- In this article, Gbénga Onalaja, the global head of marketing and communications at Kora, writes about how the pan-African fintech figured its way around B2B marketing. To refocus your B2B fintech marketing spend and maximize every dollar, Gbénga writes, you need to align your sales and marketing teams, hire the right talent, and set clear goals.
Your marketing team frustrates you. You don’t know if they have any effect on the bottom line. Half the time, you wonder if your head of marketing knows what they are doing. And if your sales team followed up on all those terrible marketing leads, they would never close a sale.
Inside the financial dashboard of financial metrics that you and your board care about, marketing isn’t seen to be moving the needle. You are done. But before you fire your marketing team, I have a few ideas to help you course-correct your Business-to-Business (B2B) fintech marketing team towards the metrics you care about.
But why should you listen to me?
We grew our company’s marketing effectiveness by over 4,240% in less than six months. In February, we created $5 in pipeline for every dollar spent on marketing. By July, we were creating $217 in pipeline for every dollar spent, with a CAC payback period of 1.02 months.
What held us back before we got it right?
1. Misaligned sales and marketing metrics
It’s a tale as old as time, rich vs poor, DC vs Marvel, sales vs marketing.
In many B2B organizations, marketing and sales don’t see eye to eye. The reasons for the palpable delineation between sales and marketing are not far-fetched. The most notorious is the misalignment between sales and marketing metrics.
In a typical B2B go-to-market setup, the marketing team generates a high volume of low-intent, low-quality marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and the sales team is frustrated because the leads from marketing are a big waste of time. Marketing is measured on leads, and sales on revenue.
This way of setting up your go-to-market engine is akin to having a football team where the defenders focus on kicking the ball away from the goalpost (even if it goes off into the crowd), while the attackers have to push it upfield and score. In this analogy, the defenders represent the marketing team, and the attackers represent the sales team.
Unifying the objective around scoring goals (i.e., hitting revenue targets) will significantly improve the number of goals scored (i.e., improve downstream business results), and the fans will be happy (i.e., investors will be happy).
Solution: Transition your marketing team away from generating leads/MQLs to generating high-intent revenue opportunities (HIROs). What’s the difference between MQLs and HIROs? Good question.
The difference is nuanced but important. MQLs show early interest through engagement with marketing content (e.g., downloading an ebook or visiting a pricing page) but aren’t ready to buy. A high-intent revenue opportunity (HIRO) signals strong intent to purchase, engages directly with sales, and is nearing conversion (e.g., leaving a clear message for sales or completing their KYC). How you qualify a HIRO will often be unique to your company.
The question you must answer is: “Does this lead signal a potential to convert to new business downstream?” If yes, it’s a HIRO. If not, funnel them into an automated nurturing pile.
2. Hiring the wrong type of B2B fintech marketer
When hiring a marketing leader, there are three options available: a corporate marketer, a product marketer, or a demand gen marketer. For a B2B fintech company just starting out or approaching scale, what you need is a demand gen marketer.
A corporate marketer is great at building a brand image or reinforcing a brand profile for a delayed downstream impact. But building a brand is expensive, takes time, is difficult to track, and requires a lot of faith. You are a fintech with a quickly depleting runway; you don’t have the patience.
Product marketing isn’t your solution either. Product marketers communicate what the product does and often stop there. To drive my point home, I’ll borrow Jason Lemkin’s words:
“Product marketing is about positioning. But until you are pretty big, this isn’t your top worry. Product marketers from Big Tech Cos that you meet are often very smart — that’s part of the job. But they just have zero idea how to get you leads and new customers. That’s not remotely part of the job.”
As a B2B fintech operating in Africa during this funding winter, you care about generating sustainable revenue right away. Of the three types of marketers, the demand gen marketer provides the best shot at building a strong revenue-generating GTM machine in collaboration with your sales team.
These marketers work closely with sales to generate a stable stream of revenue opportunities. Ideally, you want to hire a demand gen marketer who has held a “commit” — a HIRO commit, win-rate commit, revenue commit, or even a profit commit.
The extra advantage a demand gen marketer provides is the ability to hack corporate and product marketing until you have the runway to invest in brand-building. Demand gen marketers focus on the numbers — how much pipeline am I creating for $x spent, and how much is that worth in revenue?
3. Chasing too many objectives
If you run a lean GTM team, they have only so much bandwidth to chase an inexhaustible list of marketing motions.
To drive up our marketing effectiveness (and revenue), the marketing and management teams agreed that the primary focus should be on creating high-intent revenue opportunities (HIROs). We agreed internally on what defines a HIRO and directed 80% of our effort toward it (not 100% because we still have to invest in the brand, and there’s always urgent work that needs attention).
We agreed on a commit, codified inside an OKR (objectives and key results) document, planned ahead for the quarter. This allows the team to focus on a clear number of projects/experiments.
A distribution that has worked for us is focusing, per quarter, on two “cash cows,” two “investments,” and one “big bet.”
“Cash cows”: Low-hanging fruit experiments that promise strong immediate ROI. They are often fundamental basics that your team hasn’t gotten around to yet, like building use-case pages with search ads visibility, webinars, or an affiliate program. You can often launch these within a quarter.
“Investments”: Strategic experiments that take longer to execute and have a longer time-to-ROI, such as SEO or whitepapers. These experiments take about 3 to 6 months.
“Big bets”: Expensive gambles. If they work, the ROI is incredible; if they fail, the cost is immense (e.g., hosting trade fairs, a big billboard downtown, or creating industry tools).
Your quarterly experiments may not follow this exact setup, but the idea is to save the marketing team from the tyranny of urgent work, giving them ample time to see their experiments through and apply learnings that will inform the next quarter’s OKRs.
If quarterly planning is too long for your fast-paced organization, try monthly plans with corresponding monthly performance reviews (MPRs)..
To recap:
— Align sales and marketing metrics. Consolidate marketing and sales under one growth team, and measure their productivity by the same metrics.
— Hire the right type of B2B fintech marketing leader. A demand gen leader who understands the numbers and can work with sales and finance.
— Set clear goals with an OKR framework and empower your marketing team with the discipline to avoid being distracted by urgent work.
As you implement these ideas, you’ll be able to refocus your B2B fintech marketing spend and maximize every dollar.
Gbénga Onalaja is a sales-led B2B marketing leader who is currently the global head of marketing and communications at Kora, a pan-African payment gateway. Previously, Gbénga worked with FMCGs, oil and gas companies and cultural organizations across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and France to execute go-to-market, retention and growth strategies. He helps B2B tech and SaaS businesses meet revenue targets and achieve profitability through highly specialised go-to-market and growth strategies.
