Don’t be a “conveyor belt” team
Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.
Just as I have before, I think every marketer in the world has had at least one significant failure under their belts.
That might be a product launch that flopped. Feature launches that missed the mark. Messaging and positioning that just didn’t work. The heavy marketing campaign with negative ROI.
In my experience, I think many marketing teams miss a crucial step that the product world has embraced: the need to validate. We work on big projects based on assumptions without thinking how they might perform in the real world.
And then we’re surprised when they flop.
Undeterred, we chalk failures down to misfires. We move onto the next project… and the circle repeats, ad infinitum.
In the product world, John Cutler (who you should follow on Twitter!) designates a product team that work like this to be a ‘feature factory’. These teams are tasked with building features and shipping them without much concern as to whether they actually help solve customer problems.
In the marketing world, I call these kind of teams ‘conveyor belts’.
Conveyor belt marketing teams just take whatever comes down the pipe – like product features, new marketing campaign ideas, messaging, collateral requests – and just run with it.
Ideas, campaigns, launches are just put into the world with best intentions, but weak discipline as to whether they will actually have an impact.
And new tactics, new projects are always coming down the assembly line (from leadership, from product or sales teams) – so any mistakes and missteps are never long-lived enough. We’ll do better with the next one!
In this post:
Don’t be a conveyor belt marketing team
Please, I implore you. And it’s not too difficult – any teams can start getting better today.
First, start with strategy
What’s your company strategy? What’s your marketing strategy? What are the big questions your marketing team are trying to answer or prove to move the business forward?
It’s surprising how many teams don’t have these in place.
I’m a fan of the Good Strategy, Bad Strategy ‘strategy nugget’. The book is a must-read.
Three steps to develop strategy:
A clear diagnosis of your current situation and context: you need to know where you’re coming from to determine where you’re going to go
Principles that will guide you through the next phase of execution and learning: key word is ‘principles’: a truth or proposition that you hold beliefs in
Aligned tactics that detail ways in which the principles will be applied to the situation: the steps you will take to move forward
As the book details, many teams think strategy is a declaration of the goals they will achieve. That is not strategy.
Then, link tactics to goals to strategy
OKRs!
You do need to set goals that get you close to achieving your strategy. And then you need to align those tactics underneath so you can measure them accurately.
Sometimes, it’s not possible to link some work to discrete metrics. Product marketing, is notoriously difficult to measure although somewhat possible by looking at the first-, second-, and even third-order impacts of work. For example, working to improve product messaging will hopefully make website conversions increase, improve sales outbound response rates, and reduce sales cycle times.
Don’t forget to validate
Validation does not always mean long, drawn-out tests to check if something works!
Validation can be quick and simple. Use your internal teams (preferably with a wide range of people) to check what‘s missing, what’s incorrect, and what could be better. Throwing something in front of a few friendly customers might be enough.
When validating, I try to see if the idea and then the execution is heading in the right direction to ensure the objective will be met.
For example creating buyer personas – these will be mostly used by the sales and marketing team – so share them with a few internal people to see if they are useful and helpful ways to think about the market.
To test positioning and messaging, test in PPC ads and landing pages or with sales outbound teams to see if it will be more resonant with your customers.
The biggest tip I can offer is… don’t actually build before you need to. This post from Strategyzer is one I revisit regularly. If you can validate and learn something before building, then try to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
That might mean:
Regularly created PDF one-pagers to test with audiences as you work through a messaging project, rather than a big-bang launch
A landing page and PPC ads, rather than a big PR push
‘Wizard of Oz-ing’ a potential new service before you invest in building product features
Blog posts and quick surveys to test engagement, rather than a huge research report
Lastly, review and communicate
Hold regular retrospectives: what worked well and what didn’t? What actions and improvements should we think about next time?
Share what you’ve learnt within your wider teams and help build a wider collective consciousness of decisions, learnings, and understanding of how your customers and other stakeholders react and function.
And refresh your strategy as you learn more. Strategy is not a set-and-forget exercise – it should evolve as you learn more about your customers, market, and your executional capabilities.
Don’t be a conveyor belt marketing team
If you’re stuck deep into a conveyor belt way of working, change won’t happen overnight – but even the smallest changes can make a big difference.
If you’re struggling to make improvements, try these small steps:
Strategy – for a project, set out a quick diagnosis and share your principles for moving forward
Goals – look for a simple measure of success that isn’t delivered or not delivered, but a metric that can be monitored and improved, and work collaboratively with those directly responsible
Validate – get some customer input into an idea before executing; I guarantee you’ll leave with better ideas than when you started
Communicate – don’t finish a project and forget about it; revisit in 4-6 weeks and see how it was received, the results, and ask others for their opinion
Once you can free yourself from a conveyor-belt way of working, you’ll be more empowered, more strategic, and deliver better results. Good luck!
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