Episode Summary
When Michael joined Revenue Analytics as its Vice President of Marketing more than two years ago, he was a one-man team. Since then, he’s built out a small team of talented marketers, executed a complete brand refresh and solidified the company’s marketing strategy.
Over time, Michael has found that rather than investing in sales and business development reps, content prevails. People don’t want to be told what their problem is; they want to discover it for themselves, and content allows them to do just that.
“I like to tell our team when we’re creating something, pretend it’s for your brother-in-law or sister-in-law, someone you’re genuinely trying to help — not someone you’re trying to sell,” Michael says.
On this episode of Tech Qualified, Michael talks about his trials and tribulations when building out the Revenue Analytics marketing team, and he explains what he’s learned along the way. He also shares how his team has weathered 2020 and what he’s doing to best support them (and himself) during these trying times.
Guest Profile
- Name: Michael McCunney
- What he does: As the Vice President of Marketing at Revenue Analytics, a B2B SaaS company that develops revenue management software, Michael leads a small team of marketers to implement global marketing and brand strategies.
- Company: Revenue Analytics
- Key Quote: “Instead of going out there and thumping our chest and saying, ‘How fantastic am I?’ we're really telling the story, and we're doing it in a way that's educating customers as to what problems are out there and how we might be able to solve them.”
Key Insights
- When it comes to customer segmentation, identify what makes a client unique within their own vertical. Revenue Analytics serves customers across a wide variety of industries, including hospitality, media, and transportation. So instead of building a general go-to marketing persona, Michael focuses on understanding each individual customer — the unique problems and challenges within a specific company.
- Revenue Analytics has worked with business and sales development representatives, but Michael has found content is far more powerful. People don’t want to be told what their problems are, he says. Instead, they want to use content and resources to identify those problems on their own — and then turn to the content source for a solution.
- If you’re operating as a one-person team — or even a particularly small team — it’s essential you focus on building that team and getting folks on board with your vision. Michael advises prioritizing this early on rather than spending all your time executing your vision and collecting early wins.
Episode Highlights
- The importance of diving deeper than your persona
“I’m sure all of us have gone through more than a couple of personas sessions where you’re trying to identify who the players are, but it’s also important to understand what’s the actual role, challenge and problem of the company … so really making sure you identify what makes them specific within their own vertical is how we segment and how we try to speak to those very specific segments within the market.”
- Getting people to notice Revenue Analytics
“Where we’ve had the most success is by taking what we do now and by talking to our SMEs, customers and prospects and putting that into really motivating content that can speak very explicitly to what the challenges are and how we can solve them. So BDRs and SDRs didn’t work for us, but content does.”
- Genuinely valuable content > sales pitches
“I like to tell our team when we’re creating something, pretend it’s for your brother-in-law or sister-in-law, someone you’re genuinely trying to help — not someone you’re trying to sell. … The most important thing is that, as the reader, we’re constantly educating them, that we’re constantly providing value, that we’re of use to them. And that next interaction, the next time we try to reach out, they’re going to be that more apt to interact with us because we provided value — we’re not just trying to sell them.”
- Help your customers realize their own problems
“By being able to walk them through what was actually happening to their customers, what was actually the journey that their customers were going through, they were able to self-educate and self-realize that, ‘Hey, these are the problems that are really affecting us, and this is what’s hurting our bottom line.’ And so I think the content has to provide that kind of self-realization that’s like, ‘Oh, that is me. Oh, that is my problem.’”
- When you’re a one-person team, avoid this common mistake
“I think I was probably too focused on carrying out my vision and making that immediate impact and having those early wins and not as much focused on getting everyone on board as I should in retrospect. So it could have been probably better to go at 80% of the pace and spend more time bringing folks along than it was on, ‘Hey, I’m the only darn person here. I have to make a difference. Let me spend all my time trying to produce that vision.’”
- Take time to stop and think about strategy
“I have to be really intentional about my big-picture strategy time. If I don’t set aside specific time to just think and really be intentional about that, that’s something that’s easy to brush aside and to spend time on more tactical things, like helping something get across the finish line, or being part of a meeting to make sure a project gets completed.”
