Thank you for coming. Excited to kick off the session. Let's do it. Let's do this.
A lot of familiar faces here, names at least that I see on LinkedIn. So that's awesome. All right. You want to kick us off, Evan, with our first topic?
We'll get going. We got people coming in, but we'll get started and let people in as they continue to join. For sure. I think that, you know, we are the whole idea of this is around 2025 planning, really just setting motion of how we are working with our clients, how we're thinking about different demand strategies, what's working, what's not.
So really bringing this conversation, like Megan said, just to be an authentic engagement between audience members as well as just like opening a question we brought. CRM Matt to the conversation. So I think we should just kick it off. We've got a few questions throughout that we'll kind of just like gauge and go back and forth.
But as you have questions, please, like me, drop them in the chat. I think, you know, from a first, the first question I always have and it's the fact that we have what nine Tuesdays left this year, blows my mind 10 Mondays, so the years going quick. But I'd love to open it up to the team here. Looking back at 2024, you know, what are some of the top two to three trends you've seen kind of impact B2B.
SaaS specifically with that performance relatively good or bad, just like what are trends you're seeing with clients already getting into the market? All right. I'll get us started. So I like to sort of zoom zoom out a little bit when thinking about this question.
And I think it's kind of important to look back over the last four years and really understand how the B2B market has shifted in a lot of really pretty significant ways, actually. We, of course, had the pandemic in 2020 and that was a massive shift in terms of just real life. Everything basically went from in person to online overnight. And then in terms of the B2B SaaS ecosystem, we saw a pretty significant shift in the acceleration and the adoption of digital strategies.
However, at the same time, we were really at this beginning of this juncture where the digital strategies that worked really well from the early 2000s up till 2020 were beginning to lose effectiveness. There were new emerging approaches and tactics that were becoming more effective, but most companies hadn't recognized this or hadn't made any changes to their strategy. And the pandemic effectively accelerated and injected a pretty insane amount of money into the digital marketing landscape. So you have, you know, what I call almost a COVID boom with a lot of SaaS companies, a lot of VC funding was injected in the market.
A lot of companies were just over investing in growth, top line growth was the most important thing over everything else. And people were just dumping money into paid advertising because they thought this is the quickest way to grow, right? Almost treating it like a coin operated machine. And at the time, you know, refined lab specifically, we were opposed to digital media agency.
We were helping companies spend that, but we also had our unique point of view on how marketing should be executed. So we were, we were really trying to be at the forefront of that and to shepherd that change. We see this insane growth spike across the B2B SaaS ecosystem into 2021 and the beginning of 2022. And Q2B 22 is when we start to see everything kind of, the foundation gets a little shaky, right?
And things, the house of cards starts to crumble a little bit. We start to see VC funding dry up. We see startups running out of money. As we all know, there were just a lot of layoffs in the ecosystem.
And there was this, this market effectively forced this pretty significant correction. And the correction was growth at all costs without any regard for unit economics is just not acceptable anymore. And that's where the people that were able to pivot and adapt survived. And then there were those that were not able to.
And many companies went under or closed or downsized significantly over that time period. What's really interesting is when you look at B2B SaaS companies, I've noticed a pretty significant difference in terms of more mature companies, 100 million ARR plus, and then sort of the growth stage startup. So when you talk about these more mature companies, they had a relative success. They had a pretty significant mo going into this tumultuous time of 2020 to 2022.
They were able to ride out the highs and the lows and survive without much of an issue because of that strong foundation. However, this segment of companies, even today, still are deploying these digital strategies from the early 2000s and are not necessarily feeling that sense of urgency to change. What I'm beginning to notice now in 2023 and 2024 is those companies are beginning to start to see things like efficiencies that were hidden before because of their relative success begin to come to the surface, overall declining ROI on all marketing and sales investments. They're finally seeing the data that's showing that lead gen campaigns display advertising, these tactics that are generally accepted almost that just aren't as effective.
They're starting to see that in the data and they're more open minded than ever at this point to begin making those types of changes. I view that as a huge positive a little late to the game, but let's go. And because of the size of these organizations, you can't underscore the challenge of the change management process that's ultimately required for those companies to actually navigate that successfully and not only, you know, begin to grow again, but begin to grow at the rate of success. You know, you can't really get into the rate that they were previously and get back into a place of dominance in their particular, you know, industry.
Gross stage startups. It's a whole other set of challenges because most early startups that you encounter today, they don't have to change from doing things the old way into the new way. And the challenges that they have are really fundamental business challenges. Do you actually have a product or service that the market needs?
Have you actually identified core positioning and messaging that actually resonates with your buyer? Are you even clear on who your buyer is? They almost jump to, oh, I understand modern demand. I can build a founder brand.
I can start a podcast. I can, you know, execute paid social. So it's like they understand the tactics that work today, but jump to execution of those tactics without ensuring that their core business fundamentals, like their actual product and service, their positioning their business model are actually ready to scale. So there's two separate challenges for these, these types of businesses today.
And I think depending upon what type of company you are, the biggest trend that I'm seeing again for these larger ones is actually waking up to the fact that they need to make this shift and beginning to prioritize and begin to make those changes, recognizing that that does not happen overnight, that this is a one to two year endeavor to make all of the changes throughout the organization in terms of programs and headcount and goal setting in order to continue to survive for the next five, 10, 15 years. And then you have this other segment where, although I would say very savvy to what it means to build a modern demand engine are not giving the requisite attention to like the core business fundamentals. And I mean, what I tell people, you know, I have sales calls every day with companies. And when I talk to an earlier stage company, it's like before you jump to like your Google ads or your LinkedIn, you know, advertising strategy.
There's some other stuff here that needs to be figured out. Like this is crucial before any of those digital marketing tactics are actually going to drive the results that you want. So, that was a little more long when did that I anticipated, but that's what I've been seeing at sort of a high, a high level. But I'd love to kick it over to my friend and one of our best strategists here at Refine Labs, Nat Shannella, would love to get your take on the same question, you know, from your perspective and get us more into the weeds with some of the things that you're seeing and all the great work you're doing with our customers.
One of the things I'm seeing a lot of is just paid search continues to get a lot harder and a lot more competitive. And you really have to look at paid search investments at the product level, particularly for non-branded and figure out whether you're spending the right amount of money to to get there if you're spending too much. And to me, like the end all be all metrics is first off get that level of measurement from the platform into the MAP and into the CRM and map that from the contact to the opportunity to the close one and then at CAC and pay back creates and you're like the end all be all metrics there and like you need to capitalize a site into acceptable CAC and payback metrics basically at any level of the organization you can get if you're in house, you should understand it at the go to market motion all the way down to the program itself. And to me like non-branded search is just incredibly competitive for some of these some of these markets where you're spending like $150 a click before you can even have a chance to swing and get an amount of need to qualify and get through to get through your funnel so to me like it's really saturated there and you got to really get through to the market.
And so I think that's a good thing to see that you're running into a super competitive market. You really got to try some outside the box stuff challenging even even some of our own POVs and frameworks where we're finding ourselves challenging on some of those things, even in some instances like things that I do outside of our own playbook, like running small broader phrase match campaigns and uber competitive industries with like a really narrow keyword set with a super aggressive negative strategy just to like see if I can get lower cost per clicks and still get a represent number of in-bounds and then see if that progresses all the way through the funnel. And sometimes if it's uber competitive for you for a non-commercial or for a commercial number in a high-tech term, you got to think outside the box stuff like that with the limited budget. One other thing that I'm seeing a lot of and this has been a feeling that I've largely had for about six months now is just I feel like LinkedIn is becoming very saturated at channel for B2B SaaS like everybody and their mother's cupcake company runs LinkedIn B2B advertising.
And I just think like we are stuck in an advertising duopoly as B2B SaaS that we need to shake ourselves out of fundamentally as a just as a profession. I'm looking a lot more into like other ways to get in front of my ICP and my key demographic time looking at demand side platforms. I'm looking at home advertising. I'm looking at things that are I can do other programs that are maybe ABM friendly as well.
But like everyone is running LinkedIn LinkedIn is the best B2B advertising platform that exists. I'm not going to deny that. I'm not sure I could recommend that with full confidence. Even looking at there are tools coming out.
I mean if you can't afford a metadata there's tools like Primmer out there that are a little bit more budget friendly for you to do a Facebook and Instagram enrichment with B2B level targeting. So just get outside of the duopoly in my opinion of LinkedIn and Google ads and just not everybody spends time on LinkedIn. We all do here. That's part of the reason why we're all here is you all saw our organic promotions and our email.
But guess what? Like I mean, go talk to your friends who are outside SaaS and ask them how much time they spend on LinkedIn and you will be surprised after you spend more than maybe an hour a week on it. And find other ways to target and find your target audience in ways that are going to be harder to attribute unquestionably but will probably be more effective in getting in front of them with a more resident message. So that would be my that's my spiel on that.
Coming in hot, Matt. I love that. See. All right.
Let's hear what you got. I'm sure you got some opinions too. Yeah, I do. Also.
Hi everyone. I am new to the B2B roundtable and kind of demand. My name is Sierra Hopkins. I'm a VP to man that refined lab.
It's really nice to see all of you and me all of you. I love Megan, but both of you and Matt had to say I feel like I was just going through back in time making when you're like, oh, COVID. It feels like, but I know Matt, you kind of mentioned just a little bit about LinkedIn being out. I also wanted to just emphasize that brand awareness is still needs to be a big strategy in your company.
So I know we think a lot about wind marketing. It's like, oh, we need to drive them QLs. You know, we need to drive pipeline and all that is very true and should be, you know, part of your goals. But you need to have a layer above that.
Like brand awareness is very, very important. Run campaigns that are going to generate eyeballs on your logo and teach people what you do. And like in a very specific and easy to understand way and who you help with the things that you do. And just to like double click on that a little bit, I also think now we're moving into this age of AI, like anyone ever heard of chat TBT, I know Google just launched Gemini.
When you like a lot of folks now are using these tools to search for new software, you know, SaaS companies, whatever they're looking for help on. And so you need to make sure that it's in your strategy to improve some of your SEO. So make sure your website is has some of the keywords and like key terminology and phrases that explain exactly what you do. So these AI tools like chat GPT and Gemini can pick up on your value ads and your features and your benefits so that when you're going in and you're searching for, I need a software that power search for my website, your company can pop up as that, you know, what chat GPT puts on their list.
Google search is still very relevant, but you know, more folks now are leaning towards these AI platforms and these AI tools because they're giving like chat GPT and Gemini is giving us a lot more information than Google can. And it's allowing us to ingest that information quicker. So really focus on brand awareness, your SEO on your website, messaging on your website and like making kind of alluded to this a little bit too is really make sure that what you are showing your buyer's your potential buyers on anything that's digital as, you know, your website's really important is very clear and to the point with what you do and who you can help. Another thing I think is like I've noticed in the past year that some people are moving a little bit away from it's I feel like we're getting a little lazy on content.
We use we use ads in an okay way but then we point them to a landing page that's not as relevant. So let's get really clear on a content strategy in 2025. Again, like outline your messaging outline your main features or benefits who you help how you help them and write a content strategy around that. We want to emphasize having strategy in all stages of the funnel so it's that you know, top of funnel brand awareness that's kind of like high level and then the middle of the funnel which is going to be more like product features, little bit more like technical speak around your product and your platform.
To meet those people that might know about who you are at least in the industry a little bit more and then also have some content around how folks can get in touch with your sales team and what the benefit of talking to your sales team is this I would recommend a very healthy balance of each of these types of content and really focus on different formats of content so we have video we have you know advertising of course static has created you have your blogs you have your long form your reports definitely invest in a team or folks that they are focused on creating and writing this content. So folks when they come to your website they can ingest content the way they want and you can also promote this content and the way that you want. I've always thought that content is king and don't get lazy with content because this is how people learn about your brand understand what you do and it also introduced a brand awareness that SEO started you know I was talking about and ideally having folks learn about you and get inbound at a quicker time. That's a lot to unpack there and I love it.
No, no, no, this is good and I think that you know what I'm hearing really from all of this is we're in a place of 2024 was a lot about like speed and how do we hit our goals and how to be ever metrics and introducing new tools and then just coming out of a bit of a fog. But we're almost in a place we're focusing on the signals within the noise is the most important aspect so Matt talks about plinked in be insaturated CRs mentioning searches out in terms of like the traditional methods and use of them. It's worth noting you know in the last 30 30 days we've had eight sra's saying how did you hear about us or chat GPT so I think like resonating on content it is so important for us to think about differently but. Yeah it's no longer the spray and pray put shitty content on LinkedIn use AI to write content there has to be some authenticity here because we can all read through the bullshit so I love that.
Kind of just be mindful of time we're going to move forward here I would love to talk a little bit about 2025 so more directly when it comes to planning for 2025 but each one specifically I don't like to think in annual marketing plans because they're typically trash but. How's your company use historical data and set realistic targets so I'm going to love for you to kind of kick us off and just discussing some of the importance around that some of the executive conversations you've had but then you know Matt see I mean we can just double click a little bit in there and I have to say we just need to be mindful of time because of so many great questions here. I know Joey I'm going to bring you on so get ready we're going to have you come on and ask your question and to this particular question on when it comes to planning how should we use historical data I'll maybe touch a little bit on some of the things that you're bringing up in terms of how do you. How do you sort of sell you know what you believe your marketing strategy should be to an executive team right that's a common challenge for any marketer no matter what you're in but I'm also curious to dig more into your use case because that always matters depending on your company and your ICP but zooming out broadly when it comes to planning.
This is what I tell you know everyone that I speak to I talked about seven to ten marketing leaders per week and really in sales conversations and I hear the same themes all of the time and a huge one is how do we tackle goal setting and how do we out of all of the different investments that we could make and all of the different programs. How do we select the right ones and how do we make that business case to our executive team of why they should listen to us in terms of what the goal should be what the strategy should be what the tactics should be and then of course what budget is needed to actually support the execution of that strategy. And so I like to encourage that people basically take to take two things that are critical for this it's so important now to take a data driven approach to everything that you do so of course you should analyze all of your historical data. And you should evaluate what that data is telling you the other piece so that I wish wasn't I wish was more prevalent in everything that we do in life is common sense.
So look at your data and analyze you know in terms of pipeline creation closed one closed lost revenue what is the data telling you what programs and lead lead in pipeline sources are driving the most closed one revenue. What's driving closed lost revenue when you dig into that who are the customers that are actually signing what are trends in terms of demographic data industries segments employee size run a win loss analysis why are you winning why are you losing what is that data. Are you losing what is that data telling you are you seeing trends in the deals that you're losing is that telling you that maybe a certain segment or customer that you thought would buy from you isn't really buying from you and efforts should be directed elsewhere in terms of what you've already been doing in terms of programs then whether it's paid advertising or events conduct some our analysis what is it telling you how much are you spending on it. How much can you verifiably believe that it is impacting your business in terms of pipeline and revenue.
The goal is not that this is a perfect exercise we all know you cannot measure marketing perfectly and that's not the goal the goal is to identify directional trends and insights and conclusions that you can then surface. As data backed evidence that is an input to decisions it doesn't dictate every decision that is made then this is where common sense comes into play as a marketing leader the first question I always want to ask is what is the business strategy is our positioning clear do we know who our customer is is our pricing aligned with what the market is willing to receive are we clear on these basic fundamentals do we know who we want to reach do we know what we want to communicate to them do we understand what the offer is and do we believe that offer is differentiated and compelling enough to attract and acquire that customer it is critical that if there are gaps in any of those things I believe it is the responsibility of the marketing leader the sales leader anyone on the leadership team to surface those so it can be worked on it's natural course of business for there to be a lack of clarity or challenges any of those key fundamentals and that's okay what's not okay is ignoring it so if it is an issue deal with it and address it once you've sort of cleared that and you're taking a look at the data the big question I ask and I tell people is your demand strategy can be really simple where does your customer spend time what matters to your customer and what is it that you need to communicate to your customer to make them aware that you exist understand what you do and get clear on the value that you can provide so when they have a need for a product or service like yours they're already aware that you exist and there are clear on the value that you can offer to them and that is is crucial and with those data points and sort of that sort of common sense business planning along with any constraints that you get right I'm a fan of budget constraints it actually makes you make better decisions you have a budget to work with no one has unlimited resources what are the most important things that you want to prioritize ultimately to achieve your goal of getting in front of and communicating to your audience effectively to drive action in bounds pipeline ultimately revenue so we touched on I tried to like touch a little bit on your question Joey but Matt how would you what do you have to add in terms of when it comes to planning how should companies use historical data to set realistic targets. I think that's why I said earlier just creating levels of measurement for yourself and part of that is just building a resilient and scalable measurement framework so like I like to break things up through actual goals pacing efficiency metrics cost per metrics pay back into the metrics and basically I'm running that at a funnel level and then that gives me some really good comparative things I can look at so I'm looking at my high-end funnel low-end funnel if I have something like that and then essentially just by understanding some of the cost perers and everything that go into that I can look at things with confidence and know if I should do more or less for the same event especially when you're looking at against your expenditures so I'm looking at in platform metrics and I'm dashboards to me this isn't all on a state at the end of the day when you're looking at in platform metrics like do you have it set as like every touch or last touch or anything like that but I'm looking at in platform data and more support when I'm seeing in the in the dashboard at the end of the day and then like if I'm looking at it against my plan I just want to figure out what my right way longer is it breaking is it in the lead S to SAL is it in the sale up is it like is it like to stay sure something like that and then other things that I see like when I'm doing goal planning especially looking at existing ones that I got there's a couple of just huge red flags that I always kind of look at and I would have major red setting up for so one of that is escalating pipeline and close one ECV's month over month like that's never how it works really in actuality when you kind of look at it against like what really happens so whenever I see something like that happening I'm normally a little bit reticent to like look at that and want to sign up for it unless there's going to be an expenditure increase that kind of goes with it like yeah you'll reach some semblance of scalability on that but to me that's always something I usually look at and then the other thing I like to look at is if like how much pipeline do I need to close like the revenue goals of percent of pipeline I tend to look at a lot especially challenge 12 months less quarter things of that nature so I want to see kind of how we're performing historically and then it gives me a sense of how much pipeline do we need to create in order to hit this goal based on what we've been doing the last six months and that really makes a difference if your ACV or if you're close one like varies wildly because of however you guys have pricing structured whether it's a usage based model or a seat based model or something like that so when ACVs are all over the place like I really want to look at percent of pipeline close it really gives me a good sense of what we need to model around that so those are just some some quick snap feedback that I have in terms of how I look at planning and yeah that's that's kind of just for a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a difference than it's like it's like a difference and when everything Gerry and so when talking about the well if I do on a this segment they're in, even regions, if that's something that's important to your business. But I want to know what is driving the most pipeline from a demographic perspective.
And then I straight up map that data to what I'm targeting on various social channels or just in general with my targeting strategy for paid media. I also look at even down to page search, what keywords are folks searching for and then converting on and then just making sure that we're optimizing for those keywords, of course, in the strategy. But the biggest thing with historical data is I really look at the pipeline metrics and I less look at the mix of closed one just because from a marketing perspective, we can do a lot more at the top of the funnel to impact the MQLs and the MQL quality that move to pipeline. Closed one is a little far off for me.
So when I think about closed one, I liked it because I want to know what's driving revenue, but I don't necessarily make actionable strategic decisions from a marketing perspective off of closed one data. There's a lot of things I can impact closed one data. It can be the seller, the time of year. Of course, the business is up to their budget.
So I really want to look at what's driving folks to a qualified stage in a business because I care about who actually is the right person that can buy my product instead of, is this the right time to buy my product? I'm more interested in the who. And so that's why I can look at the demographic perspective. And then I also think self-attribution, self-attribution, obviously we talk about this so much, but I do think it's good to have kind of that additional layer.
And it's good for a create demand strategy when you are running a lot of brand awareness on social media and your leaders are like, hey, Ciara, I need to know what LinkedIn is directly contributing to my ROI. And you're like, well, actually, I can't give you that direct attribution data because there's so much else that's happening in the market that we don't know about from a dark social perspective. And so giving you direct ROI is actually not going to be what I want to look at from a create demand perspective. I want to look at the self-appearn attribution data, kind of like Evan mentioned with chat GPT.
And then I also want to look at just like the total mix of create demand channels and capture demand channels, already driving pipeline and how much money are we spending on marketing issues in general and do just like a higher level ROI analysis between the pipeline, you know, opportunity value and how much money you're spending on your create and capture demand channels. I know we want to dig into this topic a little bit more. So making it make sense to join, bring Joey on and we can tackle this question a little bit deeper. I want to add to what Ciara said.
I love anchoring on a qualified pipeline because it's a really tangible goal that marketers can kind of get around because it speaks to the leading indicator of inbound and the lagging indicator of revenue. And marketers are much more in control of those leading indicators and that qualified pipeline metric. And then the lagging indicator, it's so much more of a team effort at that point in time. It's like, to see our point is to sell our CAE, there's macro conditions in the market.
No one knows what's going on. Like we literally have an election in the US next week. So who knows if people want to buy something right now, like there's all these macro factors that you literally don't have a lot of control over proposal on at the end of the day. And when it comes to like measuring against a dark social brand awareness initiative, you have to ultimately look at the incrementality of pipeline growth against the ad spend, like that should be the end all be all kind of indicator of that.
Like if you're seeing pipeline grow from an incremental standpoint against the total variable expenditure at the end of the day, and you're seeing enough attribution from self reported, from in platform, if you want to add sales report or attribution or track mentions in the gum calls, if you have something like that, I have something like that with one of my clients where like we get a lot of internet as self reported, because it's not really an ICP that's like on social lines, or they just equate everything that's on the internet, which is being on the internet. So I'm just like, okay, let's just add a sales report and attribution field and let's just see what they say then. And we end up getting like that other kind of granular piece of insight to give us support on a couple of things that we're running in this one particular instance. We're running a big partnership initiative because this company's a big HubSpot partner, and we're essentially promoting out the HubSpot spot people to refer us to these companies.
And we're seeing that populate a lot in the sales report attribution. It's been interesting partnership play and it's been super successful for us the past few months. So like if you're not getting attribution at the self reported level, think of another way to extract that information in a way that's not going to be prohibitive for your sales team or your prospect. Awesome.
Thanks, Matt. Let's get to the other one here. Awesome. So quick summary and a lot of what you're saying is resonating.
The obsession with our executive team is that the more degrees of separation between what marketing is doing and the outcome, the worse we've become. And we had a similar to each other trends. We had a much larger budget. We were a little bit more awareness to men driving a couple years ago, and we cut so much of the awareness budget because we can't directly tie that we went to this event.
Sam, Sam became an opportunity in Sam Clothes and therefore we had a clear ROI calculation. It was out the door. So finally, we adapted. We had a very event driven, webinar driven, like very clear list of higher intent leads or handing off to the BDR team, like very basic marketing function.
This year I go in with the same request as last year and said, okay, we need to invest on awareness and these are the types of things that we would want to drive and it's not going to be directly driving pipeline and saying, we know we spent this and it got us this many opportunities or high intent revenue ops, et cetera. And we are focused very, they're a different focus. We have a very clear funnel, especially on the sales side of the BDRs. We know if we do X amount of calls with as many leads, we're going to get this many clothes on opportunity and we love that obsession with the funnel, but I'm begging for some faith that that type of funnel awareness, driving, we have some great content team that's now turning out content.
Nobody's seeing it or SEO is pretty nascent, though it's just sitting there on our blog. I'm like, what we need, we know what our target is. It's extremely narrow. We sell into healthcare and banking for customer communication channel.
It's a little bit niche. There's not a clear category, but we have clear competitors. We know it's things they care about. We have great differentiators.
We're not a growing business and we're doing quite well. So it's not that hard to get in front of those audiences on those platforms and show them the thought leadership, show them that we're speaking at these events with really credible people on stages and talking about topics they care about. We're investing so much and making sure we're thought leaders in the space, but nobody's seeing it. So that, and this is, I mean, this conversation happened last week.
I'm really struggling and our COO is my boss, getting him to understand. He actually understands when I'm talking about driving higher intent leads, driving in bounds, educating the buying team, accelerating the sales cycle, all these things that we're not measuring. It's just SQL's meeting schedule for the sales team. And if we're hitting that 83 a month, then marketing's doing that part, even though sales is not hitting their goals.
And if you ask the sales leader what they want from marketing, they're not getting it, even though our CEO is going to be saying we're killing it. So a lot of the things you're all very familiar with and challenges, obviously I'm not really answering more questions that you may have, but curious how you would recommend I approach this challenge. Matt, I see you jumping at the bit. You go first.
I'm not, yeah, I'm not, yeah, like I'm hearing this. It's a lot more color than what I'm getting than what I saw in the type of question. And now I want to do a lot of for a minute. I'll ask a quick follow up question, Joey, because I think a big, a big key, you mentioned your audience is very niche.
Can you talk a little bit more about who is your buyer? Yeah. And you say your audience is niche, you know, that can be a challenge in terms of what the strategy should be. And maybe some, you know, best practices that everybody talks about, they're applicable to most businesses, maybe aren't as impactful if you have a really smaller niche audience that you need to reach.
So I think that's like a critical piece of information that we need to know before we can jump to, oh, well, you should do X, Y, and Z. So expand a little bit on sort of your, your ICP profile. Yeah, it varies a bit by industry, which is a bit of a challenge, but if we're selling into let's say consumer banks, we sell into the marketing departments, of course, try to be more executive level, consumer banking, checking accounts, driving adoption of new checking accounts. So there's retail banking, there's consumer, VPs of consumer banking or deposits.
So there's a couple of very, very short titles in the banking space, but typically marketing focus in healthcare, it's also marketing. So marketing executives, a CMO, but then people who are in charge of member engagement, customer communications, and then down to if you get to like the government program that's improving, it's the people who are in charge of quality, the Medicare, Medicaid lines of business, the messaging we have aligned to all these different titles in all of our, and outbound and we go to events, et cetera. But those are the primary titles and we are very title focused. We are only calling into those departments and looking for specific titles that we've identified by talking to clients who makes it to late stage ops.
These titles, great for those of people where we're targeting the front end of that. And then in pharma, it's, you know, patient access, then it was in charge of communicating with the customer. These people are also looking at other text based solutions where the text based solution. So those are some of our competitor landscape is the other secure texting platforms in the space.
The other side of that, like target accounts like across the business, you just know these are, is it like that niche where it's like, we only can sell into these 400 accounts. This is all we're going to focus on. It's like 8000, but it's still pretty narrow. We have our like whale hunt focus of the top 20 banks and then we have, you know, maybe 1000 banks that are above a billion in assets and 50,000 customers.
So we have a pretty, and then we do the same for healthcare. There's only like, I don't know, 500 health plans or something like that in the country, pretty much all of them. We could sell into pharma is a little bit newer, but it is like no more than six to eight thousand accounts we really focused on. But we call into, we focus on a smaller subset of those and do EDM work against five to five hundred thousand.
I feel like that's one of them. Yeah, go ahead. One of the, you know, that's nice to hear, right? Because I think that's the first challenge that people come into is they don't necessarily have to start getting countless.
But sometimes when you cast yourself so thin, right? And you have two to three thousand, like, are you really going to make it in on that? Absolutely not. And you mentioned like you also, at one point where maybe I'm going to start you, but exploring brand awareness, you were testing this out.
And then the kind of executive team pulled in scaled back, is that true? Correct. You see a direct correlation in terms of quality deter after you pulled back that awareness or to do so, some latency to get updated kind of like through pre and post. And then after that, I'm sure Matt can provide some, and see, I can provide some other other.
No, and that's one of the things I pitched this year is we need to see this through. We can't do a two month test and spend thirty thousand dollars on LinkedIn and show that we have like killed it and we have proven that awareness is important. We had some metrics around, you know, visibility to our blog and people visiting and the right, you know, how targeted our audience was on the accounts that are coming to our site and some of those like leading indicators that it was working, but we didn't have, you know, where are the inbounds? Well, we didn't have people inbound and we didn't get meetings scheduled again, obsession like where were the meetings.
We didn't have any anecdotal like, oh, I better. This person had seen this article or any self reported data. So I think the the brevity of the test is what really killed us. And the same thing if you're doing like, you know, sponsorships in our direct mail, direct email to audiences with some of the partners that we work with, things like that, like we get, you know, they, as many people opened up, this many people clicked on your link.
But you know, I know, and I think that's where I really struggle is what are the metrics? They're going to care about that is going to connect them to this is going to come down the pipeline. This is going to drive revenue. We have a very clear BDR outbound funnel where if you make 10,000 calls every quarter, that BDR is going to generate one and a half close one deals by the end of the corner and we're going to have six BDRs and that's 10 new logos, quarter of BAM.
There's our goal bringing that level of predictability to something that's not as scientific is, is been where I'm struggling. You said you have a quite a great content. Is it very POV driven? You guys have like a strong POV or is it more like kind of how to do this?
Yada yada. I'd say POV, like speaking on topics that we know, we have some internal SMEs that will have, you know, right about what's going on in the industry and obviously always talking about customer engagement as a focus. You know, there we always try to make them educational, not just we need to try it. We need to put content out there.
There's an SEO optimize article about blah. If that makes sense. Yeah, it feels like maybe on the create demand side, maybe just haven't found the right mix in terms of the offer yet. So like I have a use case.
It's not the exact same, but we took like it took us almost six months to really crack this consistently, but I have one use case. We sell into we sell into surgeons and surgeons are very tough, not to crack overall. And they have this company had a list. We know exactly who these surgeons are.
We wanted to target. We matched it. We did a predictive audience as well on top of it and we started doing much stuff. We were running brand awareness ads, running static image.
They had a lot of subject matter experts who were also surgeons. We were running videos as well. It's like four months in and we were just not seeing a lot of platform conversions. We weren't seeing a big dent in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the score of changing requests, things like that.
So we started to layer conversation ads in after a while as kind of like the bottom funnel offer and basically replace that with the demo ads and we started seeing a lot more stuff come through with just the right offer there. And we got the targeting right and it ended up being like it ended up working well. So sometimes when you're not seeing it from like a platform, I don't know if you're running LinkedIn ads in particular, but sometimes like that last sort of ask at the end of the day. Maybe that offers just not quite right or you haven't found the right platform.
I remember we were talking a couple weeks ago and they had one of the surgeons come to them and say I never opened my email. I never responded to email. I never email dead, but like I'm kind of where I go to sort of like just get away from it and like, you know, I got getting that offer from like another surgeon in the space, like really resonated with me. That's what I ended up coming in about.
So sometimes it's just like just not quite having that right mix at the end of the day to sort of show something like really tangible. And once we kind of figured that out, we started to get a lot more confidence in what we were doing and looking to expand it out a little bit more as a result. So sometimes it's not that easy though. Like I'm putting a prescriptive tactical fix to something that may be a bigger sort of issue for you in terms of your first question about like having to get rid of all this stuff to do a bunch of like sponsorships and webinars and stuff like I wonder why these things have to be mutually or aren't mutually exclusive.
You can't do both at the same time to a certain level here because I do feel like you guys you have to be always on especially if you know where your audience is at the end of the day and that thing should actually make those sponsorship motions even stronger for you at the end of the day. You should be able to somehow reasonably split the baby there a little bit to say, hey, what's to do both? There's no reason for to go to sunset, wanting to go all in on another and going back to like just the incrementality measurement at the end of the day. It's kind of what I'll be looking at that against and then hopefully you can you can reason the test of that time but just diagnosing it from what I'm hearing and it sounds like it's a complicated product with a complicated ICP.
So there's probably a lot that if I got to look at a straight for a couple weeks I'd understand a lot more but that's kind of just what I'm what I'm reading right now and if I'm way off base please please redirect me but that's sort of based on your question of how you're describing it is what I would prescribe a little bit at least to look at. And just I was going to that's a great point I did try to sell it as a this not a we're not replacing something by taking 15 you know but that could be a good thing for a budget to this digital awareness strategy we're able to do all of the demand that has proven to you know deliver this past year well also making a few cuts elsewhere and setting us up to do something like this and there's still like oh we could take that 300k and hire a executive that's just like thinking about all the again like tangible it's a person it's you know not necessarily pipeline so you're 100% right and that's exactly what I'm trying to position is going to amplify a lot of the the demand gen things that we've been doing that have been working it's going to help accelerate so that's one of the questions in here and we don't do anything post handoff other than enablement for things that are in the pipeline I mean the AEs have the full responsibility in taking a most often very cold lead that we got to take a meeting through whatever to then pull them through so our qualified bucket is a it's a graveyard and you know they're getting a few that do actually have intent or did maybe see a set of event etc and pulling those through but are yeah things I pretty early on. Yeah. I'll just offer one note here too Jimmy also this is like in like kind of relevant maybe to the other folks just trying to figure out how to really drive value behind a brand awareness strategy I think is kind of this the main topic.
Really what executives care about is is the value of my money that I'm allowing my team to spend going up or down like what is what is what is what is the what are these dollars going to and the only thing that like executives right now can think about is like okay are we driving pipeline are we driving close one revenue and so it's because that's what they care about the end of the day like we want to make business where you know we want to drive revenue for business but I think it's like a marketer it's it's important that you educate on less about driving the pipeline and more about is the value of the money that you're spending going up and so how you can do that is if you have a small list or even just a list of accounts are you reaching more of those accounts at the same amount of money with marketing initiatives then you can say hey I am reaching these accounts and we are reaching one account at 50% less than we were reaching them six months ago and so I think that's another metric that you should really use to drive a brand awareness strategy and then use you know like I don't know if you're on LinkedIn Joey but if you are on LinkedIn I know like it's a saturated market but you can see if you're reaching the accounts that you want to reach and that's a good way to drive that metric of yeah we're actually reaching 60% of the accounts now when we're reaching 40% we're spending about the same amount of money we've optimized content we've you know done all these optimizations and we're spending 50% less to reach one account and so I definitely would focus more on cost efficiency metrics and less on this like pipeline you know till you die type of metric especially when you're trying to drive a brand awareness strategy really helpful yeah two reports I would just for the whole audience here companies reach a report from your LinkedIn reps if you are on there is actually a really really good report to kind of understand and sell this idea that our audience is there and or maybe challenge yourself to recognize they're not so it'll provide you as our ICP reachable and then are they active on platforms so there's two wins that will opt in pull for clients is to understand is this an audience worth exploring and but also I just encourage people to look at the velocity and the sales cycles of stage duration between each of those different sources so if you're driving through newsletters and sponsorships are those actually qualifying to any mql or qualified prospect at a faster speed than they were prior then that's kind of another layer where you can kind of just peel back to CR and that's point is it's about understanding from top to bottom what are the influencers and does that actually show that we're bringing more value to this account faster and if yes then you know they're kind of setting up the argument itself does that kind of help guide you shall we absolutely really appreciate everyone's input thank you and we just have a few minutes left as well I'm going to open it up to step I'm not sure other questions that I maybe missed popped in there we've got one from Aaron in the chat right now a few of them have kind of been answered and addressed as we've gone through which has been great awesome oh I see Aaron's asking when you're building your 25 plan and saying goals how much time thinking should you commit to how the plan impacts the next three five ten years um I love that well can we just talk about having space he's just like wow that terrifies me because the average run away for any sask company is pretty short depending on their where they are at in their growth stage and so it's more about a matter of I think three years you can look at that right and you can set achievable goals but you have to be realistic of how fast like sassy such a commoditized business as it in itself that it just gets swallowed by other competitors constantly and AI is influencing that so it's really just like about solving solutions in year one year two where we're able to scale that and then I think at year three is where it's like are their product features adoptions or we make improvements to the product that make it scalable you don't know what your product is today what it's going to look like in five years because you have to have the market influence at users yeah but let's talk about this enterprise segment that I was talking about earlier I agree with you Evan on sort of the startup in the growth stage segment segment but Aaron your question is perfect in terms of you know what if you are that you know 750 million dollar ARR company that's been around for 15 years and you're trying to surpass a billion dollars in the next you know 18 months you have to be thinking in that long-term view you have to be once you reach that scale you need to be making investments for three years five years 10 years out both from like an R&D and sort of product high level business perspective on how is your product evolving to meet market needs but of course you're going to market strategy as well so how are you investing in marketing and sales as a result of that I think it's really difficult for marketers to be in a position to take the time to think long-term because of all of the pressure internally to deliver yesterday and tomorrow so I recognize that I empathize with that but for those that are listening or those that are at companies that have reached a larger scale this is absolutely a way to present a strategy what I always say is any marketing strategy ideally has both short medium and long-term tactics that are going to help with this quarter's number next year's number you know the number from a couple of years from now so I think there's a huge variance based on the company and the stage and the scale that you're at but I love the the intent of this question Aaron and sort of thinking thinking in the long term. All right Stacy took the words out my mouth but I mean it really has to do with the product roadmap at the end of the day like where's the median three years and then how can we ramp with the product to whatever the ICP or the new industry is going to be to your point about if you're an established company or a startup company also it's just the landscape like are we you know a topographic design company who's like creating this whole new space for ourselves and we're going to sell and domain we're going to sell into big old manufacturing are we going to be like a colab and we're almost creating our own sort of future here that's a different roadmap than being you know dog or something like that where they're basically building up to feels like competing against HubSpot in the future you know so like I think it's just kind of knowing where your company is and it's in its in its continuum and recognizing where they want to go most most really established companies like that are like trying to basically build a platform out to go compete against other platforms whereas some companies are trying to build like literally the best additive tool to an existing kind of infrastructure that exists and want to own that emerging market because if you look at something like and it depends like a lot of people are selling to sales and martech but there's other things that are also like growing like leaps and bounds like additive manufacturing and there's all these added manufacturing and there's going to be all this need for added manufacturing SaaS at some point in time and there's so few companies building something like that and bringing my industrial background into the mix here so part of it is just knowing where your company stands in the landscape of your customers in the competitive landscape and then being able to ramp your future around where that roadmap and that market's going to be in your estimation. That is the perfect close appreciate on that. Sarah Megan thanks for joining everybody that also joined us today like we wanted to just have authentic conversations with community we want to keep your questions coming and this is just we have two more sessions this quarter so be sure to register those we'll send the recap out but yeah and we'd love to hear feedback too we want to make sure these are valuable for everybody so don't hesitate to email us dms directly on LinkedIn just let us know how you felt the conversation was what could be better we're always looking to improve but yeah with that we'll kind of sign off and say thanks for joining.
It was so good to see everyone I hope to see you back again at our event next month and have a great rest of the day great rest of the week keep fighting the good fight. Bye.