We have Megan Bovin, she's the CEO of Refine Labs, and she's going to tell you more about the evolution of buyer behavior and the key pillars of modern demand-gen strategies. So I'm going to bring her to the stage now and let her introduce herself and then we can proceed with the presentation. Hi, Megan. How are you?
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm well. How are you today?
Awesome. Also, after these DJ beats, really great. Very excited to be here today to talk about the shift in buyer behavior and the way I wanted to frame up the presentation today was really focusing on how to think about if you are a B2B marketer inside of a company and you have been seeing some of the things that we've been observing and that I'm about to talk about. What I want to achieve in this presentation is give you all a roadmap of how if you are at that B2B marketer and you see that your company needs to evolve their marketing strategy, what steps you can take to actually prepare a business case and make a case to your executive team, your leadership team on how to think about changing your marketing strategy and adopting a modern demand philosophy and approach that is going to drive much improved business results.
I love questions and interactions, so we'll go through the presentation and be very excited for the Q&A portion so that we can answer any questions that you have. Let's get into it. It's important to start by taking a look back and understanding how the way we buy has changed over the last 30 years. There have been some distinct eras as we look back and reflect on how things have changed and evolved.
I think it's really important to start and rewind all the way back to the 1990s, really before the internet became mainstream, before the advent of social media. We call this era really from the 1990s into the early 2000s. We like to call it the analog buying era. Let's think about what was true at that particular time.
Sales people were really the primary drivers of acquiring new customers for any business. There wasn't a lot of ways to learn about or find information without a representative from a company proactively reaching out. In this era, there were a lot of conferences and trade shows, industry events, so people would go to these events in person and that would be another way that they would learn and discover new products and services that were available. But effectively, the outbound sales motion and these industry events and conferences were really the two primary go-to-market strategies for a lot of B2B companies that were looking to acquire customers.
Those were the tactics. At the time, they were very effective and they worked because that was the only way buyers could learn. Let's talk about the first shift. About 2016, up until about 2020, and I would say it has probably started maybe around 2011, 2012, even we have what's called the website era.
A few things changed. The internet became mainstream. HubSpot is very well known for championing what they called inbound marketing, which was really about how do you develop a lot of great content and information, how do you build out a really rich website, and how do you optimize for people that have really just begun searching the internet, using Google search to discover things, and how do you make sure that you're showing up organically in those search results so that people find you and become aware of you. Around the same time, the classic predictable revenue model that Salesforce used to grow was also becoming more widely adopted and mainstream.
This predictable revenue model was about having a sales development team with a group of SDRs doing cold outreach and passing off warmer leads or meetings over to account executives to begin the sales process. In the website era, you have people indexing on building great websites, content marketing and content development, and this predictable revenue model where you had marketers focused on the MTL, you had sales, SDRs, and then AEs, and almost this assembly line approach of the strategy to acquire customers. Again, during this time period, this was super effective. This worked.
Many companies adopted this approach because the approaches that were used in the analog buying era weren't working as well. This new strategy that came to the forefront was much more effective. Buyers began to realize that they started to have a little bit more control over finding products and services, learning new information, and they liked that, and they wanted to initiate that process for themselves. Then we have this third era that we like to call the dark social era.
Think about 2020. Obviously, we had the global pandemic. By that time, social media was a tool that probably every single person in the world has some type of involvement in, and the pandemic dramatically changed conditions. Everything became digital, effectively overnight.
You have the rise of social media, you have the global pandemic impacting people's ability to even go to conferences, have these in person meetings, and with the evolution of the internet and social media, more than ever before, you have the conditions where a potential B2B buyer can find pretty much 75% of the information that they once were only able to get by having a sales conversation with a sales person. In the dark social era, you have people in Slack communities and peer groups. They're more likely to ask a colleague or a friend about whether they've used a product or service, and if so, if they would recommend it. This new era has again flipped the dynamic, and where we look back at the analog buying era, I would say really the company and the sales person had a lot of power.
They were the ones that had the information, and the buyer had to engage with them to get it. What we're seeing in the dark social era is a complete flip of that paradigm. You have the buyer who has all the power now. They are the ones that can leverage the internet tools, social media, their peers, their network to really get 80% of the way through the sales process.
They only want to engage with a company or a sales representative when they are ready to have that conversation. This evolution that has happened is really important to acknowledge because any B2B company that is putting together their go-to-market strategy needs to embrace the reality that we're dealing with and craft a strategy that is going to meet buyers where they're at. Let's talk a little bit more specifically about what this means in terms of marketing strategies and go a little bit in more detail with some of the key differences that we're seeing from the website era to the dark social era. The website era, again, this was where companies were really investing in content development and SEO, and in many cases were able to really successfully deploy what we call gated content strategies.
Here's a really rich piece of information or content that the buyer is genuinely interested in. At the time, they would willingly exchange their email address for that information. That email address ended up being routed to the sales team. They reach out to try to get a meeting set up and initiate a sales process.
That was a very common marketing tactic that for many years was genuinely really effective. What we're seeing today, though, is that strategy in particular really isn't effective. How many of us on this call have put in a fake email address if we're trying to get something online and we know someone will contact us and we're not interested in hearing from them or just bypassing it completely. If you realize, I just wanted to see the information.
They're creating friction for me. Forget it. I'll move on with my day. Fast forward to today.
Really, the primary way that most B2B buyers discover products and services is really in three core situations, three core scenarios. Many digital communities exist today with like-minded peers and colleagues. Not only is this a great way for professionals today to foster their own professional development and build their networks, but it allows them to access their peers for direct referrals and recommendations on products and services that work for them. People are more likely to trust someone that they know over a company or a sales person at that company.
People are constantly consuming on social media and podcasts. This is the primary way that people are engaging with the internet today and in many cases, obviously, for personal but also professional reasons. Buyers are constantly learning about new products and services via these channels via social media and podcasts. YouTube included.
The third condition or factor that's true today is people would rather self-serve on information and defer a conversation with a sales person until they're actually ready to have that conversation. I think recognizing this is really important as you think about what your next steps are in defining your strategy. So let's talk about the common challenges that are true in the majority of B2B companies today. So right now, if you think about it, most B2B companies are still leveraging the tactics from the website era.
They're running gated e-book campaigns on LinkedIn, they're thinking about lead scoring, their whole goal in marketing is how can I get as much contact information in front of our sales team so they can do outbound outreach to initiate a sales process. The fact that we have so many companies adopting the website era tactics in the dark social era has created all of these problems that you're seeing here. You actually can get lots of leads. It's very fairly straightforward to get a lot of people to give you their email address or to collect contact information.
However, most of those people are not in market to buy. So even if you give hundreds and hundreds of leads to your sales team, only a couple or a handful of those are actually going to convert to opportunities and even close one opportunities. People are spending a lot of money on these types of initiatives and campaigns but then don't have much pipeline to show for it. So it really calls into question ROI on that investment.
It's really difficult to measure what's working and not working. And because of that difficulty, it makes it challenging to understand what changes that you should make. And similarly, with lots of competing priorities and high pressure to hit goals, it becomes really unclear where you should invest. This shift in buyer behavior I think is also a primary reason why we see some more friction and conflict between marketing and sales teams.
If you just break it down to explain what we've been building up and discussing so far is if you're a sales person and you get handed a list of email addresses and people to reach out to, but none of them are interested in talking to you, that's a huge challenge. And you might not be very successful in converting that list of leads into pipeline or any qualified opportunities. And a lagging business indicator though that's really crucial for any business to keep healthy is really your customer acquisition cost. And what you see here is because of the lack of alignment with the company's B2B marketing strategies and how B2B buyers are buying today, you see really volatile customer acquisition costs or customer acquisition costs that are so high, they're just unsustainable.
And the unit economics of the business are beginning to erode. And so a lot of these challenges sound common to you. You would not be alone. I talked about seven to 10 marketing leaders per week in my role.
And almost all of these leaders that I speak with are struggling with all or some of these challenges. So what does that mean then? What do we do? So we sort of discussed what the current reality is and what the current challenges are.
But what's next? How do you make the change? And we talk about developing a modern demand gen strategy that is aligned to how buyers buy today that will also drive the business results that we're all looking for. And so at a high level, we like to describe this shift as moving away from the lead gen tactics that worked in the website era and adopting demand gen strategies and tactics that are effective in the dark social era.
And what that means is it really is more about quality over quantity. It's less about getting as many MQLs as possible with a very low conversion rate of those MQLs. and it's more about how do we drive a higher number of qualified inbounds that are going to convert to revenue at significantly higher percentage. So we don't need as many because they're coming to us fairly educated 70 to 80% of the way through the sales process ready to have a conversation and make a decision, make a purchasing decision in relatively short order.
So I want to drive this point home because especially, again, I mentioned at the beginning of this call you're a B2B marketer, you're inside of your company, you know, you know something feels off you know that you want to make this change, but you're not really sure how to convince your leadership team that now is the time to make the change. And so what I always suggest people do is put together a data backed business case. It's very hard to argue with data and facts and numbers. And we conduct this with the funnel analysis for every company that we work with at Refine Labs and the results are always the same.
And so really what this exercise with a split the funnel analysis does is it separates the high intent pipeline sources with the low intent pipeline sources. And we take a look at what those conversion percentages actually look like. So when I say high intent pipeline source or high intent lead source, what we're referring to are typically someone coming to your website and filling out a request a demo form or a contact sales contact us form, or maybe if you have some type of free trial or, you know, a product actually signing up for that free trial or that free product. If someone is taking that action, there is a lot of intent behind that.
You can pretty much guarantee that they've done a good amount of research that they probably spoke into their peers, and they've now reached the point in their own purchasing process where they need to do the due diligence of speaking with some on the sales team. So that the intent behind those in balance is very different from what we call low intent sources. So a few examples of low intent sources. I used this example earlier but gated content.
Maybe you have a white paper or an e-book and you're dating that behind a form, just because someone gives you their email address for a piece of content doesn't mean they're ready for a sales conversation. Content syndication used to be a very popular tactic and many companies are still doing it today. The intent here is similar. People are basically exchanging their information for content and you're getting a list of people that you can reach out to similar concept.
Maybe they were willing to give their email address for content but they're not ready to buy. Events. Hey, I've been guilty of this too at trade shows or conferences in the past scanning all the people who walk by your booth and giving that list to your sales team to follow up just because they walked by your booth or visited your booth or even had a conversation with you doesn't mean that they're going to be ready to have a serious sales process. So these are all examples of low intent sources.
So if you look at the chart here, what you're seeing is if you split up your high intent and your low intent sources, you're going to see some key differences as you analyze the funnel here. So you're typically going to see pretty significantly less volume of high intent sources than low intent sources. That's a common trend that we see. But you're going to see that the conversion rate from those leads to opportunities is significantly different here you're seeing it's a difference of 50% versus 3%.
Even though you're only delivering 500 leads versus 3000 leads, you're converting a significant number of more opportunities from the high intent sources. And then as you see, as you take a look at the close rate of how many of those opportunities are actually going to convert to customers, and even if you're generous and use that same close rate across either or you're seeing you're going to get over 3x the number of customers from your high intent sources versus your low intent sources. So this with the funnel analysis and taking your own data within your CRM and putting it in this view can be quite impactful for your leadership team if you're looking to make a business case of hey, we need to make a change look at the core difference here. And how do we think about re architecting our marketing strategy and our demand gen strategy to focus on driving as many high intent.
Sort of pipeline inbound pipeline requests versus low intent. Let's dig into the map a little bit more here because if you start to continue to crunch the numbers and tell the story, you basically come to the conclusion that you would need 16 times more leads from low intent sources than high intent sources to acquire the same amount of customers. And so again, this just continues to drive home the importance of adapting your strategy to how B2B buyers are buying today. Everybody's data is different and so you won't see maybe these exact numbers, but we see this trend time and time again with every customer.
So here's a couple of additional examples, which I think is really important, and it'll highlight a couple of additional metrics that are also important to be thinking about when you're architecting your strategy. And so again, you'll see if you take a look here at the declared intent website conversions. This is this is the best case scenario, right? This is effectively people that are coming to you and raising their hand and saying that they want to have a sales conversation.
You're going to see the sales velocity is significantly higher than any other pipeline source. You're going to see the win rate is significantly higher than any other pipeline source. You're going to see the total number of leads that you need to close a deal are going to be much less and you're going to see your lead to win close rate much higher than any of these other sources. So all of these funnel metrics improve if you take this approach and you'll continue to see meaningful compounding positive effects as you further deploy and give the strategy more time to work.
So let's get specific now. Hopefully I've convinced you that it's time to make a change. I've given you a roadmap of how to think about taking a look at the data that you have and putting a business case together for, you know, your own company and to get the requisite buy in that you need from your leadership team. How do we think about crafting that modern demand gen strategy.
So the way that we like to think about it is that you have three core pillars of your demand gen strategy and you need to think about deploying different strategies and tactics for each of these core pillars. We think about demand creation, demand capture and demand conversion. So let's talk about each one. I'm going to start with converting demand at the bottom here.
So when we talk about converting demand, this is really about for those that are in market to buy and are actively looking for you. And finding your website, for example, we want to make sure that for all of those types of buyers, we are converting as many of those buyers into sales conversations as quickly as possible. So this is really about how are you thinking about your website conversion rate optimization strategy. How are you thinking about when someone comes in and requests a demo or asked to talk to your sales team.
What is that experience like for them and is it fully optimized to make sure that you're maximizing on converting that demand into opportunities and pipeline. And so the key things to think about here are your websites really important. You want to make sure that you have transparent pricing that you have, you know, social proof in the form of customer case studies, testimonials, real use cases of the outcomes that your customers have been able to drive. And then once they submit the form, you want to be optimizing for speed and quality of conversation.
Allow them to book a meeting right within that form completion process and get them on the phone with a qualified account executive as soon as possible. So let's talk a little bit about capture demand so that demand capture pillar. And so this is really about, okay, people are, you know, there's a, there's sort of a saying that about 5% of your market will be in market to buy right now. And typically what happens when someone is, you know, actively looking for a solution like yours, there's a few things that they'll typically do.
They're going to go to Google and begin doing their own research, right. And so when you're thinking about paid search and SEO, those are really important strategies to capture demand. But it's important to recognize that that's only a fraction of your market. However, obviously we want to capture all of that demand and convert as much of a much of it as possible to sales conversations.
So here paid search retargeting campaigns SEO are all really crucial. Additionally, things like review sites G2, cap, Tara. People might be looking up, you know, your company on the sites to read reviews from other people and also see your competitors and begin to make some comparisons about what might work for them. So you want to make sure that you have budget allocated and you're deploying the right type of paid search and SEO and retargeting strategy to capture that 5% of demand.
And then the third pillar, arguably the most important pillar and the one that I think most B2B companies today are not doing enough of. So we just talked about how 5% of your market is in market to buy today. What about the other 95% so that 95% of people that are in your market but not actively looking to buy today might want to buy your product, just not now. Next week, next week, next week, next quarter, next year.
And the most impactful thing that you can do with this 95% of your target market is make them aware that you exist. Right. So the goal behind your demand creation strategy is how do I educate and tell my target market about the problem we solve, the solution, our brand, our specific product, why we're different. And how do I meet buyers where they're at today so that they can consume that information in the normal course of their life.
So the factics here are really around thinking about how do you deploy a really effective podcast strategy event strategy. How do you have your founder and your executive team, your subject matter experts posting organically on social media to communicate their thought leadership and their points of view. How are you leveraging paid social advertising to guarantee distribution to your target audience and begin to generate that word of mouth. So this is what I see as one of the biggest opportunities for B2B companies out there that are just simply not doing enough to educate their target market.
And so when the market works as intended, once this 95% of your market that is not in market today becomes ready to buy in the future, they already know you exist. And the ideal end state would be that they then come in and raise their hand and want to initiate a sales process with you. So I want to talk a little bit about measurement. So we talked about the create and capture demand pillars.
And it's really important to recognize that a lot of the traditional attribution models and methods for measurement that were used in the website era are not fully sufficient to measure the impact of demand creation programs. And if you're going to, you know, take the time to invest in convincing your leadership team, it's time to make this change and put together a strategy that makes sense. You want to make sure that you're setting yourself up to measure this measure your success effectively. And so what you're seeing here are two different approaches to how to think about leveraging attribution tools in order to measure success of your program effectiveness.
So when you think about demand capture, let's talk about the paid search as an example. So software based attribution is actually quite effective at directly attributing any inbound lead to a paid search campaign. So for your capture demand pillar leveraging the software based attribution that, for example, natively exist within hub spot is super effective, and that will allow you to see whether you're getting an ROI on your paid search program. Sort of side note, it's very easy to spend too much on paid search.
So you do want to be measuring our live. It's absolutely an effective channel, but ensure that you're leveraging it effectively and being as efficient as possible. Now, when you think about your demand creation strategies, this is where software based attribution can fall short. It's not going to tell you that the inbound lead actually heard about you because they listened to your podcast, or they were in the pavilion slack community, or their colleague, you know, provided a referral via word of mouth.
Those things just don't show up in software attribution. So what we do at refine labs and what we figured out is simply ask your customer. So when we work with our customers, we require that all of them add a required field to their primary conversion form. We ask the customer, how did you hear about us?
It's a free form free text field, and it allows them to just type in where they heard about you. And typically what we see are a common set of responses to that question. People will reference a podcast if you have one or an event if you have a robust event strategy. They'll reference a particular social media channel.
I heard about you on LinkedIn or Facebook or Reddit. They'll say that they heard about you from a colleague or a friend or it was a referral. So you begin to get a lot more rich data points on which of your create the NAM programs are effective. Something to consider here and that I always point out is you a really interesting exercise to help further reinforce the impact of these programs is to begin collecting the self-reported attribution and actually compare your self-reported attribution to what the self-reported attribute is.
So you can also use the self-reported attribution to what the self-retrobucion to what the self-retrobucion provides and what you're going to see is some interesting trends. So, self-retrobucion, for example, will typically allocate a significant percentage of the leads to either organic search or direct traffic. So let's break that down. Direct traffic means they went straight to your website, right?
They knew your URL. They went to your website. And so, the thing is when software attribution says direct traffic, self-reported attribution will show that the customer entered in one of these dark social categories, podcast, LinkedIn, events, word of mouth. And obviously, they must have heard about you from somewhere if they knew enough to find you by going direct to your website.
The same is true for organic search, right? The only difference here is that they pass through Google to get to you. So leveraging these two measurement methods is crucial so that you're collecting as many data points as possible to measure the effectiveness of these programs. We've talked about some of this, but I wanted to basically walk through the full roadmap.
So what you're seeing here is the steps that you need to take and the process for making the change from Legion to demand gen. And so, let's break it down one step at a time. So step one is embrace reality. This is where it's really crucial to put together that business case.
You need to take a look at all of the data in your CRM, like HubSpot, your marketing automation platform, like HubSpot, Marketo. You need to evaluate all of your historical opportunity data and see what the data is telling you. Which pipeline sources are the primary contributors to pipeline and revenue? Where are you seeing interesting insights on which programs are effective and which ones are not?
This is your starting point. You need to know what is happening. From there, you can begin to break down, leveraging our split the funnel analysis approach and begin to build a roadmap to build into the change. You can begin to stop or reduce investment in programs that don't have strong ROI.
You can begin to introduce new programs. For example, demand creation programs that you might not have been focusing on up until that point. And that needs to be put together into a compelling business case so that you can really get your leadership team and your sales team fully bought into this process. Once you embrace reality and you make your business case, you're ready to begin making the shift.
And so from here, there's a lot of work under here, but this is where you begin to get the work done. So, number that close measurement gap step is really around. Once you do your analysis, you might realize you're not tracking things in the way that you need to. That's really important to make sure that you're collecting as much data as possible so you can optimize your programs on an ongoing basis.
So you have to do some work there with your marketing ops team. You then want to optimize demand capture. So how are we making optimizations to our website to improve conversion rate from our lead handoff process for marketing to sales? How are we ensuring that we have appropriate budget and efficiencies on paid search?
So, make sure you're launching a robust demand creation strategy, both from an organic and a paid standpoint. And think about the medium and longer term, how you can begin building trust and authority with your target market through leadership through content community. And then step three is really what we like to call stacking growth. And so this step is once you've embraced reality and made the shift, now you can begin to build upon your new modern demand and strategy that you've implemented so that you can continue to drive improved results.
You can start scaling programs. This is about thinking about how you can leverage marketing to expand your current customer base via extended renewals or cross cell and upsell. How you can think about launching into new target audiences or segments and how you can start to diversify distribution by adding new channels to your mix. So with that, we went through all of the primary information to give you guys that roadmap of how to make the change and how to really adapt your strategy to how B2B buyers are buying today.
I love Q&A. So if you guys have any questions, I'd love to start taking some questions and we can chat through whatever's on your mind. We have one question from Google. Let me show on screen.
Question, contact us tends to be a high intent source, but depends always on the content of the contact outreach. Some prospects are just exploring and curious and reach out. The same with events. If you host your own event and bring the right people in your workshop posted event, they might have intent or not.
So what's the difference? Would it also be important to track contacts in those channels? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think you're really speaking to some of the nuance here.
And I love a question like this. So we can kind of get into a little bit more of a specific conversation around this. So I think that can be true. If you have a more generic contact us form, sometimes that could be any number of things.
Sometimes it can even be existing customers needing support to people that maybe don't have intent, but had a question that they couldn't find an answer to you on the website. So that actually speaks to how you're thinking about crafting your primary call to action on your website. And so what we find is focusing on how is your call to action really clear and specific, your primary call to action that is. That is whether it's to request a demo or set up a strategy meeting or talk to sales.
And so when you frame up your primary CTA as really oriented to taking that first step in the buying process, it's really going to make sure that the quality of submissions is consistently higher. It doesn't mean you can't also have a contact us form, but perhaps that's on the footer or in a different location on your website. And that way you'll have a barometer of quality there. That said, you will have in bounds come in that maybe aren't as far along as others.
And they're really in information gathering mode. And in that case, I still think that's a worthy conversation for your sales team to have, especially they're coming to you and they want some more information and to talk with you. Events are interesting. So when you think about events, I think that events can be really powerful for brand awareness for trust building to develop authority to really create a community, allow your potential audience to come in and spend time with other, you know, other people within their industry or their peers.
When you think of events, I think they're most impactful when you don't look at them as a lead gen tactic. Really what it is, is it's an opportunity for you to bring your audience together to give them a great experience to build community. Obviously, there's lots of opportunities for you to talk about what you do for you to use that opportunity to educate your market about things that they don't already know. But typically when we do events or when we're talking to our customers and doing events, it's not that you should try to follow up and sell to everybody that came to your event.
It's more about how are you leveraging that strategy to build that awareness. So, you know, maybe it's a year later when someone was at your event, but then they're actually in market to buy your product and they remember you. They remember the experience they had. They remember feeling that you had, you know, authority, trust, and now they come to you when they're ready to buy.
It's more of a medium and a long term play. Now, that said, you can have your sales people at the event and they can be building great relationships. And in fact, in many cases, you might end up having sales conversations that are a direct follow up for me event itself because the timing was right and your sales team was working the room and having conversations. And that's a little bit more opportunistic, but I think that's the way that I would like to think about it.
Hopefully that clarifies and answers that question. Yeah, I hope that Hugo is satisfied with the answer. But yeah, I agree with you. Definitely 100%.
It's all about networking and also me personally, I don't like salesy moments sales people being pushy and so I completely get your perspective. It's even this event, right? Like if Hugo, what if scale follows up tomorrow? Because let's have a demo.
You're like, I just wanted you, you got some great speakers together and I was really just learning. I just wanted to see it see the event. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So next up is how to prioritize demand creation channels and set budgets. That's a great question. And so this is the sort of simple strategy that I like to take.
Obviously, it really depends on the company, but this is how you want to think about it. So you want to clearly define your target audience. Who is my ICP? Who is my target market?
Who is my target audience? Once you have that really clear, then you want to identify what are the social media channels where this audience is spending their time today. So I'll give you a few examples. If you sell into marketing and sales teams, LinkedIn will be a great channel for you.
Every marketer and sales person is on LinkedIn. If you're selling into a technical audience, maybe you're a cybersecurity company, Reddit is a really interesting channel where that more technical audience really loves and leverages that channel for information sharing and learning and peer conversations. And so it really starts with clearly define your audience and then take a look at all the channels available and identify where the bulk of your audience is spending their time. Of course, your audience will probably be on multiple channels and that's okay too.
Right. You can begin to stack length them based on the predominance of the audience on each of those channels. When you think about budget, there's a few factors that come into play. The size of your audience is one huge factor.
So depending, you know, you might have a smaller niche audience or your total addressable market might be any mid market enterprise company. So your budget will really sort of depend on how many people you're trying to reach, the larger the audience, the larger the budget that you'll need. Additionally, if you decide you're going to attack multiple channels, you might need more budget to support multiple channels. What we typically recommend is to start with optimizing paid search and selecting one social channel to start to really get that going and driving predictable results and then over time, stack growth and layer in additional channels.
That way you can scale budget incrementally as you're delivering results and in a more sort of responsible and sustainable way. So you would recommend focusing on one channel first on one page channel, for example, and then proceeding with the other ones based on your findings. Yeah, and just to clarify, like we usually would recommend starting with two paid channels. So you want to look at search and social so paid search again is under that demand capture pillar and then social with the under demand creation.
So how can you identify two channels that you can deploy a paid strategy on that are going to support both a demand capture and a demand creation motion. Additionally, leveraging organic strategies on social media is really powerful too. Do you have a founder CEO that has a lot to say can they start posting through their personal profile on LinkedIn doing those at the same time can be even more effective. Obviously with paid advertising, you guarantee distribution and it allows you to drive more short and medium term results which everybody is always looking to do.
Yeah, that's true. Nowadays, everyone is looking for a short term. Yeah. So who goes said no, no demo please thanks for the context and talk the answer.
So no demo. It's okay. We have another question in your organization to target different buying personas in your marketing or focus on one. If the former what are the elements that differ in your approach to them.
Yeah, so that's a great question. So oftentimes, especially if you're selling into a B2B company that might be classified as a mid market or enterprise B2B company. There's often multiple people that are involved in the buying decision right they'll call it a buying group and you kind of have to get everybody on board in order for the sale to go through. And so the way that we think about this is number one.
Now when you think about the different people in the buying group, there may be different reasons why each of those people are going to be motivated to make that purchasing decision. And so what that means is, you know, if you're like the core messaging for maybe a CFO who's going to sign off on the purchase versus a head of marketing who's going to leverage the tool or the service, they're going to have different motivations. Right. So the thing is going to want to know how is this product going to help me achieve my marketing goals, make my job easier, save me time.
The CFO is going to be very concerned about the cost, the ROI does this product save my organization money. And so what that means is you need to map out all of the buying personas that are in your buying group, and you need to get really clear on what the core key messages are for each of those roles within your buying group. So you're not crafting your strategy for the actual creative that you're going to deploy to that segment of your audience. You want to make sure that the messaging and the creative is speaking to what matters to them most.
So you might actually have a separate campaign for CFOs that has a very targeted message that's really going to resonate with them versus the head of marketing, for example. And so again, put yourself in your buyer's shoes. What do they care about? What is motivating their decisions?
And how are you designing your campaigns and your creative strategy to speak to that? That's what's going to actually be effective and the results that you're looking for. So you're saying that you should have different campaigns for different types of the persona that you're looking for, that you're aiming for. So for example, in one company, in one company, you are going to target a CFO, a marketing, a sales person.
I don't know, like you're looking to create several campaigns for different personas. Right? Yes. You need to be identifying what is going to motivate each of these different roles and your creative campaigns and speak to that.
And then from a technical campaign setup, yes, you'll want to segment audiences. Now, some campaigns you have maybe are more broad and you can group all of those roles together into one campaign because the message you're sending will resonate with everyone. That's fantastic. But you need to be thinking about it and crafting your strategy in that way so that your buyer receives the message and it resonates with them.
Yeah, that's the most important thing. Yeah. I would like to ask you one thing if you can remember some examples of companies that have successfully adapted to changing buyer behavior and implemented effective dimensions. Absolutely.
So, yeah, we've worked with almost 300 companies over the last four years to make this change from lead gen to demand gen. The common business results or business outcomes that we see at companies that we work with include, it's very typical for most companies when they start working with us. They've never done demand creation. So 100% of their budget is allocated to demand capture.
And it's driving a certain, it's certain results, right? It's not that nothing is working. They are getting results from that. And so one big shift that we see is instead of allocating 100% of your demand gen budget to demand capture strategies, we try to move everyone into a 60, 40 split, 40% of your budget on demand capture 60% of your budget on demand creation.
That can vary obviously from company to company, but that's a general, general rule. The other thing that we look at is the total amount of in bounds that are coming into the website and how can we increase the quantity and the quality of those in bounds, especially the quality of exactly because we know that if we can put people through that buying flow, that has the highest likelihood of converting into pipeline and revenue. So how are we re-architecting campaigns to increase that? Another thing that we typically see is a faster sales cycle.
And so when you think about starting outbound and reaching buyers when they might not be in market, that sales process could take a really long time. When you take this approach of education and driving people in, they're more likely to move through your sales process much more quickly. So we start to see a reduction in your total sales cycle. So these are all common outputs.
That's of course in addition to driving just more marketing source pipeline and revenue overall, which are obviously those key lagging metrics that we all want to see. And what are some common misconceptions that I have, because you have worked obviously with some big brands, and what are some common misconceptions about modern buyer behavior? What's something that they just don't get or are really resisting to change? Yeah, I think my hypothesis, when I explain the beginning part of my presentation today to people, most people will agree.
It's hard to disagree with some of those facts that I shared at the beginning. That's what has changed. When I ask someone, how do you want to buy? You go doesn't want to demo from scale immediately.
Maybe he will one day, but just not tomorrow after this event. And so when I asked the leaders today, how do you like to buy, they reply with the same answer that I gave at the beginning of this talk. However, all of these companies are also in high pressure situations where they need to hit goals. They need to generate pipeline and revenue.
And so I think the dynamic that we're seeing is human nature. They default to what's comfortable, what they know, what they've done before, even if it doesn't work as well, or at all, in some cases. And so I think people agree with it. I think people don't know the steps to take to make the change.
Everybody recognizes that they need to make the change to be made, and that they, you know, they'll admit that the way they buy has changed. But I think what stops people is the roadmap to get there. And the reality is, is you can't make the change overnight. And that's why I walked through that three step process.
Like you have to go through a very thoughtful transition while ensuring that you're doing what you can to hit short and medium term goals, but also set yourself up for a long term success. And so I think the misconception is like, Oh, I just have to like flip this switch. I can't do it. And, you know, maybe in a transition, we keep certain lead gen programs on for a period of time while we're giving the demand creation programs time to actually drive results.
And so I think misconception could be like all or nothing. And as long as you're moving in the right direction and making changes, you know, consistently to transform your demand, you know, gen strategy, you have to start, you have to start sometimes. The things we'll start now, and I think there is a way that you can transition into it easily and do what you can for your short medium and long term revenues. I have patience and the best time to start is no.
I would say that that would be the main thing. We have the last question from Anastasia. I was once asked, How do you see whether your messaging works resonates? The immediate answer might be you see if you have sales.
You do have other answers to this. That's a great question. And so I think the best way is to actually talk to your current customers. talk to your current customers and ask, why did they buy the product?
What are the benefits that they're enjoying? Why do they keep using the product? The language that they use and the reasons that they give is going to be your first clue if what they're saying actually matches up with what your core messaging and positioning is. So I would say that would be my number one suggestion.
There's also different tools out there now. There's a great company called Winter, and they actually will do message testing with your target audience for you and give you direct feedback on whether or not that messaging resonated, right? There's different options where you can get some help if you need some external validation on whether you need to be refreshing your messaging or positioning, but talking to your customers, listening to sales calls, that's going to be how you find out. Yeah, it all gets to talk to your customers.
Like I think that's the basics that we all need to follow. Okay, so thank you Megan for your time. This was really interesting presentation. I'm sure that everyone enjoyed it and is going to enjoy it when they see the recording.
I wish you a nice day and hope to speak soon. Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me. Take care.
Take care. Bye.