Issue #15
In this issue: The Vile rumour mill waits for nobody | ABM through necessity | The 180 day attribution window | Once more we redefine the “Enterprise”
A thought before we kick off. Our business has been working in digital for 15 years now. About 6 years ago an old client who’d sold his agency said to me “eCommerce? That’s all done now isn’t it? People have got it sorted”. Firstly, NO I don’t think it’s “done”, even now, and secondly the tentacles of eComm just keep growing IMHO.
Anyway - Are we ready for 2024? Thinking about those juicy trade shows? Imagining that private dinners and customer case studies will be plentiful, and sales will all make their number right?
WRONG. It’s going to be tough, make that tougher than tough. In Europe we’ll need all the help we can get. The U.S. will go gangbusters of course 🙂
As always, we speak our own version of the truth – can we all handle 2024?
eCommerce Gossip & Vile Rumour
We caused a bit of a stir last issue by daring to mention some “failing” composable projects. Some nodded sagely, but we had a few calls asking us to justify. Happy to take those libel actions when you’re ready people.
We hear there’s a big scrap brewing in the oldest SaaS category – ESP (email providers). Apparently a newly energised ESP (recently acquired for $12bn) is gunning for another ESP who are about the IPO – we love a good fight, and let’s face it customers usually get a better service for a while – bring it on!
Some questions from merchants about the claims of Amazon Marketing Cloud to protect their customer data if its uploaded. Just the idea that there’s fear tells you what you need to know if you’re AWS, Google, Meta and the other horsemen – Scott Galloway is ALWAYS right.
eComm expo in London (late Sept) was good in general. We have heard wildly varying stories of lead volumes from platform vendors, one claiming 7 SAL’s, another more like 40. Who had a good show?
ABM through necessity
We often think that our own business is a good place to take the temperature of SaaS demand generation. Post-Covid we saw a huge boom in demand for our events practice… so much so that we had to reign it back in late spring 2023. We’re glad we did now!
Since June we’ve seen a marked switch towards our ABM services, where we currently have upwards of 10 programs operating.
There’s no rocket science involved here – ICP/Target Accounts/Value Prop/Email program/Outreach/Social Proof and 1:1 sales meetings as the output. Every client call right now is about ABM, which means either that vendors just ticked the ICP box previously (and didn’t actually execute the program) or that marketing leadership have been asked to double down as budgets come under scrutiny.
ABM – common sense for SaaS – No question in our mind. It’s the engine that runs efficiently at more than 80mpg.
The 180 day attribution window
At a recent breakfast meeting of a group we call “The Marketing Collective”, a top secret 'Chatham House' group of SaaS Marketing leaders – we tackled attribution (yes, again).
One member shared a whole load of excellent and thought-provoking information, the core tenet of which was a 180 lookback window on any closed/won deal. Any marketing touchpoint within the window (and no earlier) is automatically attributed an equal share of marketing’s contribution when calculating marketing ROI in their world.
I think we all accepted that whilst there are potential flaws using this method, there are just as many good outcomes:
There are no favourites here, nobody is marking their own homework
Over a very short time period this vendor can see trends in how clients engage in the hard yards of the buying cycle
Whilst the contribution of “owned” content is probably overstated, there is a real value in serving customer case studies in this window – often misused by sales teams prospects enjoy this content during the buying cycle
We meet in person, planning currently for every 8 weeks or so. Next meeting will be focused on Partner Marketing – any applications to join, ask Jamie Hancox.
“Enterprise” one last time
We wrote earlier this year about vendors redefining “Enterprise” in order to widen the pool of companies that their ICP could contain - and doing so to help meet the number.
In general the fever about targeting $1bn turnover businesses exclusively seems to have calmed down significantly. Interestingly we chatted to Shopify recently about their definition of “Enterprise”, and no surprises that they mean somewhere north of $50m in Europe, slightly more in the USA.
As some of you know, we have done some client and community surveys recently, and the graph below is an anonymised slide with target account revenues for about 45 SaaS vendors… it’s far more realistic i think you’ll agree.
That’s it folks - more in November… don’t forget to avoid turning the heating on for a few more weeks, and try to stay calm about all of the awful things happening in the world. Positive waves from us.
Insult of the week:
“C3PO” - bit too polite and tries too hard