How to do gamification in B2B

To Marketers,

Okerosi here with Product Weekly.

In this newsletter, I share proven insights I have gathered this week across; product marketing, B2B ad creatives & SaaS growth playbooks from the top 5% minds in the space.

In this week’s roundup:

- Carta from $20m to $450m

- Narrative archetypes for business

- Reddit ads for B2B

i always think of Asana and how when you mark a task complete, a unicorn flies across the screen

it's such a small thing, but i think the underlying purpose is to match what the user might be feeling in such moments by the product acknowledging the user's progress and accomplishments

I think there is so much power in the product reciprocating and acknowledging the triumph and success the user might be experiencing in certain moments

and that there are so many ways we can lean into this

- onboarding that provides in-product rewards
- Playstation-style trophies you receive when hitting pre-determined milestones
- in-product notifications and animations when certain things are done, accessed, etc.
- in-product avatars users can customize (like Reddit)

Here’s a quick overview of how Mutiny’s AI game worked: 

Contestants signed up online through a short (and sneaky) lead-capture form

The prize pot increased by $1 for every contestant who joined

Contestants earned points by attending a total of nine virtual workshops split into three weekly sections running from October 24th to November 9th

Workshops were led by marketing experts in Mutiny’s client-partner network, covering different AI workflows

Contestants earned bonus points for completing a challenge task at the end of each workshop The top point earners at the end of the three-week challenge qualified for a live finale event 

Checklist before recommending Reddit Ads

1.Do you have the capacity to manage the advertising workload on another platform?

2. Do you have a solid understanding of your ICP and strong PMF?
3. Are there communities on Reddit that you believe your ICP is a member of? And do you have a large enough audience size to be able to scale?
4. Do you have enough budget to properly test the impact of the platform? (minimum 5X cost per MQL or SQO)
5. Is your product/service suitable for a wide range of businesses? If it’s only suitable for enterprise companies, for example, Reddit might be a struggle, as you cannot filter by company size.

Reddit Ads experimentation 

One of the simplest experiments I always recommend:

Launch 3 ad groups targeting:
- A niche subreddit (like r/SalesDevelopment)
- A mid-size one
- A broad one (like r/Sales)

It gives you signal. It gives you scale. And it keeps you from putting all your eggs in one weird Reddit basket.

10. "Next-generation"

This is a story about how the times have changed, and new solutions are needed for new times. You position yourself as a brand for those wanting to be part of a new generation.

Attio is the CRM for the AI era.

If my CEO asked me to book more meetings with our ICP, here's the first thing I'd do:

Build a proper target account list.

I know, hear me out

The biggest difference between winning and loosing GTM teams? Prioritization. Most B2B companies don't have an ICP, they have an ACP (average customer profile). They sell to too many verticals or personas

Knowing with SURGICAL precision your ideal customer (pays you the most, stays the longest, easy to sell into, needs almost no support), allows you to do things your competitors can't

Here's what I'd do:

1. Get CRM access & export a list of all of our existing and past customers

2. This list should have this info, broken down by customer:

- Industry
- Company size
- Geography
- Annual contract value
- Sales Cycle Length
- Job Title of our champion
- Anything else you deem important, like tech stack, funding, department size

3. Add to Google Sheet

4. Group them by segments and calculate win rate by segment. I'd probably segment by industry and/or company size

THE IMPORTANT PART:

5. Give this list to my CEO and have them rate each customer 1-5 from worst-fit to best-fit. 5 being “I’d want to keep this customer at all costs” & 1 being “If that customer canceled today, I’d almost be happy”

6. Next to that score, have my CEO fill out a “Why?” field to explain why they gave that customer that score. Can be just one sentence

7. Sort the list by score, best on top, worst on the bottom

8. Find the patterns. There’s no shortcut here. Look at the data, play around with it, form hypothesis and test them

Eg. “my CEO thinks the best customers are those who pay us the most while having a short sales cycle, which tends to be mid-market companies in non-regulated industries where we have a VP champion”

9. Express & validate the criteria. Repeat it back to my CEO. I'm looking for a "that's it". Cross-check with Sales and CS

10. I'd use Sales Navigator (or whatever l have access to, ZoomInfo, Ocean.io) to make a complete list of ALL the companies who match this exact criteria. Could be anything from 50 - 20k companies

12. Next I'd pull a list of all the relevant stakeholders within these account. If we sell to SMB, it might just be 1 person per account. If we sell into enterprise, it might be 5-10 people per account

13. This list is now the basis of our GTM. I would for example:

- Create content that's hyper-relevant for this newly defined person (focusing on the Champion), leveraging internal Subject-Matter Experts at our company
- Build a custom feed in Sales Nav so we can track whenever one of our ICPs posts something and I'd send this to my CEO so they can engage
- Run our best Linkedin posts as Thought Leader ads towards this list
- Run Conversation Ads to book demos (highly underutilized)
- I'd use a tool like Keyplay to score the accounts to feed to my sales team
- I'd track signals like hiring, tech stack changes, content engagement to run warm outbound