We’re about to go into our quarterly review period at Redgate. We don’t just run QBRs, we also run reviews across all parts of the business. These are a chance to examine the last three months – what worked? What’s going well? What’s not going well and needs fixing? All part of a strong agile process for keeping an eye on what’s really happening, and making adjustments through the year.
But there’s a flaw in these meetings when it comes to marketing. The implication of this process is that the things we did in Q1 have a direct and measurable impact on the outcomes from Q1. I.e. when I’m talking about our Q1 outcomes, the activities that occurred in-quarter are the most relevant for discussion.
But that’s a very partial view of the truth. As all marketers know, marketing is a mix of long, medium and short term activities which, if played right, add up to the outcomes we all seek, such as pipeline for the sales teams.
We’ve just had one of our best quarters for marketing-sourced pipeline in a long time. I can’t say “forever” because we’ve changed how we measure things over the years, but a quarter-to-quarter growth of 20% is something I’m very happy with. I’m not giving absolutes in this chart, for obvious reasons, nor a key to what the colours mean!, but the chart below shows how COVID-19 hit Redgate for marketing sourced pipeline through 2020, then how we’re coming out of the pandemic stronger than ever:
So, great, and I couldn’t be more proud of the incredible marketing team at Redgate for making this happen.
But we’re trying to build a scalable, predictable revenue engine here. It’s not enough to know “What”, we need to know “Why?” – what did we do to achieve this? What can we re-produce? What activities had no impact, that we can cut? This is a Sisyphean task, full of estimates, best guesses, rules of thumb. And I thought back to a poster that used to be on the wall of our HR department (back when we all worked in offices!) stating “Not everything that can be measured is valuable, and not all valuable things can be measured” – which is particularly appropriate here. But we should at least have a stab at trying to know what influences these numbers.
Here’s my go, some based on data, some not. And I’ve given these in reverse “timescale” order – from things we did actually do in-quarter, ranging down to activities that have been in-play for years. And of course it’s almost impossible to weight these things – what was most important? What only made a small difference? Very hard to know..
- Project to “Leave no lead unturned”. A slightly clunky phrase, but we made an operational change in Feb to hire a couple of great temps who are responsible for passing the right marketing generated leads to the right people in Sales. Like every single B2B company in the world, our internal systems for lead flow are less-than-perfect, so, while we fix those issues over the year, we have two people passing leads over by hand, ensuring leads don’t get lost in various buckets, or in the wrong hands. By doing this we at least know we’re maximising the revenue for each lead we do generate. Timescale: 1-2 months
- Fast, agile response to a competitor mistake. Without going into details, one of our competitors made an error, and within days we’d made it clear to our customers that we were there to help them with an alternative if their bosses were asking them to “look around”. We explicitly didn’t “exploit” this error – we never mentioned the competitor’s mistake in any of our comms – but we did make sure that when people were looking for alternatives, that path was easy for them (for example, through comms and campaigns, through sales training – what should people say when these customers make enquiries? – that sort of thing). Timescale: 1-2 months
- A launch. We launched a new offering in February. Of course you can’t do a launch every month, or even every quarter (it can call your credibility into question, if you’re constantly doing grand launches for point releases!). We try to do 1-2 “big” launches each year – incredibly well researched, meticulously planned, focused on real customer needs, and when we get this right (like we did this time), these launches resonate really well with customers. Timescale: 2-4 months to plan the launch, but the research goes back much further..
- Experiments with digital spend. It’s so easy to just keep spending $$ on the same ads, the same channels (“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). But end of 2020, we decided to do some bold experiments moving budget from A to B, and this has really paid off. What we found was the the efficacy of, say $1,000 is enormously different for different products at different lifecycle stages. Specifically, if a brand is well-established, then digital advertising is much less effective than for a new product or brand. This makes theoretical sense of course, but it’s great for the reality to match the theory. Timescale: 3-6 months
- Internal marketing re-org. This is way harder to measure. But, we made some changes in marketing end of 2020, to reduce the friction between different areas and to make the partnership with Sales simpler. Primarily this was about changing the responsibilities for our field marketing teams in different offices, making it easier for them to collaborate with their local sales teams. It’s hard to say “That change made us $500k in pipeline”, but what I can say is that it’s made it much easier to collaborate on various projects (e.g. some of the things above), which I think would have been far less successful without the change. Sometimes your job is to remove barriers and hurdles, rather than add new activities. Timescale: last 6 months
- Treating our customers with respect and empathy during COVID-19. Really? That led to marketing ROI!? We made a conscious decision in April 2020 that, during the pandemic, we wouldn’t exploit the situation for our advantage. We could have gone to customers and turned the screw on various deals, trying to take advantage of their difficulties. Instead we decided “How can we help our customers this year? How can we support our customers through this difficult time?”. We started things like the Redgate Community Circle, with a focus on educating customers (so that at least, through the year, our customers could spend time on self-learning). We made sure that, if a customer was struggling to get a deal or an approval renewed, we gave them that time and space, extending trial periods for example. We actively listened to the struggles they were having (e.g. healthcare orgs struggling to keep up with demand) and made sure adjusted our interactions to give them the support they needed – for example, providing additional free support to healthcare companies, no questions asked. Can I directly measure the return on this effort? No. Do I think it was valuable? Definitely. Customers like working with vendors who understand them and their pain. Timescale: 1 year
- Moving out of the pandemic. Obviously this isn’t something you can “do” – we as vendors have had zero control over the course of the pandemic. However I think it’s crucial to recognise where your success is a mixture of internal and external forces. In marketing, we have a symbiotic relationship with our customers – we’re always trying to understand their concerns, at the same time as representing what our company has to offer. It’s obviously been beneficial to Redgate that our customers are feeling more confident, perhaps a little more willing to think ahead and getting back to solving some of their long-standing problems. Timescale: 1 year
- Long term brand work. We’ve made a number of changes over the years to clearly associate the value customers get from us with the Redgate brand. Specifically, it should be trivially easy to remember “I learnt a lot this year about how to do my job better. It was Redgate that helped me out there”. Or, “I read a great article about what I need to do about problem X at my company – it was Redgate that wrote that”. We’ve done a lot over the last few years to simplify, simplify and simplify again our brands and the associations with that brand, which I think has at least partly led to current success. Timescale – many years!
Obviously I’ve missed a lot of things here – so many great projects over the last 12 months, small and large. And, as I mention, it’s really hard to to figure out “Okay, but which of these were really important?”. Problem with that of course – successful marketing is a complex combination of lots of activities, hopefully orchestrated together to give the result you need. No single activity is sufficient or even necessary for success, but I think you do need most of these things working together for growth.
But to go back to the original problem – how do we present a successful quarter as a set of repeatable, scalable activities? Should we just repeat all these things!? The skill is to choose between either stopping, maintaining or increasing these activities. There are a number of areas which are certainly in the maintain mode – the brand work, experiments with digital spend being just two examples. We’ll keep doing these, but not more. And a couple of things you can’t or shouldn’t “continue” – marketing re-orgs are very expensive, and I certainly hope that we need to do less and less work supporting customers during the pandemic – an option I’d be very happy to lose! But the trick is knowing what to double-down on – something I’ll be working on over the coming weeks.
Finally, I wanted to present all this in a diagram – I started doing something in Excel, but it was too slow, so here’s a Sharpie version instead:
