I took over a role as as CMO about 3 months ago and have learned a TON in that time.

After spending a few years as a copywriter/email marketer, I felt it was a natural progression and another big challenge for me.

I’m by no means an expert or an authority at this…but I think that I have a pretty solid handle on the basics.

In today’s email, I want to break down how I look at overall CMO strategy and what that looks like in terms of managing client acquisition for $300K/mo online business:

I’m gonna keep this pretty high level and will most likely do a more in-depth breakdown of these individual categories in the future.

Day To Day:

There’s a few key metrics that I’m tracking every single day:

• Leads

• Cost Per Lead

• Calls Booked

• Cost Per Call Booked

• Cash Collected

• Recurring Revenue

• Total Revenue

• Cost Per Acquisition

• Front End ROAS

I break this down further by individual channel.

• Calls booked from Facebook Ads

• Calls booked from Email Marketing

• Calls booked from Instagram Organic

Each of these has subpoints.

If we’re looking at Facebook ads for example:

Our media-buying team spends about $1,400/day.

• 70% goes to core proven campaigns

• 20% goes to testing new creatives/audience

• 10% goes to retargeting

Typically we aim to keep cost per lead at sub $50.

We aim for sub $300 cost per booked call.

However, if a campaign is profitable…I don’t really care how much it costs.

If I’m looking at email marketing…

I break it down into:

• Broadcast Call Volume

• Automation Call Volume

Automation call volume is largely a function of paid ads once you have a proven automation.

Ideally you want to see consistency with automation call volume.

Broadcast call volume is more of a function of pulse on the list.

List engagement tends to go up and down over time.

Ideally you want your email marketing strategy to be geared toward long term consistency because ultimately email as a channel should serve as a hedge against paid ads.

You face more volatility with ads and therefore need email to be reliable (which it can be if you do it right).

I don’t track open rates or CTR’s…

I focus on booked calls, sales, and revenue.

For Instagram organic, I mainly track:

• Subscriber growth

• Calls booked

I’m still new to the organic growth game and will be learning a lot more about this over the next few months.

For each of these things it’s important that we’re always looking at trends.

Take media-buying for example:

If I have a campaign that’s at a $300 cost per booked call on the last 30 days…

But in the last 7 days, it’s aggressively raising and not generating any calls…

Although it’s inside KPI technically, I’m going to keep tabs on that and potentially make a decision to cut it within the next 7 days.

The same works vice versa.

If my call volume from email marketing is declining…

That means that the list is likely worn out. I’m hammering too many direct offers.

An email list is a valuable asset.

You want it to consistently insert profit into your business every single month…but you don’t want it to insert TOO much profit because ultimately we want to preserve the value of the list.

(if your ultimate goal is to build real enterprise value and sell your company - a huge email list that’s insanely profitable every month is a major selling point to a potential buyer).

If your email call volume is declining, then chances are you should pull back the aggression of your emails, and potentially pull back the volume too.

That covers the majority of marketing team KPI’s that I watch.

There’s definitely more to it but I’ll discuss that at a later date.

Now let’s move onto sales:

Everyday I’m tracking:

• Sets

• Show Rate

• Calls Taken

• Offer Made

• Closes

• Cash Collected

I track each of these metrics for each setter and closer.

I typically want my setters to hit 4 sets per day.

Although it pains me to say this, I’m happy with a 50-60% show rate on calls (it sucks but that’s industry norm right now).

I want my closers taking a minimum of 3 calls per day (I.E. schedule 6 and hope that 3 show up).

I want to see close rate above 25% on calls taken.

Offers should be made on the large majority of calls.

If not, chances are the setters are dropping the ball and allowing unqualified people on the calendars. Alternatively, the closers may just be DQ’ing too many people (generally it’s the former).

This is how I look at the day-to-day.

NOW…let’s zoom out (this is where the REAL money is made and also where I personally need the most improvement).

Big Picture:

I believe there’s a few ways you can REALLY move the needle at a high level as a CMO:

1) Offer Strategy

2) Hiring/Delegation/Training

3) Marketing Assets

It’s not enough to be just a “good marketer” in my opinion.

I think it’s very important to have a strong pulse on the market and “what works.”

Cultivating the ability to know “what works” is IMMENSELY valuable and I think largely comes from example.

For example:

What’s HOT in your market right now?

What are people complaining about?

How can you fix that and make a ton of money off of it?

I can’t speak for your industry…

But in my world right now show rates are probably the single biggest issue among most business owners I speak with.

I take daily consulting calls and every single day I hear complaints about show rates.

We spend close to $40,000/mo on Facebook ads and only have the calls show. So we’re effectively lighting $20,000/mo on fire because our show rates suck.

Now try adding a zero to those numbers and you’re looking at a VERY costly issue.

If you can structure an offer that helps people to fix show rates…they will 1000% pay for that.

Why? Because they’re losing THOUSANDS every single day because of that issue.

This doesn’t come down to having killer copy or sales skills…

Offer strategy is much more about awareness of the market in my opinion.

It doesn’t really take a lot of talent to sell things that fix painful problems for people with a lot of money.

As a CMO I believe you need to have very strong awareness surrounding these types of issues.

If you can beat everyone else to market with the right offer, you can run it up bigtime.

I’ve seen it happen SO many times.

Second - hiring.

Hiring is fucking hard.

Anyone who tells you otherwise has probably not spent a lot of time managing people.

A common issue I see:

Marketing team KPI’s are solid and have foundation for scale.

BUT

There’s only one good salesperson.

And no matter what you try…you can’t find another guy who can actually perform.

You can’t scale marketing because you don’t have calendar space…because you can’t find more sales talent.

Since you can’t scale sales, you can’t scale the company.

This isn’t a marketing problem…it’s also not necessarily a sales problem…I would argue that this is a recruiting/training problem.

If you’re worldclass at recruiting/hiring/training people and can position the right people on your team to create leverage for your business…

I would argue that’s the single biggest way to move the needle.

You have one Closer who cash collects $150,000/mo?

Find a way to duplicate them.

And then do it again.

Now you’re knocking on the door of a business that makes $500,000/mo.

That’s a major needlemover.

I know we’re talking about CMO strategy and not sales team management, but ultimately your CMO strategy isn’t going to do much if you can’t get the sales team in order.

That is a MAJOR part of your job and if you’re not good at it then you won’t succeed.

Lastly marketing assets:

Can you build out a killer VSL that converts on cold traffic and gets solid lead quality/volume in the door (I.E. can you write solid long form copy)?

Can you build out a solid IG page? Or YouTube channel? One that not only drives subscriber growth but also drives call bookings and converts into deals?

This stuff is NOT easy.

It requires true marketing talent which is a pretty rare commodity in my opinion.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. I’ll try to do a follow up on this sometime next week.

If you’d like this email, shoot me a reply back. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

• D

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