← B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
#70: Marketing measurement and the dark funnel with Chris Golec, CEO of Channel99
00:19:42
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- [00:01]
Greg Kilstrom
The agile brand.
- [00:08]
Welcome to the B2B Agility Podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on MarTech marketing operations and CX, bestselling author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show.
- [00:34]
This show is brought to you by Channel 99, a B2B marketing technology company, helping clients get more out of their spend with AI powered decision making. The Channel 99 platform incorporates two key advancements, superior account identification and the first of its kind, B2B ad verification. This allows AI to precisely identify financial inefficiencies across a client's various marketing channels. The platform then optimizes campaign and audience adjustments to automate workflows, maximize labor output and significantly increase operational efficiency for high growth mid market businesses to global enterprises. Channel 99 is a proven investment to accelerate pipeline growth and mitigate marketing investment risk. For more information, visit channel99.com what if 99% of your target accounts see your marketing but never click a single ad? How would you prove your value then? Agility requires a willingness to abandon outdated metrics even when they're comfortable, and embrace a more nuanced, realistic view of the buyer's journey. It means adapting not just our campaigns, but our very definition of success. Today we're going to talk about the massive blind spot in most B2B marketing measurement. The dark funnel where prospects engage with content and ads but never click. We'll explore how AI powered attribution is finally shining a light on this journey, moving us beyond last click models to understand true influence and impact. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Chris Golik, founder and CEO at Channel 99. Chris, welcome to the show.
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Chris Golik
Yeah, thanks for having me, Greg.
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Greg Kilstrom
Pleasure to be here. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you give us a little background on yourself and your role at Channel 99.
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Chris Golik
Yeah, so background on myself. I've been in the software business for a good 30 years, which is pretty long time. So I've been. This is my third. Third startup. I started a supply chain software company in 1996 just when the Internet was taking off and we sold that business and then I started demand based kind of in the whole ABM category back in 2006 when people thought B2B was bed and breakfast. It's Come a long way. And then Channel 99 I founded in 2021 really to look at how do we leverage AI and machine learning to really apply technology to all channels, not just abm, and really help eliminate waste and automate a lot of the operational inefficiencies that exists in B2B marketing.
- [03:15]
Greg Kilstrom
Great, great. So yeah, we're going to talk about a few things here today. I want to start with kind of rethinking what, what some of our objectives are and then the, this concept of the dark funnel that I, that I teed up in the, in the intro. So you know, we've been conditioned for decades to equate clicks with intent and success. Yet you know, any of us that know B2B sales, it's, you know, it's complex, there's multiple stakeholders, there's long sales cycles, all of those kinds of things. You know, from your perspective, what's the biggest strategic error that marketing leaders make when they build their entire measurement framework around click based data?
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Chris Golik
Yeah, I mean I think clicks feels good for marketers, right? Like paid search. It's, you know, I only pay for the clicks. Right. But you know, 85% of those are, are from people or companies that will never buy anything, number one. Number two, you know, clicks is, are probably 10% of the signal online. And so you have to be able to capture not only what's happening on your website, but what's happening off your website. So some of the, the greatest, highest value intent is happening in organic social and it's also happening off your website. So think of people viewing your G2 profile or viewing your competitor's G2 profile. I mean those types of insights are incredibly valuable and you're typically not going to capture that through just tracking a click through a UTM parameter. The reality is people are clicking on stuff a lot less. I don't remember the last time I clicked on an ad.
- [04:57]
Greg Kilstrom
And so, you know, this concept of the dark funnel, so to speak, has been around for a while, but it feels like it's increasingly a blind spot, let's say. And you know, for large enterprises out there, you know, just how much of the buyer's journey are they typically missing by ignoring other things, you know, beyond clicks, you know, view through other non click signals.
- [05:20]
Chris Golik
Yeah. So I'm willing to bet that every B2B marketer that's listening to this podcasts, the majority of their traffic gets thrown in this bucket called direct, meaning they just came to the website. The reality is they probably saw an ad, read a white Paper did something and came to the site and the source is really unknown. And so we've built what we call view through technology to really uncover is it coming from organic, social, did these people or these companies see an ad first? And a lot of times even paid search, they're influenced by other, other channels. So that while you might think the first touch was paid search, it was actually two other channels that happened first. And so the ability to, to use both APIs and tracking pixels allows us to really uncover that dark funnel. And you'd be surprised, but it's probably four to five times the amount of engagement or signal than looking at just clicks.
- [06:26]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. And so, you know, I want to introduce a term here, so AI powered view through attribution. Do you mind, you know, explaining what exactly we mean by this and you know, in practical terms and you know, how, how does this work in connecting dots between things like ad impressions and, you know, downstream business outcomes?
- [06:47]
Chris Golik
Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. I mean, everything is AI, right, so. Right. But the reality is you do want to track impressions and spend to engagement to sales activity, ultimately pipeline and revenue. Right. And have that all synchronized together. And that should be done across all your media channels. Right. Not just what you're doing in the ABM world. And that's really important. So much of the signal has been missing. So that's why we kind of focused on this, you know, view through attribution and also with the ability to identify accounts at much greater scale than what's been done in the past. So as you get a lot more customer signal now, you can create higher value audiences and then use AI to say for this audience of 300 companies, what are the most effective and top performing channels? You shouldn't be guessing what the best channels are. Right. Like it used to be, you know, test, you know, fail fast and test and trial. Those days are kind of gone. You should be able to go right to the most effective channels.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, well, and obviously this is going to help leaders and marketing leaders kind of get better attribution for their campaign. So technically they might get more credit for those campaigns as well. But beyond that, how does this level of insight change the decision making process? What kind of budget or strategy conversations can they have now with CFOs, CEOs that really were not possible before?
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Chris Golik
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, the reality is like marketers have always, you know, they care about MQLs and a lot of people still get paid on MQLs. But CFOs and CROs CEOs, they don't care about MQLs. I mean the definition is always strange. What they do care about is pipeline and do I have sufficient pipeline to hit my revenue targets. And there are leading indicators that can really help you understand what's going to work. One example is, you know, what does it cost to engage a target account? And I say target account, meaning you have to take into account the all the waste that happens. And there's different ways and these different channels, like how effective is LinkedIn at reaching my target accounts versus paying paid search for example. And so when you, when you boil it down to kind of brass tax, like does it cost me ten dollars or a hundred dollars to engage a target account on each of these channels? And that is always correlated to the amount of pipeline influence per dollar spent or return on marketing spend, as some people say.
- [09:35]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, we certainly talked a bit about clicks already. But you know, with deprecation of third party cookies and other, you know, consumer data privacy concerns, things are changing, you know, and those of us in this, you know, know that full and well. How does a view through model that relies on resolving identity not just be, be something that's nice to have, but necessity in, you know, kind of future proofing marketing measurement?
- [10:07]
Chris Golik
Yeah, well, I mean identification, you know, doesn't, you don't have to use cookies. And everything that we do is at the account level. And in the case of our partnership with LinkedIn, you know, we're able to look at the accounts that are viewing social posts or viewing ads and then what's the subsequent engagement on the website. So think of like timestamps and things like that. We also have what we call a smart pixel technology that effectively does three things, but it's a tracking pixel, it, there's no cookies. It gets placed into ad creatives, whether you're using Google or demand based or six sense or different ad providers. And it does three things. One, it identifies the accounts that are viewing the ads, number one. Two, it verifies, you know, is this company in my target audience or the intended audience? And then three, it looks at view through attribution. Is there a subsequent visit from this company within a certain time span, which is usually minutes, of course. And those things become wildly important. And in the case of organic social, you can imagine that somebody reading your social posts and then coming to your site is a much stronger signal of intent than somebody just viewing an ad.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, right.
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Chris Golik
And so now that can all be captured. The other, the side benefit Here that was, it's not surprising to me, but it was news to me was, you know, CMOs and thought leaders spend a lot of time investing their efforts around thought leadership content and social posts and they see the likes and the comments, but now you can actually tie it to pipeline and is it really driving business outcomes? Way more important. And the reality, and the truth is it does. And some of our customers that really invest a lot in their thought leadership have the best ROI on, on LinkedIn.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so you know, as, as, as we mentioned, you know, clicks, tracking clicks, it can be straightforward but also, you know, either misleading or missing out on things. What's the for, for leaders that, that get this but are still kind of stuck in that, that legacy way of, of measuring things. You know, what's, what's a, how do they get to the right, you know, in, in the right, in the right place with this measurement? You know, is this a mindset shift? Are there, you know, some practical things they can do? Like what, what would you recommend a first step?
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Chris Golik
Yeah, I mean it, all of this depends on who is your, who is your customer. Right. And so we always, we make it super easy to create a free account. You can place our, our tag on your website and you'll see how effective we're resolving your audiences and the companies that are coming to your site. We typically see 60 to 70% which is usually 2x what has been done in the past. But in the case of, if you're selling to totally different sector or dentist offices or something like that, probably not as effective. But that's an easy way to say, hey, there's some opportunity here. And that's just step one. You know, step two is okay, let's upload some audiences, let's place some pixels, let's connect to LinkedIn. These are all simple self service things, but it's important to kind of go through those steps just to make sure there's value there. And then once you kind of connect to the CRM system is usually when we move into more of a subscription relationship.
- [13:46]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so you know to, to make this practical, you don't have to share client names or anything, but could you maybe share a story of a customer that made the shift and you know, what, what was kind of the before and after from it?
- [14:03]
Chris Golik
Yeah. I'll share a case study that I actually just presented at a conference two weeks ago. So it's a aggregate of 10 or 12 of our customers that we're spending a lot of money on LinkedIn social and a lot of money on Google paid search. And on the surface they were spending on average 25, 30% more on Google paid search. So we looked at dollar per visit and they were about the same. And then we looked at what's the quality of those visits, were those visits from companies that I could sell to because LinkedIn has much higher targeting efficiency. There was a 2x difference. And so the dollar per visit then from a target account really shifted. And then when you add in the view through attribution, which is three times as many visits, the summary kind of statement here is for every thousand dollars it was, there were four times as many target accounts engaged using LinkedIn versus Google paid search. Now this is a sample of 10 companies, each of which were spending probably a hundred thousand dollars a month. It was a lot of spend. So there's a lot of data behind it. But I would just encourage anybody to, when I say don't try this at home, you should try it at home.
- [15:27]
Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Chris Golik
Because it's always different depending on who you're trying to reach and engage. But this notion of what does it cost to engage a target account is such a great leading indicator for what's going to follow down the chain.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, well, and certainly, you know, there's, there's always change. I mean, we could take any snapshot of time and you know, there's rapid change in technology channels, all of those things. Even, you know, the B2B marketing and sales evolves over time. You know, looking out one, two, maybe even three years, how do you see this technology evolving? And you know, what else gets added to the mix? You know, is there a predictive component to it? It, you know, what, what else, what else do you see coming down the pike?
- [16:13]
Chris Golik
Yeah, I mean, I, I think we're in an interesting position in that, you know, we have our customers data, all their channels, all organized and synced. I, I think where this goes, I don't know if you've heard of like MCP servers, but being able to plug these things into chatgpt into your own instance and so that you could interact with, with the data. Like people don't want another dashboard, right? They want all this data and insight into their work, everyday workflow, whether that's email, Slack, But I think these MCP servers, you know, once we're connected and LinkedIn is connected and Google is connected, all the ChatGPT, you'll be able to create a campaign, launch it, optimize it, automate everything. It's going to be really, really powerful. Because all, all these different systems will be interoperable through APIs and large language models.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Love it. Love it. Well Chris, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Chris Golik
That's a good question. Let's see. I mean this is my third March, so to speak. So it's always different and it's always challenging of course. But I think as you kind of go through building a company, kind of learn what not to spend time on. And I think we're also in a very unique time where it's important to stay educated because the kind of go to market practices. What's happening with AI, it's changing so fast and I'm willing to bet over the next one to two years we'll see more innovation than we have in the last 10 to 20 years within the B2B marketing world.
- [17:59]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I believe it. Well, again I'd like to thank Chris Golick, founder and CEO at Channel 99 for joining the show. You can learn more about Chris on channel 99 by following the links in the show notes.
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Chris Golik
Thank you.
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Greg Kilstrom
Thank you. This show is brought to you by Channel 99, a B2B marketing technology company, helping clients get more out of their spend with AI powered decision making. The Channel 99 platform incorporates two key advancements, superior account identification and the first of its kind, B2B ad verification. This allows AI to precisely identify financial inefficiencies across a client's various marketing channels. The platform then optimizes campaign and audience adjustments to automate workflows, maximize labor output and significantly increase operational efficiency for high growth mid market businesses to global enterprises. Channel 99 is a proven investment to accelerate pipeline growth and mitigate marketing investment risk. For more information, visit channel99.com thanks again.
- [19:02]
For listening to the B2B Agility Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.bagility.com. that's B2B agility.com while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.
- [19:37]
The agile brand.