Pipeline Visionaries

Lightning Strikes - Pulling Yourself Above the “Visible Line” with a Small Budget


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Jan 28 2025 54 mins  
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This episode features an interview with Melton Littlepage, the CMO at 1Password, a password manager trusted by businesses and consumers alike.

In this episode, Melton shares his thoughts on building big bets into your budget and how the lightning strike strategy can increase awareness, even on a limited budget. He also talks about how he’s structured his team to create harmony with sales and the importance of focusing on expansion marketing.

Key Takeaways:

  • The lightning strike strategy, spending a large portion of your marketing budget on a message over a number of weeks, can increase awareness better than spreading your budget evenly across the year.
  • CMOs can be very focused on acquisition, but they should not forget to focus on expansion marketing and the value they can generate there.
  • One-on-one sales and marketing partnerships can help ensure both teams are on the same page and operating in harmony.

Quote:

  •  I'm a huge believer in lightning strikes. Lightning strikes are so important to us. If you're not familiar with the lightning strike concept in marketing, it's when you align the entire business, everything about the business where you could possibly project the message into the market, the website, all digital marketing, organic, social, paid social, the sales behavior, your presence at an event, everything in this tiny period of time says one thing. And you say it in deafeningly loud. You deploy 25 or 30 or 40 percent of your marketing budget into a window of time that could be just one or two weeks. And you absolutely blast your way into awareness inside your target buyer audience. This goes against the nature of the CMO, right? The CMO, like we all have these spreadsheets of targets where I need to deliver exactly this many MQLs consistently month in and month out with a little bit of seasonality built in and I can't afford variability. Like I definitely can't miss a month. And I don't know if a lightning strike is going to move the needle and so I peanut butter spread my budget evenly. But the problem is unless you have a massive budget, and most of us don't have a massive budget, then you're constantly below the visible line. You're just relegating yourself to being below the visible line.”

Episode Timestamps:

*(06:52) The Trust Tree: Leveraging solution marketing as you move to enterprise selling

*(23:05) The Playbook: Lightning strikes and increasing awareness

*47:00) The Dust Up: Navigating CEO-decisions

*(49:00) Quick Hits: Melton’s Quick Hits

Sponsor:

Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

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