Where should B2B enterprise software marketers go to school on best practices?

Many of you may have read the popular book “All I really needed to know, I learned in kindergarten”. If you are a B2B enterprise software marketer, what is the best place to go to school on marketing?

In my experience, if you are a B2B enterprise software marketer, the PLG (Product Led Growth) companies are the best place to learn the practices which will help you set your marketing apart. Just to get everyone on the same page, Product-led growth (PLG) is an operating model where product usage drives customer acquisition, monetization, retention, and expansion. Think of SaaS companies with freemium model such as SurveyMonkey or Dropbox, as an example, where focus is on acquiring the customer to try the product for free and then driving product usage to a threshold, where they become a paying user.  This is in comparison to a traditional sales-led operating model, where marketing brings in leads and the revenue is driven by a traditional sales motion, consisting of of SDRs, inside and outside sales. So, if you are a marketer at B2B enterprise sales company, why would you look at a PLG company, which has such a different operating model.

What is unique about marketing teams at all successful PLG companies is that their DNA is extremely data driven. The marketing teams in these companies have an experiment mindset (or an AB testing mindset). They experiment, test and measure everything, with an intent to find incremental improvements that cumulatively add up over time. For example, they will continually AB test the pages on the website to squeeze every ounce of improvement in the customer journey, so that they can incrementally drive more conversions. They will test multiple copies/offers of every campaign for each persona, before sending the full campaign out, to ensure the copy and offer they select maximizes conversions.  A website copy for example is never completed – experiments are done on some part of the website every day/every week and heatmaps are used to update content, placement and offers on the page.    In weekly (or even daily) marketing operations meetings, the team pours over every aspect of data from various analytics tools, so they can understand what is working or not working and can be improved. This mindset applies to programs, campaigns, digital advertising, messaging, content and more – in short everything.

This is in stark comparison to an enterprise software company, where a web page, once live, is rarely revisited even once a month for experimentation. How often in an enterprise software company is product marketing, that is involved in creating website or content copy or messaging, looking at detailed analytics to understand what can be fine-tuned? I have not seen such a sharp focus on using experimentation to continually test and improve results in most enterprise software companies.  They have the same set of tools as PLG companies. For example, the most popular CMS tools, that they use to create websites, also support experimentation.  The marketing automation tools they use, such as Marketo or Pardot, have rich AB testing capabilities. Most of them supplement their CMS analytics capabilities with free tools such as Google analytics.  However, at enterprise software companies these tools are most often used for their operational and management reporting capabilities – and rarely for continuous experimentation and measurement.

But in a world, where marketing is trying so hard to rise above the noise and drive leads to sales, an experimentation mindset, and a data-driven approach to every marketing activity (that PLG companies use), will help B2B enterprise marketers significantly.   I suggest speaking with your peers at these companies to see how you can adopt those practices within your environment. 

For those interested, I also wrote on a related topic a few weeks ago, see my blog post on product marketing differences between PLG-led and sales-led companies.