Transforming Pipeline Development, 1% at a Time

Amy Kohl, CEO and Founder of AK Operations, highlights the significant revenue impact behind the power of 1% strategy and its direct connection between content quality and creating greater pipeline penetration.

In this interview with host Steve MacDonald, Amy Kohl, CEO and Founder of AK Operations, shares the revenue-driving activities that, when improved by just 1%, can have a profound impact on team focus and revenue creation from the top to the bottom of the funnel. Amy emphasizes the importance of the quality of the company’s content and assets. When the leadership team grasps the relationship between content and the ability to drive greater pipeline penetration and revenue impact through the power of 1% changes, they are seeing the results much faster than anyone else.

Amy Kohl, CEO & Founder of Ak Operations – Follow Amy on LinkedIn

The interview’s main takeaway is the continuous pursuit of 1% improvements in all aspects of the sales and marketing strategy. By focusing on small but meaningful enhancements, such as improving click-through rates, delivering high-quality content, fostering collaboration between teams, and personalizing the sales process, companies can achieve significant boosts in conversions and sales.

“The focus of being 1% better in any capacity of the funnel that you’re responsible for has a direct impact on revenue. I see it every day. Across 34 clients, we see the value of having that discipline. We see it accelerate and how it changes the game for the pipeline. I’ll tell you, the clients of ours that have the most collaborative mindsets on CONTENT and ASSETS, and let’s try this, let’s try that. Those are the ones that are figuring it out fastest.” – Amy Kohl

Amy stresses five main areas to focus on to create your own 1% success strategy, starting with just how powerful the “Power of 1%” truly is:

Why focus on the top of the funnel?
High-quality content that can multiply your conversion rates
Doing better than just playing the numbers game
Content themes that add value and conversion
Why you must be a partner, not a seller

Read on to learn from all five of Amy’s top recommendations and receive a copy of her “Power of 1%” tracking spreadsheet by CLICKING HERE.

Listen to the full podcast or watch it on YouTube. To watch the 3-Minute summary video, CLICK HERE.

In this interview, Amy also promises a spreadsheet that demonstrates the power of 1% increases on revenue and was also kind enough to put together a short video walking us through the spreadsheet as well.

Introduction to Amy Kohl

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to another exciting episode. And this is an episode that you are going to want to pay a lot of attention to. Amy Kohl is from a leading and award-winning go-to-market and rev ops company that basically takes charge of your entire go-to-market strategy, creates the lead gen, creates the meetings, and creates the sales.

And that’s what we want to talk about. In this kind of economy, especially, how do we get more conversions? How do we get more sales? And we’re going to talk about the power of 1% – that if you go to the top of the funnel and if you can increase something, like your click-through rate, by 1%, how does that travel throughout the entire funnel and actually get you a new customer every single month just by doing things a little bit differently, a little bit more efficiently, that you can scale.

So Amy, I don’t know if you want to add to that intro on the power of 1%, but I’ll turn it over to you to introduce what that concept is, please.

Just how powerful is the Power of 1%?

Amy Kohl: This topic is hitting home a ton for our customers and us every day because as folks are trying to stay leaner longer right now with all of the shifts and demands that the economy’s putting on fundraising and runways, it’s a big deal to focus on the little drivers that people can do with their current resources and their current headcount to make a big revenue impact.

So again, I think I shared this last time we were on a podcast, it’s a series of base hits. So if every base hit had a discipline or a goal around getting one person better, proportionate to whatever the driver is, what kind of impact can that really have?

And we do this every day. It’s actually the driver of our pivots and our strategy, but people need to think about this in a more tangible way. And I’m hoping that today we can share some of the tricks that we use for our clients every day. So thank you for having me back again.

Steve MacDonald: So if you could, just so we have a good understanding of the trickle effect of the 1%, you and I were talking right before we pushed the record button. If you could take us from the top of the funnel, the clickthrough rate, and how you think about it with your clients and how we get to more customers on a monthly basis.

Amy Kohl: Yeah. A lot of times, when we’re talking to our founder CEOs or even our VPs of Sales, we’re always talking about the small improvements to the win rates or the pipeline conversions. And I, while I appreciate that at that base hits discipline, if we actually back up to a full cycle and we focus first more on the top of how we’re actually getting the initial interest, that’s where a lot of the volume can kind of come into play with a stricter discipline even higher in the funnel.

So an example of this that I shared with Steve earlier was, if we were able to improve our click rate by 1%, how many more visits can we get to that book a demo or contact us form on our website, knowing that 30% of the visitors complete that form, and then 10% of those will go forward into the pipeline as a qualified meeting?

That’s huge. So that little change in how we’re messaging or structuring our emails or our ads on social or any digital ad that increases more of those visits to that one key page, how much more impact will we feel for our sales team down funnel? And again, it starts with the valuable content that you’re offering, how we’re articulating it, and making sure you’re testing it 20 different ways early, so by the time you have budget and confidence, you’re really pouring your money or your focus into the right strategies.

So again, to recap, we’re really good at talking about qualification, to all sponsored demos, to pricing agreements, and then to our win or lost. But even higher than that is where the continuity really feeds sales and marketing together.

And you and I talked about this before, but having the discipline and focus on conversion rates early makes a game-changing difference too, and confidence that you’re going in the right direction. So early on, you want to do all your experiments, and you want to start slow so you can go hard and heavy later.

And again, you do this all with no extra resources or headcount, which is what, ultimately, a lot of people are needing right now.

Why focus on the top of the funnel?

Steve MacDonald: So there’s so much to unpack there. One of the examples that we went through was, let’s say that you got the power of 1% increase on the click-through rate. Right? Could be from your email campaigns or from your ad campaigns. It’s your demand gen. And let’s say for round numbers that equals 100 more MQLs. And of those 100 MQLs, you are able to convert 10% of those into meetings. Right? These are very doable numbers based on your experience.

And if you can even convert 1 in 10 of those new meetings, those demos of interested people in your personas, then you just increased one new customer every single month.

Amy Kohl: Correct. Correct. So that’s where you have that controlled waterfall. Now you can do that backwards, but yeah, that’s the biggest game changer for us is how many people you are feeding at the top.

So does your demand gen program have 10,000 people active right now? A marketable database is typically right around 10,000. And if you want to get 1% of those folks to engage each month, you’re going to have about 100 MQLs. And again, we have some clients that’ll book one in four, one in five of them into meetings.

And those are folks that are, I would say they’re targeting SaaS, B2B marketing, and sales leaders. Those are high converters. They’re learners by trade. But even our clients that are targeting IT and cyber, those folks are still engaging with content too, but they’re at a lower conversion rate to meetings.

So let’s say 10% of that bucket. And then you have ten meetings, 50 to 75% of those are qualified. So let’s just say five. And then you have another conversion rate between there with your active pipeline, and that’s still going to give you, let’s say, one and a half customers on a 33% win rate.

That’s doable. Those are normal, very standard, typical numbers in the pipeline. And that’s where really the hard, hard, hard work is. But at the top, just being a little bit more sophisticated, you really give them significantly more at bats. Not to play on baseball so much, but the base hits, the at bats.

It’s all joined together. And so whether you’re listening to this podcast and you’re a marketing leader, or a sales leader, or a closer, or a BDR – everybody has a base hit they’re responsible for. It just may not be as glamorous as a closed-won deal. It might just be a click-through rate.

It might be a conversion from MQL to meeting or, for a BDR, how many meetings, how many dials are you making, and how many connects can you get? Could you dial differently at a different time? Could you dial the coast, one coast at this time, the other at this time? Could you call engagers?

There are a whole bunch of different conversion rates throughout the whole process, but I think it’s very important for teams to sit down and say, what are the driving forces to help me move the needle north? And I said this, I shared this earlier, but the needle’s always moving. It doesn’t just wait until the end of the sales period to go, oh, it fell backwards or we’re moving the needle forward. It’s every day.

And it might be just ping-ponging back and forth like this, but that’s why everybody shows up every day with that focus. So just doing 1% better, it’s going to inch north all the time. And again, you have to have the team alignment and structure, and you have to sit down and war room it out. Say, okay, BDR, what are the things you can control that gives us 1% more or 1% better?

And they’ll have different drivers than everyone else at the table, but by the time you whiteboard it all out, every driver matters as much as the last and the next. And that’s really why I’m so obsessed with sales and marketing because it’s such a team sport.

And so they’ll sign. If you know anything about me, I love soccer. I coach all my kids playing soccer, and everybody has a role to play on the team. I look at my team the same way as I’ve grown and scaled my company. We can’t all be center midfielders. We only need one goalie. We all have to play our own position, and when we do, we’re scoring goals.

Same thing with our sales and marketing.

Steve MacDonald: So, clearly understand the power of the 1%, how it impacts the entire funnel – and we’re going to include a link to the show notes here to a Google document so that you can get in and you can start working with those numbers and change them and see how it impacts the entire funnel all the way through that sales conversion.

High-quality content that can multiply your conversion rates

Steve MacDonald: That’s what happens. Let’s talk a little bit now about how do we create that 1% change. Because that’s probably what everybody’s thinking: Okay, I clearly see the math and the impact there. But we talked just a little bit earlier about one of the favorite drivers, and in our previous podcast, we talked about the power of content and the higher quality of the content, the better the ROI at every stage of that funnel.

Maybe talk a little bit about content and click-through rates and how that impacts everything we’ve been talking about here.

Amy Kohl: Okay, so a couple of practices that have gone a long way for our team, and luckily we’re in a very modern multi-asset.

It’s easy to make a quick Zoom video, thankfully, because those are some of the biggest key drivers that we’ve experienced with our own clients. So at the top of the funnel, you obviously are testing different strategies, different targets, different ads, and different content CTAs. It’s not always a requested demo.

It should oftentimes not be. I like our cold marketing to just typically be about something, I think we talked about this before, where we’re serving them, and they’re able to consume content that supports a pain they have because we know who they are, and that’s how you dialed in your targeting. So content there, of course, matters. But I think something that we often overlook is how content nurtures throughout the pipeline, too.

So, for example, if your team has a drop in no-show rates. Especially in the summertime, this is very challenging right now and top of mind for a lot of clients. So your BDR team or my team were to book a meeting, and it’s with the founder or the member of the sales team. How impactful would it be to receive a video of the person you’re about to meet in the next, it might be seven days from now. But to keep it really relevant.

So rather than just saying, hey, thanks so much, I’ve sent the invite. We’ll talk to you next Thursday. Instead, it’s, hey, thanks so much. I sent over the invite, and in the meantime, here’s a quick video of Scott, who’s going to be taking care of you next week. He has a really cool background. He shares about this in his video.

Looking forward to meeting, then they’re watching Scott. They’re learning more about him, why he is an expert in this space, and why it is, in fact, a meeting they should attend. So that’s a really cool way, and it’s custom content. You ask each rep to make one of them. It’s no big deal. No big deal at all.

Then inside of your video, you see how many people view it and then you bump it up against how many people attend. Did it help? Did it move the needle at all or did it stay the same? Neutral? Okay, but your conversations might be better. Your qualification might be better later.

So that’s just one example at the top of the sales funnel and then more at the bottom of the funnel. I really love content that helps them circulate our value internally. We call it consensus-building information. So I imagine getting off a demo with me, and I say, Hey Steve, I meet with people like you all the time.

You’re going to go to your boss and your boss’s boss and say, hey, I think we need to discover or look into this more. I think this could be a great fit for us. But here’s an internal discussion document that I think would help guide your conversation because there are concerns you guys should discuss that I want to come up with because I also want to help you overcome those or show you how we’ll aid you in our relationship as our customer.

So I think being very forward in nurturing the conversation and guiding the sales process really establishes you as a resource, and the content will certainly help you then.

Then, Steve, you have a PDF or a link or some sort of discussion guide to share amongst the rest of the buying team. And it’s not just on you anymore, and I’m not just hounding you anymore about following up and the next steps. So that content isn’t important when you’re in the late stages of closing a deal and onboarding questions start coming up, and people are worried about scheduling and this person’s out.

So let’s just push this close date back until September instead. What about an onboarding roadmap to say, hey, for the first 20 days, it’s all us. You’re going to give us these assets, we’re going to do all this lift, and then we’ll get together right around August 15th to do the initial kickoff, and we’ll just do it with one team.

Well, now our deal doesn’t have to push 60 days because that person who is going on vacation isn’t a make or break to it being successful. So really thinking about content so much more outside of just what your pretty ad looks like on LinkedIn or Facebook. And thinking about how the continuity assists the sales team throughout the whole process is so key.

And I don’t want to act like I know it all. I do think our clients kind of are on their own journey when they’re learning they need content, and that’s okay. I don’t think you should make content until you really have established the need for it, because a lot of us are strapped and time consumed, of course.

But it makes a big difference when you start identifying trends, thanks to our conversion rates. And then you’re focused on fixing one base hit at a time. And then that change makes it really measurable to see if it worked or not or if you’re still neutral. So I hope those are some good examples of what you had in mind.

Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. And there’s the content at the top. Let’s just say that the ad’s going out to X number of people, the email’s going out to X number of people. You could think about impacting the numbers game: if I just increase my email list or increase the amount of money I’m spending on my ad.

If you’re not thinking about the quality of the content that attracts, that clickthrough rate is only based on the quality of that content. So you’re kind of, we talked about this, if you just add numbers of email contacts, you potentially are scaling the inefficiencies versus saying it would be even better just to stick with what I have but focus on higher quality content that attracts.

Doing better than just playing the numbers game

Amy Kohl: It can be very reckless. And honestly, there are so many professionals out there that look at it as strictly a numbers game. If I push out this, I’m bound to get at least this at best. All I need is one. You know, I always used to hate if 1% of the market would buy what we have, we’ll be set.

That’s not the right kind of mindset. The mindset strictly needs to stay on, if I were to fill the funnel or fill the, I call it, fuel here at AK Ops. If I were to expand my target audience to three x, will my conversion hold true? And that’s where your content has to be on point.

And it needs this. And again, going back to the whole mindset of serving first before you’re selling, especially at the top, it’s so, so important to test different variables of content. Like I said before, a marketing and sales target audience versus an IT-focused or something more in a cyber industry.

They’re looking for different types of resources. So just because you did it once at one company, you don’t just rinse and repeat that same strategy. You’re starting from scratch with the same roadmap, but your variables are always going to be different in what you’re saying in your content.

To your point, too, about clickthrough rates, the clickthrough rate at the top is a goal indicator of whether or not your content’s hitting. But if your content is not hitting, you should probably look at targeting, too, before you just throw out your content. If you dialed in your list wrong, or maybe you’re too broad, and you’re not really getting any learnings, and you need to narrow it down a little bit.

Those are the things I would pivot first before scrapping any content, especially if it’s worked well in demand gen. I do really appreciate a demand gen strategy or email marketing because it really allows you to control a quick sample of who you know needs what we serve, what we do, and we test our messaging there in a kind of controlled pond.

It’s not as expensive. These are really quick results in terms of email metrics. Then you assume that holds true, and then you can see, based on my list, here were my high engagers, and this is the profile they fit into. Now I’m going to apply this to paid and bring that over to my ads, and now I’m spending money, or arguably more money or a more expensive channel, on something I already know to be true, and I have higher confidence in this.

Testing. So I just think starting in demand gen, and then flipping over to paid, is something that many people that we work with are significantly more comfortable with than just rolling out a whole new channel and strategy without tested content.

Content themes that add value and conversion

Steve MacDonald: And if you could remind us, it was a big point that we covered in our other podcast episode, but when we talk about there is content all throughout the funnel, but when your demand gen campaigns are reaching out to more of the masses of your personas. It’s not about what I call an inside-out sales strategy or product marketing, it’s value-add, and it’s helping. It’s expanding their knowledge, their ability to do their jobs, and make their decisions.

So remind us a bit about if you have specific themes you run in terms of content and why that’s important at the beginning.

Amy Kohl: Yeah, so the themes are kind of a funnel in and of themselves. So the intro, I guess the first piece, typically needs to be the ultimate guide to better prospecting. So, let’s just use that as an example. So I think it’s really important to stay high level, initially, as a nice intro. Suppose companies, or three or more contacts from the same company, are engaging with that piece of content. In that case, that’s a very high indicator that that’s probably the pain point that they, in fact, have and informs my sales teams quite well to follow up and say, Hey, do you have any questions on that?

Or, Here, can I just send you a really cool worksheet that’ll help you guys collaborate internally to do better prospecting just for this? For that theme, I just pulled it out of the air. So hopefully, this works.

And then the second one would be four tips to do it better yourself. That’s the piece that then the rep could share, or it would be the next one they’d receive inside of the automation. So, four tips for prospecting better on your own.

Three ways to evaluate if now’s the time to change or partner with somebody. And then I also like to get into an urgency piece, like what’s the cost of not doing this for another year? That’s the pocketbook, status quo objection. Sure, you’re going to grow just fine if you just keep what you’ve always been doing, but the gap’s going to continue to separate over time.

And this is what your other competitors are doing, and you will soon find yourself pushed out of the market because you’re falling behind—something like that.

And then the final piece, I, again, similar to the internal discussion guide and being super transparent, I like offering a buyer’s guide in markets. So if you’re truly the leader and can serve your clients better, you’re a better fit for them. Share a buyer’s guide. If you’re going to Gartner, they already see five or six other people in the quadrant alongside you. Go ahead and summarize those. Say how you’re different from them.

Offer the playbooks that you guys share, don’t just wait for them to bring it up on a call because what they’re thinking, only 5 to 10% of it actually comes out when it’s into an objection or closing conversation. So be transparent the whole time. Share that, and if we market that way, it does presume this, or it allows them to assume that we are going to be very transparent and we know that they exist and know that they do good business and have great customers.

But here’s how we’re a little different, and we may be a better fit for you. And if we’re not, we’ll find out in our conversation. That’s okay. So I think if we all get back to selling a little bit more about just finding the right fit for them and for us, sales will continue to be more consultative.

It is getting significantly better than it was in the past, that’s for sure. A fast-forward button to a more consultative sale. So again, that content initially that the demand gen’s creating and people are nurtured with is one thing, but arming your sales reps to share that content at the right time is really cool, too.

In fact, we have Sarah Klaus, our CSO here at AK Ops. She has been with a client of ours for a very long time. In fact, their entire pipeline was really built up as her little baby. And she has a great affinity for this founder, and he loves her too. But she actually built out a really cool step-by-step.

If you hear this, this is what we’ll nurture with. If they share this pain point, this is what we’ll follow up with. Very customized pipeline nurtures based on the information we collect in the sales process. So, a little shout-out to her because that was not my idea. It was hers, and it works and aids their conversion rates quite well.

Why you must be a partner, not a seller

Steve MacDonald: What I love about all that content you’re sharing there is it positions the company as an industry expert. And that’s so important when you get down to the bottom of the funnel in the conversions. They always want to be doing business with a partner. A partner that expands, that has value, that helps them do their job better and get more sales on their end.

Amy Kohl: A hundred percent. Very, very valuable. I think gone are the days that people do business with the big guys because they get it. They know it, they’re in the industry. They might be industry leaders by size or revenue, and all these vanity – you know, it’s honestly BS vanity metrics for growth.

But you can be small and be a leader in your industry if you’re positioning yourself that way. And I think the buyer, especially in SaaS, isn’t always looking for the biggest name on the books anymore. I think they know that a lot of these guys are spinning off of those leaders, and they fixed the same problem in a little bit better, more efficient way because they’ve spent their careers listening to their customers, and they intimately know the environment that they’re serving.

So, I really do believe content’s the best way to help build that reputation. And not being totally self-serving, it’s really a different tone than what the big guys do. And obviously, I serve small businesses and startups, but many of these founders, these big guys, wouldn’t hold a flame to some of how sharp some of these guys are.

And their tech’s more agile, more modernized. It’s quicker to implement. There are a thousand reasons people are shifting to the startup ecosystem instead of the big guys anymore. So building content like that buyer’s guide will help illustrate their position in the market and keep that stronghold on their reputation for sure.

Summing up the power of 1% improvements

Steve MacDonald: So, if we wanted to wrap up this discussion with, here’s the summary of what we want you to take away from the top of the funnel 1%. The power and how it trickles down. How to use content to feed that 1% change because there have been many articles that have been coming out lately in these times where marketing budgets are constricting.

You have to do more with less, and content is the fuel that you were talking about. So if you could give us a rapid takeaway, that would be fantastic.

Amy Kohl: Sure. So, obviously, in the times that we’re in – and it’s not the last. It’s not the first, nor will it be the last time we’ll be in a position like this, unfortunately.

It’s super, super important to take a look at what those base hits look like for your company today. What are those conversion rates as the batons pass downstream, then each team, either on their own or as a whole, depending on how large your organization is, needs to sit down and say, what drivers support this one conversion rate?

And I think we’d be very surprised. I know our teams will be. Your team will be very surprised when they sit down and think about how many things they’re doing. And they don’t really know what to contribute the conversion rates to. It’ll really help skinny down what people are responsible for and what they’re using most of their day for.

And if it’s not a revenue-driving activity, it has to drop to the bottom. And then, after you know what two or three tasks need to be for each person’s driving activities of their day, or the bulk of their day, then you’ll be able to identify, okay, today did I close that gap at all? Or are we accelerating the right way or the wrong way?

And then that helps us really figure out what to do less of and what to double down on. So, the focus of being 1% better in any capacity of the funnel that you’re responsible for has a direct impact on revenue. I see it every day. Across 34 clients, we see the value of having that discipline.

We see 1% drop in how it affects a quarter. We see it accelerate and how it changes the game for the pipeline. I’ll tell you, the clients of ours that have the most collaborative mindsets on content and assets, and let’s try this, let’s try that. Those are the ones that are figuring it out fastest.

So, we live in seven-day sprints. And I think every young company, especially right now, should operate that way with only focusing on the base hit they’re responsible for. So again, the conversion rate dictates the health. Not the volume and dialing it down so people can stay lean without missing a ton of their goals, especially in the back half of this year. It will be essential to those that really thrive and those that, unfortunately, don’t.

So I’m happy to help. If anybody has any questions on how we do that, I’ll take a call with anybody just to help. There are no strings attached. But that worksheet will be really, really, a strong resource just to put that out to each team and see what their drivers are and what their 1% would look like.

Steve MacDonald: So we’ll make sure, Amy, we’ll get your worksheet up that people can link to. We’ll put a link to you on LinkedIn. Is that one of the best ways to contact you?

Amy Kohl: Yeah, that’s perfect.

Steve MacDonald: Well, thank you again for coming on and sharing. Just a wealth of knowledge and a way of thinking that is a plan that you’ve proven time and time again.

Inside and outside of economic conditions, just the little things along the way that you can do to improve 1% from the very, very top down to the bottom.

Amy Kohl: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Next Steps

Amy talks directly about why content marketing is important to B2B marketers’ success. To elevate your content’s ROI and revenue impact, don’t miss the opportunity to CLICK HERE and schedule a 20-minute strategy session with Steve MacDonald, founder of ConstentStrategies.io.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.