2022 Growth Trends: Full Funnel Marketing with Breezy Beaumont

Today we're here with Breezy Beaumont, the Head of Growth at Correlated, the leading platform for product-led revenue.

Breezy is also an expert in all things PLG and the host of the Product Let Revenue podcast.

In this interview we discuss:

• How to get closer with your community
• The limitations of current attribution models
• The benefits of product and marketing alliance

I've worked for a number of software companies and also done some advising for early-stage startup companies as well. A lot of that has been in the SaaS space.

My background is in marketing and Demand Gen. As I moved more towards the growth marketing role and saw some of those full-funnel metrics and the user journey across the whole process from before they even know about us to when they're promoting us as a company, that got me focused on this idea of product-led revenue.

That's where I am today.

We've been really focused on getting the people who are on the front lines of what we're talking about to be involved in the conversation.

We're working with a lot of companies who are either product-led today or maybe were from the start and also some companies who are thinking about moving in a product-led direction.

This is such a new and innovative space and although there have been some PLG companies who have been here for a long time, like Zoom and Atlassian, there's still a lot to be learned there.

Broadly what we've been trying to do in all of our materials is think about how are various people solving this. Then how can we help to highlight how they're doing it so that others can learn from it, we can learn from it, and we can go forward together in the same direction.

We run these bi-weekly chats, so that's a good way for these product-led revenue leaders to get together and talk live about it.

We also have the podcast where we do a sort of a deeper dive on one company. And generally, these are some of the leaders in the product-led space.

The other thing we're doing is these sort of like live Q&A events, different from those bi-weekly chats. We bring in some of the people who are on the front lines. We’re not running it like a webinar, anyone who's there can participate and ask questions and add their thoughts.

We have a couple of experts, obviously on the panel who help to run that discussion. Those have been some of the primary ways that we're helping to bring those people together.

Attribution is always tricky and I'm not a huge fan of the whole attribution piece because I think a lot of what you capture in attribution is false. It's leading you in the wrong direction.

Even though you might be catching that first touchpoint, that first touchpoint is your first measurable touchpoint, not actually your first touchpoint.

They might have heard of you at some random dinner that they went to and someone mentioned your name, or their cousin, or they might have seen your stuff on LinkedIn like ten times before they actually convert on it.

That being said, it is important to measure what you can. As much as we can measure, we will. That way we can help to put more resources into what's working.

We have HubSpot as our marketing automation platform and we are able to capture a decent amount of data that way. We also do some manual data entry.

When a salesperson jumps on the call and asks, hey, how did you hear about us? And they say, oh wait, I saw your post on LinkedIn. We'll mark that in our CRM.

Another piece of it we know that they're learning about us across the various platforms and events and things that we're doing and we're a little in the dark on it.

As a team, we're accepting of that and we know that it still works, so we're willing to push forward.

Depending on what you're doing, there are always some pieces that you can measure, and then you can look at the bigger picture. For example, let's look at the podcast.

You can look at the number of downloads and plays of the podcast, and you can look at that across the various platforms that it was played on. That's some pretty solid data.

We can also look at Google Analytics to see what was the website traffic on the page that the podcast was on?

Campaign specific, you can see those pieces and measure what you can. Looking at the larger picture, now that we've run this campaign or opened up this channel or done this activity, how has that impacted the number of demo requests that we have or further down funnel or the number of opportunities that we have and the amount of revenue that we have.

All that would be dependent on how fast your sales cycle is to see how far down the funnel you could measure as close to revenue.

I think that marketers, especially in the product-led space are becoming more product experts, which I think is great.

In the past marketers knew what the product was for the company you worked for but I think if people really thought about it and maybe were honest with themselves, they didn't have a ton of product knowledge.

Something that I think is exciting is that more marketers are getting more product knowledge. They're hanging out in the places where their customers and prospects are to not only talk with them, but just to listen to them and hear what they're saying so that we can help to solve their problems in the best way possible.

The other thing is that it's again related to product, marketers are becoming a little bit more closely aligned with the product team.

One of the big pieces of the product in this PLG space is virality or network effects. As a marketer, we have that brain to think about how can I make virality a piece of our product?

By working with the product team, you can help to not only get the people initially in the product or excited about it, but help to really create that exponential growth on the other end of it.

It's the same way that we've seen with other product-led products. Calendly, if someone shares their calendar link with you, you're like, wow, this is really ten times easier to book a meeting together. I want to create my own calendar.

Gating content, nobody needs it. Also, marketers who are focused on strict Lead Gen.

In my opinion, that's still not the top thing we want to be thinking about. We want to be thinking about when does that lead become an MQL? Or when does that MQL create an opportunity and break it down per channel.

That's something that I think more marketers and revenue leaders are doing going forward. Not just thinking about, how many leads are we getting or how many MQLs are we getting?

They're actually looking at how are these converting through our pipeline, and how are they converting when we look at them on a per-channel basis. How can we then optimize based on that.

It's not we want more leads, we want higher quality leads, not higher quantity.

Ideally both but if you had to pick one, in most scenarios, if you break down the numbers on conversion, you might actually end up choosing the lower quantity because the conversion rates are higher.

That's something that I'd like to see go is teams who are focusing on sheer top of the funnel numbers and not looking at how that relates to revenue.

Look at the conversion rate past the MQL. What's your lead to MQL rate? And if that looks a little funky, definitely poke into a couple of numbers.

Then look past the MQL. How many of those MQLs are turning into a sales allowed lead or sales qualified lead. How many of those are becoming an opportunity?

How are those opportunities tracking over time? How many are turning into closed won or closed losses? Can we look at various titles and seniorities and does that sort of change that?

Based on your stage, it depends on how deep into the data you have. For a more well-developed and further along company, there's a lot to dig into there and it generally surprises the team.

A lot of times I've seen companies who are really focused on a certain buyer persona and if you dig into the data, you actually find your true buyers.

First step is to look at the conversion rates at the various steps. The further down funnel you get, if tweaking your conversion rate, the tiniest bit at the bottom of the funnel is like night and day.

Whatever we can do to increase those conversion rates, we should do. It's a little bit of a cheat code. As marketers, you have to put all this money and spend to get top of the funnel.

Then you realize like, oh, if I do a little bit of bottom of funnel work, I'll get the same result.

I was actually just talking to a company the other day about splitting out their top of funnel and bottom-funnel campaigns.

They were running campaigns on a topic-based. But by splitting out the top and bottom of funnel, they could actually push people faster through the bottom of the funnel and reallocate spend appropriately to top of funnel.

HubSpot is our marketing automation tool that's sort of like your classic. We are also running LinkedIn ads. BuzzSprout is how we actually track our podcast to see how that's performing across the various channels.

I don't know if this should really technically count as a tool but the various Slack communities out there. That's a big tool and organic social too.

The Slack communities, LinkedIn, and other social channels really give you a peek into how your customers and prospects are thinking about various problems and channels to reach them there too.

I think there's been a re-emergence in the marketing world about sharing. We realized the way that everyone thought was the best way to do it really wasn't.

Now we can share, be open, say what we're doing and ask for help when we need it. I think the same applies in the product-led space. It's so new for so many people that everyone's very willing to share what they've learned. Share where they've done well, their mistakes, and ask questions and be slightly vulnerable.

I think it's a really great opportunity on both sides, whether you're the one receiving that information or helping to give it out.

Correlated helps teams who are either product-led growth companies or companies who are focusing on expansion. We help to either convert all those free trial, freemium, and other users coming in or help to find those expansion opportunities.

We're generally working with a bunch of the leading revenue teams out there from product-led organizations and helping to get that product usage data into the hands of the people who actually need it so that they can take action on it, push it into downstream tools like Salesloft and Outreach and Slack and really kick that data into motion.

If you want to learn more, you can go to getcorrelated.com, or you can always find me on LinkedIn.

I'm very active on there and I'm always happy to share best practices or help you in your process.