Demand Gen Machine: Driving Growth with Precision

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present this episode, I’m thrilled to announce the first-ever in-person CMO Super Huddle that we’re hosting in Palo Alto on November 8, 2024. The theme is “Daring Greatness in 2025” and we’re rocking a full slate of inspiring speakers with ample time for networking. Early Bird tickets are on sale now, so grab yours at cmohuddles.com. It’s gonna be flocking amazing!

You’re about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the accomplished marketing leaders of CMO Huddles, a community that’s always sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness. The marketing leaders of this episode are Michael Callahan, James Stanton, and Jeff Morgan, who join us for a conversation focused on all things demand generation. They share hard-earned insights to get from generating activity to generating results and the small tweaks that can lead to big wins. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. Alright, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddle Studio, the live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I’m your host, Drew Neisser, live from my remote studio in Jupiter, Florida. In four years of huddling with CMOs, I don’t think I’ve ever heard one say, “Guess what? Our CRO asked our team today to stop delivering high-quality opportunities.” Never happened. In truth, the demand for generating demand seems insatiable at most B2B companies, and the pressure on CMOs to build predictable, scalable demand gen engines is rocketing. So what does it take to build a demand gen machine? We know it’s some combination of people, processes, programs, technology, maybe even partnerships, but getting that right seems to be an art form. Fortunately for you, we have three formidable demand gen artistes with us today. 

And with that, let’s bring on Michael Callahan, CMO of Salt Security, an API security platform, and returning guest who previously appeared on the show to discuss cybersecurity and product-led growth. Hello, Michael, how are you doing? Where are you this fine day?

Michael: I’m doing great. I like the introduction as an artiste. Thank you. I am here in bright and sunny Dallas, Texas today.

Drew: I love it. Well, you’re gonna just paint this picture like an artist to help all these other folks who are listening or watching how to do this, and now you’ve been, it’s interesting, because you’ve been at Salt Security for six months, and I’m sure you know, job number one was assess the demand gen strategy. Can you talk a little bit about how that process went?

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And it was, I mean, because ultimately, what we’re all doing in marketing is we’re helping to build demand and create the pipeline so that we can close business, to drive the business. One of the things that I did was look at the funnel so I just like, at a macro level, what kind of conversions am I getting from leads coming in all the way through? And one of the things that I found was we were getting a ton of meetings, but they weren’t converting to deals or opportunities. And it turned out that there were two reasons for it. One of them was the way that we were incentivizing not only our internal team but also externally. So we were using gift cards as an incentive, and what I found was our own team was focused on getting the meetings versus getting qualified opportunities. That wasn’t the right incentive, because we had hundreds and hundreds of meetings, but they weren’t turning into opportunities. And at the same time, we found that, because we were using this incentive of a gift card, people were coming for an hour, and it was worth it to them to get $100-$150 but they would never reengage. So it’s interesting because it gets people’s attention, but it didn’t really work, so we eliminated that. And then, well, are these even people that we should be talking to? And so we went back into kind of a basic, you know, what is our ICP, and found that we were casting way, way too wide of a net. So the change we made was to change those incentives, but then also focus more on the ICP. So do some technographic filtering and some demographic filtering to really talk to who we should be targeting, and we saw conversion rates increase kind of across the board.

Drew: So I want to break this down just real quick because what you pay and what you pay for is going to drive results. So the way you incentivize teams, and it’s we’ve seen it so many times. In the old days, we used to talk about, you know, marketing just generating leads. And of course, we all now call MQL useless, really, but that’s a great example. There could have been a lot of MQLs at that moment, right? So incentives, and getting that incentive structure right, and you don’t often think of the marketing person sort of getting in there, but hey, you’re fresh eyes. Why not?

Michael: I think it was interesting too, Drew, that it was like this double-sided incentive, right? It was we were incentivizing people to come talk to us, and they were like, “Sure, an hour for a $150 gift card, great, I’ll do that.” And then we never hear from them again. And then internally, we were focusing our own reps on just getting that meeting right, but not, how do we get a qualified opportunity? So both sides of the incentive were wrong, you know?

Drew: And it’s so funny because I think of the classic sales thing. “Oh, just get me a meeting and I’ll sell.” Well, it’s not true. You gotta get a meeting with the right person who is, in fact, at a stage in time where they’re ready to have a conversation and interested in the problem that you solve. So now let’s talk about narrowing the focus a little bit because I think that’s also really interesting and important. I suppose some folks would say, well, you get too small and you’re not reaching enough people. How did you sort of find those folks? And you talked about sort of techno filtering, talk a little bit more about how you narrowed it down.

Michael: Yeah. So we went back and looked at, where were we most successful, and where were there companies that had the biggest need for what we do? And we found that they had some technology similarities, right? They were using technology, not our technology, but other technologies. So in our particular case, I’ll just give an example. We do computer security, there’s something called an API gateway, which just tracks APIs that are used to have applications communicate. And we found that if they had certain API gateways, they were more likely to need our solution as well, right? Because they’ve kind of already pre-qualified that they’re in there. They know what’s going on with APIs. They have some kind of interest there. So instead of just saying we’re going to talk to anybody that’s interested, we started narrowing that and saying, “Well, do you have a gateway? And if you do, if you have this particular one, we’ll give you a message that is a combination message that you know this plus us gives you a better solution.” And it’s working really well, right? But it’s a way that it’s like one example, probably three or four that we did where we said, let’s target this down, or narrow this down, rather than fishing the entire ocean, let’s go spearfishing, so to speak.

Drew: Yeah, and it’s so interesting, and it sounds in retrospect. It sounds so simple and so obvious, but it makes sense. And, you know, we talked about this. Last month, actually, this month, all of our huddles have been on partnerships. And this is a great example, while it’s not even an official partnership, although you could go there, but the solution of you plus the API gateway, is a lot better than either the API gateway or you guys. You’re stronger together. But for you, you can sort of really say, “Hey, people with an API gateway like this,” and they can, sort of, they can see, “Oh, they’re talking to me. That’s me.”

Michael: Exactly. Yeah. So then, instead of like, a generic message, you actually have a message that lands. I mean, it’s not like every possible scenario that that person or that company might have, but you, at least you’re talking their language, where you’re saying, “Hey, I know that you’ve got such and such,” and we can do a one plus one equals three. And they’re more interested in that than just them trying to figure out how it applies to them.

Drew: Yeah, it’s funny. It’s a little bit of thinking like an Instagram algorithm, right? Where, oh, Drew likes penguins. So let’s show more pictures of penguins, which, by the way, is what’s happened to my feed. It’s crazy. That’s just nothing but penguins, which, fortunately, I find endlessly endearing. But still, it’s the same kind of thing. These people are interested in this area.

Michael: There’s a new term set technographic or demographic. It’s going to be penguin-graphic.

Drew: Yes, yes. It’s a target of like three including Poppy from the Global Penguin. That’s a real person, by the way, and he is actually on an episode of the show. Anyway, those were really big changes. Was there anything else in this first six months that was sort of really helpful to you to get the demand gen engine cooking?

Michael: I think a lot of people use this technology, but it’s called Gong, and it’s a way that reps can get better at listening to customers’ needs and refining their story. I listened to a lot of Gong calls or Gong recorded calls, understanding what it was that customers were asking, and so it helped me better message to their problems, how we can help them with it. So spending that time and it’s a commitment, right? Because it’s like these are half-hour or hour-long calls, and you’ve got to dedicate the time. But if the more you can do that, because you can’t always get on a live call, but if you can use some of these recorded ones, it totally helps your level of messaging that you’re delivering.

Drew: It’s funny, because I know that Gong is integrating AI tools, and there are other AI tools that you could, in theory, upload all these calls, the transcripts, and look for patterns. And, you know, have it identify where certain things, but I don’t think there’s any substitute for human ears either.

Michael: Exactly. I agree, completely.

Drew:Interesting because I do think that’s going to be the combination of sort of where AI is going to shine is going to be able to look at a massive number of calls and find the patterns.

Michael: In fact, I was on one this morning, so I read the transcript, so it took an hour call, and it gave me a single page-like summary, which was interesting. But then I went in and actually listened to how one of our reps was using our new sales deck, and it was super enlightening. It was like, “Oh, that point really landed. I love that.” And that one, that’s not exactly what we’re trying to get across there. So it’s not only we’re hearing the customer problems, but it’s also, how are we presenting our story.

Drew: Right, yeah. And again, I think this goes back to sort of a fundamental core of being a CMO, is know your customer better than just about anybody else, and you just can’t go wrong anytime that you spend either talking to a customer or listening to a customer is probably time well spent. Okay, awesome. Great way to kick it off.

Next up, James Stanton is a VP, go-to-market at Empyrean, an HR tech and services company. James is an industry expert who has graced our stage before to delve into topics of building marketing teams. Hello, James. Wonderful to see you again.

James: Hello. Good to be here.

Drew: First of all, how are you and where are you?

James: Doing great, typical, right? Head of marketing, a bit overwhelmed, but hey, aren’t we all? And I’m coming to you live from Charleston, South Carolina.

Drew: Awesome. Alright. Well, we are definitely leaning on the southern part of the country today, with me down in Florida. So anyway, I did notice that your title, VP, go-to-market. Do you want to talk about that?

James: Sure, sure. I could talk about that. Made a bit of a purposeful change in my team, I guess, sort of towards the end of last year, to go from marketing to go-to-market, really in an effort to reflect all of the work that we were doing, to not only take things at the end of the process and just, you know, market them, but also to think about how we are bringing things to market, how we are, of course, positioning and driving opportunities. But then what’s the underlying structure? And within my team now we have sales, revenue operations as well as inside sales. So when that addition came to my team, that’s when we made the change.

Drew: Right. And it makes a lot of sense, because it is a slightly different and broader perspective on, you know, it’s about going to market. And so now, where does Customer Success live?

James: It lives on us all, Drew, but the customer success team here at Empyrean lives over with its own dedicated group and senior leader. It’s actually called CXT, Customer Experience team, right there, and there’s a very tight partnership, for sure, between our team and that team. In fact, we had someone from the marketing team actually move over there recently for a new job opportunity. So that, to me, speaks volumes to how marketing and go-to-market is connected with the success and growth of our clients.

Drew: Very cool, okay, and I ask that for the listeners. I ask that because often when you talk about go-to-market, you talk about the combination of product and sales and marketing and customer success and revenue, if you will, revenue ops in the same sort of motion.

James: We are heavily involved in the experience, supporting the experience of the clients. As an example, it’s our team that takes point responsibility for our annual client show, right? Which is a few hundred folks that we bring together. So we are pretty intimate in supporting that team, but the success rate of the engagement itself, you know, the subscription dollars that are spent with us, that stewardship comes from our CXT team.

Drew: Got it, okay, well, I sort of pushed this off topic, but not really, because I do think these things are connected. But let’s talk about the evolution of your demand-gen engine. You heard a little bit about some of the things that Michael discovered. Curious in you, looking at how your demand gen has evolved over the last year.

James: For sure, and I may even rewind a little bit further than a year to see how we’ve evolved. When I joined here at Empyrean a few years back, there was a great deal of spend happening on what I would call more traditional demand gen tactics, right? Spending on paid advertising, keywords and things, things like that, that was generating activity, but wasn’t generating results, right? You know, early on, I asked the person that was responsible, you know, show me the data, what’s going on. And it was very high on dollars going out, very low on attributable support of opportunities that we’re getting. That was a problem, we went to work thinking about that. There were a number of other pieces, I would say, of our marketing strategy that needed to be addressed. Mainly, you know, what is it that we want to take to market as a message, right? What’s our brand strategy? All of those things.

I find that there are some CEOs or COOs who get very tactical. Like, well, if you start just like, spending on things and like, you know it’s like, if you don’t have your core strategy set, if you haven’t thought through how you are going to get a message across that lands and what’s important, it makes no sense to spend money because, you know, crap in, crap out, right? Sorry for the colloquial there, but that’s what will happen. We did take some time. We actually paused on some of our demand gen efforts as we got our strategy set. That was, you know, one kind of learning, and then we purposefully moved, and I know we’ve talked on this show, and I think you guys were talking about a little bit earlier too, the whole concept of MQLs, even a little bit Account Based Marketing. And a lot of those lessons still apply. They’re no longer suited to, at least within our business, a proper or efficient or effective way of driving demand.

Not every one of the companies out there is going to be like us. So I’ll explain that, because I think it’s important to understand how we are taking our game plan, making it real, and that first step is by understanding exactly who you’re selling to, right, and getting super crisp and clear and clean on exactly which buying centers you want to get in front of and what your ideal client profile looks like. Ours is tight enough, because we sell to larger companies, and we know the buying centers exactly that we want to get in front of, that we can wrap our arms around that in Salesforce. So that’s why I think less about MQLs or even less about account base, and it’s more about opportunity generation, right?

There should not be an account and my sales team probably, if they listen to this, will be rolling their eyes a little bit, because I’ve heard this, but there should not be any accounts in Salesforce that we are not 100% sure that we want to sell to, right? That’s the work we ask of our sellers to do to know your territory. Now we, in marketing on the ops side, will complement that, right? We’ll help fill in some of the gaps and some of the demo, the firmographics, and potentially identify some folks that you should talk to. We have an ADR team that will also get to work helping with that, with that in mind, right? So if you think that for us, we’re starting with our arms around the serviceable market. That’s where we spend money on right? So we start thinking about generating demand. What I’m trying to do is take those certified accounts and create pre-qualified opportunities in the sales funnel, so that’s the work that we do. I’d be happy to talk more about what that work is, but I’ll stop there to see if you have a question.

Drew: I know Jeff is waiting for us to go over to him, but let’s put a little meat on a bone. We’ve moved from strategy to targeting and a very specific with these pre-qualified ops. Maybe share just the highlights of a campaign that you’ve done that sort of has applied the lessons that you’ve learned over the last couple of years.

James: Actually, I was telling you, one I was thinking about was this webinar, and there’s one that the origin is awesome and the execution left us with some work to do, right? So might be practical. So in our business, it’s really important to be listening, as any business right, to what’s going on in the market. And we hear a lot of really good intel from the advisors who are part of the channel, right? So you think about a channel approach, there’s a number of folks that influence our deal. We talk to them, and we clued in through what we were hearing from advisors and what we were starting to see in sales deals that was funneling up through our team, we try to be super collaborative with our sales leaders and our sales directors to get insight on how the deals are going and what you’re winning and losing.

And there was a particular competitor that we could tell was really struggling, and that was confirmed. That was great intel that helped us to build, and I won’t name names, but a knockout campaign, right? And the knockout campaign is one that we did put to work with the group of companies that we knew were considering or might consider this particular competitor, or perhaps had that competitor in place. And we’re with the knowledge that we have gained through our listening channels was a super tight camp content punching, just a couple of things that went out, and the good news is that we were getting some traction. The bad news is that we had made some mess-ups in HubSpot, and so everything was getting caught up.

Drew: Amazing. So we’ll have to come back to that, because I do want to get into that, because a lot of this is about making some mistakes. You had a great idea you executed, but there was some back-end work, and that matters, and that’s sort of the thing.

We got to move on to Jeff Morgan, and so we’ll be back with that. So welcome Jeff, the Head of Marketing of Elements, a wealth tech, SaaS platform for financial advisors, and who has previously joined us on the show to discuss top-of-the-funnel challenges. So Hello Jeff. Welcome back. How are you and where are you this fine day?

Drew: I’m doing very well this fine day. I’m in Salt Lake City.

Drew: So you’ve heard what Michael and James talked about. Talk a little about what you heard, and how Elements demand gen evolution compares.

Jeff: Okay, well, a couple of things that I thought were interesting that they mentioned. Michael was talking about how gift card incentives were leading to less than qualified sales meetings or demos. One of the things that I learned in my agency days was that if you pick the right incentive, sometimes it actually enhances the call. An example of that was when I worked for a company that sold medical billing software. They were always trying to talk to physicians about implementing this billing software in their practice. So the incentive, instead of a gift card, was to give away this ICD-10 coding guide, which is something that they have to buy every year in order to do their medical billing. If they were interested in the guide, they were interested in medical billing. The incentive, which was like a $200-$300 guide, would actually pull the right people in at the right time. I just thought I’d bring that up because it made me think about gift cards, yeah, they probably aren’t a great idea most of the time, but if you pick the right incentive, it can be really good. 

I’m really interested in hearing, maybe discussing in a minute, more about this idea that MQLs are dead. My perspective, I guess, maybe it’s the way that we use MQL, but it’s really just a signal of their buying stage, and it lets our outbound SDR team know who’s more qualified to call and try to set up demos with than others, so I’m interested to hear why that’s kind of become passé.

Drew: It’s not something that people are using to measure. What they’re not doing is talking about it with anybody, because it’s a stop along the way from MQL to opportunity, and the business needs to focus on opportunity. If the board, for example, is fixated on MQL, they have a problem.

Jeff: No one cares about that except me.

Drew: I mean, and this is the argument that goes back and forth, is, you can’t get to an opportunity without that lead progressing somehow. And so an MQL still has a role in theory. It’s just doesn’t have a role for anybody but you, and certainly not something that you would ever want to incent against, right?

Jeff: Yeah, right.

Drew: And I think that’s another important part of it because if you incent against this, and a lot of marketers used to do that, it’s problematic anyway. Talk about a campaign or initiative that’s been, you know, when you’re looking at your demand gen evolution, that’s been particularly successful, or maybe one that wasn’t as successful, because I think we can learn from both of those.

Jeff: Yeah, for sure. Well, one of the things that we have had a challenge with over the last couple of years, since our initial go-to-market, is that our customer acquisition cost has been higher than we wanted it to be, so one of my objectives for this calendar year is to find new and less expensive ways to generate demand. So what we decided to do was focus on partner marketing. There’s been a variety of different ways and different types of partners that we’ve started to engage with, and it’s really led to some exciting opportunities for our business. So we’re doing co-marketing with people who have larger audiences than we do of our exact same target audience, and we’re doing email campaigns, social media campaigns, webinars with them, and we’ve seen some really big lead gen and demo days based off of those co-marketing partnerships. We’ve been putting into place some exclusive pricing and service agreements for specific organizations within our industry that have a lot of financial advisors that are part of those organizations. And we’ve found there’s lots of smoke around that, and it’s really driving a lot of demand there as well. We’re even doing some new product integrations that started with the co-marketing initiative, and then we found synergies between our product and some of the other products in our industry that we’re doing integrations with that are opening up some really big opportunities for us. So I’ve always thought partner marketing was great, but it hasn’t been a core part of what we’re doing, and I’ve just been really excited about the success that we’ve seen so far.

Drew: I’m so glad you brought that up. I mean, first of all, the key thing is, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Oh, we want to drive down our cost per acquisition. Well, how do we do that? Well, then you went on to, well, gosh, if somebody already has a relationship with this person, and they’re bringing their credibility and our solution and their solution similar to what Michael was talking about, that if the bundled solution is stronger, then you sort of, they’re opening the door for you, right, and so your costs are going to go down, because you don’t have to spend money on all of that awareness and preference stage, you’re just coming as an easy, recommended partner. And I’m just thinking about, you know, Brent Adamson and making buying easy. Well, in some ways, you’re taking the risk out of it, right, because there’s an implied endorsement from that. So co-marketing, special pricing. And this last point I wanted to sort of make, and this came up a lot in our partner things, is we all think that we’re selling an individual solution, that we’re special, we can go to market with it, but a lot of times in tech, you’re not, you’re part of like a combo of solutions, and to think of yourself as a standalone is probably doing your customer a disservice.

Jeff: Yeah, I totally agree with that, and it’s interesting that you say that because this focus on partnerships has actually led us to thinking of our product in a completely different way. We used to think of ourselves as a point solution in a broad spectrum of different types of software solutions for financial advisors, and now we’re starting to position ourselves as the hub in a hub-and-spoke type relationship, so that the customer, or our financial advisors’ clients, their client experience, starts with our software and then branches out to all these other point solutions in the industry. And that’s what’s really opened up so many doors with these other much larger organizations that are interested in integrating with us, because they know that our client portal solution is a lot better than what they’ve seen other places in the industry.

Drew: It’s amazing, and they would be able to have the insight and appreciation of it, because they know your target really well, because they’re saying you’re sharing the customers. What’s interesting to me about that is it is a radical way of rethinking about demand and demand generation. We also know that partnerships are tricky, and you got to create the win-wins, and there’s all these other things, and you need a different thing. And just confirming, these partnerships were marketing-led?

Jeff: Everything that we’re doing right now is marketing-led, so it’s been really fun to also be able to establish new relationships from a career perspective. I’m establishing relationships with the executive leaders on other teams in my industry, so hopefully someday, when I am in transition again, I’ll have a deeper network. So there’s a little bit of a side benefit there to getting to know some of the people.

Drew: Yeah, I love that. That’s awesome. Alright. Well, we’re going to come back and bring all three of you together, because we’re going to talk about CMO Huddles for a second. 

CMO Huddles was launched in 2020. It’s a close-knit community of over 400 highly effective B2B marketing leaders who share, care, and dare each other to greatness. Given the extraordinary time constraints on CMOs these days, everything about CMO Huddles is designed to help leaders save time and empower them to make faster, better decisions. So Michael, James, Jeff, you guys are incredibly busy marketing leaders. I’m wondering if you can share maybe a specific example of how CMO Huddles has helped you in your decision-making process.

Michael: So one of the things that I really like a lot is the Slack channel, so having that available to just either kind of eavesdrop or see what conversations are going on, or if I have some things specific where, like, “Hey, I need some input on this or something we’re struggling with,” and to get that community to respond back is great. And it’s one where, like, you know that if you do that internally, sometimes people question like, well, don’t you know everything about everything related to marketing? And really, what you’re doing is just like, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And you want to get that kind of non-judgmental sort of feedback. I love the Slack channel on CMO Huddles.

Drew: I love it, but the broader perspective is it’s so hard because the CMO is expected to know everything, and it’s a stupid thing, because no one can know everything, no CEO knows everything, but it is a safe place where you can ask questions. So thank you for that, Michael. Jeff, go for it.

Jeff: I found all kinds of value with CMO Huddles, but one of the things that really stands out to me is the opportunity to connect with peers. Outside of our huddle days, I’ve actually had an opportunity to meet with probably 15-20 other CMOs with just like 30-minute introduction calls where we got to know each other, talked about some of our challenges, and in some cases, we’ve followed that up with additional conversations when we’ve run into different challenges, and we’ve been able to help each other through those challenges. So that’s been really valuable to me, like just expanding my professional network, and I also think the LinkedIn and personal branding emphasis has really been impactful for me. It’s made me think differently about how I present myself to the world and how I network, and how I prepare myself for the next phase of my career. In so many ways, CMO Huddles has been an influence on me over the last year and a half or so that I’ve been involved.

Drew: I appreciate it. Well, and by the way, you probably take advantage of our one-on-ones. So great. And I love to hear that. Anyway, James, any last thoughts on this?

James: Yeah, all of that, plus one. I’ll give you some props there, Drew. I think that one of the things that I’ve loved about CMO Huddles is getting an opportunity to learn some of the things from you. And during one-on-ones, there’s a really good nexus that you bring together from the points of view that you collect across the board, and that’s been really helpful. So that all gets that’s all a part of the package when you subscribe to this great community.

Drew: I love it. Alright. Well, thank you, all three of you for those kind words. And if you’re a B2B CMO who can share, care, and dare with the best of them, do yourself a favor and visit cmohuddles.com. Check out our free starter program. We hope to see you in a huddle soon.

Drew: Okay, so we’ve talked about and covered a lot of different ranges of demand gen engines. This is a question that comes up, and it’s very tactical, but where do BDRs and SDRs sit? I mean, I think, James, we know that that’s part of your GTM. Michael, where are they?

Michael: I have them in marketing. 

Drew: They’re in marketing. And Jeff, do you have any BDRs? SDRs?

Jeff: Yeah, and they sit officially under the sales team, but I manage them and create their cadences and do all the sales enablement collateral for them. So it feels like they’re mostly under my direction.

Drew: And Michael, I have felt that this is such a critical thing for CMOs, because it gives you control of what ultimately becomes an opportunity. Is that a valid perspective? I mean, how do you feel about having them report to you?

Michael: Even though we all try to work well together as a team, right, that having the BDRs as part of the organization, it just brings you closer. So we can have that kind of quick reaction, or that conversation of, “Hey, these are working,” or “These are quality,” or “These are not quality,” and it just speeds up your ability to execute. But it’s like, I’ve been in situations where it’s both sides. I think this way is more efficient. But the argument that I always have, or I use with this, is, if someone has a sales quota, like, and it’s not like an overlay quote, it’s an actual quota, they should be in sales. If they don’t, they should be somewhere else. In this case, I think they should be marketing. And that seems to kind of make it a little bit agnostic, because you’re arguing a different principle than like, “Well, I want them in my team,” or “I want them in my team.” You’re just like, this is the argument we should have, and then we’ll figure out what happens after that and where they sit.

Jeff: That’s why they sit on the sales team for us, because their incentive is tied to actual sales. And so we want the sales leader to ultimately be the one to meet with them and hold them accountable to those numbers. But in every other way, the marketing team is enabling them to do their jobs.

Drew: I mean, one of the things that, and this is really starting to get in the weeds here. But how do you have stronger relationships with sales? Well, marketing is delivering high-quality opportunities, then you have a much stronger relationship, and you can’t have some sales saying these leads are garbage. So you just eliminate that thing because you’re qualifying for them.

Drew: I want to go back to James talking about lessons that you learn from things that didn’t quite work out as well as you expected, as you’re building your perfect demand gen engine. And you just touched a little bit, James, you did this campaign. It was against a competitor. You ran the campaign. But then there was a breakdown. Talk a little more about what you learned there, where things went wrong.

James: Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, “Measure twice, cut once” approach there. We had moved over to HubSpot fairly recently. And so this was one of the earlier tests of how that was all working. And there was a drop having the lead turn up for the, we call them account development reps, for the ADRs, to see it was happening. So it was literally just a plumbing [issue]. If that last mile isn’t working, then things fall apart. So we were able to rectify it rather quickly and get the results along that we were getting. But it just gave a red flag, right? Like, just make sure that you’re looking because we get caught up in all the big ideas and the strategies, like all of that. It’s like, well, if the plumbing ain’t working, then you’re not going to get the results you want.

Drew: Yeah, literally, today, we sent an invitation out to an in-person event, and we rushed it out. It’s the first of its kind that we’ve done, and we forgot to put a registration button on the email. It’s like, well, the response rate to that is not going to be very good, is it? Fortunately, there was a quick fix to that, because we just then sent the meeting invite. Little things happen that can really have a real impact on your measurability of it. Michael or Jeff, you want to share some little thing that went, “Ah, gee, wish we caught that earlier”?

Michael: Well, I’ll give you one maybe less about technology, like you’re explaining. It was with a vendor. It obviously leads to demand gen, because it was an SEO vendor that we were using and SEM/SEO, they were doing both for us. Man, it was the best pitch ever. I was all in. I’m like, this is it? I mean, this is gonna quadruple, or whatever. I mean, this is ridiculous. How great this is gonna be. Probably took four or five weeks before I realized it was kind of smoke and mirrors while we were being pitched. And I was embarrassed, right? Because I’m like, I’m the one that was touting this internally and going, “Hey, this is great,” but I ended up using it to say, we’re all going to make mistakes. And so what we did, as soon as we learned, we stopped, right? So we let them go, and went out to the next thing. And it kind of gave everyone else, not just in marketing, but in the rest of the company, like this, okay, kind of a pass to say it’s fine. Try stuff and if it doesn’t work, then just make a quick change and move on. So it ended up being kind of net positive from that effect. The fact the impact of it, I basically wasted five weeks dreaming that it was going to be the best thing ever, and it really wasn’t.

Drew: Yeah, well, but you tried, and what I love is that you did have that moment of acknowledgement it didn’t work because we got to do that.

Drew: I want to keep moving along here. We’ve touched on technology a little bit in terms of martech stack. Jeff, you mentioned HubSpot and Salesforce, and I think Michael, you also mentioned Salesforce. Can we talk a little bit about your tech stacks and just what’s sort of in them? You know, what’s working for you right now. I’ll turn that over to you right now. Jeff, what’s your stack look like?

Jeff: Sure, yeah, like you mentioned. CRM is Salesforce. We’re using HubSpot for marketing automation, data management, lead scoring. We’re using Chili Piper for our appointment setting, specifically for demo settings. We use Asana for our project management system, Zoom for meetings, Gong for meeting recordings and sales coaching, Salesloft for our outbound SDR and AE and CS motions. And then my favorite category of new tech is the AI category. A lot of different things that we’re playing with and trying. I’m like a really AI early adopter, and so I’m loving trying out all the new things and seeing what they’re good for, or using GPT-4, Claude 3, Perplexity, Midjourney, Reclaim, Fathom like and even more than that, but those are the ones that I use every day, where our team uses every day, and finding lots and lots of efficiency gains. We’re becoming more effective using those tools.

Drew: Well, you’re going to want to try chat.hub.gg, then, because that is an aggregator, so you can sort of put something out to like all four or five at a time. You will want to check that out. Michael, you heard the tech stack that Jeff ran, what? How’s yours same or different?

Michael: Yeah, similar. So of course, Salesforce, we use as our CRM, and we use Marketo as part of that. The reps use Outreach. We’ve invested quite a bit in 6sense that’s given us a lot of indicators for both the BDRs. But then also, to go ability to target. We’re using ZoomInfo. We were using a chat product that we didn’t like very much on the website. We were switching to Drift. I think Drift is a lot better, and Drift has some cool new AI functionality, so you don’t have to think about every possible scenario and what the question or the answer would be. It’ll actually go and find some answers for you. So we’re pretty optimistic about what Drift’s going to do.

Drew: Very cool because Drift had sort of been in huddles. It had been losing momentum. I could tell a lot of people were going in a different direction. So it’s good to hear. James, anything in your stack that was different, or you want to mention?

James: Yeah, it sounds like we’re all kind of in some similar tech stacks here, which is cool. Outside of the ones already mentioned, a couple that I like: one, we’re big into participatory social media, so we use Oktopost for that. That’s been really helpful in driving some pretty significant growth of our LinkedIn community and followers. So I like that one. We use a fun little tool called Loop & Tie. I’ll give those guys a shout out for our gifting. Very nice way that they go about it, also very genuine in types of gift collections like women-owned businesses or sustainable practices charitable, right? So they’ve really kind of thought through a little bit more of the emotional as opposed to just the substance of the gift itself. And then some new things that we’re on all the AI stuff. Yep, I got people on my team. I don’t even know. I’m signing off expense reports like, go figure it out. See what you like. I just say speak nicely to the AI is all I ask. So if things gotta go the wrong way, at least we’ll be on the positive side here. But Nevatic is a new one that we’re working on right now, and that’s an interesting way for marketing folks, product marketing in specific, to pre-create demos and tell stories through the ways that we can actually demonstrate our features and functions, which I’m really excited about, because I think it’s going to help our sales team to think a little bit more critically about when and how to use our demo environment, as well as make it easier to answer questions in the, you know, in between meetings. So all that in-between space that marketing lives in once an opportunity is developed. So those are a couple.

Drew: We have a question from Dale Davies, who’s been watching the show and is asking if SEO is smoke and mirrors. I want to break the question down real quickly, because yes, there is a longer ROI, but let me just ask this question. Is organic search driving high-quality leads for your business? You can just raise your hand.

Michael: Yeah. So it is, and I’ll even talk to since I was, I think, the one that said smoke and mirrors, so organic is driving search. And just to be clear on what I was mentioning there was, it was the vendor. It wasn’t the idea of SEO or SEM search or display. It was the vendor issue in this case.

Drew: So you all raised your hand that SEO has value. I, you know, to me, the more interesting question is, you know, are we about to have this Google Apocalypse where it’s going to change so dramatically that all that traffic that we used to count on, we’re not going to see anymore, because suddenly you are on the front page and now you’re on page three, because so much of this is being taken up by the widgets. So I don’t know if you want to speculate on that. There wasn’t really a question.

Jeff: I agree. That could have a high likelihood of having a really dramatic impact on the quantity of traffic coming from organic search. I think with the first organic search result being pushed off of the fold, that is going to be a dramatic difference in the amount of clicks that you get. If they integrate links to reference material like they do in Perplexity, if they do it that way, maybe it won’t be quite as dramatic, but I’m a little worried about that.

Michael: You know what’s interesting on this too, specifically to what you’re talking about, how the upper part of those results are going to be not organic at some point. Like, what that does is it forces us to then do paid, right? It makes us pay. It could just be an anomaly. It could be an early indicator, I’m not sure. We’re seeing better results with Bing lately. It’s surprising, because we’ve always gone Google, and then what we were seeing was, “Oh, these are actually higher quality and better conversions.” Let’s keep putting a little bit more and more into Bing and see if we like max out, or if it’s really something.

Drew: Bing paid, not Bing organic? Because Bing is what, 5% of search traffic?

Michael: Yeah, well, so we were seeing it on both, right? Like we were seeing actually more coming from Bing organically, but then also, the paid piece was actually quite a bit more effective than the organic piece.

Drew: Wow, they’re smiling in Redmond right now.

James: They’re the first to win with the AI, right? They put a lot of effort into the user experience of search. And I think Google is optimizing their business plan, right? That’s at least how it feels.

Drew: Interesting.

Jeff: I think the demographic of who uses Bing is really interesting, because for the right product, I’ve found that Bing actually way outperforms, especially on the paid side, for certain types of products where the target audience is more likely to use Bing. Whereas, like other products, I’ve tried it on Bing, and it’s been a complete flop, because the target audience uses Google or uses a different search engine, they just don’t live there.

Drew: I mean, it’s so hard because, again, Bing is only X percent, you know, less than 10% of the total amount of search. So, I imagine that you can max out pretty quickly on how much you could spend. And that’s so, you know, if, in fact, organic goes away as a significant driver, because you guys have invested lots and lots of time and energy into getting hundreds of keywords that you know land on the top page, and suddenly they’re below the fold, and traffic goes. Something’s going to have to give, right? Because if you count on that site traffic, which most brands do, it is going to… and you’re not going to get it from ChatGPT, you know, maybe you get it from Perplexity. But I don’t think the reach is there yet. But that would be interesting. I wonder if there are SEO strategies for being the answer to Perplexity’s question, you know.

Michael: Well, or you wonder too, if like, the person using it is just going to start to reject it, because they’re going to be like, “All I’m seeing is ads.” I want actual results, and so they start going to DuckDuckGo, or not Bing. But what’s the other browser even that Microsoft is doing? I guess Bing’s probably better than that, but you may get, like, a rejection from the actual users because they don’t want to see the ads.

Jeff: And I really think there’s a good, like, view into the future of what all the search engines will look like, because they are doing a really excellent job of, like, mixing organic search results with LLM responses. It’s just like, I use it so much and it’s one of the most valuable things in my tech stack right now.

Drew: Amazing. Okay, so very quickly, give me your top two metrics. When we’re focused on demand gen, what are your top two?

Michael: So the top one for us is stage two opportunities, but that stage doesn’t mean anything to you guys, but it’s qualified, right? So it’s qualified opportunity, and the other one is net new inbound are the two things that I look at aside from like ARR and all that kind of stuff.

Drew: James, top two?

James: Very similar. It’s the number of pre-qualified opportunities generated. And then also, little further down the pipeline is impact on closed-won business. Marketing program impact.

Drew: 100 touches and 70 of them were marketing kind of a thing, something like that. Okay. Jeff?

Jeff: Yeah, demo held volume is number one, and then demo to close conversion rate would be number two. So we’re kind of trying to measure the amount of inbound that’s coming from marketing and how well that’s converting into revenue.

Drew: Perfect. Okay. Now final words of wisdom for CMOs who are standing up or refining their demand gen engines, and we’ll start with Jeff.

Jeff: I’d say that diverse set of content types that touch different levels of the buyer’s journey. It’s like the old standard approach of top of funnel is educational and initiating relationships. Middle of funnel is introducing your solution to a prospect’s problems that you uncovered in top of funnel, and then the bottom of funnel is pushing them towards having a sales conversation with a really strong like benefit-oriented call to action.

James: I would say very much start with your strategy before you spend any money, before you buy any tech, right? You need to know exactly who you want to talk to, why they would want to hear from you, right? So it’s, I know it’s marketing basics, but I’ve just been amazed, if you don’t follow that, you’re going to end up spending lots of money on things that aren’t going to help at the end.

Michael: I agree with James, what you said on that, but I’ll take another push, maybe that on the tactical side of that. You went with strategy, I’ll go to the tactics. Look at that funnel and see, are there obvious places where you’ve got issues? If you like, even if your strategy may or may not be super dialed in, it’ll be obvious, if you look at the funnel to see, “Oh, I’ve got problems here, here, here.” It could be top, middle, but whatever it is. And then you can figure where you want to focus your efforts.

Drew: I love it, and a lot of this comes down to you may be targeting the wrong people, and the data is there if you just look for it. Alright. Well, thank you. Michael, James, Jeff, you’re all wonderful sports. Thank you audience for staying with us.

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we’re live, join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile—that’s Drew Neisser—every other week!

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!