s11s

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We don’t track (in the sense of metricising it and growing that number), strategise for Quora as a channel. The only thing we’ve done is made it a part of our Content Repurposing hygiene. For ex, when we repurpose a podcast into different types of content for different platforms, Quora happens to be one of those platforms.

Here’s what content repurposing looks like:

I’m sure there are others in the group who have leveraged Quora more though.

Quora worked well for US SMB MQLs when i was marketing a customer success platform. made sure that the founder and I were top 10 writers for that particular topic and answered neutrally and linking to our blogs only when required.

I have leveraged Quora both for organic as well as paid efforts. And we used to have a multi touch attribution model in place so I can say my findings were largely accurate.
From a paid perspective, Quora was never a discovery or a conversion channel (ie first and last touchpoints), it always used to appear somewhere in the middle that too for 10% of the leads. Which suggests that Quora is/can be an influence channel to keep your leads warm. Don't use it for demand gen or lead gen. Secondly, I found Quora targeting to be lukewarm, not a big fan having worked with almost all the major ad platforms of the world, including even Yandex and Yahoo Japan :)
From an organic perspective, you can use Quora in two ways, either as a distribution channel or as ideation engine to feed into your organic content plan. From a distribution perspective, Quora was a dud. Not that you can't get anything out of it but it is not worth the effort. I found Quora most useful as an ideation engine, basically how we used it was we used to search our focus keywords on Quora to get an idea of what questions people were asking and that helped us decide how to structure our content schema. This helped our content appear more often in the Google's “people also ask” section. We saw an increase of 10-15% in our impressions although not much increase in our traffic.

Quora ads is a flopshow. Unless you are going for broad targeting, your campaigns likely won't spend at all. And broad targeting brings in junk. Organic distribution (+Search visibility &amp; possible Snippets) is worth looking into

About Quora.pdf

A lil' late to this thread.

I was able to talk to somebody on the Client Partnerships team of Quora a few months back (in my previous gig)

Reads more as a primer on the platform itself (and less as a deep-dive into whether it is a great TOFU channel)

Sharing it here as a PDF in case it helps add more colour to your evaluation of Quora as an acquisition channel.

Bizible - 30%. <@U02PDC6B0HH> could have got it down to 40% , but I wanted to close fast

hum gareeb bootstrappers ka bhi socho sir

trust me you're better off using the SMB tools. Marketo, Bizible and the likes bring headache, require training, someone to manage them.

Correct, correct

So, let me be specific then - going for Clearscope - has anyone gotten a parity pricing discount from them?

<@U02PDC6B0HH> Side note — nah… marketo is not that bad, once you get to know her :)

yes "not that bad" is a compliment for Entp saas.

Fun fact — most Marketo implementations are just glorified email tool! (maybe for the exact reason!)

EA to CEO are glorified note takers - <@U02UY3EPQDA> :joy:

Marketo is :heart: Power of Marketo as it lets you segment on time

<@U02V9QUDK1Q> have you evaluated <http://jasper.ai|jasper.ai>?

created <#C0318NH5G3C|> for whoever wants to promote thyself, thy product, thy tribe. Join and start promoting unhindered.

let me know which specific areas you need help with. i can share some pointers

Hey i also need some help, in terms of creating google search campaign and qualification of the lead

I worked at <http://DelightChat.io|DelightChat.io> previously. It's more on the omnichannel support side but has many WhatsApp marketing features too. You may need to check if they have everything you need tho

Marketing owns GTM - because there is the word Market in it 

Marketing owns ABM - because there is the word Marketing in it

The better question is should there be a single owner for GTM. Revenue is a lagging indicator, while at the same time Marketing hitting all the goals in leads, and revenue/pipeline not meeting goals doesnt make sense.

IMG-20220202-WA0001.jpg

The number of Rohit(s) in the community :joy:

This is new - super interesting for local business

Don't think it's new. Google always picks a landmark (Likely in the corner of the street) that you can easily recognise while driving.

Will it try to advertise it? would love it actually

this will like marketing to the sub conscious level

and this is likely free/organic - i guess brands will be consious of where they are placed on the road :slightly_smiling_face:

it will be interesting to understand which one google picks (there are many shops around the corner)

Haha. It would be criminal of Google to try 'Voice ads' while people are driving. Imagine you are in a bangalore cross road &amp; there is an ad. So many lives dependent on Google maps today :smile:

Gurgaon already hijacked this by selling the metro stations to corporates. You can't really call them anything else. :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

<https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9756891?hl=en>

on that topic: I am curious how y'all compute LTV in Sub model?

Subscription Model: <https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.profitwell.com/recur/all/youre-calculating-cac-wrong%3fhs_amp=true|https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.profitwell.com/recur/all/youre-calculating-cac-wrong%3fhs_amp=true>

sorry for hijacking this topic :slightly_smiling_face: but how are you able to measure it with a fair degree of accuracy?

the systems which are aware of CAC are not aware of LTV and vice versa

I like this for benchmarks --&gt; <https://baremetrics.com/open-benchmarks>

At early-stage though, LTV is a moving target. CAC Payback Period is a much better metric to ensure rational spends.

An early practice we adopted to calculate LTV was not to look at actual LTV but a computed LTV based on avg lifetime period of an average customer. For example, if an avg customer stays for a period of 'n' months, then their

LTV  = Their effective MRR at the time of signing up for the product X n

The idea being that to identify marketing performance, you should separate it out from product, customer success or internal customer (customer shutting down shop) issues. A customer leaving  has less to do with marketing's performance and hence the LTV for marketing performance needs to be different than actual LTV. This also doesn't give any false attribution to marketing for any upsells, which is actually a merit of the product/customer success team and should be rightly attributed to them.

To answer your question, during last year for paid ad spend, we have seen LTV to CAC ratios vary from 1.5x to 4x on a monthly cohort basis. We don't really look too deeply into these ratios to decide our ad spend because that is driven by our future goal targets. These ratios are lagging in nature and always looking behind.

DM'ing you to get more gyan on this topic :slightly_smiling_face:

IMG-20220203-WA0004.jpg

That space is pretty well covered by Gartner, Forrester, Everest and NelsonHall. Almost all of them have some kind of assessment already done of the vendors in that space (Eg: Gartner Magic Quadrant, Forrester Wave, Everest PEAK Matrix etc.). Have you referred to those?

Find the Gartner report you are looking for and I will try sharing that with you./

Thank you <@U02ULN6EFNV>, It would be a great help.

I would love to see the output by the agency if anyone has done this.

The importance of recovery in the creative process:


<https://open.spotify.com/episode/1usSq3M8Q0lNqXAdtGTula?si=i41heZ86T42sP55cIaBOGg&amp;utm_source=copy-link|https://open.spotify.com/episode/1usSq3M8Q0lNqXAdtGTula?si=i41heZ86T42sP55cIaBOGg&amp;utm_source=copy-link>

<https://www.everyonehatesmarketers.com/podcast/seth-godin-marketing-secrets>

My fav quote from this podcast is “_*Marketers are selfish, lying, short-term thinking scum.* We believe that our job is to manipulate people as we market to them._”

&lt;feverishly-searching-trying-to-pick-one-in-masters-of-scale-podcast&gt;

Non-marketing podcast that I tune into:

<https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9kZmhfdmVyVg?sa=X&amp;ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwjAorGCqOP1AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ|No stupid questions> hosted by Stephen Dubner (co-author of the Freakonomics book series) and research psychologist Angela Duckworth (author of Grit).

It is fun to watch these two talk and discuss questions that might seem "stupid" but have another side to them.

Also, <https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RoaW5rLWZhc3QtdGFsay1zbWFydA?sa=X&amp;ved=0CAMQ4aUDahgKEwjAorGCqOP1AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQqQE|Think Fast, Talk Smart: Communication techniques>

Hey All,

Any idea about how you assess if your firm is ready for "Top N companies to work for" kind of surveys? Would appreciate your inputs on this.

+1 looking for suggestions for fast and low-fuss turnaround teams

<https://www.guch.me/|guch.me>
Got this product video done from them --&gt; <https://youtu.be/yfdLoRIpio4>

They do all sorts of video and have worked with the biggest scaleups as well as SMBs.

Have known the founders forever, highly recommend. LMK if you need an intro - can connect to the founder

<https://www.owledmedia.com/>
Personally worked with him/founder when they were super early.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy-9IilXNNc>
They created above product launch video for us.

<@U031BVBGHCK> Pretty cool video. Was the script theirs too?

Following! How is RedBangle? Keep seeing their add so much. Has anyone tried them?

<@U030SKG09E1> Combined work it was. But yes, they were involved in ideation stage also.

We got ours done from Habit of Seeing, they are amazing. Can connect you to the founder.

Here’s the video: <https://vimeo.com/657338560|https://vimeo.com/657338560>

<https://creativerascals.com/>
A cool team with fantastic ideas and great execution.

Thanks Sri! Happy to chat <@U030ZBUDAUC> 

Thanks for the tag, Shashank. Opting out, as I do not work for Webenza anymore. Happy to give an intro. They are a pretty solid team :slightly_smiling_face:

Hello! Since new folks have joined, friendly reminder about the rules of the community
<https://s11s.slack.com/archives/C02PS0CGPU1/p1642512874006100>

ARKInvest's latest whitepaper on their big ideas: <https://research.ark-invest.com/hubfs/1_Download_Files_ARK-Invest/White_Papers/ARK_BigIdeas2022.pdf>

This is a very common challenge, I'm sure many must've faced it.

Quick question: when you say large volume of inbound leads, are these MQLs or just content download leads on site?

Typically in such a scenario, a good way to deal with them is either restrict emails to only work emails or have a lead scoring mechanism in place to decide which ones to handoff to sales.

I'm sure there's more we can discuss. Happy to chat further

I worked on a similar project 2 weeks ago.

I'm to chat and learn.

zoominfo alternate? Wow. I am curious to learn more deepan. zoominfo has been interesting experience for us - it builds all the FOMO vibes needed for stickiness and i have a love and hate relationship with it. I dont think we use it to its full potential and should chuck it. But we wont because we would feel lost and directionless without it.  :joy: my objective in a similar exercise you seem to refer was to define my own mql formula - and not drop leads just because they have gmail id - say title fit, similar account fit etc. not sure how your exercise replaces zoominfo need though, but if I understood right - That would be cool :joy:. 


Hey <@U02USELSBRT> Thank you for responding. These are MQLs coming from our demand capture campaigns (No content offers at the moment). In an ideal scenario, I would've restricted personal email IDs or A/B test forms (With or without). But a strong pattern we've seen is people using 'personal email IDs' while exploring and once convinced, they don't hesitate signing up/demoing with their official email addresses. I'll ping you on this further.

Had a lovely chat with <@U02PDC4883V> who was gracious as always to share his thoughts/experience &amp; how I should approach this.  I'll compile everything I've learnt after my interactions &amp; drop it here for the community.

<@U02UZ4T10PQ> Good to see you here. Trying to figure out a process/qual criteria without asking for too many details from the users. I guess 'Clearbit integration' as recommended by Sid is one step closer or Single sign-on with Gsuite. Implementation is underway.

I :blue_heart: this community. What a gem of a thing do we have going here :raised_hands:
So many folks ready to jump on a call and then Deepan promising to compile the learnings and share with all of us :100:

Our product solve this problem with technographics and other signals. Upload your accounts, filter by technology - competitor, CRM, helpdesk, martech, chatbot etc or other filters. We cover about 80m orgs - companies, ecommerce and non profits.

Won’t be of much help though if you are grappling primarily with personal accounts.

Happy to chat.

Happy to chat about this! I have implemented the lead routing framework for few SaaS companies, happy to share my learning.

As promised, here's what I've learnt so far 1) Avoid collecting 'Personal Email IDs' if that's an option. The volume will go down, but it's a sensible choice when sales don't have enough bandwidth 2) Make 'Lead scoring' mandatory. If the leads enter through 'Demo' or 'Create account' funnel with their 'Official IDs', give a higher lead score &amp; hold sales accountable for downward stream conversions Eg. MQLs-&gt; Meetings Booked -&gt; Meetings Taken -&gt; Negotiation -&gt; Won/Lost -&gt; Reason (if Lost) 3) If you can't avoid collecting 'Personal Email IDs', have marketing own 'Lead scoring', use clearbit integration or a follow-through email sequence, get the lead to achieve a score, before handing them off to sales.

Most importantly, set up your dashboards and have regular chats with 'Sales' for accountability. If the lead scores are high &amp; sales is only looking at them, there better be higher conversions :slightly_smiling_face:

I'm yet to chat with Aniruddh, Karthick and Chirayu who offered to help. Will share more insights once I get their viewpoints as well.

More from my discussion with the wise folks of the community - 1) Lead Scoring can be done based on these attributes - demographic (job function, *seniority*, age), firmographic (country, *company size*, industry, revenue, *tech stack*), intent (what are they searching for, what are they reading), behavioral (time spent on site, pageviews, content downloaded, *product features used*) 2) Test your nurture emails/workflows like a scientist till you get it right &amp; don't take random sequences available on the internet. 3) Do not obsess over 'Personal Emails'. Bite the bullet &amp; accept only official addresses. Very difficult to prove the ROI of personal emails which couldn't be mapped using enrichment platforms. If you still insist, you can try with a possible combo of (Manual/Auto Enrichment + Nurture + Lead Scoring)

Exotel has been doing this for over 7 years now.

IMG-20220204-WA0182.jpg

Always love the perspective you share - specially the breakdown. :slightly_smiling_face:

I agree 100%
My reps have a 70:30 - fixed:variable structure to their salary.
30% is uncapped and is calculated based on the SQLs and pipeline created based on their efforts

Since I moved to this model, the number of meetings dropped, but sales is happy because they are seeing better quality leads passed to them

SALs are used as an early warning system only.

<https://lu.ma/>
super-simple, easy-to-use
and is too good for a free version

The recent RBI regulations has definitely caused a lot of headache for both buyers and sellers.

My product teams are also working on this issue for international subscriptions. I'll ask them if they have found a fix and will connect you.

We have been trying a lot to get the Stripe subscription to work but it just doesn't want to work :sweat_smile:

Our stack - Chargebee + Stripe

Following for a possible solution.

<@U031LJ4MZ7Y> Do you manually update the payment status from Razorpay to Chargebee?

yes. we make subscriptions link in RP, send to customers. make a Subscription in chargebee and then update its status. painful process.

the problem is that users are not using those limited cards. in UPI, people are expecting google pay etc.

razorpay webhooks not fun :slightly_smiling_face:

Stripe works for cards (with international payment support - which i guess is not prevalent in india beyond metros yet)

product stickiness is must for saas model to work in india - spotify has a nice pay when you need model with weekly/monthly/&gt;monthly prices

Do you use Stripe in India? My issue was that our plans are in USD. Do you use them for INR Subscriptions ?

<@U031LJ4MZ7Y> We use Stripe India with INR plans. Doesn't work, the payment fails due to RBI regulations.

Okay. I guess we are in the same boat then. I was tying to make an INR plan on Chargebee and see if I could populate that plan for Indian Customers. However since you are saying Stripe is failing for even INR payments, not sure whats the option

Have you explored <https://www.cashfree.com/payment-gateway-india|Cashfree>? i havent yet personally

*Early Access:* Now collect recurring payments via any UPI app with UPI AutoPay.

Razorpay is also doing this with UPI - they allow amazonpay, PhonePe, Paytm. But the credit cards are too less. lot of times customers want to use credit cards

City Union, Equitas, HSBC, Karur Vysya, OneCard, Slice - Only these cards are supported. I am not sure what % people will be using these.

My customers want bank transfers :joy:

Not sure what is the solution for this.

Hey Reza, I can help. Feel free to connect sometime :slightly_smiling_face:

if possible write your questions here? so we all learn from a public interaction

non stop questions don't count as spamming na?

Not on channels. 
In DMs may be for some, not for me

Please stop me if I end up replying too much :joy:

Some of the threads in this group are GOLD. 30 more days, we will have enough material for a book

We've found a long ass commenter too in <@U02UY3EPQDA>. Appreciate the detailing in his responses

I blame my shiny new mechanical keyboard... :joy:

IMO Clarity in messaging, sensible pricing &amp; great WOM by creators. Love their LinkedIn ads. 

I know clicle.so up close.  And I also built a product for the creative class.  So, in this space, you don’t need blogs, lead magnets, whitepaper or and a Salesforce CRM (as you would if you’re selling a traditional b2b).

_Creators are consumers that purchase like SMBs._  So, the marketing also looks like a B2C-ish for the most part. Below was our most promising early stage marketing channels were:

• Referrals hooks
• Instagram Organic + Paid
• Reddit Organic + Paid
• Sponsored newsletters 
• Basic gamification
• Twitter
• Patreon Community
• Patreon platform (via integration)
• Cold emails
• FB Communities
• Our own community (on Fb and Kamsite)_
1. Hosting or Sponsoring Events_ [this is for companies w/ deeper pockets]
2. Influencers and Product Placements_ [this is for companies w/ deeper pockets]
_(notice — no SEO or SEM)_ :smile: 

We also did not have a blog or content calendar nor a CRM or marketo behind the scene.

_Our brand tone was peppy and casual — used emojis and puns._

_We had Dwight Schrute (from the Office) as our assistant (to the) product manager — he is a bot in Intercom and he did all outreaches (both on website and some ice-breaker emails).  He was a great convo starter and ensured we had higher than avg. engagement._

_You can see similar strategy w/ Gumroad and Patreon as well, which are older companies in this space — they do have blogs, written w/ an intent to help their users succeed than to generate a lead._

_Side-note: B2b can get boring, but it’s always fun to market to creators —  most lively TG ever!_

_(I’m sorry, you’re never going to get developers to book a sales meeting, attend a demo of your product!  Never.)_

_*If possible, consider marketing to PM personas or go after CTOs (not even tech leads).*_

If you’re building developer tools – I’d make the product self-serve., which they can try on a project without needing to get in touch or see a demo.

Only time they will ever interact is if they run into a dead end or need to customize something.

More than website devs will want to spend time documentations.

Which geo is your primary?

<@U031T8FN4PM> You can think about this through two strategies:

1. Bottom-up: You market to developers and focus on getting free-trials. Once you have enough traction, you basically approach the engineering managers with proof that your teams are using their product and that becomes a segway to fix sales calls. Most devops products are sold that way. For this to work, you need to work in a well defined product category and your UX needs to be kickass.
2. Top-down: You lead by thought leadership, gartner reports and referrals to focus on value first approach. You showcase how you can solve a big problem that can help them leverage their existing capabilities in a much better way. UX is not something that pops early in discussion. You will hear terms like sprint burndown, code stability, cycle times, code coverage, code churn etc.

<@U02UY3EPQDA> As of now we are targetting India App developers but have operations running in the middle East as well. 

Also thank you for your comment

<@U02USELSBRT> we are going with the top down approach. The problem I am facing is how to qualify leads in channels which has push marketing. As via Google we are getting desired results, but FB is just bad

P.s - Our E-mail marketing team is very strong as they have gotten us the most business till now

<@U031T8FN4PM> I was recently discussing this with <@U02V22EUXM4> for another related question but sharing what I wrote to him.

Lead scoring can happen on 4 dimensions:

• demographic (job function, *seniority*, age)
• firmographic (country, *company size*, industry, revenue, *tech stack*)
• intent (what are they searching for, what are they reading)
• behavioral (time spent on site, pageviews, content downloaded, *product features used*)
I have highlighted some of the pointers in bold, they're the ones I think would be a good starting point to approach scoring-based qualification.

<@U02USELSBRT> This is helpful indeed, right now my primary focus is just on the intent of the search. As I realised once I get them inside my website, then the other battle begins..

But thank you I will try to implement these metrics on my reporting &amp; analysis for sure.

The good ones charge nothing less than 250,000 a month for a basic scope. This is for the Indian market.

For MEA &amp; SEA regions. You can get good ones at around 4000 USD a month.

And for the US regional it around 15K USD a month

A good agency in SG will set you back by 10k a month easy. 

Good agency - Knows that PR is just a part of Communication. Understands your business vertical / space. Has the right connects. Prioritises stories over placements alone. And knows that PRNewswire is not PR strategy