How to grow your turnover to over a billion rand
By Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake How can your company scale and break through the competition to get to US$100-million (R1.8-billion) in revenue? This has been the biggest challenge at every startup I’ve marketed for and taken public over the past 25 years, including Snowflake. It’s no small feat. Back when Snowflake was founded in 2012, an extremely small percentage of companies made it. According to a 2013 study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, only about 0.02 to 0.05 percent of companies founded in the United States reached US$100-million in revenues in a reasonable timeframe. There’s also no magic formula, and what’s most important is how well you execute. But there are a few strategies or pillars that I believe marketing teams should follow as they scale. These pillars were the cornerstones of our marketing success at Snowflake during our journey to US$100-million. Create strong positioning Positioning is actually more than a pillar of marketing—it’s the entire foundation. And just as with a house, if the foundation isn’t strong, the walls will crack. With strong positioning, you can avoid cracks in your marketing, and your program investments will be more effective. Author Al Reis describes positioning as the battle for your prospects’ minds. Winning the battle is about how well you differentiate yourself in their minds. The first thing you need to do is define the category you wish to own. In 2016 at Snowflake, the category we were determined to own was “The Data Warehouse Built for the Cloud.” Our positioning has evolved since then, and today, Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud. But for our journey to $100-million, that was our positioning. We ran extensive focus groups with real prospects to make sure that our positioning worked with people who didn’t know Snowflake. Most often, companies do a few interviews with current prospects or customers, but that isn’t really enough. The category that you’re creating needs to be relevant to companies you will sell to at the next stage of growth. You also get a lot of data and insight back from prospects, and this data-driven process makes it easier to get buy-in internally, which is vital to create consistency in your positioning. Your employees, partners, and customers all need to describe you the same way. So for more than three years, our Data Warehouse Built for the Cloud positioning was everywhere, and if anyone described us differently, we asked them to change it. You can’t win the battle for your prospects’ minds if you are changing who you are every six months. The more consistent you are, the more impactful your marketing will be. Be the most customer-centric When you look at what the most admired brands in the world have in common, you’ll see that they all own their categories, they’re extremely consistent with their brand experience, and they have incredible customer loyalty. Within Snowflake’s marketing team, our number-one priority from the beginning has been to put the customer first. That means that we think from the outside-in, all the time. What do customers need from us? We did a few things to make sure we always kept our focus on customers. Our marketing team ran almost daily meetings with our sales engineers who were out in the field with our customers. That helped us learn which questions and concerns we needed to address. To scale our content development in those early days, we got almost every employee involved with writing content and creating videos that were laser-focused on what our customers wanted to learn. This helped us create trust and credibility, which startups often lack. Whenever possible, we put actual customers at the forefront of our marketing programs. We have thousands of brand ambassadors among our customers today, and they are our most effective marketing. To get customers involved in our marketing efforts, we worked on building direct relationships with them and made sure there was value for them to participate. We also started customer advisory board meetings, where we gave our customers fake dollar bills and asked them to invest them in different parts of our roadmap. This helped us prioritise the things that mattered most to them. Finally, I recommend companies start an annual customer engagement survey as early as possible. This also helps you establish your Net Promoter Score (NPS) score. Every year, we measure every single component of our customers’ experience with Snowflake, and the survey provides us with invaluable insights. Build for scale Many startups get to US$20-million and experience a slowdown in growth. This often happens because they rely on manual work, and because they don’t build their marketing technology stack and processes to scale. In 2017, the big topic at every all-hands meeting at Snowflake was around automating more work so we could get rid of the “hamsters.” The hamsters were all of the resources doing work that should be automated. In the beginning, they were very important in doing things such as setting up accounts for our customers. But it wasn’t really until we had a fully automated provisioning system that our free-trial sign-ups took off. We also built our marketing technology stack to scale with our growth from the beginning. If you don’t, you’ll have to slow down and start replacing parts, hindering your momentum. In addition, we scaled every component of our demand process. For example, we introduced live product demos to cut down on one-to-one meetings. We instituted a weekly Office Hours session where prospects can talk live to a reference customer and get all their questions answered. This eliminates the one-to-one reference call request and helps us respect our customers’ time. For startups looking to scale to US$100-million quickly, get rid of the hamsters as soon as you can, make sure your technology can grow with you, and find ways to improve every component of your buyers’ journey that is time-consuming. Be bold To break through in today’s competitive market and compete with large, well-known brands, you have to get noticed. The
The B2B Formula: The 5 key pillars to growth engineering
By Andrew Honey, Founding Partner and Group CEO of ThinkSales Global B2B market-leading companies are led by CEOs who understand the factors that impact revenue growth and profitability and then design a strategy to address these factors. Factors impacting revenue growth and profitability in the B2B landscape: Revenue growth engineering: How market leading B2B companies do it Ultimately, for B2B companies to excel, they must enable the Sales organisation within the business to deploy a customer-centric, differentiated customer engagement process. The 5-pillars of a market-leading B2B sales organisation The foundation of a successful B2B organisation is what we call a ‘revenue growth approach’ that simultaneously focuses on sales growth and margin protection. There are five key pillars that must be developed and then matured in every organisation to achieve this goal, finally reaching a level of optimisation that ensures a strong, sustainable and above-all competitive B2B business. The five key pillars of a high-performance sales organisation: 1. Competitive strategy Many companies do not have a documented, customer-centric sales organisation strategy that differentiates the organisation for a competitive advantage. Instead, many companies simply have a set of actions they will take to make a budget, not founded on market opportunity, but rather an increase on the previous year’s sales. Furthermore, strategy too often fails to be translated into an execution. As a result, sales managers are not equipped with a clear road map of where to focus or what exactly their sales reps should do differently. The solution: Executives should conduct a 360-degree GAP analysis of their sales organisation and then design an ideal future-state strategy. The potential for a competitive advantage for a company is for the sales organisation to perform a set of activities differently to their competitors. This is simultaneously differentiating and difficult to commoditise. 2. Customer engagement If the process and systems for prospecting and customer engagement is either not defined or randomly followed by sales reps, the business has no control over how customers are perceiving a B2B organisation. This can result in sales teams who are unable to articulate value to customers or guide them through a quality decision-making process. The solution: B2B organisations must develop an agile approach to mapping, refining and testing processes in response to changing business environments and customer needs. 3. Sales talent An ill-defined approach to hiring and developing sales talent means that leadership teams do not develop star performers who are able to articulate value and differentiate the business. This often leads to missed opportunities and missed targets, because the sales team is unable to engage on value and with the correct level of stakeholders on a B2B level. The solution: Building a strong sales force starts with hiring. Companies that rely on scientific assessment tools over gut instinct to identify competitive sales DNA will win in the end – as this will result in a high percentage of sales reps who can meet their revenue targets. 4. Sales management In many organisations, top sales reps are promoted into sales management positions in the hope that a star performer will somehow rub off on sales reps who report to them. The reality is that this is seldom the case, particularly if the sales rep in question relied on their charisma and relationship-building skills to close deals. The solution: Strong sales management abilities rely on a systematic, metrics-driven approach including coaching to drive sales rep activities and outcomes. They also need good change management capabilities as B2B customers are constantly evolving and changing, and so how an organisation sells to them must be both agile and adaptable. 5. Sales enablement Since 70% of B2B buyers are doing their own online research before they even reach out to a brand, presenting compelling collateral that effectively positions your solution is an important foundational principle. How a customer engages with your brand is therefore the product of sales collateral that supports the entire buying funnel. The solution: A buyer-centric view is essential when developing engaging collateral. Industry-aligned and needs-driven content captures a buyer’s attention, while evidence-based case study content that demonstrates a strong return-on-investment is important to help position your brand as a leader, overcome scepticism and justify buying decisions.
Social media lead generation ideas for your business
By Rucien Petersen, Managing Director, Spottmedia There are many challenges businesses could face when it comes to building a brand on social media. A few challenges include lack of creativity, online reputation management and the ability to become noticed and stand out. However, there is one challenge and theme that is becoming a daily issue for many businesses and that is the creation of content on a consistent level. Content is the life blood for a business on social media. If you do not have content your socials become inactive and dormant. There are three main aspects brands should consider when it comes to positioning themselves on social media. These aspects include education, information or entertainment. The creation of content should be based on these three aspects and should align to the business goals and objectives. Below I discuss a few ideas we focus on when creating content for a business on social media. Here are 7 social media lead generation ideas to try next: Run a competition If you start out generating followers and engagement is not that easy. A great way to draw attention, generate followers and engagement is to run a competition. Partner with brands that align to your company’s values. When it comes to running a competition the trick in making it a success is the prize on offer. Make sure the prize is of a higher value, what we found with competitions is that the higher the value, the higher the interest and traction. Product/service feature and benefits If you are stuck with creating unique content the simple and easiest content to focus on is your product and service offering. However, we found that most brands are going this route on social media. One way to differentiate yourself from your competitors is to focus on the benefits customers will derive from your product/service. So instead of simple images of the product, share more about the experience and value potential customers will gain from it. Blog Blogging contributes to your brand being found online and is an effective tactic used to educate potential customers. Besides writing about the value your product/service can offer, you can also write about solution offerings. The words “How to” have been the most searched keywords on Google. Blog using ‘How to’. If you are a baker, you can write regular blogs on How to bake the perfect chocolate cake? How to bake a simple carrot cake? How to start a bakery? Use this content on your website as it will help your business with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) then share this content on your social media pages. Tips Another form of content can be to provide weekly tips. Once you understand who your target audience is. Try to see how you can add value to them by providing tips and ways to overcome the challenges you have experienced. These tips can be in the form of short video clips or carousel images. CSI (Corporate Social Initiative) There are many needs within our communities. As a startup or small business you might not always have the funds to sponsor a NGO. The easiest way to get involved in your community is to offer what you have (service, product or knowledge). This will only cost you time and you can use the sponsorship as content for your social media pages. Customer reviews Credibility and trust is a major issue when it comes to consumers buying into your business and service offering. Asking your clients for reviews and posting it on social media gives you more content to play around with and to use. Posting your customers feedback instills confidence and trust amongst potential customers when conducting research online on your brand. User Generated Content Humans connect with humans and user generated content is an effective way to establish a human connection. User Generated Content can either be in the form of your clients or an influencer campaign. You can post about your clients’ experience in your store or shop. Alternatively run an influencer campaign where you run a trade exchange offering an influencer product/service in exchange for posts over their social media platforms.