronize. 

You need to be able to share information seamlessly between your teams, and if this isn’t the case because you seem to be using an endless number of tools, then Rev Ops could be the answer.

Your Processes Aren’t Evolving Quickly Enough 

Do you keep making the same mistakes over and over again? 

This might be because your silos have become so ingrained in what they’re doing that they’re not capable of self-reflecting and making change. Sometimes you need to see the bigger picture, and with one foot in each department and one foot outside of them, Rev Ops is perfectly placed to do this. 

Your sales, marketing, and customer success teams should be working on what they’re good at, while specialists help to create the processes that enable them to get the most out of their jobs.

Structuring Your Rev Ops

Different businesses will structure their Rev Ops in different ways. The best structure willl largely be dictated by the size of your business and the resources it has available to it. 

A small business might not be able to create a dedicated Rev Ops team, but it can make changes to job specs, and make some new hires to facilitate change. On the other hand, a large-scale business with lots of resources might be able to create a brand new team from scratch. 

Rev Ops isn’t something with a hard and fast structure. It’s a principle that facilitates predictable revenue, and different companies will enact this in different ways.

For businesses that choose to create a dedicated Rev Ops team, this is how it might look compared to a traditional structure.

Image Source

While this option is an efficient way of integrating Rev Ops, it may not be the correct option for all businesses.

Small Businesses

Small businesses may just have a handful of people in each department and not have the resources to create a whole new Rev Ops team. The principles of Rev Ops are still applicable to these companies though, and it is possible to create better alignment between the departments. 

One of the ways you can do this is by forming a Rev Ops committee that draws in people from each department. This can be set up very quickly and allows you to start implementing positive change. 

While this structure doesn’t necessarily allow for someone to take overall responsibility for Rev Ops, it can help coordinate these departments and make sure they’re working towards targeted joint goals.

Mid-Size Businesses 

For mid-sized businesses, there is a little more scope to delve deeper with Rev Ops. They might not have the resources to create a full Rev Ops team, but they can introduce different operations positions into their sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive change in people, data, and processes. 

You may not have the resources to address every position at once, but if you choose the areas where you think you will see the most benefit, then you can start to enact change. 

Large Businesses 

Large businesses are the ones with the resources to make real structural changes to how they operate. 

Given the size of these companies, they’re also likely to be the most unwieldy, with silos emerging between departments. This means that they can benefit greatly from a dedicated Rev Ops team, as shown in the image above.

This model offers a high level of oversight and ensures that departments are making the most of their individual skills but remaining part of a coherent unit. To implement these changes, a big emphasis will have to be placed on change management, but the results could be crucial for your business success.

Conclusion

Modern businesses have dedicated sales, marketing, and customer success teams because they each bring something different to the table. What’s important though, is that the skills they bring complement each other and are utilized in a way that maximizes business success as a whole.

A lot of businesses find this isn’t the case, often leading to uncertainty around revenue and different departments doing their own thing.

Technology should be there to ensure that these departments are aligned, making processes more efficient, and using data to inform decisions, but it doesn’t always work out this way. Instead, we have different people using completely different tech stacks and nobody bringing everything together. 

This is where Rev Ops comes into its own, making sure that your revenue-generating teams are working in unison. When done right, this should result in transparency, accountability, and predictability that will drive your business forward.

What do you think of Rev Ops? Are you considering implementing it to solve some of the problems discussed here? Let me know in the comments below:

I’ve founded a lot of startups, so I’ve had a lot of experience hiring VPs of Sales. So, if you’re in the process of hiring a Sales VP for your startup, it’s essential to navigate the vast pool of candidates and find the right fit for your company. One effective strategy is to explore various platforms to do job listings in remote sales roles. These will provide access to a diverse talent pool.

I must have looked at well over 50k resumes and interviewed just about as many candidates. I’ve made some smart decisions along the way – but I’m not going to pretend I’ve got a 100% success rate. I’ve made a ton of mistakes too.

Fortunately, that means I’ve learned a lot of actionable insights from all the things I got right and wrong. Here’s my advice on hiring a Sales VP, plus 13 tried-and-trusted questions to ask during the interview stage.

When Should You Hire a VP of Sales?

Before you get any deeper into this article, let’s pump the brakes and consider whether a VP of Sales is what you actually need.

You might think you need a VP when what you actually need is a Director of Sales or a Sales Manager.

Think about how big your sales team is going to grow in the next 12 to 18 months:

  • If you’re a funded startup, absolutely hire a VP of sales. There’s no replacement for that experience; it’ll save you time down the road.
  • If you’re a bootstrap startup, adding two salespeople every year, or you’re still trying to figure out product/market fit, maybe a Director of Sales is more applicable.
  • If this is your first sales hire, you’ll want to hire more of a “doer,” like an SDR.

It might sound obvious, but the more senior and experienced a person is, the better they’ll be able to help you avoid mistakes, forecast results, and build effective processes – but they’ll also naturally be more hands-off. 

If you need someone to make you money right now, that’s probably not a VP of Sales. The last thing you want is a hands-off sales leader, when you really need them to get their hands dirty in the first year when you’re just trying to figure it out.

I can definitely speak from experience here, albeit from a marketing perspective rather than sales. 

I was hired as CMO at a pre-product/market fit company. That relationship lasted three months before we both realized: “This is stupid.” They had a bunch of stuff to figure out before I could even begin to add real value.

So my first key learning is: make sure you hire your VP of Sales at the right time for your business.

How to Approach a Potential Candidate

By this point, I’m assuming you’ve decided that a Sales VP is definitely right for you, right now.

In that case, you’ll want to start approaching candidates. They’ll fall into one of two categories:

  • People who’ve applied for the role themselves
  • People you’ve reached out to (in other words, headhunted)

You’ll need a different approach when speaking to those different types of candidate.

Approaching a Candidate Who Applied for Your Role

You’re automatically in a strong position here. 

This candidate has applied for the role, so you know they’re interested in your company and are actively looking to work for you.

That makes this a beautifully simple conversation. Just reach out to them and arrange a time for your first-stage interview.

Approaching a Passive Candidate

Here, things get a little more difficult. You’re effectively doing cold outreach to these candidates. Admittedly, it’s not exactly the same – you’re paying them the compliment of saying you’d love to hire them, not trying to sell them something – but you still need to proceed with caution.

A passive candidate doesn’t know you’re going to contact them. You don’t know anything about their current situation, or whether they’re interested in a new role.

Get this wrong and you can piss off a lot of people. It’s easy to come across like they should be flattered by your approach. Whether or not that’s how you really feel, it’s definitely not how you want to come across.

In my experience, your best bet is to keep things super casual. 

Send them a short, friendly email or LinkedIn InMail that briefly discusses the role and references what’s great about your company, then ask if they’d be interested in finding out more. Don’t call them – it’s too pushy, and they might be at work, which can make their life pretty awkward.

If they respond in the affirmative, great! Your next step should be to arrange a quick call – make it clear that this isn’t an interview. Instead, it’s a chance for you to sound one another out. Give more detail about the role, talk about your immediate and longer-term goals and how they fit in, and answer their questions.

By the end of that call, if you’re both on the same page, then you can plan a formal interview.

13 Interview Questions for Your VP of Sales Role

As I mentioned, I’ve interviewed a lot of potential VPs of Sales over the years, so I’ve picked up a few questions that I now rely on time and again.

One final point before I get to the questions:

Remember, this person is a potential VP, so you don’t have to make their life easy. Challenge them on their answers – especially if they don’t align with your vision for the future. A bit of friction among the senior team is often a good thing – you don’t just want someone who’ll nod their head at everything you say. Are they prepared to stick to their guns if you disagree?

1. How Big of a Sales Team Do You Think We Need Right Now?

You’re hiring a VP for their experience and strategic thinking, so they should have some idea about how big of a team they’d ideally be working with.

Get them to be specific. What would their ideal team look like? Do they want BDRs, SDRs, or Account Executives? Or a couple strong all-rounders?

2. Tell Me About the Teams You’ve Managed & How You Built Them

Presumably, your candidate has strong experience in managing and building teams. If they can’t talk through the processes they’ve followed in the past, that should set alarm bells ringing.

This question could lead to a ton of follow-ups. You might want to dive into the characteristics they look out for when hiring sales professionals, or push them for specific examples about their approach to recruitment.

3. How Should Our Sales & Marketing Functions Work Together?

Depending on your stage of growth, you might not have a marketing function yet. If you do, it might just be one or two people.

Regardless, you want to know that your candidate has a clear view of how sales and marketing should work together, both now and in future. Dig into their thoughts on lead generation and sales funnels, and the part played by each team.

4. How Should Sales and Client Success/Management Work Together?

From a similar perspective, you want to gauge your candidate’s understanding of the customer lifecycle. 

Press them to get specific. You don’t want to talk theory here – ask them to make their answer relevant to your company and your future strategy.

5. How Do You Create a Winning Environment?

Being a VP of Sales isn’t just about hiring the right people at the right time – it’s also about getting the most out of those people. To do that, they need to build a high-performing culture. 

They should have a clear vision for how they intend to do that, ideally backed up by real-world examples from their career.

6. What Sales Tools Have You Used in Previous Roles?

While VP of Sales is a largely hands-off role, you still want your candidate to have a strong understanding of the tech stack and the practicalities of doing the job. 

As a startup, there’s a good chance you won’t have built your whole tech stack yet. Even if you have, it’s probably not set in stone. You’ll likely want to hear their recommendations on tools to invest in and processes to implement to drive efficiencies and improve performance. A good sign is if they’re familiar with tools designed to improve the efficiency and productivity of sales teams, such as Weflow.

7. What Will Our Sales Function Look Like Six Months After We Hire You?

You want the successful candidate to come in and hit the ground running; you certainly don’t want to spend days or weeks telling them what they should be doing next.

Even though this is just the interview stage, they should have a rough idea of the strategy they’d implement if they got the job, and what medium-term goals they’d be working toward. Dig into these goals, and see how they align with your own.

Bear in mind that this could be a broad answer – in fact, it could arguably form the bulk of the interview. It’s useful to hear which aspects they focus on the most – is it the size of the sales team? The culture? The tech stack? Or a metric like leads or revenue?

8. How Would You Go About Setting Quotas?

Early in your company’s growth journey, you likely don’t have a ton of data, which can make quota-setting a difficult task.

How would they go about establishing team-level goals, and breaking those down across individual salespeople?

9. Who in Your Network Would You Want to Join Our Sales Team?

Any prospective VP of Sales should have built up a little black book of high-quality, high-performing salespeople. 

You don’t necessarily need a list of names at this point – it’s unlikely to mean much to you. But some detail about their background and why your candidate would hire them will definitely be helpful.

10. How Do You Overcome Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt in Prospects?

Especially if you’re an early-stage startup with a new, unknown product, you might face a lot of skepticism from prospects. They might be reluctant to put their faith – and budget – in a relatively unproven brand.

Your VP of Sales should have a strategy in place to overcome this doubt. Ideally, they’ll have worked in startups, or with brand new products, in the past – so they’ll be speaking from experience.

11. Talk Through a Typical Working Day for a VP of Sales

You’re a founder. You’re probably not a salesperson, and you may not have worked closely with a VP of Sales in the past, so you’re likely not the best person to give them specific tasks.

You need your candidate to take the lead here. How would they structure a regular day? What would they focus on? And how would their priorities shift over time, as your company grows?

12. Describe the Rep Who You Found Most Difficult to Manage

Anyone who’s managed people in the past will know it’s not always easy. But you often end up learning more from your most challenging direct reports than from those who just come in and get the job done every day.

Find out why that particular candidate was so difficult to work with. Was it a performance-related issue? Or was it more about culture and behaviors?

Importantly, you also want to find out what they learned from managing that particular salesperson, and the actions they took at the time.

13. How Will We Beat Our Competitors?

This question is about more than just reeling off your product’s key features and benefits. It’s about digging into their strategy for overcoming the competition in the long run, and the specific tactics they’re planning to use.

It’s also useful to find out who they think your competitors are. This can tell you a lot about how they see your company and product.

It seems like everything is offered ‘as a service’ these days: platform, infrastructure, recovery, storage, database, security, management, and more. There are so many, they had to create an all-encompassing term – XaaS, or Anything-as-a-Service – to represent them all.

The XaaS industry is booming, and it’s the software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies under that umbrella that are growing faster than any other type.

Continue reading 6 Upselling Lessons for a Successful SaaS Company

Global interest in podcasts has absolutely skyrocketed over the last year, which inevitably means that there’s also been astronomical growth in the number of podcasts.

In total, there’s an estimated 1.5 million podcasts with 34 million individual episodes. With the average episode lasting about 43 minutes, that adds up to more than 24 million hours of content. It would take you about 2,750 years to listen to all that.

With so much content out there, finding the best and most insightful podcasts feels like searching for a needle in a haystack.

So if you’re looking for advice and insight that can help you out as a SaaS founder, it’s useful to know where to start. That’s why I’ve compiled this list of my favorite podcasts and episodes.

1. Acquired

The reason I love the Acquired podcast so much is that you get to hear the full, end-to-end stories behind a wide range of companies. How the initial idea was conceived and how they got started, right through to when the founder(s) exited, or launched an IPO, or they went bust.

Acquired doesn’t only focus on SaaS companies, and the guests aren’t just from the US. That means you get a really diverse range of stories and opinions.

I feel like every time I listen to an episode, I learn about a different business model or pick up some new insight. And I think that really helps level up your own game when you’re a founder-entrepreneur.

Standout Episodes

2. SaaS Growth Stacking – With Dan Martell

Dan Martell, the guy behind the SaaS Growth Stacking podcast, is super connected. 

He’s very, very sharp. He loves playbooks and processes, and he offers a ton of practical information.

But it’s not just about Dan’s own insights. He also talks to folks who’ve been there and done that at all levels of business.

You’ll find a gold nugget or two in every episode – mostly stuff around process and structure, rather than specific tactics.

Standout Episodes

3. The CX Broadcast

The folks at Zonka Feedback, a leading Customer & Product Experience Platform, host The CX Broadcast – a podcast series where they talk to leading experience managers and experts on all things customer experience.What you will get — stories from different heads from Fintech, SaaS, Healthtech and more on how to navigate and win with customers, along with some amazing insights on what really goes behind keeping customers happy.

Standout Episodes:

4. The Growth TLDR Podcast

Growth TLDR is pretty much what you’d expect: a ton of advice and insight about growing a business, with none of the noise or unnecessary detail.

It’s hosted by two folks who work at HubSpot who have a big marketing focus and really know what they’re talking about.

If you want to think about growth, I’d strongly recommend going back to episode one and listening from there! There are like 170 episodes in total, and you should probably just listen to them all.

Whenever I have a question – like, “How do I do freemium?” – I’ll just go to Growth TLDR and search “freemium.” I pretty much use it for finding out things I didn’t know and that I want to dig into, just like you use Google.

Standout Episodes

5. SaaStr Podcast

As far as I’m concerned, Jason Lemkin and the whole SaaStr community have must-listen-to status.

Now, the SaaStr podcast isn’t as tactical as some of the others on this list. I don’t know that I walk away from listening like, “Boom, I have to go do this thing right now.”

But it’s amazing for broadening your understanding of SaaS, keeping up to date with the industry, and learning about the cool things different people are doing. 

For me as a bootstrap founder, it’s not necessarily as relevant to my business because all these people are funded. But to know what folks that chose different routes are doing is very helpful.

Standout Episodes

6. The SaaS Revolution Show

Whereas the SaaStr team typically talk a lot more about sales and revenue, the SaaS Revolution Show has a bit more of a deep focus.

They don’t necessarily speak to as many “sexy” startups. They’re based in England, and a lot of their guests are from European startups.

But as a marketer, as a founder, and as a growth person, your job is to understand everything you can about SaaS, not just listen to advice from all the same people. So it’s a really good show for broadening your horizons.

Standout Episodes

7. David Skok

Okay, so this one’s a bit of an anomaly, because David Skok doesn’t actually have a podcast. But he’s so awesome that he definitely should!

David’s a venture capitalist, and his framework is just fantastic. You should definitely go read everything on For Entrepreneurs – it’ll basically give you practical guidance on how not to do a horrible job at stuff.

I think his unique value lies in his understanding of the business model of SaaS and the metrics and key pieces behind it, and then his ability to distill all of that information into ways that are easier to understand.

8. The Startup Chat

I like to think of The Startup Chat as the home of philosophical SaaS learnings.

What do I mean by that?

Well, both the guys behind the podcast are really sharp practitioners who know a lot about dealing with things like stress, and emotion, and failure, and how to communicate with your team.

So I guess it’s a little more “soft and fuzzy” than some of the more revenue, growth-oriented podcasts on this list. But it’s pretty damn good!

Standout Episodes

9. The Top

In The Top, author and podcaster Nathan Latka interviews all sorts of founders – but typically those who don’t have millions in VC funding behind them. 

That means he gets to hear the stories behind different companies that don’t normally attract a ton of attention or written about in industry publications.

That makes it really interesting for a couple reasons. One, these aren’t the stories you’d usually hear about. And two, the people he speaks to are often more prepared to open up and give genuine answers than the real big hitters.

Also, Nathan is a real gunner. He’s so fantastic at getting fascinating information from people.

Standout Episodes

Honorable Mentions

Like I said, there are a lot of podcasts out there! 

If those I’ve listed above aren’t quite doing it for you (or you’ve somehow managed to listen to every episode of each), here are a few others to check out:

How Do I Find Podcasts?

There’s a ton of podcast recommendations in this article.

But as well as checking out all of the above, I’d also really, strongly advise you to get out there and track down your own favorite SaaS podcasts, because your needs and the things you want to learn might be very different to mind.

So how do you find helpful podcasts?

Well, I always start by thinking of any fast-growing company, then Googling their name + “founder podcast interview.”

Go listen to it, waste like a whole day, and learn everything you can about the fastest-growing SaaS companies on the planet. What you end up getting from listening to these folks – basically by stalking the crap out of them – is all the advice they’d give you if they were your mentor.

Of course, not all of them are 100% transparent and honest. What people say in public is the nice stuff that makes them look good.

But the interesting thing is, when you listen to enough of these podcasts, and you’ve heard the same people interviewed four different times, you can start to form your own opinion about who really knows their stuff, or how things really played out.

From listening to probably hundreds of hours of podcasts, I’ve got a pretty clear idea on who’s amazing and who’s full of it, but you can figure it out yourself!

What are your favorite SaaS podcasts and why? Let me know in the comments below:

What “Failing Fast” Really Looks Like: How to Transform Past Failures Into Successes

Dress it up how you want – “unfinished success,” “pivoting,” “learning”- we all fail. There is nothing we can do to stop it – making mistakes is part of life. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and in fact, it’s essential for growth – both personal and professional.

Unfortunately, fearing failure comes as naturally to us as failure itself.

Continue reading What “Failing Fast” Really Looks Like: How to Transform Past Failures Into Successes

When I Work gets about 500,000. Mailshake gets more than 300,000, Voila Norbert is at 100,000 and Right Inbox brings in over 150,000 per month.

So I’d say I have a lot of experience in building blogs. But that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten everything right along the way – in fact, I’ve made a lot of mistakes too.

In this article, I’m not going to talk about the practicalities of building a blog, because a lot of other content covers that.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about the good, the bad, and the ugly of building and running a high-traffic blog. It should help you understand your next steps once you’ve got your blog off the ground. What are you going to do with it? And how’s it going to help you?

The Good

Building Your Brand & Strengthening Relationships

Let me be clear about one thing: there’s definitely more indirect than direct benefit to building a blog that brings in tens of thousands of visitors a month.

Your sales team can utilize it. You can use it to help educate your customers, which ultimately will reduce churn and help expansion revenue. Some people have even given us low NPS scores on the product, but in their review they’ve still said, “I love the blog.”

Think about the value from a business perspective to have somebody say, “I love your content,” and be impressed with or get value from it. That’s an experience they have with your brand, whether they have to pay for it or not.

SEO Gets Easier & Easier

Over the years, we’ve built up this SEO powerhouse just by doing good content marketing.

Now, anything we publish on almost any topic just ranks well in three to six months, without us doing anything.

By putting in all this hard work over the course of three to five years – and we’ve spent more than $1 million on Mailshake alone in that time – we can now pretty much create content and reap the benefits.

So our job gets easier and easier. All we have to do is create the right content that maybe has decent search volumes and we’ll see results from it.

Now think about a bigger brand like HubSpot. They rank for almost every single term they target. They could write an article and it will rank because they’ve put in the effort upfront, and Google and customers reward people who have done something for a consistent amount of time.

Building a Blog Helps You Build an Audience

Before I built any of my companies, I built my blog and I built an email list.

Regardless of whether or not it helps me directly sell, that email list has huge value, because it’s helped me move mountains since those early days.

Let me give you a concrete example of how that audience has benefited me. 

SujanPatel.com generates 30,000 visitors a month. I’ve been publishing on it for years and I used my blog and the audience I’ve built to start Mailshake, to grow Right Inbox, and to promote When I Work. I also used my blog to sell over 50,000 copies of my ebook, 100 Days of Growth.

If it wasn’t for my blog, none of these blogs or companies would have had the kickstart that they had. So the value of a blog and an audience is huge. And it shouldn’t be measured by revenue.

You Can See Big Value Without Huge Traffic

Having put in a ton of work, my blogs are now generating hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors.

But the thing is, you don’t actually need to build up massive amounts of traffic to generate massive amounts of revenue.

I’ve already told you how SujanPatel.com brings in 30,000 visitors a month. It’s been doing that for the last five years, even though I’m pretty much half-assing the keyword research, and I mostly just write about stuff that I get asked a lot about or that I care about.

I don’t do as much of the keyword research as I should, partly because I’m doing this on the side of running a bazillion other companies and doing a bunch of other things.

But my website still generates over $1 million in revenue a year. That comes from the 20 to 30 leads I get per month for consulting engagements.

So on one hand, my blog kind of sucks. If I was just looking at traffic, I’d count it as a failure.

But over five years, I built $5 million in revenue from it, so actually I’d say it’s a huge success and that’s likely to be the outcome I was going for anyways.

Even though it only gets 30,000 visitors, it actually generates more revenue for me than all the other – much bigger – blogs combined.

Doing More of the Stuff That Works

Right Inbox is a Gmail extension.

If you check out the blog, you might notice that we write a lot of informational stuff around Gmail, like how to create labels, or how to archive an email. It’s very basic stuff – more like customer support articles than blog posts.

But those articles actually generate a ton of traffic, and we have hundreds of them.

Between them, they generate thousands of new installs a month/year.

Part of building a successful blog and validating the intent of your buyers is about testing different things to see if they work.

If I’d read something telling me that a bunch of informational articles would lead to installs and conversions, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. But even though the conversion rates are super low, the volume is very high, so it actually works really well for us.

The Bad

Ignoring Buyer Intent

Do it right and a blog can drive signups, sales, installs and free trials.

But if you get it wrong, it won’t do any of that. I know that for a fact, because I’ve done it wrong a lot.

The mistake I’ve made with every single one of my blogs is focusing on creating the brand and top-of-the-funnel education.

As soon as we stopped thinking about bottom-of-the-funnel or middle-of-the-funnel or top-of-the-funnel content, and started thinking about buyer intent, we noticed free trials or installs or sign ups go through the roof.

It’s a silly mistake to have made, but because all of these companies are growing, it was easy for me to ignore that one key point: does this content, this keyword that I’m going after, have any buyer intent?

And if I’m being honest, I’d say 70-80% of our content has no buyer intent. It’s just general informational keywords that do a good job of tackling the persona, but have not historically delivered results.

Fixating On Influencers

I’m not here to tell you that influencers are bad.

Crazy Egg and a lot of other companies have leveraged influencers and subject matter experts to build up a large brand by getting these people to publish guest posts on their site.

So we tried to do the same. But a lot of the people we worked with ended up not doing anything for the actual growth of our blog.

The performance would be the same, if not worse than, the content we publish ourselves. And the audience reception was almost the same as well.

Of the content we publish ourselves, we can clearly see that the stuff we created where we got the intent right works ten times better than that influencer stuff. And when I say ten times better, I mean the content ended up generating way more traffic in the long term.

It wasn’t always like that. When we were just starting out, the value from influencers was high. But after you’ve got 100,000-200,000 visitors a month, the value diminishes a lot.

Part of this is that 5-10 years ago, when Kissmetrics and Crazy Egg built up their mega content sites, the industry was a lot less mature and a lot of people were actually using influencers to build their brands.

Now, a lot more folks use guest posts solely (or almost entirely) from a link-building perspective to improve their SaaS metrics.

Also, many content creation companies like Fresh Essays have the opinion there’s so much content out there that the consumer of that content cares less about who wrote it. They care a lot more about the value from it.

The Ugly

The Value is at the Tail End

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts.

Building a blog that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a month requires consistency. You gotta do it day in, day out.

The value of creating all that content and building all those funnels lies at the tail end, meaning if you do it for two years, you should expect to see pretty much no value. 

But at the end of year three, you’ll get enormous value.

So you have to decide if you’ve got the patience and resource to stick with it.

Direct Value Isn’t Guaranteed

As I said at the start of this article, even if you do build a massive blog, you may not get any direct value out of it.

So you have to think whether the indirect value is worth the investment in time.

For me, the indirect value has definitely been worth it. For instance, our content now generates more links – just by being out there – than our link-building team can generate themselves.

So if we measure our content on how much it helps us do SEO, it’s more work than two full-time people on our team can do.

So What Does That Mean?

I’ve covered a lot of points here, but there are four big takeaways that cut through all of them:

  1. Be aware that you might never see a direct ROI from your blog
  2. Don’t forget about the massive indirect value that an amazing blog can bring
  3. Always have buyer intent in mind
  4. Validate your approach through testing

Looking to build or scale your own blog? Which of these points did you find most valuable? Or maybe you have a tip of your own? Let me know in the comments below: