What do you want?

More than a few of the B2B teams we work with are looking for ways to better mobilize their experts – particularly on LinkedIn.

And they’ve got great ideas for how to engage their audiences there.

But our discussions always end up circling back to the most important question:

What are we hoping to get out of this?

It sometimes helps to work our way backwards: Through awareness, engagement, likes/comments, DMs, follows, connections, to one definitive, trackable outcome:

In many cases: Meetings. Or something else that’s a tangible, data-backed indicator of: I’m a potential customer.

This moment is critical. Once we know the end outcome – what actually matters to the business – we can start to design our strategy and tactics accordingly.

As marketers, being closer to sales helps anchor our strategies. Here’s how we can do that:

• Get access to your sales data and interview your sales team about it. How did this lead find us? Why did someone eventually buy (or not)? What objections did they have along the way? Your sales team’s insights are critical to finding the “why” you’re looking for – I find it nearly impossible to do a strategy without interviewing the sales team at a company in the early stages of a project.
• Interview your clients. No one knows why a client made a decision better than the client themselves. We interview our clients’ clients all the time to understand why they’re winning or losing, and the unique Jobs to be Done those clients are looking to accomplish.
• Identify the trends that matter in the data. Every project is different. We recently ran a client win/loss study that showed our client was missing one critical element in their sales process – we compiled all the interviews into one video montage to emphasize the importance of that element. Other times, we’ve identified 8-10 different “jobs” across different buyer types – requiring a much more complex approach to that company’s marketing.
• Create a pilot project. Once equipped with data, your team can try new things – with the cover that those new things have a real measurable, desired outcome. Pilots are, by design, small and experimental: We’ve created hyper-specific email series designed to assess where someone is in the buying cycle, and brand-specific presentations on buying intent to boost meetings, for example. More on that next week.

Have you done this exercise and been surprised by what you’ve learned? Let me know – I’d love to write more about this in the future.

KRYSTLE KOPACZ CEO, Revmade krystle@revmade.com

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P.S. I'm speaking about content monetization at the RevUP Summit in Annapolis Nov. 20th – if you're going, drop me a line and let's connect!