How to improve executive communication about your marketing work

05/16/23 • 6 min

SaaS Marketing Bites from Powered By Search

As a marketing leader, a large part of your ability to get the job done is in proving that you're delivering value already But it's also an area of marketing leadership that many get wrong Are these 3 communication errors killing your ability to prove the value of your work?

1. Stating an observation without impact, importance, or insight
2. Using passive vs active voice
3. Giving inputs more airtime than outputs

🚩 Stating an observation without impact, importance, or insight

It's extremely easy to notice something and report it. But all you're doing is giving metrics, not meaning.

By understanding the importance of a metric, we can make a choice about what to do next. Want an example?

❌ BAD – Traffic is up, conversion is down

✅ GOOD – Traffic is up, but conversion is down indicating that there's a misalignment between our ICP's pain points and the topic of our most recent blog posts

🚩 Using passive vs active voice

Generally, you should avoid using the passive voice when reporting

It weakens the entire point you're trying to make by removing any sense of agency from that message.

Make yourself or someone else the owner of the action rather than the benefactor and you'll see a great improvement in your executive communication. Want an example?

❌ BAD – Changes are being made to XYZ

✅ GOOD– We are making changes to XYZ

🚩 Giving inputs more airtime than outputs

No one pays you to be busy. They pay you to produce results.

But the majority of your reports are likely focused on what you did rather than what you produced.

In fact, this is the most common problem with executive communication.

If you're suffering from this consistently and have tried to change it, ask yourself:

if I can't produce results worth reporting, am I doing the right things in the first place? Here's an example:

❌ BAD – We created 5 new ad campaigns this month and we refreshed 15 creatives

✅ GOOD – We generated 329 new SQLs by refreshing ad creative and running new campaigns

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SaaS Marketing Bites is produced by B2B SaaS marketing agency Powered by Search. It's hosted by Head of Growth Marc Thomas. You can follow @iammarcthomas or Powered By Search CEO Dev Basu @devbasu on Twitter for more updates and marketing insights.

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2 If you’d like to learn the exact demand strategies we use for free, go to our blog or visit our resources section, where you can download guides, calculators, and templates we use for our most successful clients.

3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.

4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.

1. Stating an observation without impact, importance, or insight
2. Using passive vs active voice
3. Giving inputs more airtime than outputs

🚩 Stating an observation without impact, importance, or insight

It's extremely easy to notice something and report it. But all you're doing is giving metrics, not meaning.

By understanding the importance of a metric, we can make a choice about what to do next. Want an example?

❌ BAD – Traffic is up, conversion is down

✅ GOOD – Traffic is up, but conversion is down indicating that there's a misalignment between our ICP's pain points and the topic of our most recent blog posts

🚩 Using passive vs active voice

Generally, you should avoid using the passive voice when reporting

It weakens the entire point you're trying to make by removing any sense of agency from that message.

Make yourself or someone else the owner of the action rather than the benefactor and you'll see a great improvement in your executive communication. Want an example?

❌ BAD – Changes are being made to XYZ

✅ GOOD– We are making changes to XYZ

🚩 Giving inputs more airtime than outputs

No one pays you to be busy. They pay you to produce results.

But the majority of your reports are likely focused on what you did rather than what you produced.

In fact, this is the most common problem with executive communication.

If you're suffering from this consistently and have tried to change it, ask yourself:

if I can't produce results worth reporting, am I doing the right things in the first place? Here's an example:

❌ BAD – We created 5 new ad campaigns this month and we refreshed 15 creatives

✅ GOOD – We generated 329 new SQLs by refreshing ad creative and running new campaigns

===

If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:

3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.

4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.

Previous Episode

2 ways Cognism broke landing page best practices – and why it works

Landing page best practices? Useful. But not always the best
This page by Cognism is almost perfect

And it breaks a lot of the best practices that you'll find in an article about making B2B SaaS landing pages

✨ Best practice 1: Keep your landing page copy short
Cognism's response: here's a wall of text

Their homepage hero currently comes in at 116 words. Compare that to ZoomInfo which comes in at 33 words

The best practice assumes the reader doesn't have time to make a choice but when they're buying a tool like this, they *need* to make a considered choice

There's potentially millions of dollars resting on the choice because the data quality and usability of that data matter in their own sales process

That Cognism spend the time to go work through objections right from the top of the page and at depth shows how clearly they understand this

✨ Best practice 2: Shallow on the homepage, go deeper later
Cognism's response: Grab your snorkel and dive in!

Every section on the homepage ought to help a customer qualify or disqualify themselves quickly

But the common practice of giving shallow info about the product in the hope that the prospect stays to learn more is so weird to me

What Cognism do feels bang on the money: help people learn whether the product's for them ASAP

They do that by giving answers to common objections, adding a section on who their product *isn't* for and also including use case based information

Crucially: none of it is skimmable – you've got to work to get that info.

I believe that these two approaches to landing page design have probably caused a huge number of prospects to book a call with Cognism

Honestly, incredibly impressive work

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If you enjoyed this episode, you can do the following things right away:

3 If you’d like to work with other experts on our team or learn why we have off the charts team member satisfaction score, then see our Careers page.

4 If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.

Next Episode

Why SaaS marketing agencies have such low LTV

A lot of agencies view their clients as a problem.

"They ask so many questions"
"Why do they always want a call?"
"Why do I need to build a business case"

Jeez. With a mindset like that is it any wonder that the average LTV is ~ 3 months? Many of our clients have been with us for 3 years. No, you read that right: 3 years. Not 3 months. What do they see with PBS that they don't with other agencies? I believe there are three components that matter:

1. We have a differentiated methodology

Plenty of marketing agencies execute aspects of SaaS marketing work but Powered By Search is the only agency that takes a holistic approach to marketing by fully addressing: Attraction – going from obscurity to dominance in your marketConversion – eliminate friction in your conversion machineEngagement – go from loose engagement to locked-in prospects We’ve found that if you only execute one or two of these three stages, you might see some results, but you won’t be able to predictable decrease CAC and increase QPC and LTV To see how we’ve implemented this model across a variety of different companies, check out some of these case studies:

How Powered by Search Helped iWave Achieve a 7-Figure Revenue Growth from Paid Media in Under a Year
How we helped Loopio increase demos by 41% quarter over quarter and achieve consistent growth
How We Helped PointClickCare Get Over 2000 Leads with LinkedIn Ads

2. We're the only fully specialist B2B SaaS marketing agency who can support companies between $10M-$100M ARR

We work exclusively with B2B SaaS companies that sell to enterprise customers. Unlike most SaaS marketing agencies, we’ve developed a proven process optimized to navigate the complexities of longer customer journeys and are familiar with the nuanced challenges you’re currently facing Why does this matter? If an agency works with SaaS companies, ecommerce companies, and service businesses, they probably apply a “one-size-fits-all” marketing approach to all their clients A one-size-fits-all agency might drive some results, but it probably won’t drive the best results as the process isn’t designed for the nuances of your customer’s journey, and the employees in the agency probably don’t specialize in SaaS marketing

3. We prioritize our the health of our internal team

"Wait. Isn't this meant to be about why clients stay?"

Absolutely but marketing agencies are notoriously tricky to hire because your ROI depends largely on the people executing the process If the talent working on your account constantly changes, you’ll inevitably lose some time, money, and ground on competitors as they learn the nuances of your business We prioritize exclusively hiring experts. So instead of hiring a robust client management team, we pay top dollar for the talent that’s actually executing your marketing strategy You can check out our LinkedIn profile to see our employees’ impressive backgrounds for yourself We also realize that the experts we’ve hired could find another job tomorrow, so we prioritize their well-being and cultivate a workplace they enjoy This strategy has worked out well – looking at our Glassdoor reviews, you’ll see the average team member stays with us for two years This means you won’t have to build new relationships with new account managers every few months or worry about losing ground on competitors as ne...