Jeff Wood: Marketing strategies and actions you can use right now to accelerate go-to-market growth. Those are the topics we’re going to cover today in the next 8 to 9 minutes. I’m Jeff Wood and I lead our fintech practice. And with me today is Kevan Savage, longtime marketing executive and leader of Alexander Group’s marketing practice. Today, a couple of things we’re going to cover on how you can use one marketing spin benchmarks for insights into your competitive positioning, considerations to design the right marketing operating model, and why you need to be refining your ICP in a very fast moving sector like fintech. So let’s dive right into those execution strategies so you can begin to accelerate growth. Kevan, you know, first, executives really need to understand marketing practices for budgeting and planning purposes. So can you describe a little bit about how companies are using marketing spend benchmarks to better understand their competitive positioning so they can allocate budgets more strategically right across demand, generation, sales, or even partner channels.
Kevan Savage: Yeah, Jeff, it’s a never-ending conversation. I’ll put it to you that way. But when we talk about benchmarks, we’re talking about benchmarks in the context of people and program spend in terms of like, where do you invest those dollars? But more specifically, how do you look at the performance profile of those investments? And so a couple of things for you to think about in terms of, for your own organizations. One is like we typically will look at return on marketing investment two ways for every dollar you spend in total marketing and every dollar you return in marketing also broken out for demand-specific investment and performance. So a portion of your budget, you need to be looking at demand stimulation or demand generation and you should be calculating your return on investment that way. And you should be benchmarking it that way. A couple other points to think about is the mix of your what we call program or your discretionary budget is actively changing. And what I mean by that is we are seeing companies start to allocate program or discretionary dollars aligned to their coverage model.
Kevan Savage: Upmarket and enterprise mid-market down market. Historically, marketing teams are not thinking that way. But guess what? Your sales teams are organized that way in your markets and your territories. So you need to put the investments relative to your coverage model in the market. Last point is really looking on the the people side, re-envisioning how you deploy that people spent. So to give you an example, we have multiple fintech clients already that are looking at their people as an upskilling strategy and saying, where can I AI assist and where can I AI resource. So as a practical example, we have a client at the moment they have three copywriters. They have three copywriters. They know they need two really talented copywriters internally, but they have an agentic strategy to complement those two copywriters with a third resource so they can free up that headcount to fund new roles like product marketing. This isn’t about costing out. This is about redeployment of your people spend in a very smart and pragmatic way.
Jeff Wood: That’s great. Kevan and I know we worked on a project a little while ago. Can you share a little bit around an example of where benchmarking actually helped a client set their proforma or budget that was more aligned to their strategy and the ideal customer profile to accelerate growth?
Kevan Savage: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it goes back a little bit to the comment I made around aligning your budget to your coverage model. We had a client that had an emerging marketing organization, meaning they were maturing but not maturing in the sense of how to align the overall investment focus and performance focus in the broader go-to-market sense. And so what that meant for us with them was let’s baseline where the budget’s deployed today. Let’s look at how the performance is optimized today. What channels, what campaigns? What are you putting in the marketplace? How optimized are those things? And then let’s look at rebalancing that and pro forma that up to the future state coverage that we need to go drive new market entry, better coverage in, you know, an existing market where we need more share. So that was about rebalancing the budget and reallocating the pro forma of where to put that investment and people spend to drive future growth.
Jeff Wood: Great. Thanks, Kevan. Yeah, I know I get a lot of questions from executives saying, you know, let me see the benchmarks I need to understand where am I underspending and where am I probably overspending and let me rebalance that so that I can get the right mix to go after the growth opportunities that we see out there. So as we kind of move on to the second point, so now that we’ve got a budget that aligns to my strategy, can you talk a little bit about some of the key elements of a successful marketing operating model and how companies should be be thinking about aligning leadership and structure with their budget in the strategic goals that they’re trying to achieve.
Kevan Savage: Yeah. A couple ideas for you and your organization to consider. Unfortunately, we still see things like annual operating planning not turn into proper marketing planning in organizations. And then you have sales teams that are doing their annual planning process and their quarterly forecast reviews and things along those lines. You need to bring that marketing operating model together with your sales operating model. So we see lots of clients kind of putting together marketing leadership councils that have sales attendants. We see marketing QBRs or monthly business reviews that are also including sales leaders. To really talk about, like how we’re covering canvassing and converting the market together, as, you know, one kind of distinct go-to-market plan where you can also pivot your marketing campaign planning within it, right where you’re getting traction, where you’re not. The second is making sure that your leadership, your executive leadership in particular, understands that marketing planning is just as critical as sales planning and really kind of charting the path for the teams and the expectation that that is how they should work and are expected to work and operate as a combined team.
Jeff Wood: Great. Thanks, Kevan. And I know one question I get all the time from executives, especially clients that are in a transformation and they’re making major changes, you know, do we build our blueprint before we hire new, new leadership, or do we wait a few months, bring the new leader on board, and then think about the benchmarking in a blueprint that we need to build out. Can you elaborate a little bit of what you’ve seen work effectively to help clients scale quickly?
Kevan Savage: Yeah. So in this particular client situation that Jeff and I were discussing earlier, they had somewhat of an existing marketing team, but they didn’t really have. Was that Future State blueprint to really transform and scale this marketing team relative to the overall go-to-market strategy for the company? So in this case, we had to kind of build the blueprint and hire the leader at the same time. And the importance of that is not waiting. One, two is making sure that, you know, you can put quick wins on the board with your go-to-market teams while you’re hiring that new leader role. Lastly three. You’re hiring the leader for multi-year results right? And so that’s a situation where you have an existing marketing team that needs a charter. They need that North Star. And you got to get that done and get it in play by hiring that new leader. And in those instances, even if you need to hire that leader 95% of the time, they very much value that. There’s already been a blueprint created. So when they come on board, they’re not starting from a zero base. They’re able to sprint as opposed to kind of crawl or walk. Right.
Jeff Wood: You know, I think one thing that we’d like to kind of drill into, to give some actionable insights and think about why people need to be thinking about the reevaluation of ICP. As an example, when you’re defining your ICP in the fintech space, we see the product offerings evolve pretty rapidly, the industry is shifting. There are acquisitions and mergers. Why is it so critical for companies to think about refining their ICP in a fast-moving market?
Kevan Savage: Yeah. I mean, to put fintech in perspective. And, you know, Jeff probably thinks about this while he sleeps, is like, where do you get the right banks, where you’re looking at, you know, where you have something like embedded payments and software targets? Where do you have the right partnerships? What loan systems or adoption should you be looking at so you can really target who you need to market to from an end-user standpoint? Those are attributes of your ICP. And those are fairly unique to fintech. And that’s rapidly evolving, especially with the emergence of AI. So if you can’t incorporate those elements into your ICP, one is you’re going to be off target in terms of where you’re putting your focus and your marketing dollars and your people focus, but also with your sales focus. Which means that at some point you’re not going to get realized. Revenue and the revenue walk that you put in play. So point there is that really understanding those attributes and not just standardizing that, but operationalizing that with the teams, putting the right weighting, the right criteria there for your ISPs is an important aspect to really put the right focus and productivity into the teams, too.
Jeff Wood: Great. Thanks, Kevan. And how have you seen ICP refinement really impact the revenue realization, especially when you’re thinking about some partnerships? And embedded solutions play a really key role, like fintech.
Kevan Savage: Yeah, it’s a great question. So a couple of performance-related things that we see work well are related to ICP. We will see sales leaders run a forecast call and ask this very basic question. What percent of our pipe is ICP aligned versus non ICP aligned? If that answer is heavily weighted towards non ICP aligned, you’re typically not going to see conversion there. You’re going to see a lot of productivity drag on your sales team. You’re going to see wasted marketing dollars. It allows you to dive deeper into how do we get more ICP aligned pipe that we think should and will convert as you test it and prove it out over time. And so that’s where we see the kind of definition of ICP get operationalized in something like a forecast call. We also see pipeline reviews reflect that as well. So the call out there is as to you to leaders, if you’re not asking that basic question, what percent of our pipe is ICP aligned or not ICP aligned, how are those two things performing? How are we allocating investments to those things or demand generation programs? Basic, basic starting point. Go ask that question. See how your team responds. If your team responds with we don’t know, that means you have an opportunity to go relook at your ICP, which means that you actually don’t know where you’re driving your demand and you don’t know where you’re driving your team’s effectiveness around that demand as well.
Jeff Wood: Got it. So we’ve got our ICP, we’ve got our budget. We know our allocation and our operating model in place. So what are some of the effective strategies that companies now need to really think about executing that go-to-market plan so they can drive the adoption revenue pull-through? Always a huge issue for fintechs and consumption companies. How do you think about some of those go-to-market items to execute immediately once you have this in place?
Kevan Savage: Yeah, I’ll give you 3 or 4 to think about. Assuming you have the right targeting alignment between the teams. One is making sure that you’re, you’re looking at the rules of engagement between what we call demand generation and demand fulfillment. So making sure that your marketing team is, you know, stacked hands, trained with if you have investors, they are just as knowledgeable as your products, your ICP, your service offerings, your marketing team, but also that you have the right weights and measures between your marketing team, your SDR and your team, and your account execs. Why that’s important is so you can drive better velocity in the funnel, but also when you start thinking through, you know, hand-off points from, you know, signing to launch, you also have the right CSM engagement model and Am expectations there. That’s point number two. Point number three is that you can actually actively pivot where you’re not getting yield and results in different customers or customer sets around that demand generation, demand fulfillment engine. Lastly, that you’re able to actually celebrate value creation for your customers and leverage what your customers expect into your case studies and customer marketing to kind of fuel additional growth that we all know is mission critical for fintech companies as the whole.
Jeff Wood: Great. Thanks, Kevan. I think that probably 80% of our fintech engagements were always dealing with this kind of hand-off, and companies are constantly trying to figure out how to increase our value-added services, how do we do the cross-selling? How do we pull this revenue through from the time we landed to the time we accelerate it? What does that mean in terms of client reference ability and how companies should be thinking about that? Kevan.
Kevan Savage: You know, I think the the reference ability piece there hits a little bit on the customer marketing item that I just referred to, which is you you need to actually show as a marketing leader, you need to show that end to end engagement that you had with customers from all the way through how you engage them in the marketplace, how you welcome them in, how you started to do business, how you onboarded them, how their business is getting kind of ramped to volume, if you will, in terms of once they’re onboarded, those are all elements of your customer marketing and that value story. And that’s a key area that we don’t see. A lot of fintech companies still really do what very well at times is really kind of bringing that value story forward to kind of help drive the kind of not only the peer to peer affinity between what others in the industry might be expecting or looking for, but also really looking and showing that coordinated approach to how your organization works in turn inside out, right internally to externally to create that customer value.
Jeff Wood: Great. Thanks, Kevan. So, you know, in closing, as we wrap some of the things we’ve heard about today, Alexander Group, we have a number of different briefings. We have a new partnership briefing that’s coming out specifically in fintech. Over 100 go-to-market leaders are talking about how they’re thinking about their partnership program. Kevan, can you talk a little more about the next steps folks should take? If you’re looking for some of the marketing benchmarks and how to get started to really put this marketing planning into action.
Kevan Savage: Yeah, absolutely. As Jeff mentioned, the first thing is you should look at your marketing investments and performance levels that you have in place today, where you’re looking to invest more in your next fiscal year. We have a ton of different benchmarks in the marketing space around people and program spend, pipeline contribution percentages, things along those lines. Reach out if we can help you in any way. Kind of unpack some of those data points on your end. More specifically, do look at the investments you’re making and the performance you’re driving in. I’m going to go back to the coverage model in terms of, like, where are you putting your most costly and valuable resources in the sales team? And are those investments aligning with your marketing investments? That quick answer is no. Point your benchmarking exercise, though.
Jeff Wood: Great. Thank you so much, Kevan. We appreciate the time today, and we look forward to anyone reaching out to us. We’re happy to jump on a short call and share more about what we’re seeing in the market and answering questions that you have. Thank you.
