Today on SAC and Growth, Matt Chinella is launching the first episode of B2B Reality Check. This is going to be a bi-weekly series where he comes on to talk about a problem that he or someone else is facing in the B2B marketing industry. So today he's responding to a survey that our senior VP of marketing, Evan Hughes, conducted earlier this year. One of the questions was what would most likely cause you to change agencies?
And there were some really interesting answers here. So Matt dove into those and tried to break down some of the reasons why people don't seem to trust the agency that they're with or can't explain the impact that they're having. Hope you all enjoy. I'm Matthew Chinella, VP of Innovation at our Fylabs, and this is your B2B reality show.
So I want to talk about the kind of state of agency relationships for B2B SaaS marketing leaders. I think it's a really interesting question that we asked. And the question was what would most likely cause you to change agencies? We got almost 100 respondents to this question.
And there were two answers that were cited substantially more than others. And I kind of want to talk through both of those answers. And the first one that I wanted to talk through for a reason they would change agency was 33% of respondents cannot explain their agency's impact internally. And it made me think about why that's the case for marketing leaders and their agency relationship.
And when it comes down, there's two fundamental issues that I see at play there. One is if the agency cannot show a less touch attribution, which I think is where a lot of agencies get judged for better or for worse. Everything looks fuzzy in terms of looking at measuring impact. You get boxed into really only a couple of channels, Google or LinkedIn, or you're going to run direct response on meta or another platform.
And then I think one of the other big reasons, and going back to that whole point about Google and then those are two of the most expensive advertising platforms on the internet right now. 60 to $200 CPMs on LinkedIn, depending on your bid strategy, your audience size, whether you're enterprise, targeting these with all kinds of complications there. And then on Google, there's just it's such a saturated channel. Everyone is running the same high intent token modifier exact match strategy.
You basically could be everyone else doing that. So unless you have a very unique way to run exact match page search, you're basically running two very expensive channels to show impact. And then the other part to me is market leaders are often tied to a North Star metric that forces certain behaviors. So that for most are MQL volumes.
And then to me, what that means is those four certain behaviors. So if MQL is your North Star goal, ultimately what happens because we're humans and this is our nature is the, in order to hit the goal, you lower the definition and when you lower the definition, you do different, you do plays to fit that definition. So low, so MQL, the luminous MQL goals equals lower MQL definitions, equals volume legion placed. And I think a lot of that comes down to running like content download or like you're doing a lot of, you're doing like email or a certain, certain other sorts of tactics within it that are just designed to get last touch attribution, a lot of legion form stuff as well because 80% of impressions that you deliver only did right now are going to be mobile.
And imagine just, if you know that, how much different your behavior would be only if you understood just how much of your delivery was actually mobile in nature. The other one is, I think it's just the marketing source metrics. So like it has to be tied to a marketing event. So you have hand raisers, form fills, event attendees, cold outreach.
So there's just a need to track against the silo goal. And that's just incentivizes marketing leaders and their agencies to behave in certain ways. That means you run a lot of direct response, you run low-intensity gen, you run a lot of webinar plays with like a pre-unsophisticated sales outreach motion on the back end of it. And a lot of what drives effectiveness in paid media is actually not marketing source outcomes.
Really, really good paid media run well. And this is talking, when I'm talking about agency relationship, I'm usually talking in the context of a media agency. A lot of what drives effectiveness in paid media is more than type of sales outcomes and not necessarily marketing outcomes. And so when you think about what you would triage on, if you can talk about sales outcome, really what that comes down to the first metric, the leading indicator metric is actually book meetings and not MQLs.
People wear sales sits down. And imagine how you would behave differently if you knew that was your new or star metric. How would you do paid media differently if that were the case? And I think that gets down to the other real root cause fundamentally to me, which is the expectation setting.
So there's always with an agency, a POV that they're coming in with, right? We do this ourselves out of our final ad. We have the Branding Man Expand framework, right? And your POV is often what gets you hired in the first place, but POVs from agencies are not mandates from boards or CEOs.
So the mandate comes from the CEO, the executive team, the board, that's what marketing is responsible for. So the mandate comes from the CEO, the executive team and the board. This is what marketing gives you a sponsor before. Normally it's a marketing source goal of some kind, right?
MQL, marketing source pipeline, sales qualified pipeline source for marketing, et cetera, et cetera. The agency POV seeks to fit around that, but that might not always vibe. For instance, if the mandate for you as the marketing leaders is less such attribution through a POV motion, an agency that's coming in with a heavy brand awareness POV is going to get themselves in you fired, right? So the big part walking in here is your agency should understand what are you on the hook for and how can they support?
Because there's no chance to run their POV until they can meet your goal, whether one you have to go in front of the board for. So marketing leaders, how can agencies, they need to be really clear with that agency, right off the bat. This is my mandate. Here's how I have to report on it.
These are the constraints I work with. Everyone's going to have constraints. It's kind of the unspoken part about marketing. Like I am tied to last touch attribution.
I can only advertise only in Google. We can only target against this account list. There's all these constraints that you walk. Our data is really bad.
We don't have great conversion tracking. We run two different websites that don't talk to each other. We don't have good signals. There's all of these constraints that marketing leaders work with that they just don't really want to tell their agency out loud because they feel like they're telling everyone else.
But telling your agency the constraints you work with as a market leader is one of the best things that you can do because your marketing agency is probably seen this before. But they probably seen it after they've been running their program for three to six months. It's not working as well as they would expect. So understanding the constraints at the outset helps them shape the program to help you be successful.
So this really all boils down to that beautiful word I like to say alignment. But understanding constraints is part of aligning with your agency. And then the other thing is just telling them like I would like to do more of this outside my mandates because I believe in it. Double esophically, totally cool.
And then how can we balance both to get where we need to go? And like these kinds of open discussions, first it just sets a tone for the relationship I think in a way that makes it very mutually beneficial. The agency wants to work to help you get your goal and you want to work with the agency to make sure that when they tell you that they need things that are not in their scope, you can help get them there. One of the biggest things that we run into and see it's the most successful clients that we ever work with.
They all have great product marketing. I think that's the most common line of, this most common thread across any client we work with that we do really well with is part is PMF, part of market is there. And the product marketing is consistently updated. The messaging is clear.
They have segmentation. They zero in on it. You know, those things drive a lot of success. So so if you're a marketing leader and you're struggling to explain your agency's impact internally, think about how well you're aligned with them on your mandates and your constraints and what you need out of them.
Agencies on their part need to be clear with their POC. So your mandates fit or don't fit how pay media works. You should tell your POC that and adjust accordingly. You really should be doing that sales process more than anything.
Your go-to-market motion matches or doesn't match your data and your signals. If they have a good onboarding process, they'll be able to ID that in the first 30 days and be able to tell you that. So if your agency does not cannot, if your agency cannot tell you that, they're not doing a good job onboarding you. Like they should know if you go to market motion for a pain media is going to match your data and your signals and kind of what you're working with.
And they should be able to discuss that with you. If not, you need to revisit your agency. You're probably paying for a cheap rate of C that's not your CRM. And that's usually where a lot of these relationships go to die.
I think the other thing, this is especially true if you have a last touch mandate, your offers are weak and they're not distinct. If you're heavily judged on last touch, a demo request offer is not good enough. You need to be more tightly aligned with your sales team. You need to be more open to doing webinars.
You need to figure out content offers that can turn into sales offers. And you need to be willing to test things that maybe you don't like philosophically. Gift card demos will be one thing is, for instance, you need to think about what is a proof of concept or a pilot look like that's enticing. How does it fit around a go-to-market?
What's something that we can do for $50 that we can sell for $100 that can feel like it's worth $200? Think about offers in those contexts, right? So offers I think are another big thing. They should be telling you whether you need to work on your offers or not.
Ideally, by talking to a couple of customers, having networks where they can talk to things like that. And then the other thing is going back to your data and your signals, your infrastructure, CRM in particular, doesn't allow you to do lift-based or incrementality-based testing. If you want to look at going back to triaging on sales meetings, if you were to do that in the absence of attribution, how would you do that? You probably want to do some kind of a mentality, a lift-based test, to tell that out.
You want to do that with a split target list. You want to do that by looking at designated market area data and your CRM. You want to tease that out. You want to do that against the product line.
You want to judge that on meetings booked, source agnostic, all kinds of ways you want to test that. But if your infrastructure isn't there, you just need to tell you that and tell you to work on it. And then the other thing is just needing more segmentation to validate an ICP fully. So a lot of times we'll run into companies where their best-fit clients are this, this, and this, but they all want to run this, this, and this.
And you can see that mismatch and see how that doesn't work. And this goes back to your mandates and your constraints. If you're constrained, if you're constrained, it's less touch. You're probably going to want to split that segment out very fully and then go with a very market specific offer there, as well as market specific messaging.
This goes back to like in the Brand Amen Expand Firm, like, we're going to talk about this in future podcasts, like what does a immature versus a mature model look like? And a lot of that comes down to having good market segmentation and messaging that fits across that. So needing segmentation to validate an ICP, your agency should be able to tell you that because they should have been in your CRM in the last 30 days, or in the first 30 days and telling you whether you have it or not. Okay.
So the other thing I was really interesting about this survey going back to the question, so that was the first result that to me was really interesting. I wanted to talk to, I think, implications on that. The other answer of what would most likely cause you to change agencies is I don't trust the recommendations. I'm getting 29% of respondents said that.
That was the other, by far, most common reason cited. To me, that is really in two things. Again, probably three, but I'll try to really tell. Let's forget.
I'm going to go to three things. Three things. One is there's a lack of paid media testing. And this is amazing how we walk.
We, in other agencies, do a walk into clients and will want to do testing, like real testing, and say they can't do that because the budgets are earmarked. And it's like, you're not for what? You have to kind of think about what do you want to be able to accomplish for you? A lack of paid media testing is when you're not testing constantly, you're not learning anything.
The idea of paid media testing should be to learn something and then figure out whether it's repeatable and then actually figure out if it's repeatable, then figure out if it's scalable, right? And so you think about repeating against markets and then scaling against segments, for instance, when you were to run, like, let's say, an incrementality dust. It's hard to recommend stuff other than what is in front of you. So if you take a big bunch of media budget and you run that to a target account list and you're looking at a account penetration and you're saying, okay, well, we were able to penetrate 10% of our accounts this year, spending a half million dollars in ads then.
But that's really all we're able to tell you. By and large, we can tell you directly to what we got from Legion or events or branded search or how many impressions or engagements we're delivered, right? But like, it's not learning anything and supporting it. You want your paid media to help you learn stuff about what channels work better for you and why and like, what kind of, how did you learn that, right?
And that's rooted in testing. I think the other reason why you wouldn't trust recommendations to get this because your agency just isn't deep enough in the data. So you're not going to trust recommendations that they aren't deeply rooted in your scenario data. I think the last thing you want to know is like, or Google ads producing anything, is branded producing for us?
Not branded. If we were to turn branded off, what would that do for us? That kind of goes back to testing and those are things that I think you need to understand. How many of our target account was moved to opportunity?
Was there direct attribution? Was there a lot of influence data if you have tolerance for that? Not everyone does. It goes back to expectation setting with your agency.
What are the cross effects between LinkedIn influence and branded search conversions? Something that we look at all the time and are very interested in kind of teasing out and chilling. So like, what's that relationship look like? And then the other thing is like, the reason why you don't trust those recommendations you get is because your agencies aren't helping you answer.
I think if you really keep on questions within your pay media data, one is, is my expenditure in this channel driving the result I need? And then how should I be evaluating these channels? Not every channel is going to be one that you can run performance marketing on, right? YouTube is not really that kind of channel.
CTV is not really that kind of channel. At home is not really that kind of channel. DSPs, another one can be difficult to do that way. So how should you be evaluating channels?
This goes back to constraint semantics, right? Is it direct conversions? Is it lifted meetings booked? Is it account penetration via a split test?
Like, how should I be evaluating channels? Goes back to alignment with your agency. And the more upfront that you are with your agency over this is the mandates I'm working with, these are my door star metrics. So this is what I have to meet.
And before we can do anything that's more advanced, we have to hit this minimally valuable goal. Cool. I mean, just have to be upfront with that overall. So when I think about what's causing VP of marketing anxiety when it comes to agency relationships, I think a lot of it comes down to communication, alignment, understanding constraints, aligning their POV with your mandates, and then coming up with a way to hit the thing that you're on the hook for or have it support, have your pay media agency support the thing that you're on the hook for, drive a percentage of that based on the way that you're judged, and then allowing space for that same agency to work on the things that you believe in fundamentally drive results.
And if you were to do that, I think everyone's affiliated with their agency would be heck of a lot better than what the survey tees out. Have a question? Want to talk to your media? Want to say Matt, you're totally full of shit.
You have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to running pay. It's cool. Drop me a line. Ask me.
I'm happy to answer that question to the best of my ability. We're all human and infallible here still in the not quite age of AI. So happy to answer. And I hope you guys reach out to me and ask me because I'm curious to hear what you all