Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
Hello and welcome to the WebCanopy Studio Show. I'm your host Tom Andrews and I'm joined by WebCanopy Studios CEO John Aiken. In today's episode, we're going to dive deep into a concept that flips the traditional marketing model right on its head, and it's called marketing marketing teams can supercharge your business' growth, how lead scoring can help your sales team prioritize prospects for best engagement and conversions, and how using educational content to build trust and authority with your audience is the single best way of turning leads into loyal customers. So stick around as we unpack these strategies, share real world examples, and challenge traditional marketing rules. Trust me.
Tom Andrews:You won't want to miss this. So, John, how are you doing today?
John Aikin:I'm good, Tom. How are you, sir?
Tom Andrews:I am very good. Here in England, across the pond. Yeah. It's almost the end of my day. You're, I guess, just a couple of copies in so far?
John Aikin:I know. Well, yeah. I've had 2, and it's time to get another one. But that's okay. I'm glad the meantime
Tom Andrews:went to help. Exactly. Wait. You said you got
John Aikin:up at 6, and I I was still working at midnight, so I was at my desk. Does that happen? Do you get it that early all the time?
Tom Andrews:Maybe. Kind of. I'd say around half 6 is my natural wake up time.
John Aikin:Yeah. We should do we should do our podcast when you wake up when I'm going to bed. I'm sure it'd be a lot more interesting.
Tom Andrews:Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I trust what I say, but I don't think it would be I don't think we'd even be eligible what I say at that time, but it could be fun.
John Aikin:Yeah. That'd be alright. All good.
Tom Andrews:Awesome. So, John, marketing backwards. You just said that you have released podcasts in the past about marketing backwards and your whole philosophy, but think where we're starting this from scratch and there's gonna be new listeners and old listeners who haven't heard your sultry voice for a while. I think it's a I think it's a good idea just to start this new series off with describing what is marketing backwards. So give me an overview of it.
John Aikin:Yeah. Great great question. So, the idea of marketing backwards is is focused on looking at the metrics that matter the most for your business and building your entire marketing, your sales, your operations, your cross sell upsell retention model around those metrics. And so often, when you have these situations where your sales team is working in a silo and the marketing team is working in a silo and they're not really getting a lot of cross pollination, it is very easy to think about completely separate metrics and completely separate goals in mind. So the marketing backwards concept is essentially like, let's identify what those key numbers are that we wanna work with almost always is like spoiler alert.
John Aikin:Almost always they are revenue related sales revenue cross sell. Even if you're not just getting marketing leads past the sales, it's MQLs, it's opportunities, deals created, things like that. And then start looking backwards from there and identifying things in your process that are creating those avenues, that are opening those doors. And that's really where it's at because most of the time, when people think about marketing, they're thinking top of funnel, high level, especially when you're looking in a b to b world. It's very different.
John Aikin:You're selling to a consumer and you're selling directly to, hey, like, buy these t shirts or buy this package. You're literally living at bottom of funnel sale point. Right? Like, that's where you're focused. But if you're not in that world, which is pretty much everybody that I talk to, you are focusing on so many people focus on that top of funnel world.
John Aikin:Social media post, where what are we gonna talk about on Instagram today? What's the blog post that we're getting out? How are we doing on SEO? Is our website traffic going up? Are we getting clicks in our ads?
John Aikin:And, yes, valuable points, those are important. Email open rates, yes. They do have a place and and they're they are very important. But if they're not coming to a specific means at the end, it's irrelevant. It's just a lot of activity for no real output.
John Aikin:And so that's the concept of marketing backwards is starting at the end, identifying those, the goal, and then kind of reverse engineering what has to happen to impact that goal.
Tom Andrews:I love that. That is so cool as well when I've worked with clients in the past who have, like you said, probably been marketing forwards, I guess, where they have started at that top of funnel. And one thing that really stood out to me was they never really gained traction in any of their campaigns because the top of funnel stuff, like you said, that is really important, but it takes time to get going. And if you if you're not starting where the money is made, where the sale is done, where the deal is closed, then, essentially, I just find that you're spinning your wheels for months months months, and you're probably actually gonna give up before you actually see, like, the fruits of your labor, essentially. Yeah.
John Aikin:Absolutely. I
Tom Andrews:would like to ask could Go ahead. Can I just ask you one thing? I want to get your opinion. So say I'm a new client, and I'm coming to you and saying, John, this like, I say my manufacturing business. John, like, we need to get more leads.
Tom Andrews:Simple as that. What would be your first advice or maybe even the first question you'd ask me if that was the case?
John Aikin:Yeah. That's a really great question, and this happens all the time in the relationships we deal with with our clients now. So the very first thing that has to happen is okay. You're saying I need more leads. I need to have more essentially, what you're asking for is your sales team to have more at bats.
John Aikin:So quick story, quick background. We've had a number of times working with clients, you know, years ago where we would be doing a lot of marketing on that front end piece, not thinking about marketing with the end in mind. And so we were helping them create blogs and doing social and, like, forms and things on their website, email campaigns, and so on. And we were just absolutely thrilled for this one client because we were like, hey, look. We brought 30 new deals in this quarter.
John Aikin:Like, look at the deals that are in the pipeline. That's 30 new at bats for your sales team. That is awesome. I'm thinking we're gonna go tell this client, hey. We gotta bump our services.
John Aikin:Like, we're gonna make them all kinds of money. And they gave a cancellation notice to us, like, that same week. And I'm like, this can't be right. Like, there's something wrong here. Where how are we this is like this should be like agency fails 101 from back in the day.
John Aikin:And so I'm I get on the phone with the client. I'm like, hey. I just wanna make you aware. I got the cancellation notice. I wanted you to see, like, we I feel like we crushed it with you this quarter.
John Aikin:Your team was great. My team was great. We got a lot going on. And he's like, yeah. 30 deals.
John Aikin:I needed 90. And I'm like, okay. Where was that in the conversation when we're talking about what your goals are and where you wanna be and what you wanna do? He said, well, we just didn't know it at the time. And I'm like, okay.
John Aikin:So maybe what if we what if we reframe instead of canceling our agreement? What if we reframe and talk about, let's set the goal, and then help have my team understand how we can help hit that goal through whether it's different reengagement actions, whether it's ads, whether it's some kind of, webinar workshop boot camp kind of process. And so that is a really great scenario to explain kind of where you were just asking that question of, like, what would I want to know or what would my first question be if a a if a client or or manufacturing VP of marketing said that to me? And I would say, I need to identify what the goal is. So when you're asking or saying I need more leads, what should we do?
John Aikin:I wanna know what you're doing now. I wanna know how that's performing. Is that good? Is it bad? And then I wanna know where you'd like to be.
John Aikin:And so, if I can see where we're at now, and I can see where you want to go, what the next step then is to break it down and to start identifying 3 to 4 to 5 key obstacles in the way of getting there. And so then as a team, we collaborate and break down what those obstacles would be.
Tom Andrews:So those obstacles, are they generally the same obstacles, like, from client to client, or are they vastly different on an individual basis?
John Aikin:Great question. They are generally the same depending on the kind of, kind of process that that that company is working with. So, in most cases, it's usually just a disconnect between what the marketing team, what the sales team is doing. Most of the time, the marketing team has their own goal or their own efforts that they're working towards, and that's driving everything that they're focused on. But they're not necessarily tying that into the sales team's quota or how that impacts.
John Aikin:The other thing that I've seen with that is the the marketing team sometimes does really care about that, and they really are invested in that. But the sales team looks at it as well. We are a sales team. We're doing our own like, I'm busy with my own leads. Those are just leads for marketing.
John Aikin:Those are extra. We'll get to those another time. And so there's not really that cross, pollination thing happening and they're not connected there. So that's usually one of the first ones is to help bridge that gap between the sales team and the marketing team, making sure that those systems are in place to at least understand what the definitions are and what has to happen for those definitions to be triggered from the stage to the next stage.
Tom Andrews:Awesome. So can you go a little bit deeper into that? Like, how you would do that and how you would sort of bridge that path between sales and marketing?
John Aikin:Yeah. So a really great example of this, a quick, fix for anybody that's trying to figure this out in just a short term, is to utilize lead score. And it's it's really easy to do if you're in HubSpot. There's a lot of other tools that will do this as well. But, and ideally, it's not even just one score.
John Aikin:I'd like to see 2 scores because the idea of lead score is to identify prospects that are high fit and high engagement. And so in order to do that, I need to be able to somehow identify and score contacts or leads that I'm working based off of how good of a fit they are compared to my ideal client. So I might say, industry manufacturing plus 13 points. Industry, higher ed plus 5 points. Industry attorneys, negative 13 points.
John Aikin:No offense, attorneys. You know, like, you'd have you have the different issues you wanna work with, and you don't.
Tom Andrews:John English minus 13 points. Yeah. I'm English. I wouldn't say that.
John Aikin:British. British.
Tom Andrews:British. Yeah.
John Aikin:Yes. No. Tom, we love you. Come on, man.
Tom Andrews:Yeah.
John Aikin:So the you would have these different criteria to go plus or minus. And based off of what data you collect, whether you're using enrichment data or it's data that's filled out from forms or things that you've identified on calls, whatever it might be, you're gonna add to or subtract from that person's lead score. And, again, in HubSpot, that's just automatic. So I would look at it from a fit score perspective in that situation. Then we have engagement because it's one thing to just identify a group of people that are good fit, but if they don't know you, if they have no clue who you are or what you're doing or really anything, essentially, about the engagement or the the efforts that they're trying to talk to you with, it's a wasted phone call because they're not gonna know who you are.
John Aikin:Right? So we look at engagement as well as a separate score, and that engagement would be things like, have they visited the website? Have they clicked on our ads? Have they filled out forms? Have they reengaged in nurturing email?
John Aikin:Have they opened checklists and guides? Like, how plus or minus again, how active are they? And the the minus part is really important too because I want to subtract if they're not active anymore. So it's really important to have, like, last activity date within 60 days or something like that because at that point, we and then subtract a lot Because at that point, they're not actively engaged within that 60 day window, so they're not technically a high fit, high engaged customer. Now the reason that this is important, high fit, high engaged.
John Aikin:If you have that criteria, as soon as someone hits that, you wanna notify a sales rep right away. And even if you have to notify the sales rep and cc your CEO or somebody on it and say, hey, this person meets all the criteria for a great client, and they're engaging with all of these really good signals right now. We we want the sales team to work this. Most of the time, sales person that hears that and knows that and they have a quota to fill, they'll be like, thank you. I'm gonna go call this person, rather than just seeing it as, oh, these are a list of leads that someone fill out a form.
John Aikin:The other way that that would be valuable would be high fit, but still just a little bit low engagement, that need a little bit more push. Not completely cold, but lower on the engagement level, so there's some awareness. And why I think that would be valuable, the the story that I I tell in the past on previous podcast was, like, if I'm a salesperson and I have 2 hours in my day to just prospect, just just to try and add more opportunities into my pipeline, I want to spend those 2 hours as wisely as I possibly can. So those at bats, if you will, need to be valuable. I don't wanna spend those 2 hours calling people who are gonna yell at me and hang up on me and waste my time because I wanna have as much, positive momentum as I can one call after the next.
John Aikin:So where am I gonna go to identify that? Well, rather than just googling, looking at Zoom info, looking at Apollo, and just hopefully hitting something at some point, I wanna look at this data, and I wanna see those that are already in my database that are scored high for high fit and are also pretty well engaged, but aren't being worked yet or aren't having that conversation yet. And so in that situation, we're we're basically giving a list of active people always for the sales team to pursue.
Tom Andrews:That's awesome. I love that. And I remember I was in a sales job years ago. This is just after I finished university or college as you guys call it. Selling instead of gym membership, so very much b to c.
Tom Andrews:But part of the job was cold calling people, which I didn't really like, especially because we didn't have any of this lead scoring stuff. So it was just calling people. And even though you're selling a good thing, you're not selling, like, something that no one cares about. You still got a lot of really peed off people who didn't wanna hear from you. You're disrupting their day.
Tom Andrews:So this is really fascinating stuff because from a sales point of view, if you can call someone who you think, judging by the data, is gonna be receptive to your message and is actually gonna, like you say, be like, make it worth your while and your time for actually calling them, then happy days all around. Now just quickly, you've touched on what sales can do there. So when they look at all the these scores, like, say, who's high fit, high engagement, what could the marketing side do for somebody who's high fit, slightly lower engagement? If you're a marketer, is there a way you can target this group of people to, like, increase that engagement?
John Aikin:Yeah. Great great point. Great question. I think the biggest opportunity here is not necessarily about awareness. This is a more consideration kind of approach.
John Aikin:And and what I mean by that is this is where it's really important to focus on relationship building and trust building, building authority, letting people know that this is a a very safe and secure means of solving the issue that they have. Again, at this point, a lot of people still talk about themselves all the time. Every single if I open my inbox right now, every single promotional email talks about the products, the software that people have, why I should get a demo with them, and like, I don't care. I do not care because I'm busy. I'm checking my email because I've got a contract that I need to send out, and I gotta get it countersigned and send a link to somebody else.
John Aikin:Right? So when I see this email come in, it's like, hey. I wanna give you a demo of my product. I'm like, you're just wasting your own time right now because I'm gonna send you to spam. So, what we don't wanna do is have our own outreach efforts to this group of people end up in that same bucket.
John Aikin:And so the the best way to do something like that if I'm on a marketing team and I'm trying to warm up people who kind of know us, maybe they're on our list, maybe they've done some things with us, but they are good fits, at least from our own perspective with the data we have. I want to build authority and build trust with them, and the way I'm gonna do that is through a workshop, is through a training, is through some kind of let me help you identify what you, like, just something within your role of what you don't want to have happen in the future or what you need to be aware of. So a perfect example, one of our clients, was a, a higher end software and they were for, construction companies that needed to make sure all of their employees, all of their their contractors were had the the correct credentials and OSHA certifications and all these different things so they could go pursue government work. And so in order to do that, rather than just selling the software, which they were doing, they were sending out all these emails and sharing all this information about, hey.
John Aikin:This is our software. You need to get our software. It's gonna help your contractors, yada yada. We help them see that, why don't we change this to, like, here are the changes in 2024 for OSHA standards that your construction company needs to be aware of. We're doing a a free webinar or a free workshop around things to prepare for for next year.
John Aikin:And it's a quite helpful resource. And so people get in there enjoying it. They're getting they're hearing the CEO talk about it specifically. And guess what the pitch is at the end? It's we actually have all of this documented.
John Aikin:We have the entire process ready to go. It's as easy as a few clicks of a button. All you need to do is enroll your your contractors into here, and you're good. And so they sold without really selling, and that model is so brilliant for people who are in in in a situation where they need to get some people who are high high fit, but not quite all the way engaged. You just need to build trust, and you need to build authority and, like, be a resource for them.
Tom Andrews:Yeah. I love that. And I know when we started doing a lot of that for clients several years ago, that some of those campaigns worked so well, especially because that whole model it's a guy called Russell Brunson who's in the the the business opportunity world, and Yeah. It's a little bit that world can be a little bit dodgy, and I don't necessarily believe most of the claims in that world. But in terms of the actual marketing itself, it is very good.
Tom Andrews:And there's a lot you can learn from that world, but and take it away into what I call the real business world, especially in the b two b, or even, like, the ecom world as well. But we've essentially taken that or you essentially don't wanna take credit where it's not due. You essentially took that model and, started running that model to our clients and then also the clients we put on to their own clients or prospects, should I say. And it worked super, super well. So if you're listening, it's definitely something to, try on your own.
Tom Andrews:And on that note, next episode, John, I would absolutely love if we went really in-depth into this whole masterclass model where we just provide value and we sell on the back of it. So
John Aikin:Love it.
Tom Andrews:Thank you very much for listening to this episode, and we'll see you in the next one.