It’s easy to feel optimistic when staring down that list of leads. Turning a prospect into a customer is extremely gratifying.
Sadly, not every buyer will buy from you. Figuring out how a sale went wrong is a complicated process, but crucial to uncover the necessary improvements.
Many software vendors struggle to comprehend where they fall short. It starts with a shared vision and creating processes that facilitate collaboration between sales and marketing teams.
Eli Rubel is the CEO of Matter Made and a marketing advisor to companies including Loom, Dropbox, and more. As a go-to-market expert, Eli and his team consult with B2B software brands to craft strategies to surpass their growth goals.
In the latest episode of GTM Innovators, G2 Chief Revenue Officer Mike Weir spoke with Eli to discuss the framework his company built to inform startups and later-stage companies on what they’re doing well in their GTM strategy, where they have gaps, and how companies at all maturity phases can learn from one another.
The inspiration behind demand efficiency benchmarking
If you’ve ever worked at a marketing agency or consulting firm, you know how crucial the initial discovery phase is when kicking off a new engagement. This is an essential part of onboarding clients where outsiders try to understand the delicate and nuanced ins and outs of the business they’re trying to help.
There’s just one problem: executives and leaders have tight schedules. Getting time on their calendars is a consistent challenge, and it can impact how long it takes before any tangible work gets done.
Eli and his team knew this challenge too well. Sometimes discovery can take up to a month, which got the team thinking about how they could speed up the process and still generate useful insights.
After combing through five years' worth of data helping companies scale their growth, Eli and his crew took a hard look at the must-have questions and areas go-to-market teams most often overlook. Creating a new framework around these considerations led to the inception of what he and his team call the “demand efficiency benchmark.”
What is the demand efficiency benchmark?
Today, this framework is a five to seven-minute open-source evaluation that companies can circulate among executives and leaders to get a sense of where they excel and need to perform better. This can be a great exercise not only for getting ideas for optimization but also to serve as a starting point to address diverging perceptions between executives and other members of a go-to-market team.
How sales and marketing can inspire one another
A common theme we hear executives and other GTM experts mention on the podcast is how more robust sales and marketing alignment leads to more outstanding outcomes. As a previous guest noted, this alignment is now the bare minimum.
Achieving greater alignment presents unique challenges from one company to another, and many struggle with this task. Eli thinks doing so is also essential and offered up some great advice on how marketing and sales teams can work towards greater alignment.
Sales teams need to trust the funnel
Marketing teams put a lot of research and consideration into crafting funnels. From top to bottom, these contributors leverage data to create messaging and content designed to engage a prospect throughout their buying journey best.
“Marketing feels like a black box to non-marketers.”
Eli Rubel
CEO, Matter Made
They’re the experts in what they do, meaning you can have complete confidence in them. When sales teams talk to prospects without understanding and placing full trust in the funnel, Eli sees this as a missed opportunity that can lead to revenue leakage. Don’t treat these leads like a cold call for prospects progressing down the funnel.
How sales can make marketing more creative and engaging
Marketers are best at what they do. To no one’s surprise, so are sales professionals.
There’s a lot these two teams can learn from each other. All it takes is intention and commitment to figure out how to create a steady flow of information sharing across them. For starters, Eli thinks sales teams can be an immensely beneficial resource for marketers.
“They're talking to prospects and customers all day long. The best marketing ideas and changes to the buying journey come from those conversations.”
Eli Rubel
CEO, Matter Made
What startups can learn from later-stage companies
Eli and his team work with B2B software companies that span industries and maturity stages. He took some time during the episode to talk about some specific ways startups and established companies succeed with their GTM strategies and how they can learn from each other.
Startups typically emphasize sourcing new opportunities and often put significant effort into top-of-funnel strategy, messaging, and content production. Eli admits that getting customers in the door is important, but sometimes startups focus too much on this buying stage.
One idea startups can glean from their later-stage counterparts is strengthening their middle to bottom-of-funnel content and messaging.
Driving pipeline can be so consuming that it’s fairly common to forget all those prospects that weren’t ready to buy at the time. Eli also sees an opportunity for early-stage companies that later-stage organizations do very well in optimizing their messaging for expansion and upselling to be more compelling.
Why Eli Rubel thinks companies need to invest in more “surfaces”
GTM teams know the most common levers and channels foundational to their strategies and day-to-day execution. In a later portion of the podcast, Eli talks about the roughly 80+ areas or activities these teams often ignore because they consider them lower priority or “nice-to-haves.”
By investing in what Eli refers to as “surfaces,” companies can drive significant improvements to their conversion rates simply by giving attention to these smaller opportunities.
Other learnings from Eli in this episode
Here’s a look at other takeaways you can hear Eli Rubel talk about in episode 3 of GTM Innovators:
- What later-stage companies can learn from startups
- How a minimal tech stack can get the job done
- The metric that needs to be the North Star for sales and marketing teams
Watch the full episode on YouTube and learn more about Eli and other GTM experts by subscribing to the GTM Innovators podcast today - available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, and more.
