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hi everyone welcome back to demand coded dan here as usual and we have josh back on the podcast which is amazing after a couple of fantastic episodes he's joining us again and this time we're talking all of we're talking about attribution and how we go about attribution without the politics in marketing and attribution wars between marketing and sales it's kind of been an issue forever in marketing and in sales how do you attribute how do you compensate how do you actually align these two core functions of the business and give them the credit they deserve and also serve the business in the best way at the at the same time and yeah hopefully in this episode we're gonna share some insights on how to align those two teams and how to attribute in the best way possible so josh great to have you back here and yes it's an interesting topic i'm thrilled to be back this is our first time doing this when we're not in the same room so or see how it goes but yep back here in atlanta and this is this is a topic that's been you know since the dawn of marketing right people have been struggling to get to have their met marketing and sales teams on the same page singing from the same play him book or whatever you know analogy you wanna use yeah i i'm excited to talk about it let's sneak in before we get into the episode today here's a quick word from our sponsors hubspot you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city's football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience all in one platform this allowed their small team of just three to build an entire website in just three days the result nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better well i think to frame us off like we should just cover why this is such a big issue why has always been such a big issue but why still an issue you'd think with all the technology available all of the systems we now have in place for marketing and sales surely the attribution problem like should be put to bed but actually it's probably more prevalent than ever it's a bigger issue than ever and yeah really just companies are struggling to solve this challenge and i think we've both had experience and witness issues firsthand right yeah i mean i you know i think of it as maybe three different key drivers of this dilemma what one is human beings generally want to be measured for their contributions based on what they can control it doesn't feel real good to be able to to to be told we're gonna measure you this way and that way you know you don't have complete control over over what happens right and so that that's part of it and for marketers you know that that often not always but often ends at the hand off to sales and so it's very easy very intuitive to say well i show only be measured on that part yeah sales you know from a sales perspective though if you put your your shoes on your salesperson shoes on for a minute and walk walk in their shoes they never have complete control over there outcomes right they have competitors they have internal politics at their customer they have all these other they have they have to rely on product effectiveness product market fit they have to like all these things that impact their ability to be successful and they have to be and they still get measured on that success one one way or the other right there's no excuses in sales and so i think those dilemma are those the nature of those you know those functions when not proactively managed and designed can all can it just it's it's sort of natural that these things come up i think the second reason they come up and it's something you brought up while we were prepping for this is that very often they end up in different systems mark been working in one system and sales is working in another i mean and and i think you've seen that with some of our customers right absolutely yeah it's it's such a big issue that you just wouldn't expect right sales are operating out of the core crm that might be attached to service as well like serving a customer afterwards marketing have absolutely no visibility into the pipeline into closed one revenue and this just in itself causes measurement gaps marketing then have to measure something to prove their worth in the business but this can't physically be pipeline or revenue because they don't even have visibility of it that and that blows my mind i mean especially when platforms like hubspot do exist that do a great job of of being able to bring them to bring people together and bring those those two sides of the house together i know you know the other guys would say that they can do that too it can but but it's a whole lot harder to manage in their environment and so like within hubspot like as a hubspot agency we you know that's i just expect that sales and marketing are are are seeing from you know working in the same environment but you're right i mean we run into customers all the time that that are still using hubspot for marketing and and salesforce for sales and while they can be integrated it's never as smooth as if everybody's working from the same platform yeah and then and then i think the other thing that happens dan is over the last twenty five years of b to b growth that that i've been leading the buyer journey and the degree to which we get to play a role in the buyer journey at different places has changed dramatically right and and the frequency of that change and the pace of change i think also contributes to this because there are companies lots of companies that just don't stay up to date on that and so they're using old models and so that when they're as a result their their growth volumes which might have been great for a while start to decline or plateau and they don't know why and and as soon as they don't know why but the but the people above them are pouring down at everybody then point you know finger pointing across can easily happen and and so i think it it again is incumbent upon executive leader leadership senior leadership to really push their teams to you know to to have shared goals shared compensation shared and and a shared ownership of the the state of the art how how b2b b growth continues to evolve and and how it how they need to be behaving now compared to even three or four years ago yeah do you think there is some sort of historical cultural us versus them mindset which causes this disconnect between marketing and sales i mean in certainly in some places like yes i i i would tell professionals in both sides that it's in their best interest to spend a year working on the other side like if you've if you've never carried a bag if you're a marketer and you've never carried a bag you're not going to understand the the pressure that an individual salesperson goes through in their day to day they it's sorry you're not yeah you can pay it well you haven't you just haven't lived it yeah the and and the same is true on the other side if if the average salesperson understood the complexity of marketing and the complexity of the the the demands the volume of demands would generally the the lack of budget to meet all those demands that most organizations have to deal with and the lack of information that marketers have in oftentimes gaps from you know sometimes marketing is the this isn't the certainly the best best practice but but sometimes marketing is the last one in in the door right like last one invited into the meeting and that's a that's crazy but sometimes that that's the case and so like i i do think yeah that that it would be amazing for so you know for people to shit to switch seats for it for a year as ways to build stronger growth teams yeah you know what there's there's a lack of empathy on both sides and right i worked with a really great marketer who was a salesperson before and he kind of like drilled into me the thought process of a salesperson when it gets to the end of the month when it gets to the end of the quarter like okay we might be sending them these a hundred leads we captured at an event or from a webinar they don't care they care about hitting their target to get the their compensation so they can pay their bills like go on holiday like do the things they need to do and have security in their job whereas i like marketing to be fair you know and i say this as a marketer right who doesn't have that target on my back at the end of every month at the end of every quarter like we don't come under that same level of scrutiny that we need to succeed in in order to you know have a livelihood right yeah you're no you're it's a great example of you know when you let's say the companies managed by quarter because most of our b clients aren't month to month their they're quarter to quarter in that environment the last week and a half of that quarter that's that sales team is full on focused on closing right and and so if marketing plans a webinar and in that period and then generates a bunch of leads and we know right we know that leads need to be followed up on in minutes right not yeah not days weeks or or months and the the value of those leads d rapidly over to over you know very short windows well we're not doing ourselves any favor if we plan that in the middle of crunch time for the sales team and so yeah be brings but that's you know again that's where sales and marketing leadership need to be working together to plan their calendars and plan you know plan where they're gonna invest what resources and what their shared outcomes are trying to be right if if we i i mean the other like how many times have you heard a sales or a marketing team say well we generated sql and the sales team say we haven't seen any sql and and and there be this you know giant river of of gap between what marketing things should be good enough and what sales is saying hey no i want the table set better before i engage because it's not worth my time and you know that's that again that is executive leadership but anyway that's a whole another conversation we could do that at another another podcast like how do you how do you define those things in a way to to drive fish effectiveness of both teams but yeah but let's so let's get back to attribution so so you know so yes so we have these dilemma and everybody wants to use money well marketing doesn't wanna lose their budget they wanna be able to assess what is what is effectively turning you know what is most cost effectively creating the most pipeline in the in the best of worlds that's what mark marketing goal is right it's they don't have any other agendas they're just trying to do what's best for the business which is grow as much pipeline as possible qualified pipeline ic pipeline in you know through through means that we can i'd identify understand and replicate right yeah that's what that's what attribution for so you know people go through and there's been all kinds of models right there's there's there was first touch which claimed you know top of funnel success whoo and it didn't matter what happened at the at the bottom there's last touch which which completely ignores everything that happened above you know above that which sometimes sales lu because they may be the last touch but but and then there's there's hybrid models you u shaped models w shaped models like all these different models that pete that we've tried to and but the truth of it is not a single one of them truly emulate the buyer's journey yeah right and why is that i mean technology can only do so much right our ability to view a buyer's journey at every single stage is inhibited by the technology that's available to us buyers are complex creatures and there's this ga guide and we can put it on screen now and it's like the b buyer journey and it's a few years old now but i absolutely love it because it has it has lines all over the place it's just an absolute mess and spaghetti mess but somehow our attribution models our technology is meant to identify all of those sources all of those signals of information and it's just totally impossible some of the most crucial things that happen in a buyer journey might be a conversation around the coffee machine in the office about your product it might be a conversation down the pub with you know an x colleague who is using your products it might be in a slack community that you have no access to it might be in a whatsapp group but there are so many actions that take place outside of any technology visibility whatsoever so in terms of whether you use first touch last touch multi touch i don't really care like they all have their own issues and the the truth thing that matters is the goal at the end and not the attribution that is assigning credit along the way like i do have ideas that we can get into that we apply and how to try and attribute in the best way possible but technology just has fundamental issues and if you think you're gonna implement you know an attribution model you know let's introduce multi touch and it will solve all of your problems and tell you where to invest in the best way possible i'm sorry it's not gonna happen right no you're i'm i'm a hundred percent with you i think it's fun to to talk about what we do here at blend too so what do we use a blend yeah so we are big advocates of several attribution in our attribution modeling taken a hybrid approach so several broad attribution i've i've spoken about loads on this podcast right so it's basically asking the buyer how did you hear about us and the great thing about that there's there's downsides as well which i'll will talk about absolutely are but the great thing about using several attribution is highlighting the dark places where buyers are having conversations they're hearing about your brand for the first time probably the most significant you know recall of your brand and telling you what that is if you look at your software attribution compared to your self reported attribution there will often be a huge disconnects there right if if hub hubspot or another software is telling you that the buyer came to you from organic search or a referral they might actually say in self court attribution oh i heard about you from gary in you know in this company and he just told me to get in touch with you basically so actually your marketing there did nothing right it might the other and it's it self reported attribution is what gives us the roi for this podcast because does we otherwise any other attribution model prohibits us from being able to use this be being able to prove there's a a value to this podcast other than just in in the inherent value of us being out there chatting right like for the you know six people that listen i'm it's skin the the the only one i'm on so the the so but when when when we do that we start to see that people say regularly oh i i heard about you on your podcast and i'm coming to you now because i wanna talk to you about my challenges i've heard a number of different marketers out there tell tell customers oh you shouldn't do podcasts because you know now there are a lot of work and you have to stay you have to stay up on it you have to you know we we spend a lot of effort on it but i think it's one of our best performing go to market strategies and and pipeline generation strategies and yet we would it's a it's a the reason people are saying it that they shouldn't do it is is because they have no way to measure it well self self reported attribution is one one way to measure it it's not the only way but it's one way i think there's also as we approach the world of ai and you know we're we're spending more time in l m's and and getting comfortable with use you know letting the l consume massive amounts of data if we have access to you know if we're collecting every touch point from marketing for a customer or a prospect and every touch point from sales and every page view that they come and visit and we're collecting all this information in our systems ideally in hubspot but you know lot people do lots of different things if we do all of that we can take all of that data unstructured and push it into l and let the l detect you know over the course of let's call it a thousand one in lost deals right a thousand contacts ten ten thousand contacts whatever whatever the right number is to get for it to be able to do have statistical relevance it will go and it will find patterns that we would never find and now to the extent that anything you know that any buyer's journey is well understood that's going to give us a much better sense of what's happening when deals go go to the finish line and what's happening when they don't and and i'm i'm super excited about being able to do that for some of our customers in the near future because to me we've just been like all these attribution models have have been trying but failing to really understand the buyer journey this podcast forecast is brought to you by blend we're a b2b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in martin so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b dot com so yeah funnily enough josh i actually connected claude with hubspot the other day i was doing like a few tests because obviously hubspot now has an integration with chat and claude kept it on read only mode for now because you know i didn't feel comfortable pushing lots of data back into hubspot based on response i got and claude is read only on the way chat gp can work directional but claude is just read only and yeah i mean even the level of analysis i was able to do just on some of our like self reported attribution modeling was but really interesting it's kind of early stages in the testing but it's already given me a really great understanding of what's possible from these large language models with that amount of data being able to structure it in a way that is easily digestible and the amount of context you can get to the prompts to receive something back is absolutely incredible one other the thing that i was thinking of as you were talking then was the ability to measure signals in action and when when we talk about attribution a lot of the time we're thinking channel first so we're thinking out well how do we measure you know our roi from linkedin how do we measure the roi from the podcast but actually we forget how do we measure the roi from intent data how do we measure the roi from outbound signals that occur and there's really interesting ways to go about this as well pulling all of that data into your crm and like you say using ai to detect when this signal occurred we took an action like sales took an action off that and the conversion rate into pipeline and close one based off of that action was this it could be website inquiry comes in it could be zoom info detects a new account has received funding in your ic so you go outbound to them it could be that you met somebody at an event there's all of these other signals that are almost like a layer a layer up of the kind of buyer journey that you then also need to track and understand which ones are most effective for you that that covers your entire go to market model not just marketing yeah that that's exactly right that that's really my vision is that we we have an ability to aggregate all that data without feeling the need to to structure it or define it in any way because we won't do as near near as good of a job as ai will in in doing that and you know i i mean as long as you have enough data enough touch points you're you know you've got like i'm not sure this works for the five to ten million dollar company but if you're in if you're in a company that's doing twenty five million in revenue and above you absolutely have a nut you should mean you better have enough touch points enough data elements across everything that you do that you can you know and this works this should work on both sides of the house too right like we should be able to also turn this to existing account growth and be able to analyze everything that happens with that account and there are frankly the the systems that are in place today do a better job of that inherently in detecting patterns because it's it is a bit more structured but you know if you if you build intent if you if you have intense signals and you bring those intense signals in you can even do that against your existing customer base and start to detect hey my existing customers are start somebody in my existing customer starting to search for what i do and that might be concerning to me right even though even though my service team says oh they're they're happy as a clam all of a sudden you start getting intense signals that are suggesting that maybe they're starting to look other other places or maybe it's a different part of the company that's looking for something and that's that's you know you can identify opportunities for same account growth by expanding your footprint all of that's possible now with with the you know with the use of ai and and so yeah so i i think i think in the next i don't know six to twelve months we will have a set of tools that are you know fully capable of being deployed like that and i think there's probably a lot of other people who are who are working on the same sorts of things for their businesses it's an exciting time it doesn't however like if we re if we think about all that as that reporting let's say it does do it first of all to your point earlier it it doesn't completely model the buyer journey there's a big chunk of the buyer journey that's still going to be invisible because they won't have touched us right and and so we still have to figure out brand matters being out in the in the marketplace generative engine optimization is still a thing still is going to be a thing is gonna be an increasing thing all because we want to be able to influence ahead of when we fight first recognize the prospect but but the other thing that that doesn't solve even if we get to a complete view of or as complete as possible view of that buyer journey and where we're where we're seeing success and where things are falling off it doesn't change the fact that marketing and sales may have different measurement criteria and comp structures and i think that that if there's anything that executive management needs to do while their teams are sorting out all this and trying to build these systems and create better visibility what executive management should be doing is sitting down the head of marketing the head of sales and bring them together if they aren't already reporting to the to the same person anyway and creating shared success of of view of you know a measurement rubric and compensation scheme that's based on shared success if we don't do that we're gonna continue to to even if we have more data we're gonna be continuing to to foster these com you know these challenges yeah and just to be clear you know and ask the question do you see that and have you seen that in the past basically a shared revenue goal between both teams yes depending on depending on the type of business so like for example in a b to b software or tech enabled services business that's got an average ac of half a million dollars yes absolutely i have in fact i've led teams where we've created a revenue component or a win rate component or a you know some some degree of of success sales success as part of what marketing is measured by it did i i got lots of flack on a regular basis because they didn't have complete control but my my point was look that's kind of the point is you know we all succeed together yeah and we can't have a part of our organization claiming success if another part is is is failing and if the business is failing i can't you know you can't just sit over in the corner and say well we did our job like you you didn't because one one way or the other our growth organization which is sales marketing channels everything to get everything put together didn't deliver to the business the revenue that it that was needed or the growth that was needed yeah and executive you are absolutely responsible for the outcome of that and that's the conversation i would have and then we would go about discussing what those shared goals we're gonna be and then how they could influence them i mean what it did do is it it forced my marketing leader to be sitting daily with my sales leader to discuss what they're seeing and how you know how this is going and and it wasn't just hey we're throwing things over the over the wall we ended that led to bd go getting re reassigned from sales leadership to marketing leadership we realized that bd you know the at that time the speed of follow up and the type of follow up that we wanted in in the leads that we were creating meant that the bd r's really didn't shouldn't be serving the outside sales team they should be working hand in hand really very closely together with the marketing team and so it made sense to move them under under marketing and the sales leader was great with that because that meant that what they were getting was a when when the handoff would happen it would be a much more thorough qualified pipeline than than was happening previously and they could focus on just crushing pipeline and so yes i mean that that did that has worked that's just an example it probably doesn't there are probably cases where it doesn't always work but yeah i'm i'm for it generally yeah absolutely it's aligning them around one particular goal right i've i've got another question for you because in our last couple of episodes we were talking bit around you know cmos in their first board meeting alignment with you know ceo the board around metrics and understanding how much do does do the business leaders do the board do you know private equity investors care about attribution i don't think they do they might they might claim that they do or they might have read an article and therefore they think their experts but what they really wanna know is what's what volume of of legitimate pipeline was created based on my marketing spend and if i increase it do i get a linear or better return you know growth of that marketing spend and how and how much more than linear and and then they wanna understand sales efficiency right so it's a it it still shocks me when companies higher sales before they build pipeline and then they expect in this world like i i'm talking specifically b to b software b b hardware b to b like tech tech and tech enabled services i'm not talking about like there are businesses the brokerage business trucking brokerage in the states for example is example where you do you do hire tremendous numbers of outbound like cold calling cold emailing just it's a there there are other ways to do it too but but that tends to be still be an effective growth strategy but in but in most worlds like complex solution selling type environments the the idea that you would hire sales team before you have demand before you have pipeline created is like it doesn't make any sense to me but people still do it so like to me as an executive as an investor i want to know what's your what's your how much pipeline are is each salesperson managing how much can they manage before they're just over overwhelmed right and what's that what's the ideal close you know number of accounts that they should that each salesperson should be managing or a number of opportunities and then when does demand when will demand overtake yeah the volume of sales teams you have so that we can then be hiring ahead of that and training so that we can catch those opportunities and continue to convert without causing our sales team to run out the door because we're just brow beating them but there's no question in my mind that the if that if i really wanna build a go to market efficiently i don't just hire your salespeople and tell them to cold call i i or you know use their network which is another one of those you know nineteen eighty five thought processes the the you know what i wanna know is is okay i'm gonna give demand i think we by the way i think we should start calling chief marketing officers chief demand officers i think that would change change the world in terms of like how they think about themselves and what their what their objective is but k so doesn't doesn't help or it doesn't hurt that we're called demand decode in this podcast right like i like don't hand part but so our our chief demand officer then is is ultimately responsible for generating as much pipeline with as few resources as possible and so they wanna know all of that and they wanna be as sophisticated as possible but what their invest when they report to the board they want one metric right an efficiency score with and may and maybe two metrics an efficiency score and a close rate score right here's the quality of the pipeline just demonstrated by our close rates and if we can increase efficiency and increase close rates in our and and see total demand increasing every investor in the world gonna be thrilled and gonna be wanting to give them more money right let's okay then let's let's keep going let's do more yeah so did i get your yeah and there's a reason why i asked you that question because i knew you'd give me that answer you know i the board don't care about your channel attribution they don't even care about your signal attribution like you say they want it one number we put money in how much money do we get out like basically what is the roi of your marketing and go to market investments overall and in marketing yes of course you need to break that down and understand where are you most efficient are generating in that revenue which channel is it which signal is generating in the best returns but at the end of the day you're only reporting to you know the people who are ultimately investing in the business that one figure so if you need to invest in areas where you don't have the clear the clearest sight of channel roi if your multi touch attribution can't detect that thing well that doesn't matter to the board okay it might matter to where you can deploy that budget but if you can then start using things like increment incremental lift tests and things like that we invest here we did this activity we saw a lift in pipeline and revenue and you can tie it that way you don't actually need to do the granular channel level attribution that you know people rave about needing may mainly technology vendors rave about you needing it's not actually necessary in order to get the result at the end there are other ways to think about it and as long as you can report on that main number at the end which is you know like you say roi efficiency then you're okay yeah i think that you know the other person in the room that outside the board that that you may have to go into more detail on with is the cfo in the but in the annual budget cycle or or you know the quarterly budget cycle depending on what kind of company you're asking for you know when you wanna go ask for money you're gonna have to to demonstrate that you understand how to be a good steward of that money that's that's legitimate but i think that's where you can educate the cfo too like he's historically that cfo might have been gotten used to people using first touch attribution to justify and then and then cognitive realize wait a minute they're telling me that this is all great but i'm not seeing revenue increases over here yeah so whatever they're telling me doesn't doesn't like i i become skeptical so when they ask for money i'm like that maybe i'll just re you know reduce that if i some to make my my numbers work on the other side the that's why i i i mean i'll come back to getting everything into one system getting and then using ai to analyze the details of that's of every touch and every sales engagement and be able to really try to to create a a more transparent view of that buyer a more thorough and transparent view of that buyer may may help us to to connect the dots with the cfo the ceo and and it's no longer a political thing because you've got sales and marketing data together and you can show like in and you can show like that's what like if you oh gosh really the guys the the first guys that we're doing call recording and and and like deep analysis of call recording maybe gong yeah yeah so gong has been doing this for a long time but the the last couple years they've gotten really really deep in the psychological analysis of of what they're hearing the tonality the engagement level the eye contact the all this stuff that that and they're they're coat using that to coach reps that level of analysis and data but across every single touch point of of the the where the buyer connects to you in any in any way listens to a podcast download white paper whatever i think is the in is where this gets really interesting to me yeah yeah i think you're right like there will be a point in time in not not too distant future where you are feeding in all of your channel data all of your go to market data your you know marketing attribution sales attribution signal data into one large language model and that's kinda aggregate the data it's going to pull out the things that truly matter to you in a in a view that makes sense to you know the board to the people that need to see it and that's what we're gonna be aggregated view in in one single place and it's terrifying to think about but absolutely amazing to think about what's what is gonna happen there yeah so i didn't prep you for this and it because it just crossed my mind but if we have people listening to this who wanna go down that journey with us reach out to us we will give you the deal of a lifetime to to be able to get access if you have enough data to be able to do this in in the real world outside of just our own data and be able to work partner with you to to to build this analysis to help you really get visibility into what you how your how your company grows or how your buyers bought we're your where your buddy we come come and reach out and and we will we will bring the resources we will work with you to get the data and and yeah i this is this is such an exciting place for me personally to because like we use the term growth engineering and blend wants to be the premier growth engineering firm in the world mh this is how you engineer growth in the in the world of ai and in the world of you know the the the modern buyer journey you really have to get your hands on all the data and be able to analyze it in depths and detect these these patterns and and anomalies and and let that drive your behavior and and so yeah so for any customer that's interested in going down that journey i i i would love to talk with them about how do how we can do that and partner with them yeah good josh because you know sometimes just being able to work with an external consultant in order to you know aggregate that data in ways that you might not have thought before would be really interesting and i think for us being able to like you say have that volume of data to look at to understand to kind of shape what that looks like with another business will be valuable to everybody and of course you know we'll share those learnings along the way on the particular right try and help more people how we kind of enter this next phase of of you know business and and growth engineering let's get back onto attribution and sorry because i mean what a tangent but a good one i think because yeah i mean ai literally creeps into every single podcast now there's no escaping in it and that's just the way of the world right but i think we can probably start to wrap this episode up now from an attribution standpoint but just circle back to that point i think from my perspective we've mentioned this a few times the attribution war between marketing and sales can be largely ended by ref framing the single goal by re framing the compensation that they get out the back of those goals and by aligning the systems which is still a humongous gap for so many businesses if you're a marketing team if you're a marketing leader listening to this and you have no visibility of pipeline and revenue you need to be taking that to the ceo to whoever right now after this episode because there is no way that you can efficiently spend your budget efficiently deploy your team and your resource in the best way possible to get the best result it's just simply not possible but when it comes to attribution we've kind of mentioned a few things on this self reported attribution will be a really great easy way to identify some of the channels that you might not be able to see in traditional software attribution that are working hard for you aside from that looking at signal based attribution will be another good way to evaluate the entire go to market engine you can supplement this with some technology attribution to but aside from that those are the things that are probably gonna help you out most yeah i i agree with that a hundred percent dan i mean that the i think the other the last thing i wanna say is there's there's there's no silver bullet to growth but particularly in b to b tech right there you can't if you're using attribution to say this is the thing this is the the the marketing channel that's gonna you know enable our growth and it's it's the one i'm gonna pour all my money into that's gonna be that's gonna fail because there is not or it's not gonna at least it's not gonna be as optimized as it could be because buyers connect to us in so many different ways and they want to connect to us in so many different ways and and so just be careful how much you're you're paying attention to individual attribution points and trying to create roi cases for one thing as opposed to really building a portfolio approach to to how you're to to your go to market overall and looking at the connect the connective tissue between those portfolio items i think being able to that's the whole point of this ai discussion is really to understand the connective tissue and what happened you know what succeeds most often when this touch point goes to this touch point goes to this touch point and in what timing right to be able to to understand where you can now you know spend more optimize what what have you so yeah i'm i would not get into a conversation any anymore with with anyone trying to to have a religious view of first touch or last touch they're all they're all just you know up there yeah yeah they're all just noise and they all have their issues right which is why we we advocate for like a hybrid approach that takes into account multiple things alright cool well let's wrap it up there unless there's anything else from you josh i don't think so may maybe just pay the one thing you can do if your hubspot customers pay attention to the attribution reporting in hubspot it it it will automate some things for you if if that's all the appetite you have then you know that's better than nothing but but let's let's use those to start and then let's get your data and let's let's really build something out help you understand your grow yeah and i would just say self report attribution again on top of that because a really important thing to supplement that data with alright let's leave it there that was a really interesting episode we went down a few rabbit holes hopefully you're going to you know boring for everyone with those things but yeah i i liked the fact we did that on the last episode as well they've gone down pretty well so i think you know when that thought comes sometimes you just need to lean into it right and you just need to kind of go down a rabbit hole it it entertain us if nobody else right so yeah exactly well thank you for listening to that waffle of a monte coded so it's really fun and yeah we'll catch you next time if you could drop us a light rate in drop us a follow on whatever platform you listen to that be totally awesome but until then yeah we'll catch you next time thanks for listening

hi everyone welcome back to demand decode dan here as usual with phil on the other side of the desk over there and on today's episode we're gonna be talking about the biggest b2b website mistakes that are costing you leads and revenue through your website no it's not the sexiest topic of the latest greatest ai tool that's come out but this is genuinely something that can change your business lead volume and pipeline volume overnight if you actually get it right and there's a few reasons why we're discussing this today right phil the rise of ai and zero click searches yep being a big one of those and just some other historic things that have always existed with poor websites yeah now i think about it b to b website cro i think is a relatively underserved sort of topic a bit and a bit misunderstood because of course when we think of cro we think of changing the bottom color on an e commerce website but that's not what cro conversion rate optimization is in majority of b cases and for a variety of reasons it's not a topic that marketers spend a lot of time talking about it's a it's a discipline that is very different to ab b testing in any ecommerce situation and it's as you say becoming more and more critical as zero clicks search increases as ai search and research increases changing the landscape for us in terms of what what what i'll beat what our website is doing the landscape it's operating in but it's an area where actually mark ought spend a lot more time and effort and focus conversion rate optimizing their website to get the most out of the traffic they are getting whatever traffic they continue to get and the effort of their the the the output and the outcome of their other efforts further up the funnel yeah before we get into the episode today here's a quick word from our sponsor hubspot you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city's football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience all in one platform this allowed their small team of just three to build an entire website in just three days the result nearly three hundred fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better there's two big things in there because zero click searches ai seo and just l m's in general are causing traffic to decline on websites and marketers might be thinking oh well actually maybe we'll just neglect the website a little bit more and try to appear in these l m's and do other things to combat that but actually that is you know completely the wrong thing to do the traffic that you do get now will be more qualified better informed and you need your website to work harder yeah you yeah that to the neglect intellectual website now would be a real a real costly mistake and an issue you're gonna get much less traffic to your website overall in the future meaning relatively speaking every visit is more and more important to you and your ability to turn that attention that brief opportunity into an engaged visitor to build on their understanding of your brand their trust level with it and to turn some of those into high leads and pipeline is ever more critical i think zero click search and ai search is such an interesting topic because of course historically google's algorithm would reward websites that provided it with content with visits in their states right potentially loads but only if you got to the top few positions for any particular attractive keyword searches you know ai search on the one hand is interesting because it it's been shown it's been proven that it can delve a lot deeper into the rankings but what you get as a publisher of that content is so diminished compared to the visibility in a link yeah the the click that you would have got the visit you would have got that's all just staying within these ai tools so by the time people buyers ideally ic coming to your website all that's taken place all that's happened without them visiting and they're there now it's super important that you focus on providing an experience that's to aligned to what they need and what they want if you want your business to benefit from what is in most cases an incredibly attractive source of pipeline self nominated self qualified opted in high intent leads we've seen it over the years right the conversion rate on that is high you've gotta be optimizing for it and you should have been doing so all along but when we look at the way b b budgets get distributed d up and spend website optimization often isn't there's not even a limelight yeah it doesn't feature yeah and businesses go through these like lu like multi year from one facebook and i get it you know these websites are big complex projects when you're doing them you know to a fresh but when you're doing a new website applying a conversion rate a b to b conversion rate optimization mindset critical and even in between those projects improving your website's ability to convert is a very very worthwhile you know use of budget and time as a marketer in a b2b companies need today yeah yeah i mean i just wanna go a bit deeper on that again because one marketer that i speak to you regularly always uses like the the ten k mark as a kind of neat starting in point for any investment if they're doing an event no matter how big no matter how more minimum ten k okay doesn't matter campaign ten k another thing ten k anything is ten k how much do they spend on their website cro zero and it blows my mind because all of these investments add up you know their marketing budget is well over a million and not a single penny of that is being spent on improving the website yeah and you're driving huge amounts of traffic just naturally not even if they're not attempting to drive direct traffic through links yeah it's a product of everything you do yeah if they're sponsoring events it's just a byproduct and no matter who you speak to then the buying committee from that deal might end up on your website too like all of these buyers these people these factors like contribute to them coming to your website and if your website isn't communicating your value proposition like communicating what your product offers effectively then really you're just diminishing the returns of everything else you've spent up upfront it's interesting like we all know this right all marketers know this and yet there's a blind spot for it when it comes to you know where to put time and attention and and there's probably something in that that's rooted in you know fear the unknown uncertainty we most of us want to do things that we think we know will pay off or not and maybe this is an area where people don't feel saving because yeah as i've said b b website cro is not a very well discussed topic but it is so it it it is a blind spot where there is yeah just this you'll obsession with looking away from it instead of looking to it i increasingly think of our website as a part of our what i consider to be our performance marketing investments mh so the part of our marketing which is focused on producing an outcome whatever that outcome is not necessarily a not a leads outcome or an attributed outcome but a business outcome and our websites are not brochures they're not creative exploration of our brand they are performance tools in our go to market which need to be optimized to perform in the way they do i think marketers need to shift the website from wherever it sits in their mind into this is something that has to perform and therefore i need to learn about why it does or doesn't perform and how i can make it perform better yeah there's a lot of shiny objects right now in marketing more than ever before and everyone's chasing the answers to how do we show up in ai answers how do we get more from ai basically any question related around ai but that's not proven yet that's not a slam dunk if i invest in that area and trying figure it out that i'm gonna get measurable results your website conversion rate is a proven tactic and strategy to get more high intent leads which result in more pipeline and more revenue for your business it's a safe bet to put budget to put effort and focus yeah it's an it's interesting actually you you're i completely agree couldn't agree more although i'm well aware that a lot of people are in a position today where their website currently generates no pipeline whatsoever no high intent leads whatsoever because it hasn't been built around that objective mh and so the first thing for some businesses is to actually realize and learn that their website should be a reliable trustworthy real source of pipeline and to make that first transition before you optimize its conversion rate you actually build it with conversion in mind and and the goal that you have because we can say with absolute confidence that websites can ensure generate lots of high intent good quality leads and can be and is in most cases a source of very high converting close rate i mean opportunities yeah so you you you've got to put your you gotta put effort into creating it but doing so is very very reliable and valuable yeah absolutely okay well is that the rant over rant over out we're passionate about this stuff but yeah in the next part of this episode we're gonna dive into some of the core things to look at when it comes to your website and really the biggest mistakes that we see that are costing your website's ability to actually work hard for you to convert ultimately so yeah yeah absolutely yeah i'm i'm just thinking that yeah b2b website cro is such an interesting topic that we can we can do more to help people understand and help them aggregate the resources that already exist because that's the interesting thing right there's a load of research done on this topic you have to have a you have to have your common sense switched on to be able to distinguish between what would work in a beat to t setting versus a b to b setting not all research on website user behavior ux is distinguished between the two but there's a load of resources out there the people can and should use to learn this subject and we can perhaps do more to aggregate some of those but yeah there are mistakes that we see over and over again that either prevent people from getting this result this outcome or the you know limit the the success and the impact they have with their website yeah for sure alright well should we dive into point one and i think this is something i hear you talk about regularly consistently all the time something you're passionate about i think which is positioning position are i wonder where you were going because there's a few passions but positioning i mean this is a this is a relatively speaking a a detailed point because of course since before you can get to your the point where your thinking really carefully about the the the key message on your website you've got to have built an entire website you've got to have your whole website project you know moving and we'll talk about that in a moment but of all the things on your b website there is none with higher impact more importance than the few words and the supporting images that a biases sees on the homepage when they first arrived which will in most cases be the hero message which should be a extrapolation from your business positioning your positioning should inform you where your product or your offering exists versus competing solutions in the landscape of buyer challenges why they should care about it why they should spend money to solve the problem you solve all these things makeup positioning it's quite a it it's not a simple part of the go to market strategy it's it's a it's more complicated than a single sort of sentence and what we do and your website then has to communicate that effectively and clearly i've been reading and loving the work of fl who are specialists on product positioning and the work that they do can really help businesses get their positioning right in a way that informs their messaging on their website and helps you to communicate value to your ic clearly quickly so that the first five to eight seconds on the website the blink test result in a high level of affinity for the message and a desire to stay you know a comp propulsion to continue the journey as opposed to bounce away and it might seem sort of trivial to some but the cost of saying nothing there or saying something that doesn't mean anything to your ic is enormous because it means every visit you do get is more likely to bounce away and less likely statistically to continue the journey to take a call to action to enter the pipeline yeah and of all the things on your website that's the one with the greatest connection to your results what you say in the homepage hero what your messaging is and how it relates to your positioning yeah it's the first thing that people see when they land on your website and no matter how they've heard of you elsewhere or how they've come to get to your website that needs to resonate with them instantly yes to know that they are in the right place or the wrong place and if they should go elsewhere for their solution or to learn more or if they should stay and explore further yeah absolutely most businesses you know need to convert right they need to convert because they don't most businesses are not in the position where customers flood to them yeah right you can get there you know salesforce forces is arguably there but in your earlier years you need to convince people that you've got a compelling solution to their problem and they should work with you and when it comes to your website this is where you do it so falling into the traps of for example using your brand strap line mh as your homepage message instead of a clear concise statement of your value is a classic mistake most strap lines are very nice sounding are very clever when you understand them they make a lot of sense yeah but to a first time visitor or to your website they rarely communicate what you do in a clear way so it's a massive fail to either run with your strap line or to start off well but then end with your strap line which i've seen happen quite a lot you know another mistake is to think that you will be able to make up for a overly sort of clever or cryptic headline with a good sub headline mh i often see sub headings on websites that are significantly better than the main headline at communicating yeah the proposition problem is significantly fewer people will read the sub headline yeah compared to the headline so you're just wasting the good work you've done there by not putting it in prime position lots of websites would do well to basically swap those two things around right lead with your sub headline clear statement of what you do and what you offer and then follow it up with a nice witty you know thought provoking line on why that matters or what that that can help you achieve yeah that putting the good work in the sub headline unfortunately wastes that work given how how many people won't see that content yeah like the eye drawn to the large heading on the page totally know which is typically gonna be your h one unless you style it otherwise for an seo purpose but yeah absolutely i just wrote down an example of i'd i haven't seen this as exact line before but it's just like classic like driving growth with next generation solutions i mean like that kind of thing isn't it it's that kind of like ambiguity around a message exactly and people end up there for lots of reasons multiple stakeholders in indecision unprepared or inability to select a core market and what that tends to do is drive people up the benefit change right so fl anthony there calls it multi order benefits and i think you've nailed it with that which is if the benefit your software your product delivers is you know faster turnaround time on a on a project or you know something specific if you take that up and up and up and up the food chain as it were yeah eventually you'll get to save time make money yeah yeah it's all about but that's what everything does moving away from the benefit you offer to a higher order benefit so that you end up saying something that could apply to truly any product means you're saying nothing mh and it's a common problem that people end up in for a lot of reasons but you gotta fight it you gotta resist it and i get it i have to admit that the best homepage messages are not always super exciting but i think there is excitement in communicating clearly in a compelling way in getting people excited to stay on your website and that's what i want people to pursue yeah and our role as marketers is to get a result at true it's to drive pipeline and drive revenue for the business it's not to excite ourselves or the business internally with a sharp snappy like homepage hero that means nothing to the buyer yep you know yeah absolutely and you know and ultimately bear in mind as well that messaging website messaging doesn't make up for poor positioning mh it doesn't change your positioning it's an expression of positioning and if businesses are worried about their positioning or feel that they could be clearer on it they should look at the work of april dun yeah her book obviously awesome and the she's it what she writes on the subject of positioning particularly for businesses that have got multiple products yeah multiple personas or multiple markets i think is critical reading to get home homepage messaging website messaging that's that creates pipeline and to do that effectively so absolutely definitely look definitely look that up cool alright homepage messaging checked off do we think tick that is the first place to look though like absolutely after this episode you know listen to the end of course but just go and have a look at the homepage message does it communicate communicate clearly what you do and who you do it for yeah completely this podcast is brought to you by blend we're a b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in marketing so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b b dot com what are some of the other core mistakes we see on your website i think the ones to talk about next is that a commercial call to action if you think about the way buyers buy you know the website plays a a vital role in it but also some of the people that buy from you and in some situations that people that buy the fastest and the best as it were they've come to you because you were top of their mental shortlist already for work you've done in the demand generation phase they may have researched the topic in ai or google but that won't have necessarily disrupted your place on that shortlist and they've come to your website with an intention to talk to you really homepage messaging needs to confirm that any pages they visit obviously should build their trust in you but providing them with a call to action that is mutually beneficial and aligned to what they need and one at this next stage is probably the next best thing to do because some of those visitors will just instantly click after visiting one page only on your top right navigational call to action yep and that's an area where you can create an impact if you align it to what a buyer wants from your website as opposed to what is conventional wisdom or what you want where am headed with this if the button at the top right your website says contact us change it nobody coming to your website to contact you that's pointless and truthfully we don't want people to contact us we want people to buy from us so a call to action that meets their requirements and your requirements will much more likely talk about or speak to that process the purchase process and whatever the purchase process looks like in your category so yep in some verticals the right call to action is talk to sales talk to an expert yeah speak to somebody specific about something specific not contact us not open ended va meaningless contact us in other verticals categories it will be book a demo it will be see the software live experience it with someone who knows it inside out yeah and ask your questions in others it'll be take a trial you know i think each of those is relatively speaking more attractive to website visitors than the preceding one because it's lower investment but that doesn't mean it drives the result you're looking for as a business so you need to dial this in around what works for you and your customer to get the best results doesn't make sense to drive a load of trials if it isn't trials that get people to buy but take a trial demo talk to sales has improved performance significantly in lots of the cases we've seen it used and when you think about it makes sense because it says what you want buyers to do and what they're there to do yeah yeah you know we've got case studies of some of these things as well i think the wrong radar one i'd have to go back and double check but i'm sure is between ten and twenty percent conversion rate improvement from changing contact tests to talk to sales and that's you know completion of the form yep in terms of conversion rate there you know ultimately what we're trying to do here is provide a mutually beneficial offer to the business and the user right like it's it's rooted in being bios centric again which is actually something that people forget a lot of the time when they're building their website they forget what the buyers they to do you know the right call to action for lot sites could be get a quote yeah and you know we've seen that when put in the right place for the right customer have a very positive impact because not every buyer is there to talk about a a a a broad solution problem now if you have a taught sales cta alongside it that can give them a route to do so yeah but if your buyers today tend to ask you to quote for your product tour offering make that easy yeah something that actually caught my attention recently was a a a a a discussion about conversion rate optimization on the conversion rate expert website and they were talking about a test run that had been successful and i thought it was interesting because the rationale for the success was not in you know increasing click through rate by making it more attractive or or more you know aligning the color to the buyer preference or whatever those sort of typical av test that we it was about remove removing friction you know thoughtfully removing friction making the conversion process easier for people that wanted to yeah and that's a lot of what b cro is actually making it easier for the people who can and do wanna buy from you to do it yeah as opposed to thinking that you're gonna create loads of new customers if you make this change or that change to your website yeah totally agree and you've set up you know at the start of this episode that b to b conversion rate optimization is totally misunderstood or not well documented because if you look up anything around conversion rate optimization it will be telling you to test an orange button instead of a green one and you know tests an increased font size or font way or tiny micro changes that most b2b companies don't have enough data to measure the impact of anyway yep and you know changing those tiny things they're not gonna have the biggest impact when it comes to b2b it's aligning your website and its journey to the journey that your buyer wants to take yeah absolutely absolutely okay can i go on my rant now rant bike so one of my big issues with b2b websites is the hand off process between the website and the sales team or the experts or the account manager whoever it may be i submit a form on a website and all of a sudden i need to wait twenty four hours forty eight hours to hear back that just does no longer align with buyer expectations the expectation now because it's being used so well on many you know products websites and service websites now i submit a form i get to book a me in straight away mh and so many businesses are losing out on great buyers because their hand off process is absolutely appalling they've got buyers falling through the cracks who never hear back from sales because not only are they not booking meetings ins instantly they're just not following up together there's no process in the back end to enable that because to be fair some buying processes don't need a medium boat right you know they might just need a quote instantly but that needs to be formalized and have a fast automated processes to enable it to happen as quickly as possible but most b2b companies especially those with products or services like will have a conversation like of sales in order to sell the product on service and it just like blows my mind that businesses aren't investing in relatively like cheap cost effective software to solve this issue like i just invite lots of them have it but don't don't use it use it solve this issue this should be table stakes yeah this should be as foundational as security reliability edit you have your website you know the work that you've put into generating traffic and into converting it into opportunities to have these sales conversations needs to be met matched with the a seamless streamlined hand process that's aligned to the way your customer buys completely agree and it is you know a real waste when it's not taken care of and it's a puzzle because like we said a a lot of people have the tools to do it yeah you know and if you're in any doubt how to do it give us a call drop us a line because we'll help you with that because it it it isn't shouldn't be difficult you you need to be able to provide a website experience that gives the buyer what they need whether that's a form to fill in a diary you know route rooting them to the correct person diary or following up by a email quickly or sending them with a documentation that you need to send them and then internally assigning that lead to the right person making that person aware getting that person booked in with that contact that prospect or you know in new newer systems you know creating a lead object for example yeah track the process this challenge should be automated absolutely and i was just looking up a study that i put together from it's a couple of years old now from blend ourselves so we had an existing process that used automated emails after somebody submitted still a a better process than just leaving it you know it's to chance for a salesperson to follow up with the lead yeah but essentially somebody would submit a high intent form on our website and they would get a series of automated emails to that had calendar links within them so you know not a not a bad process not the optimal one but interestingly our sql so that's a high intent lead on our website to meeting conversion right so how many of our m q hours was generated through the website ended up booking a meet during that period h one twenty twenty three with the automated email follow up was forty two percent mh in h one twenty twenty four would updated this process to have the meeting scheduling capability directly after the form fill yep and the q to meeting conversion rate was seventy seven percent yeah amazing impact and it's so significant some a little change relatively simple to do but so effective in terms of improving our ability to connect with those prospects and yeah yeah identify fit and we say you know the software yeah it is available for most people but even if you needed to spend an extra ten k twenty k to get almost a you know hundred percent increase on that conversion rate like the downstream impact of that on pipeline and revenue like cannot be underestimated and yeah it just bog my mind again that you'd spend you know that ten k twenty k on some linkedin ad to drive some more traffic to your website that then still isn't converting into meetings for sales yep it's part of the optimization process of the website as a pipeline generator and you're investing you know ten k hundreds of k's in some situations in driving people there and then sq that opportunity it's it's it's it's it's something that has to be addressed yeah yep so the best thing you can do here is still have the form the high intent form on your website because we've seen that still adding that little bit of friction in will result in more qualified buyers and opening up your calendar to anybody and people who are probably gonna sell to you rather than you're trying to sell to them yeah that's a bridge too far yeah having the friction in place that actually somebody has to go through the motion or filling out your form and then seeing the the calendar is just the way to go yeah i mean we've talked about sort of the the three points of the conversion rate triangle on on the website which is the homepage message the call to action and the handover process i think those are truly some of the highest impact things that you can focus on the whole website matters of course but changes you make to it don't have the same ability to influence your outcome you just have to build a website that's optimized for website users so you know broadly speaking don't underestimate the importance of headlines everybody's skimming the page looking for interesting relevant snippets they're not reading it verbatim so your headlines are critical short snack content that's consumable quickly or by skin readers as opposed to walls of text is it's broadly the way to go imagery that supports the message supports the content and in particular product imagery if you can show it are the ways to create you know effective website pages that if bounded by this very strong conversion rate framework can produce a really good website that buyers you know use to form an opinion to educate themselves and then convert into really really high fit good quality leads that you can close with these yeah one thing i'd add onto that is can we just all agree now to not gate content like i feel like you know we've our first episode of mandy coded was on this topic wasn't it i think it was a big feature there and and we're still talking about it eight the odd episodes later yeah reckon you know we've probably seen a movement in more people have un gated their promotional content than had back then but it's not uncommon to see gated case studies yep gated pricing yep gated decision level content around products and solutions and there's very little points and you can usually analyze that right by saying well how many of the people that download that that go through that gate give us that information become our customers and just like the influential content of old i reckon it's very very low but one thing you you can't measure is the impact of not having that and the impact of people who don't choose to download your gay piece of content because it's gated yeah and they go elsewhere oh absolutely i mean you're completely right and it sort of you're having you have you have as b2b marketers you have to use the measurements you have available and your insight into the buyer to form conclusions and by measuring the poor performance of lead generation content we're able to build a a perspective that was actually given the way these two cohorts of buyers behave there's a there's a huge cost negative cost to this approach we're not seeing can't measure it because it doesn't happen yeah but that's the issue it doesn't happen so if you look at your case study downloads and your pricing guide downloads and you compare that to people who buy from you and there's a really big distinction you could probably you could potentially get a lot more people to buy from you if you gave that information away to them freely during the research process and you know it was true in the algorithm seo era and it's probably just as true in the ai seo era which is gated content can't help you get found in those platforms yeah so by gating that case study content you're potentially cutting off a nose despite a face when people could be discovering the stats the success the impact in conversations with ai as they move towards the more com commercial end of their queries which is where we think there's actually more opportunity to impact ai results through content yeah yeah just insane to me you know case especially but why wouldn't you get your most crucial valuable pieces of content that show buyers on your website the results that you could get for them yeah yeah yeah it just it just shocks me you know how many businesses still get content like when we did our breakthrough event a few months ago you know there are some industries that are lagging i think in these areas and yeah it's truly surprising that how many businesses are are doing this and sometimes it feels like we're in an echo chamber of people who are moving on to the next thing and the next thing but actually there's a lot of people who are still trying to figure this stuff out yeah like marketing always evolving new things were always disappearing but they tend to they either they either disappear you know like become obsolete and lose their relevance or they add to the foundation that you've actually got to keep your eye on and keep maintaining and this is one of those things and this is why we do the podcast right so to hopefully help you know one or more people like move out of a fog you know from by by hearing our perspective our our discoveries you know because that's the like you said like the a lot of a lot of the world we live in is echo chambers where yeah where the ideas is we already have a forced by s ais and you know the people we choose to follow and so on exactly and it's really useful to have that sort of challenged and broken down every now and then by outside opinions and thoughts that you can then process and apply yeah for sure i think one thing to to touch on air phil would be the technology you use for your website because that can have a huge impact on a number of things right well indeed so as we've said when we were talking about the handoff off process we said it was it was a table stake and it was like reliability speed availability security privacy stability all of which are not things that you design no they are they're part of what you buy to host your website we use hubspot for the websites we build because as a product it incorporates all of the things that we believe are critical to an effective b website project on which we deliver the creative strategic expertise to build outside and we code you know in in in lean performance ways but we don't have to worry about infrastructure you know defenses against the malicious stuff that goes on out there a tool set for editing yeah etcetera etcetera etcetera that's all taken care of my advice to all businesses is before you go and procure a website platform as part of a project or on its own that you that you don't make that decision based on what you think you know yeah you form a comprehensive list of your requirements and you check which software platform vendors meet those requirements and you get demonstrations from the people that will build on it so that you can be be shown and you can see firsthand what the eligibility position you're gonna end up in truly is yeah because a lot of promises get made in this world done are not born out either buy the product itself when you buy it or by the solution that's built on top of it yeah and that's a critical point and you know i i don't i hate nothing more than hearing people who've tried to make good decisions but then end up in uncomfortable situations because they didn't do that part of the due diligence so you know test and pro what's gonna get built for you when it comes to your website to ensure that you ability is gonna be useful edit eligibility not just crippling overly complicated edit eligibility yeah or no edit eligibility at all like edit eligibility is is a massive one right because all of the things we mentioned today require you to go in and edit your website in on in one way or another and if you can't do that you need to you know email developers to do it or you just can't do it full stop for whatever reason that's gonna limit your ability to improve the conversion rate of your website and have an impact through it and it's gonna stag really quick yep i'd i'd love to show people you know our new websites edison experience because like you know that went live last month and we're already thinking about okay right we're gonna change that we're planning to do this like the changes are already gonna be happening because a website iterate it evolves over time and like you need to be empowered to do that as a marketer you shouldn't now need to spend an extra fifty k over the next year to get developers to make tiny tweaks on your website like you need to have the ability to be able to do that and iterate time yeah absolutely i think we've really nailed our approach to that and it basically puts you know our customers users of that platform form in the right place on the like edit eligibility spectrum which is i i have a saying which is when when while everything while while a website should live up to this the the phrase you know everything should be editable that doesn't mean anything should be possible there's still lying beyond which you are going to need the support of others to achieve a goal but that's a good thing if you wanna maintain the consistency of your brand the standardization of your style yeah the security reliability and performance of your website so we get people to the right point on that spectrum with our approach to it and that's what you should ask to be shown when you're engaging vendors around project that alright phil well i think that should probably do it for today's episode i think we've outlined you know why this is still such an important thing to get right yep in amongst all of the shiny objects happening right now like your website is just a fundamental business set that needs to work as hard as possible for you and yeah hopefully some things in there like tactical advice that you can go away and look at today improve and have better results tomorrow yeah alright cool well let's wrap it up there hopefully you enjoyed this episode of demand coded as always a review a like on whatever platform you listen to is always appreciated and yeah until then we will catch you next time thanks all bye

hi everyone welcome back to demand decode dan here as usual and phil making a surprise appearance on the podcast it's been a few weeks i'll weeks you've back been on been on holiday so yeah nice to have you back today we are covering the state of seo really and the state of ai seo it's a topic that keeps coming up in almost every conversation can't ignore it we're everywhere yeah with marketers in communities that i'm part of it takes the the hot seat in terms of every single discussion it's on everyone's mind you know like what is happening with seo should we still care about it anymore how do we influence ai seo yeah should we even be looking at that what is it so on today's episode we're gonna try and cover all of that for you and give you some insight into what's happening now and what could be happening in the future before we get into the episode today here's a quick word from our sponsors hubspot you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city's football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience all in one platform this allowed their small team of just three to build an entire website in just three days the result nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better so phil seo i think let's just touch on that for a moment like where are we at right now do we even care about it anymore and what do we do it's a crazy time for sure right the rules of b marketing amongst other things are being rewritten by ai so we've got to look again at what we're doing and why and so seo for a long time has played a very central very predictable very core role in smart b growth strategies right and we've all reap fantastic rewards but technology drives by behavior and bio behavior drives technology and currently that cycle is moving very fast in new directions and we're seeing ai really really fundamentally shift the way buyers use seo and therefore we have to shift the way we think about it so seo the way we used to think about it the way we did it is no longer i don't i think that's fair to say i think i think ai will for the vast majority of people listening for the vast majority of businesses with a few exceptions and a few you know lag ards for and early adopters most of us are in the core where ai is replacing the meaning of of seo in our go to market strategies and therefore how we think about it what do we know we know that buyers are quickly adopting chat based interfaces for the ease and for the speed with which they get them information there was an an initial sort of concern that accuracy would be an issue would be a factor and and buyers would resist or doubt it but actually that's been q right yep one most chat most ai based l based chat tools have quickly figured out that in order to provide the service or the experience buyers want they've got to enable web search fan out queries as part of their offering so it's no longer relying on the knowledge that the weights within the ai model you know have what they're actually doing the prompt engineering for you they're going out and finding the most relevant the most accurate content within search predominantly so you don't have to making that the new prompt so people are experiencing up to date accurate information meaning they no longer have to look at blue links at all they no longer have to go to search results they no longer have to sift through them they no longer have to choose which ones to read compare and contrast multiple ai is doing it and it's doing it on a scale that we could never do ourselves often you're seeing hundreds of pages referenced within a single query in an ai engine whereas most people would look at two or three you know and usually two or three on the first page ai doesn't care about the first page ai is going down to the tenth page to get the most specific results so going to google searching something and picking which page is to visit it doesn't make sense anymore for most buyers so yeah i think there's gotta be a drastic rethink about what to do and where and why with the budget and the resources you have available one critique i have of the way the industry is talking about ai is it's not factoring in scale affordability and like feasibility for businesses most of us operate on constrained budgets resources so we have to pick and choose where we bet where we place our money we can't do it all at once if we could do it all it would be easy right we would we'd implement every single recommendation that was given about how to influence ai search how to update your seo strategy etcetera etcetera etcetera but most of us aren't in position to do that so i hope that we can share some things that have got like sensible like sound advice for people who've got constrained limited budgets with which to do their marketing to grow that business yeah love that i think seo as we want to knew it is dead like it is is over i and i say that more from an informational gathering perspective yeah you can probably say seo can be divided down into a number of intense yes informational being them the big one the massive one where we all spent tons of time in effort creating content and getting some reward if we did it smartly and we did it well and then there's the more commercial and navigational side and if you draw a line the informational side of seo yeah gone gone yeah gone for most intents and purposes because ai has so dramatically changed the way information is yeah found provided and accessed yeah and we've just seen now that ai mode is now active in europe yeah yeah so an exciting day seen that offer to us for the first time with without vpn yeah but there we go right and we were kind of saying it's in the us it's in india like it's a matter of time before it comes to europe and now it's just a matter of time before that becomes the default browsing experience yeah people will already be trying out and using it now and using that conversational ui to gather information but that will become the default and that will be used and that is you know if you're not aware what ai mode is it is basically gemini a gemini based search experience within google's default browser that we've we've all used forever yeah and as a side no note i think it'd be really interesting to see what this what the introduction of ai mode does to market share up until now chat gp was kind d facto leader in the space but google's at everyone's fingertips and i reckon they're gonna take a big chunk out of that user base just because of ease of access so it'd be very interesting to see what it does to that and it will usher in like you say further usher in and advance and accelerate the shift from traditional information discovery and consumption on the information side and the ai version of that yeah i i would say like four marketers content people out there who are thinking about what create now who are doing their content planning if you're still planning in content around the the what is the how do i do this type content i i honestly wouldn't bother but most industries yeah and it's not because it doesn't have an in an effect or an impact right you know these ai tools are still using fan out queries yeah to search for content that closely matches the the the quick answers the question they've been asked but even if you like produce the content that the ai engines find and used to sen s their answers what benefit do get from it it's so small now compared to what a visit to your website exposure to your brand you know would have created in the past ai has exploded the variety of queries that users can can use meaning it's like just atom optimized the need for content and it's also atom optimized the visibility of any brand that influences the answers yeah so while seo content created to to be found by those ai engines might still be found by them the purpose no longer exists because it isn't generating what you need as a business out of being part of that answer it's really interesting to see how that's shifted but when we see these responses because we're testing all the time we're you know we're we're looking we're we're using ai every day ourselves to see what query responses look like we we're testing tools that you know aggregate that data analytical tools you know one thing that's consistent is brand mentions brand visibility is almost none yeah you know you get little snippets of urls you get little lo yeah for any informational content you get the odd link but not much yeah so there's no point yeah it's not gonna drive your pipeline yeah when we talk about the other end the other types of searches is like commercial being a main one well we'll talk about ai sc seo i think in a bit but if that that's where you can have value on your brand being mentioned not a cited source of information necessarily although that could help too but your brand being mentioned in a list of vendors for a particular pain yeah yeah yeah exactly it's informational search the way ai ai basically if it takes the view that most things are common knowledge right most of us weren't creating cutting edge original content that was you know completely unseen before and we've talked today about whether they're still like a space for that and like you know academic journals publishing content to to share what they're doing not for seo reasons but because they have to like might still fulfill that need but most of us in business in categories where there's some competition not creating net new knowledge every time we publish a blog post yeah ai the way buyers sort of think about ai i think or or or treat ai is that most of that stuff is out there somewhere already you gain nothing by being one more business yeah to describe that topic to a buyer that's not gonna see your brand your value prop your website when when when they search this podcast is brought to you by blend we're a b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in marketing so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b b dot com i think there is still an opportunity for informational content but just not in the same mediums so video audio public speaking things like that way you can still create a real connection between the audience and you and your brand still has a lot of you know a lot of runway i think to connect with people on that level if we think about what the purpose of informational content that was surfaced through google was it it was about getting people onto your website to see your brand have a click ultimately and then have you know potential retargeting opportunities potential lead capture opportunities things like that but the main thing was they knew your brand from that and people still well are using video more than ever to consume information yeah and right now that is a big opportunity i i think for brands to still serve some unique informational content with a you know unique point of view within that and connects with the audience on that level yeah and i think if your content informational content contains a unique point of view then it to some degree becomes commercial because it creates a a perception of you that is unique to you and can stand apart from the the mountain of informational content that just describes topics you know in in a fundamental way and also those types of content have more applicability outside of search anyway where buyer attention is drifting to other places and other channels and seeking other kinds of content because although buyers love ai for what it can offer them you know there is still a growing desire for the authenticity side of companies to show through so when you're active on linkedin when you're posting videos to youtube when you're in other channels that your buyers using outside of search yeah ai you know those mediums have real cut through potential because they reveal your authenticity and they reveal your point of view and that can make you stand out from your competitors in that in that discourse on that topic yeah yeah so i think if you're thinking about informational content and you want to produce content like that to share your unique point of view that's probably the mediums and how to do that in for commercial related content and queries i think seo still has a place right now so commercial commercially people still need to get to your website and there's still a process that they go through in terms of like making a evaluated decision yeah right you know they they they id things you know on social platforms and communities in real life with peers they will probably use a variety of channels and tools to research that mh ai will play a pro of a very dominant predominant role in that but it won't necessarily drive new brands into their consciousness but they still need to find the best competitors to whoever their their sort of top of mind brands are which might produce commercial focused queries within ai tools and they still need to navigate your website yeah so there is still definitely content to be created and work to be done to get people to you when they're in that later stage of the research process i think that's what you're referencing there yeah it is because people are still i'm still seeing people using traditional search for that type of query as well so this is before branded search yes before they go to a website that they know they wanna visit and after information information search is done they're still looking for the best providers for certain problems in certain categories yeah and things are a lot of that nature yeah you know when you think of like the commercial suffix is on the end of a topic like project management software or solution or best of this thing i'm still seeing people go to search traditional blue link search to answer those questions yep i think that will be swallowed up by ai as well eventually now that ai mode is first and what will become first and foremost definitely absolutely like for now it still plays a place still has a role within that but i think more and more people will be turning to ai because of the amount of context you can give it because of the experience you get from it like people's expectations are changing from the research process buying process having to go to google search for you know project management software and then having to do all of that vendor research yourself clicking into ten different websites analyzing the features the product the pricing like that is just that's no longer long no longer a thing yeah when it comes to ai search like you can go to chat ep ask for the best project management software but give it all of the context of your exact situation ask for the pricing there like everything is done for you yeah what what the ai experience allows people to do is take a take a commercial keyword that would have historically been really valuable and very attractive you know best project management software for you know saas or yeah agencies or aviation or whatever and then like continue to refine it with you know specific information to you your scale your vertical your role your challenge and and get answers to are that much more specific to your query which is a real change to the way commercial keywords yeah operate and again it's that explosion of variety the opportunity there though is that there's far more content on those queries in existence because people haven't historically been creating that really niche focused like refined content that's to some degree might be perceived as duplicated to and to an extent yeah yeah but but differentiated how it addresses specific concerns for specific types of buyers and that appears to be an opportunity that we're exploring for content creation that is both seo and ai seo focused yeah yeah well let's dive into that a little bit then because yep we've spoken yeah about the importance of being mentioned like your brand your vendor information being mentioned in these types of commercial queries now which i think is the the big play here for ai seo it's basic if somebody searches for who is the best to do this what should i be looking for in vendors to do why like you need to be servicing in those conversations in the in the chat interface and yeah we've been playing with a few different things and there's some good information out there from the marketing gets the grain podcast also part of the hubspot podcast network which most people would be aware of and they had a episode where they were talking about what hubspot are doing from a content creation perspective and how they're kind of going down like the industry page route i think they were referencing where they're looking at the signals that ai is looking to reference things like stats data information specific ic granular detail about what the user might be searching and they're crafting these unique pages say unique there's definitely like you say some duplication some crossover there perhaps but in order to be cited for very specific prompts and yeah we've been trying some of those things but also some other like information and type content streams as well yeah you know it's really interesting because i think ai has got every everyone excited quite right but it's worth remembering that artificial intelligence is still a long long way from actual intelligence right l m's are super impressive but they're nowhere near the human brain what the human brain does is almost magical you the our ability to create to invent to you know because we're we're both we're both logical and chemical biological yeah right so so ai isn't at the level of the human yet meaning even though what it does is incredibly impressive even though what it does is prob rather than deter and even though what it does is really really massive compared to what seo and and google's algorithm based search could do it's still a system mh and it still behaves in some predictable ways because it's still a machine behind the scenes running a set of rules and so there is a way to say that we can influence the results within that commercial part of the spectrum in a way that means that we're sighted more regularly if we align some of the content we create to the query and the needs of the query i e the l and put content out that is that has far less competition yeah so as you said if you if you draw together the key information for a very specific niche very specific user very specific set of challenges and queries and you put the relevant information together even though there'll be some similarity with other content on your website we've seen already that you can become cited in that commercial type of query very quickly yeah under the current circumstances impossible to say how long that will continue to be a needle you can move so easily but at the moment at this moment in time based on what azure frost said to marketing edge grain in terms of what they were seeing being the opportunity of content which was lots and lots of quite high volume of content yeah focused on these commercial queries i think is a reflection of the fact that they're not as competitive ai always got less to choose from and therefore for now there's an opportunity to get a visible result quite quickly yeah this is content not for search it may still have some benefit for search i don't think there's any drawback in creating very specific industry focused service pages with all of this content that ai is looking to reference there's no drawback on search quite i don't see yeah i don't think so but i think it's important to note that this is content created for a machine right right do you agree with that yeah i think so i think like ultimately we're not trying to get somebody to visit this page no and consume it in its entirety we're trying to be featured in the most valuable types of queries yeah in an l and they're not even pages that are part of our user experience once once people are on a website so yeah i think you're right i think these are pages predominantly created for the machines yeah one other thing that i've been playing around with and i think i don't wanna give away everything here because i think well one we're not totally sure on a proven method we got more work to do before we're it i wanna make sure that we're getting pipeline and revenue from these things before we actually start saying okay this is a playbook that works right now and also like we're spending a lot of time money and effort on figuring these things out and like i would say some of it is like intellectual property right now when it comes to the workflows we've put in place and the structured way we're forming this content so like if you did wanna dig into any of this deeper i'm happy to share it on a one to one basis but yeah some of the flows and thinking behind it are it quite novel i think but one thing i will throw out there that everyone can look into and use is try to become your own source of information try to be the source what you'll find if you go to chat eb and put in your category and common searches that might be made to find a solution so the best project management software available for manufacturing companies if you put that in and you see what's being cited as the source material you'll see a lot of list a lot of blog content from vendors themselves yeah yeah which is a which is something you can i hesitate say emulate it's something you can implement right and yeah you can you can suppress plant them as the source of information about your brand yeah and improve the quality and the frequency of the citations in those critical commercial ai queries yeah and we've seen we've seen that impact as well and it can happen overnight yeah and you make a really important point which is the we we have to keep asking ourselves why yeah know why i do this you've got you've got a finite amount of budget spend there's a few places that i you would say most businesses wanna to consider and some are more predictable more measurable in terms of their pipeline generation we think this will be important and and impactful but we aren't there yet to be able to say that is absolutely where you should take a chunk of your budget and and and investing yeah yeah not yet i don't think i i i'd like to think we will be able to say that with confidence fairly soon but yeah i i do think there's a big opportunity to become your own like to be the source of those vendor curated lists within within a chat interface and all you have to do really is go into like i say like do a few test cases within the the chat interface for your category and i'm pretty confident in most scenarios you will find list calls of vendors being shared from vendors themselves and they're putting themselves at the top of the list yeah yeah yeah yeah and then they're being cited as the best for that but they're their own source so there might be a sound strategy that we come that we recommend or develop which is to say that two types content sort of like the the the the category list yeah and the niche specific commercial pages together in tandem could really enhance your results in those commercial searches it's quite logical again really when you think about it user types in a query ai goes and searches for the most relevant content of which there will be less by definition yeah and and therefore if you put something out there that has a degree of likelihood to be again when when we were creating content for seo something i always reminded people was if if somebody if nobody ever types that into google there's no point creating that piece of content or at least no point using that title like it's gotta connect with users doing something for you to get a benefit yeah you can publish all the blog posts you like and get zero pipeline from it if it's not connected to user behavior on that platform yeah we're talking here about you know after informational queries have been done where there's like i mean we used to talk about long tail search the tale is so long now it's impossible to manage yeah but we're getting back here into ultimately there are only so many categories there are only you know so many types of business that we'll use a particular company's products and offerings you know so there's a bit more concentration on these types of queries meaning it makes more sense to try to influence those results and you can i think be more likely to have a predictable impact yeah and it's it's easier it reminds me of like the whole backlink versus internal link conversation where it's like oh well we're trying to get backlinks but it's really really hard so okay we'll just do internal linking which we can control which we can manage and we can have our own impact on that it's like people are talking about well how do we get site as these sources how do we get into these places how do we get into medium how do we get into the g two list do it yourself yeah agreed absolutely our stance on internal linking versus backlink was always this is so much easier and and has an impact almost straight away but most people overlooked it i think because i don't know there's an to being referenced by someone else and there's and there's a lot of a or to you know the the really high valued backlink that the algorithms you know placed on those backlinks yeah but they were so hard to get whereas you could create dozens maybe even hundreds of internal links and have the same impact yeah the this is it again right most of the advice that i've seen about how to influence the ai engines is all about reddit medium subs forbes like okay that's fine but again you've gotta do a lot of this stuff to move the needle in a measurable way to your point if you can become your own source for commercial queries in your category i think the impact could be realized a lot faster yeah potentially we've gotta do our due diligence on that but it's exciting to think yeah we're we're kind of early stage and we're we're sharing the journey with everyone here right and everyone's trying to figure this stuff out and we're trying to figure it out and we're just kind of sharing that journey yeah but absolutely like the amount of work you'd need to do to reference yourself in reddit and in these other places like quo would be really hard to also be genuine whilst doing that yeah and feasibility again at at scale right if you're a medium sized sm i i think this is a probably got this within a a a mix of a few other activities probably got more you know sense than and you just can't afford to do all of those things you can't afford to have a a a full going p strategy that means you're getting you know you're getting featured or guest content into those publications on a weekly basis you can be generating this material weekly yeah so yeah it's got real attraction for me for sm yeah i do worry about the longevity of it and we kinda spoke about this yesterday right i'm i'm worried that chat eb other ai models will have to start thinking about trust signals more very much like google did back in the day we don't know that though no it's an interesting it's an interesting point and i think it will be interesting to see how the mission of these companies determines their behavior it's really interesting that you know chat gp now and probably ai mode doesn't really seem to care about domain authority yeah the way the yeah searched it it'll go as deep as it needs to go to get the more accurate the the result and right now that's resulting in really really useful information for people that's a that's a big departure from google's mission which was to provide the most you know trustworthy content to the to the user's first it will be really interesting to see how that evolves and you are right to warn people because the pace of change is so incredible there are no guarantees in this world which is why i think we have to sort of put this strategy this channel you know on the board with the other things that we could do with our budget yeah and determine where we feel we're gonna make the biggest gains and i think that like we're trying to work this out and people should probably let us do that you know before necessarily going all in on that if it comes at the expense of other things that we would say have got a high degree of predictability or relevance in today's b2b b buying journey yeah and longevity as well like building your brand being known as the go to vendor for a particular thing is always gonna be the number one priority for any marketing intent yeah yeah the lion's share of purchases go to the brand that was top of mind when the knee year arose and buyers had long moved away from search yeah for that moment in their journey that was happening on social that was happening at events that happening in communities that was happening in webinars and in videos that wasn't in search anymore and i don't think ai will bring that back no so if you are in the mind of your ic as a credible provider of a solution in a category that is dutch worth a lot of yeah time and attention ai is replacing search but all of these things the vendor selection process was is still happening outside of search for a large majority of buyers anyway like their vendor list is curated in their mind over times over touch points of brands over years sometimes yeah yeah absolutely so being within that list that's predetermined in somebody's memory is you know the number one strategy for any marketing team and for most of us fortunately it doesn't take a lot of work a lot of content a lot of effort to to win in branded search right if someone searching for our brand google the the ai tools are usually pretty decent yeah about giving them us yeah now there are situations where companies have the same name right so you do have to have some degree of you know visibility is good or some sort of nuance that people can you you know to to get to you but but google's pretty good if you've created a brand and and you can get people searching for you while they research other people you're in a strong position you're in a really strong position because you're top of their supplier shortlist your out of their mind and there is a statistical likelihood that you will have a very good shot of that deal you don't need to be part of the research process the search process for that to to work and i think again if if one of those came at the expense of the other you've gotta be really cautious because if you can't brand because you're doing this yeah that might that might not pay off over the long term yeah exactly there's one thing that i actually have that i wanted to cover which is a comment that i've heard thrown around a few times you know since the rise of ai seo which is if you just do good seo and you rank well using traditional seo tactics like it will pay off for ai seo and i think that is fundamentally not true and you can prove this out quite easily as we did yesterday i think went into google search and search for the best b web design agencies mh if you compare what you get in the all tab in the first ten blue links with hopping over into ai mode and seeing who is referenced in there you will not see the same vendors quite yeah so like good seo doesn't do you any harm no it's not negative absolutely but it's also not gonna produce the result you're looking for and again it it comes back to what are we trying to achieve like we're trying to drive pipeline and good seo isn't going to deliver that result good seo may impact ai search results but that might still not impact you yeah your business and i think we've gotta be really clear about that and look at what is happening in the buyer again it's about being bio centric not company centric right it's like you can rank for all the things you want to but if buyers aren't using that information informed decisions it's it's for phenomenal and if the ai models aren't using those ranking signals to inform the content that they're to inform the answer there giving which they're not the correlation between ranking yeah yeah yeah and content retrieval like is really poor i can't remember the exact stat there's an hr report yeah i mean i think it's brilliant i think it's brilliant for users the ai is able to pull from results that are so low down the traditional rankings because ultimately that levels the playing field again right the playing field was leveled when search became a thing and then it got increasingly un level and if you weren't in the top three results you you didn't really have a hope yeah this is fantastic but at the same time although ai can pull from those deep deep down results it doesn't generate brand awareness and it's brand visibility traffic to your website when it does yep so it's kind of moot in many cases and not really worth your time or effort to be in those twenty deep informational results commercial side that's got some legs that's got some that's got some worthwhile you know it's worth exploring as we're doing and then building that brand before search winning before search as as pep says i think it's really really where this exciting opportunity for business is still even while ai disrupts everything yeah and let's not forget a lot of the things we we do for seo for technical seo reasons for seo in general making you know headlines more clear with target keywords in there like these things are actually all still great for user experience incredible yeah you know like you shouldn't forget about these things just because people are using ai to search i was thinking about this recently and i was thinking how like ai is sort of swallowing up right this whole part of the buying journey the the buyer experience and i think that increases the stakes on our brand creation work or activity the importance of being a known brand in your category and the importance of your website user experience being good right mh we've always said you well the saying is you only get one chance to make a first impression and so how you structure your website particularly your homepage particularly your hero particularly your navigation has always been critical to your conversion rate because of the degree to which ai is robbing us of traffic you know informational traffic particularly but also just traffic overall we're gonna get far fewer opportunities to make that first impression yeah but every one of those opportunities is gonna be vitally important because it's probably gonna be a more qualified better fit visitor to our website so getting your website user experience right becomes even more yep valuable and being a known brand in your category becomes even more valuable and so i think it's really interesting to think about the effect that this change in search is gonna have on the other parts of our go to market alright well i think that probably about rounds off this episode we'll have to come back to it for sure i think you can come back every single week on this topic you will and you know like have something unique to say that's how fast things are moving i would say like there's probably no more exciting time to be a marketer than right now people are freaking out right but people are also like so much more engaged so much more in about like what to do what's next how do i figure this out than ever before yeah i mean we've we've had a period of time where it was just rinse repeat right we we knew what we were doing we knew how it worked and we knew how to do it so we were just doing but but those moments where we've had an opportunity to figure something out to be the first or be one of the first that's that's incredibly exciting this you can look at this time this change with you know with fear or with excitement and and i understand both but yeah it is really an exciting time because there's so much opportunity to to change the way we do things yeah and somebody will figure this out right if we think back to brian figuring out the the skyscraper technique somebody will figure out the ai seo content technique maybe it's maybe it'll be us yeah maybe it'll be somebody else but if you're part of that initial fold of businesses that can do that it'll benefit you yeah lot you'll you'll have the the the lead on people you'll have a window of opportunity arbitrage will exist and it might not last forever but your reaper rewards cool alright well let's leave it there good to have you back phil thank you and yeah if you would love to follow us like the episode on whatever channel you listen to watch on youtube spotify apple podcasts any engagement is helpful to us we'd love to see it so yeah we'll leave it there but thank you very much for tuning in and we'll see you next time thanks all

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded dan here as usual and it's a solo episode today and we're talking about linkedin ads and in particular we're gonna cover well i'm gonna cover why your linkedin ads aren't working and how to fix that it's actually funny how many times i hear the question have been asked the question why aren't my linkedin ads working and it's a generic question but it is rooted in not seeing any measurable improvement in you know data leads pipeline revenue from linkedin ads themselves so if you've tried linkedin ads and you've walked away because you've thought maybe they're too expensive maybe they didn't generate any qualified leads for you maybe they didn't move the in terms of pipeline and revenue this episode will hopefully unpack some of the common reasons why linkedin ad simply just fail for so many businesses they are extremely expensive in a lot of cases depending on who you're targeting but most of the time it will be you know high level professionals who will be highly like in highly concentrated markets where a lot of businesses are trying to target those with ads which does make them a really expensive channel a lot of the time to serve ads on and you need to make sure that these ads are performing in the best way possible to build your brand to drive demand for exactly what you do capture qualified leads who are in market to buy and ultimately you know drive pipeline and revenue and growth for your business every investment that you have in marketing should aim to do that and linkedin is absolutely no different it's just a channel that people for some reason struggle to get right despite all of the right things existing on the platform itself so yeah in this episode will impact all of that and hopefully give you the best advice possible to fix those linkedin out of that just aren't working for you before we get into the episode today here's a quick word from our sponsors hubspot you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city's football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience all in one platform this allowed their small team of just three to build an entire website in just three days the result nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better let's start with the main core issue when it comes to actually linkedin as a channel more broadly not just that ads themselves and the main issue is that your audience your buyers just aren't on linkedin let's face it not all industries not all professionals will be on linkedin every single day if we think about industries like you know selling to hospitals and medical professionals where they might not be able to access linkedin in all the time and they don't like to consume linkedin content in their personal time there's a good chance they're gonna be really hard to reach on that platform and other channels will actually give you a better opportunity to reach those it may be conferences that that they go to it may be communities that they're part of how do you get your content how do you get your ads into those places how do you get your brand seen in those places where they actually are so yeah linkedin of course starts with understanding your audience understanding that they're there understanding the kind of content mediums that they enjoy consuming to and all of that starts with audience research it's something that we spoken about time and time again on demand decode ultimately doing their upfront audience and customer research will allow you to understand where your audience goes to consume information which channels they actually operate on in terms of social and other you know information consumption needs and and things like that and if linkedin isn't actually coming up in that research you know you don't have to use it as a channel just because it's kind of become the default advertising channel for a lot of b2b companies does it mean it has to be for yours ultimately you should be putting your budget in the best place possible to reach your buyer so that you can you know build up brand awareness brand affinity with them drive demand for exactly what you do and ultimately convert them whenever that buying trigger occurs later down the line for most b2b your audience will be on links in it's just a matter of fact it is the biggest professional network the biggest professional social channel your linkedin your audience will most likely be on linkedin you know there will be those exceptions that i just spoke about but for the most part they will be on linkedin but what i've seen time and time again is targeting that is just way way way too broad and when it comes to linkedin as i mentioned at start they are expensive ads and they get more and more expensive as you start to target more senior professionals who are gonna be targeted by more and more companies than the competition heats up but one of the biggest mistakes i see is just burning budget on an audience that simply cannot and will not ever be able to buy from you or influence a a purchasing decision for your brand so for example if you're going after cfo for mid market saas companies you're targeting should reflect that or at least branch out just into the kind of buying committee and influencers or maybe champion for a product that you're trying to sell but you shouldn't be you know targeting any more than the financial responsibilities within a business and you know that financial kind of vertical within that if you end up seeing that your demographics are all of a sudden branch now into it procurement sales then you have a huge problem on your hand when it just comes to those demographics alone but actually what you often see more so is people loosening the reins on kind of like industries company sizes the kind of things that allow you to have a broader audience but probably aren't your actual ic themselves the the way that i've always done linkedin targeting is to target our best customers already if you're not yet ready to serve your exact future ic then trying to build a brand with them is a good thing but trying to actually make them buy from you when you're actually not in a position to serve them is probably not a good thing so one thing that i've always done with some success is basically enable our linkedin audience to be our highest fit ic that we're already selling to that are already a fantastic fit for our business because it enables us to get the best roi back from our budget because we know that we're targeting an audience who are already a fantastic fit for us we can serve them perfectly and we probably already have the case studies and the trust and those kind of signals to actually back up what we're saying within that there's other best practices that we've talked about before on this podcast like don't use audience expansion only target the actual linkedin platform form itself not the audience network because you know you need to be thinking here audience expansion is just gonna be expanding your audience into other people on the platform who actually aren't in your perfect fit persona or ic you know why would you wanna be spending budget on people who you haven't defined that you want to target and not enabling the linkedin audience the network expansion is just a really quick way to waste budget on showing your ads in inefficient places where your buyers probably aren't and where they're not at least consuming that kind of information there's a reason why you've probably come to linkedin as a platform to use and show ads because you know that's where your buyers are you know they consume content there and you know that's where they operate so that is a huge huge issue that i see time and time again targeting just being way too broad rein in as much as you can and you've maybe we'll get onto metrics a little bit later in this but your targeting should be narrow enough to give you a frequency if we're talking cold audience you probably want between three and five so if your audience is absolutely ginormous and your budget really low your frequency probably gonna be below one which means a particular person within your audience is only seeing your ad one time well we know you know scientific studies have proven that just seeing your brand one time is not enough to make you mem remember it you actually need to see it multiple times in order to get aided recall signals back to the brain to stimulate it to remember what they've just what they've seen time and time again so then that eventually when the buying trigger occurs they will associate your brand and that memory with the the pain that they have and the thing that they actually wanna go ahead and buy so yeah we wanna be refining that audience having a a smaller audience is pretty much always best to get frequency high whilst saving on budget use using it as efficiently as possible number three is a quick point about objective because for the most part linkedin objectives are pretty good you can't go wrong with website visits or brand awareness or video views or conversions if you have the data most people don't so i'd avoid those they're all good i i tend to default to brand awareness because it gives me the biggest reach with the audience for usually the most reasonable cost i would say website clicks website visits are also fairly reasonable as well you can get a good amount of reach there but cp can sometimes be quite a lot higher one thing i just wanted to say on objective here is that i still see a lot of businesses using lead gen ads with a completely cold audience and a completely kind of low quality offer that is just gonna generate leads who will never ever buy from you linkedin lead gen adds are the fastest way to burn any marketing budget for low quality lead who will ultimately not be interested in buying from you later down the line it bog my mind that businesses and marketing team still spend you know fifty to a hundred dollars on a lead from a linkedin lead gen campaign that will ultimately never buy from you they they've built up no connection with your brand just from that tiny piece of content that they've consumed it might not even be relevant to them they might not even enjoy it and you've spent that much money on collecting an email address which most of the time is gonna be a personal email address too yeah you can you know go to a platform like apollo zoom info cog get the same lead information for you know literally ten cents whatever it may be an absolute fraction of the price and you've got that professional email that ready to use and the arguments i've heard is that well they've consumed our content they've seen our brands so they'll be more like to engage with us but that's actually not true because the offer that you've given to them isn't building a deep connection with your brand because they could have consumed that content elsewhere without exchanging that level of information and nobody wants to be nurtured and spanned after filling out a form you know we're not in twenty twelve anymore where that's kind of a new and acceptable thing to be doing nobody wants to be submitting a form for what's probably a bog standard piece of content with no real original content or original original content probably wrong original data anyway no like first party information within that content itself nothing totally unique that it would warrant an exchange of information and then just be spam by emails and spanned by salespeople on the phones to try and sell something that ultimately they're not ready to buy and probably don't want to buy actually so yeah when it comes to objectives absolutely avoid legion ads as much as you can i would even say when it comes to retargeting there is maybe be more of a case for it because there's more trust there's more affinity with your brand they may be more likely to sign up for your newsletter or exchange information for something of value within that stage but for the most part you can just leave that all un gated and your audience will consume it freely within their own time and come back to you when that buying charter occurs because you've built up the brand affinity the brand awareness and you're gonna be top of mind when that does happen this podcast is brought to you by blend we're a b2b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in marketing so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b dot com okay number four the biggest mistake that i see when it comes to linkedin ads in particular is creative saying a lot without actually saying anything at all and this one gets me so much because teams just don't see the problem that's wrong with it it's it's not as clear as an audience or a particular budget or objective that's being set you can't say that's categorically not the right thing to be doing or implementing in that scenario because creative is up to a matter of opinions right it's down to preference and what somebody has come up with creatively but this one is just absolutely everywhere it's where ads look sleek they look good the headline sounds professional it you know it all joins up in terms of a creative eye sense but you read it and you have absolutely no idea what the company does or what they sell or who they do it for stuff like we empower revenue teams to unlock potential that could be a saas company it could be consulting it could be coaching ai literally anybody can say they do that and it has some sort of impact if you're creative when it comes to linkedin ads is to abstract vague or trying to be too clever it's just not gonna perform people who are scrolling linkedin are poor on time they wanna be scrolling things and seeing immediate resonance within the feed with that piece of content and if your ad isn't doing that they're just gonna scroll straight past it if you think averaged dwell times on our ads are around five to ten seconds but an add of that isn't relevant isn't even gonna get five seconds worth of screen time for that particular user they're gonna be looking at your ad for a couple of seconds and if they don't understand it within that exact you know couple of seconds that they're dedicate into it they are just gonna keep scrolling so adds to that are trying to be too clever are usually you know the enemy of their own success whilst they're witty they sound great they're actually just not saying anything to the audience at all and it might sound really boring just to say well just say exactly what you do and who you do it for and how you help them yeah that that might be more boring than coming up with a a witty headline that you might see from coca cola or sony or apple but let's remember we're in b2b it doesn't mean we need to be boring but it does mean we need to be direct and we often don't have the brand equity behind us in order to be really fancy really creative because we're actually trying to craft a market for us we're trying to build brand from zero in some cases and by being too witty you're just making sure that people don't understand what you do rather than actually speaking to people directly and ensuring that they know exactly what you do and what you offer you know just when it comes to things like powering next gen growth enable that's actually one that i saw when the product could have probably said something more along the lines of automate sales follow ups but thirty percent more more demos no extra head count like it's benefit driven and it's not there's no fluff i've actually got a few examples here because let's face it we're not all perfect right even though our ads i'm really happy to say all have over a naught point four percent click through right of course we have some that perform better than others so let's now just show you a few different examples of ads and some that perform better than the others because i think there are some clear reasons behind it and this you know times that we've tried to get too clever too so this ad here we've got twenty five examples of bespoke tailored websites that are built on hubspot and i do like this ad from a creative standpoint and we're still running it because the click through rate is reasonable enough in order to you know have a varied creative ad set but it doesn't perform as well as a more simplistic version of this ad and what we're trying to do here is be a bit too clever and mimic air drop ultimately by saying we'd like to share twenty five examples of you twenty five examples of creative hubspot websites with you but you know it looks a bit misleading perhaps with the acceptable decline looks like we're trying to bait people out in order to click that and it's maybe just not as clear as what we're actually trying to offer here in terms of the ad which is basically a link to a blog with some of these examples on the click through rate on this was around zero point four percent whereas if we compare it to this which is going to exactly the same place has similar messaging as well twenty five examples of hubspot websites but it just shows them more visually laid out it doesn't have the kind of clickbait bait button options and the headline is actually a lot bolder here this actually performs at around naught point six percent so we've got a big improvement there on click through rate and i just think the clarity here is really helping helping us in this scenario i've got another example here and it's a similar concept that you might see around linkedin on ads every now and again and it says conversational style so we're trying to put ourselves in the shoes of our customer here being the marketer and we say marked sick of seeing and poor results from your website and we've got message bubbles here the ceo saying how's the new website before mark said not great actually our traffic down thirty percent and we're not seeing the leads we hoped for ceo says maybe we should have gone with blend after all i hear the get great results and actually on the surface this ad looks really sleek it's really cool it's quite a kind of unique format to use on linkedin too but again it doesn't perform as well as our ad actually showing an example of our work it's saying a hundred and thirty two percent increase in demo request with new website like this is an actual true case study that we have from a website that we've got a hundred to a hundred and thirty two percent increases in demo request is amazing right and we're not just trying to let the audience read all of these chat bubbles in order to get that we're saying it right up upfront here and i think that's the difference in there when we have a look at this you would have to stop on this ad for you know five to ten seconds in order to get what we're trying to say here whereas if you just scroll past this you see wow a hundred and thirty two percent and it immediately captures your eye and guides it then to the text below increasing demo requests with new website so a couple of examples of there of a couple of examples there of when linkedin ads can be over engineered over designed in order to try and say a message in a you know clever witty way when actually just saying the thing that you really wanna say is easier because it's easier to understand it's easier for everybody to consume and recognize b buyers don't just click and buy they don't look and buy they look and consume and learn and that's what your linkedin ads need to be doing too and you can't expect that somebody sees an ad for your brand at once and will immediately go and buy it there are cases where that does happen right if you happen to reach an audience who are in market to buy which you will most likely do if you're targeting your complete ic you have no idea where they are in their journey if they're about to pull the trigger and buy something then if they're totally new to this pain that they're experiencing and need educating and you don't know where they are so the chances are actually you will hit somebody buyers who are in markets to buy and you might get lucky or you might just be in the right time at the right the right place at the right time that's not luck it's just being there and that's a great thing but for most of your audience ninety five percent of them are not in market to buy and that means you need to be building up trust you need to build be building brand affinity brand recognition throughout the entire duration that they are not in market to buy until that buying trigger happens and they actually now need a solution that your product or service falls into the category of you then wanna be as high at that vendor option list as possible when it comes to actually you know deciding who to go with ultimately and in order to do that showing your ad once it's gonna be forgotten in thirty days i can't remember the exact stat around that you'll have to go and check out a guy called dale harrison who is a absolute mastermind when it comes to brand recognition brand memory kind of cognitive information of brands and brands are forgotten i believe this within thirty days or maybe even less from you know seeing it the first time i think it's less and what our job is is to enable people to remember our brand time and time again and to have aided recall so that when they see a portion of our brand our message our logo our colors whatever it may be that they remember us that they remember to associate us with that particular benefit with that particular pain point so when the buying trigger occurs you know we are there and simply running one single layer might get you you know a decent frequency but as soon as you layer on retargeting you take the engaged people who might have clicked on your ad viewed seventy five percent of your video you know they're actually engaged with you you can then double down on the budget to reach those harder and faster with more and more ads creating more and more recall more and more affinity with your brand so in the long run it's gonna benefit you because more people are gonna remember you when that buying trigger occurs one big issue in all of this is actually the measurement itself people saying our linkedin ads aren't working are usually measuring the wrong thing they don't actually understand if it's working or not the trouble is when it comes to linkedin ads and brand ads in general starting them in most cases won't have an immediate impact on you know high intent leads pipeline or revenue based on your sales cycle you might again you know end up being in the right place at the right time with those ads and have some success there but for the most part it's gonna be a longer term play and you need to give yourself enough time in order to measure the success of these ads so the best way to measure linkedin ads and to understand this effectiveness on the conversion throughout your entire buyer journey and your funnel is to measure using self report attribution which we've spoken about time and time again on this podcast so asking people on your high intent forms how they heard about you if you're running good linkedin ads people will likely you know reference those linkedin out of being how they first heard about you or maybe even the most memorable part of that you've then got your actual linkedin conversion tracking itself which can easily identify any just view through conversions themselves let's not forget that if you do have some software attribution in place like hubspot for example which is fantastic at measuring clicks from your ads and how they've then progressed into your website converted etcetera it misses the people that i've just seen your app in linkedin gone to google search for your brand name and then convert it later view through conversions will give you that data so it's really important and hopefully that's where self report attribution can capture some of that as well because self reported attribution then enables you to tie that attribution type linkedin add social wherever you may bucket it as and then track that progression all the way through to pipeline and revenue so now you can truly split out your channels linkedin be in one of them how much are we investing in it how many high leads have we got what is their value in terms of pipeline how many are converted into closed one there you've got your channel roi the final point is marketing teams who aren't iterating and just ultimately guessing linkedin is a channel where i found shipping fast iterating fast is the way to go because you're running a lot of ads there's a lot of volume out there when it comes to you know high budgets high impressions high clicks and you learn a lot from being able to run a high volume of ads in a short space of time the best campaigns that i've seen that i've ran as well are a result of iteration and not luck and when it comes to like ab b testing and testing granular things on linkedin it can work you need a lot of budget a lot of volume there to say oh okay let's just tweak this button color or let's just tweak this headline you can do that and i have done that in the past and you know we might have seen a winner by naught point zero five percent click through rate and okay we might have a few extra clicks then onto our website but actually i find when it comes to iterate and what we're trying to do here is find the concept the type of ad that's actually outperforming all the others is it a screenshot style review ad is it a clear you know one line message exactly what we do is it a couple of product benefits is it a case study with stats what's the actual format and what's the wording being used in that format that's resonating most that will allow you to then lean into more of that format and do more of those you know you can get into the kind of micro ab b test but i actually prefer to lean into the kind of broader concepts that i working and double down on those because i found that you know in the past they can have improvements or differences of naught point one zero point two zero point three percent click through rate instead of the smaller iterations that you get from just changing micro things on an ad so just because one campaign has flopped in the past and you haven't seen the results that you've bought you were gonna see from linkedin ads absolutely doesn't mean that it's not a channel that's gonna work going into the future so i would say always be able to come back iterate and not go off of guess work but use the data you're inside the platform in order to iterate test and improve over time hopefully that's giving you some insight on where to look if you're asking the question you know why aren't my linkedin out to work in you've got some places to look there to hopefully improve those ads for you and just remember you know linkedin ads aren't magic you can't turn them off and immediately generate ten x more pipeline and double your revenue overnight but they're absolutely not broken they may be more expensive than a platform like meta of course they're gonna be because the targeting is just so much more advanced for a b2b b company but you can just have so much huge success there and brilliant roi really when you get everything right from the audience the targeting objective creative measurement when you have that all in place all working correctly you can really start to build an engine which is gonna build your brand generate demand for you and ultimately drive revenue for your business so fix all those things and hopefully linkedin will be a channel that's really gonna work for you going forwards but you know if you did wanna chat to me about linkedin campaigns or you know know just wanted to shoot me an ad get my thoughts whatever it may be dm me on linkedin always open to that happy to connect and you know share ad examples whatever it may be so yeah feel free to hit me up on there if you haven't liked or subscribed on whatever channel it is that you listen to this to it might be youtube or one of the audio players then please do so demand coded is growing rapidly at the moment which is amazing to see i'm sure the hubs podcast network as it's something to do with that we've had josh on for a couple of episodes and the last two which were a lot more detail orientated we're not detailed they actually weren't detail orientated in terms of you know tactical analysis but they were further up the change should we say when it comes to strategic marketing thinking approaches to take and kind of c level executive board thinking which you know is still fantastic and we'll get josh on in the future for some more episodes a bit more tactical today which is hopefully still valuable so yeah that's my ramble over for this anyway and hopefully you enjoy this episode just love where demand code is going at the moment and really really looking forward to the next episode see you nice time

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded dan here as usual and we've got josh back again who was introduced on my last episode if you missed that well you have to go back and listen to it but josh is our new ceo of america's at blend and yeah go back and listen to the last episode where we introduce him fully and get a just a smidge of his expertise which now we're bringing more into this episode too and we're covering private equity and what private equity firms really care about when it comes to marketing and you probably won't be surprised to hear you know it's not traffic it's not lead volume it's about marketing that actually drives eb growth retention and ultimately the exit value for the business and yeah there's kind of nobody better i i don't think to break it down then josh here who not only brings marketing and sales expertise but also firsthand experience in the pe world which is really valuable to this conversation and we're gonna dig into the expectations from pe owners post acquisition the kpis that really matter how to align the marketing strategy to those financial goals and the mistakes to avoid if you want to actually build a marketing engine that drives true enterprise value so yeah really excited to get into this conversation josh thanks for having me back dan this is a fun topic so yeah looking forward to the conversation yeah we were kind of just chatting before as well it's it's a timely episode because we've got a lot of customers and we will likely have a lot of potential customers too that work with us in the future that rp back mh and understanding what they're truly looking for from marketing is really important yeah i agree that it's like we talked about in our last episode oftentimes marketing isn't invited into the boardroom or at least the the you know the mid level marketing teams that could would really benefit from understanding the context of the investment that the private equity group made oftentimes is our left out of conversation so hopefully today we can give them just a a baseline of what those investors are thinking about how they how they measure value and then give them a way to to be able to articulate the the results that they're driving in a way that investors will consume and and appreciate yeah and i feel like i mentioned this a couple of times on the last episode but this isn't a tactical episode about how to rank first in ai search engines but if marketers can truly understand this level of thinking around what matters to ultimately the people investing in their business that's really gonna help level up the thinking the execution and the strategy behind all of that it's exactly right it's a more purposeful when you know what the end the outcome is that you're trying to drive you can be more per purposeful in the decisions that you make right before we get into the episode today here's a quick word from our sponsor hubspot you don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident angel city's football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience all in one platform this allowed their small team of just three to build an entire website in just three days the result nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in just two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better alright cool well let's kick this off because i think you kind of wanted to run through well and give me as well an indication of what happens behind the pe lens during deals and afterwards and all of that well all of the in between yeah i i think the i think the important things to understand as a marketer who's working for a pe firm is how did that be come to the how did that investor group come to the investment that they made and and what is the math behind that so generally when private equity growth equity companies look at an opportunity they're going to look at a a wide variety of multiple of of metrics and then they're gonna apply multiples to them and and to come up with a an investment thesis that they can look to you know look to execute on that that creates the valuation they're looking at eb they're as a percentage of revenue eb earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization it's supposed to most closely evaluate operating costs without getting a lot of other you know non operating costs and impact in the the the net earnings but they're and they're looking at revenue growth primarily recurring revenue growth they're gonna look at retention rates both gross in that we talked a little bit about that the last time so there's a variety of metrics but but let me just walk you through the math of a of maybe a you know a fictitious example right so let's say you had a a sixty million dollar revenue company and that's sixty million dollar revenue company it's recurrent let's say it's a hundred percent recurring revenue which never happens that the great was and then they're doing let's call it fifteen percent eb so that's a twenty five percent eb better rate right let's assuming let's assume that they're growing at fifteen to twenty percent so that makes them what's called a rule of forty their their growth rate which fifteen to twenty percent plus their eb percentage which is twenty five percent is you know forty to forty five that's called a rule of forty company and and that and that type of math right there determines what level of valuation or valuation multiple that that that company may put it out now where venture typically venture investors tend to invest in multiples on revenue pe tends to invest in multiples of eb and so something like that that fifteen million dollar eb company might sell for let's call it a hundred and eighty million dollars that's what twelve x of the eb rate at that at that price point that investor can fund that in two different ways they can just write a check with the cash they have in their fund or they can use debt that they that then the business cons you know is responsible for and and usually most often it's a combination of the two so at a fifteen million dollar eb company with a twenty five percent eb rate it's probably fair to think that they could handle a five x senior debt load mh so that might be seventy five million dollars in debt that they're going to use as part of the purchase price which leaves a hundred and five million which they would probably fund in equity that comes out of their fund just cash right there's there's way more to it for those of you who've been in this space a while just i know this is overs simplifying let's not have a bunch of comments about it overs simplifying but that's that's the idea that's so so okay so they've got a hundred and five million in and now they need and they own the company and now they need to grow they wanna sell it in three to five years ideally and they want a at least you know three to four x return on their invested capital and so they wanna sell it for somewhere in the three hundred and fifty to four hundred million range so that they can pay the debt and and then harness the you know harvest the results the the remainder so let's say they they need to achieve that outcome really that means their goals are probably something in the order of driving revenue to a hundred million at let's call it a twenty percent c compound annual growth rate and driving eb to twenty five million that that maintains the twenty five percent eb multiple twenty percent c that gives us our rule of forty again but now they're now they're they have twenty five million in eb they've scaled it up and they qualify for a higher multiple because the high the larger the the eb typically the larger than multiple as long as everything else stays you know roughly the same and so let's say they they were able to sell that for eighteen to twenty x which wouldn't be unreasonable call that a four hundred and fifty million dollar sale price remember they paid they had seventy five million in debt mh so they have to take that off the top and they're left with three hundred and seventy five million dollars of results or that then goes back to the fund and eventually back to the investors that's a three point six ish x what what's called a mike multiple on invested capital so hundred and five million of invested capital what do we say three hundred and seventy five million in returns three point six mo is a top tier result for a private equity firm so that's what that's basically what they're trying to do go yeah yeah lots of numbers there yeah if you didn't follow along rewind listen to it back again because yeah interesting to hear the way that those deals work even if it is over simplified but yeah i mean it it's it is overs simplified there's all kinds of additional costs deal costs and things that go into that and adjust numbers and whatnot but but the the main point is to think like an investor mh and know how they're you know you know your own company's numbers and therefore why how they're engaged and what their goals are and why their goals are what they are right if you don't know those things you're being told by the board and here's your budget and here's your results and you might feel like well wait a minute this is crazy that i don't i don't understand how how they came up with this it just feels like a spreadsheet exercise well no it's it's really what's what they're doing is engineering in a an outcome and then working backwards to figure out how to achieve that outcome yeah so where does marketing fit in this equation yeah okay so what do we say there were there were a few things that were important eb growth was important so from a marketing standpoint i need to be able to grow eb in a growing company not in a shrinking company anywhere you're just reducing cost but in a growing company you're trying to grow top line but you're trying to grow top line efficiently mh so marketing comes in and says i've got i can measure my channels i can look at total cost of cap or cost total customer acquisition costs yep and and then look at what are what are the channels that are most efficient right but it's not enough i mean we talked about this a bit the last time too but it's not enough to just measure marketing c right we have when we when we use the word c or the term we have to make sure that we have cost sales cost of partner payments cost any any type of cost yeah so related because that's that's the only fair way to evaluate the entire process to to know what it's gonna cost you to acquire customers so they care about that they care about scalability they care very much about der risking the investment so when they predictability is is maybe even more valuable than rapid growth mh knowing you know a private equity investor they're not they're not a venture investor venture investors want you know a ten x return on one deal out of out of five right yeah and they expect the other ones to go to zero pe doesn't do that pe says i need i need good solid results out of every company that invest in and i'm only trying to like a three x three x to five x return is a home run in most cases and so in those circumstances that means that d risking every investment about getting you know getting a repeatable predictable revenue generation model that that you can then choose to scale up or scale back depending on what you're trying to achieve is is extremely valuable and that's i mean that's frankly that's the cro job it's the cmos job it's the ceo's job to be able to create that from a der risk standpoint and how that information at actually gets served to the pe company at the time what are they looking for in particular around a model like what's the data what's the model what are they actually being presented with in order to say okay that's an investment that i feel comfortable in is risk free enough for my capital well i think it's a i mean it's the same way you would look at risk how much money do i am i are you asking me to spend and what's the likelihood of conversion mh if i have to spend a thousand dollars and i've got a one percent likelihood of conversion and i've gotta spend a thousand dollars per account let's say well that that sounds expensive compared to have to spend a hundred dollars per lead and it's got a forty percent probability of conversion i'm i'm far less risky mh risky in those cases those are probably that's off the so there's probably really bad examples but but the idea is what we what we wanna do is we wanna look at the entire revenue generation process yeah starting starting at you know customer and the first touch point and going to the really the end of their life with the with the company so include that includes cross sell upsell it includes retention it includes do we expect this type of customer is going to negotiate you know discounts every time a renewal comes up and how do we fight against that and you know like all of those kinds of dynamics go into looking at the end to end process and then look and then taking it apart and looking at each step and deciding how do i how do i create predictability and how do i reduce the risk that something unknown is going to upset that and the lower the lower the cost of each step the lower the risk to me right because i can fail if i can try something and it's gonna cost me ten bucks but i can try it a hundred times and then i know you know i spent a thousand dollars and and i know it whether it worked or not that's it if you tell me i need to make an investment in a third party it analyst organization that's super expensive and i won't know whether that's successful until i go through an eighteen month sales cycle yep that's super like risky right like i'm gonna spend probably millions in between the analysts and the travel and the actual human beings that are in my enterprise salesforce and i don't know whether that's gonna actually create the recurring revenue i need until i'm well on the road so i i wanna sometimes that's the right answer mh rarely sometimes but but i think the you know the the that's the issue of risk that we're trying to to address and battle yeah what's really interesting is compared to our last conversation which was all about cmos in the boardroom and the information you should be presenting in that scenario it sounds like actually the pe owners are looking for more detailed explanation of the entire kind of funnel and the repeat predictability the predictability of that before they go ahead and invest ultimately whereas in the boardroom like you can forget most of that is that right it they don't yeah i i know you're why you're saying that in the boardroom they they don't want to be handed a slide deck from a cro or a cmo that goes through every single stage and talks through every single finding and but they would love a pre read mh because what what happens is the board in the boardroom got a limited amount of time you've got a lot of topics there's information overload and it's you know it's the partner that's sitting there they might have one of their analysts with them but if you give them a pre read with all of the data that depth the data or or or you're working with their consultants ahead of the board meeting and helping them look at the data then you can you know everybody can be up to speed and you can have a strategic conversation in the room because everybody's already digested it and analyze the data themselves and and they have an opinion on the topic right so i i would i would say that's the mh i for the last time we talked there was a cmo walking into their very first marketing meeting or or board meeting and and yes the council was definitely don't go into loads and loads of detail but but even then the conversation is still all about about return on investment yeah not it's it's the vanity metrics that i think get cmos into a lot of hot water yeah for sure where does lt come into this i don't think we've mentioned it yet how important is that see yeah i mean i think there's a lot of organizations that fail to recognize that and kara brown has a has a book that she's recently put out it's great book worth reading but it it talks about three funnels and everybody understands the first two funnels the lead funnel the and the revenue funnel mh but a lot of people forget about the customer funnel and the customer funnel is your existing customers and the the the process they go through to increase what they spend with you right whether it's cross sell or it's up upsell your your process there is equally important and oftentimes marketing gets either left out of a loop but it that whole thing gets handed to account managers and and you know and they stop talking to marketing or people forget to spend money in marketing for their existing customers and i i think the entire everything we do in the first two funnels are absolutely critical in the third funnel so that's that's really what el what drives lt tv is being able to continuously serve the customer make make thrilled customers but then up upsell them because when you're up upsell them you're creating more value for them right where does lt though come into play for pe owners like how much do they care about sorry so i didn't answer your question is what you're saying lifetime value is is a questionable metric depend but it's just depends on the business in pure saas companies it has a it has a lot of value yeah particularly the the easier in a business really it it maybe i let me retract that the for lt tv's value to be high the ability to leave or switch has to be high so if you're have low switching costs and in your in with what you do let's say you're you're selling microsoft office and somebody could easily go to google with very little extra little effort right some individual well you're your switching costs are low so you so wanting to know your lt tv in a business like that is really valuable because you wanna know how long that customer saying with you in a business like like i had a tracks for example mh we had customers for sometimes like we celebrated a thirty year history with one customer like that's a long long time yeah so calculating lt tv there has very limited value because like the risk of losses is pretty low yeah okay interesting i'd love to now kind of dig into your pea experience and understand a bit more about what the pe owners really want to see from the portfolio companies marketing mh when it comes to results the kind of engine the approach that they take is there anything in particular they're looking for that listeners should think about and be aware of yeah i mean i think the more you can structure your reporting to the board and and really the way you talk about it even internally with your cro and your and your cmo is let's look by channel the entire process of of lead capture you know attraction awareness attraction everybody has different terms yep top of funnel through all the funnels to end of life and and let's look at what meaningfully drives revenue and what are the costs associated with doing that what are the timelines associated who doing that and as you take that take your business apart and you can identify if you have the right data data is critical and and you know we can talk about where that data comes from so but let's say you have a hubspot implementation front to back and you've done it the way we would teach you to do it then you know you're probably in a good position to be able to analyze here's every single channel that i have for for generating revenue and here's what my costs are in each stage and here's the percentage of of deals that come through and you know and here's how long they take right because time matters and and so i can do the math there it it's all math right you can do the math and i can determine okay this is the most efficient the only question the only thing that's not math is canopy be scaled mh right so this this might be great this channel like my favorite channel but yeah is it repeatable yeah and so if i can you know turn turn up or down because it did the value of repeat is important because the the pe investor at certain times in their hold period are gonna turn the dial way up mh grow as fast as you can yeah right but it's certain but as they get ready to exit they're gonna turn that dial back mh and it's not as fun for a marketing leader who's like high growth let's go yeah but but there is a an appropriate time where it's time to okay show that the business can still grow but not grow quite as fast because we need to to establish that it can also generate real significant earnings yeah so just to simplify that basically the pe owners wanna know if i give you fifty percent more budget do you have places where you can deploy that where i'll where i'll get a you know good measurable return on that yeah yeah that's that's right i mean if if let's say you marketing comes out of operating costs right so fifty percent more budget let's say you had five million and you get two and a half million more well that's two and a half million of operating costs i'm sorry that i keep going into math math is the the yeah all yeah it's if you don't understand the numbers then you're you're definitely not gonna serve the p for well yeah so two and a half million of operating costs if you're looking for twenty five percent eb let's say you're looking for a twenty percent eb ebay because the math better then i need to deliver twenty percent earnings yeah and now i have to do gross margin i need to know how much of my of my revenue comes in drops to the to you know below cost of goods sold and so i'm gonna lose the audience if i keep going through this stay with us guys have this so so i here's the thing here's what i'm trying to say if a if a pe firm is gonna give you more money you need to do the math to see what type of return is necessary when i say are they gonna give you more money they're not actually giving you money they're they're just giving you more budget yeah they're giving up earnings right every dollar spent marketing is a dollar that would have dropped to the bottom line and maybe that's the most important thing and so if you're going to do that you've gotta be able approve that to yourself and to the the firm that you're going to deliver a return in an acceptable timeline that will ultimately add to their eb percentage mh it will increase the that percentage of revenue that's dropping to the to the you know quote unquote bottom line have you seen our split funnel analysis yeah i love your split five funnel analysis yeah is one of my favorite things nice do you has that got a place here and you can split that out by any way you want it doesn't have to be you know particular marketing like media spend channels it could be pipeline sources it could be you know like high intent leads via the website partners outbound yep if you split those out by total investment total return on pipeline total return on revenue is that the kind of thing exactly in here okay interesting right okay i've got like my marketing brain is aligning with us now i like it okay good so yeah so i mean that that's that's really as complicated as it gets there's you know there's i think the challenge is that there's so much data that you have to pull in yeah to be able to do this thoroughly but that's where a partnership with your cfo a really good marco stack or sales stack you know between those two things i think you can you can usually pull the data together that you need this podcast forecast is brought to you by blend we're a b2b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in martin so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b b dot com obviously there's a lot of math that's come up here there's a lot of numbers there's a lot of kpis to be here a lot of numerical data that the investor base is looking for yeah i might be wrong here but are there any other things outside of numbers that they actually care about yeah absolutely i i mean i think the numbers are critical but you can help your investors in multiple in other ways too marketing in particular should be able to educate the investor base the team the you know the pe team that they're working with on the market that they're in on market dynamics what trends what's changing on competitors on what's happening with those competitors if there's you know m and a in the space in the pe firm we'll probably know that too but but you can give them more of a market view customer view of that and so i think yeah if you have a seat at the table being being coming not just with you know my bean county head but but but also a real solid appreciation of your market dynamics and being able to educate somebody who you know isn't in your market every day and help them understand what's happening in that space is super important yeah love that i love that they even value you know that kind of thing they do that's good yeah for sure okay so now that we kind of understand what pe companies are looking for from their marketing teams it'd be interesting to see how we can pick what that actually looks like in terms of actionable strategies like can we give our listeners a solid playbook or at least an idea to work from that will please their pe company and investors yeah i mean this is a little self serving now but but that's what blended for me ten years ago was was help me build that and i know we've done that for a lot of our other clients too i mean being able to create an invite a a data environment that allows us allows a cup customer to measure all of these things that we're talking about is is kind of you know abc of of this the foundation of what we do i'm sure you see that too yeah absolutely and yeah this is you know what we do without being totally self serving but the approach here from my mind that would serve the the pe investors as well was the general approach of working back from revenue identifying the conversion points along the journey and optimizing every single stage to get the best return on investment so that means initially looking at the conversion between pipeline and revenue now some of that is out of marketing hands it just is quite simply not trying to create a battle here between marketing sales but sales have a job to do to convert the deal and get over not it's not only sales either right it it might be channel sales it might be like you may be selling in all kinds of different ways and so it's yeah this absolutely isn't about sales and marketing but marketing is the place where the data should come to be you know to have one view of the truth and it's important that the marketing leader aligns with a sales leadership whether it's a direct sales leader whether it's partner sales that are sales teams that are in other companies altogether the the cro is going to need to manage those relationships but understanding the costs yeah all we can pull all that back into the stack and be able to to then report on it yeah and marketers don't like saying this but i'm happy saying it and i'm keen to get your thoughts on it a lot of marketers don't like like saying that marketing job is to help sales sell from my perspective that that's totally true that's the only reason marketing exists in my opinion yeah i that may get me in trouble but i mean yes they they create brand right they but all there's no the brand yeah unless unless you're finding a way to turn that into revenue right now if if you're in a business where marketing can turn it into revenue without sales even better for an investor right like if you're in a let's call it an e commerce environment where you can you can find a way to eliminate the need for individual salespeople my sales friends are probably staring tankers at me right now they've they turn it off a along yeah that's that's funny but that that's true but yeah no i mean it it's it's true though right is lowest cost of of customer acquisition that is both reliable low risk and and scalable and so yeah i think marketing is the right place for all that yeah so you know working your way back through that playbook of starting with revenue understanding how pipeline converts into revenue what's marketing role there how can you influence that work of sales closely to give them the resources that they need in order to close those deals best then take another step back and i'm just doing a this off the top of my head now but it's all around the high intent website conversion to pipeline ultimately so the people that you're actually getting through the door hand raise is i wanna buy from you i wanna talk to sales how are you getting those into the pipeline as quick as possible you know identify any gaps in that process that's slowing things down things you can do to accelerate those deals as fast as possible i assume p company is gonna be all over that absolutely yeah absolutely and and you know i you we both know that there's all kinds of tactics and strategies once you get to that point for some companies that going to be an ab strategy for for some it's going to be an e ecommerce strategy for some it's you know it's gonna be something different but the point isn't to pre in the in the playbook the point isn't to define the right answer the playbook should be about d decompose the business mh and and understanding all of the transition states and why they happen and how long they take and then and how much they cost and then be able to engineer intentional growth that's why we call it growth engineering yeah the the playbook starts with your business one and what you offer and how the market needs that ultimately and having the deepest possible understanding of your audience and your buyer will give you a competitive advantage over everyone else because you understand what they like what their challenges are their deepest darkest secrets and challenges that they don't want anyone else to know you understand how they buy you understand how they consume information you understand how they research how they evaluate what truly matters to them and if you compare that with what you offer you know you're you're gonna be okay yeah so i i mean i think that that playbook is made up of really three things and it's built you're right it's built we have a a foundation but it's built for each customer individually because it has to take apart that customer's business and really understand those things but the other two things beyond the the that data and and you know the math is the stack mh and the stack is repeatable right yeah you i mean we're hubspot fans love the platform there are other platforms yes people can use other platforms they're not as good hubspot but the the the the point is understanding what stack works and and there there too you have a cost benefit analysis in in each you know step but having a stack that is fully integrated fully connected allowing you to to gather the data you need quickly automating as much as you can for the salespeople right so that you're making their lives easier because we know salespeople you know generally love to live in crm and and so yeah and then oh i'm sorry and then the third section is team structure mh making the deciding on the human investments you're gonna make and again that is gonna depend on the business and and the approach there but but i think channel and and you know sort of engineering your growth strategy having a stack that works and then having a team that supports that engineered approach is what is how you build growth yeah and ultimately when it comes to improving the things that the the pe investors want to want to see and what which channels to go after first ultimately is firstly identifying the best performing ones for you and like you said earlier on are they scalable you know prove if they're scalable invest more dial it up dial it down as and where you need to prove out the thesis with the audience understanding the buyer knowledge are your buyers operate in there like if so yeah it's probably a good place to invest you can test that out though for sure there's a really interesting approach to testing out new channels which i'm not sure if you've heard before and it was from chris walker a few years ago now i'm not sure where he's gone i'll do miss him dearly but it was called revenue r and d i think he framed it as and they had a position and shift on this and it was a really interesting framework where it was all about setting aside channels and investment based on you know core of like audience understanding but without diving too deep into a particular channel so you'll have your thesis that you work with okay our audience on tiktok for example or they are you know consuming x y zed content on there perhaps that's a a place we should play without going ahead and investing wildly in terms of tiktok ads or personnel to come in and help you you know bolster that resource to create more content how do we start just internally with what we have right now and scale up to get x results so that might be okay we wanna see you know this amount of pipeline from tiktok over this period of time if it doesn't work like let's can it basically and it's a proven way to invest small amounts of budget but to test to scale and to iterate and it's like taking one one thing at a time not spreading your too thin to test everything and getting super excited it's like a methodical way to work through channel by channel to see what's truly working and things that do work okay you know we've hit our target for pipeline whatever it may be stage three stage four pipeline might be too early to see revenue depending on your sales cycle but okay based on that we can invest a little bit more then if we start seeing revenue from it okay let's invest more and more and more until we start to see you know diminishing returns yeah i i generally agree with that approach right fail fast try small fail fast do a lot of experiments that's that's usually good advice in whether you're doing product led growth or whether you're doing any like just usually could advice the only thing in this case that i would say that i'd be it'd be a little cautious of is that there are going to be channels that have minimum minimum investments to make to really test it right and be able to determine it and so you you at risk if you don't do enough you are also at risk of saying no to a channel that could have been really productive for you i'll give you an example that i see all the time and it's in it's channel partners yeah i see so many companies say well we're gonna we're gonna go build a sales channel and we're gonna go sign up channel partners but they don't but if you're if you're running a channel program you've gotta make i'm now selling through another company sales team well that means i need to spend time educating that sales team supporting that sales team giving them the resource to be able to execute effectively like they were my own sales yeah sales team right and and very few people will commit that they'll go out and they'll find partners and they'll sign partnership agreements and guarantee referral pricing and so on and or or yeah and and they don't follow it all the way through to say you know what i'm gonna have to invest quarter of a million dollars in this partner yeah annually to be able to deliver hopefully five million in in revenue right but if i'm only willing to invest ten grand and then i'm like hey where's my sale yeah just oftentimes i see people going down that road so i would say that let let's just to make sure that with it with each investment we're evaluating the minimum viable product minimum viable investment yeah and channels are really good example actually because you know you mentioned it from the sales side there which is really interesting because i've seen from the marketing side as well right like with channel partners are you giving them the marketing resource and help that they need in order to market your product your service to the best of their ability in most cases no right you know like what your five steps ahead of what they have in terms of what you're marketing and they need the support in order to be an effective channel for you to market through and into sell through yeah you need to train their sales team you wanna have to sell like you and sell your products effectively but you also need that support from martin yep absolutely okay cool let's kind of start to wrap things up here sure maybe with some like common pitfalls mistakes that you've seen in the past from that portfolio company yeah i'll i'll hit them quick because i think we i think we have a covered forgotten most of them but you know lack of commercial understanding lack of understanding where the investor is coming from hopefully we've we killed that nausea yeah earlier in this con conversation but it's important for an investment marketing team to understand what their investors think about focusing on soft metrics is certainly one we've talked about you know the last time i was here and and this time too that these vanity metrics that you know don't tie directly to revenue yeah yeah get them out you don't need those siloed operations where you can't because you've you've chosen to set up your stacks in a way your tech stacks your data in a way that that won't allow you to connect the cost of sales and marketing and channels and and and and customer success and anything that has to do with customer retention if you can't pull that altogether and then slice and dice it because of your silos or because of the f in your silos the politics of your silos equally challenging from a you know if if you don't have a top down direction i think that those are common challenges and then and then maybe the last one i'd say is is pe investors and board members are a lot like anybody else they're human beings they're they are at risk of shiny object syndrome and and so something works and they just they they're gonna grab onto it and at like like any of us would like it's a silver bullet and most of us know there are no silver bullets in business that that you know the business is constantly changing and we need to be able to keep measuring and identifying when there's signs that this thing that did work isn't working quite so much anymore and we get need to get ahead of it and know what our other options and and levers are and so helping your your pe firm recognize when that's happening and when they're maybe getting little too and ent with a one particular thing and we need to really look at what the other options are is i think is important yeah there are you talking about so they might be bringing in something from another company that they've seen work or are they looking at your data and potentially wanting to invest more in something that is gonna fail both i mean i mean i i think the best case is the latter they're looking at your data the worst case is when they bring something in somewhere else and and i think it's just a magic bullet that our silver bullet that that is going to you know carry through every customer or every portfolio company yeah i mean that that does happen but hopefully with and shouldn't say that that's always a bad thing there are best brett like being in a portfolio is great and that you can learn from the if the pete firm smart they'll give you opportunities to get access to other portfolio leaders and so you can trade i use this stack i use this stack i use these processes and and so on and learn from each other and see what's working and what's not so yeah that that's wonderful but if it's just this thing worked over here so everybody else is gonna use it yeah you know that's that's less less i'm amusing yeah it doesn't work most of the time when it's based off of that ethos in terms of it worked for them so it should work for you sometimes that's true but it's best to prove that with the like commercial results yourself that's true yeah cool alright we're kind of like coming up to an hour now so i'm i'm sure you've got some wise words of wisdom and thoughts to leave us with okay i'll i'll give it a shot so i think the first thing evaluating marketing based on value creation and understanding the the investment thesis that went into that com that investor buying your company is job one if you if you don't understand that go talk to your ceo explain to why she he needs to give you access to that understanding and how would help you do your job better and then you know pound on the table until they do second if you ask yourself what would you wanna see if you owned a company but you weren't in it all the time and let's say you had eight board meetings a month that you were going to and you were and you were trying to evaluate in a very short amount of time what whether that investment was working out or not and whether there were any course corrections or anything that needed to be done like walk them all in their shoes right give them pre reed give the like treat them the way you'd wanna be treated and i think that can be very helpful and i i'd say maybe most importantly like tomorrow or today depending on what time you're watching this go to your marketing dashboard can you clearly link every metric to a financial outcome and evaluate each key stage of your buying process for your customer's buying process and look at whether your look at what the different channels are and be able to evaluate time and cost and scalability and if you can't start you know build a plan to go do so and you know if you need blend to help we're right here but but seriously like that that should be every everybody listens to this if if you if you don't have that you owe to yourself and to your owners to go build it yeah go get it the amount of times that we hear marketers say marketing leaders say you know don't have access to this data to that day to try and improve these things you know we say well you have to get that right if if you want to prove marketing effectiveness in the way that pe owners care about in the way that you should care about essential i mean if you don't wanna be replaced yep because the one thing that i know about investors is that if something's not working they will fix the problem and if you can't do the job i mean this is part of beat the job of being a nlp owned portfolio company is to run it the way they need it run mh and so yeah i think i think that's absolutely necessary yeah cool alright well let's wrap it up there and alright yeah i'd say again josh like the insights we have from you on here i think are just so brilliant for our audience it's not it's the you know it's not the classic marketing advice that you get and that's why i think i love it because there's so much of that out there available and of course you know we can bring a lot of that to the podcast but understanding and you know even from my own benefit like i love doing podcast because i get to sit opposite people who are usually smarter than me and i like on particular topics and for today well i i would even say today and yeah it's fascinating to learn from and like elevate your understanding of not only marketing but also business context because if you can apply your day to day marketing job to the context of what your pe investors and owners are are thinking about then like you'll do a much better job for yourself your career and your company absolutely right absolutely right cool alright yeah that's let's wrap it up absolute blast josh and yeah we will catch you all next time bye everyone

hi everyone welcome back to demand ko dan here as usual but it's not phil it's that opposite me today they might look fairly similar but i've got josh ba with me today like incredibly incredibly excited to have josh here he is blends new us ceo and if you follow blend on social or anything like that you'd have seen the announcement and what that means to us and everybody else involved with blend in some way shape or form i'll let josh introduce himself shortly but today's episode is one that i'm really excited to have josh in for actually because what he's gonna be able to bring to this podcast not just this one but also future episodes as well is a fresh perspective on marketing generally and i won't kind of you know spoil the intro to your background but it's a really really interesting one that has already taught me lots actually just in the short time we've actually spent together and this episode is all about how to survive your first board meeting as cmo so for marketing leaders out there that may be entering this scenario the boardroom the lion's den so to speak you know how do you get through that how do you prepare for it what to expect and how to come out of their successfully and also to aspiring marketing leaders who wanna know what happens in the boardroom and what to expect in the future when they might enter the boardroom as a cmo or whatever role they play at that time so it's a probably like a different topic for this podcast more kind of executive level but a really interesting one that i think any marketer actually at any level will find insightful because it's just that fresh perspective on what truly happens behind the scenes and those conversations we don't always have access to so yeah josh welcome to demand decode i'm thrilled to be here it's i've been a fan of the pod for a bit and it's it's just it's really exciting to be here and and as we announced yesterday the us the opening of our us office and the the expansion we're we're conducting in the us i couldn't be more more excited about leading that charge and so yeah thanks for having me on and i'm looking forward to our conversation yeah incredibly exciting times at blend so josh as i mentioned it probably be good for you to introduce yourself i don't wanna sure miss any points out but i've i've thinking in as and where i can i've learned a bit about you over over the last few weeks been talking my kids yeah alright so let's see so i've been in tech all my life all my professional life came out of school in with a comp sci and math degree and immediately went into writing code was not terribly good at it discovered that that i had a a pension for human problems and business problems and and gravitate towards those and so very quickly got into tech company and service company operations and and that led me into growth eventually and for the last seventeen years i've been an executive leader for growth functions sales marketing m and a strategic services for a variety of both private equity held and publicly traded companies primarily or i guess all headquartered in the us but many of them global in nature one interesting thing for this podcast in particular i find is that you haven't come up through the marketing ranks necessarily like i i would say although you've ran marketing teams in the past they've also been sales team and you've you know had the cro and president role in previous companies but also are more of an investor as well like some people might call you so bringing that perspective to a marketing conversation has its benefits as well yeah benefits i'm sure it benefits and drawbacks as your as your audience would suggest but yeah i'm not gonna tell you the best way to do to to design a campaign that we have great team members to do that but i think i do bring perspective of having been in growth oriented companies and leading that charge for quite a quite a quite a while now so happy to get into the conversation yeah said about it yeah and this one in particular actually you've got seventeen ish years of boardroom experience as well being in the boardroom on in multiple roles actually and you've had a lot of experience in terms of what happens in the boardroom and how you've seen cmos come in deliver well cmos come in and deliver poorly and not get their point across well and crumble and i've been one of those there we yeah so yeah so i've held roles that i have included chief revenue officer and when i've been the cro i have always required that marketing and sales both report up and be a combined function and for reasons that we'll talk about i'm sure either in this podcast or in the future because i'm fairly passionate about it but i've also held the role of president i've held the the i've been on the other side of the table i've been an investor at board meetings and and you know it's it it's it's not the lines them but there are definitely best practices and better ways to engage with the board and and maybe worse yeah yeah and we only had this conversation earlier and i think our audience will also benefit from this and it's the like financial acumen side of marketing that many marketers lack understanding in and even you know myself trying to improve in that area can be difficult and i think having you on this podcast yeah we'll just take our listeners as well to the next level to understand what truly matters inside the business i hope so yeah alright well let's dive in and i think where we typically like to start and i think is an important place for this podcast is why this conversation matters so much in particular for cmos because it you know the the boardroom can be a tricky place to get your point of view across and cmos can make big mistakes in terms of the kind of things that they present and bring to the table so yeah let's just chat a little bit about you know why why were we're even discussing this today okay so it's not only cmos that have this challenge but those of us who are operators in a business whether you're a cmo a cro a coo or cfo for that matter we spend all of our time in the business we spend all of our days in the business we know the business inside and out hopefully and and we manage teams inside the business we live and breathe our markets our customers all of that depth is what makes us successful at our day jobs but when we're talking to a board the average board member is coming in and has spent the last twelve hours studying your deck mh maybe reading compliance reports and the last company that i was with before before this we were a publicly traded bank our board members had to read four to nine hundred pages of content prior to a board meeting wow k so if you're if you're ingesting that kind of information and that level of information and you're responsible as a board member you have fiduciary responsibility to to your investor base for the the financial and risk profiles of that company you're spending most of your energy not thinking about the detailed operations of that company you then get a couple of hours maybe tops on on a single day of that board meeting with the leadership team and if i as a cmo come in and go deep into the weeds of of operational metrics i mean i've done it so the you know you just see people i actually had one board member fall asleep on me no yeah yeah to true story yeah it was a about a i don't know there were maybe seventeen or eighteen people in the boardroom and and yeah i looked over i'm standing in front of everybody giant screen behind me and i looked over and there was a guy that's a asleep and you know that that's not his fault that's you know that's that's my fault for not keeping him engaged and and involved in the conversation so yes i think that i think this is an important conversation for specifically for first time board you know board presenting cmos to really think through what is the what are priorities what is the outcome that they really want this podcast forecast is brought to you by blend we're a b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in martin so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b dot com you spoke about the translation you know issues in terms of understanding what really matters to the board and you spoke about marketers and cmos digging into the operational metrics of that function is that like a recurring challenge that you've seen in the past where actually they just need to read the room understand the audience and present the right things well it's i mean there's reading the room but there's also just in the moment certainly you have to read the room but there's also a a set of things that that let's use private equity exam investors as an example so if you're a cmo or a head of marketing that you know is reporting to a ceo or a cro but you're getting invited into a board and the board is made up of institutional investors those institutional investors have invested with a specific thesis and they care about how well that thesis is tracking and they use very specific metrics to track that if you come in and you start using non you know disconnected marketing metrics and showing what a great job you're not there to show what a great job your team's doing driving website traffic as an example right especially today but but going in understanding what they care about in in a fair you know in some degree of detail and we'll get to that yeah it is is critical to you so yeah i guess it's still knowing your audience but it's it's a whole lot more preparation ahead of time yeah there's also a big challenge i find in marketing with you know people in your position like in the past where everybody thinks they understand marketing everybody's marketing everybody's a marketer yeah everybody in that room will have an opinion on marketing and think that their opinion is right and the right way to go about market i think in itself that presents a a challenge yeah i had a a of a friend ham who who's been a ceo he was my ceo at one of my last companies and hemp always said the cto of the business is the most dangerous guy in the business because nobody in the room can question them right yeah they they don't have the technical expertise the flip side is also true every single person in the room thinks they know how to market yep and some of them have more experience or less but you are you you just you have to know that walking in that there are a whole bunch of pre conceived notions and you may have to be able to defend yourself and explain why you've come to certain conclusions and what data you've used to to do that and i think i think that we'll we'll get into that more as we go yeah alright cool let's frame the boardroom that sure because most people listen to this won't have actually been part of a boardroom environment before and even understand what goes on and who's in there okay so can we outline that and sure let's start with the participants yeah so the board if it's you know midsize pe owned or vc invested company the board's pretty much gonna be your ceo possibly your cfo or or a or in a venture backed tech company maybe that maybe even the cto or or you know technical founder but then it's gonna be the the representatives of the investor groups that you're working with mh if you're working with one you you're owned by a one particular private equity firm then you're you'll have probably a ceo on the board and two to four private equity board members if if it's on the excuse me if it's on the larger side very often that'll consist of a couple of folks from the pe firm mh a partner and a junior partner maybe or an associate and then a couple independent board members that they go and they bring in who have particular expertise in your domain and are you know friends of the firm or in some way engaged with the with the firm or the fund in addition to that you may have your attorney there you may have an outside accountant accounting firm there and then there may just be consultants that the board decides to bring in who are board they call them board observers and and in the my experience is in the marketing and the sales side that's actually quite common where you'll have go to market consultants of some form sitting in on on summer or all board meetings and and so i think you know when you're going into that as a first time cmo a no who's gonna be there ask your ceo right who's gonna who who are the all the attendees do your research if it's the consultant so i'll give you an example it tracks my first or second board meeting we had kimberly casper who was a marketing consultant and ray villa who was a who had run huge sales teams and they had been they had been involved in my hiring process but they were also brought in as as friends of the pe firm to contribute during the board meeting they were amazing they were fantastic they were because they were great marketers and and sales leaders in in their own right they were able to validate the growth strategies that we were presenting and and you know the directions we were heading and they gave and i was meeting with them outside the board boardroom too so i we were able to you know to align things and to to trade ideas i don't know that the boardroom where you wanna have most often where you wanna have you know challenging conversations at least not in your first one there are times for that but but so i think preparation with anyone who's not an actual board member of preparation with those people ahead of time to help them under what you're gonna present and if they have opinions or ideas you know get getting those on the table first is really helpful is there something in creating those allies within the border as well well so more broadly speaking i i have always approached boards and i don't know that i have the science here but i have always approached presenting to the boards as knowing who the chairman is mh or chair person that might be your ceo or it might be a member of the of an investor group or in a public company it may be an elected position and and knowing what they care about and and direct it and making sure i'm directing out of respect if nothing else conversation their way there are also gonna be board members who actually do know more about marketing and growth science then than others and if you can figure that out ahead of time and you can direct more detailed comments to them yeah you can oftentimes get them nodding their heads yeah and and feeling engaged and and you want them to be engaged that conversation right you you want them to ask questions because they'll sound like intelligent questions and you'll be able to ask and tell or give intelligent answers so i i think those are the two groups that i but i'm not i'm specifically not reporting to my ceo or my peer group i'm there to talk to the board members i can talk to my ceo and right i can talk to to my peers in the executive team anytime and i should have we should have done lots of prep ahead of time but in this in these situations i'm gonna have very limited amount of time you should expect even if you're running sales and marketing together you should expect your time window for a an average boardroom bat board meeting is gonna be between ten and thirty minutes tops yeah and if it's just marketing if you get ten minutes your aces that's about as because it gets so really constructing what you wanna present and prepare for is i think critical what segue what's a segue into into our next part because as i suppose as let's you know frame it cmo been invited to their first board meeting they understand who's there they've done their research they understand the chair person and like you say there might be a couple of members in there but they're closer with have a better relationship and understanding of yep now they need to prepare now they need to actually put together the information that the board need to understand for whatever reason it may be which we can get onto to some of the reasons that cmos even you know go to the boardroom because it might be for different reasons right right how do you prepare okay so it starts with sitting down with your ceo and the rest of your executive team well ahead of the board meeting reviewing past decks reviewing what's ben said review understanding what the perspective of the board is asking lots of questions if you haven't been in those conversations you i mean you have a right to know who are the participants and what do they care about and what you know related to the business and and then what has been their expectation and what's going on in the business is the business in a and an uptick is it in a down tick is the market constrained is pricing getting pressured is like where what are the macro trends happening in the business and and what do they know and what what maybe don't they know yet that they're gonna be surprised with not by you but by other members of the team what is the c what are the what's the ceo gonna talk to them about maybe without you even in the room right there's executive session where the ceo may have a conversation with the board before you ever get in there what are the things that are gonna be consuming their mind space can i ask before you walk in what those things are like what what will those ceo be talking to the board about and what it could be a wide range of things it could be lawsuits that the companies involved in either on on on one side of the other it could be real estate transactions it could be i mean it can be just a huge wide range of things that don't involve the operational team may involve the it could be operational or executive hiring mh right it could be personnel matters that the that only the ceo is gonna be in there or the ceo and the cfo maybe and so and then there's you know there's equity planning and and and fundraising and all kinds of different things that are that most operational leaders won't be in the room for all the time anyway and so it's helpful to at least know the topics and know if you the ceo may not wanna give you all the details yeah but it's at least helpful to understand what's filling that board members mind if if if my marketing message is coming right after they have a really hard conversation about a sexual harassment lawsuit yeah like that's not when i wanna walk in the room and try to tell them all about what we're doing good marketing yet so working with your ceo to to plan that and plan the agenda and understand where you fit in the agenda is yeah helpful typically speaking them what is the cmo role within the board meeting why are they even there yeah i mean i i think generally boards especially private equity boards like to hear from all of the leadership team they you they own the company right so if they own the company i own the company i'd wanna know the people who i'm trusting to run the company right to deliver the results and so yes i obviously have to know my ceo but i wanna know all of the executive team a a ceo's maybe most important job bar anything is building the team that's gonna run the business the ceo doesn't do it right it's the ceo's team that actually runs and leads the business and so having some exposure to the to that team and judging whether the ceo is doing a good job recruiting a team that i that i've have trust and can complete identifying where the ceo may have had some conversations with the board about performance of his team or her team and and understanding where there may be and maybe wants some some help gauging whether there's room for improvement so i mean that that's i think i think that's the the the the environment you're walking into now i think it's also important to talk about what are the business metrics that the investors in the board actually care about because when you walk into that room you're thinking all about leads and conversion rates and this and the operational thing but yeah but that's not actually what an investment thesis is going to be focused on when that private equity company wants to go sell the business eventually any buyer or further investor may get down in the weeds in into the those types of weeds but they're gonna be primarily focused on arr growth on eb gross margin gross retention rate net retention rate these things that that are used to create company valuation and free cash flow like these kinds of things right and so so if if that's the case and you walk in and you just immediately start plowing into all of your cool marketing metrics they had they don't have a context yeah right like it would be like me going to buy a car and i'm thinking about how how fast this goes zero to sixty and and and the the guy selling to me gives me all kinds of metrics about the internal rate of combustion on of the of the engine and like like what are you talking about like it's so i i think understanding understanding those metrics i mean arr growth pretty easy right you hopefully you're talking about that already eb as is earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization that's that's a very common one and you can google that if you've you've never heard please do if you've have ever heard about it gross margin is is pretty well understood gross retention rate net retention rate are two things that i think board particularly private equity boards and vcs care about a lot and sometimes it's misunderstood so gross retention rate is all of your your revenue that you're retaining year over year or period over period minus anything that you've lost net retention rate is the same thing as your gross retention rate but now you get to add in anything you've ups sold the the dynamic there is important especially for a marketer or somebody who's leading growth right because gross retention rate typically is how well is the business holding on to your customers mh but nat means i can also upsell and if you're in marketing you better be involved in the customer funnel right the customer up upsell funnel cross sell so that we can measure the outcomes but that that metric right in great companies net nr net retention rate is usually a hundred and fifteen to a hundred and twenty percent that means you're adding you're holding on to your existing customer base and customer revenue and then you're adding gross retention rate you know is gonna be a bit smaller than that because you know don't get that add upside but but so anyway so i think having a good feel for those metrics and knowing which ones are most important and then taking what you care about and tying it to them yeah is allows you to create context for that investor to show you to show what your work does and your team's work does to support their thesis yeah i suppose there could be a a tricky scenario where you don't have access to that level of data right yeah maybe in this scenario that you're describing in these board meetings and i think it depends on the majority of company that you're in as well whether you have access to them or not but like do you have any advice or word of wisdom for those people that are struggling to get access to those metrics in the first place well yeah you've mentioned this to me off camera too and i thought it's a big issue marketing really so so i mean i'm an american so i'm gonna be a little bit brute force but you gotta go get it stop lining like it you know your ceo it this isn't true for someone who's three levels down in the marketing stack but if you're being asked to prepare for a board meeting and you and and your ceo is gonna walk you in there this is my marketing person you have every right to demand access to data that's gonna help you tell the story properly and you're see it's not that the business doesn't have it even if they don't think they have it they certainly do have it we just have to collect build it but this the cfo has all the the data that you would need to be able to do that if they're not doing it already and they should be the cro should have sales data and cost of sales here so i'll give you i'll give you an example c hate c mh okay and i hate lt tv and i'll tell you why in a traditional i don't know if there's tradition anymore with ai but in a traditional saas company where you are selling widget kind of software like small ticket software in it lots and lots of times c lt tv makes tons of sense yeah but people have taken that and said oh it applies to every business yeah well i was running a company at tracks that very rarely lost a customer like we had customers for thirty years literally if i had a customer for that long my lt tv is so high it would justify a c of four million dollars a year or for per customer acquisition yeah it's not feasible right but but do you think i got asked what's your c lt tv i sure did mh and i had to explain to them why it didn't matter yeah helping them helping folks understand what metrics really drive shareholder value and enterprise value is really important and and that's why i think conversations in prep with your ceo and your cfo well ahead of time well ahead of the board so that you can get a to a friend of mine in prep i'm thinking about prep and a good friend of mine talks about his name's is jp he's he he talks about if you ask me to present for an hour or an hour and a half i can be ready in ten minutes i've got top it ready i'll go i know what i know if you asked me to dial it back to same topic but condense it to thirty minutes i'm gonna need a week to prepare if you ask me to get that same topic down to ten minutes i need two months to prepare because i have to be salient i have to hit the i have to really practice exactly what yeah yeah you're gonna have ten minutes so you better be preparing well ahead of time and and really practicing with your team exactly what what you wanna share with with those board members yeah the point around c and lt tv is really interesting and also something you know we were chatting about off camera because it can have so many definitions as well right that are right relevant or not relevant to different businesses like you say it tracks there was no point even right know trying to look at c to improve it or you know however you wanna measure it no no there are other metrics that do make sense right yeah like pipeline efficiency pipe you know speed speed to conversion all all kinds of things that will tell me how well we're operating the business and what channels make more sense or less sense and those kinds of things right but but yeah that one in particular nope doesn't belong here yeah in that particular scenario or yeah but because i would say probably in almost any tech enabled service business yeah for the same reasons right tech enabled service businesses b to b enterprise they don't switch all that often because enterprise switching costs are just too high yeah and so if you're if you're gonna have customers for lots of years lt tv is and c they're just not very useful yeah for sure okay cool so you are the now you've kind of understood the metrics that you need to take to this board me and you understand how you might need to structure your point that you're trying to well you understand the metrics and where you are in the agenda and the kind of things that might crop up how do you actually structure the message that you're trying to get across in the border so start with the end of mind that's what i mean that's what i try to tell myself anyway what what my first time my first board meeting what do i want my listeners to come away with if it's the first time they don't know me well they may have heard about me in the hiring process or they or maybe i'm coming i'm being raised up from you know in a promotion situation so the ceo's talked about that but but this is my first access point to the board i want them coming away with three things that they feel that i have demonstrated command of my market command of my business in that i understand what how our business works and what's and what levers and drivers make a difference in that business specifically and then command of our metrics those three things will if i leave the room and they feel that way then i know that i have earned their trust to then when i come back the next time three months later what whenever that is they will be open to critical feedback i may present them that suggest hey we need i'm observing this we need to change this or we have changed this here's the results but the first time i wanna i wanna come away with those three things yep both maxed okay so so how do i do that i i think about personally i think about i i've got two slides maybe one but i think two no more ten minutes i got i'm gonna assume ten minutes that's two slides yeah it's not more than that because you gotta save two to three minutes for questions yeah so seven minutes tops in presenting and i've gotta be able to stitch together some salient points about what about how they view the world what they care about connected to what i control mh and so i a very limited time and it has to be while we get there so so i'd like to i like to be prepared with metrics of my like stitching together that story of what metrics i manage yep and and care about and the performance of those examples might be at this at this stage pipeline velocity and conversion that that connects directly to arr and to net revenue retention channel performance like what's what what's converting faster slower per channel what's my cost per channel that's that's connected to c it's connected the eb it's interesting you said because i i would think just on the service that that might be too pacific actually channels yeah that's i'm surprised you've brought that one up it depends on the business yeah if the business is primarily a channel sales business then you wanna be able to i'm not i don't mean channels like website versus social verse i'm not talking about least yes i'm talking about without getting too deep into attribution that's a whole another yeah conversation that we can have someday but and phil should probably be here for that but but the the idea of channels in this case is more channels business growth channels yeah in that case yeah i think that that boards should absolutely care about throughput invest and investment per channel because that will help them better understand the market that they're participating in the key partners things like that yeah i was so do you mean channels more broadly like partnerships for example could be partnerships yes yeah it could be you might be a reseller you you may be at an oem and you're you're resell to a bunch people or you may be a reseller and you've got a bunch of products that oem products that you're combine together into a solution all of that is meaningful in a channel discussion marketing roi is important but we have to be really careful with marketing roi you as you mentioned you may not have full control over cost of sales and just marketing marketing roi doesn't tell me enough about what that what that campaign might have cost to actually deliver revenue it might tell me how much it cost to create pipeline but if for example that pipeline now has to be closed by a direct salesforce verse a channel salesforce that didn't have that campaign what i pay to those direct versus channel salesforce has to be weighed in on before i can answer the question do i wanna do more of those campaigns do i do i care about that particular marketing strategy well it seemed good to create pipeline but then it converted way less in sales and and so it turns out that it's actually not terribly effective right the whole efficiency of the go to market engine right that needs you consider obviously that that that measurement process connects to eb connects to cost c and arr growth and and so i think continuously and i can even envision some of the charts i've used but continuously drawing your your listener back to here's how this contributes to the things you care about is really help can be really helpful and then and i'd i always talk about the devil on your shoulder the the little guy on your shoulder that's constantly whispering in your ear while you're presenting well what about this and what about this and what about this what about this you know more about your business than your than your listener based does so don't answer questions before they ask them mh that for me that that was one of the hardest things about getting in the boardroom i would start going off because i felt like i'm reading your face and it looks like i'm not connecting so i better go deeper here really make sure i drive on my point when you just might be tired you've yeah you've just gotten out of a that's just conversation or yeah or you're just trying to be polite yeah and so so yeah so sticking to the high level keeping it punchy keeping it friendly and not trying to cram too much into that ten minutes finally and this is a lesson i learned from the cmo at triumph michelle michelle holmes came in and one of her first board meetings that she presented at she finished her little segment like she didn't have a big long segment she had a little segment just like the rest of but she had a little segment and it and it finished with a visual i'm not gonna tell you exactly what visual was a private board meeting but but it was awesome and it made me realize the one thing marketers do have is they have the ability to excite mh and it's not just data it's not just it it's not even storytelling and anecdotes having something visual a video a customer testimonial something exciting happening and at an event finding a way to bring the board into that especially in private companies i think nah that's not sure even public companies this is true getting them to to live the brand and feel like this is the ram they own the company oh now i can see it yeah it was awesome and so i'll do that absolutely every single time going forward whenever i'm in a boardroom boardroom leaving them wanting more because they're they're you know they're excited about like the now it sucks for the guy behind you right if if it's the op the coo that's presenting next great thanks that's but but yeah i mean i think that's it's a helpful thing that they that folks can do yeah and i think you know we should reiterate the point again that we've that you've mentioned around marketing jargon just within boardroom spaces because i can imagine you've seen it and being guilty of it time and time again just using jargon that people don't understand yeah yeah even i mean like internal names for products and stuff like that like you might have you might wanna tell them this product is doing better than this product like they may not even recognize your the names of those products and now they're completely lost yeah so really putting your your your you know grandma goggles on that's what i call them but if if my grandma can't listen to my message and generally understand like she's a bright woman she she should be able to understand what i'm telling her and and why it matters if i'm losing her i should probably rethink my approach so yeah i think the other thing is or the other tenancy of folks that aren't maybe experienced in this environment they'll come in and they wanna do such a good job they wanna set they wanna you know get people excited they wanna motivate they wanna impress and they result the result as they set expectations that they'll never live up to in the next meeting right we're gonna sell you know this might so it's really important that in your first meeting but then in every meeting you do tell them what what you're gonna be doing over the neck you know in the next period say it's quarter in the next quarter and what they can expect but in those cases i would be very conservative and you again whenever ever it you know review all of that with your ceo your cfo ahead of time make sure that that those plans are aligned no surprises in the management team ever and the definitely no surprises for the ceo that's a best that's a bad career move but for but if you're the marketer you know you re yeah you wanna be able to talk about the key decisions you plan to make any any major personnel moves it doesn't matter if you're gonna hire a new copywriter ford doesn't care yeah so leave that alone but but you know any major things you know you're expanding your team to europe that's that's something or to america in this case something that you might wanna mention to your board and then as you're setting expectations and what the key outcomes are for next quarter though that's that's an important thing to to both make sure you present because you will have one or more board members who go back to the previous quarter deck and review that interesting i could and then go to the new quarter deck mh and and i have been called out on yeah i wonder so josh yeah last quarter you said on this page here and if you don't know your own stuff thankfully i was able to say yeah well you you i won't call navigate it but but here's yeah here's why we've made this shift and yeah and what we learned and so on but yeah anyway you don't wanna be cut flat footage yeah that's a that's a good point that's a definitely good point i suppose does that round it out in terms of how to prepare what to expect inside the border yeah i think so okay cool i would love to hear firsthand experience some of the biggest mistakes that you've seen inside of the border from cmos and maybe or mistake mistakes that you've made inside there as well that people can avoid yep so we've we've touched on a couple of those already the the the the the tendency to over explain to over present that's for so like i that's definitely number one so many marketers who love what they do and and are proud about what they've achieved they goes head long into the details and i mean you you're trying to give them the no fly zone and like kicking them under the table and it's just you know pull it back up really understand really understanding your audience and the degree to which they're ready and able to to receive the information that you're presenting to them is you know is important getting lost in vanity metrics mh so talking about metrics that have you know we grew x by sixty percent this quarter but it has no business connection yeah is bad move and and again you'll lose your audience or you'll just you know we you'll you won't demonstrate that you understand how the business works do you think you lose a bit of credibility yes with that's exactly people as an executive not as a not as a marketing person sure but at like oh your marketing person great they don't need to come back to the next board meeting yeah i've seen that multiple times and you know and it's just something to be to be cautious of i think there are times when executive teams don't prepare enough together none of us like to role play yeah but role playing for a for a team and having your entire executive team together and going through those operational slides super important super important and having one member of the team sitting out who who maybe isn't gonna have an active board presentation rule but kin has has some senior and and can listen for what board number's gonna care about yeah or maybe it's one of those consultants or advisers that yeah that they may be bring in having them in that session to to shoot at you it's way better to get shot at practice than it is in the real game right so i think that's oftentimes we we see some of that and so it's good to to plan for that i wanna be sensitive here we all want to be seen as doing a good job in my very first board meeting remember i was a company called be mark and i was very interested in self preservation i was much younger in my career and i really wanted to make sure that the board felt like i was doing the right things and and i was and so my metrics were or my presentation was far more me focused mh and not business focused like fight the temptation these these people they're just people but they wanna know that you're doing that the business is doing well that this asset that they own is is in good hands they don't they're not walking into the room doubtful of you so so just kick that impostor syndrome out the door and instead focus on how you can make their lives better by giving them information that they can use what if the business isn't doing well well that i mean that i've been in those situations we all have that to me investors don't want leaders that hide from that yeah you have to confront that head on like right in the face and say look we know this isn't what we want here's what we've observed here's where we're having trouble these are things that we either can change or things that we can't change about the market at the world our competitors sometimes that that does need board help sometimes there's a legal solution to certain challenges that are in yeah that are facing like acknowledging the real problems the the major risk problems for any company is is absolutely part of presenting to the board and that and you know again you just you can't do it just on the fly like you've you've got make sure you prepped for that with your leadership team and i i think you'd agree with this but no matter what role you're in or what level you're at i think that's something you should always take forward like don't get hide from absolutely negative results like set the the plan in place to combat those negatives one of our core values at blend exactly so yes we wanna hit hit things hit challenges head on yeah and and sort them out face to face without trying to sweep anything under of the rug yeah because you get found out as well yeah in the end yeah it comes it comes to roost yeah yeah absolutely it's never never a good idea to hide behind the negative results because if you're just trying to impose positivity on a negative business situation like the people at the top are seeing business metrics declining mh and if you're just presenting positive impacts there's not aligning and yeah you you're gonna get found out yep absolutely cool what if you're not in the boardroom yet and that might be people that are either aspiring to be in the boardroom or are i just actually interested to know you know how you might go about preparing for that or what really happens how even earn earn a spot really yeah right like so when you're talking to your cmo if you're reporting to the cmo when you're working with your if you don't have a cmo but yeah the cro is handling all of that and you want so you wanna have access to that first of all ask right like you have to make your desires no not all of us can just assume that like i know a lot of people that would never wanna be in the board room they run for the hills yeah i'm sick that day so you yeah make make your your desires known but then work for it mh be able to like everything we've talked about if if you're not the one presenting the person you're talking to is the one that's gonna have to do that job help them be successful yeah show them that you can get you know you understand the world that they're walking into you want them to be successful and so you're willing to go and do some of the grunt work that might be necessary digging through data putting together stories and and framing them in ways that that help them prepare so that they have a reason to think that you might actually do a great job yeah coming along and being have you know having a seat yeah be the side kick like the robin hood that's gonna that's often where it starts yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah love that anything else for for that more junior i don't wanna say junior but the marketing person the marketing team member who's not yet being invited to the board i think the only other thing that i would really stress and this is me as an ex cro is really understand your cro like mh understand how they're driving the revenue strategy and connect always think about the revenue strategy don't think about the marketing strategy as much right think when you when you're not only when you're prepping for the board but as you think about your job think all the way through it don't think your job ends with creating pipeline or creating leads or creating conversions or whatever you're or creating images would depending on what your job is right you think about how all of that connects to driving revenue driving nr driving eb arr growth all of the the things that investors care about and that your executive cares about because if if you can't do that and you get and you're stuck really just like all i can think about is my piece without that broader view of the business you you're just not gonna get to that spot yeah cool alright i think that probably you know wraps this up i was just looking at the time there and thought yeah we're probably like almost always been going an hour hour which is kind of like flown bike right that has flown back is there anything you kind of wanna like wrap up with leave some like rapid tips or takeaways of people from this i mean i don't have anything new properly but i give you three three summary points know your audience walk in their shoes speak in business outcomes not tactics and rehearse your message or rehearse until your message is super clear two slides there you have it remember your out the outcomes that you're trying to drive are real demonstrated command of your market of your individual business in that market and and of the metrics that drive that business and if you can do those three things you can set the right prop the right expectation the right impression with that board the first time you get in there and then from there then you can start to pull them into more substantive conversations and plans and strategies and so on love that alright well let's wrap it up there i am just so excited to do more of this stuff right these kind of topics on the podcast because even though some marketers might hear topics like this and think oh well you know that's not about conversion rate optimization or that's not about how do i get more leads from linkedin and we will still cover those things on this podcast for sure because our audience isn't an all cmos actually the minority is cmos and a lot of the people that we speak to from this podcast are yeah not cmos and do you still want that tactical thinking but i think as a marketer if you can understand what happens in the boardroom what happens in the c suite what happens when they're talking about financial metrics and exits in the business and like all of these kind of things that like truly matter to the bottom line you can just level up your marketing you know tenfold and yeah really become an even bigger asset to the business and like i i am super excited to learn more from you and do more of a of these podcasts and listen back to them and vice versa yeah like this is gonna be awesome and i hope that everybody listened to this podcast enjoys diving into some more of this stuff alongside you know our usual more tactical things as well because yeah i think it's kind of just really helping marketers to to become the best they can be in their role so yeah awesome really looking forward to what we do next i think our next episode on demand decode will also be us again so say stay tuned for that and yeah apart from that we will catch you next time it's been amazing thank you everyone and see you next time

hi everyone welcome back to demand decode dan here with phil as usual and today we're talking about conversion rate optimization it's not a new thing in bt marketing it's not sexy thing in beats marketing it's something that actually a lot of people don't care about and don't think about it's not the new kid on the block that everybody's racing to understand and racing to implement in their business but as ahrefs report showed ai overview in search are reducing clicks by thirty four point five percent so now it's more important than ever to have a good strategy for conversion rate optimization on your website and really make it work harder than ever i know it's something you know phil we've championed for a long time lap blend and believe i mean i agree with everything you say in terms of how cro is perceived by marketers but you know ultimately for me it's one of it's been one of the sexiest things going for a long long time because it's so important it's so it's so impactful it's such an opportunity for many businesses and given how much of the rest of our efforts are aimed at getting people to our website in the first place it's really key that marketers take responsibility for their website's conversion rate and you know optimize it and maximize it so many of the clients that we work with have seen significant results through applying their attention our on our effort here it's a huge lever that can be pulled and a lot of marketers don't pull it because they don't fully understand it like you say it doesn't necessarily you know get talked about in quite the same way as some other tactics channels methods they think it's not for them because they're not in commerce or they don't have the kind of volume that others have but yeah cro is important and can be a huge lever yeah well i think you said at our event last week you know if you implement it in the right way you take the right approach to conversion rate optimization and implement implement that in your b2b design we're talking like over a hundred yeah i mean isn't i i said well there are two things that i think one is very few b b websites have been optimized for pipeline generation efforts may have been made to optimized conversions but very few have been thoroughly overhaul and optimized in terms of the user experience by a journey to create pipeline when we apply our house approach to that it's not unusual to see a hundred to four hundred percent increases in the high intent conversion rates on those websites which is basically pipeline huge impact yep and it means that everything that you then do to drive more of your ic to your website whether that's advertising whether that's organic whether that's ai whether however you get people there you're able to turn more of that attention and their interest into pipeline and it's wrong to believe that buyers will convert no matter what yeah you know you can significantly positively impact the number of buyers who arrive on your site that reach out to you if you take steps to optimize their experience and and give them what they need and want from the journey and you know optimize the way that you get them into the pipeline and into the conversation with sales all these things have an impact and they can transform your results without a doubt and it is just amazing how much budget is spent on ultimately getting buyers to your website because whatever you do in go to market whether it be outbound events paid media organic search like generative engine optimization now whatever it is if people are seeing your brand name or have a direct link to your website or want to convert and speak to you or get a demo from your a free trial in some way they will be visiting your website the buying committed the buying committee for that deal will be visiting your website like everyone is coming there but the actual proportion of budget that's allocated to conversion rate optimization and making that website work so much harder to then you know double down on the rest of the marks thing budget the investment like is so negligible yeah it's ridiculous completely agree i i think a lot of businesses would do well to actually real budget and split it you know more evenly or at least more favorably over channels that drive attention and and and traffic and interested in and website conversion optimization whereas in a lot of businesses i reckon zero percent at the budget is attributed to website improvement over time yeah i understand that a new website is always an extraordinary capital spence right you cannot fit those typically into your operational costs for marketing but maintaining and improving your website should be something you're always doing you know and and it's not hard actually if you if you have time and budget allocated to it what's even more sort of interesting and i think foundation is like quite a lot of marketers don't even collect the data that's needed to make those improvements like you know so many don't have heat maps you know running on their website not necessarily all the time but at any point throughout the year to find out what buyers are doing don't even necessarily look at website analytics in a way that leads to conclusions about how to drive more pipeline so there's a shift there needed as well and then you can start to implement certain changes without replacing the website but b is different to b and different to e commerce where some of the changes that you need to make to see the big gains are you know fundamental you know they do exist at the at the lowest level of the website and they can only really easily or efficiently be implemented when you are doing a big update a big replacement but there's always things that you can do in between those to adjust an and incrementally improve the conversion rate for sure yeah for sure and i think we'll talk about a few of those today i think for me when it comes to conversion rate optimization and where you start it's essentially aligning your website in the experience of your website to your buyers like needs and wants from that experience itself yes absolutely in addition what they their behavior what they will and will not do on a website whilst trying to service those needs and once it's a it's a combination of those two things i think there's an interesting risk developing at the moment where we've often said in conversations before that your website is not a place to be innovative per s as in buyers are not really there to figure out how to interact with your website how to navigate it so in two innovative approaches to navigation to layout out of content can be counterproductive mh and i've seen actually with the in with the sort of dawn of ai in the buying journey there's some innovation going on at the moment in website user experiences and i fear that smes might be moving too soon before buyer behavior caught up because the best results in terms of pipeline come from aligning the experience to the information requirements and needs and the behaviors that they really demonstrate on your website today and that intersection is where you get conversion rate optimization yeah yeah absolutely one really good example that i actually saw from us for the customer was that they they'd already done some really great persona research so they'd clearly outlined who their audience is who their buyers is and what information they need before they eventually convert and then how they like to convert right when you have a look at the persona information and compare it to the the website the information that's on there the conversion points are on there they were totally miss a misaligned okay so you know the well the homepage hero messaging to start with didn't tell them exactly you know what they were looking at on that website the product information available wasn't the kind of product information they needed to consume before making a decision and the conversion offer was just a simple you know contact us as opposed to aligning to exactly how it they like to buy which is either talk in sales or getting a quote yeah like even just that language get a quote even if it is still contacting somebody and the process is very similar using that exact language which essentially aligns to the task they need complete whilst on that website will improve conversion rate and we saw it first and that yeah that for me that's about creating mutual benefit in terms of giving the buyer what they need and want from the process but also you what you need and want from the process it means every conversion that comes through that is like q is high quality and likely it's so yeah that's one of one of several key strategies that we employ which is a align your conversion offers to the needs of the buyer that's on your website today you know yes you can aspire to change the profile of the buyer that's coming into your website but whilst you do that you wanna maximize what you've got in front of you at this point in time so that's a that's a key track g for sure this podcast is brought to you by blend we're a b2b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in marketing so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b b dot com so if we rewind a little bit i suppose phil because yeah good example there but speaking more generally what are some of the core things people should be looking at when it comes to b to b conversion rate optimization specifically yeah so i think the things that have the like largest individual impact are probably the the contents of the homepage header section the hero section are either the first thing that via see when they're on your website and they're giving you that eight second blink test to decide whether it's the right place for them or the wrong place for them and they go off the approach you take to navigation and how people get through your site and in what order to discover content is another key thing that you know can have a pronounced impact on its own all things have an impact and then what you offer in terms of conversion what the experience is and what happens after it are the big ticket items you've also got to look at every page and its contents you know things that are things that apply everywhere across the whole site as opposed to specific areas are stuff like your typo geography you know is your site easy to read is it legible is the font size big enough is the font way high enough is it easy for a visitor to consume the content that's there is your copy scan you know is are your paragraph short in length and is it concise and are there headlines everywhere that show people which bit of content focus on because we know b b readers are skimming they're not reading word for word so those sorts of things apply universally they've got to be on every page every site and sometimes that'll will require you know going back to the brand point to update that but if you can move it in the right direction you should but then when i look at b websites i typically see three core mistakes made that if changed if corrected can produce some of the impacts that we see which is homepage homepage content messaging navigation hand yeah let's version offer let's dig into those though because homepage messaging is a fundamental issue that we see again and again and again and again when it comes to websites what is it that is so wrong about messaging like a lot of the time really it's yeah it's not even a minority of website it's it's really interesting because i i i suppose there are simply many more mistakes than right ways to do it right which is you gotta visit your website you know they they may know something about you but typically they will behave in a very fresh way right they they don't they they come with a sort of blank canvas opinion of your brand your website and you've got a few seconds to make a first impression and you only get one chance to make a first impression the contents of your homepage hero need to communicate your your value proposition you're positioning why you're the right solution for them at that point in time you know in that moment and why they should stay businesses trip up here because they struggle to come to terms with or find ways that are both clear and and concise but also creative and often you find that they reach for overly creative solutions to their homepage hero statement which unfortunately ob escape the actual meaning they don't communicate what the product is who it's for and why it's unique or important or or or powerful positioning is a broad topic right and you know it's a business strategy and your positioning is the product of your you know products unique features and and benefits your buyers challenges the market you're in the category buyers think you're in is all these things affect your positioning and you don't want your positioning to be relayed word for word on your website you actually wanna be able to test different ways of communicating your positioning but your positioning has gotta come through the words on your website cannot be vague fluffy words that tell people nothing about your your product solution for all your problems doesn't actually get people to stay in dig deeper and and the other big mistake that we see often is people using their lap line as their headline on their home homepage twenty website and strap lines typically create these big images around you know grand impact and you know exciting things but contain no meaning yeah so there's an art and a science to homepage messaging and it is a it's about getting across your positioning your value proposition in a unique creative way that doesn't lose the meaning ultimately yeah and sometimes that means coming to terms with the plane way of speaking the we often think is necessary yep but actually some of the best results i've ever seen have come from the most plain and the most boring way of communicating value proposition we do x for y differently because of that you know and that will actually get people to stay on your website navigate and potentially convert at a higher rate than something that's incredibly lofty vague and lacks meaning yeah yeah it is just so true that that strap line issue is such a big one and it it does come a lot of the time from like branding agencies then like doing the website and having such a big influence on that as well because it might look great it might be sold into the business as this great idea and like everyone can get behind the concept and it's fine as a strap line but it just doesn't work as homepage messaging absolutely i i was thinking about this recently and i realized that there's probably a dilemma in businesses which is where they come at this problem what to put in the home homepage here with the idea that it's got to be perfect it's got to be the one and only version and therefore it's got to contain the the highest most important message you've got and that might be your strap line what i encourage businesses to do actually is d this home homepage section from their brand from their positioning to create the freedom to test different messages there create the freedom to to test different ways of saying what you do and what's different about it and see what impact that has on you know conversations you have with people what people tell you during the sales process and obviously results because you need the freedom to be able to iterate and to be able to change it the the message there without it changing your brand and without it changing your purpose for doing things and that's a really important step to take if you d those and i think that will remove the problem for a lot of people because it mean we're no longer trying to create the one perfect message that sums up our business we're creating the message for now you know for for this month for this quarter because of this trend because of this buyer a behavior we're seeing and we and we are free to change it over time and that's a powerful place yeah the the really easy test here is when you look at your homepage or when somebody else looks at your page i don't know ask your wife ask your mom ask your dad ask your friend whoever it may be say when you look at this can you tell me exactly what this business does and who they do it for yeah if not you probably need to make that message a bit more clear absolutely every buyer trying to put you in a category right so if you leave that to chance or you you you end up in the wrong category your competitive position is gonna be really affected right so it's important to be clear and concise i've also said previously that ultimately if your homepage hero state value proposition statement is you know not clear not concise you know if the the result might be that the wrong visitor the the wrong visitor to your website can't tell that they're wrong and if they can't tell that they're wrong then the right one can't tell that they're right either so you're gonna get a lot of poor quality conversions wasting some of your time if you're not helping people self identify so there's lots of benefits to having clear concise sensible content in your homepage in the hero section and your imagery needs to support it if possible so you know it's been found over and over again that if you're selling software show your software yeah peep it creates that trust it creates that removes that obstacle that barrier to exploring further now not everyone has software to show and sell but your choice of imagery and your choice of whether it's static or moving are all elements of the user experience in that critical part of the site you can optimize this is why like i love this framing of conversion rate optimization because we're not just talking about the conversion point here we're not talking about changing a button color from green to blue which you might wanna test and it might work but like most people don't have the data to like me test and improve that anyway but this thinking around conversion rate optimization is all about you have somebody on your website the goal is to convert them but first you have to keep them there like exactly first you have to you know ensure they can understand what you do and move through your website like that is the first hurdle to go but that's the first part of conversion rate optimization completely and you make an important point the rare the reality is that most businesses won't have the volume of data to tell them exactly to do in these critical places you have to use aggregate data and external expertise to do it well and do it right and that's what you know we offer and you've got to use information that's been gathered across lots of different sites and research that's available on the topic cross reference it with your unique requirements to create real impact and success and have confidence what you're doing is gonna work because it doesn't come from like you say micro changes on button colors or individual words or or minor details because even if they have the desired impact the data won't necessarily be there to reveal it to you yeah not unless your apple or some sort of b to you know commerce or with masses of traffic and it takes huge volume huge volume not just on the site on that part of the experience yeah and a lot of us just don't have that yeah okay so we kind of covered off the homepage messaging in there the other two places you called out as you know having regular conversion rate issues were the navigation yep well let's cover navigating yeah i mean navigation is all about again a aligning experience to what buyers really do and really want from your site so that is fundamentally optimizing the the navigation for the device they're on you know presenting it in their format that is suitable for the device are on so that is you know on mobiles you're gonna have collapsed menus in bergen navigation and so on but on desktop you're gonna present it horizontally logically intuitively visibly not hidden away and you're gonna pick and choose an order the content on that navigation in such a way that it aligns to their informational priorities and you're also going to try to create an experience where it's intuitive and so that means it's a the term the term that i don't like particularly is informational sense but you want the headings that are in your navigation to give good clues as to what's behind them and what's there so you wanna structure navigation to flow good information to the top in a logical order and not take a necessary steps to like group things in in broad or vague buckets if you can now some of us have to have product services solutions that's the only way to get our content onto the site but if you can give more away at the top level you're gonna get more click through to your core pages and your core sites but also ordering things there's no point i don't think in the majority of cases yeah well it's always interesting me when i go to our website and the first thing in the navigation is home i'm like it's twenty twenty five we don't need to put home in the navigation you're already at home and everyone knows that the logo will take you home so you can get rid of home quite often the next option which will now be the first option is about us and like yeah okay that's good content to have on your website so it's always good to tell a story and reveal more about who you are but that is not why buyers are coming into to your website for the vast majority of the time so it's your product and it's pricing that they're gonna wanna see first so move that into first position structure it logically give away as much informational centers as possible reduce the cognitive load the burden that you put on the visitor to find the right information and content by making good choices on their behalf and you'll just get a lot more people going from that first page they land on whichever page it is and exploring the site and successfully achieving their aims for being on the site in the first place finding the information they need satisfying their questions their concerns and being inclined to go somewhere to convert yep yep love it great advice therefore phil and i think again this does stem from having that deep understanding of your buyer and your audience and what information they want to consume the behavior they take on you know particular journeys and aligning the navigation not just the content but the navigation to the information that they need to consume before they convert yeah navigation is one area where on a b website you might have enough density of like activity for for your data to be useful to you yeah which is why heat mapping software like clarity and hot jar and others is so is is useful particularly around navigation what are people clicking on like most and what are the positive and negative con like consequences of that where are they getting lost and what are they g rotating towards which content do i need to prioritize and optimize and update and which can i you leave until i've got time or budget left over so heat map data there is very valuable and of course research like there is so much good documentation on this topic out there you just have to read it and consume it and understand it and apply it to your data and you can make great strides in that area in particular yeah it's having that like proven industry research with a suite of data available to you yeah combine the combine the two of them and you you know you will have the proven practices that ensure you have a good amount navigation like you are able to optimize your website for conversion absolutely yeah the right research the right data and the right partners you can do great things yeah okay offer was the third one i think you mentioned yeah usually that's the sort of glaring opportunity yeah you know you might go to a website and you scan along the navigation everything's in the same font in the same format and then down at the end you've got this sort of tired old contact us link which doesn't stand out yeah the name button like no color there's no there's no yeah there's no contrast there it doesn't stand out and let's ask us i i i say to businesses and people that told me like ask yourself the question is contact us what we what we really want people to do on our website the answer is no we want people to act on their interest in what we offer in a way that turns into pipeline that's never contact us so that's never the best language for a key like conversion offer better language is always more aligned to the real exchange of information that you want to take place now that could be taught sales talk to an expert book of consultation get a quote could be take take demo book a demo tech trial there's always something better than contact us for your home homepage now for your hero even your website header navigation to create quality and quantity of conversions into your pipeline and we've seen the positive impact of that multiple times over you know we we changed our own website many years ago to essentially not have a contact us page and have a consultation page instead significant improvement in both quality and quantity customers recently have seen the same impact i was literally just looking for the case study with a robin radar we changed their conversion offer pretty quickly from contact us to talk to sales because ultimately like that is what the buyer is there to do yeah that's mark we don't hide don't need to hide the fact that buyers don't like aren't there to talk to sales if they want the products or the service they understand they have to talk to sales in order to do it's gonna have to have like it's like this taboo subject isn't it it's like oh sales like let's not put that word sales on there i do get it because when you're in more of a like consultative selling space as well you don't want to actually say that you're selling because it is more of like an expert led conversation i get it i do get it for sure but give it a go because they saw like an instant ten percent improvement yeah in conversion rate so i think it's rooted in a general sort of thing that marketers for val of which is this idea that if we sort of that we can maybe trick a few more people into buying from us if we don't say it clearly but that's not true you know people know what they need and what they're about it and so if you optimize for the high quality visitors to your website the ones that know that they're interested in your product and they're gonna have to talk to sales to get the final information that that's necessary that will produce like i said you can always increase quality that forgive me you can always increase quantity but it's harder to do so without it being at the expense quality yeah so if you lie about what your conversion offer is and you make it more attractive than it really is you might increase the quantity yeah but they won't go anywhere you won't have quality you know as well so clear specific honest mute beneficial course action are the strongest move on a website like that yeah that gets them to the page and then you've got the conversion page itself which has a lot of room for improvement in a lot of cases like does the text tell you exactly what's going to happen after you submit the form yeah like you wanna der risk that conversion basically so a buyer knows if i submit this form here's exactly what's gonna happen okay i feel more comfortable given away my information in order to receive that thing back think you said mutually initial mutually beneficial start right you know getting that across in the information before they actually convert adding social proof we added quite a cool section which was what was it who we're not the right fit for right yeah yeah because actually we we want to deter some people of course it's not because it's wasting their time to to us it's not beneficial for anyone so yeah there are things you can do you make an interesting point i reckon it it becomes easier to think about how you can improve the page when it's no longer a contact us page mh that changes the mindset and and the frame of reference a little bit and like you say a commercial bottle of the funnel high intent conversion page needs to have you know good content that articulate what will happen and what won't happen and der risk it you know supporting information like social proof and you know positioning like that like who should do this and who shouldn't do this and then of course you wanna make sure that what happens afterwards both on the website and in the handoff process is both reflective of everything that you've said and and promised up front but also a continuation of the seamless user experience that you've hopefully created on the website which is this is really honest this is really easy and this is really aligned to my needs and interests as a buyer so you can obviously you know route them to the right calendar page you can follow it by email quickly you can do a number of things to ensure that the good work you've put into your website continues yeah yeah and you know one of the things that i've seen us stu i don't know how long you know we've done this phil but is move that contact us form that businesses is still want and need ultimately for those generic contact us queries into the footer yeah i mean that was a move we made a long time ago now because the hypothesis was the leads that i get through this contact us page are shit you know they are really terrible leads you know when i look at the quality the quantity on balance it's meaningless i've got more people offering me their services through that page than inquiring about our product or offering so i was like i don't want that so i don't want that page yep now somewhere we came along with the idea of well let's have that form available on every page in the footer which to some degree you know might feel counterintuitive right why i have more contact us forms if they generate poor quality leads but the reality is that having them in the footer within the context of the pages that contain useful information about our services in particular produces well more conversions on that form and better quality quite a lot of our good fit leads still come through the footer contact form as opposed to the hero book consultation form right it's had a really really good effect and and it has worked out has had a similar effect cross number of sites so it's a strategy that i think is quite counterintuitive not well you you know not common not frequently adopted but really could be quite powerful yeah it's yeah it's one that i now see on every single website that we've right absolutely absolutely there must be some good data telling us to do that well i was on reddit the other day and put an individual posted that they'd they'd had somebody advised them to do the very same thing do do away with their contact us page i and put it in the footer and that they seen strong results from it and that person wasn't me so it's it's obviously spreading which is probably our customer i i asked the great i said was that person me because not a lot of people say that but regardless it's a great move it's a sound strategy and you lose nothing ultimately yeah by not having a contact us page let's face it if we look at data across all the businesses we work with you won't see a high that being a high quality source of opportunities it just doesn't it that way yeah for sure okay so we've covered some core areas there like homepage messaging navigation offer is there anything else to cover in terms of like obvious blind spots when it comes to b2b cro i'm sure there are i mean ultimately every page needs to be ordered and structured in a logical order so for example on your home homepage you might wanna have social proof pretty early on pretty high up yeah quickly get across that signal but on your product pages you don't want that to come before products information for example so each page needs to be structured in a way that aligns to the priority with which the information you know best relevance to the visitor so you can usually you know review each page for the the order in which you present information and also the way in which you present that information scan text lots of headings and supporting imagery that's actually supporting yeah opposed to just nonsense and not gating crucial product information which i still see yeah i mean that's a that's a very good i mean we've obviously talked about un gating content and that's a that's a ship that sailed which is great well is it well i not i would like your things like conversations week it should be yeah a good point they're yeah there are lag ards yeah but yeah like i think there's a lot more confusion around gating case studies product data sheets and brochures and the like and i mean i think you've always just gotta look at if you've gated that information what have you been able to do those leads afterwards yeah are your buyers the people who actually buy from you seeing it first or are they actually just not because it's behind a gate your data will tell you and yeah for the most part i think it's gonna be clear that you should un gate product information un gate case studies so that buyers can consume it freely anonymously on the side the the thing you have to ask as well that won't be visible in the data though is how many buyers are we losing by gating how many are just not looking at this information going elsewhere where this information is free to consume rather than actually filling out yeah i mean you know when i think back to when we first un unblock content you know full stop it was because i could see clearly that the people that bought from us we're not seeing the gated content you know and it was so stark and so off obvious so i was able to form a pretty strong conclusion which is the buyers that buy from us and the buyers that don't are not seeing the content if i believe the content will have a positive impact on our reputation or you know our the buyers his opinion universe of us then they need to be able to see it and so it was pretty clear to me that it needs to be un so i think people can review their like their their stock of content in the same lens which say well if the people who buy from you are not first downloading that content then it's a clear sign that the people who who don't buy from you are also not downloading that content yeah and the people are are downloading that content i'll probably just leads that you've just can't convert you struggled to convert yeah they or tell you that as yeah sure exactly i mean you know ultimately there's loads of little things that you can do and it is all about just reviewing everything with a critical eye and with data and with research to say can this be made more suitable for a buyer who's on our website researching and what we offer and there's lots of things that you can do across your site but we've we've certainly touched on what i think are the the the biggest individual factors that have the biggest impact and are most often wrong those are the ones that people should look at yeah like quick smart yeah and i mean like we can be confident in saying this as well right because we over and over implement it god knows how many times i get blend right oh completely yeah i mean absolutely it's it's not unusual to see between as i said a hundred and four hundred percent increase in high intent conversion rate when you apply our best practices for conversion rate most of which are out there for people to read it about and and and apply themselves if they look around it's a huge lever that has a multiplying magnifying effect on everything else that you do successfully before and after but i should you you you shouldn't leave it to lang because you know at least i don't know what fifty percent to a hundred percent of everything else we spend in marketing it has a aim of bringing someone to our website yeah and so if your website is converting poorly and rates differ dramatically across issues right rate is the hard thing to talk about everybody wants a benchmark but rates are hard can we give a benchmark well i was gonna say that it's it's not unusual to see a website because so few have been optimized around this kpi to see websites that convert at zero point zero zero something you know that that is not new so is that visitor to high intent exactly yeah visitor to high intent conversion bottom of the funnel conversion you know commercial conversion offer you know a really small number often very lower sometimes a whole decimal point lower like so small almost nonexistent existent but by optimizing your website for your buyer's experience you can skyrocket that you can move that to zero point zero two or zero four or zero point one yeah you can make huge strides and they're so close to pipeline the impact is massive and then everything you do will produce more pipeline from the same investment it's it's a no brainer yeah i'll tell you what i think this episode just made conversion rate optimization a bit more sexy you'd hope so wouldn't you when you think about the like the the gains the gains and the opportunities that are available yeah it it does require that marketers think in terms of revenue contribution right really it does it does require that mindset that we're here to generate pipeline and you have to navigate the situations where your kpis leads and the sales team won't expect the leads and any drop in leads will be you know a problem for you this is all about optimizing for high end conversions so hopefully if you can look at it with that viewpoint that mindset you can have an incredible impact on your business yeah for sure alright let's wrap it up there shall we conversion rate optimization i enjoy the great episode yeah i feel like you would really getting into the flow that well we'll go into more detail on a lot of those topics on websites decode we've we're talking about them more specifically but that's a nice overview of things that people can look at today look at our portfolio see what we've done kind given a lot of it of away there yeah for sure well do exactly as phil says otherwise he'll be knocking in and yeah hopefully you enjoyed this episode i did it's a good one and we catch you all next time to you next time bye everyone

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded just a quick episode today from myself and phil because you might have noticed that on our podcast podcast artwork there is a small banner at the bottom now which says hubspot media and we're so excited to now be part of the hubspot podcast network and hubspot media network more generally it's like an amazing exciting time and opportunity for us to join the hubspot media network it means you know we're part of thirty forty other shows and even broader content creators more holistically across other channels and in terms of what it means for the podcast well it won't change a huge amount you know fill and i and other guests are still gonna sit around this table you know online wherever it may be and bring the best insights we possibly can with our own knowledge of you know clients work and successes and knowledge of other people communities that we're part of and you know bring them and share them on this podcast but it also means it will enable us to do more podcast podcasts better podcast podcasts and have access to some fantastic and awesome guests as well so yeah it's only gonna mean fantastic amazing things and yeah it's just like such an exciting thing to happen for this and our other podcast as well which yeah i should mention at the end yeah it's an incredible group of creators the hubspot podcast network that we're incredibly proud to be part of with demand coded and websites decode and and although it's not a requirement in order to be in the podcast network we we've of course been a hubspot partner as an agency for many years now since twenty thirteen twenty fourteen and i forget when we exactly formalized the relationship you know but we've believed in hubspot you know for a long long time and we're constantly checking you know what hubspot offers against the requirements of our clients of our business and it constantly consistently exceeds everything we need and all our expectations so we've been a partner of for a long time we believe in and we you know we really really utilize that that that platform to a great results great extent so becoming part of their podcast network is just an incredible honor you know it's a fantastic real feeling to be you know included amongst those greats but also you know another reflection of the quality of the partnership that we believe in hubspot so yeah no change to what our mission is here with this podcast what we're trying to do but certainly a signal you know that says that we're gonna keep doing it we're gonna try and make it better and better and better and you know they are a a i trusted partner to us in more ways than one absolutely and you know you may notice a few ads for hubspot now pop up aside from just the way we talk about them anyway like hubspot always pop up on this podcast because it's a suite of products that we fully believe in to meet so many requirements for marketers and for businesses but to be honest like we're super proud to be doing that as well because like it is a product we are you know always happy to promote to people because it fits so many needs and helps out so many businesses yeah it's a cornerstone of our offering as a hospital website agency and demand generation agency and you know it's been a key you know pillar of our growth over the last decade so really really pleased to be partnering with them and not having to russell up sponsors every week you know to promote because we don't want to do that whereas this is a real yeah a real match made you know in not heaven that's thoroughly but it's a good match close it's a good match place enough and yeah their support will help us to do a lot more with the message and with the podcast you know without having to change our approach to it which is really great yeah for sure and as i mentioned and phil mentioned earlier we also have another podcast which i'm not sure like what the crossover is between demand code and websites decode but they're both now part of the hubspot media network and the hubspot podcast network more specifically and i would absolutely say like now is a great time to go and check out websites decode if you're listening to tom demands coded because it is such a great podcast that fill host with really short actionable episodes that you can listen to every single week to implement advice straight away into your website as we know the website is such a cornerstone piece of every single marketing strategy and only becoming more important so you know it's a podcast worth checking out and i think a lot of people will get instant value from listings to that yeah it's a website decode is an excellent companion to a demand decode yes ultimately a lot of what we do is trying to create traffic to our website that we can then convert and it gives me great pleasure on websites decode to share all the ways that we've learned to optimize your website conversion rate the user experience around the generation of pipeline which is the ultimate goal of a demand generation approach to marketing so they go hand in hand really well and we'll be doing a lot more with that one as well as a result of this fantastic partnership yeah for sure cool yeah i mean the last thing i would say is go and check out obviously all of the other podcast podcasts that are part of hubspot podcast network it's full of all kind of business topics really yeah and great podcast podcasts when i think of some of the ones in that you know mars against the grain my first million like the nudge like some of my favorite podcast podcasts are part of the hubspot podcast network the best names out there which is awesome go and check them out you know a a huge range from marketing to sales customer success like business podcast and some of the best ones there so do check them out but yeah just wanted to update everyone really because there's gonna be some exciting things coming on this podcast and yeah we're really look like looking forward to the next phase i think yep here's to the future of our podcasts with hubspot cool alright we will catch you all in the next episode see you

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded dan here with phil nice to sit down after a a few weeks not in the studio which is yeah it's always nice to get back in on today's episode we are covering what to include in your marketing dashboard and i feel like this has always been an issue for marketers but with ai coming along and really like raising the stakes and the importance of marketing the importance of understanding what's working understanding what we actually need to measure in order to keep an eye on things make sure we understand where things are moving and where we need to jump in and like what we actually need to analyze understanding what's in your marketing dashboard and who needs to see what information and when is just so important and it is just what like we do talk about measurement a lot because it is still a just fundamental issue across entire marketing team so yeah that's what we're gonna cover off today yep good to be back it is an interesting topic it's not a new topic but it's changing and evolving because there are changes affecting us every day what i think is key is the fact that you know marketers for a long time have had challenges getting by and getting support getting trust from senior management yeah getting the budget they want getting permission to use the budget the way they want and largely it's been well at least a factor is the disservice they've done themselves in terms of what they've presented and reported back on there's a lot of useful data within marketing but the data that you need different audiences to see differs and marketers have not always been good at identifying that difference we've seen that over and over again and we've fortunately helped some change that but it's a p pervasive issue that i think everybody would benefit from getting clear on if they wanna be given the support and trust internally that they need in order to do their job like you said marketing is very very data driven as a discipline you need good instincts but you need data to support your message and to and to get the trust that you need from others yeah yeah like you you've really hit the nail on the head there like marketing has become in some situations perceived as a cost center because they've presented themselves as a cluster center yeah in their data u they have only shown the cost that they're spending and not really showing what they're getting back from you cost yeah yeah well there you go you are a cost center the metrics that you report back don't carry value you're you're only you're only talking about what the expense was associated to them it does start paint you in a very cost center type picture yeah yeah good alright cool well let's help marketers out and really say what needs to be on this board yeah okay so phil i really like your onion analogy which you've used in a few different examples maybe you really like onions i don't know but i like the analogy anyway which is almost you know putting something at the center and peeling back the layers to potentially the less important or less crucial things yeah yeah so we we kind of chat before this and agreed on on our onion model right so where when it comes to marketing measurements and the data you have available to you at the very core of every business is the commercial metric the executive level metrics that everybody understands everybody can appreciate and everybody needs to know ultimately so the crucial things that should be that close one revenue marketing roi customer acquisition costs lt tv to some extent those kind of core things that are directly tied to business critical outcomes yep yeah absolutely well many things in life are onion like you know the analogy doesn't apply solely here at all there's layers right and when you sc something you often realize that you can peel back a layer and get something even more valuable beneath or even more important and that's true in marketing measurement too something that has been discussed for a long long time although it does still happen very frequently is that marketers don't peel back the layers when it comes to presenting to the management to the people the budget holders and they don't talk in terms of business outcomes they don't identify and show how the the effect of their work is contributing to things that you know are either measured in terms of financials or very very cor to those financials and so like you say a good is a management level marketing dashboard does not really focus on the cost of a channel to that business or where budgets being spent or what the you know kpis around optimizing for a platform or you know performance of a component are at all they don't talk about that they talk about things that make sense when we talk about business valuations revenue pipeline forecasts and and those sorts things so so to your point closed one revenue is probably the the number one thing to get clear on you said something fantastic on linkedin the other week which was you know marketers are expected to measure roi without any visibility into the r you know and and that's just that that's crazy right and this is where that that starts by talking about how much pipeline that the business one that you're able to demonstrate a role in the creation of is is the key to it and then you can layer around that additional useful data such as what is our cost per customer you know what is our return on marketing investment what are the you know average if we take into account some fixed variables lifetime value of customers you know or you know the likely sort of you know churn rates or whatever you wanna do you some of those things are not all perfect measurements of past performance but if you fix some of the variables they become useful storytelling around business impact of marketing investments and move you from that cost center perspective to this value creation profit center perspective which is where you start to win trust and support yeah and i do think there is maybe this is peeling back a layer here where you've got your core closed one revenue figure there but there there will always be questions around like where is that source who how can we attribute that back to an investment ultimately and i hear i hear some people saying oh well we can't do that we just need you know one figure or rally around something but i don't think many businesses jive with that because when you're investing in sales outbound motion event marketing like performance marketing linkedin ads brand campaigns you need to be able to attribute that investment to something so even if it's not at a channel level but it's at a kind of like signal and source level so for example from your close one revenue pipeline was that source a high intent lead on the website yeah was it outbound you know where did that person actually originate from into the database ultimately yes was it an import from an event you know like i think i think it's unhealthy for organizations to sort of argue the toss over each and every deal from a attribution from a credit point of view that's not healthy that doesn't create the right outcomes or behaviors but when you're analyzing the data i think you can draw some lines that say this segment of our pipeline was originated through the efforts of marketing and the budget that we spend not the team not the people but the budget that was allocated to marketing and this portion of pipeline was was originated through our sales effort you know and like there's always gonna be some gray area right there's always gonna be some crossover but it's about saying we put this amount of money in we get a result that we understand and we value and that's true in sales and in marketing of course we still need sales to close every marketing and put deal that's originated but far better to measure marketing in terms of how much it puts into the sales team that they can have a chance of closing than to you know fuel the fire but of the fight between the two you know and make and make it you know incentivized marketing to do the wrong things so that sales get recognition for everything yeah you see mark my point there's nothing worse on a dashboard than having marketing source and then sales source next to it because it just creates competition where neither really wants to support the other when in reality like you say every single deal that comes in needs sales to close it every single opportunity that comes through sales will have touched marketing at some point like whether it's the deck that you shared with them that marketing created but they will go to your website most likely at some point they will touch like each team in like every single scenario yeah this podcast is brought to you by blend we're a b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in marketing so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b b dot com i've spoken to a few marketers recently and customers of ours and they've asked similar questions around our board wanna know if we put this amount in we get what will we get out of it ultimately that is what you know the board cares about the people injecting money into the business and care about ultimately if we put x in what do we get out of and like you need to be able to demonstrate that in some way that is really for me the most important metric in marketing you've got a budget to spend how effectively are you deploying that budget to get a return yeah yeah and in fact this sort of approach to reporting and and measurement and your dashboards is a two way street because it's not only what you know business leaders need to hear and see it also requires you to gain visibility and understand it right a marketing team's job is to make good sound investments of its marketing budget and if you're if you're looking at the wrong set of data reporting the wrong set of data you're not in a position to make good sound investments you may create metrics kpis that go up you may have high impressions high engagement high clicks high leads but if that's never measured through to business impact how can you say that's a good investment of that budget yeah so this so this this drives positive change in both directions and marketers need to be the need to be the first to make that change actually if they wanna change the opinion of the function if they wanna change the representation they have at the top table they have to start by measuring and assessing themselves in terms of these business kpis yeah for sure aligning a few of these things together is really important it's worth saying because customer acquisition costs for example is a funny one we were chatting before and customer acquisition cost is essentially just total cost of marketing divided by number of new customers and that's that's count of customers whether that customer is worth ten million or ten thousand doesn't matter like it is just the cost of acquiring however many customers yet got and obviously we always try to improve marketing metrics so customer acquisition cost we'd always wanna try and bring that back down but in reality it might not actually matter if customer acquisition cost is going up for you to acquire certain accounts like certain customers that you need to acquire in order to grow so that's where pairing customer acquisition cost with marketing roi yeah for example is super super important yeah because essentially what you're factoring in there is the average deal size that you're creating which if it's going up you can tolerate you can accept a higher customer acquisition cost so yeah it it is it is necessary to look at these things side by side and also over a variety of time periods right because nothing in b2b marketing happens you know starts in the morning ends in the afternoon is reported on in the evening right unfortunately we operate in sales cycles that are days weeks months years sometimes and a lot of these measurements are in the month so tracking the trend month over month but also quarter over quarter and in some cases year over year is really important to get the full picture like i say they might go up they certainly will go up with you know specific investments that you might make your new website for example your attendance at a key event these things will likely mean that you spend more in a certain month meaning your customer acquisition cost during that month will go up but your roi will be affected later on yeah so yeah really important to take a big view a broader picture and see them side by side and you know different timelines of customer acquisition cost because if you look month on month it might look like a a shark mouth you know with customer acquisition cost aligning with big expenses for example if you look over a longer time horizon and you might actually see like ka start to reduce slowly yeah and i mean there's probably some sophisticated ways to report on that even while it's going up and down as well but usually if you look at this over a you know the the length of your sales cycle then you start to get a really good impression of whether you're trending in the right direction or trending in the the wrong reaction and to be honest i would try not to over complicate it because as soon as you start over complicate something you've then got some serious explanation and reasoning to add with everything that you present it loses interest from people like you just need it easy to understand no measurement in marketing probably apart from closed one revenue is perfect well yeah i mean and even that you know again during what time frame based on what investment so you're a hundred percent right there is no mark measurement in marketing that's a hundred percent reliable trustworthy everyday no matter what you have to apply your intelligence to it as well but these are some good ways to make you know meaningful data available to your team and your you know business leaders yeah cool alright so that's that's the core i think of yeah the marketing dashboard they are the measurements that need to be on there and should be presented to the executive level that's what they'll all want know yeah yeah and then you can step back from there and say well what you know you're you're now sort of thinking about the marketing function specifically you know no longer looking at the sort of net result of marketing and sales working together on opportunities so there's a next layer of data which is reflective of as a function with a budget spend what what are we looking to optimize around what's our what are our major kpis for our own efforts right is that where you put the attention next yeah yeah so i've got it kind of down as the leading indicators and revenue drivers like what are the things that we can generate predictably that correlate heavily with revenue yeah and what are the levers that if we pull them will mean positive results on those business dashboard yeah so i've got things in here like pipeline generated some would argue that goes in layer one for me that's cut layer one is really the truth like you know the bread and butter that can't be argued yeah i think that'll business may differ on that way yeah but it's a valuable metric it's a lead indicator of revenue though that's the that's the difference for me it's an indicator it's not the like cornerstone definitive data point yeah so pipeline high intent leads sales velocity you could throw in there and then you can break things down like pipeline and high intent leads by self point attribution you've then got you know conversion rates lead or high intent leads to opportunity conversion rate for example these are all things that if you measure side by side if you you know correlate them with revenue as you increase one like revenue should also go up up ultimately and if not then you know you can identify the problem from that yeah exactly you know there aren't so many of them right it's it's interesting you know ultimately when you analyze everything marketing is trying to do it it boils downs some pretty fundamental stuff and i think you know high intent leads through our variety of channels probably the number one thing that marketing teams need to you know think about how they optimize their create creations for their assets for the result being pipeline you know again the conversion rate from high intent lead to pipeline might fall under marketing or sales depending on how an organization works but it's two really important metrics sales velocity that's a bit of a that's a bit of a challenging one i might be i might suggest people replace that with time to close or average time to close or at least have that data available to them there are people out there that would point out very quickly that sales velocity as a predictor a not a a a measure of past performance you know but your conversion rates from different sources into those things those like that's key data right i mean again we've spoken about marketers does not only need to understand like business metrics business impact but usually that's just simply a gateway to seeing the stark differences that exist from tactic to tactic channel to channel in terms of what really creates high intent inquiries pipeline opportunities enclosed one revenue yeah exactly exactly that and this is this is really where i love like talking to customers and really like putting this dashboard together when you start to show them you know what pipeline are we generate in from which self reported attributed sources you know where are our high intent leads coming from terms self employed attribution we probably haven't spoken and i was just about say yeah to put that on the list because i think it it needs to be there well yeah i mean i i put it in kind of like underneath things because you'd have the core metric like pipeline like high intent leads and then break it down by self report attribution but i still just love it like i still can't believe businesses just don't have this like i still speak to so many marketers that are just like what self employed attribution is mental have you seen any change in the nature of the self reward attribution responses we it's not so fresh a concept anymore and i've heard some discussions around you know businesses starting to think about how they capture it and you know what they put on their forms if you seen anything change or are people still giving us phenomenal insight it does depend on industry it does i'm in a lot of hubspot portals yeah for our clients and like i see a lot of data around this and it really does vary industry industry manufacturers for example will get online okay a lot you know very helpful online search you know sometimes just nothing or like web you know like set things that you can actually struggle to then attribute back to a channel itself yeah if somebody says online wow you know online is really anything now was it on social did you google me like a was it a you know it could be a whole host of things when you get into our industry for example where you're selling to marketers they're a lot more willing to give you a lot more information aren't you know our answers are still fantastic yeah insight for self support attribution like absolutely fantastic most people will tell you if they came from google search they'll tell you what they searched yeah amazing like it is it is that great but yeah it it does vary based on industry quite a lot but no reason not to have it right still there's no reason to not because you wouldn't have that data otherwise and occasionally you know you will get more in debt answers you know i'm i'm kind of general industries there because it does vary and that's what i've seen but it's absolutely still worth having yeah and i mean again you know self reported attribution has its proponents and its opponents it's never gonna be a hundred percent crystal clear reliable but it's better insight than you can get from a lot of other sources and better insight than a lot of statistical data ever will be yeah we would never never never reject it every time that i've recommended it that we've built it to report in dashboards the response has been like overwhelmingly positive that they can finally see some data that tells them a bit more than organic search or direct traffic you know this is truly telling them more about their overall marketing investments and which which ones are having an impact ultimately on these leading indicators of revenue love that love that yeah we're gonna talk next about the the the next layer which i think correct me if i'm wrong is gonna be more more in the channels more in the you know data points where ai is gonna a topic u is a topic here i don't think so necessarily because it's a channel ultimately yeah self reported attribution as we're seeing already as a lot of customers are seeing shows you where always is showing you you know we're hearing about you from chat from gemini from complexity they're still just using other forms of navigational search to find your website i don't think it fits in here though i i think when you're starting to look at what we'll get into it right share of voice and how you're being in ai for me that's channel performance yeah yep but you want to understand via self support attribution how how you're generating high intent leads through those channels yeah actually your thought comes to mind which is that you know as a marketer you always want to have you wanna be prepared with this data because although you know ai as a channel doesn't belong here per s or necessarily and therefore probably doesn't belong on that mark that management level dashboard you're gonna get questions about it yeah you need to be ready to refer to you know information and data that shows you've got a grip on it and you've got a handle on it without it becoming a top line measurement report i feel like it is one thing you said to me before actually which is maybe somebody you worked with back in your sony days but they always had the answer to data like whenever there was a question like that i think that's such a skill for marketers to just either have the data immediately know it or nowhere where to find it because it does paint a bit of a bad picture if the question is asked and you don't know the answer to it yeah i've met a few people like that over the years and i you know i've admire them greatly so yeah like you say these these layers are reporting you know not only required but they're beneficial because they mean that you can respond to questions when they go beyond what's being discussed and given the the height of the discussion on the topic of ai ar you're bound to get asked about it right yeah well should we just go into that straight well well listen outline the channel metrics first because we've got let's just you know recap right layer one was our commercial metrics executive level the metrics directly tied to business outcomes yep layer two we've got the leading indicators which basically forecast the future commercial outcomes but they're they're very relevant to like strategic planning as a business then you've got your channel level metrics so these are like the tactical performance indicators which would be used to optimize those individual channels yeah so yeah like you say i think ai is a channel linkedin is a channel youtube is a channel search is still a channel events is a channel events is a channel all of these things require their own individual analysis yeah there layer three though because they aren't as easy to correlate with those direct business outcomes you can't quite easily correlate linkedin ad impressions with revenue the two things don't correlate so as that correlation starts to disappear and grow greater you peel another layer off yep absolutely yeah i mean and within each of those channels there's you know potentially a dozen metrics that are important to your team important to you in terms of how you you know create and distribute content to those places how you measure them what impacts you're looking for so this is where we start to get into really granular data that's valuable and useful but it doesn't bubble up to the top because it just creates the wrong mess it drives it's focused on how you make the investment in that channel work hardest for you not what impact you're creating necessarily yeah one interesting thing well we should get onto the ai point actually sure we cover that on first so what's what to measure in terms of ai ai analysis right now ai visibility you know basically visibility within large language models people ask question people see your brand that's like that's what people wanna know that's what people wanna see is that worth including in the marketing dashboard now and how to get that data is the question i suppose well i think this is a rapidly evolving area where solutions are new and it will take some time to shake out what the real you know reliable methods are doing it but if you think about it ai is a place people can go to ask questions and that generates some data now as far as i'm aware at the time of recording this you know these these systems chat claw gemini i don't believe they're providing like a host pipe of analytical data to vendors but there is a growing category of solutions around ai analytics which i think are essentially using information that you provide to query a large language model and get a sense of which brands are present in this response and i think there's a few ways to be present you know to be mentioned to be cited to be linked to for example and you know it's probably time for businesses that you know well for businesses that for which seo was an important channel yeah it's probably time for these businesses to start thinking about how they can use these tools to understand their place in ai there might be rapid change down the road be ready to change your approach change your tool change your metrics because it's a it's an evolving area but it's encouraging to start seeing some platforms come through that will give you a you know a benchmark at a data point that you can track over time yeah and that's what we're looking into right now right like we wanna understand how the the channels vary between organic search and our visibility there compared to our visibility in ai in large language models and it is gonna become a a key driver for marketers going forward and i think everyone should well be thinking about this at least but be looking into the tools available that are out there i mean it's made clear for us right because we started to see self reported attribution yeah results come back saying fan and chat gp fan via ai and because increasingly google searches are being proceeded particularly when people are researching and using informational queries being proceeded with our overview ai mode is coming that may get in front of a lot more informational searches and frankly commercial searches as well how buyers it interact with those tools and engage with them remains to be seen what i think is really interesting in terms of ai sort of analytics and understanding is you know that there was a stat about google searches which is a huge proportion of them on any given day you had never been seen before a massive number like it was only the minority of searches that were repeated even though they aggregate that data to the keyword level i can only imagine that's like way higher in ai yeah because the the conversations are so much more natural and you know the query is so so much longer and more in detail and also con so the data that we get back about these is gonna be really interesting because imagine this right an ai analytics platform takes a keyword that you wanna be found for puts it into chat gp it gets a response how likely how often are we as users going to follow that pattern no never it's so it's gonna be a approximation as opposed to a rock solid definitive data point interesting things to think about and it's a conversational experience where no you will not have individual keywords and individual phrases it it's a conversation the the most interesting part for me is like how this all changes based on memory like if you enable chat memory function then you'll get wildly different responses between people for the same queries based on it's memory of you and your search history and it's conversations with you in the past yeah so yeah it'll be i i we don't really have a a tool to recommend like for yeah a yeah a kind of like fail safe way to measure of this i don't think anybody does no like isn't really experimental right now there's lots out there that are using the same techniques like you say they are basically querying ai models to then understand how many times you're referenced a lot of those are doing the same things based off of the same kind of processes but yeah i mean i don't know how it's gonna imitate memory and different personas no no i think we we've just gotta keep reading on the subject you know hopefully a ll you know vendors will continue to publish information and and content on how their models work you know this like the model itself in fact quite a few of them have said we don't really know how this is working you know which just kind of fascinating and terrifying to hear but ultimately they've got a a transformer in there which is you know taking in an input and producing an output but what's happening now is increasingly those tools those platforms are doing some sort of fan out web search right where they're going taking your query turning that somehow into a set of searches choosing results not necessarily the top results that's the question mark in the tulsa if they were just choosing the top three results this would be easy this we all know exactly what to do but because there appears to be as sem rush found low correlation between top search results and ai citations how are they selecting that content what signals are they using to choose what to return this is all stuff we don't know yet or we don't understand well yet and if we do understand it everything becomes a lot clearer yeah it's all it's really exciting this is such you know we've gone down a rabbit hole here but i think it yeah it's really it is really exciting i like everyone here is really exciting like we are in the weeds of figuring this stuff out absolutely figuring out you know which places do we need to have our brand mentions on most yeah like is wikipedia like pages necessary for every single business now potentially like how do we get in reddit in core like these places these third party websites that are being referenced sell off yeah exactly quite trusted yeah you know by the l and and by their users how do you get your name in there yeah it's kinda like digital p r to an extent as well so maybe need to think about you know whether we start to factor in strategies like that on top of you know owned owned content creation yeah or not yeah it is really interesting and i mean ultimately all these other channels that we've mentioned they're pretty well understood right when it comes to measuring linkedin measuring youtube and there's is some nuance there that some people might need to hear but you know you've got your engagement you've got your impressions you've got your clicks you've got you follow through conversions you've got your dwell time you've got your you know we know what the stuff there we do one thing i would say on any ad platform linkedin being the main culprit here is because we work with a lot of businesses who are leaning on linkedin to be their main ad platform and i think every single one that we've gone into to start with has no conversion tracking set up there's no excuse for me to not have conversion tracking set up to be investing in a channel and not understanding the impact that is having on conversions on your website yep which is the main place buyers convert yep for me there's just no excuse right that's good and good advice to everybody then which is get that place kinda like the revenue like challenge from markets like you're doing it blind if you don't have that data available to you yeah fascinating so in in platform conversions view through conversions for linkedin especially like need to be measured because many people will just be scrolling through the feed they will see your ad and might have you know some sort of brand recall aided recall to remember your brand and then go back to it later yep via search via some other navigational method you still want to be credited on linkedin yes like to have influenced that yes some way to know that that channel is working that buyers is seeing your ad and then converting at some point absolutely absolutely you know few things happen instantaneously right do it like people don't click on an add and buy in b that's not how it works and if you optimize around that you're optimizing for the wrong viewer the wrong outcome the wrong kpis but you gotta be able to like track back and see what impact you had with these platforms on your conversions and how that goes through to pipeline as well yeah that's good advice for everybody yeah the other thing i wanted to ask you phil is should website traffic beyond a marketing dashboard these days well i mean i think from a marketing team level there's no reason to remove it why you know why make yourself blind to something which you spend so long understanding and still contributes to some degree to your overall results but is it the report that goes in the top left of the dashboard anymore no certainly not the changing the role of search in pipeline generation is changing the importance of pipeline in the big picture of things the the website traffic rather in the pic in the big picture of things you shifted and so i'm i i'm still fond of search right i still get i still think we've spent so long mastering it and it will remain and it will still drive visitors to our website particularly commercially so why not know how many businesses are come to your website what's your thoughts on the subject yeah i think just because something is decreasing like it is for most businesses organic traffic is going down ultimately and i can only see it continuing to go down like it will ultimately continue to go down just because it's going down doesn't mean you should remove it from the dashboard because you need to see that as going down like that is that's just much of understanding okay our website traffic is going down what do we do about it like that's the purpose of a dashboard to understand the the movement of data and react yeah to it you might no longer take action to try and push it up right you might not try and drive website traffic up although you you would probably benefit to think of website tech traffic in terms of commercial versus informational and want commercial website traffic to go up but of course website traffic doesn't necessarily break down neatly like that so on its own it's not terribly useful in achieving that aim but yeah i mean i think the you only take something off a dashboard when it's completely not aligned to the goal you're trying to achieve yeah and it may be removed at some point as the correlation starts to you know get wider and wider between website traffic and the rest of your metrics it's like high intent website conversions yes and most businesses are already seeing that website traffic is dropping off because of informational queries but but informational traffic being swallowed up yes elsewhere but high intent leads pipeline like remains consistent like the gap is growing between those because informational search which didn't provide businesses with all of those opportunities is going elsewhere yep but the commercial queries like still remain in some sense yes it it was historically a leading indicator if you grew website traffic you typically grew yeah your high and intake versions as well no longer quite the same but not completely detached so i think for the time being it stays yeah then i've seen some weird weird things on marketing dashboards like that are reported to you know really senior people in businesses like domain authority score website bounce number of seo errors and stuff back number of backlinks all of this stuff by the way is becoming is a gonna become less important i think like these large language models and i know we'd get on to ai it seems like in with every sentence now but like domain authority is a google search thing it's not a chat thing it's not a flawed thing yeah claude and chat don't care about make that they're not measuring trust signals to your website and authority on on deciding whether to include you yeah they might at some point well it's interesting but it's gonna look different yeah absolutely you know it for for something to appear on your dashboard even even you know at the team level you've really gotta be able to draw a link between it and the business kpis that you're trying to improve which is which is if i spend a significant amount of effort improving this metric like am i going see the results i wanna achieve you know ultimately over the years you tend to develop a sense for this which is like bounce rate is not something that if you improve it you'll see you know you'll see a business impact you know etcetera etcetera so most of those things don't belong on a dashboard i mean again they're they're important data points so you use the skin of the onion pro yeah good because like it's not even the layer it's the skin yeah trusty bit i love that actually i think that's very well put which is say you definitely need it in your arsenal but it's not it's not dashboard material you wanna refer to it if you need to yeah i mean something else that i've seen quite frequently that is you know these funnel based reports these like conversion rate based reports and you know they they're quite they're quite pleasant to look at so i think people get quite excited about putting them in place but i've i've i've seen quite often that they look on their own they lack they lack insight they lack they don't give you a lot to go on my general preference when it comes to reporting at all levels is show a time series so that you can see directional travel these funnel reports only show you a snapshot whenever i've used the final report myself i've always put a previous period right alongside it so that i've at least got some comp yeah but stats snapshots moments in time they don't mean a lot so i think all of these metrics are best reported you know over time so that you can see the direction of travel are we going in the right direction you know it the days when we could exactly attribute you know the value of every pound to every outcome in in a performance marketing well they're over right so it's gotta be direction of travel that you optimize for are our investments driving you know increasing in increasingly better outcomes or worse outcome and what do we do to address that it's it's all correlation ultimately ultimately i are we what are we investing in and when and are we seeing a result in this time period yeah absolutely and yeah direction of travel ultimately brand is an interesting one because you know i'm a podcast addict and all i keep hearing in every marketing podcast that i listen to is the importance of building brand now i think you know we've said a few times on this podcast that actually this notion of brand marketing is actually just good marketing that isn't performance marketing yeah ultimately like it's just creating demand like it always has been but people like to dress things up and i get it to kind of differentiate it as a thing you know i see the value in doing that to be fair yes i think there are some ways to measure brand marketing and they can be useful on marketing dashboards understanding things in search console like how many people are actually searching for your brand name for example mh mh share a voice is a useful thing to understand branded traffic from seo so how many like people are actually clicking through on your brand like these are all important things to understand but i do think in the kind of like brand marketing era right now just investing and understand the correlation with those leading indicators is more important than these super specific metrics yes you know at which are you know again subject to the correlation challenge which is they don't necessarily one hundred percent line up and and tell you what the future is gonna be yeah so there's not a lot of point in you know his spending heaps of time and money to try and establish hyper granular data in the area now if you're a ginormous fm g giant it's a different story but if you're you know an sm or a scale up trying to drive pipeline then these directional or sort of sentiment indicators are are good enough for you and like you said i think i think whenever anyone myself included here's the term brand marketing i think about big lavish brand exercises and that's a form of brand marketing but it's not the only form most marketing can be brand marketing probably should be brand marketing when the outcome you're optimizing for is a better place in the buyer's mind yeah resulting in pipeline you know down the road that that brand marketing create it's i think inspires an image of big expensive of like costs but it can be small and and and you can do brand marketing every day in every way if you optimize for those outcomes yeah for sure okay cool anything else before we kind of wrap things up here should we just recap the layers that we've got gone so at the core of our onion we've got the commercial metrics executive level metrics directly tied to business outcomes yeah then we peel bach a layer we've got the leading indicators for that the revenue drivers so these metrics forecast the future commercial outcomes in layer one then we've got layer three the channel level metrics the tactical performance indicators of specific platforms and channels that buyers use then you've maybe got a bit skin on left hand onion where you you might you know just have some metrics in the arsenal like domain authority like bounce rate like some of these brand metrics perhaps in terms of branded search impressions branded search clicks those kind of things that could be useful to pull in when you're diving deep into particular channels yep yep and not a mention of revenue attribution in there all not a mention of revenue attribution but you good think absolutely given how hamish misleading it is yeah maybe we need to do an episode on that actually yeah i think i think i'll probably just about cuts that i think the big takeaway here is when to present that information and in what what format yeah like they know your audience and realize that that they have different requirements and needs and yeah and like change the record right if you're one of those marketers that's been frustrated by the lack of support the lack of trust lack of buy in first question to ask yourself is well is what i'm reporting consistent with getting that back from the audience this is the solution to that yeah for sure you know yeah if you want more buy in for marketing be perceived as a like serious function not just cost center like this is the approach to take absolutely yeah okay cool let's wrap it up there we'll have to do a little mini episode i think next time because people listening may have seen you know some small logo at the bottom of our artwork for this podcast now which is really exciting but yeah we'll talk about that and how exciting that is and well that means probably next time alright so yeah good that's where there yeah let's leave it let's wrap up cool thank you everyone for listening yeah if you drop a like on youtube drop us a subscribe and a follow on any podcast network that you listen to this too that be fantastic and see you next time thanks all

hi everyone welcome back to demand coded in this episode we're going behind the scenes of a real product launch with a brand we all know and admire for their marketing cog and it's really interesting because i got an inside look at this product launch with liam and some of a of the gang at cog out of meet up a couple of weeks ago a few weeks ago now i suppose and yeah it was awesome we got some amazing insights interested learnings that i didn't expect too and here liam is bringing you know the insights to us that demand decode which is great so yeah awesome to have liam here who is vp of brand and customer marketing at cog at cog and we're gonna break down you know the the details within this product launch so you know how they refine the ideal from a profile built the product that actually solves a real problem that they identified and most interesting probably to this audience is how they launched a demand gen campaign that actually delivered results so yeah awesome to have you here liam and it was great to actually be you know see you put the thought process behind this in person yeah i know great to be here and yeah i'm a excited to kinda like dip into it and share some of our learnings and yeah and our process to what we did and yeah i mean if anyone ever has any feedback of ideas as well i'm always open to hearing them so yeah yeah awesome i suppose i should maybe like fan boy out for a minute maybe because i i remember like it must have been a few years ago now where alice was pretty active on linkedin talking about your shift from lead gender demand then you actually you already you guys already had a podcast but it was more sales related then you like put in this mini series which was then the loop but it was in this other podcast and like i first started i listened to that then so then i was in like i heard about like you and fran and you fran and alice were all doing this at the time and now the loop is still going right which you're sometimes hosting but other team members are so like i just think what you guys do and what you've done for a lot of marketers like building in public sharing your learnings your mistakes like being really honest with people publicly is just like so amazing and i think we should thank you for those lessons because i've learned a lot that's so good like so good here we actually just changed the podcast again so yeah i think we started with revenue champions and that was like half well first test of a podcast alice was like to me just go away and create a podcast because everyone was like right even a about way then so yeah we are trying to yeah we wanted to create something didn't really want and we didn't know and we've got like three very distinct personas really the purchase cognizant being rev marketing and sales so we're like oh try and merge it all into one i think the issue we found was we like speaking to everyone and no one and then the lead gen demand gen was such a big topic at the time that it was an and we were going through the midst of it of was such an easy thing to sort of talk about so we then ended up creating the loop and and working on and like building that out i think as that topic started to like wan and like the loop maybe became again a bit of like everything and nothing in like sort of marketing like yeah conversations it's always like trying to find that next thing that like okay what you wanna be known for where you can really provide value so now we've actually just changed the podcast to like you're subscribed to leave still subscribe to it but we've changed it to marketing dilemma which is supposed to like focus a bit more on the on the guest and enable them to like come over a dilemma and then we can discuss it together and aim being there that i just sort of took inspiration from some of the best podcasts out there like any old and they often now like have like a formulaic format like at like off menu or like desert island discs it's the same every time natural guest matters less because then it have to come with some sort of insight they just they answer the questions that are there and i thought one thing that mark all get out of is just learned knowing that everyone's kind of one there's like a little bit of like a yeah like a little bit of like a sick pleasure and kind of knowing that everyone's struggling with the same stuff so like someone come people for like if you get big names that come forward and they're saying that they're struggling the same things it's actually really helpful and and good to hear and like the other half of it was also that then maybe we'd une earth different like different things that we could actually learn from at the same time and if we're learning from it then the audience stephanie is so yeah i think it think it's like a a cool format at the moment and sell yeah to start playing around with it and i and also it works for us in that again you don't have to be some big thought media to come on the podcast we can get customers are we can get opportunity like opportunities on our own coming in and talking about their own challenges and then we can sort of like build that connection with them at the same time so but yeah there's bit of an evolution with the with the podcast so then now i'm might fully hosting that one so funny they've got this one today and then i've i think i'm recording another webinar and then three other podcast podcasts this week so i'm like fully content out i you you are literally becoming the face of cog right yeah i look whenever i look at somebody's profile from cognizant you're in the banner you know whenever whenever i look on cognizant like company page on linkedin your you know at least five posts down i'll see a video of liam and you're hosting the podcast like you are mister cognizant yeah i think i maybe took the brand a bit to you personally you're trying to know yeah look your lead in the charge which is great this podcast is brought to you by blend we're a b2b website and demand generation agency we work with ambitious businesses just like yours to create and execute effective demand generation strategies that drive pipeline for your business we also recognize that your website is the most important asset you have in marketing so we specialize in building scalable websites on hubspot that convert the demand that you've created if you want to find out more about our services and see real results that we've generated for businesses visit b b b dot com i suppose we should probably get into what we're actually chatting about today which is sales companion because at the demand gen meet up you gave us all some behind the scenes insight i would say of how you launched sales companion and i think we probably don't need to get into all the details today but there are certain things that i'd like to get into but i think if you could first just kind of outline what sales companion is like how you guys found this product in the end and why it came about and then we'll actually get into the launch of the product which i think is the meat yeah it's kind of in its name and the sales companion is supposed to be like a cells like an sdr or an ae best like tool a tool that like pops up straight away as soon as they log in and start their day in the same way the traders kind of have this i fact i used to work for thomson reuters they're like an i icon or something like that where they are like pivotal to their rowan where they get all their news and stuff to actually like crack on and within the cognizant products obviously like data and data quality like a core it's like core value core part of our brand and and what we do and what we're focused on especially like our strength in european data but what we can also do is surface insights but some of the insights i suppose and the traditional way that cog the traditional commas product is i presented like you have to go out digging for them and actually as a sales rep you want those insights to deliver to you exactly when you need them with guidance to actually where you should be prospecting next so that's what sales is is and like and more advanced and a more advanced chrome extension that they can actually help guide a rep to their next best opportunity but then provide them with the quality contact data that means they can actually go out and speaks to the people that they need to speak to as well and they can rely on that so yeah i and there's other parts as well that i think then appeal to the other sides of like the personas and that as like you know as we move that market that companies want to be able to control who their reps are reaching out to and that it's not random acts of prospecting it's prospecting with purpose and and intelligence behind it and and the ops team can set those parameters set territories enable people to take ownership of accounts and actually like then does camp companion can use that to actually make the best recommendations for who they should next reach out to you to be able to prospect account of an account efficiently so that all came from like a lot the learnings that we had when we did our sort of ic search as well and then like enabled us to actually work out the product that we needed to build today to meet the market that we wanted to get and i also like deliver a product that was a value to them that they could that they would yeah get the most value out of and then hopefully increase our our greatest retention rates as well yeah it was quite like an intentional play right to meet that up market demand because i remember you guys were saying that the cognizant product itself lends itself almost perfectly to kind of mid market almost sm style businesses that just want some contact there you know like there might even just be a one off campaign or they wanted is some contact data but actually where they could get the most value from the product is by lowering on top all of these other products and services that you offer to and that's where sales companion comes in with that information then you mentioned doing customer research done upfront before the idea of sales companion even came around yes exactly so they actually informed the idea of sales so actually at the beginning of last year was when we started ic project and then that was gonna inform the product that we that we we created and in that like research you know it wasn't only like less than ten years ago that everyone was buying data from lists right so you would go out and get a data broker i remember using data brokers and you get given a like an excel spreadsheet and then you you'd use that for your marketing campaigns and it would plug the gaps that you have and like reps would use it for phone numbers as twelve so like a lot of those times says this were like out date by the time you got them records were like yeah well like rubbish and so when we launched problem cognizant begin with it was like kind of in the era of like zoom info and discover org merge it was like this idea that you could now get a platform and get access to data at time but then it's changed since then because now there's multiple providers doing exactly the same thing and actually access the data isn't the issue anymore in fact if anything we've all got too much of it it's like knowing what data to use so and and when and yeah there's i think there's boys gonna be a demand just for b to b data but how do we differ differentiate ourselves as a provider they're saying oh we don't just provide data we provide actually intelligence as well alongside that data and data that's actually gonna get you in contact with the people that you care about not just like volume of counts which i think is is easy to do as well like we could you could say you've a huge volume of counts there or like decision makers then you're not gonna no they're not all decision makers and they're not of like a media user lot of people like we found that even in our own data set in the in that research it's like that it was made it was one percent of our data was access most of the time and that's everyone is looking at the same people and everyone wants they get the same people and that's not to say that the rest of the data is useless just to say that that data is the most important data and that's why you where we need to really focus so if we're serving data and inherit it that contact intelligently to people then that that data needs to always be correct because that's the data that people want and that's why we're gonna spend our time as well yeah that's insane but almost not surprising because you know when you think about who businesses ideally wanna target it's the decision makers it's the c suite it's the v vps it's the directors and i can imagine you know that that is the data that everyone's going after alright cool i suppose the next step once you identify that the product had a fit in the market already where i suppose it was the other way around you identified the problem created the solution right can we just unpack what was next after that like the actual go to market strategy i kind of wanna get into the messaging that was created how you kind of got to that how you were testing and iterating it because i thought i found that really interesting yeah so yeah so we built that we built we started by by building a brand story first to suppose around what cognizant was and why it was and like what like what we were what we were trying to achieve so that was in the intelligence quality personalization compliant and then we start then we wanted to like work like forward from there to some like get that into like messaging what that means sales companion can do for you and i suppose actually there was a little bit of it that was like you can paint it now that it was like done in like a perfect creative process but i think it was actually just a suggestion we kind of accent went probably the wrong way straight to the go to market and we're like looking at ads and we were like building out all of our product messaging around it and we were struggling i suppose with the product messaging i feel like we we did we weren't happy with it looks a bit stale with those brand teams we couldn't quite get yeah across the value that we wanted to and then one of the demand general just mentioned this idea of being sales companion being a plus one like your plus one i suppose that always turns up for you and like support you brings in and like delete and like saves you at the time when you need them so then we've they he side building out there's a different messaging around like sort like the plus one that never lets you down the plus one that's always there the plus one that always shows up and then we realized that this was gonna be like a great theme then that we could actually run through that product messaging and like really backs up what sales companion is as that plus one and so then we started to thread that throughout all of the product messaging and that was like came like the key part of the the creative campaign that we ran and the original like images that we came out with around that and the and the and everything was like based on sort stock images and then we thought we'd go out and like actually personalize them that's when nike we decided that like we'd have me and some becky and the team to feature and then we can we could by that way we're like human it for it with people from cog as well and we also separately come up with like i run these like quarterly the create creative days where we come up with some of our new creative concepts i think they're getting more organized now but at the time we're just sort of trying to come up with fun ways that we could demonstrate sales companion and we came out with a separate idea at that time we i think we've done we'd released alice diary cmo and there was a launch video with that where like fran just pops up in the background in one moment of it which and offers budget to jamie who works there and we we all found it so funny but at that point before oh it'd be kind funny if we could we we recreate some of those videos where someone pops up and they are sales companion obviously them but as we just before we went to shoot those we then came across this the plus one theme and then we were like okay so then we can solidify becky as as as sales companion and that's kind of how it all came together so it was actually a bit pig in the end i think now when i like by accident right you stumbled across this just random idea which ended up being the best idea you probably could have heard yeah and i think actually from it we've kind of realized that we like trying to now create that make this crazy today a little bit more formulaic a little bit more led by data but like to land on those ideas but in the time of the orders that we're not going back changing work that we've already done quickly changing scripts and things like that which was kind of where we were at but yeah it all landed in the end and and kind of self together the trouble is with those creative ideas and when you try and force a creative ideas somebody but if we said oh okay let's book a half an hour call this thursday to discuss ideas for this like all the ideas would be bad probably and like most people wouldn't have any because like the idea just comes at a random moment it could be walking the dog it could be in the shower so like the idea of plus one probably came you know on the toilet like it could've have been like any strange moment so like what are you planning on doing next time or whenever you need that new creative idea to to not kind of rely on a random moment to try and make it a bit more formulaic but allow for that creativity as well yeah so the way we've run the creative date at the moment so we've we've got we've got one at the end of june and previously what i would do is come in and i get the whiteboard out i've split it into three with yes it's complicated and no betty anything ends up and no because we're all british and we don't really wanna insult anyone but there's a lot that ends up getting it's it's complicated and everyone like just the simple thing of like writing we'll come up with their like we're looking for like content themes for their some messaging teams but whatever we're running the creative for and everyone writes on post notes me go through them and then eventually we always we land on something between you got the whole team nearly the whole team there so it's like i think in any of those creative processes it's best to have as many heads as possible because something then clicks and then someone add something else it that then finalize the idea it always comes out something a little bit random but the change now that we're doing is we've got like almost like i suppose it's like a pre read ahead of that now where we actually run through all of the data first and then that gives like two weeks so the data is supposed to then inform what we're gonna do so i think before some of the issues we're taking big swings so there were things that didn't go exactly to plan with sales companion because it was a big swing it was big swing creative idea that was great for creativity but maybe missed on performance so looking at the performance data means that we sort of like control for some of that swing and then by the time we've had two weeks people come and the agendas of it and people then can have those moments beforehand when they just saw like sometimes as i do just sit up bolt up right as soon as waking up going oh my god i've got the idea yeah and then you can like come at the later of those yeah exactly great and i have those ideas when when they've gone for they're walking the dog in the shower or something like that and bring them to the to the meeting and then we expand them so it's like there is no dumb idea it's like all ideas on the table because there might be one that starts off a little bit ridiculous and then we actually work out this the right one so well i'm interested to know what sort of data you bring to the start of those meetings because you must have so much data on all of the content and assets you create it'd be interested to know what you whittle it down to to the most important things that you share yeah so each team like is responsible for like bringing flatbed bets so there's obviously and because the problem is there's competing priorities between them so what might be great content doesn't perform from a performance point of view mh so the our paid media team come with the best performing assets on paid media where we like where that works so then we've also because i think sometimes we actually create too many assets sometimes like i actually you think as a team we never struggled with content production sometimes it's that's what we struggled with is like where it best fits and and its execution then sometimes it's actually a blessing to have too much content but that's actually a bit more of where we've suffered with so the the paid income forward with what's actually resonating on paid what works linkedin ten what how and what works a matter like where we're seeing that performance so it could be something is and that's measured in intuitive different ways of different sort buckets on linkedin depending where where they're aiming for reach or conversions so looking at converting topics looking at topics of high engagement and then get us reach so that we can be like we're gonna focus on those areas messaging that's landing the demand gen team link the dots there as well but also would the pm team think about looking at what messaging is actually working for specifically for mid market so they'll they'll come with like and then there's a lot of like cra testing on that so where we're seeing benefits what uplift on the website of like mh made a difference where we need to where we wanna focus our messaging sometimes the big creative idea is a great creative idea but it doesn't actually say what we're doing which is the that we need that we've you've got blend the fun and the boring and then the content team are coming or come forward with what's flying organically what's working organically what's driving traffic to the website at the moment where we're seeing that work what podcast episodes are working like like the topics i suppose that are actually leading the conversation the where we wanna be like known for and then hopefully between that we'll be able to then figure out kind of some of that accept because some of this stuff as well it's about redoing things rather than starting getting great a lot of good content so it's like work working out what's worked from that so that's the plan and then we'll see if it like if it helps like guide yeah like that that creative process time well i'll be interested to know how that goes and hopefully you posted our on linkedin because yeah i'm i imagine bringing that data up front would be useful for everybody to then bounce their ideas off of what they've just learned so yeah it's it's interesting getting back on topic that was a great you know segment though on sales companion so you have this amazing idea which was the plus one the message testing and getting that message like composed in a way that would resonate with buyers was an interesting process i think you guys went through using tools like winter testing out know you know different variations etcetera to land on the things that worked could you talk us through the process you went on there to land on the things that would actually work yeah so i mean it goes back to the the ic project that we did which we worked with a company called cas to do and they sort like paint this picture of that you need to like identify your head pin in the market head pin being like if you pinch pictures of temp bowling yeah pin everything else falls down and goes and and and you and you land the rest of the market because that head pin like talks about you say positively that he starts to bring in people from outside a it so we started i suppose with on that project with like we had to identify our crown jewels like what are our key strengths in the in the space being and for us was like data quality european data and being like an expert in european data and having like really strong data quality in the market market especially for for europe then we went now and did what they and we then called the target market initiative which was we interviewed key prospects key customers former customers as well to find out exactly where they see how we help solve problems and where they where we see the best fit from identifying our crown jewels that gave us the parameters at that that i those people that we interviewed so that means to start find like a what they'd we called straw man which is like not just like sorry these names are brilliant yeah yeah that's so good that's and makes it sounds so much more technical is but the the straw man being like not just like looking at your industries and your company size segment but like looking at what else make someone a good a customer what ours actually drives high retention rates and that like for us would be that they have european operations and that they have like an advanced tech stack maybe like salesforce hubspot which we integrate into and that they have an advanced rev ops function they're it's that and and i actually have like an sdr team as well so sales head became like an important part of for that mh and then that enabled us to then go when we spoke them to actually build an idea of what that product would look like to fit the needs that they that they had so then we had to one go take that to to actually validate some of further what we we'd find found out so we used tool call use tool called user evidence to to then survey our customers and i validate and that through that we were able to validate some of those findings that you know i think it was like seventy percent of our customers believe that the right people it's the it's the biggest benefit of having a sales intelligence provider like finding those right people they continue to struggle of accuracy crm around dates data i think that's was about eighty percent and of our customer base seventy percent of them europe was their most important region which then validated some of the that idea of what our crown jewels were and and and who our straw was as well and then we took the same sort of like process of testing it to to to like the wider market using winter and winter enables you to you sort of survey do market research of your your ic so you can select the types of job titles and companies that you wanna go after and company size and send them a survey and they're like rewarded for it to give us ideas on on who to talk like to give us their feedback on on on our questioning and like and and that and the the what we we'd wanted to validate and we found that seventy two percent of respondents cited again that data quality was their biggest challenge and that eighty percent agreed that the most important benefit of a sales ton by abilities connect with the right people so then we had both customers and prospects really backing what we were saying we use winter again further when we were building out like then later with the messaging as you say like and looking at the the website so we like built website of all the messaging that we had ready to go for sales companion with the plus one idea and we you can just give them screenshots of the fig files that you're going over and and ask for their feedback and we sent that to then that core ic that we'd defined on the cas project and then they give quite brief feedback some of the time as so whether your messaging is landing and whether they really understand what you're selling whether it aligns with what we believe it is as well so then we use access of them edit further that messaging to that actually meet the expectations of the of the market mh yeah i mean the upfront cost there that you spent on the market research that you spent on you know landing page messaging test probably saved you a hell of a lot in the long run if you kind of went down the approach of testing ad variance to see you know which had the higher click through rate or dwell times to you know resonate best like you knew immediately which pain points were gonna resonate most with the market which like you know is it's common sense when you think about it but not many businesses actually go about product launches that way yeah yeah yeah definitely i mean we could go further and i think i would would like us to i think going forward is actually do a smaller test of some of the creative to begin with as well unpaid because again that that alignment of like the messaging that lands on your website and then aligning it with messaging that delivers in an ad that actually encourages someone to click through and then also that it maps back to your website and like two different things and i think that's something we found with some of the sales companion creative that maybe those two things didn't really like and they enjoyed the creative that they didn't still didn't from that ad understand exactly what the problem was we were solving yeah because you showed some of the eighties arcade themes which have like you know the pac man chasing the prospects or you know i can't remember what exactly it was gobbling up but gobbling up something and like i thought on a visual creative level immediately like they looked fantastic but i suppose when you actually dig into what the prospect is seeing however many seconds maybe like one second you have to actually tell them exactly what you do in the feed and how it will help them maybe it took a bit too much time to figure out what that ad was trying to say and i think you guys compared it to the ads that you ran afterwards which was really you know just telling exactly kind of what the product did yes exactly yeah that was on the so we created cheat code series alongside the launch so yeah and that was it's supposed to be kind of like our go to market series of how you can actually use cognizant to then solve very specific challenges i think we lean too heavily in on the creative idea of it being of the cheat codes that we missed some of like the selling point of yeah of what we how we were trying to solve it and not being clear enough interestingly enough like at the time i saw the greatest and i was like i really like them i think i said that like i i i like have some doubts whether that land have paid based on previous experience but the only way you can test these things is actually by taking them to market unfortunately but like i think some of these things can be done in more controlled limited tests but as you know from that presentation i think we got like seven hundred and fifty ads live and it was sort of like pushed through quickly so we had to do our learnings on the fly as well yeah well i think we should talk a bit more about you know the content that went along with this campaign and kind of like the go to market strategy around the launch too because you know if you haven't seen it yet liam is the next up and c hollywood star like you know the the legendary video acts within this launch are just great i just i love the fact that you spent so much budget on distribution rather than creating the content because that so you see so many brands polishing up video and polishing up assets for launching a particular campaign and maybe spending a fraction of the cost on distribution so nobody ever sees these like amazing new things right and you managed to kind of create this halfway house where the video still like looks professional but it's like very authentic let's face it you know i'm not discredit your but like you know you know tom cruise right but yeah i mean talk us through what like what you took that particular approach to create in some of these assets and yeah yeah okay i think we've always had this of culture and and we we have like an in house video resource and we had the culture of self like creating some of those videos internally there i'd also a voice that have conversations with linkedin there's a lot of like like insights from linkedin themselves that self of authentic videos yeah less polished videos often do better on platform like as you see shared on other social media platforms so we have like the means and the ability to do it so then we focus the budget that we have on distribution instead and create that content internally i also resent the idea which you see so many companies do probably spending like i've god knows tens of thousands of pounds on some really polished video with a production agency then it gets sort of posted on the company linkedin account it's not actually really optimized in any way the paid and they can't optimize it in the same way because that's not how it was built and recorded so it gets like used once gets a number of likes and then it it disappears so the idea of like taking it internally is we have a bit of control over there we human it by using people from cog as well so that you create like hopefully a recognizable element between it so the like your our content strategy is based around having key internal people focus for different pieces of content so that the tires between cognizant and that person as well and then if they're like featured in the creative as well then we can like really start to like double down on that because also insights from linkedin is that obviously people buy from people they wanna see the same they you know they like to associate a person of the company as well and all of that allows us to save money on the production side and then push that back into the distribution side which is where we can then obviously really like get that reach get it out there get the message out and i don't yeah i personally don't think from the engagement we get from it that people are like super fast whether it's a super polished video or not obviously there's times and moments when you wanna have that high production video but like if you really wanna scale video which i think is becoming the predominant content format on linkedin then you have to do a mixture of both and that's like real user generated content bits more scrappy content like video content on top of them some of the the more body stuff that you can do as well yeah it's a hard balance act isn't it because you want people to take you seriously as a business and especially i i imagine it's a tricky one for you going up market because typically you'd think maybe they want something a bit more corporate like they want we want them to take us seriously so we don't wanna be too silly but at the same time like people on linkedin now enjoy humor like they enjoy the authentic nature or something they don't wanna be solved to especially so the add almost and the video content needs to not feel like an ad but like it's okay if it is at the same time if it's a bit joke it's a weird dynamic right now i i think when it comes to content but yeah especially with the up market shift as an interesting one yeah i think that's one i'm still getting my head around because i like to get the idea that as you move that market people won't needs to be more serious more stiff because i like to believe that people like and i behind the company there's always a person buying and therefore and you know they might be on like at work and then when they go home they're on reels and tiktok watching all manner of content and do they really what they gonna and engage with do they really look at it at night see differently between their business life and their and they're like personal life that bit i'm unsure of i do think there's obviously the part of being like being taken seriously and like as a company that you're able to deliver on what you promised and maybe that part is relevant so i think what we try and do is like if we're now releasing something a product launch or a content launch and we have like an engagement element to it which might be more fun content that it's backed with all of the serious content that's needed to say yeah that's a obviously a bit of fun but like here's what you can expect and what we'll deliver and why we're up to job and all the customers that kind of support us with that so i think it's a balancing act i think you you have to in my mind you have to have both because if you get it on the pure series for you then you just don't get the engagement again with and you don't get you message out yeah you don't get the attention and like marketing is a game of attention and it feels like that's even more through now than it ever has been because it's hard to get that attention and people are fighting for it probably more than they have done before yeah i suppose my just my initial thought did go to the serious route like once you have that attention a fortune five hundred company like an enterprise company will need to you know der risk that purchase and understand that you know you they can be you can trust you know your supplier ultimately yeah yeah so i think you have to have all of that side to to back it when people are on linkedin there they're on for a purpose like either with like reps for doing they're actually prospecting on there using it from work masters might be coming on that marketers is ar sometimes like senior saudi leaders might will be coming on there to to learn and i think to capture that attention and that in that feed you need to either a be providing real value real or like entertainment but then after that point you need to be able to deliver the actual message and the trust in the brand that you're actually yeah that they like they can der it and they can and they can see that it's not just all joke content there's actually a serious product behind it as well so yeah that is that is definitely the balancing act for sure yeah okay i'd love to get into the distribution side of things now because you spoke at the demand gen event around some like influencer marketing campaigns that you had going like the huge internal launch that you were doing as well like the ability to rally everyone around and yeah just some like more interesting place you don't hear a lot of people talk about influencer marketing in reality there's a lot of chatter i would say around how it can be used and all influencer marketing you know it's the next thing in b2b after it's been in b like you know there's murmur around it but i feel like you don't really hear of many brands executing it quite well but do you think it went well during the launch yeah i mean we always try back now or any launch we do ever as a contact in our product launch using influences as well at using internal influences we've created plus an external influence for net network for sales companion itself we used a company called furniture to actually help us select some of those influencers and then also work with them and actually manage the relationship to get them to post and some of those like post then like got like insane engagement and actually able to like reach i suppose more of ic in like a different personal way and the influences go away and they take your brief of what your actually launching and then write and do those post themselves we've always we've we started to make use of inferences like probably two years ago we we worked start off by having like what we call like a brand advocate at the time and like an ongoing contracts we we did we worked with ryan raise it to begin with who did like our sales like content and worked with him as like a subject matter expert and then also promoting for his channel and then we worked after ryan with morgan ingram and we've still done a lot of work with morgan so this was like and then when we launched the d of cmo we did the same in night sending people mh books i think and getting there and gave them to post about the boat themselves and that was like hugely successful like in the end i think steven bart that commented on alice post and that's really like blew up there you go but back then actually you've got more of external influences a lot of people were willing to post free of charge there was less of this monetization of it like as it's grown so now you we like find that you have to put budget behind it but like for us it's always like being a great way to completely take over linkedin if you want to do it and actually drive some of that that organic traffic but and get yourself backed by like people that they respect and like content they enjoy so one of the influence we used was like tom boston and he's got like very particular style lots of people follow him for his style and like he creates very specific video for it so yeah like it's always part of our strategy now and when we're thinking about launch we always think about what we're gonna do with influencers both internally and externally as well yeah it's it is so cool to see it in action and just to break it down a little bit so you obviously have this idea for the launch you basically provide a brief to you know a com a third party company who might manage those relationships for you or to the influence influence of themselves they then record their own or produce their own content around that brief like with some unique creativity in there of course we can't be too scripted and then what that's just one time or there's like multiple pieces rolled out across the period yeah so and then and then we would i could prove it sign it off and then we have like the launch date for them and then we we just keep then you just keep those people kind of like on like a retainer so not like not that like like a retainer that as in you sort of like you just keep them on record and then we can go back to them for other launches and you have like an agreed if you're doing it once one you have a agreed price for posting or like and for those launches and then if you're working with the third party then they can manage that for you as well and then you can put your budget to it so kinda starts to work similar to like how you'd manage a paid campaign but just with like a little bit more planning an organization in it as well and i think the second part of your question was around our internal launch structure which should probably sure that answers up well yeah we can get onto that i suppose you just mentioned paid and i haven't got this question written out but here's a dilemma for you if you could only choose one to either launch the product again but only have influences and internal influencers or only have paid ad budget which one would you use totally hypothetical i know well if it was between the difference between our paid ad budget and and the influence budget i'd take the paid budget however if i was in a small company and i didn't have much budget then i would go down the organic group let's say it's the same budget right so i imagine your paid ad budget was like ridiculously more expensive than influencer a budget but you can take that entire budget but you can only use it on either influencers or pays i think we're probably struggle to spend it then i think for delivery you're gonna get always get further paid and in fact a lot part of the paid part as well is then the posts that then the influencers create we then pay promote afterwards right like where which is what linkedin is pushing people to do like i i either think about it as you go on instagram and you have your four use section the organic reach in linkedin is really limited they have monetized the four use section basically by saying that you can have it randomly pop up and feed but you have to pay for that that post to be promoted so they that's basically what they've done so the two end up going like hand in hand so i probably would still stick with the the paid media side because just that's where you're gonna get your reach but the best performing ads are always come from what we call that thought leadership bucket when they're actually they promoted actual brought leader ads on linkedin item yeah yeah exactly yeah that kind of mar up with what a lot people are seeing and i think from you the results from thought leader adds because the nature of them how authentic they look i think is kind of the leading format right now on linkedin yeah and exactly back to there some people buy from people ideas so yeah for sure the internal launch then yeah is an interesting one because you managed to rally the entire business almost round for launch day maybe even for a period after to do like an all might you take of linkedin so did that take quite a lot of planning what went on behind the scenes to to do that yeah i think that was actually the most successful internal launch we've done and in terms of posting and definitely something we wanna replicate so we just planned a a launch party internally it it really didn't cost much we just got some balloons got some like cupcakes with like back in myself on them we'll just built up some hype around it showed the launch video the marketing asset really i think with sales it's always like and our cro always says that he got a lead with the watson in it for us message we had so he he led the charge on that we had our chief product officer talking through and vp of pm talking through the vision why we're doing it so really like drum up solve that excitement for it and obviously then a few drinks as well and then we with that we then launched like this media pack with it and encouraged the posting and really like drove it then saying so they gave them all the assets that we had plus banners for their linkedin and things that day and it i yeah it just really drove it so like i think when we got our first few like the marketing team really led with it we made sure the whole team was in the office so if anyone had any questions about posting they could and it were like it just had a huge success because then everyone was posting those videos and i think it's just because we were able to build that assignment and we did that like across the international offices we did almost like euro vision style where each of the offices were like introducing themselves because we had it on a big screen in the in the main like yeah did the uk get any votes no no biggest region we were right at the bottom again but yeah so yeah i think it was just about trying to like actually it stand at extend that hype and get everyone involved i think some of the mistakes you make for like you launched something you do something completely virtually or don't have that and don't or don't build enough high it you drop all the assets in a slack or or on an email and just everyone ignores it and they don't get to see the value of the the hype that they can create as well so yeah yeah was the coffee van on launch day as well because that was interesting that was for pass buying anyone in the shard as well right yeah yeah so then we yeah we did the the coffee around with that i think the plus one to feel your day and that was like another way of getting people in the office heights in our own like in cognizant coming in get your free coffee make them feel like it was a special day but also like as sort of like little greater move of like getting some of the other companies in the the the like the shard where we are to like get nurse in the round london bridge so like a as a branding effort alongside it which was actually yeah just kind of like a fun exciting play that we could do and actually those things are always surprisingly not as expensive you as you think yeah and there was some bikes maybe with branding and like just some cool elements that you wouldn't usually expect yeah so we rolled that into we we were into forest to wave so we then branded some pet cab as well around forest wave as well and that was like about two weeks after the launch so then we're i was trying to of layer in each of the launches then across the different things that we've got going on and try and make use of the events in the same way so yeah yeah really cool alright i'm just conscious of time and i wanna to get onto some other things but if i missed any like core things there in terms of the launch and distribution that were like really noticed of like noticeable at the time i don't think so actually i think that are they're probably the big ones yeah alright cool in terms of learnings you shared a few of us at the meet up like seven hundred and fifty ads for example a lot to launch in one day you're gonna have mistakes and things crop up but were there any big surprises like you know big mistakes and things that happened on launch day and beyond yeah i think there were all the like small ones i think which we showed on the day is like we had like video ads that maybe didn't have the a thumbnail to begin with so that like hampered their engagement which you would immediately expect there's other small things like some of the stuff that we created videos for organically don't start with the cognizant brand and when you would have them on page you need the actually an organic you can damage organic reach if you have your brand flash up too quickly because people don't see it it's authentic but like when it comes to page you need to have the immediate brand recognition so we sort of changed the process there so like paid ads have the brand logo flash up in the corner and then disappear again so that they had that instant recognition we actually did like a we worked with system one alongside linkedin to actually find that out that sometimes we get record at the end when i logo ago was showed if we didn't have it at the beginning then sometimes that would affect recall at the end that was something that we kind of missed in this campaign and then also i think the sales come that there was obviously the cheat codes messaging there wasn't specific enough about what that cheat code was gonna solve so that's sort of like that that didn't perform as well as we wanted it we had to redo those creative to do so and we also found with the sales companion messaging that it didn't always land exactly with what we like they always got high engagement rates because i think the creative idea was good but then actually the drop off we were seeing on the landing pages was huge and it's because people weren't like clear on what they were clicking through to the two messaging didn't align heavily enough i don't think those ads said what sales companion dirt they highlighted a fund creative of concept but not exactly what we did so then we've got needs to go been going back trying to rework those so that we can actually demonstrate alongside the plus one they're doing like what we do at the same time like obviously i think some of the other parts of it works like probably the back of night that that people start to be back recognizable the ads themselves of fun but like in hindsight if i to read that messaging myself and my ten feed i wouldn't be like oh that's a sales intelligence tool and this is what i'm the through to yeah the the different the thing is though there's the balance again to be found because it can't just be messaged from click through rate on that and and like then conversions from those ads because when i when we look at like disco calls and yeah come through like people all aware of the campaign and they want to find out about it we had huge spike in traffic after all of the organic play so there's an element that's like sales companion as an idea was out there whether it was well said enough that people were turning up to demo requests knowing what sales companion was i think is was the the bit that was potentially missed so it's not against the creative content again it's more about how we think about how we message it unpaid and we found like for example the videos did well because they have the products explained on the on the end of them so you get the sales marketing process and then you get like quiet next client an explanation on the product but the specific image ads that we had maybe like missed the mark there and they were the ones that them didn't perform as well as we wrong to so i think getting trying to get that in to i'll add it's like it was was a key learning yeah yeah really interesting just two quick fire things then before we wrap up if you could do one thing differently next time like you're cl everything but you can only do one thing differently what would you do differently i think we would i i i think we need we'd need to start more methodically like so i think we sometimes we we bake in the speed that we rolled it out we just had we like jumped back and forth from different items which means that we like there was a lot of repeat work so i think really we started methodically with the ic and then and the brand story and then kind of like lost our way of it and i think really we'd wanna start then go back to what we're doing now looking at the data deciding on the distribution part before we decided on the messaging so it's almost like we know what we wanna distribute and then we create the messaging to match to me that would be the way that we'd go about it where maybe we got carried away with the creative concept first and then just try to distribute yeah i think that that switch would be is would be the key thing that would definitely change yeah makes perfect sense and what worked really well that you would definitely do again i think creating all of our own content around it and human icing it with people that that works really well and i think that be like a a rinse and repeat and i also think having some element of like emotional connection in that so i think the humor part pays like i'm a huge part on that whether whether like time and we'll learn whether like humor is like like is this effective in moving that market like i i really feel like that questions aren't answered to me but like there needs to be some emotional elements still to it that actually captures people attention because we saw that that bit worked for engagement say yeah yeah buyers like are human and buy with right i think we forget that buyers don't live and breathe this funnel and they buy on logic because they want this feature like that feature is solving a problem which is a pain to them which is emotional like it's all to do with notion and like how we act as human nature ultimately exactly yeah yeah hundred percent so i think that's when we get all the bright best brand recall that's when we get with the best engagement when we like make someone feel or something of anything for sure alright cool well let's wrap it up there we've got one minute to go but yeah liam it it's was great to have you on i've been meaning to ask somebody cog to come on this podcast for ages because i am a bit of a fat boy off the lie and yeah like it's been awesome to have you on and yeah hopefully so you're at the next demand journey up but yeah been awesome avenue thank you thanks having me dan yeah great chat cool and yeah we'll see everyone next time on demand decode