Jennifer Rouse

Audience planning is a fundamental crisis mitigation strategy — is your company prepared for the unexpected? In her latest blog post for Forrester, analyst Jennifer Rouse serves up a lesson from recent emergencies to help emerging companies mitigate risk.

• Product marketing and audience-centric marketing are not mutually exclusive
• Hypergrowth depends on identifying the best path to revenue with the least amount of resistance
• Audience-centric marketing attracts an organization’s current audience and those who have yet to associate their needs with its solution

• Surviving a crisis requires a shift in both marketing and sales strategies
• To survive the immediate crisis, companies must focus on their customers first
• To continue to thrive following a crisis, marketing must think short term and sales must think long term

• New marketing, sales and operations leaders must evaluate their entire inherited technology ecosystem to determine its ability to support team goals
• Proposals for new technology investments often fall flat because of an inability to present a clear business case that addresses business leaders’ concerns
• Drawing a clear connection between business objectives, technology dependencies and the solution is the way to create a winning plotline for your tech proposal

• The strong ones on your team need attention, too
• Influence and inspiration separate leaders from managers
• To create a strong team, you need to encourage growth and training

• Shifting priorities too often can kill the momentum and motivation in your company
  
• Every new opportunity is not necessarily the right opportunity
  
• Know your audience, create a plan and stay focused

• Seventy percent of leads will get disqualified or discarded at some point, but 80 percent of those leads will buy from you or a competitor within 24 months, so marketing cannot focus only on lead generation but must also add nurture to the recipe for success
  
• The primary ingredient for sales and marketing alignment is a strong service-level agreement
  
• When possible, create a new marketing “dish” from scratch – use a recipe that is already proven and amend as needed

• Marketing and sales are partners – one function does not work for the other
• Your customer should be your focus, not an internal team
• Conducting an audience framework exercise aligns all teams’ focus on customer needs

• Too often, gating content is the fallback of an emerging company’s marketing team under pressure to deliver leads
• Instead, the goal must be to focus on creating a compelling buyer’s journey
• Organizations need to know the difference between a contact and a lead – and educate your executives and sales team accordingly

• At emerging growth companies, expanding your team’s skill set is often more advantageous than hiring new talent
• According to the SiriusDecisions 2018 Global CMO Study, investing in training substantially increases the growth potential of an emerging company
• A culture of learning and growth will drive efficiencies to help emerging companies scale for hyper-growth