Are you a modern marketer?
Modern marketers are creative, curious, experimental, willing to fail, and obsessed with data and tech. Plus news, events, and our GTM Problem of the Week
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This week’s research note includes:
GTM Research: The Guide to Modern Marketing
A weekly deep-dive into new GTM research and insights
We’re excited to launch a new report this week: The CMO’s Guide to Modern Marketing.
Marketers are constantly trying to do more with less.
But every single aspect of marketing is more complex and challenging now than it was even a year ago. More channels, variables, markets, and touchpoints make attribution harder than ever. It’s chaos out there!
How will we rise to face these challenges?
More importantly for CMOs and CEOs: what should you be looking for in a demand gen leader?
Our report has three assessments that will help you make sense of it all.
Charting a new course
There are no playbooks anymore that work for every company in every market. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.
The only way through uncharted territory is experimentation. It’s what makes marketing so fun, so challenging, so demanding, and so frustrating. It’s why those of us that do it can stay engaged for a lifetime
What is a modern marketer?
Our research involved mining decades of our own experience, talking to customers, and interviewing a dozen modern marketers specifically for this report (shout-outs below).
What we found is that there is a group of modern marketers who have fun with the chaos. They live to experiment. They are constantly pushing the envelope. They are mavericks who create their own funnels and make their own playbooks. They also experience great results because they’re measuring everything.
They work for organizations that are willing to fund demand gen with the talent, tools, and technology they need to find that perfect blend of art and science: creative campaigns that actually work (or are learned from and abandoned if they don’t).
These modern marketers run demand gen strategies that relentlessly segment, personalize, and optimize based on data . . . even when things are going well!
Here’s what they all seem to have in common:
Curious, innovative, independent personalities
Willingness to experiment
Obsession with data
Focus on their true buyers
Use technology as a competitive advantage
Optimization is a way of life
Take the assessment!
Modern marketers are creative, curious, experimental, willing to fail, and obsessed with data and tech. They understand that the business of marketing (company strategy, P&L, NRR) must inform marketing the business (campaigns and activities).
We put together three Modern Marketing Maturity frameworks to assess:
Are you a modern marketer? (psychology, leadership style, organizational role)
Is your company supporting modern approaches? (culture, technology, alignment)
Is your marketing strategy modern? (measurement, targeting, messaging, channels, and motions)
Here’s a sneak peek:
Thanks to the modern marketers who lent their expertise to the report:
Adi Hagag, GM of Metamatch by Metadata
Carlos Mario Tobon Camacho, Director of Demand Gen, Eightfold
Corrina Owens, Chief Evangelist, Purple Cork
Gil Allouche, CEO, Metadata.io
James Gilbert, VP of Demand Gen, Bloomerang
Jen Leaver, Senior Director of Demand Gen + ABM, CloudBolt Software
Josh Carter, Director of Demand Generation, Pavilion
Julija Noskova, VP of Marketing and Global Demand Gen, Pigment
Kanika Mirchandani, Digital Marketing Manager of Demand Generation, Own
Rowan Tonkin, CMO, Planful
Roy Naar, Head of Strategic Marketing, Atera
Tim Hillison, Founder and CEO, Entrypoint1
Can we help you solve GTM problems and create a strategy that will accelerate efficient growth? We’d love to talk!
GTM Problem of the Week
Send us your most pressing GTM problem, and you’ll get a short session with an analyst to answer it!
Dear GTM Partners,
We created an ICP based on employee count, revenue, and industry, but I’ve seen you share a much broader list of targeting criteria. How deep should we go? Do we need to cover ALL those bases?
~Targeting in Tampa
Dear Targeting in Tampa,
It’s true, we do have a pretty broad list of things to consider when defining your ICP
We are big believers that companies should go deeper than firmographics and technographics, but just how deep you go is up to you.
We are big believers in using scoring to help us figure out what matters and what doesn’t.
Start with a big brainstorm of everything relevant you can think of, using the list above as a guide.
Then score the characteristics on a positive or negative scale using the guide below.
You can’t have too many characteristics that are wildly negative or positive!
If there are categories that are neutral, those are the ones you pay less attention to.
For example, you may not care what CRM or MAP your customers use or if they even have one. You may not care if they’ve recently gotten funding.
But it might matter a lot to you that your potential customers like to think of themselves as progressive places to work.
How would you find those companies?
Look for companies that have won awards, are in progressive industries like tech, have senior-level DEI executives, have a diverse executive team, and have headquarters in places like New York and California.
That doesn’t mean you’ll turn down an inbound lead from a manufacturing company in Ohio, it just means you’re not spending valuable advertising dollars attracting them, because they aren’t as likely to be a great fit.
We challenge you to make your ICP a bit deeper than you may have previously thought about it, but only as deep as is useful.
Hope that helps, but we are always here to pitch in if you need us!
Send in your GTM Problem of the Week.
We solve GTM problems like this every single day!
Book a call to learn more about how we can help.
GTM News
What we’re reading and thinking about this week.
How ActiveCampaign hits $250M: we loved this piece in Growth Unhinged that reveals (and grades!) the GTM strategies and tactics ActiveCampaign used in the last quarter.
A framework for recurring revenue: Toni Hohlbein combined Winning by Design’s bowtie framework with GTM Partners’ ROI framework to show the necessity of driving recurring impact if you want recurring revenue.
Sales advice from modern sales leaders: Hubspot awards winners share what sales leaders should prioritize, principles to live by, and how they should work with their teams in 2024.
GTM Events
A list of upcoming events of interest to GTM professionals
March 28, Austin, TX: SaaS Open
April 4, 1 p.m. Virtual: How Rev Ops Can Propel Your GTM Strategy in 2024
April 11, Salt Lake City, UT: GTM Made Simple Roadshow
April 18, NYC, Pavilion CMO Summit
We are just coming off one of our biggest roadshows yet. Thank you, Austin, TX for hosting us, and we look forward to seeing many of you in Salt Lake City!
Love,
The GTM Partners Team
Love this!
Marketing is more complex now than 1 year ago, using a solid approach to align the entire revenue team is critical to the success of a company's go-to-market motions.