Everyone welcome back to another episode of Sacking Growth. My name is Evan here and joined by my awesome co-host Ashley once again. Hi everyone. We're looking forward to today's episode.
So as you wrap up the year, we're thinking of entering Q4. Everyone's thinking about annual planning. There's chaos ensues within the marketing departments, the sales teams. We really wanted to kind of unpack a little bit more how you can set up your Q1 at the next fiscal for success.
What are some of the tactics you can use as a marketer immediately in Q4 to reach those goals? And then what are some of the other levers that maybe you're able to service to other internal teams and stakeholders to really kind of drive and maintain momentum? Because I think about it at the end of the day, when it comes down to Ashley, we've all seen this as Q4 hits. More often than not, there's an under-pasted goal because everybody likes to forecast, you know, kind of like up into the right.
So Q4 is the biggest quarter of the highest goals. But I think what people forget to realize is like, in my opinion, Q4 is one of the shortest quarters of the fiscal. You factor in vacation times, we're all burned out, kids are out of school, people are taking PTO, not to mention just holiday breaks that are built in there. So if you don't have stuff closing within like the first of December, there's a high probability that that's not going to close.
But budgets are locked and all that stuff. So a lot of rambling here, but I think this is kind of an interesting topic. And I think for the listeners, it would be really interesting for us to, what are some of the levers we've actually pulled that we're pulling with clients today? Right?
So between both of us, we're working across like 14 different clients. Let's just dive in. So actually kind of thinking about that Q4 chaos, but Q1 success. What is like one area that you like to focus on or what is one lever that you like to pull or suggest?
Yeah. So in Q4, it's kind of, you know, like you said, all hands on deck. You're trying to do anything within your power to hit that number and you're getting pressured from about two, right? You know, you want to hit that goal.
What can we do? Sometimes it comes out at like a growth at any cost kind of mindset too. One thing that I would recommend doing is, you know, refine lab stocks a lot about creating demand. But I would make sure that you were properly also funding your capture demand channels in Q4.
So if there's a place for you to shift a little bit of your budget in order to fund a Google ads campaign at full capacity versus the roddling it in other months, I think that's a smart move to do in Q4. You're probably going to see a little bit higher competition as well in those channels as other companies are doing the same. I would just make sure that you were captured to be on channels are rolling at full capacity because you really want to just grab them as much as you can. I like this actually.
And that's one thing I don't think you're suggesting here is expand your reach in terms of adding new keywords that are just kind of these lowing in terms of potentially traffic drivers to get people to the website. I think here it's like really looking at impression share, right? Like, how can we, what are the levers that we can pull to improve impression share on our high-end tech keywords? So knowing that there is demand there, there is going to be competition in market.
You know, maybe we can move that needle with a little bit of budget going from like 75% impression share to 85% impression share. I think that that's one win that you can think about too as you go into directly associated with Google Ads. I really like that. Yeah, and another thing too.
You know, setting up your Q1 for success, which we'll dive into in a little bit is a huge focus in Q4 too because that's when a lot of other companies budgets basically open up and that's when they evaluate new providers. So you really want to be at your highest amount of viewers shipping Q1 and so you don't want to throttle the spend too much into the capture in Q4 either. So what I would do and I would recommend to any company as well is make sure, you know, ask for more budget in Q4 too so that you can fund the capturing in Q4. You can also start funding the creating demand because it takes about a quarter in order to get your brand out there and for you to really make an impact on memorability so that when Q1 rolls around, they think of your brand right away.
So that's another lever I would pull is ask for more budget too and also explain why you want more budget. Yeah. And I know some marketing like the thing that we joke about is we're always asking for more budget, but it's something that I would make the case for if I was running in a marketing team in house of, hey, here's what we can do to hit the number, try and hit the number in Q4. However, I also want a little bit more in order to do that, but also set Q1 up for success.
Yeah, it's definitely not pivot all budget into man capture. That's the last thing we want to do to sell momentum. But I always joke that I swear to God, money falls out of the sky on Q4. Like for some reason, somewhere somebody didn't spend other budget or they're able to.
When you have a strong case, right, that supports why you want to do that. So if you can prove there's demand and you're missing that demand by having, you know, an 80, 20 split, 20% of Google ads or paid search, 80% of demand creation, paid social, Facebook, LinkedIn. If you have a strong case as to why you want that budget, more often than not, you can find it. Of course, there's smaller companies too when there's individuals that are the one person show at startups right now, but there isn't a budget there.
So totally understand that. We're just saying that there's an opportunity to kind of crowdsource a little bit more funding or think about it differently. That's definitely a good lever to hold. A lot of budgets just reset it, new fiscal, right?
So it's like use it or lose it. We might as well use it and continue to kind of build that momentum as a flywheel for success in Q1. For sure. Another thing I find interesting is mining through your C-R-M to see if there's any opportunities for outreaches there and maybe could be a partnership with sales and marketing too.
But if you notice someone, like if you create a smart list in house of how to buy for sale and it's a non-customer and they can't do it. And it's a non-customer and they keep visiting key, high intent landing pages on your site. I find that really interesting to figure out a strategy for outreach for those contacts because they may have done something and they need to be retargeted in order to boost them up into a high intent conversion like central demo. But I think there's also really interesting ways you can mine your C-R-M to for some quote unquote low hanging brew.
I just mentioned before this that term isn't always my favorite, but it makes sense. It's so applicable right now. I totally hear you. Hello.
What is some success you've seen with doing that with clients in the past? Kind of mining the CRM, especially in Q4, do you use that to action? Yeah, I mean, it can go either way. It can either work or it can't work or it won't work.
It's kind of a bet to place. I've seen it really work in email marketing, actually, which here I'm saying a little bit more captured in email marketing. Things you probably never thought you'd hear me say here at fine labs, but email marketing sales a place within marketing teams is not totally dead. And I've seen success with re-engaging with a very tailored marketing email outreach campaign and whether that's repackaging how you're delivering the message of your product.
Maybe it's a promotion. A couple of other things to get them to come in. I have seen success with that, though, setting up a smart listing. If they are not a customer, they have not submitted a high-intech conversion, and they have viewed X amount of high-intent landing pages in the last 30 days, send them this email.
So those are a couple of quick wins that I've seen work in the past. Well, and I think that quick win rate is better than what a lot of us marketers or leadership will default to in Q4. Right? So more often than not, and not speaking for everyone, but we'll see people suddenly revert back to lead gen.
Yes. We revert back to pumping money and defines to capture email addresses, which have low intent. So I think that's, you know, you're kind of walking away from this conversation or you're listening or thinking about what things not to do as well. I think some of the ideas to think about Q1 for success is don't pull the levers that we always do to just try to hit a goal, because that goal is associated with a top of funnel metric that isn't materializing into revenue.
So sure, start high-fiving your marketing team, you hit your goals, you got the email addresses, and Q4 is over. Right? You wipe your hands clean. And I think that that's one of the frustrating things we always see with clients pushing back to, like we need to hit that goal.
So I love that idea of using other intent signals in addition to your demand creation components, like within pay media, but finding different angles that you can maybe start a drip campaign or nurture campaign with a more high intent or just uniqueness that our competitions. Less expensive and add market. For sure. And they've shown some, you know, interest in your product.
You touched a little bit on things not to do in Q4, and I think this would be a really great segue of, you know, maybe putting out some, some high priority things not to do, and then what you should do instead for Q1. So an often kind of like marketing tactic that I see, and usually it's because of pressure from above, happen, is that you start emailing your entire database of non-customers. And you just start sending out any and all marketing emails. There's a way to do marketing emails, which I touched on briefly a little bit before it needs to be very personalized, tailored, segmented, and so on.
But when you just last your contact database, what you're doing is you're hurting your future self, because those contacts in your database, I don't know about you, but when I get a lot of emails from a product, I go unsubscribe. So I'm not interested in the product, and you just hurt a chance that you may have had in Q1 or Q2 or so on. So to not email your entire database with blanketed marketing promotional emails, because you're going to hurt your future quarters from doing that. 100% straight to trash.
So shout out to Garrett on our team as well. One of his best practices to keep his email inbox clean is he sets up a rule for anything that contains the word unsubscribe. He goes directly to a folder. And from that folder, directly to the trash.
I don't know if he does that part, but I definitely do. So it's one thing to just keep in mind right when you're blasting your database, wipe this off the central prospects or just irritate them, because you add another layer in Q4. So it's not just marketing that's all hands on deck. You have the entire organization.
You suddenly have sales team. Your sales partners are doing the same thing. Their phones are smoking, they're dialing and calling everybody. So you just think about you're hitting your prospects and potential prospects.
You email, they're getting unsolicited phone calls, conversations. I understand the intent and I totally get it. But to your point, you're sacrificing that long-term growth opportunity, just because of the short-term sprint that really lets us assume you have a 60, 90-day sales cycle, there's no way that person's going to even move through the final by the end of the fiscal anyway. So you're better off really touching, thoughtfully personalizing those outreach campaigns or those messaging or those tactics.
I think this is a good talking point too, as a marketer, right? Like how can you help the sales team in Q4 going into Q1, right? Knowing that we don't want it to be a lead gen, we don't want to give you other leads to reach out to the VDRs, just our calling because we know they're not going to materialize. Sales team's not going to have time to really invest their.
So what other levers do you suggest would be helpful for listeners to think about or insight thinking surface to the sales team that shows like we are a partnership and we are thinking about Q1 versus right now? Yeah, so thinking about Q1, I always look at marketing being ahead of the eight wall for sales. So sales is focused on the right now and we should be like three months in the future if you think of it that way. So we are really trying to get ahead of the curve so that sales can be in the now.
And so that means that they can close those sales, etc. So when we set ourselves up in the future for Q1, we're ensuring that they're going to have a solid Q1 and hit their quotas and so on. So by focusing on what plans are we having in order to grow a larger audience in Q1 that is going to start showing intent of being interested in our product. So whether that is refining messaging, working on new advertising campaigns and so on, I think really just being prepared shows the partnership within sales of, hey, we're going to focus right here right now so that you can have a good Q1.
Totally. I think using insights right that they're capturing to build your campaign planning and I absolutely think campaign planning year long campaign planning so frustrating but if you really think about a Q1 sprint and let's say we're looking at themes within the CRM that as a marketer right you should have access to CRM and you should be surfacing the stuff to the sales team and just showing that you want that partnership. So not only are we identifying maybe close lost reasons or themes within closed one to set up like our campaign plans and maybe messaging sprints into Q1, I think that's also one of the great opportunities in Q4 too like maybe you do want to surf in some of those insights what are some of those themes of the recent close lost deals potentially it is, you know, not a big, I know you have an opinion zone when I get this on discounting and stuff, but like another an angle here is right let's see we see a lot of individuals close lost to pricing is there an opportunity for an outreach there on discounts but before that what do you think about this. Oh man, I told Evan before this call that I have a lot of opinions on promotions I'll keep it short so we can keep this concise.
There's a time and a place for promotions. You have to be very careful with doing too many discounts. I call it the gap effect so for instance I will never buy anything full price with the gap because they're always on sale. That's not a great brand image to have within your company.
I've seen it within companies that I've you know had pleasure working with where there's constant sales going on to in order to hit quotas and what happened was companies stopped paying full price and I just waited until that month came about promotion and so I started hurting revenue because you have to think about the cost that you are you know the discount that you are providing without taking away from the overall number and also dilutes your brand image so if you're always on sale or if you are discounting why are you discounting are you not giving it at the fairest price like I've seen companies have a whole blog post and stamps on why they don't discount I thought it was so brilliant because it really felt like hey we're trying to give you the best product at the fairest price like that's why we don't discount. They discounted in the sales process though but there's a time of place and I think it's all about how you package up the promotion so it's going to happen in Q4. I think it's really about is there ways that you could if you were a company has your core product and then you also have add on features could you talk about a way of bundling those together in a creative way that showcases the value instead of just the discount. I think that's a huge takeaway here is when you do a promotion make sure it's value led and you know really setting your product up as highly as you can versus just focusing on the discount.
I like that right so you see that there's pricing as a factor for a lot of things and maybe it's not even a discount or promotion right maybe there have been changes to the pricing structures in general since some of these conversations have taken place so I think proactively it's like a marketing leader or marketer organization like just surfacing some of these ideas in Q4 too just build that strategic partnership and I think whether they can act on it or not it's important to kind of develop that bond because nobody wants to go into Q1 with a frustrated sales team because marketing just kept feeding them crap. And also Evan I feel like I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I think internal communication during Q4 with sales and marketing is really interesting too. Like as transparently as you can talk to them about what you're doing whether that's in a slayer a shared slack channel where it's just like here's what marketing is working on so they can see all the movement because oftentimes with departments that can get very siloed especially down to the individual contributor level so they're you know they're not hitting quota and people what is marketing doing even like we're not hitting our quota like what in the world but if they could see from a transparency level of okay you know they're setting us me up for success in Q1.
I think internal communication is an interesting lever that you could probably pull in Q4 as well. Yeah no I love that and a lot of times right we'll think we'll assume at least you know when I was more junior in my role at the marketer I would just assume that all my feedback was getting to the right teams and the right leaders you know and some of the things the projects that are working on in the big picture the conversations I was having but oftentimes there's just a disconnect from that conversation making it to the right team so I'm a big fan of you know finding individuals and cross functional stakeholders to build those relationships with and just kind of keeping them informed too right kind of this groundswell effect of if I know a couple people in sales team various roles like. These are some of the projects we're working on like totally know where it admit that you're under pacing goal to right to build that trust and it's not like no I think what gets frustrating right to a lot of these teams and myself included is you almost are like. Phoebe into the stakeholders on the same team when you have the same exact goal because you're like yeah we can get there marketing get there will hit our goal.
But at the end of the day that's not like we keep coming back to that that's not your goal that short term sprint to you know your banded campaigns is not part of your overall business goal to grow revenue so I love that internal kind of communication is so important to. Just build that trust to right so they can reach out to you maybe they're doing stuff that you're not thinking about just kind of having that feedback. Yeah, and especially in Q4 to just like a little bit of like a. Like a culture piece I would add to you is celebrate your sales team like send them a slack message when they close a deal you know send a gift celebrate them publicly in a channel.
You know like if you're in office bringing treats for them whatever it is I've seen huge success as when I was internal we did this a lot and creates creates a like a flywheel effect of momentum and then they you know it helps with the closing of the deals to feel supported and energized and so on so. A little bit of other one Evan with okay so we know all these different things we know that these band aid solutions for Q4 that like kind of quick hits that you as a marketing team you can do. You can also start to distract you from future growth and making more of an impact on term. So let's say you're in the position where you've gotten the executive leadership by and I'm like hey we've done as many different forecasts as possible we've done an optimist pessimist and realistic forecast for where we think will end in Q4 we're going to miss.
And you've gotten the executive by in because you have incredible team and they say cool. Now what and so you come back with that of what we want to set up Q1 in 2023 or the whatever next year was success where do you start as a marketing leader after that conversation like where would you go with that. Yeah I think that's such a good question and having a plan in place like even for a Q1 plan is so important. I think it's really making sure that the conversation is rooted in the objective of meeting revenue targets so whether looking year over year at forecasting right was Q1 forecast set up for success or was that based off of you know Q4 sprints previously.
So it's like the first place I would kind of evaluate is like what is our forecasting patterns been what are some cyclical cycles that maybe we could have avoided and then look at what our projections are right because I think you for right you have kind of budget starting to get set locked in for the next fiscal you have some rough estimates of forecasting. But I think raising your hand and your voice often if that is just an unrealistic number to hit is going to be like step one absolutely like do the research as a marketing leader is the same logical does it seem like it makes sense. Step two is just continuing the narrative about momentum building right so you should use your last fiscal performance to look at that growth. So if you are executing a demand creation strategy or you're thinking about kind of driving over high and 10 bound don't stall that momentum in Q4 and then suddenly put the gas in Q1 that's one thing I also see that it's frustrating to it's like suddenly you have a lot more budgeting Q1 so you just pull it rattle you screw up all the algorithms.
So I think it's just like continuing to have more succinctly saying like look at your forecast do they make logical sense if no flag that flag the reason why and then put it on paper. What does this actually look like if we were to pull this lever well then that sets us up for a bit of learning curve that could take an entire corner for algorithms to catch up or if it had to be with our audiences like set the tone of what that looks like. So there's a genuine relationship. Yeah I love it you mentioned the forecasting piece because these Q4 kind of sprints all come down to one thing and it's how the forecast was laid out for the year.
If they were laid out and also forecast and you're planning they're all like the risk betting essentially you're taking all the available data you have and you're setting bets on how you're going to achieve a goal that you need to hit for investors your company you know wherever it's coming from so you know just acknowledge that first but when you do forecasting well it reduces friction within the business and you're not sent into this place of a Q4 sprint. So if you're in that place right now I think it's a good call out that planning could probably use a little bit more work for next year we obviously know a lot of factors come into play. We can't predict the future there's been a lot of curve falls in the last two years that we've all been thrown. We wouldn't have predicted any of us so also recognize that but there is an opportunity to focus on planning.
I think Q4 should have a theme of what can we do to set the next year up for success and a planning mindset and there's a lot of different preliminary reports that you should be pulling as a marketing and revenue leader and you mentioned a little bit I think on seasonality I think is an interesting one. So if you have noticed you're over here that you you know Q1 is really great and Q4 is really terrible your revenue targets to showcase that for the next year as well so you're not put into this Q4 sprints so you know if you I would look at it as pull off your revenue as far back as you can break it up month over month in your quarter of a quarter of a quarter you can do a couple different equations there and look at what the percentage of total contribution to revenue is. And those should match within your forecast so whatever your total number is it should have that well okay well it let's say Q1 contributes 35% to the total revenue whatever that total number is 35% of that is going to be quoted in Q1. And then there's some nuances within the planning and how you're going to get there from there but I think that's a big one is it shouldn't be a month over month or quarter over quarter like up into the right quota because that's just not how the business works and it's not how your buyers work either.
Yeah and I think one thing we all take right it's usually top down bottoms up approach and there's obviously it's a tough job and like finance and leadership always do a great job like thinking through it but I think being so far removed from the true execution of it makes some of these conversations challenging so then as your marketer or sales team or whomever like your excitement is kind of deflated like nobody likes to continuously miss the whole level of the goal obviously and but also nobody likes to push let or pull levers that aren't going to get them truly performance results and satisfy those top level goals so of that idea of thinking about seasonality of that idea of just servicing these insights to like don't be afraid of whole marketing contribution to talk about it don't be afraid to pull like conversion rate patterns quarter over quarter month over month like maybe there is some seasonality that you don't see a play. But one thing I also started to do a couple years ago is keep a log of major milestone changes to it's a bit of an headache but sometimes these changes whether you're tracking them in Google analytics or there's a large sales team update like really have a log that you can reference to because sometimes let's say there's an internal reorg within the sales department in comparison to fall through the roof or receiving falls out of the sky and you're like wait what's happening now without that context because employee turn is typically 18 to 24 months like you lose that backstory so just keep a log of that as you think about that service that through the forecast and conversations that you're leading with your teams and just make sure that they're aware of that. Oh my gosh this is just like a side highlight I want to mention that you touched on you're not using annotations and Google analytics start doing it like now it's that's everyone up for success I love it because there's always going to be new members that join your team or even existing members and it's like well why maybe you're looking back on the year and like why didn't we hit the goal. This year and it's always like what happened in X month or what change and it is really really hard to think through everything but when you can go into your Google analytics and compare it with your website traffic or you just use it or the change log there it is so helpful to see like oh we changed this year or hey this that removed or whatever it may be or whether it's an Google sheet or whatever but also highly recommend always using Google analytics annotations.
Do that anytime you do a website update or any change. People love to change everything at once and then what they'll happen I don't know and forget about it in 12 to 24 months. It's been a great conversation is always actually you know definitely more of thinking about Q1 success and I think that if we were to kind of you know put a bow on it. The biggest takeaway here for me from this conversation is Q4 shouldn't be where that sprint takes place Q4 shouldn't be where those leverage a poll they're going to run into Q1 and set yourself up for failure and Q1 Q4 should really be about setting the stage with the team setting the expectations managing expectations up.
If you're going to miss goal and Q4 you likely know as you enter Q4 I mean it's not black and white so starting the dialogue with the sales team servicing when loss analysis insights to sales team maybe you can start different nurture campaigns for people within the CRM that are further along the stage. What else would you what's one of the couple takeaways for the audience before we wrap up here that you think are helpful. Yeah there's definitely a couple of kids you can be doing as a marketing team just make sure that they're very tailored and personalized and not like a spray and pray kind of mentality because that will hurt your Q1 so there are a couple of kids I think that also helps with just you know internal politics a little bit of making sure that marketing is showcasing that there. All hands on deck as well I like how you mentioned managing expectations within it and then for me Q4 is actually is really focused on setting Q1 up for success so this should be your preparation month so while you're doing a couple quick hits for you know the greater company this really should be a time that you are heads down hunkering down and figuring out what your plan is the next year.
Yeah awesome awesome well this has been great thanks to all the listeners to this question kind of actually stem from our stack and read live episode so we love the feedback we're always listening so anytime that you know find us on LinkedIn actually or myself or just anybody within the organization we're always taking these questions and thinking how we can provide you back to the audience and just. Love having this dialogue so thanks to all the listeners actually thank you and until next time everyone.