What is Helmur?
Helmur is a cross-functional tool for planning and operating your demand funnels.
What does Helmur mean?
The name Helmur is a play on the word, Helm: noun a tiller or wheel and any associated equipment for steering a ship or boat. verb steer (a boat or ship). Teams that plan well and develop a healthy operational cadence tend to be most successful at performing well towards their goals. We’re changing the way teams plan and go to market with Helmur. Just like the lyrics from the song Drive by Incubus, we firmly believe that teams who “take the wheel and steer” their plans will be most successful and want you to “be the one behind the wheel”.
Why are you building Helmur?
At Helmur we strongly believe that Revenue performance follows Demand performance (i.e. Revenue is the output). If you are seeing issues in Revenue consistency, then there is an issue with your Demand Operation (process, tactics, people). If you are close to the Demand Seat, then these scenarios might be familiar to you: - Your organic lead flow is way behind the size of your Sales team. Result, your Sales team is likely having to rely on outbound selling. Or, you’re having to spend more budget than planned for paid leads. - Your lead flow is way too high for a small, growing Sales team. Do you even know how many leads each Sales person should get (and in what time frame)? Are you getting the right yield from your leads? Are you flooding the engine? Are your new reps fully onboarded and at full productivity? - You forgot to consider conversion velocity (time it takes for a lead to convert to a customer) when building your funnel model. As a result, you are likely delivering leads too late to hit the goals for your current reporting period and you are behind on revenue. - You’re rapidly expanding into many new geographies. Result, you probably don’t have a baseline of performance in those territories. And maybe your Sales team isn’t fully enabled (content, messaging, tools) to acquire customers in those regions. - You’re experimenting with various strategies (ABM, PLG, SLG) simultaneously and a) it is difficult to build goals for each, let alone understand readiness and performance across each strategy. - You’ve agreed on a revenue target, but you haven’t aligned on how to get there (your strategy is: we’ll figure it out). -Detailed plans for team growth and budget to support your annual revenue goals took too long and were too complex to launch with your SKO. The performance pain and misalignment starts almost instantly. - Your RevOps team is more Revenue (BOFU) focused and your MOPs team is more stack (systems) focused. Result, Demand isn’t their top priority and it’s all on the head of DG to figure out how to hit the number. - Tracking actual performance to your model performance is so cumbersome, it is only done at a quarterly frequency. All your learnings and improvements happen in quarterly increments and you only iterate on your revenue engine 3-4 times per year. Your goals are likely DOA (dead on arrival) because you don’t have the right operational cadence to iterate at the speed your growth goals require. - You still talk about your funnel as the monolithic Funnel instead of realizing that your overall revenue output is the result of 10-20 micro funnels that perform differently based on your region, audience, motion and lead channel (to name a few). - MarTech is too expensive. With a few exceptions there’s been an “over platforming” in the MarTech space and solutions are being sold with a complex, top down (CMO/CFO/CEO focused) Sales process. This comes with a price tag to justify it, when in reality Ops teams are often looking for microservices. Martech should be sold like Developer tools. Easy for the tool users to try and buy, cost effective to adopt, and an ability to scale based on needs. Helmur was conceived to help shine a spotlight on these issues and help out Demand in the driver seat so your revenue output is more predictable. We want to help Demand teams become more agile, Demand Operators.
Who is Helmur built for?
If you go to work every morning thinking about how to hit a number (quota) then Helmur is for you. Believe it or not, demand is not just part of Marketing's purview. The function of creating demand and capturing demand spans across Sales, Marketing, Customer Success and even Product teams these days. Helmur is built to help this cross-functional group.
What is a Demand Plan?
The simplest version of a demand plan is a spreadsheet representing your funnel stage goals (# MQLs, SQLs, SQOs, Deals). However Demand Planning has gotten very complex as companies apply combinations of demand motions (ABM, PLG, SLG, etc) to generate revenue. Also, product portfolio, audience segment, geography and GTM methodology (inbound/outbound) tend to be considerations during the planning process. However, the most neglected aspects of demand planning are budget for demand and hiring tempo for Sales. As you might have gleaned now, Demand Planning is a cross-functional process involving Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product and Finance. Lastly, we believe that a plan is never one and done. It is a continuous iterative process that needs revisiting regularly as you track the performance of your execution. Our vision is to bring all these planning, operations and teams together into a single tool to help Demand Generators become Demand Operators.
What is Demand Operations?
Demand Operations is a term we've coined to focus on the operational aspects that help the demand function. This is a subset of Revenue Operations or Marketing Operations but narrowly focused on demand and funnel optimization.
What is a micro funnel?
We see that most businesses refer to their sales funnel as a monolithic, single funnel - "our Funnel" with a capital F. The reality is businesses have a bunch of micro funnels add up to form the main Funnel. Each micro funnel performs slightly differently. E.g. Your acquisition funnel is separate from your existing customer funnel. Your paid lead to customer conversion will be different from an organic lead and thus they are two different funnels. Each geography, product and business segment can perform differently as will each sales motion (inbound/outbound/partner). Customers who expect all these funnels to perform uniformly are in for a big surprise at the end of a revenue period.
What is operational cadence and why is it important?
Most businesses have a cadence for revenue reporting, e.g. quarterly. Often that leads to those businesses operating at a quarterly cadence. However that means businesses often learn and iterate in just 4 cycles in a year (ever been to a QBR?). Unfortunately this is not fast enough in high growth and competitive environments. Just like development teams work in short sprints we believe that demand teams need to operate at a cadence that allows them to learn, iterate and improve quickly. This means that the operational cadence may be more prolific than the reporting cadence (e.g. monthly). Businesses must proactively think about what operational cadence is right for their needs. Helmur helps businesses plan and build up to an agile operational cadence.
How is Helmur different from other planning tools?
Our goal is to help demand generators become demand operators. There are many "platforms" available for Revenue planning and acceleration, marketing budget management and even Sales territory planning. Helmur is designed to be a lightweight tool and hyper focused on demand operations.
Do I need a Demand Planning software?
We're biased. While the demand generation role is almost exclusively seated in marketing, the reality is demand is a cross-functional responsibility. The idea behind Helmur is to get all the demand planning (including budget, headcount, campaigns and goals) into a single tool as opposed to splintered across many siloed spreadsheets.
What are some of the principles behind the Helmur application?
We conceptualized Helmur with some of the following principles to ensure our customers find it useful. - We support the customers’ business structure. - We support the customers’ business nomenclature (naming) - We believe in micro funnels, which means there has to be a way for customers to go granular with their demands plans. It also means teams can assign owners for each micro funnel. - We incorporate best practices while supporting the customers’ customizations - We help you become an "Excel-jock" without the need for Excel.
How much does Helmur cost?
Helmur is in early access beta right now. Our earliest customers are trying the product and providing us with feedback so our first release will be ready for everyone. If you’re interested in giving it a whirl, request beta access here https://www.helmur.com/helmur-beta-request.
What does the Helmur logo stand for?
The Helmur logo is a capitalized "H" stylized to look like an hourglass, representing the combined acquisition and expansion funnel.
We believe that building funnel goals might seem easy, but operating a demand plan requires consistent operational cadence and cross functional alignment to become nimble and successful GTM machines.