What's up everyone? Really good to have you here. This event has been put on by Refine Labs. Thank you all for coordinating it.
I'm going to spend some time diving in deep with our guest, Alice DeCorsy, the CMO of Cognizm, also a CMO that I respect a ton of pioneer, I would say, in the way that we look at marketing and then being able to actually get it done in practice. And so we're going to start to try and extract a lot of the expertise and learnings that Alice has had. Many CMOs and marketing leaders aspire to do and accomplish those things that she's already been able to accomplish in her career. So I'm really glad to have you here.
And I'm looking forward to talking through some of the moves you've been able to make and also some of the moves that you're planning for the future. Wow, an entry. I can live up to it. Awesome.
Also, I noticed as I was doing some of my research before the event, Diary of a First Time CMO is now at the one year anniversary of publication. So congratulations on that book. I continue still to this day to get DMs from people that read that book and got a ton of value from it. So thanks for putting that out into the world as well.
And now let's get into it. I know that tons of marketing leaders, marketing teams, even people outside of the marketing department would like their organization to be able to make some of the transformations that you've been able to make a cognizome relative to the transformation from a lead generation marketing strategy into a demand generation strategy. And so maybe just to set the table a little bit, could you talk through sort of how you view the rationale around making this type of strategic change and how you go to market? Yeah, I mean, I think it was quite simple.
Well, it's not simple and the change isn't super simple to make. And so I do understand that there's a lot of aspects to it that can be difficult. But I guess if this is comfort to anyone, to give you the back story and the history, I was a complete advocate of lead generation and that approach and believed that that was the only way, mainly because I was kind of what was this philosophy of everything had to be measured. That was the way we built our revenue models.
That was the way that we empowered the sales org. It's how we predicted to be hit target month after month here after year at Cognizome. And I felt trying to change all of that was going to be an incredibly difficult task and getting most importantly going to buy in from really the CEO and then also other revenue leaders to do so. So much so I took Chris on this topic and kind of debased it with him a long time ago now.
Actually, I was like, yeah, I was like, yeah, I was like, yeah, I was like, I'm going to go. We got to a quick scale, I guess, that Cognizome where when I started digging into the metrics, it became incredibly clear to me that the things that were really driving our revenue and performance were all about direct demand, the things that actually high intent want to talk to sales. And the stuff that we were spending so much time on and focus and energy was all of that good old fashioned lead gen ebook kind of play. And when you looked at the resource and the cost and then the actual output from that from a revenue perspective, it became incredibly difficult to argue with that something needed to change.
We were going to go on scale to where we are today in terms of like revenue size and organization. We would have built such an inefficient engine had we continued that way. So very glad we made the change when we did. And yeah, that's kind of what spurred me on to do so.
Amazing. And then so as people progress and as you progress through this sort of transformation, how did you make adjustments to the metrics and the KPIs that marketing is reporting as well as to be able to get the executive team and the board aligned with the strategy? Because I know a lot of companies try to do this. They spend three or six months moving into it.
They aren't able to set up the metrics properly. They don't get alignment. The things fall apart. They go back to doing what they were doing before.
There's easy to measure. And so we'd love to get some of your perspective on from a metrics and even like board executive management standpoint how that works. Yeah, I mean, super important is that you don't tell people you're going to change everything overnight. It's got to be like a step by step process and you need to have that match out and you need to actually implement it as a test.
So I think how I had historically always approached everything at Cognizant was like 80% was how we do like how we're going to hit the target and keep things going as stages quo and then 20% kind of room for changing things up, trying new ways of doing things, testing new growth levers. And it was a very similar approach for this. So again, it was a case of us saying, right, we're going to take 20% of the budget and the spend and we're going to put it into what we call this demand play. At this stage, it was like so basic.
It was as simple as the 20% of the budget on LinkedIn, we were going to deliver and distribute the same sort of content that we were already doing on the gated side, but we were going to ungate it all. And in that time period, we wanted to see that we could also see an impact in people wanting to talk to sales in terms of them correlating upwards in line with the spend. And that was as simple as my experiment was, that was just how I mapped out for the leadership. And I reported back on that on a monthly basis and I ran that for three months and the data kind of spoke for itself.
And then at the same time, I was doing what I'd call some like a softer stakeholder management where it started spitting the funnel for reporting purposes. And I was showcasing the cost to the business of us doing the lead gen model versus the efficiency of what I want to talk to sales high and tense demo requests were bringing in for the business. It became really clear in those meetings that people are asking me, yeah, I get it. Like we can see that that is the funnel we should be optimizing for.
We want more people to talk to sales. How do we do that? And that was where I could say, well, that's why I'm doing this experiment. This is where that's 20% of spend is going.
I'm going to prove this out gradually over time. And then if that does show that we can increase that bucket of people we want to talk to sales in line with the spend, then we know that this is something we can pull more fuel on the fire for. But I think that showcasing the split funnel reporting without saying I'm going to go and change everything, but just bringing that to the fore, the meetings and getting finite eyes on it, getting operations eyes on it, it just enlightened people too. There has to be a better way.
We were all kind of aligned on that session. Spoting the funnel is such a powerful concept, especially if communicated properly to sales leaders, SDR leaders, finance leaders, all the things that you mentioned. I think it's an incredible concept for anyone that wants to make this change and is currently running more of a lead generation strategy. Just look at the leads, try and group them into big buckets of intent or look at them as every individual signal, look at how they're converting into opportunities, qualified opportunities in one, and then be able to present that data and show the differences of here's how our ebooks for aggregated content or things like that versus a hand raiser is a great conceptual concept to help companies see that.
And then even more so to that, eventually if you're able to adjust how you model your revenue, not against any type of MQL, but also more narrowly defining what a quote unquote MQL means to make it more defined like an hand raiser can be a great move as well as your in that journey. And just want to reiterate, love the step-by-step concept and not changing everything at once and working toward it using that as a test or a way to prove out a concept and then being able to gradually build definitely as a way to increase the probability of success when we do these things. Now that you've made that change and gone through quite a bit of scale since you've been doing that, I'm curious what your perspective is and some of the advice you have for people as to how to maintain efficiency through that level of scale when operating this type of strategy. So in terms of what I think about key initiatives that are having essential for us in scaling like this demand engine, at different parts of our journey, different things have become a challenge.
So one of the things that we found was that we needed to build a structure for how we go about creating ideating and delivering content. That's going to be the driver for creating all of that demand into our segments. And I'm not a paid sponsor, but we did work with Refine Labs on this and we got a really helpful framework to look at how we think about the content that we need to be building and what sort of, I call them buckets that it sits into. And that gave us a really good framework to go away and kind of start creating a roadmap for that content.
So we think about things in four buckets, which is product content, which I think products speak to itself, I'll take it to explain that. But that was actually a huge amount for us that is creating way more content around what it is that our product really does and how it helps our customers and personas. And we just did very little of that in the lead gen world. And now we are, I think, quite innovative within that earlier doctor of interactive demos and ungating those and thinking about how can we scale case studies without actually needing customers that utilize our customer success or to actually do walkthroughs of our product.
They can talk about a use case and a real customer without having to actually talk about the brand name and getting permission. And that's a really great way of scaling that type of product output as well. So thinking really innovatively about how we thought that product bucket was like a huge amount for us. The content bucket, which is that dotted line back into what your product does, I think again, that was a really interesting perspective that we've never really thought about.
Before that, we just kind of had thought leadership and tactical. We never really thought about this kind of other bucket of content, which is, yeah, so that sits in the middle there and can sometimes be a bit more of a challenge to think about what that should be, depending on the persona for us, we have B2P content data provider. So actually for sales, it's super simple, calling is a great piece of content that we can kind of do endless amounts with. And on the marketing side, it's actually something we're discussing at the moment, it's a bit more nuanced and it's sometimes more challenging.
But yeah, it's just a good way of framing how you think about things. Then we have a thought leadership bucket, which again, it's obviously very simple. That is general thought leadership that does not need to be tied to what we do as a company or a product. And then the social proof piece, which again, really, really important.
I think we've done a lot of innovating around in terms of how we're doing that and using it as well. And it's great to see that loads of the teams adds are kind of shattered out across LinkedIn a lot of the time as well. And they're really thoughtful about how they go about approaching it. So I think that was like a big challenge.
And it was just taking those four buckets and saying to think about how we were going to continue to create content within them. And when we needed to as well, like when did we actually like what was the threshold for swapping content out of a bucket and renewing it with new content. And I think you have to build your own benchmarks. And so I would say start collecting data on how you're performing what the cost per impression share is.
And it ties back to you probably have different objectives within each of those buckets, depending on what we're trying to achieve. But make sure you start collecting all of that data and building your own benchmarks so that you can then learn how often and when you need to be cycling in and out content. That was, yeah, I think that was something that you can just prescribe. I think it has to be very much based on your business, your audience size, how they respond to what you're putting out there as well.
And then actually another thing, a real unlock was really thinking about that. When you go away from the generation, you become free to quite a lot of the manual, directly boring tasks that kind of come with it. And you actually have the time and headspace to think about things that actually become incredibly important in a demand generation, which is your website. I think a website can be a really forgotten but crucial asset for a lot of teams.
And in a demand-gen motion, you're going to be filtering a ton of traffic, hopefully through your website. So it's worth investing a lot of time, money and energy and making that good. So we invested in a couple of things that I would recommend checking out. So winter, which is amazing, software that helps you validate messaging.
And then mutiny, which allows us to do a lot of personalization experiences across the website and both of those have enabled us to increase conversions on the website on the client-hand pages. And they've been massively beneficial to us in terms of investment and time. And I think the other thing on that is don't just buy a piece of tech and not have a plan for how we're going to implement that systematically. So again, it's like, how do we create a programme of developing initiatives using this tech to help us continue to scale, maintain and improve our website.
We're definitely in the phase of making sure that everything is quite process driven and there is data to back up the way in which we approach things. Another thing is the SME programme. I think that Cognizant has done this really well and I do think that it's still early days when a lot of companies, when it comes to working with, when I say SME, I mean subject matter expert, when it comes to working with subject matter experts and how they roll that out across the programmes and what they're doing. So I think we've actually been able to prove this at all levels of spend.
So if you're on here and you're coming from a small organisation with a lower budget, don't think that rules you out from having an SME programme. Brands that we have, CASPA has very little just due to the cost of our total ARR of our product sale there. We have very little budget to spend, but we've managed to create just a successful SME programme on a very much smaller budget and scale. Whereas at Cognizant we have three core personas and we've built out SMEs for each of those sales marketing and rev-ops and again the complexity of the programme varies depending on the persona and kind of how, yeah, where we are with it.
So with rev-ops it's quite new for us. We have quite a very early adopter kind of programme going with one subject matter expert and we keep things very simple. And then on the sales side, we've gone, I guess, show beers with Morgan and Grim working with us on the sales side of the subject matter expert piece and that's been really great for us and then on marketing we're able to utilise our own internal resource there. So I think thinking about a subject matter expert programme, how you want to approach it, building it out is crucial.
I think that there are some key things that you want to be thinking about when you work with a subject matter expert. You need someone who generally does know what to keep out and like lives and breathes that stuff and are going to continue to do so really important, but also that they can hold people's attention well when they're going to come across in the media format that you're actually going to be sharing a lot of this resource from because that can actually sometimes not be the case that you don't necessarily marry together and can be difficult to find. I'd say it's also really important that you create very clear objectives from the outset, always pay them, just never don't pay them because it just won't get what you want from it. And I think as a team, you have to take and hold the account's ability for getting the agreed output from that subject matter expert and you should have a vigorous programme for really reporting back on what you're getting from them.
Yeah, and I think those are kind of in a nutshell, some of the things that have helped us really scale our demand and engine over the last couple of years. That was amazing. I'm going to double click and highlight a couple of points that you mentioned for the audience. So I think the first one on this like organic thought leadership play what I was causing SME strategy is critically important through scale because organic is going to blend down your overall cost of acquisition.
It's much less expensive to actually go that route. And so rather than just continuing to double your budget on paid channels to have more of a balance between paid and organic to keep cost per opportunity and customer acquisition costs lower improve marketing ROI hugely impactful when you can get it right. You totally read my mind on the website. I was actually going to go there right afterwards.
I'm glad you went there. When you shift the strategy and instead of having your LinkedIn lead gen ad where you're not even thinking about if the customer is going to get to our website, you just want them to download the e-book via LinkedIn and then enter your email nurture flow or get called by an SDR. When you shift your advertising strategy instead what you're doing is I'm trying to deliver this information in LinkedIn so that later someone goes back and searches my brand and Google and lands on our homepage then that's when the website really really really matters. And then lastly love the point that you mentioned in terms of having a variety of different content I find that tons of many companies out there have so many good assets when it comes to product marketing and social proof and other things like that but never think about taking them off of their website and then deploying them using paid programs.
Again, it's because of the lead gen mindset and methodology and so when you're able to shift that then you can go and take your key feature pages and your key customer stories and things like that and deliver them ungated on LinkedIn and all of a sudden your target customer is seeing that stuff for like three cents per impression. It's very very powerful. So let's move to a little bit of future forward things. So one of the things that I want to talk through you published your book in February 2023 so it's been about a year since that book came out.
What are some new things that you've learned during that time that maybe weren't included in the book that would be like a 2.0 for some of the people that are fans and have read it? Yeah, I think it's just the way in which I guess a lot of the process and the scaling of the same sort of ideas and initiatives that are in the book that as I always say we're building our playbook in public was still iterating on it daily, weekly, monthly. It's yeah consistently learning but I think one of the things would be about how do you think about content creation? So cool that we've got the full buckets but for example just if you take the content and thought leadership buckets just thinking about how you're going to build ideate and create more content for those buckets.
It needs to be some framework around that. Your team has to get behind some form of planning and methodology in order for that to really work at scale essentially and we've tried some variations of this so we actually we worked really closely with Todd, Kowser and Abed on a framework called Easy Mode and that was a really good exercise of us I guess thinking about content more strategically in this demand-gen ends. However I think we're now yeah if I'm being transparent in the light of kind of sharing what we're building we're taking a bit of a step back from that because one thing that we've realized is what we have done really well without actually intentionally doing it was had nailed what we wanted to be known for within two of our core personas. So on the sales side it was calling and on the marketing side it was this lead-in to demand-gen shift and what we realized we kind of done is we started over engineering the way in which we thought about the content and we were taking it down to many levels so it's almost that issue of being if you're known for everything and kind of nothing and we are now revisiting the way in which we're thinking about content creation and I think we're going to simplify it much further and it's just going to be a question of I guess what the Easy Mode framework would have called your strategic narrative is actually just like what do we want to be known for and then we'll kind of split it into the thought leadership and the tactical there's this whole theory of are you talking to a bottom-up audience middle-out or top-down and that kind of covers it it's like thought it's a little tactical and then we'll have one further lens where we'll think about is this for everyone and if it is doesn't need to be tweaked for enterprise and that is a more simple framework and structure we're going to be working on deploying over the rest of this year and so we'll see if that helps us kind of take the best parts of what we have been doing right with I guess stumbling across these core topics but then also having a process and framework that enables you to idea quickly and to really scale that content engine and I think that's really important.
Another thing which is definitely a term I've just coined my team were like what are you talking about but value loops this is something that I've been thinking about a lot and I came to realize that it's okay when you think about oftentimes when we're measuring things and we're thinking about even just a demand-gen plate we think about something in style or something in an of its own thing so you might look at an example of this live event and say this live event is really successful because we attract some people percentage number of attendees and that's great but what really is going to be successful and allow you to scale is if you build an audience of people that get captured in what I call value loops which are initiatives which deliver value consistently that you don't have to have a net new initiative in order to make that happen so a newsletter would be a great example of that once someone subscribes to your newsletter they are continually delivered value but assuming that you only deliver premium content and do all that stuff they're consistently being delivered value from you as a company and you can stay top of mind without having to say pay to get in front of that audience and some of our live events are very similar once people are engaged with that live event then again we can consistently deliver that kind of value over time and a way in which we have kind of built out that value loop for a live event is to supplement it with more of a community as well so yeah that's been something else that we're still again I think we're still very much in phase one of building out but it's how we think about every initiative now is is there a way in which we can capture someone in a value loop with that thing that we're doing and again with website journeys and using mutiny a lot of the pop-ups that you'll find will be trying to push people into a content piece of play which means that they'll get consistent value from us over time and that is essentially what we're trying to achieve anyway because that's what we want to be doing we'll be in front of them as much as possible in the places they find it helpful to consume content we're going to be coming up on questions in just a few minutes so I just want to put a call out I see the chat going in there so if you all have questions for a footage off of the chat we'll keep people up from there love love the concept of value it's basically the entire strategy that we have at a refund lapse in the other companies that I've worked with it's such a huge thing because you don't have to think you don't have to sit there in a meeting or do a brainstorming session about what are we going to do next you show up you do the same consistent activity you continue to do it better and well and add more value to people and you get a compounding game by doing the exact same thing every single day week or month whatever frequency you decide such an amazing point I see so many companies have all of these different ad hoc content programs like a random act of marketing every time you're thinking about doing something and being able to sort of create some structure around what you're doing simplify the things you're doing and make them into loops I think is an incredibly powerful learning cool last question before we get into getting to questions from the audience which are going to be great let's get a little sneak peek into 2024 for what you all are planning any big bets that you're making anything so you're really thinking about would love to get the audience a little bit under the tent around some of the things you're thinking yeah I mean I think in terms of big bets I mean something that we are working on it's not necessarily a big bet I think it's something people talk about a lot which is ABM but ABM for Cognizom again it's going to be a play bet that I'll probably build in public and be very transparent about I hate buzzwords and just doing something to do it I think what we're going to be executing at Cognizom is going to be something that others can replicate and I believe it's going to help us unlock true enterprise business we're taking a lot of the demand gen principles and we're kind of applying it yeah just on a smaller scale more one to be one to one and don't wait wait we require tons of technology behind either so I guess that's a teaser of stuff that's we're working on we're thinking about problems that we're going to be solving on that side of the fence and then I think like this is not a sexy thing that we're doing but I think it's important super laser focused on the funnel like every single stage to the point that it's boring I mean it's probably boring anyway but what can we do every single part of the funnel to improve our metrics and to get more out of it everyone's talking about efficiency doing more with less this is kind of a easy place to start because you've already got stuff going through it and it's just about optimizing every stage and I think where we've grown really quickly and we've had a lot of success we've got a lot of opportunity in there that we just need to really focus on yeah our attentions to different initiatives again which aren't around the max and marketing repeatable process driven and we're going to be doing a whole series on that as well so hopefully we can share all of those things that we're going through to really tighten up our funnel with all of you as well so that's a really un-sexy thing and hopefully it can more sexy thing I seriously want to double click on the point around like these non-sexy quote-unquote boring things are typically the things sitting right in front of your face are going to drive the highest impact without a lot of money so sometimes I'll be and even recently I'll be consulting with companies and I collect feedback after we complete some of those engagements and customers will say I wish you had brought us a lot more like innovative sexy ideas and I said well I brought you the three ideas that are sitting right in front of your face they're going to double your pipeline next year so I think there's a balance here between thinking about new sexy things like how are we going to get our brand so popular on TikTok versus how are we going to convert our website demos by two percent more each year and get six million dollars in additional revenue by fixing that part I think there just needs to be a huge balance between these things and not to have our own subjective judgment around what is sexy and what is not the things that are sexy are the things that drive results as the way I think a great way to frame it and look at it so and you've already done all the work as well so like what it makes of it. Seriously yeah especially with the funnel and the website and things like that it can be hugely impactful so thanks for sharing all that I know people that probably sparked a ton of questions I know people are thinking stuff so would love if you all feel comfortable coming on live we can ask Alice questions I'll wait you know wait in my perspective when I have one and we can have a little bit of a dialogue and understand what you all are seeing and what you want to learn so Megan let's move to Q&A. Let's do it we got a bunch of questions covering a lot of the topics that you mentioned so this will be a great opportunity to dig in deeper and clarify some points. Nancy you're up first I'm going to bring you on to ask your question live welcome to the show thank you I always learn that time this was fantastic as usual in Alice I am clicking on Amazon right now ordering your book even though I'm going to ask this question which is does your book detail some of the nuggets that you shared with us this morning specifically how did you set up your split funnel what framework did we find labs actually share with you that help you rationalize your content did you get into that level of yeah yeah and if you wanted to check before you purchase it's also available online so you can validate this first before you go ahead and buy the book but it is very detailed in terms of the step-by-step approach that we took the premise of the whole book is actually that because we're building in public as I mentioned by that I mean I was documenting things reposting on LinkedIn really across the last three years and so every post is accompanied by a more in-depth explanation of what actually went on behind that by the thought or the initiative that we ran and there's a lot of practical guidance with it and it's a lot about the Legion to Demand and Shift great and I start there you have 20,000 people following you on LinkedIn so I just send you a connection request I hope you will accept of course thank you well played Nancy nice work all right we have another great question from Sophie so I want to bring you on next you had a question about the benchmark concept I think this is a great one to dive into a little bit more welcome Sophie hi thank you Megan it's actually funny because yesterday I had the same chat with my manager about on benchmarks and how we're going to approach that so I would be curious to know how you did the zettas or you approached this because it seems a bit of like an overwhelming topic but yet super important to get right to measure the right things okay yeah so I guess to unpack it if I'm talking about what we think about LinkedIn as an example and the four buckets that I spoke about within that there'll be campaigns that have different objectives so let's take a reach campaign objective for example what we did was we would create a report based on the data within that campaign and other campaigns that we're running because we have different other reach or better campaigns running against the different personas and also in our other brand cast but anyway we would be putting all of that data for the first three months we're not really doing anything with it it's just a case of collecting the data we would look at it and see is it gone up has it gone down just because that's just an interesting thing to keep an eye on but then over time what you're going to see is if there's a correlation between things like the frequency of the ad serve and the cost per reach and if that is driving it higher or lower and those are things that you can then correlate when you're collecting all this data over months and months and you can start to understand where a healthy benchmark for you as a company sits what's the best frequency I mean I'm sure Chris could probably talk to what he sees and because he has the billion tons of accounts but as a company who only looks at your own account this would be the approach that I would take but I don't know Chris if you want to add more to it I think it's partially driven by the volume of strong content that you can produce as well so some companies that don't have that engine have to run a campaign at six or ten x frequency because they don't have anything else to put behind it I think the optimal ends up being somewhere between two and four x frequency where that person eventually is going to have almost a point of saturation like I've seen this ad it happens to me too like I've seen this ad six times in the past day like I get it but give me something different so there needs to be a balance between how much content you're actually putting out in the quality of that the size of your audience and then the spend that you deploy on a particular channel and to balance those out so that you're you're reaching the right point of saturation with the audience the only thing I would add that and completely agree is that there are some campaigns for us that have been on forever because they're totally great against our benchmarks they never decline our influencer ads would be a great example of those so these are ads where it's a post that I've done organically and we've taken it and made it look like not looking for you like an ad but we're serving it up as an ad and it gets kicked through to more content essentially they are by far the best in terms of pipeline and revenue for us and so and that's never changed and they just have remained on and so sometimes there will be things that will stand out to you'll be like frequency is x so I should probably turn it off but you have to then look at pipeline and revenue like you need to follow it all the way through.
Classic awesome point there. All right the questions keep coming in so let's keep rolling. I'm gonna bring on Libby to ask the next question welcome Libby. Hi Alice I was curious when you were talking about re-evaluating your mix and your marketing framework how often are you doing that analysis to identify areas of over engineering because when we're moving so fast and have so many moving parts and complexities it's really easy to end up in a situation where you have a lot of bloat so what kind of frequency are you going through your programs to identify these inefficiencies?
Yeah and I would say this isn't this is also an area for us to really improve on I think probably last year when we think about it was probably half yearly whereas this year we want to get to a point where it's a quarterly initiative but it all comes from reporting on the right things. I think what we got quite guilty of was we were reporting on things that actually didn't tie back to our objectives and key results and that we just got ourselves kind of spinning our wheels a bit and you just have to sometimes take a step back and yeah look at things from a slightly bigger picture perspective and tie every exercise to very clear objectives and key results and we're really going through a process this year I think my team will become really bored of me saying okay ours and key results but yeah that's something that we're gonna get much better at this year and I think quarterly for me feels about right and I think half yearly was probably too long. Okay wonderful thank you awesome I'm gonna bring Alex on next he wanted some clarification and some expansion on the four buckets that you were talking through there was a lot of chatter in the chat I think a lot of people are interested in this so Alex why don't you tee up this next question for Alice? Thanks Alice for all the insights and yeah so I just wanted to circle back on the four buckets because correct me if I'm wrong but you would have product, top leadership, content, social proof and my question would be like I'm kind of having a hard time to like differentiate and be content because in my mind product and top leadership would be some form of content so could you just maybe dive more on what you mean by content sure I mean this is definitely we've taken this from a final answer I'll go and I'm sure this can come in and give the final answer a bit for us I'm going to give you an example that so cognizant a BTT content data provider so when we think about for the sales persona some sales the four buckets this is how we map the content so this hopefully super practical product would be how does our contact database actually serve you quality contacts at scale for your SCR team we'd highlight some key features that we know people love like our diamond data, it's like 90% accuracy that would be all the sort of product we did live product walkthroughs of the actual platform and how people use it that is all the stuff that we would be putting in the product bucket then on the thought leadership bucket so that could be literally anyone probably mainly us I don't matter expert that leave the book leadership bucket so let's take Dave who's I see our director him talking about how AI is impacting SDRs today or the future state of SDRs in SaaS that kind of stuff would be thought leadership because it really doesn't have a connection to what Cognizant does outwardly you wouldn't think so so that would be stuff that we'd put in the public and thought leadership bucket and then in the content bucket that would be all the things that we do around cold calling so we run this show called calling live with more than a lot of the snippets and content that we produce from those would be going in the cold calling bucket a lot of the best practices and reports and things on cold calling that would all go in the content bucket because it's got really clear dotted line back into what we do you cold call with numbers and we provide numbers so yeah that's how we think about the social proof I think that's probably quite sad actually but that would be customers shouting out about the quality of our data and we would be putting their reviews or case studies whether they put video or other in the social proof bucket yeah and just sort of a communicate because that was a like right when the last time she said it was a white bulb for me that thought leadership is about the where the profession is going where the sdr profession is going and then how Alice is framing content which maybe we should think about it just a different term so it's more clear for people is really about sort of connecting a thought leadership content item but it ties back directly to your product so it's almost like a more focused version of thought leadership within that profession so the way that I've always thought about it is product marketing which Alice explained perfectly sometimes you could put social proof into the product marketing category if you wanted to but I love that she broke it out so for clarity you have category marketing how are we actually marketing just the idea of using a database but not necessarily use why we're better than a different database so that could be one typically for newer categories like the database categories very mature I don't think we need to convince people about why they should have one I think that's well been done right now so maybe not as relevant to more mature categories and then you have the thought leadership bucket which could then be broken down a little bit deeper to things about the profession but also the thought leadership topics that directly tie back to your product yeah and I would say on our Casper brand where we did have a stay level of spend we started out by combining product and social proof and to some extent thought leadership and content so if you don't because it is a lot to maintain to have these four buckets consistently it's a lot of budget split it might not make sense for you depending on the size of your organization to do that that's like what I would call the best possible scenario but there's ways that you can kind of hack it if you can't do it that way yeah early stage thinking about we have a product marketing stream and we have a thought leadership stream I think just having those two simply could be a great way to get it off the ground and then expand from there it was perfect I'm waiting to see if anyone else has a question but I had a couple of questions that I'm going to sneak in here now since I have an opportunity when you look back Alice over the last few years in hindsight can you reflect on any challenges or obstacles that you had to navigate as you were making the number one kind of making that transition from lead gen to demand gen and then also even just continuing to scale and innovate and experiment once you did that transformation I think we've talked a lot about I think a lot of your successes and I think you've alluded to the fact that it's not easy and so what were some of the obstacles or some of the challenges that came up for you over the last few years I think one thing we probably haven't spoken about that much is sales and sales role within that shift so that was definitely a big transition for us when we moved we had a whole team dedicated to dealing with the content leads we were generating thousands of thousands of these content leads at $10 a pot which seemed amazing we got really good at lead gen but and that was their whole role was to go and call in on these leads and try and put them in for a meeting and suddenly you're saying we're not actually going to this isn't going to exist anymore and we're only going to do in bounds and people actually want to talk to sales and then you open up a whole kind of worms which is what's the best way to do that because we now have thousands of people requesting to talk to sales every month and it's been a big operational process I guess around all of that in terms of really working out what works best so experimenting with having dedicated what we call marketing development reps who speak to those inbound leads versus directly rooting them to account executives versus directly rooting them to sdr's paired with account executives on larger accounts there's a whole ton of iterations in there which we've been working through to kind of hit on what is the perfect way to run this model that's cost effective a good experience for the customer and also as efficient as possible so and there's a lot of operational lift that comes with all of that as well that has to go on in the background some of the things that we use to help make it more I guess easier is we leverage something called lean data which is a great software for for rooting and we also enrich data with our own database essentially so that we can decide if we feel like these are great for accounts and we can then start directly reaching them to account executives without having them have to be qualified pre-qualified with an MDR yeah so all of that there's a ton that comes with it that's the nitty gritty stuff that's actually really really important and a big change management piece as well awesome thank you for that how do you think about labeling and handling intent I'm going to assume that what this question is getting at is when I say high intent lead I guess what I call that what is that to the art business and what do I mean by that and so there is just two versions of it for Cognizant some one requesting to talk to sales or some one requesting information on pricing if they do one of those things that for us is that's a high intent lead and that's something that we then go ahead and the rest of the process is followed from it I think when you go away from lead generation the great thing is you don't have to worry about lead scoring arguably grading we do use some grading that's more on the enterprise like ABM side of things but this whole idea of what's low intent high intent becomes really clear yeah that's how we think about it just add in a little bit when you're doing these things two things matter account fit and account intent and they are two entirely different dimensions that we need to be looking at both just because you have a great fit account and they download your ebook may not mean that they're ready to talk to sales or if you have a medium fit account that's submitted the pricing request maybe that'll have a better conversion most likely it will so fit and intent really matter I've been sort of evolving my thinking on this house I actually love your feedback on it because we started to get to the point now where I felt like starting to say whether it was a demo or what about when they watch a recorded demo is that a high intent is that medium intent it started to become subjective to me and so what we've started to transform a piseto is thinking about it not necessarily subjectively about what we think the intent was but more so the data and the conversion rates down the funnel and then it becomes a numerical objective thing where if you watch a recorded demo video and that has the same level of conversion rates the pricing request and those all fall into one bucket based on the actual performance rather than a subjective definition we're not there yet but that's what we're trying to get to yeah and I think that's like an evolved version of what's the demo on demand isn't it so it's one of those things to be tested of is someone just watching it to watch it and they're more and they're still really adding on their stage of analysis are they actually ready to buy and I imagine it's going to be a whole swag of data and yeah in the end as we close out the session I'd love to ask both Chris and Alice a closing question to get your thoughts as we wrap up for today so what would be your top advice for any B2B company out there that's trying to replicate the success of making this transformation from region to demand and what would be some of the advice that you would leave the listeners with as we wrap up I honestly think you'll succeed if you do really well at content and I don't mean that small bucket that I talked about in the context of the four buckets I mean content in its oldest possible term and that includes all four of those buckets I think if you can be the place that your audience goes wherever it is that they like to be to find out more about either you your industry or things related to what you the product that you serve then you're going to be successful so that is led by all the things I spoke about like subject matter experts and these types of initiatives but if you can figure out content then yeah you're going to be okay I love that and what what I'll add is use data to make the changes and get people on board not your opinion and that leveraging whether it's a split the funnel process or other types of analyses that you could do to demonstrate to the organization that what you're doing right now is counterproductive and it's not helping the marketing investment the company the sales or SDR team and being able to communicate that using data is going to lead to a much likely probability of success and then additionally once you start moving forward in that recognizing that if you do not change the metrics that you're scoring and reporting then this will almost undoubtedly fail you need to be able to shift what are the core kpi's against like a high volume of mqls or formfills it's starting to think about it differently you'll also likely need to think about attribution differently and so thinking about that is looking at historical data and then shifting the metrics that you offer success in the future I think is a critical foundational item as well great conversation today thank you so much Alice thank you Chris thank you for all of you that depended and asked all of the great questions