Pipeline Power Hour: Marketing, Fall '23
Get ready for an hour of back-to-back masterclasses from some of the best in tech on the channels we’re all trying to perfect, hosted by our VP of Demand Gen, Sarah McConnell.
It's good to feel a little confident in 2023 after the last few years have been
a little weird.
And we know that for 2023 pipeline is going to be critical.
And there's five things that people have been asking about all year long.
The five things are events, digital ads, inbound, outbound, and content.
You have to crush these five things in 2023.
You have to. It's non-negotiable.
So we brought in five experts, five people who know these five things inside
and out that have
been there and done that so they can share their playbooks with you. This is no
fluff.
It's the pipeline power hour. So we're going to get right into it. Grab a dumb
bell, grab a shot glass.
It's a power hour after all. First up, Julie Legal, former CMO of Slack.
She's going to share her perspective on events. Pipeline power hour, Julie
Legal.
So excited to have you. How are you? I'm great. Thanks so much for having me
excited to be here.
Yeah. We are thrilled to talk events. Obviously, you have done many, many, many
B2B events over the
years with Slack and at Salesforce. So in your mind, how do events fit into
pipeline generation?
I think it's a mistake to think that it's a one size fits all answer. I do
think events are
usually at their most effective when they are closing and upsell events, but
events can
play different roles at different times in your pipeline. So going to third
party events can be a
great way to do prospect generation. Similarly, I've seen very high end bespoke
experiences,
serve that purpose with executives who may not be willing to engage with you
but are willing to
come to some really very special experience that you do. But a lot of the
events that I worked on,
especially at Salesforce that were our bread and butter, were about people that
were further down
the funnel who were either getting closer to ready to make a decision or
customers who are looking to
increase the value of the software that they had already purchased, the systems
they were already
using and also figure out are there additional things that they wanted to do
with it.
And the reason I think that can be so effective, especially in hosted events as
opposed to third
party events is it does require an investment on somebody else's part to come
and spend time with
you. So, you know, is a cold prospect and it come to, you know, a two day user
conference and spend
all that time with you if they don't really understand what you do yet. No, you
're probably
going to need something smaller and a lower investment on their part before
they get involved.
And so having somebody who's a little further down the funnel, I think that is
the real sweet spot of
what people traditionally think of, big conferences, seminars and things like
that.
Yeah, what you're saying there is almost more like part executive briefing
center part
event if you're able to bring those folks in that are, you know, to accelerate
pipeline and
get them to meet with a bunch of your big wigs that are all there at this event
, which is pretty
hard to do, you know, on a normal everyday basis. Yeah, I mean, I think the
beauty of a big event,
so certainly they're great spoke event, executive experiences you can do within
the events.
The great thing about a big event is you can bring that almost executive
briefing outcome,
which is a chance to interact with your product to meet people from your
company who can explain
your product to hear from other customers to a broader audience. So, you know,
you might do
an executive briefing center. Like certainly we did one at Dreamforce every
year, we hosted
hundreds of executive briefings. But I also like to think that a lot of the
people out on the show
floor who were not part of the executive briefings who maybe weren't executive
levels,
were at some of our smaller customer or the like got a lot of that same
experience because they
got to see the feature, they got to get their questions answered, they got to
drill on topics
that matter to them, they got to talk to customers and to like product experts
from Salesforce. So,
in some ways, a great event can scale that experience as well.
How should teams measure success or outcomes when it comes to events?
It's a great question. I think part of the question is how do you decide what
to measure?
And I think that goes back to what is your intention. I think one thing that
Salesforce always did
very well and we also were really good about that slack is like why are we
doing this? I think there
can be a habit, especially in the pre pandemic times of let's put on an event.
Everybody puts on
events, let's put on an event without really thinking about what you're trying
to achieve.
So, I think it's important to decide what you're trying to achieve and design
those measures after
that. If it is a prospect event, if it is, I'm going to go to a third party
event because
we're breaking into an industry where we don't have a ton of customers yet. So,
I'm going to go to
an industry focused event to get myself in front of those people. Then I think
it could be about
new names, meetings, achieve demos given, things like that. You may not want to
measure that
directly to pipeline because maybe that's too high up the funnel. I know events
that I've done
that are a little bit further down the funnel, it's sometimes not just pipeline
generated because
maybe you're already touching pipeline that existed. Maybe it's did that
pipeline closed faster,
did it close at a higher rate? Were we able to generate upsell opportunities,
you know, six to
12 months afterwards? Or if it was a customer event, did we drive multi-product
adoption? So,
I think you should be really intentional about that. I think it can be very
easy to look at an event
and say, "We're going to measure scams," or "We're going to measure how many
people came to these
sessions." Those can be great and meaningful if they tie to the reason you did
the event in the
first place and what you were trying to achieve. So, I think you need to be
really thoughtful and
go in understanding what are the behaviors you're trying to drive and then
decide how to measure
those and sort of what your goals will be. Yeah, it seems like you're almost
advocating for more of
like a portfolio approach to doing events where it's like big, small, medium,
having senior leaders at certain things, more of the users at one level, kind
of like hitting the whole
buying committee with sort of different parts and different types of events. Is
that fair to
who words enough? Yeah, in some ways, I think very much in my career and at the
companies that
I've worked out, that's how we looked at events. Salesforce is sort of known we
were an events first
company in many, many ways and so we use them in a lot of different ways and a
lot of different
styles and sizes and we really did build out a portfolio that meant different
needs. You might
have a different type of product, you might have a different point in your
marketing journey where
different things are working. But if you find that you have a need that can be
met with an event
and there's great reasons to do it, it's a great way to build trust. If you've
got a complicated
product and expensive product, buyers want to have that face-to-face
interaction, then think about
what point in the pipeline do you want to introduce that to and I think start
your portfolio from
there. Certainly at Salesforce, we didn't start with the huge portfolio we had.
We started small
and we grew it based on the expanding needs that we had as a marketing
organization as a company.
Yeah, with virtual events being so big now and in-person events being back, it
almost seems like
people go to those two things for almost very different reasons. This event
versus meeting us
when we did our qualified event during Dream Forces past year, totally
different things you and I
share to be here and etc. So how do you think about virtual versus in-person?
Yeah, I still remember the beginning of the pandemic and everyone freaking out
and canceling
events and then everything went virtual and it was like, "This is great. I can
have 10 times as many
people at one tenth the cost. This is amazing." And of course what we all
quickly figured out is
virtual events are amazing. They play their role and they also do not replace
the in-person. So
I think virtual is amazing for you talk about it takes an investment to come
and spend time with you.
Well, maybe people further up the funnel aren't willing to certainly travel to
a new city or even
take a day out of their office or out of their home if they're working from
home and go be somewhere
physically with you for three to four hours. But they might be willing to drop
on a virtual event
for a half hour or an hour and kind of understand what you're talking about
here from a couple of
your customers, see your product in action. So I think virtual events give you
this amazing ability
to scale. They also give you this great way to extend your in-person events. I
mean at their heart
what events really are are experiences that are engines for content. And so if
you're creating all
this content for 50, 100, a thousand, 5,000 people in a room, wouldn't it also
be amazing to have
the people who don't have the time, the resources, maybe the interest level yet
in your product to
come be in that room with you to also gain something from that content. So
doing an approach where
you have both that in-person event and that virtual experience I think is and
should be the
norm. It's certainly something we were doing even before the pandemic. But I do
think it's hard to
replace that in-person experience. And that is to the point of sharing a beer,
it's the personal
connection. It's the getting your questions answered. It's meeting up here who
may have a similar
business challenges as you do. And figuring out if you're looking for a
solution together,
can you get an answer there? Is there another customer you can learn from? And
all those sort of
informal ways that people connect. And then of course there's also the brand
experience like as
much as we do online to tell our stories and stuff. An event is a 3D immersive
experience. I don't
know, maybe someday we'll wear headsets and do it from home. But you can't feel
, you can't smell,
you can't see, you can't experience the spectacle of a live event virtually.
And because of that,
I think we'll always want and always have a place for that in-person experience
. But I think it's
great we have both because to your point, I think they play different roles.
And I think
your best served as a marketer to think about how both fit into your portfolio.
Okay, we got one minute left here. I need some just quick advice on how the
heck do we drive
attendees? Because it's so freaking hard. You know, it's funny. That's kind of
how I started an
event. I wasn't like the traditional events person. I was the demand-gen person
that was like,
how do we fill the room? And I would say first and foremost, it requires a
demand-gen mind. It's,
you know, you don't build it and they will come. But you have to, just the way
you sell, you know,
an offer or your product, an event is another offer. So what is in it for them?
Like be concrete.
And we would put together, you know, for all of our events campaigns that were
multi-touch. And
maybe the first one was about, you know, save the date and sort of getting
excitement amongst
existing believers who had gone to four. But then maybe further on, like top
five things you'll
learn there or here we've announced a speaker and we would architect it out to
kind of build
that excitement along the way. So I think you need to be really intentional
about it. You need
to segment those lists. You need to think about who you want to be there. And
it's not just something
you, you know, throw to someone who's never done demand-gen before. It's not
inviting someone to
your birthday party. This is a campaign just like any integrated campaign you
would do. And if you
don't get the people there, all that effort and money that you've put into the
event won't matter.
So take it seriously and resource for a true demand-gen program for your events
Anyone that you added in your career that jumped the attendee list, like Bruno
Mars headlining
or Bachella Bama headlining or anybody come to mind? Oh my goodness. No, but I
will tell you my
absolute favorite email we ever sent was we announced Metallica with an early
bird pricing
expiration date and Metallica actually, you know, talent has to approve these
emails when they're
in them. And it was like only five more days till early bird pricing goes off
to Never Never Land
with like a big picture of Metallica as the sub head under like Metallica
announced at Dreamforce.
So I can't say that that one jumped at the most, but I still, I mean, not had
to have been 10 years
ago. And I still think back to that email and and giggle a little bit about how
cute it was.
Julie, you're the best. Thanks again. Thanks so much for for chatting with us.
Any final thoughts?
No, but it's it's great that Qualified is doing a virtual event. And I hope
everyone's having
a great time in learning a ton during this power hour. Thanks again, Julie. You
are awesome. And
events are going to be so important in 2023. So thanks for sharing that stuff.
Up next,
I'm going to chat with Jason from metadata. And we're talking about digital
advertising.
Pipeline power. Our Jason, how the heck are doing? Great. Man, that sounded
ominous, but like strong.
I like it. That's that's our vibe here for the pipeline power. Our ominous, but
strong. Okay. Today,
we're going to talk about digital advertising, how it fits into your broader
marketing strategy.
Jason, how can digital ads teams just make sense of what's going on and not not
fall into the trap
of vanity? Ah, yes. The good old vanity metrics. So the reason we fall into
these traps of vanity
metrics is because they are the easiest to measure, right? So like, it's easy
for me to tell what my
click through rate is because it's come from the same system. And it's looking
at the impressions
and the clicks. And it's just a, you know, it's just dividing it and giving me
a percent. It's
easy for me to understand cost per click. Because again, it's coming from the
same system. I've got
my spend and I've got my clicks. And so it's very easy to tell that. But it's
when you start to cross
these systems that it starts to get a little bit more difficult. But that's
where these non-vanity
metrics lie. So now I need to know my cost per opportunity or I need to know my
cost per, you know,
some other deeper metric cost per revenue or cost per dollar of revenue. And so
now I've got to make
sure that the data is very cleanly being passed from, you know, one of these
systems, my ad system
over to my CRM, you know, and so that I can actually see that cost per
opportunity and
understand that and have it connect. But, you know, for me, it comes down to
like the reason why I
want to focus on non-vanity metrics. Like what would we call them? Like revenue
, revenue-based
metrics is because I just don't want there to be any confusion at all about
marketing's impact
to the bottom line. And so if I stop at a more of a vanity metric, like even M
QLs, like let's say I
stop at MQL and that's what I report on, there can always be this argument
conversation about,
well, your MQLs don't turn into revenue. And so if I stop at MQLs, I don't
really have that
defense, you know, that I can say, well, no, look, this is actually how it
impacts the bottom line.
And so you can't really argue. And I just don't want there to be any confusion,
any argument at all
about our impact. And I think the reason that one of the reasons marketers stay
in that area is that
I think there's fear, right? There's fear that like, okay, if I move downstream
, I'm going to be
found out. And that's if like if my MQLs actually are shit and they're not
great at turning into
revenue, then I might be found out. And so I think there's some hesitation too,
and moving from vanity
metrics over to deeper revenue and pipeline metrics. But what about all those
folks that are
already lurking, they're on the fence, they're out there, they're looking at
all sorts of different
content, dark social, dark web, all this stuff, maybe dark web. What about all
those folks
engaging with your paid? So what do you mean? So just like what, what about
them?
Yeah, how are you making sure that that those folks are tied back to revenue?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, most people are using cookies, UTM parameters,
or trying to follow them when they click in an ad or click an ad to a website.
I primarily am using email address, you know, so I'm not that interested in
having somebody sign up
for a register for content or give me their email address for a piece of
content, only when
they're actually requesting a demo. And so once they request a demo, I've got
their email address,
and I'm going to follow that down through the different systems and use that as
a connection
point, because that seems to be, well, it is stronger than trying to rely on
cookies and UTMs
and things like that. And so, so yeah, we pretty much try and just follow an
email address from
the time they raise their hand until they either are in a meeting, have an
opportunity,
you know, created, win, loss, a deal, that kind of thing.
What channel is working for you right now? Own, earn, paid media?
So when it comes to impact to revenue, it's primarily been paid media, but over
the last,
I don't know, six months or so, we've really improved our website, we've got
our content engine
really run in, we've got a new community, our demand event, so we're seeing
almost
all, and that's a little high, but almost all of our qualified demand is coming
in via our own
channels now. And so, so much so that we're actually on a plan to voluntarily
pull back our spend on
paid ads by a pretty decent percent over the next five months, because I just
kind of want to be
more, well, just because so much of that qualified demand is coming through our
own channels,
I want to focus more on those owned channels and use paid media in a little bit
of a different way.
And that's just kind of part of our, you know, part of our growth too, kind of
a part of our growth
strategy was to really use paid ads really heavily upfront at the same time,
get the organic content
audience community going. And then at some point, when that started to feed us
enough,
then we would pull back. And so we're kind of at that inflection point now
starting to do that.
Yeah, using that paid as a lever that you can, you know, push forward or pull
back at any time
while you're working on the other stuff. Yeah, and to do that, you got to plan
quite a bit ahead,
because it does take quite a bit of time for these other non-paid channels to
really start to
deliver, because if you expect them to deliver right away, then you're probably
going to do it
the wrong way. Or if you have like these really high goals around, well, I need
my organic content
to start performing in the next two to three months against revenue, you're
already too late.
And so, so yeah, having that long game thinking and then using paid as like you
said, as a wedge or
lever until you get to that point, that that was that was our strategy. And we
spend a lot on paid
today. And so probably more than most companies of our size, I would probably I
would guess. And I
kind of know that because a lot of our customers are our size are a little bit
bigger.
Wedge based marketing brought you by Jason. So where the heck should people be
spending their
money? Where are you spending money? You doing LinkedIn, Facebook, doing TikTok
? What's working?
Yeah, I mean, we're so B2B, we're mostly on LinkedIn. We're on Facebook quite a
bit, but that's
because we have our own platform to help us target there. So, but they still
seems to be even folks
that don't have like a B2B targeting for Facebook seem to still spend quite a
bit of money on Facebook
too. Yeah, that honestly for us, that's really a majority of our $1. We don't
really
spend much anywhere else. We don't do a lot of Google search. Sometimes we kind
of dabble in it a
little bit. I'm seeing some of our customers though, if they're a little bit
more experimental,
some of our customers are trying out channels like Reddit and Quora. And they
're having success
there. Like a lot of our customers have been pretty good success on Quora,
honestly. More
like the IT, you know, like the maybe the deeper IT cybersecurity folks maybe
might have more success
there. And Reddit of course takes a very specific style to work on Reddit. But
if you know that
style, then you can get that to work. And TikTok, yeah, I'm seeing, I haven't
seen a lot of B2B ads
directed to me on TikTok yet, but I'm seeing a lot of B2B content on TikTok. So
my guess is,
you know, they're starting there and then they're going to start to do ads
after they maybe build
up their profile a little bit. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know how TikTok
works yet. I just
not a watch TikTok. Yeah, I mean, that's that's kind of how I feel with like
LinkedIn video right now,
where it's like, it's if you're if you're publishing videos on LinkedIn and it
's, you know, reaching,
you know, hundreds and thousands of people and all that stuff, it's like, why
pay for those ads
when you can make them for free. And I think that that's kind of the same sort
of thing with TikTok
right now is people are making the content for free. And so kind of thinking
like, why am I
paying for it when I can make it for free right this second? Yeah. And you know
, one of our, one of
our strategies as we're pulling back on spend is we use LinkedIn organic,
maniacally, I don't know,
that's probably not the right word, but we use it a lot internally. And our
strategy is to,
we're marketers selling to marketers. So it makes it easy for us to connect. I
can just have a target
account list that we're trying to sell to. I can just take that over to
LinkedIn. I can just
start to connect with the marketers over there. And they'll connect with me
because, oh, hey, it's a
VP of marketing, just like me. So sounds good. And then we distribute, then we
end up just using
that as a content distribution mechanism. And so we don't do a lot of salesy
stuff. We do maybe
10, 15% of our posts would be about the product, the rest are how tos, how am I
doing this? What
happened over there? We try not to do too much like, oh, sappy stuff, I guess,
a little bit, but just
more useful content. And that'll be a bigger, a bigger part of our strategy
going forward as well.
Yeah, a little 80 20 rule there for, for value ad versus sales, sales, sales,
or sales type.
Yep. Yep. Exactly. Some, some gifts before I get it. Jason.
Yeah, exactly. Someone wrote about that one time. All right, we got one minute
left. Any final
thoughts or advice on, on, on digital advertising? No, I just think I'll just
touch on targeting
real quick. I think, you know, think, really, really think about targeting. It
all starts with
targeting, right? So if you really want to waste the least amount of, we're all
wasting money on ads.
If you want to waste the least amount of money, you got to get really good with
targeting. And so
my suggestion there and what I do is I try and go outside the bounds of what
everybody else uses
to target. So if I'm using industry and job title and all these basic things,
that's the exact same
data that my competitors are using. And so I can't expect to be really any
better
at targeting than they are. And so I tend to create my own signals, my own
targeting data,
really, by combining data from a lot of different sources. And so I just
recommend any company that
really wants to win on targeting, which is an easy way to win. Really double
down on that. Find
your unique data points that really help describe your best customers and go
find a way to get that
data because it's probably not readily available. And that can actually be a
competitive differentiator
for you. Quick example, quick example for myself. I wrote a program that goes
in Scrapes LinkedIn
and counts the number of ads every company has out there. And I use as a proxy
for how much money
they spend on advertising, because we have a minimum ad spend threshold in our
platform for you to be
well, for it to make sense even. And so I can really curate and reduce my list.
Otherwise,
it's all B2B companies will that are advertising. Well, that's probably not
great. So yeah, I use
that built out about a year and a half ago. Thanks again, Jason. Always great
chatting with you.
Next up, we're going to be talking with qualified zone Sarah McConnell to talk
all things inbound.
Pipeline power hour inbound marketing. Sarah, how are you? I'm good, Ian. How
are you doing?
Excited to chat inbound with you and everything that's going on, qualified and
all the amazing
demand that you all are creating. How do you define inbound marketing? Inbound
marketing is
anytime someone comes to us and is expressing interest. So anything marketing
is doing that's
helping drive pipeline and prospects are coming to us. They found out about us,
they know about us,
and they're interested. So I think a lot of times it gets tied to marketing for
a good reason.
It's a lot of the effort that marketing is doing to drive awareness and demand.
And what's your strategy to identify your ideal customer profile and think
about persona?
I think it's changed a little bit over time. When I first joined the company
and we were much
smaller, it was really just looking at very small sample sizes and saying like,
who's buying from
us right now? And that was sort of our general idea. I think as we've grown
larger and we're talking
about how to refine our ICP or our personas, we start looking at closed one
revenue now that we
have a bigger sample size. And we're trying to identify out of our deal cycles,
what's the most
common titles that are in there? Or can we find any commonalities between the
champions and those
programs? And are there any trends that we're seeing? So we're looking at if we
see certain things
about our champions, are the deal sizes bigger? Are they moving at a faster
rate? Are they closing
at a higher rate? And then we're going to spend a lot more of our time budget
and effort in
marketing, focusing on those personas. In our case, a lot of times it's titles,
but it can be
different at every company, because we've seen from a revenue perspective that
they're the most
impactful in buying cycles and deal size. Yeah, like a good one would be like,
people who just
raised 50 million bucks or more. Right. It's like, if you just raised series C,
then like,
that could be someone who's in your persona. And I think that that's one of the
things that has
really evolved over the years to think about not just, hey, fortune 100 or
global 2000, but like,
what are the mechanisms that sort of drive that ideal customer? And everyone's
that's different. Like for us, it's technographic. So we don't sell to you
unless you have sales
horse and you have to have a certain amount of website traffic and we know
titles are better.
So there's a whole lot of things going into our personas. And typically, we
have a pretty good
idea, but we come back to it frequently to refine, look at reports and see if
we should make any
tweaks on where we're focusing our time. And then that buying committee, you
know, there's all sorts
of different folks in these modern B2B buying committees. Sometimes that's like
10 15 people.
How do you think about that? Yeah, so typically we try to push our team really
hard for good data
hygiene when we look at buying committees. We obviously want to be able to
measure as much as we can.
So if we have a large buying committee, we want to put an annotation to who
they are in the buying
committee. So we've got our champions, we've got our decision makers, our
budget holders,
our influencers. And that helps us from a marketing perspective. If we have all
of that data and we
start to understand, are there certain things about our ICP that impact where
they're at in our buying
committee? And again, it just helps us refine our marketing, our effort, our
audience and our
segmentation. So I think is the the buying committees get bigger, having the
best data hygiene possible.
So you can identify who all those people are and what role that they're playing
in your deals.
It's just only going to help your marketing get better. How do you think about
personalization?
So I think as personally, personalization is huge. I think people have just
become so accustomed to
having personalized buyer journeys. B2C teaches us a lot about what to expect,
whether we know it or
not. It just sets the expectation for us. So for us, personalization, I'm going
to make a little
pitch for qualified, but we use a lot of our own product or experiences in chat
bots that pop up to
drive some sort of personalization, whether you are on a specific page we can
reference, you click
through a specific campaign or an outbound email. But I think even bigger than
that and what we've
learned from our own product is personalization is just a lot more than
throwing in a dynamic
field and saying, Hi, Ian, like welcome to our website when it's great, but it
's kind of just
table stakes now and two, when you get it wrong, it creates a really bad
experience. We've actually
found in our own, our own way that we call digital body language is like, what
are people doing?
What are they showing from an intent perspective? What are they interested in?
What are they doing
actively on your website? That's probably a better indicator of what they care
about in that moment.
And if you use that in your personalization, in your messaging, when you're
talking to them,
it's probably going to have a lot higher impact than just saying like, Hey, Ian
, welcome to our
site today or something like that. So that digital body language and intent, I
think is a huge
component to how you can do better personalization. And it's what we really
focus on from a personalization
standpoint. Yeah, and it seems like one of the ways that you all have done
personalization so well
is with your content. You know, I call this the edutainment portfolio, but
these B2B content
portfolios that personalize by series, by persona. How do you all think about
that? And how did you
think about doing it? Yeah, similar to the first question is going through our
ICP and understanding
who's involved in our buying process. So for us, it's marketing revenue
operations. We're really
deep into sales force. So we started to create content around those personas.
So how can we reach
them? How can we just keep our brand in front of them? And not always a salesy
way, like they're
going to be somewhere different in their buyer's journey, but just because they
're not looking to
buy from us right now, doesn't mean we shouldn't give them something
personalized and important
to them. So working those personas and having those be the driving audience for
our content creation
is how we came up with our demand and visionaries podcast and our rise of
revenue podcast. It's
it's really the content we know our personas want to hear about. And it really
helps us in that
personalization journey. Yeah, and I think it's so cool because people always
get worried about
how do you start, right? But I think sometimes people lose sight of the fact of
like what happens
when you're there, like DGV has 100 episodes, you know, rise of rev ops has, I
think we're at
whatever 20 plus episodes inside the Ohana has a bunch of episodes out there.
And when you start
to look at these series, as you've done iteration after iteration, like they
become these fully
fledged little media properties just for that persona. And there's so much
power in that.
Totally. And I love the way you put that. I think thinking about personal
ization as more than just
a tactical thing of like throwing a dynamic field somewhere or personalizing
based on company your
name, there's more to personalization. That's also just meeting your buyers
where they're at and
giving them relevant content to what we think they're interested in. So I think
personalization is just
a bigger topic than sometimes we just shove it into populate dynamic fields and
emails. And that's
what we think of when we think personalization. Yeah. And I think another part
of this is the
types of content that people I hear a lot like, Oh, we need a podcast or we
need a blog post on this
thing or a video. And I think that what we're seeing now is that what type of
content, what type
is it a news show? Is it a personality driven show? Is it, you know, two hosts,
one host? Like,
how do you do those things? And at the end of the day, like some people like
Marvel movies,
some people like to watch 60 minutes. And like how you personalize the content
is so important.
Absolutely. Any mistakes that you've seen as it relates to inbound?
I think mistakes I've seen when it relates to inbound is just making it harder
for your buyers
to buy from you. And I think that comes in, you know, sometimes we talk about
forms. I don't think
it's just forms. I think if your buyers are showing interest in you, meet them
where they're at,
like don't make them jump through hoops to get there because it's so easy. Now
people have short
attention span. They can just drop and move on to something else. So I think
when it comes to inbound,
if you've put in all the legwork, the budget, the time to drive awareness,
someone's interested,
they're on your site and they want to have a conversation with you. However,
you can make it
easier, less fields, live conversations, video calls, whatever it is, meet them
there and answer
their questions and get them through the buying journey faster because you'll
see it come out in
revenue. If you can meet them there and answer their questions when they're
most interested,
they're going to get more pipeline and you're going to get more revenue. So
just don't make
your buyers jump through hoops. Try to keep that as frictionless as possible.
Yeah. I mean, if it takes more than five minutes to respond to a lead, like
stop what you're doing
right now and like go fix that process before anything else in your entire
marketing stack.
Just have such a short attention span. Like, I don't know, I lose attention
before I even
finish snelling out of forms. So I just think, yeah, to your point, Ian,
keeping that process
as concise and tight and short as possible is just going to benefit so much in
your inbound pipeline.
Yeah. Any other final thoughts on conversational marketing? Obviously,
you're the queen of conversational as the VP of demand, Janet qualified.
Yeah. I think I spend a lot of time in conversational marketing. I do think it
is a way to transform
your website into driving more pipeline. I think we talked about it. It takes
personalization beyond
just throwing in company names and first names. And it can really help you talk
to your buyers in a
way that is relevant to what they're doing in that moment, how they're browsing
your site, what
they're looking at, all of that intent that they're giving you. So if you're
considering
conversational marketing, think about where you would want to see improvements
in your inbound
marketing. If that's pipeline, which I think is everyone, because they're at
pipeline power hour,
personalization, doing more with less. I think that's where conversational
marketing is really
going to help people out, especially during this time that we're in.
Yeah. Convert the people that are that you're already working so hard to get.
And I think that
that's going to be the name of the game in Q4 and for sure in 2023. Absolutely.
Sarah, thanks again
for joining me today. Next up on the pipeline power hour, Lauren back arello
here to discuss
outbound marketing. Lauren, how are you? I'm good. How are you? Excited to have
you on here today.
And we're going to be talking about outbound, which you know all too well. So
you just came into the
role at Salesloft not too long ago. Tell us about outbound and how those
marketers out there can
take their outdated tech infrastructure and recharge it. Awesome. Great
question. So I am about five
months into my role of CMO at Salesloft. And it's been super, super fun. So I
think a lot about
and as marketers, we think a lot about inbound marketing, we think a lot about
outbound. And
it's so easy for marketers to focus just on. Here's the leads that come in the
door. What do I do?
I'm going to work with my SDR team. I'm going to build app. I'm going to build
cadences. We'll
figure out how to really optimize that funnel. But there's so much opportunity
working with your
outbound reps, whether they're your outbound SDRs or even your AEs on how do
you build that.
Sort of how do you build that cadence? How do you build that system process
technology? So things
that we do are anytime you can align intent data with your outbound prospecting
, you're going to
have a material impact on what your conversion rates look like. So if you can
pull in intent data
whether through using something like qualified or G2 and saying, not just this
company, but this
person is in market right now. Great, great lead to kick over to your sales
team and say, now is the
time to do that outbound outreach. And as marketers, we shouldn't just stop
there. What can we do
to set up some sort of automation, whether it's here's the content that you
should have,
here's a sequence, here's a cadence that you should start using just to make
the whole process easier.
And who's sending that stuff? Is that stuff coming from marketing? Is it coming
from your SDRs?
Is it coming from BDRs? Who's sending that stuff? It should come from your BDRs
whether you're called BDRs or SDRs, but you're going to have a higher impact
when you get those
personalized one-to-one communications as marketing. It's our responsibility to
build the outlines and build some of the templates to give to the BDR team. But
you'll get better
results when your BDRs are the ones going out and actually setting that
personalized communication.
Yeah, and how personalized should we be? More than most, to be perfectly honest
, the idea of,
I'm just going to copy and paste this template. Your audience, no matter how
interested they are,
are going to be a lot less likely to respond. So the sort of sweet spot is
personalized about
20% of your email. And by having that 20% personalization, you're going to get
a better result.
Do you find that, I mean, again, it kind of seems like it's basic, but
obviously most folks
aren't doing it when it comes to personalization plus intent data for outbound.
Why aren't people
doing it or what mistakes are they making? I think a lot of it is, it's a new
motion,
it's a new muscle. We'll give everyone the benefit of the doubt of once you
know someone is interested,
how do you do that? But part of it is, it's that little bit of extra time and
work. And I know
sellers are under so much pressure right now. The world has changed, the
economy has shifted,
it is harder every single day to make your number. So a lot of sellers are just
sort of in that
mindset of I just have to keep going, I need to do the volume game, I need to
get as much out as
possible. And that's almost the part of the downside of it is you're so focused
on getting as much
out if you take that extra time, pause, focus on personalization. Technically,
you're not getting
as much out the door, but the quality is going to be higher and you'll get a
better result.
Yeah, less is more, right? I mean, it seems that way, but I just feel like we
get so much crap in
our inbox all the time. Like, how do you not just be noisy? How do you not just
be annoying?
It is. And it's like, how do you stand out in these situations? And it's one of
the things I
actually love about Qualified is the outbound prospecting that you can do on
the website
with the Qualified chat. So if you know that, you know, Caspian Studios is on
your website and they
are a massive, massive prospect to you to have your outbound SDR or have your A
, see that Caspian
that Ian from Caspian's on the website, have that initial sort of outreach come
up on the website,
have that communication. So you get intent, you get the timeliness, and then
you take Ian from
Caspian, you drop them into a sequence in your sales engagement tool. So you
just keep going and
keep that conversation going. That's how you're going to stand out because you
're going to capture
them the moment that they're interested and you're going to keep that
conversation going.
Is there something that you're doing to make sure that the pipeline is high
quality? I mean,
you mentioned obviously intent data being like a huge part of that. That's
going to definitely
filter a ton. Anything else that you're doing for high quality pipe?
So we've actually aligned the entire organization around this idea value use
cases. So what are the,
what's the real value that we're driving? So it's not about it's this feature
it is about this is
the value and we are aligned all the way from our brand awareness, our demand
gen programs and
marketing to the cadences that our SDRs are using to how the sales people are
selling,
to what our sales engineering and value engineering teams are talking about and
how they're building
everything is all aligned to these use cases. And then we pull that all the way
into the delivery
arm. So it's about you're capturing pipeline with the right message, you're
moving it through the
funnel and everyone's completely aligned. And the magic to that is what becomes
time to deliver.
You are saying the exact same thing that you said in the beginning.
What about channels? Like how do you combine the right channels for outbound so
that again,
you're not just spamming the same thing over and over and over again?
That's a great question. Honestly, a lot of this goes back to the data that you
the data that you collect and how do you start to optimize. We can put best
practices together and
say, no, for an outbound cadence, it's going to take 12 touches and you need
three phone calls and
two voicemails and you have these best practices start there, but you're going
to get so much
information in real time and be willing to test to optimize and to say, you
know what in this
segment or in this geo or in this vertical, people respond to LinkedIn better.
Let's focus there.
So be willing to test to try new things and to optimize as you go.
Yeah, I had someone reach out to me the other day that was like, hey, I just
left a five-star
review on on-demand gen visionaries. Can I talk to you about etc, etc, etc. And
I thought they
commented on some posts too. And it's like, those are the sort of touches that
I think adds so much
value to the person. 100% because it shows that you actually engaged, you care,
you're part of the
process versus I'm going to click this button, I'm not going to actually really
care. I'm just
going to go through the motion. So I love that they did that. And I bet that
made you say, all right,
I'm going to pick up the phone or I'm going to respond to this email. Yeah, at
least I'm going to
read it, right? And I'm not going to just like archive the thread. The other
thing,
these sequences that are all pre-made in the lab somewhere that seem so stale,
that are super long.
And I mean, I can't stand long emails. I think a lot of executives feel the
same way,
where I just would rather have like a single question or someone has something
of me.
Any best practices you're seeing there in terms of what you should actually be
putting in your
outbound? Great, great question. I think one of the biggest mistakes people
make is 100%
templatized. This is what no offense to marketers out there, but this is 100%
marketing put together. And maybe the marketing team never actually talked to
the sales team about
it or got that sort of field communication. It can't be 100% templatized. We
all can spot that a
mile away and no one really spawns well to it. So for best practice, again,
personalize at least
20%. Do that a little bit of research. And then it goes to know your audience.
If you're reaching
out to an executive, executives aren't going to read 20 pages on anything or 20
sentences. It is
what is the most relevant information that is solving a problem for them today?
So if you're
solving a problem today or if this is a, I know you care about this right now.
So that's the thing
that I'm going to mention. Those will start to get you that at least the
likelihood that they're
going to read it. Another great best practice is if you have any sort of mutual
connection.
So if someone sends me a note and says, "Hey, I'm really good friends with Ian.
He speaks really
highly of you. Just want to touch base. You at least guarantee I'm going to
read that email.
Hopefully I'll reply, but you'll at least guarantee I'm going to read it."
Yeah. Final thing before we get out of here too. For executives, find the
channel that they have
the least followers on social media. If they have 15,000 followers on LinkedIn
and 400 on Twitter,
hit them in the DMs on Twitter. It's like, find the path of least resistance.
Learn any final thoughts?
Again, go back to know your audience as much as you can. Spend a little bit of
time. If you were
going to do an outbound campaign to someone, figure out who they are. Do a
little bit of research
upfront to make it personalized, to really connect with them. If there's any
way to capture that
person in the moment of interest, that is when you're going to have the best
possible results.
Thanks again, Lauren. Awesome insights. Talking outbound. Next up, last person,
Nick Bennett,
talking about content and brand, my personal favorite. Pipeline, power, our
guest, Nick Bennett.
So excited to have you on the show. A mega superstar influencer on LinkedIn.
Amazing content,
amazing brand building. That's what we're going to talk about today.
I'm good. How are you doing?
I'm doing great, excited to talk about Alice and all the things that you know
about content
that you want to share with our audience today. Let's start off. What's your
framework for content?
Yeah. I think when creating content, it's important to consider how relevant it
is to
your target audience. For us, we sell to other marketers, people exactly like
me. I've been
having these pain points that the people were looking to solve for for the last
10 years.
So I feel like I'm at a bit of an advantage here. And so when we create our
framework and what we
want our content to be, how we want our brand to come across, which is a fun,
loving, kind of like
out there, somewhat edgy type of brand, we try to really relay that back into a
lot of the
framework that we do. And so the first thing that we consider is the context of
the content.
So is it timely? Is it relevant to what's happening in the industry or the
world at large?
If it's not, it may be not worth pursuing. And so we look at a lot of different
things. For us,
we're coming up on the holiday time. And that's one of our busiest seasons
because so many people
are trying to figure out ways to one close pipeline at the end of Q4, but also
start to build pipeline
as we move into Q1. So, you know, the context there is incredibly important.
The second piece is
considering your audience. Who are you trying to reach with this content? What
are their needs and
wants? If the content isn't tailored to them, it's probably not going to be
successful. And so we
try to, again, it's easier when you have subject matter experts that have lived
and breathed this
for the last 10 years or so. We can really step in and feel like we know that
we're walking in their
shoes. And we really focus on that. The last thing that I would say is consider
your goals.
What do you hope to achieve with the content? And if it doesn't align to your
overall marketing
goals, it's also probably not worth pursuing, you know, content that's relevant
to your target
audience, timely, relevant to your industry and aligned with your marketing
goals is more likely
to be successful. And so we try to keep this framework in mind when creating
content. And we feel like
if we do it in a way that we've done it and we plan to execute probably about
70 new pieces of
content this year, we really feel like we can hit the mark. Interesting. 70. So
why that number?
We did a lot of research. We actually, we brought on someone that manages our
content engine right
now as well as SEO. And we did a lot of research, customer research, just
industry research.
And so we've been focusing on doubling down both on like the social content on
the blogs. We have
we put a big piece out every year called state of gifting. And what we do is we
analyze
hundreds of thousands of data points from our actual product and what people
are using the product
for. And then we ungate that for the world to see because I feel like there's a
lack of education
in the market and whatever we can do to contribute to that, whether they're
using us or using someone
else, we just want people to use gifting. And we feel like we're trying to stay
non biased in a lot
of these reports. We're also on top of that creating the first ever industry
research report
that is 100%. Why would you use gifting in 2022? Like what's what's the benefit
of it? And we think
that's going to be a it's going to be a gigantic report that we're putting out
like it's probably
about 60 pages long. But it's going to be really phenomenal data driven
tactical. And we hope
people are going to learn something. And then I'd imagine you're taking that
report and breaking
it into all sorts of micro content for social and otherwise over the course.
Exactly. Yep,
breaking up. We run a lot of paid ads and both organic. We have that type of
brand that people
want to interact with. It's it's something that we've worked hard over the
years to build. And even
our corporate handles people when we don't just say, Hey, you know, come join
this event or here's a
piece of content. We tried to make it inviting, try to deliver value. And you'd
be surprised at
the amount of people that are commenting on our stuff on social that are
engaging with it.
Target accounts, the people that we want to actually sell to, they're just
jumping in and giving us
all these additional insights without us even asking for it. Yeah, you know,
and you mentioned
the timeliness of both the year for you at the end of the year, Q4 trying to
figure out how to close
the the year strong, how corporate gifting plays into that. I just want to know
for everyone listening,
if you're selling into cast me in studios, like, please feel free as many gifts
as you want. We're
taking it. Go to Alice.com, you know, sign up for it. Figure that stuff out.
Because we're here for
it all day every day. But it is very timely and it is very relevant. How do you
kind of focus on the
stuff that is a little bit more evergreen versus the stuff that is more like
right here right now?
This is this is immediately this week, this month. This is critical. Yeah,
there's always,
there's always going to be pieces of content that are incredibly important that
we put out there. I
mean, take international, for example, or compliancy, like GDPR, like all these
things,
it's so incredibly important that people are constantly going through through
the year. And
they don't know how to gift. If you're in the US and you want to gift to say AP
AC or UK,
like there's so many different regulations and traditions and things like that
that if you send
the wrong thing, you could come across as a vendor that no one would ever want
to deal with. And so
we've put out additional, you know, blog reports around that and just different
pieces of content
that are really touched on those things. But we really try to give away, and
this is something
that we've done really well, we try to give away the frameworks of how to build
a campaign.
Again, whether you're using us or not, we'll give you the exact template to use
when you're sending
out your email, the type of gifts that you should be sending, the follow up
emails that you should
be sending. So this is literally handing it off to someone again, ungated and
just saying, hey,
if you're going to go run a gifting program or gifting campaign, here is how to
do it, start to
finish. And we are literally giving it to you word for word. And the amount of
people that have said,
thank you so much. And the amount of people that have actually converted from
that, because they
say you're just giving away all this information for free, I figured I'd have
to take a demo at that
point. Yeah, I love that. Always, always great when when folks are saying like,
I figured I'd have
to get a demo to get all this information. That's that's usually a good sign.
Is that tracked in
your metrics? Like, is that is that one of your your KPIs people who are
overwhelmed with how much
love you get it? Yeah, it definitely is. And so we I would say last year,
probably a year from
a year ago, from from now, we switched to the the how did you hear about us on
our demo form. And
the amount of insights that we get are incredible, because as marketers, we
love to put people in
boxes. And you go to a demo form, you click the drop down, how did you hear
about us? Google,
like everyone's going to put that. And so, but the amount of insights that we
're getting now,
where they're specifically calling out, like my content on LinkedIn, additional
employees,
content, specific blogs they wrote or podcasts or events, we can start to map
that entire journey.
It's not just like, you know, first touch, last touch is cool. But what about
everything that
happens in the middle of that journey? That's where the goal is. And that's
where you start to
capture a lot of these pieces that then develop future pieces of content as
well.
Yeah, and I think that they're really meaningful touches. I think that that's
part of why content
marketing is so critical is that it means more, right? Clicking on a number of
ads is, you know,
13, you know, impressions equal sale, right? If you see those 13 ads, that's
one thing.
But if you read a report, 60 page report, that's a totally different
waiting than, you know, clicking on a on a Google ad, right? If you listen to
an hour of someone's
podcast, like an hour of someone speaking, what is that worth? What is it worth
to have, you know,
someone that used a tool, you know, to get a promotion or to figure out
something new and
they go and tell their spouse like, Oh my gosh, I found this, this, this how to
that Alice has on
their website. And like, I ran this awesome campaign, I literally got promoted,
like, what is that
stuff worth? And I think that that's where in content marketing, we struggle a
little bit to
capture the value that we're creating. How do you think about that?
Yeah, I agree with you 100%. And there's so many of those. And that's why, like
, for me,
I've always been under the impression in a lot of what I try to do is 80% of
what I do is directly
tied to revenue. It's, I mean, obviously, leadership would like to see ahead
100%. But 80% of what I
do is focused on revenue, where you can directly attribute that to revenue. The
other 20%, I call
it brand experimental. What can we do to get people to talk about us excited,
maybe social
media engagement going is going up website traffic is going up. And so I like
to really focus on in
the majority of my job specifically, I focus on that that 20%, because I like
to experiment with
different pieces of content, whether it's through the corporate side of it,
through it's my own
personal content, whether it's blog posts, whether it's joining podcast,
because that's
that's the thing that goes unnoticed. Like, I've done probably about 80
podcasts in the last year
and a half as a guest. And so the amount of people on our inbound demo request
form that
mentioned they heard me about a podcast with Chris Walker or someone else. And
it's, it's,
it's that evergreen content that's always going to be out there. And it's like,
it was so easy to do.
It's just video that then I'm taking that raw file and I'm chopping it up if
they don't chop it up
for me. And I'm distributing it on LinkedIn, TikTok, Rails, YouTube shorts,
which I mean,
we could get down into that later, because I think those are going to be huge,
huge pieces for
B2B moving forward. But yeah, you know, it's, I feel like a lot of times the
goal is to increase
brand awareness. And so in that case, you're going to look at like that website
traffic, SEO,
like, is social media engagement going up? How often is your brand mentioned
online?
That's an interesting one because the amount of people that tagged Alice on
LinkedIn,
we run a monthly, like, meeting where we see how many people actually have
tagged Alice
in the amount of impressions that it could have driven and the amount of impact
that it could have
done. And there was, there was one month where we got tagged about 175 times
from different people,
brands, individuals. And that was just, that's just all free traffic at the end
of the day.
Is there a most surprising thing that you've learned in the past year with
content?
I think it's, it's just being able to really just focus on, on delivering value
and not making
it fluffy. That's, that's another thing. Like marketers love to make fluffy
stuff and like,
I'm doing something about project right now internally where I'm trying to redo
our,
our customer stories and I'm trying to make them into playbooks and tactical
playbooks
because any marketer that reads a case study, no one's going to write a bad
case study, let's
be honest, they're going to make it sound all nice and awesome, but it's
probably fluffy,
to a certain degree, but I, but what if you read a playbook of a customer that
said, hey,
I got a 537% ROI increase and here's the 10 things I did using Alice to get
there.
I think that's a game changer at that point. Not only is that going to help on
the retention
side of the business, it's also going to help on the acquisition side of the
business.
And the final thing I'd say on that is that people always think about content
as like blog,
video, podcast, like that's the wrong way of thinking about it. It's like
thinking of all of
those things as the utility of what it is. It's a how to, it's, you know, in
interview, it's,
you know, something that is a guide or a resource or whatever. And then doing
them in video, podcast,
social, like those formats, like people just got it wrong. Like I have a
podcast or a video or
whatever, like that's not how it is. It's, it's go utility first and then the
platform and the format
that it's supposed to be in. Yep. And another thing on top of that is now that
in-person events
are back, I can't tell it. Like my whole strategy, I think, I think trade shows
are useless. However,
I think that going with a content plan to shoot content at trade shows is going
to deliver way
higher ROI than sitting on a booth that's probably next to the bathroom.
Nick, this has been awesome. Thanks again for your time. Any final thoughts?
No, I think that, you know, just, just think of ways that you can use content
and don't be boring
with it. Don't be fluffy, deliver value, and you'd be surprised at what it can
do for your audience.
Awesome. Take care. Thank you. Thank you for joining us at the pipeline Power
Hour. I feel like
I'm drunk with ideas. My final thought for 2023 is you're doing your planning
is you got to make
something remarkable. Our budgets might get smaller. There's a lot of
uncertainty. We don't know what
the future is going to hold, but you as a marketer need to rise above the noise
. And to do that,
you have to create something remarkable. Thanks again for watching. Thanks to
our visionary
pipeline leaders. And next up, after a quick break, you're going to hear from
Kristen Herson,
VP of Marketing at Groove, as she spills her tech stack secrets.
Thank you.
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