Hello and welcome everybody. I am so excited for this session, particularly excited for this session, because this is what we all need when you want to scale companies and this is what we all talk about in the Regina community. I see a lot of discussions around this and I'm particularly excited about an amazing panel of experts that we have today with us, Evan, Sara and Stacy, and without taking any of the spotlight away from this amazing session, I'm going to pass to Stacy, who is also helping us moderate the session today. All right, well hello, welcome everybody.
I'm happy to be here with Sara and Evan and we'll just do some quick introductions and then we'll get started in our topic today. So my name is Stacy Danheiser. I quick little back story on me. I actually started my career in B2C marketing and then switched over to B2B marketing, where I spent several years working for various Fortune 500 companies, both on the strategy and the execution side.
And then I decided to leave and start a consulting practice where I now work as a fractional CMO and a consultant and I also lead a mentorship program for VPs and CMOs, specifically in the B2B space. And I'm also the author of a few marketing books. So I'm happy to be here and excited for this conversation today about helping you scale your business. Evan.
Awesome. Thanks, Stacy. Everyone excited to have this conversation later this afternoon. I am from Seattle, Washington, so born and raised in Washington.
But yeah, I've been in marketing for about 14 years now. Similar journey to Stacy, I started out in large corporations. I was with Walgreens from B2C managing kind of their direct consumer understanding the initial ROI. Started to get an interest in B2B, ended up moving to AWS for a short period of time managing their customer acquisition program and that got me really excited about this market of B2B understanding that buyers journey, understanding the playbooks that go into in the frameworks to really drive success.
So I took a leap of faith and three, just over three years ago, I joined Refine Labs, my first startup ever agency ever. So it's been a whirlwind, but I've now kind of overseen the growth strategy for the entire company. It's been an exciting journey, but I'm excited for today. I'll pass it to you, Sarah.
Thanks, Evan. Thanks, Stacy. My name is Sarah Brannock. I am dialing in from London today.
So I found more of a head start to my day compared to the other panelists. I'm originally from Ireland. I got my start in tech by moving to Boston, Massachusetts. And I actually worked as a demand generation intern.
I had no idea what demand generation was. I was just a kid from overseas who was really trying to get their break in the marketing world. And I've followed a very linear path ever since. I've always worked at 30 stage startups.
I've always done demand gen and I've gone from intern to manager to building out the function and I currently work at a company called Hunters, which is in the cybersecurity space. We've gone through rapid growth. We've also gone through the highs and lows of marketing and sales at a high growth organization, especially through the COVID boom and then economic uncertainty and whatever you would call 2024 so far, rolling with all of the punches and also celebrating the win. So this is probably my favorite topic and two marketers I respect most of these.
I'm really excited to have this conversation. Awesome. All right. Well, then let's dive in.
There's going to be a great conversation. I think there's a lot of pressure on companies and specifically on marketers right now to help their organizations scale and figuring out what is going to really move the needle and cause customers to take action. So first question, when companies are trying to scale, they often look to their competitors or the big players in our industry to kind of copy or see what they're doing and to try to follow suit. What are some ways that startups and scale ups can stand out from the competition and really try to make a mark in a crowded space?
Yeah. This one kind of jumping off point for me is if anybody's any organization is trying to get their name recognized and they're copying another competitor, then they're going to get lost. You know, they're going to get lost in the noise and be a distraction to the typically the holder of market share. So there's always three things to tone.
The POV and the unique value profit the brand is what you have to go to market in. So in my opinion, whether that is through your SME or your executives, through your LinkedIn page or whatever page of yours and distribute your content as a brand, you have to just be unique and have a single point of view that kind of resonates across all the organization. And by that, I mean, just your fundamental foundational to believe some things. Everybody should have unique point of view, but the core, it should feel the same.
Yeah. Sarah, what about you? Coming from cybersecurity space is a very copycat space, especially from a messaging perspective. I think many, many companies that compete with one another, they have the same thing.
It's very hard to differentiate yourself because if you come up with a new term, other people will follow. So I think differentiation is extremely difficult and you need to decide whether you're going to differentiate your message or whether you're going to have the same message and actually be different in other ways. Your brand, one of the things my company did from the beginning, the first iteration of the brand colors and the brand look and feel, it looked exactly like every other cybersecurity company out there. It was like a navy blue, fake encryption type branding.
And then the former CMO, once we got around to funding decided we're going to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. We're going to be bright pink. We're going to use images of real people not stock imagery. We're going to wear Hawaiian shirts to conferences instead of branded logo embroidered polos that everyone else is wearing.
So I think you need to decide how you're going to differentiate yourself and whether that's price, whether that's brand, whether that's message, it's really your decision. But I think it needs to be something that all of your executive team is brought in on and marketing should be leading those discussions and providing this creative direction around how you could be different. It doesn't need to be one specific thing. Yeah, I love that.
I studied C of Seamus in several different industries and discovered that we were curious, why is this happening? Why does this practicing so prevalent? And we found that there were a few different reasons that kind of kept popping up. And you hit on a couple of them, Sarah, and I'll just sort of paraphrase.
But one of them is the risk aversion to try something new. And if you're a startup or you're just coming on or maybe you're having a little bit of success, there's this fear that if we do something different, we might fail. And that really starts kind of at the top down and really is a culture issue that has to be addressed internally. Like, can we just adopt a mindset of experimentation?
What if we try something? What if we do something that's different because being different is a little bit scary. The second is just the, let's call it lens and this comfort blanket of success. We tend to look at the industry leaders and we're like, well, if they're doing it and they're successful, then we must be have to follow that same suit.
But the problem is it's hard to stand out. As you mentioned with kind of everybody wearing a blue shirt or having a blue logo, it's like all these companies look the same. They all sound the same. And then the third, which I thought was the most interesting, and this was directly from the mouths of marketers and business leaders is that they were just being lazy.
And being like, as you mentioned, differentiation is hard. It takes a lot of internal work and really asking the question of what does make us different. It might not be the product. It might be something else like your customer service or the way that you do your billing or the way that you leave the sales process.
And so really paying attention to those outliers and those things that make your brand or your product special and different is a way to differentiate. And then I think the other piece just related to the opportunity that companies have as they're scaling up is to be consistent and relevant in the market. And a lot of big brands fall off of the wagon. And so finding an opportunity and really figuring out what is it that your customers are seeing and how might you stand out in a different way because it's naive to think that your customers aren't considering anything else and that they're not doing research for other options.
So good advice on that topic. Let's talk about, you mentioned a little bit about really understanding your target audience. And so this is around building an ideal customer profile. So what are some steps that you think companies should be taking to get really clear on who it is that they're targeting and who they're creating this messaging for?
I run this for companies quarterly typically just to understand what their historical revenue drivers are, contribution to revenue by vertical by industry by job profile. And I think that this is really important for any marketer, what I'd really think the company is, is that you start by looking at a historical look back. So even if it's depending on your sales cycle, I typically like to go to sales back, but pull the data with all opportunities, closed one for that period of time, pull in all the demographic, from a graphic information you can that you may be capturing your CRM. But that's when you can start to pivot a little bit and understand what are the top industries in terms of revenue contribution to the business over this last period of time, sort it from high to low.
And do we understand, okay, it's manufacturing is a key industry here. And then going a step further, that would be like step one. And then within manufacturing, I like to dig into all of the contacts that are associated with those. Like how many people are in the buying committee?
What are the job profiles? How long have they been nurtured? Whether it's a net new contact or it was a decision maker. So you kind of are peeling back the layer of that, but you're understanding what are the boiling points then of those job profiles you're finding?
What are the pain points? What are the common themes? What are the conversations or having with sales? And that'll kind of paint a picture of, okay, this contributed X amount of revenue for the business over the last two sales cycles.
This is really kind of a sweet spot for our ICP. We need to double down and make sure we have the right enablement, the right tools, the right infrastructure here for both sales and marketing. I think where the challenge comes in is people kind of set the true ICP that their product is satisfying and their desired ICP. But a lot of times a desired ICP, they don't necessarily have the enablement tools, they don't have the resources.
So it's really backed by data and I recommend any marketer, rev-ups, leader to understand historical performance before you kind of put pen to paper on outline in an ICP. Yeah, and that's a good point. What do you, when you say desired ICP versus true ICP? Like what do you see, I guess, are some of the gaps?
A lot of times you'll see people that just have these kind of fairy tale companies, they want to like the whales, like the ones that are unrealistic to their product features. We look back and you see wired companies turning understanding churn rates and it's often the features, it's pricing, it's competitors, but then we have like a sales team that's like, no, if we land this company, then we're going to absolutely hit our quarterly goal. But they're not recognizing that actually the enablement that's needed for that customer to be successful is not available for that customer. There's no infrastructure in place, there's no tools or product or features.
So I think it's just setting reality by the enablement material you have, whether it's a large account or it's a sub-vertical, you need to make sure that the sales and marketing team are able to promote that equally and to help the same narrative. Somewhere, you talked about consistency of the original question, that's how I think about it. Sarah, anything to add on that? Yeah, I think like what Evan's saying is definitely true and I felt the pain of, you know, sales team chasing for retail customers and you need to almost get the entire company rallied around trying to win a deal with a huge customer.
And if that sales cycle doesn't close or if it takes 18 months, 24 months to close, it's very, very difficult and really unscalable from a resource and a revenue perspective. So I think at this stage, like from zero to 10 million in ARR, it's very normal for companies not to truly understand what their ICP is. You're throwing things at the wall and you're trying to see what sticks and I think what companies need to avoid is sales people doing this kind of land grab of, you know, just because I'm the first sales person in the US or the first sales person in Europe, you know, you need to be mindful of targeting every single vertical and every single size of company out there because you're not going to be successful from a marketing perspective if you're trying to capture the entire universe. You really need to speak to potential end users, potential buyers of the product because those two things can be very different early and get that feedback of who is actually going to use this product, get value from it and buy this product, really put dollars on the line because I think in the early stages, people will be interested in brand new companies and say, oh yeah, I would love a product that does this or this, but when it comes to actually signing an order and paying for it, I think the conversation can be very different.
So really focus is so important, try not to get distracted by fairy tales and realize that large enterprise companies, they've got a lot of requirements from a risk and compliance perspective that they're going to be hesitant to do business with a very small startup and that may not be where you want to hedge your back. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think focus, yes, is 100% true. I think a lot of companies have a tendency at the beginning to say yes to everything.
Every possible deal is potential revenue and yes, yes, yes. And then looking historically at that data, it's always interesting to see, are these companies and customers actually profitable? And does this really fit our ICP? We might be getting a lot of money.
In one company I worked with, we were getting a lot of money from some of these large enterprise customers, but when you applied, how much time and effort was spent on the customer service and we had to hire additional people just to service their account, the profitability was really, really small. And so there's a trade off. And I think I hear from a lot of companies in this phase that everybody wants to work with large enterprise and wants to get a big deal, but those are not always the best accounts. Procurement takes a long time, you might not get paid for a long time, so you have to really, and they're very demanding, so you have to be willing to go through those pain points and have enough revenue to sustain yourself if you really want to get one of those accounts.
So it's a double-edged sword sometimes. Yeah, well, I'm just a little bit clear there. You can want the account, but I think it goes back to if you do not have the resources to activate that account, you're wasting your time, you're wasting your budget, and you're going to effectively burn out. So we can talk all day about, yes, the sales team wants to go after this niche industry.
Yes, the company will be great at this niche industry, but the minute you move them down the funnel, is there any sort of self-serven able that's going to actually activate them? If that's not, then figure it out, bring on the right person, but don't waste your time trying to push forward to something that you're not able to bring across the finish line. Yeah, and I guess that leads kind of to our next question and sort of the frequent requirement for marketing, which is to make an impact quickly, right? And it's fast-paced and we need just the immediate results.
So I know you both are experienced in creating effective strategies to try to get some of those early quick wins. What do you recommend, let's start with Thera, on how companies can start to think, you know, maybe both short-term and long-term with marketing? In an ideal world, I think any of us would love to work with a founder who's passionate about founder brand, and they've got a strong point of view, and are able to work with them, whether it's ghost writing, or in an even more ideal world, they're writing their own posts on LinkedIn, and you can repurpose those to blog posts. You can get them on podcasts as a compelling guest.
They can get invited to speak at conferences in your industry. I think that is the easiest, fastest, most effective way of getting started from my perspective, and if not the founder, there must be somebody in the early stage team who's able to partner with marketing to have these unique perspectives that you can convert into LinkedIn, both their blog posts or speaking sessions or podcasts, whatever media you prefer. I think you need that resource. If you have that, you have a huge advantage, and I'm very happy for you as a marketer if you have that.
If you don't, you need to find a way to create that. You need some sort of content generating person or forum that's going to help you build content from the website, all channels, everything you need, customer or sales messaging. I think that's for me, the key way to get started. Finding yes, an internal subject matter expert and somebody that's passionate about the brand, how do you convince somebody to do that?
If they've never posted on LinkedIn or they have this fear that LinkedIn is or any social media platform feels too salesy? I think you can't convince somebody who doesn't want to do it, and I think you will fight a CEO or a co-founder to the edge of the earth, and they will say, no, no, I don't want to do it, and if that's the case, don't waste your time trying to fight them or convince them. You need to ask them, okay, if not you, then who? If I guarantee there will be somebody either within the organization or somebody that they can hire or use of the contractor who will fill that void, I think it'd be interesting to hear Evans' perspective, but I think it's almost impossible to convince someone to do this unless they're actually willing and able.
Yeah, it starts from the top down, right? So if the founder or let's say you're a millionaire, or you're really founder-led sales, getting started with acquiring customers, there's that desire and drive to engage, but sometimes you can't move that beyond just customer conversations, sales pitches, one-on-one networking, and I've worked with a couple founders that don't believe that this works, which is so interesting to me in the B2B space. I can spend my time better utilized by engaging with our current customers and or prospecting for net new customers. In my mind, prospecting for net new customers is creating your own brand narrative that's authentic to you and communicating that across different social networks.
So you absolutely agree with Sarah that there's how you can get people to do it, though. You can't. Like somebody will do it for consistency we keep talking about as a theme for this conversation. They might do it once or twice and then they kind of fall short.
There's a framework that I always like to recommend, whether it's my team directly, if they're just getting familiar with it or they're trying to build that muscle, it's kind of a three-by-three framework. So connecting with three people that you respect in the network a day, commenting on three of their posts, like an actual conversation and do that three times weekly. So if you can kind of repeat that pattern, it's a very short lift. It takes maybe 15 minutes depending on how comprehensive your responses are, but that builds that brand affinity.
So just kind of adding a little negative, what's helped me unlock some of the team members on my team and how to kind of move forward with that. But I want to add one more piece of color to like how to move quickly and think about like this past week's environment. If you're coming in as a marketer, if you're kind of a first-stage marketer early on, your biggest point is going to be focusing on that conversion rate and making sure that your landing pages are optimized to capture the traffic. There's no sort of data blocks that are allowing you to not understand why the customer isn't moving forward.
So social proof is your form capturing the right information is the form above the fold. All of these things are little quick wins that you can come in there and make sure if you have a founder that's out pushing the brand or you have a sneeze or out pushing the brand, when people come back to your website because we all know kind of they found back through dark social, are they able to confer without friction? And if they are not, the map should be your job as a quick win to kind of unlock that whether it's out of your landing page. Okay.
Okay. Okay. Great. Yeah.
So to recap, I think if there's any founders on the webinar, you know, partner with your marketing team, you don't have to write or produce all of the content. Really, that's what the marketing team can help you distill sort of those thoughts from your head onto something that might be interesting or entertaining to consume. I worked with a founder who thought he was a really great writer. And the problem, I think, especially with like engineering led firms and technology is that their expertise is so vast that it's hard to, you know, for lack of a better phrase, dumb it down for people and put it into a format that people want to consume.
So just sort of quick tip, the Heningway app.com. If you guys have ever used that, it's just it's or his readability. And this is a great way to just kind of showcase how well something might be consumed. And so this was a great tool that I was able to use to kind of convince this person that, you know, they're writing it, I think it was like a great 19 level, which is like the, you know, government bills are written at that level.
And they're not enjoyable to read. And if it's not enjoyable to read and if people aren't getting paid to read it, they're not going to. And so that's where I think the marketing team can really partner with with people that might not see that as a skill that they have personally. And so it's really that partnership together.
And I love the three by three framework. And that's especially if there's sales people on the call that they can start doing and commenting on people's posts and following people and just starting to get more familiar with that and more comfortable with commenting on somebody else's post it before kind of moving on to the next phase of posting something on their own. So great recommendation. Okay, so I think with a couple of questions, let me pull up the Q&A.
And you mentioned Evans, well, let me start with you. This is from Mary. What are your pointers on trying to get customer testimonials for credibility when struggling to get the product where it needs to be? This one's tough.
Sarah might have a better, better point of view here with this one because I've seen some of the customer testimonies they play out. Yeah, I can start. I think especially at early stage, the type of person who's going to buy your product is somebody who's a bit more visionary that buying into the long-term vision. They're potentially, I don't know, introduced by your board and your investors.
And I think they believe in the long-term potential of the company. And they may give you a testimonial based on the potential that they see rather than the shortcomings that they may be experiencing. And I think you'd be surprised how many product champions within an account are actually quite patient with those, the product immaturity. Once they feel like they're being heard by your product team and your executive team, so I think managing that relationship carefully, you'd be surprised how people will help you, knowing that you need to get points on the board being revenue at this point.
They may give you a testimonial based on the potential they see. Yeah, that's great. I think leading with a lot of these early companies that are joining early stage companies, they recognize that vision to your point and kind of see you're effectively a feature that they need at that point, early stage. And so if you are listening to them, a few opportunities here, it's like you have your power users and they're trusting that as they give feedback and you are updating the product and features, then that right there builds that initial relationship that long-genities.
So I think anytime you have your power users and you can identify one or two conversations where small changes you may be made to the product have been unlocked for them. Those are the customers that I would potentially reach out to to ask for some sort of testimonial and just genuine feedback. And oftentimes these live conversations one on one is the best way to get that. And then if they say something in live conversation, then you can ask them, hey, do you mind if we capture some of this for more of a testimonial, they can continue to build a brand.
But when you just kind of cold outreach of, hey, would you be willing to fill out this warm share some feedback? That typically kind of falls on deaf ears. So. No, and that's a good point.
And I love what Michael said in the chat about asking for a LinkedIn reference as soon as the relationship is going well, because timing actually is really important, right? There's a short window where things are you're experiencing some success and that's really kind of when to come in and strike not waiting until maybe full implementation or six months into relationship. The other thing I was just going to say on this topic is that if you can't get a customer testimonial, you can also create use cases. How are people using your product and showcase based on a real-life scenario, maybe they don't endorse it specifically with a quote or you can't use their logo, but use cases can be really helpful to show how other companies are using your product or service and get kind of that idea in their head.
The last one, Stacey.com's combined that's been effective for us is when you're speaking sessions, big reputable industry conferences, inviting your customers to speak is huge because they get that honor to speak on a stage in front of their peers. And they don't have to endorse your brand or your product, but often they'll work it in in terms of this is part of their stock and this is helping them become more effective and then often you know if you could help them with the presentation if necessary or if they want you to help that's repop it from your perspective if they do and if not and you are mentioned as part of their story when they're coming off the high of speaking on stage and having this great experience, you can often ask them if you can publish this in the case study on your website and people oftentimes say yes. So I also would recommend that people look at that as a potential opportunity. Yeah, that's awesome.
Okay, taking note. I love that. All right, let's talk about content creation. So, you know, again, the theme of consistent content creation and building a content engine and especially when you're kind of just getting started, what are some best practices that companies can follow to start to develop really a strong brand reputation, a strong content strategy, and ultimately how do they measure this?
There's the approach that I've taken with a lot of clients and myself is recognizing one, especially now in 2024 and the importance of video soundbites to all social platforms. So video is a key aspect to us getting our message out there getting our brand out there in our positioning. The challenge I think a lot of people face is marketers kind of stepping into these growth roles is they don't necessarily have the budget or the resources to kind of put together a pod, we can't get podcasts a lot, record it, distribute it. So I think one quick content like action plan that I put forward that's worked well is you kind of go through like this kind of force that process.
It's one is I've identified three to five podcasts that fit kind of within my ideal ICP. So whatever customer that is has customers in my community that are engaging with that podcast and it just kind of create my own CRM. So what are the podcasts? Who are the guests hosting that?
And that's where I start that three by three framework where I'm engaging with them and they're networking and communicating. I'm kind of bringing out alternative points of view to spark interest and conversation. And then over time you'll build that relationship where they'll start to invite you on. And so right away if you can get invited to even once or one or two podcasts a month or every two months, they send you the clips, they send you the full video after the full recording.
That right there is your video content creation for the entire quarter. If you break that up. So I think that that's one effective way where you can really leverage other people's network as long as you have a strong point of view, you're acting as a CME and you're not selling your product, you're selling your kind of point of view that you can really build that robust content engine. Yeah, that's great.
And I think repurposing is a big, a big huge way to be effective. Have you, are there any, I guess on that, that note tools or things that you found are useful to make that happen quicker? From the repurposing point of view. So a lot of the transcripts, so kind of how I start, so I've been fortunate to leverage an internal video editor, but I know there are some smaller tools out there.
But is I will use transcripts and use a or check, you can be to drop those in there and kind of identify the summary points of the timestamp. So then I can pass that along to our internal team and just be like, I want cuts of these three to five timestamps. So it's not necessarily a tool, but it's a quick way for me to identify areas that are key topics or key kind of themes for the newsletter that we want to put out and how can I get to that quicker. Okay, great.
That's a good tip. Sarah, what about you on content creation and how to get started with building that engine and making it consistent? For my side, a lot of learning, a lot of things that I would do differently in hindsight. So from the very beginning, I joined my current company as we were leaving a time where people typically didn't leave their home for a long time.
And we saw a huge opportunity in going to in-person events, especially because we were able to get fast feedback. You can do events super scrappy, you can get startup, you can benefit from startup pricing, which is a lot like significantly cheaper than when you're an established company. So we took this approach, went very event heavy, didn't create as much content. Also, we're now operating in a segment of the market where we would call ourselves something different from a product perspective.
So we intentionally did not build up this SEO muscle at the time. And more than three years later, I'm kicking my path self thinking, why didn't we invest more in SEO? Why didn't we invest more in better pages and the things that are driving internet traffic? The thought process at that time, other than being scrappy and prioritizing events was we compete with companies that are much, much older than we are.
They've been writing SEO content for over a decade. So how do you compete in that way? But I don't believe it was the right decision to avoid investing in SEO. I think teams need to.
And the advice I would give myself three years ago is you as a marketing meter, I think your time is very well spent speaking to customers, speaking to your sales teams, speaking to your executives. And that leaves not a lot of time to do the real pen to paper marketing work. And at the time, I thought, you have to do all of this as a marketing meter. You're the marketer.
You love to write. You want to create content. But at the end of the day, there isn't enough time in the week to really stretch yourself, to get all of your SEO objectives done and to get your website at full strength. So I think a lot of companies at the stage, early stage from zero to 10 million in ARR, they have to be very careful about headcount and the type of roles that they bring off the team.
The advice I would give myself now is hire external writers, work with external content creators, figure out how to get that content created in a way that does not depend on your marketing team doing it, because you need to cover those bases and you want to, you know, hopefully you're looking up to be in a company three years later and you want to see those things compound over time. So I would encourage people to, you know, if you're a marketing leader, don't feel like you need to do everything yourself or that your team needs to do everything or that you're waiting on this amazing hire to come in, but who will do everything? You need to find ways to actually get that stuff done today. Yeah, that's a great advice.
I think what you said earlier about meeting with customers, meeting with sales team, meeting with your customer experience team, really hearing what is going on is going to help you build the foundation. And once you, like your job as a leader, building the foundation, that's when you can bring in external resources to help you execute against that foundation. And so one of the things I like to do is to really focus on, this is for every stage of company and especially for companies as they scale and add more products or have more than one thing to sell, is focusing on value themes. And what that means is that you pick, you know, at least once a year to the top two or three problems that your product or service and that you develop your content around those value themes and you don't stray.
And B2C companies are really good at this. You can think of many B2C brands who have the same sort of message pillar year after year after year and that consistently sticks. For some reason B2B, we think we have to change every quarter and unless really something nature happens like a COVID year or a major competitor goes out of business, you don't really have to reinvent the wheel every single year every single quarter. And so this structure by focusing on what are the top three problems that we solve for customers that we hear over and over and over and over and then starting to build your content against that really gives you sort of this robust platform to then start to answer all of those questions that a customer might have.
And so, you know, an example may be, you know, we help customers be more productive. We help customers grow their revenue and we can measure that. We help customers be more efficient or help them reduce their risk and that you really sort of focus on those three things. And what happens is when marketing starts telling that story and then sales starts telling that same story, then now you start to get the momentum in the market because it's like a drumbeat of just constant reminders of here's the situation where we stand and this is what we do and how we can achieve that.
And that's generally something that I would say marketing teams can spearhead and lead. It's just a matter of, you know, synthesizing all of that customer research and your conversations with the sales team and the executive team as to what are those top three problems that we're constantly hearing that we help solve and the value that we provide to customers. A good question kind of piggyback on that because it can't be to be a solutely like the market is swing so drastically and maybe I'm sensitive to that from 2020 to 2024, like all the changes there. But I oftentimes see that as like whether it's a new client that I'm starting to work with or it's like a historical client, they're branding their messaging, they're going to market strategy is constantly shifting because it's a new individual coming in or it's a new leader like the tenure on a CMO at B2B company is so short.
And there's like the solution is hard there. But I think that that is becomes a challenge and obvious challenge as we go into these roles at home times and you know we are hit by unfortunate circumstances of a potential layoffs. So how do you like I guess then bringing that into an organization is a challenge. And I think that's just one fight that's like continuously as a marketer like being able to stand something up that you recognize as like sort of stuff.
That's more just commentary. Yeah, no. And I think it's a really good point. It's going to lead into our next conversation and topic that I was going to ask around alignment right because this is not just a marketing project right what value does our company solve what problems do we solve what do we provide to customers that's really a company wide issue.
Marketing is just responsible for the communication part of that. But product is responsible for creating something that's going to deliver. And then of course you have your delivery team who's responsible for making sure that that actually gets implemented and that value gets used by customers. And so it's a big part of the of the marketing leaders job is in especially you know I would say for CEOs driving this the more CEOs can understand this that consistency wins and consistency is a strategy that's sustainable in B2B that alignment piece that we are these we're very clear on the problems we solve we're very clear on the value we provide to customers.
It's not a marketing exercise though if the marketing team leader leaves and you know gets replaced it's not like okay let's reinvent the messaging wheel. No it's something that really should be everybody should be very well aware of this. I mean I would love to see like more board meetings have these conversations it's so focused on the financials but the financials are an output of did we did we nail this do we have the right customers do we have the right product are we delivering value the financial metrics is really just a proof that that's working. And so it kind of comes from a practical circle to the alignment which I guess kind of leads into our next question and Evan I know you said you spent some time on the sales side I have worked on the sales side as well and I have this you know special like place in my heart for sales because I was coming out of college I had a job offer for marketing a job offer for sales and I chose the marketing path and you know went down that but I always kind of was a secret sales person.
So how can marketers especially you know as you're scaling and you're growing fast create a better relationship with the sales team and create more alignment and making sure that that story that's being told in the market is consistent. Yeah one kind of building trust is such an easy thing to say but actually building the tangible trust as a marketer to a sales person or sales individual to a marketing team or marketing leader is absolutely the most important aspect of any organizational alignment and when I say building trust it means like understanding and recognizing as you know if you're a demand to market or growth marketer recognize that sales team has closed right so they have goals that they need to march towards you have to empathize with those goals and recognize how you're going to enable them but in order to have those affected conversations like one thing that really was the unlock is understanding the business revenue performance all up what is sales contribution what is marketing contribution what are those outliers and vertical in industry kind of like when I talk to pop this conversation like understanding your ICP that same exercise because then you can have authentic conversations with the sales team it's not like oh we're going to push out this e-book we're targeting this audience we're going to help you to quote it it's like hey this industry is really showing a lot of interest in our marketing efforts we notice it's like top key vertical for you and your sales quota like hope you understand a little bit more about that customer help you understand a little bit more about the standpoint so I think it's authentic real conversations that you are setting and the boundaries that you're bringing in language that's about revenue and business metrics that kind of gets the sales team excited and that was me on the sales side too like those conversations so I'd say that'd be the foundational aspect is knowing your numbers before you try to initiate a conversation yeah what that there anything you would add there yeah echoing what's evident a little bit in terms of like as a marketing leader and especially demand-gen marketer field marketer you have a responsibility to help your sales team hit their number and I think the only thing impossible is having conversations about hitting numbers when you just do not have the time to make it possible where you're trying to help the team you know bring pipeline out of thin air in the next four weeks when you have a six-month sale cycle like those types of conversations will never be successful but the beginning of the year you got six monthly time to create pipeline for Q3, Q4 to ensure your sales reps to hit their number for the second half of the year you need to be asking these questions of what are you missing like what do you not have in your plan that would prevent you from hitting your number and give them that opportunity to say I think if I'm missing this and this and marketing and sales leadership or maybe customer success or product work together to actually solve those problems when you have time to fix them and marketers I think we're often almost afraid in sales conversations afraid of what we don't know or afraid that we don't have an equal seat at the table but marketers need to feel empowered like you're extremely talented otherwise you would not be sitting in the seat that you're in you've got a toolbox full of resources from content to you know events and other campaigns you can run so you absolutely should feel empowered as a marketer and you should also carry this responsibility to ensure that your sales reps have everything you need at the beginning of a year or the end of the year to hit their number yeah I love what you said yes about having a seat at the table I think one one way that marketers can help earn that is to ask their sales leaders you know what are some sales books or methodologies that they follow everybody kind of has their own favorite one they're all very similar I've gone to sales training multiple times they might have different nomenclature for what they call this buying stages or the process but it's really helpful to understand sort of the just like you would do on understand the buying process to also understand the sales process and if you can ask your sales leader to recommend a book or methodology or some type of training then you can at least be talking the same language as the seller and come at it from that standpoint and I think it a thing which is an interesting opportunity for marketers is realizing that you know the job is to it's really aligned to customers right at the end of the day we're trying to get customers and we want to get more close deals and if a marketing person can tap into and find customer insights and ideas and things that help a seller close a deal for example that might be on hate publishing social media and we have one of our key accounts that commented on something are we noticed that somebody from one of our key accounts filled out this forum and here's what they said you know being able to show that to the sales person helped them look smarter and advanced that deal and also looking at buying triggers and really understanding what causes somebody to buy and the more that you know around those buying triggers the more you can write recommendations on campaigns or content or events or other tactics that will help hit people when they're kind of experiencing some of those buying triggers and that will help you really align better with the sales team so true is there a good question kind of piggyback so you talk about alignment and insert mention kind of some of the metrics you're baselining so in the questions Tony asked what are the key metrics a director of demand gen should be marching to and i'm kind of curious to get the panel's perspective here as well but his examples were social followers demo request and quilt pipeline so i don't know i'll kind of pass it over to you one either of you but i'd love to dig into this a bit too i think i'm happy to share my own perspective so like i think the the the bl end all of the business is like it has to be revenue and retention because otherwise you know social media likes or followers aren't going to pay the bills so i would say at the end of the day it's revenue and then pipeline is what's required to get the revenue goal so looking at pipeline coverage for each of the territories that all add up to the ultimate number like free x coverage i believe is the minimum and then you have companies that need four x coverage five x coverage and you may need five x coverage at this stage just because you know your win rate may not be as strong at you know zero to ten million error r so unfortunately five x coverage is probably required for each of your sales reps and territories then also looking at things like we always want to see an increase of demo requests that are coming qualified inbound to the website so that's really important and i'm really fortunate to work with a executive who feels extremely passionate about how many followers we have on our company page i mean recently hit 20k after hitting 10k not so long ago and i think it's one of those metrics you'd be surprised that an executive would care about but i think it's great because it gives marketing this target to aim towards and it keeps people excited and interested and consistent with social media yeah i mean i i would um i agree with all those i think the way i like to think about it is visually like looking at the customer lifecycle and that each stage of the customer lifecycle has various tactics and different ways that we would measure that and so that first stage you know the people everybody says let's just skip straight to revenue well we don't go just get to magically close revenue if we if we haven't done the first two stages which are creating awareness which is where website visitors social media followers um pr mentions right people that have attended our event or stopped by our booth if you're doing in-person events all of those metrics are basically saying did we grab your attention did we do a good job of grabbing your attention the next phase of that is is creating demand and leave right or do an engagement so looking at okay do we get comments on our social media posts are we getting people to subscribe to our newsletter are we getting people to come to our webinars are we getting um these people to fill out the form and and turn into an opportunity and be willing to take a sales call or have a meeting with us right all of those things are basically measuring engagement and specifically relevant is our value proposition relevant have we done a good job first we grabbed your attention now we have a relevant value proposition we and that the customer believes that we can solve their problem the third piece then is sales which um i like to look at both closed deals one which of course is revenue and also closed deals loss and to figure out why right and so there's a whole bunch of um things that can happen sort of at that sales stage where maybe there's an enablement problem maybe the sales team isn't doing a great job of communicating values sort of in the moment right we take in marketing who's communicating a mass message and then sales kind of tailoring it one on one for that customer where are we falling off we do a good job here and we do a good job here okay somehow one on one we we miss the mark what are we doing did we reach the right buyers do we reach the entire buying committee did we have a tailor value proposition did we prove our why um so that kind of sales stage and then that moves on to retention right and so if you sell something that requires renewals or that requires um multiple purchases or maybe there's upsell or cross-sell opportunities right looking at retention and then the final one that i will add which i don't see on a lot of customer life cycles but to me is actually sort of a pinnacle of of where companies should be aiming is loyalty and can we create customer advocates and loyalty um by referrals for example are they willing to be a testimonial are they really willing to do case studies are they willing to do a press release are they willing to do certain things and make it known publicly that we are um that we are in business together and that they're introducing us into their network so you know i would say i just i'd like to look at the entire customer life cycle and each stage requires sort of a different marketing playbook um for where the problem might might exist but you really need all of it to be working together yeah no i we won't go to this but i just that's simplest one from a demand director demand gen when you think about think about how advanced your program is or how long your program is running it's a net new one then you start top of final right new web page visitors new understanding historical benchmarks and then you can have the conversations report back to leadership okay to get qualified job title it costs us this much on average historically now look at we're driving our qualified iCP this is the average cost per demo request for qualified job title that's kind of the top of the final and then what's the win rate so there's leading to my indicators um this is the number one question that gets asked in the ball so it's it's funny here you guys perspective and definitely think you've all nailed it it's just understanding where your program is at but really it should come down to how much does it cost to drive qualified opportunity from inbound that's like the core metric that i look at the start because it depends on your sales cycle front or back end when i say qualified it that is loosely defined by the company but right the question is funny okay we have a few more minutes um i think let's talk about AI and maybe and then we could wrap it up with sort of the summary um one action item that everybody could take today but let's let's talk about AI just because i think it's you know obviously top of mind we've all been experimenting with different AI tools we'd love to hear your perspective on how you're incorporating AI into doing the job of a demand gen marketer i use it daily for two different things so one is i mentioned summarized in transcripts to find out key points whether it's like a podcast episode that i've been on or that my team's been on or it's just an interesting one and i have kind of wants fart notes in order to kind of cultivate brainstorming and thought leadership and then another one is for closed one for closed lost analysis on the reasons why so kind of pulling out and extracting because a lot of times that there's not infrastructure in place to capture like a succinct response then you'll get like a long winded answer for some reasons and then something not enough so kind of on a quarterly basis depending on that i could i will drop that and chat gbt anonymize everything but like what are the main points here that to take away from like these the reasons that we lost these opportunities so those are two kind of quick wins that i think help x tonight of something that typically takes a long time to yeah those are great there i'll unfortunately i don't really have any great examples because i think like i would love to use ai more for content creation but what i see that's ai generated is like i don't know not so great i'm reading into like actual human psychology and writing based on human emotion and real-life act notes and i don't think ai is as good as that as humans are um we use it a little bit for campaign inspiration and all of these presentations that either imagine people or feel marketing people are presenting to sale the round here's like the idea for a certain type of game that we're presenting at our booth and my company is doing a capture the flag event which is really really big in cybersecurity and we use chat gbt to try and come up with the basic concepts around how that would look and feel um it's kind of based off of the play off of hunger game um the ctf called the hunters game and again it's really getting inside the mind of the people who are actually interested in a product like yours like super cyber nerd which is you know entirely different to the icp of like marketers selling to marketing people so i think chat gbt can help uh in that way um but i i say i think the people listening if you've got any cool idea in terms of how you're using ai on your marketing team i'd love to hear because i would love some inspiration yeah i'm kind of with you that i don't love it for content creation because it's so boxy if that's a word um but i do like it for brainstorming i think there's some quick ideation that you can get from chat gbt and the other thing that i have used it for when i do customer research especially customer interviews um to be able to distill down specific themes or pull out specific quotes that support themes that can help with creating and crafting testimonials really quick or hey turn this into a case study example how might i present this and so it can reorganize that information but it's always kind of giving it a starting point versus um asking it to come up with something on its own and the other thing that is useful going back to that concept that we talked about ctf sameness um pulling you can kind of copy paste from your competitors like their ys story or their abouta story um and put it into chat gbt and say okay what are the main themes that you are getting from this and then compare it to your own and you can get some interesting insights and kind of how similar things are or how different they are and if you're doing a good job of differentiating yourself just even if you're about us messaging um or any content that you're creating really. Staira is the sound of because i've heard of this but just for the entire audience perplexity is one of the best customer research tools out there that i found or any sort of q&a that you might have because it gives you back a response with multiple resources combined together so then you can click into those resources and you can dig deeper so you're doing customer research or you have questions just general questions on how to build a ga4 dashboard like that is the big unlock for me and my teams because then you don't have to dig around in multiple videos it gives you the resources. Okay perfect thank you.
I guess we're we're one minute left if there's kind of one action item we can leave the audience with today um what would you guys say to just get the demand gen engine going? I would say there's a huge amount of like doom and gloom you hear from people about marketing whether it's from marketers or from people who are non-marketers of how hard it is to do marketing nothing's working anymore like i totally reject all of those statements and i think it's actually a fantastic time to be a marketer and i'm really encouraged by the the talent within the marketing community and i think the perception of marketing is improving greatly where CEOs are beginning to understand the value of marketing the value of having a good marketer in your team the continuation like evin's that you don't want to fire your entire marketing team and then have a new team completely change your your message and your phone of voice and you're looking for you. I think there's so much value in actually retaining marketers over time and having them be true partners to see eos and the executive team so i think any marketer's distinction feel encouraged and feel optimistic about the state of marketing today. Awesome.
I would just say community learn how like not learn how but master communication to executives so really anything you want to deploy and recognizing that the man generation isn't paid and all i hear this a lot but what are the results how do we do against results what are the insights what are the performance of what first of all was expected learning is which initiative contributed and like recommendations so you can talk to those four things and almost every communication you have within executive you're gonna level up your scale and challenge yourself to think that way. We love it. Yes. All right.
Mine i will just say it would be to focus right we talk about a lot of things and I think there's this perception that we have to be constantly juggling all these place at all at the same time but it has been proven you know where we put our attention and where we focus is what grows so pick one thing pick one tactic in trying to build that really solid foundation start there before moving on to next thing because if you start yourself too thin nothing will work. Amen. All right. Okay well thank you everybody.
Thara Evan with awesome chat thank you guys so much for participating and hopefully this was a great use of everybody's time and you learned something new. Thank you so much to all of you for the session. All right have a great evening. Thanks everybody.
Bye.