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- [00:01]
A
From Refine Labs, this is State of Demand Gen.
- [00:07]
B
What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Demand Gen Expert series. I'm your host, Chris Walker, and today I am really excited to have with us Alice De Courcy, the CMO of Cognizant. And we're going to be talking about the transition from lead Gen to demand gen. And we get these types of questions all the time. I get them in my DMs of LinkedIn. I have executives asked me to go and speak to their company or spend a half day off site at their company to help them try and make these transitions. We do events and get questions on it all the time, and I believe that I've communicated a lot of the things that I've seen work. But I am really excited today because we'll get the opportunity to talk through and ask questions from a CMO who actually has made this transition inside of their company. And so, without further ado, excited to introduce Alice to corsa. I'll give her a minute to introduce herself and then we'll get into some questions and topics. Hey, Alice, Good to have you on here.
- [01:02]
A
Yeah. Hi, Chris. Yeah, excited to be here. Longtime listener of Refine Labs and now a customer. I'm CMO at Cognizant. Happy to talk about, like, our experience going from Lead generation to Demand Gen. Funny story. I actually had Chris on one of our podcasts, like, maybe three years ago.
- [01:17]
B
Two or three years ago, yeah.
- [01:19]
A
To debate with me how the ebook wasn't dead. And here I am, a full convert. So hopefully got a lot to share on there, what that journey's been like.
- [01:28]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And so I guess to get the question started, we'll riff off that event because. Right. That was two or three years ago. We were on an event and one thing that you said is that my executive team, my board, needs everything to be measured and know the ROI of everything in order to do this. And when you make the transition, some of those things change. So how did you navigate the expectations of the rest of the executive team and the board when you started to make this transition?
- [01:53]
A
Yeah, so I was thinking about this a lot. We get this question a lot now that we're talking about it more and more and trying to be quite transparent on our journey. I'll break it down into two separate sections. The first section is the easy stuff. It's the things you can do right away that actually don't involve changing anything about your MQL model. So it's the stuff you can start doing where you don't need exact buy in, it's all in your control. You don't even need more budget or a different way of approaching things. It's more of just a shift in mentality and tactical execution. And then the second bucket is actually changes that will alter the MQL model. Those are harder. And I'll go through the step by step process we went through to kind of get to that point. But the things I'm talking about in bucket one were the things that we 100% bought into and believed in. And so we started doing which was things like utilizing a subject matter expert for our content. Like why wouldn't you level up your content? It makes sense that you shouldn't just have someone writing on your blog or whatever that content is that actually isn't an expert in what they do. Or like why wouldn't you use influencers or other or people who are experts in the things that you're talking about to your audience? So we started doing that straight away and you don't need to get by for that, you can just execute that within your own team. And it's just a change and shifting of the tactics. It's harder to do, takes longer, but it's definitely worth it. We completely rethought about our LinkedIn organic channel. So again, kind of taking a leaf out of the Refine Labs book, we started actually tracking every different type of post that we were posting. Was it a carousel, was it like video, long form text, was it short form text? And linked blog, all of these things. And we were measuring and we were understanding what was working, what our audience wanted, what they were engaging with. Very soon became clear. Like the things that did work, they were actually giving value in post, in feed us, not trying to take them out of LinkedIn. So optimizing everything that way, again, that's like an organic piece you can change straight away. Upping our game on product and bottom of funnel content. So this again came from you guys really understanding and getting to grips with our value proposition, our messaging, how we talk to our different Personas and actually be much more transparent about our product. So open product tools, these types of things and building out a whole load of content around that. Again, nothing that you need buying for. You can start doing that off your own bat. And then this idea of building out a media machine for our subscription channels. So this made sense to me as well. It's like, why would I pay, I don't know, 20,000 K, 20,000 pounds to go on someone's newsletter when I Could put out our own newsletter channel ourselves. So we really start doubling down our focus on our podcast, our newsletter and our YouTube channel and then also our blog. So I know like refinels is not something that's like a key part of your strategy, but for us, like the blog and a content led approach was always key to me, but I wanted to think about it as like an always on hub for all the amazing content that we were producing that was super easily searchable and people could go to. And I wanted the content to be different. Like I wanted it to be time timely, I wanted to be journalistic. I wanted to have content writers who act like journalists, find a story, are actually in those dark social channels. And we found a huge uptake not only in like blog views, but then also on time on page gone from like one minute to four minutes. We have over four minutes on some of our blog views now. So again, just like some of these things that you can do straight away without any buy in. Tell me if you want me to stop because I can go into step two now, which is the harder bit, which is all around changes that actually alter the MQL model. But yeah, first things first is we approach all of that differently.
- [05:18]
B
I love that there are some easy takeaways that people could take that require no organizational change that can start to get you moving on this. I thought that's great. I think on the hard stuff I'll guide us through this because I have a couple of setup questions. But I realized that maybe we should take a quick step back for everybody and just talk about why to do this in the first place. So from your perspective, when I talked to you two or three years ago, everything was going fine, right? In your business, things were going good, you were growing. So why consider this change in the first place?
- [05:47]
A
Yeah, great question. It was not going to be scalable to the point of scale that we wanted to go to. In a way that it became very apparent to us that to feed the MQL hamster wheel at the scale we needed to get to was going to involve us hiring bodies in the what we called MDRs, marketing development reps who dealt with all of these MQLs, we also then needed to produce more and more of them. And we understood that the conversion rates on them were lower and the cost that we ended up spending on what we call the content side of our strategy was only increasing. And so for me, it didn't feel like a very scalable way for us to continue to progress. I was interested in becoming More efficient. I was interested in us actually having more conversations with people who wanted to buy. And also just ultimately, I think I understood that the way the whole world had changed. Like, I didn't buy off an ebook download. I just knew for myself that wasn't like a emotion that worked anymore. And it was really hard to ignore. And I wanted to be ahead of the curve. I wanted to do it early. And, yeah, I just saw an opportunity to kind of. And I'll explain. I can explain later, like, how that, like, evolutionized. It wasn't, you know, switch off one day and start, go, full go, all in the next day. It was definitely a transitional phase because, yes, I understood it. Yes, I thought it made sense. But was it going to work for us? And is it definitely applicable across the board? That was questionable.
- [07:12]
B
Yeah. How many people are in your marketing team? Just a real quick question for context for everyone.
- [07:17]
A
19 people now.
- [07:18]
B
19. Okay, perfect. So everyone's got a sense of the size of the team. So we understand now how you got yourself bought in. Right. But the questions that we get a lot are the marketing people are bought in, but they need to also get the head of sales, the CEO, the cfo. So what were some of the conversations like? And maybe if they were different by the person that you had to work with. I think this might be the most valuable part of the event, is like, how do you work as a CMO or a marketing leader to educate and inform the other people inside of the executive team about this change in direction, which goes, quote, unquote, against the grain of what people think that you should do.
- [07:57]
A
Yeah. So it was actually. It all stems from spitting out the funnel. That's absolutely the first step you've got to do because you don't have any data until you do that. To actually go to people and start having these conversations with. You don't have to be having formal conversations with them at this point. As soon as you split the funnel, we had our MQLs and then we had our direct demo requests. And then I did the blended piece. It was incredibly obvious and super powerful from a data perspective. The difference in terms of conversion rate. So to give you an example, it was like 25 leads, direct demo leads for one deal, if it was an inbound demo request versus 500 on the MQL side for one deal. So the economics of it became really apparent. So I just was reporting on that. I wasn't asked to report on it. It wasn't something that we were necessarily measuring as an organization. But I split the funnel and in every revenue meeting. So our rev ops that we have once a month in our board pack that I was presenting to the board every quarter in my weekly updates to the CEO, I would split down the funnel. I would show the difference in the conversion rates, I would show the investment that we were putting into each. And I would just talk about it. And I was trying to just instill this information into people like early on. And my early adopters into it were rev ops and sales. And then the conversations I was having with rev ops and sales was I really want to understand the opportunity cost on time from an outbound rep perspective. How long do they cadence these leads for? How much time would they get back if they weren't working on these content needs and actually were working on pure outbound and having a conversation with them about would it be easier to manage a team of reps if all they were doing was outbound and there was no excuses on their quotas and their attainment on distractions around content, quality content needs or not quality content needs, building a lead scoring model or not. And this was all the noise that we were getting when we had content as part of the playbook. And so that actually just having some of those conversations early on really helped to frame kind of where I wanted to get to next.
- [09:56]
B
Yeah, I love the idea of dripping out the information. For those of the people that don't know what splitting the funnel is, we have plenty of documentation on that. We're not going to cover the details of that here, but that could be a really awesome tool to demonstrate to people the conversion rate and the impact differences between certain lead sources, especially when you're running a lot of direct response or lead gen. I also love the point of if presented the right way, that rev ops and sales should be your allies here. They should also want to be on board with this change because it's better for everybody. And so it's solely about being able to communicate this in a logical way so that everyone can understand it. Because again, it does feel like a concept that goes against the grain, but when presented with the data will make sense to everybody. So now let's get into a little bit more of the. Like, you started to socialize the information with people. Right. Were there any hard conversations that needed to be had in order to sort of do it? Or maybe this is part of like how you transitioned it and you phased it out. But we'd love to hear sort of like what was the next step. Right. We've socialized the information we Have a couple of other departments that are like, yes, this makes sense to me. We can have our MDRs do pure outbound instead of following up on marketing MQL. So what happens after that?
- [11:09]
A
Yeah, so like I said, my board and exec team needed everything to be measurable and they needed to have proof that something was going to work before I could just like go ahead and do it. So I put together this is how we work cognizant about any change. So we call it like a change deck. So I put together my change deck, which was what I was asking for at this point, put it into context and percentage of our budget. It was probably like 2% of the total budget to have as what I call like a CMO experimental budget. And I said, I put it into a hypothesis that I wanted to run this experiment for three months, three, four months where I would have this budget and the own. There would be no measurement on that. That was budget that sat outside of our operating plan and program. And it was for me to use to try and prove something out. And if it didn't work, then fine, like so be it, we move on. And so I put together and I clearly stated that all I wanted to get from that three months was to see an increase in direct inbound demo requests in line with that increased spend month over month that we were operating this new demand gen motion. So the ask was pretty small. I mean it really was more in terms of our budgetary terms. And it felt like there was like big gains to be had. And ultimately I think I had enough goodwill at this point that like they would give me this opportunity to go and experiment and try something out. I'd also Recommend to all CMOs, when you do budget planning, ask for an experimental line from day one. Because then it makes this conversation even easier. You don't actually need to go and get the approval. If you have it, you can utilize it for this purpose anyway. And so yeah, then I started running some of our demand gen plays on our top performing content ungated. It did all of the good stuff with it, paid, put it up on paid social snippets, et cetera. And we actually saw a consistent 47% increase in direct inbounds across those three months in line with the spend that we had reapportioned into demand gen activity. So it was like a super easy graph. What I then did is put it back into the presentation. I had the graph in the deck, I could show the increase in inbounds and I could show the spend that we had literal spend graph to and so it became like a really easy conversation at that point. But even then I wasn't just given green light to go ahead and like radically change everything. I had just proven to myself that this was something that definitely had scope to work. But it's still kind of on me to work out how I could release the budget that was powering this MQL hamster wheel to allow me to do more of the demand gen play. So I actually just split my MQL funnel and understood underneath that the layers we have a break even cost per lead on the MQL side and any campaign that was underperforming that break even cost per lead. I reallocated the budget into those that were hitting it and doubled down spend there which freed up like another a proportion of spend which I was able to put back into the demand gen plays and we ran it like that for another three months and then at this stage we had a huge amount of data where we that we were able to go and prove out that this was something that was worth us doubling down on and a lot more buy in across the board as well. Because I continued to report it back. I continued to get buy in from Revops and the sales team. They continued to hear a lot of noise around content and the time it was taking to follow up on content and that might be why they weren't hitting outbound quota and et cetera, et cetera. So all worlds collided and it became a really nice story at the end of that process.
- [14:29]
B
I want to emphasize and highlight the point that you mentioned about if you analyze each of the individual lead programs and you make a black and white decision and you cut the ones that are clearly not justified based on the outcomes, you can recover a significant amount of budget. I'm not sure what it was for you, but some companies that spend a lot on Google Ads will be more than 50% of the budget can be recovered and deployed to programs that actually work. When you just look at it of is this driving a result that justifies the spend and the answer is often no. I love that point. Would you be open to sharing sort of like a range of how much you were able to recoup when you did that?
- [15:04]
A
40%.
- [15:05]
B
Yeah. That's a significant a 19 person marketing team at a fast growing company that's a significant amount of budget that can be redeployed to better programs. I love that it made it so
- [15:15]
A
easy for us as well. So we weren't asking for any additional budget to like Prove this out. We were just reallocating and when you
- [15:21]
B
did that, the MQLs must have gone down. So how did you manage that?
- [15:26]
A
The MQLs went down but again because we were actually shifting the spend that we were running on MQLs into the campaigns that were getting better cost per leads, we were able to make up a lot of the gaps. So they went down like maybe like 20% overall but not to amount a percentage amount that actually really impacted the sales org. So it wasn't something that was a concern and we actually had almost too many MQLs for them to even manage at the time. So yeah, it wasn't something that we were worried about.
- [15:54]
B
What does the MDR team do now? Right. So if there's. It's either lower volume of I would call low intent leads or maybe there's no volume. So I'd be interested to hear because I think this is a breakthrough concept for people because a lot of the things that hold people back is that I don't know what I'm going to the company broadly right. It's not the marketing team, it's not the sales leader, it's the company broadly thinking. I don't know what we're going to do with our team of SDRs, MDRs, BDRs when we shut this thing off. We'd love to hear how you manage that.
- [16:26]
A
It's easy. We just repurposed marketing development reps into just inbound. So what we've seen by actually shifting all of this budget out of the MQL and into the demand gen inbound engine is we can deliver a huge number of direct demo inbound needs. And our MDRs are responsible for creating an amazing experience for people who come inbound and request a demo from us and creating a great process in that world. And then we didn't have many. We had like three. So we have now three globally. It was really easy repurposed just inbound only and then everyone else just does outbound. There's no MQL Great. Which sales love because they were getting a lot of noise around the time that the team were taking to work content needs or they were booking content meetings. Even worse than like so spending the time converting them that then weren't converting further down the line. So we weren't getting revenue out outbound and they were missing their revenue number and the excuse would be in revops. Oh well we're spending all of our time on these content needs, blah blah blah.
- [17:27]
B
I love just the continuous emphasis of that. This is really Good for the sales team too. If you'd mind giving a little bit more insight on the outbound side because. Right. I think that you've made an interesting choice. I think it's smart to have MDRs focused on inbound and then have a separate team that's focused on outbound. But a lot of companies blend it together and would love to hear from you. How does the outbound team trigger their outbound now? Is it using intent? Is it target accounts cold? Do you have a little bit more detail on how that works?
- [17:56]
A
Yeah, I mean we're a B2B contact data company so I should say that first. So no shortage of contact data. So we have a pretty phenomenal setup when it comes to that. And so our outbound team get powered with the best contact data. It's a combination of accounts and intent overlaid. We also do things like with technographics, et cetera. We have a commercial and enterprise segment. We have two sections. We actually now because of the shift into demand gen, our commercial segment is powered purely by marketing. There isn't, there's like we have. It's a training ground for our outbound reps when they join cognizant to begin with. And we don't put into the panel the model really any revenue coming from that outbound. They're just kind of doing that to like get their feet wet to kind of like make some calls in the commercial piece. But we don't really have them do outbound there. Where we have outbound heavily focused is in the enterprise and for US Enterprise is 500 plus their account focus. And they have as I said like a pretty amazing setup when it comes to the quality of that account data that we can give them the contact data for key stakeholders. And yeah, that's the motion.
- [19:07]
B
I love that. I think it's so logical to set up whatever Your cutoff is, 500 employees. But I think it's gonna be different based on each individual company. But to have this entire SMB mid market velocity motion coming through your website and it just like they just show up and sales closes them and they get a huge contribution. They don't have to worry about any type of outbound or prospecting to that segment. It really does make a huge difference. And then when they. But you need the revenue coming from that segment because it's more consistent, it has higher velocity, it's more repeatable. Exactly. While then the team, because they don't have to go and hit their quota using that type of stuff, then they can focus on how am I going to be strategic? How am I going to think long term, how am I going to work? Enterprise accounts that are going to take longer to close are going to be more lumpy, are going to be less predictable, things like that. I love that point. So what metrics do you use to report back to the executive team and the board on marketing performance? Or maybe let me rephrase, what were the metrics that you used originally and then how have they changed to now of what you report at? Like at the board level?
- [20:08]
A
Yeah, I mean ultimately the board level I always lead with the revenue figure. So but we used to split the revenue figure out by what we called channel. So it was inbound, that's the direct demos content that was the MQL piece and then so inbound direct demos was everything organic and then paid, which was everything direct response like from paid. So we had that kind of split and that was how I report cac, LTV and then also like ultimately revenue and it was also how we'd split our waterfall funnel metrics. So like everything, all the key KPIs that marketing were working towards. How that now looks is it's. We don't obviously don't have content so that, that goes away and it's much more of a. It's a blended picture. So ultimately it's leading with revenue. I still, I report on things like the sales cycle as well. That's really important for us, cost per SQL and how that's decreasing. I report on inbound lead velocity to spend and how that's increasing. And now I've really got dug into like content engagement and like I've been trying to work out how to report at board level meaningful metrics around content engagement. And that I'd still say is like work in progress because it can look really fluffy. But it's super key to everything that we're doing and we're investing huge amount of time in it. So yeah, that's also something that we're looking at.
- [21:31]
B
So I noticed in the metrics you move from at the beginning it was sort of like by channel or by program. Right. Sort of like what you're trained to do. And it's like mainly facilitates channel level attribution and ROI and moving to a blended approach that measures the success of marketing against marketing outcomes. And I believe that that transition is mainly through the acknowledgement that attribution is not perfect. And if you do want it to be perfect, you must run direct response. Would love to talk through a little bit because this can be a difficult concept for other executives to grasp. And so was that something that was challenging to you? And if so, like how did you start to explain it or did you not need permission to make this change?
- [22:11]
A
Well, once we had proven out didn't make economic sense and we removed that, it was actually much easier to kind of redefine how I was reporting anyway because it was new world. It started with a lot of education. That first board debt was actually like this is old state, new state. And trying to explain to them exactly what that meant and then showing them in the metrics and the numbers how that looked differently and just redefining how marketing was going to report. I mean I have to like ultimately marketing at Cognizant owns like 70% of the new business number. It's huge. So if we're hitting, we are fine. Ultimately I'm in a very happy position and there's not too many questions and it's a much easier place to be and I completely acknowledge that. So it would be a different situation if we weren't hitting the number. But I think what was key is the way that I transitioned from lead gen to demand gen meant that we never missed. There was never an excuse. I didn't use an excuse to be like, oh well, we're changing everything up, we're doing something new and that's why we've missed the number. Always hit the number and then everything else is easier.
- [23:18]
B
Yeah. I want to emphasize the point as well that this way of measuring and reporting on marketing to the executive team and the board is way easier, way more simple and it gives your marketing team a lot more flexibility to do what is the best things that are going to help our customers either be more successful, know more about our company and brand, things like that. This has been awesome. So what's on like comes so far, right? And it's amazing. What's the, what are some of the next things that are on the frontier for you? What are you thinking about that maybe you haven't done yet, but want to do?
- [23:49]
A
Yeah. So I think we've only touched the surface in terms of like the subject matter expert piece. So the way we've been rolling this out is again, it was like I had to do a deck, I did a change deck. I got sign off to have a three month trial with someone who's called Rhyme Research. You can see them all over our LinkedIn and things. And he was basically acting part time for us as a subject matter expert. I don't think there's a proven out model yet for like how that works, how you bring someone into your marketing org, especially like a sales leader expert who earns a lot of money doing what they do really well and affordably have them within marketing delivering all this amazing content consistently into like your media machine. So we trialed that out in Q1. We had initial, like we believe very good success in terms of the quality of the content. We could show that in terms of engagement rates being up like 10x podcast views and listens from him, just posting that and doing it more consistently, et cetera. These are some of the early in like the follower numbers that we were able to get for him and to our channel and all of these types of metrics were looking strong and promising. So in Q2 we've doubled down and we're going to get pretty much got him full time. Now again, we're not like it's not a full time commitment. We're just going to do it for Q2 and see how it goes. But I think for me, like I really want to prove this out. I want to show how valuable it is to have that person sit in marketing and power this media machine and build our subscription channels like ourselves. And so that's like one big thing we haven't fully worked out yet. And we're looking to.
- [25:18]
B
I love that I'm seeing the chat blow up with questions. I think it'd be awesome to start getting into them so we can get a little bit more tactical with people and help them out. So Angelica, could you want to roll through some questions and Alice and I can drop our points of view on them for sure.
- [25:32]
C
So David had a question. I'm going to bring him on to ask it.
- [25:39]
D
Hey guys, how are you doing? Hello, Chris. Hello, Alice.
- [25:42]
B
Hey, David. Good to see you.
- [25:43]
D
I definitely want to be in your wonderland doing this. I have a question. So I totally believe and know that a split the funnel exercise makes everything much easier because you can base things on numbers and just really quickly. That's obviously taking all of your higher intent leads and putting them into one stream and measuring their success over a sales cycle. What would you suggest if you don't have a split the funnel because your metrics are so messed up, because your internal systems are so not quite connected yet. Do you have any suggestions on how to make the case that this is the right thing to do? Even though the metrics may not show it just yet, because we're still building them because we still don't have the connected systems that we need in place or Is it really just you've got to do the one before the other and it's just not going to work otherwise?
- [26:39]
A
I'd say all I set out to achieve was something really, really simple, like, you should be able to measure this with the most basic of system. It was a correlation between spending and velocity of inbounds. So assuming you can measure inbounds.
- [26:55]
D
And that's an assumption.
- [26:56]
A
Yeah. Assuming you can measure those two things, which I hope you can, then when you actually start doing some of these motions, you should be able to, at the simplest level, be able to track that velocity.
- [27:08]
B
A couple other quick points that I'll add. This is a huge indicator to go to the company and say, hey, we got to clean this up. We can't make good decisions about marketing or sales until we have this done. It's like basic infrastructure, you know what I'm saying? So that's one piece, but it's not going to help you in the short term. The other thing that I'll say is, in absence of all the data, one of the things that you might have is qualitative feedback from the sales team. And as I continue to get further and further into this, what I acknowledge is that salespeople are very smart. And when they're smart, one of the things that they do is they're going to find the fastest way to hit and the most effective way in order to hit their goals every single time. And so if marketing is doing things that help them hit their goals, they're going to be happy with marketing. And if marketing is not doing things to help them hit their goals, they're not going to be. And so the easiest way, as long as you, as sales knows, hey, these ones are coming from marketing, these ones are coming from somewhere else. If they know that you could go and get direct feedback from them. And you'll often hear these, don't help me hit my goals. I don't like following up with them every time I call. I never get meetings. Or you'll get qualitative insights from the sales team. And then you got to figure out how do I package that and elevate it to a story that makes sense for that team's leader. That's great.
- [28:27]
D
Thank you.
- [28:27]
B
I appreciate it.
- [28:28]
D
In the current situation with a very small startup where the systems are just say it charitably, you could say evolving, because we all start from somewhere. Thank you.
- [28:39]
B
Appreciate it. Awesome. Good luck, David.
- [28:44]
C
Okay, Sam, you're up next.
- [28:48]
E
Hi, guys. Hi, Chris. Hi, Alice.
- [28:51]
B
Hey, Sam. What's up?
- [28:53]
E
How's it going?
- [28:54]
B
Things are awesome. Where are you calling from?
- [28:57]
E
I'm in the uk in Leeds, north of England.
- [29:00]
B
Fantastic. Cool. What can we help with?
- [29:03]
E
I've got a question around paid media and justification which I'm sure you've probably heard a million times before, specifically in the early stage. Now I think paid media obviously plays an integral role as part of the demand gen piece. I've heard you talk a lot Chris, about sort of optimizing for in feed consumption and going about it that way and moving people forward through the buying journey like that. But I'm interested to hear from you. Alice, around. How did those conversations go early on in the shift? You know, in the first six, 12, 18 months when you said to your CFO you walked into boardroom, right guys, I need 50 case, you know, whatever it might be a month to spend on these paid media channels. But we're probably not going to see much back in terms of direct response. You know, we're going to move away from that direct response strategic angle and move toward a more. We're going to tell a story that moves people forward. You know, how did you, how did you justify that and what, what was the CFO's reaction and how did you go around that?
- [30:05]
A
I think this was the beauty of how we approached it was that I said this change, I'm still going to hit my number so the marketing revenue is protected. That's still going to happen. And the way that I evolved and transitioned into it was that I was removing spend, actually wasted spend that was sitting there kind of unknown and hidden in a blended view and putting it directing that into these activities that then were driving. And we saw this very quickly happen. Like it actually doesn't take a lot of time that we're driving those higher quality and higher volume direct inbounds and we needed far less of them to convert into revenue. And we started having record months. Like I think August was actually the one where we just, it took off and, and we had been operating like this only for probably like two to three months previous. But the key was like redirecting the wasted spend. I wasn't asking for more money, I never asked for more money, I was just using it in a different way. I had to back the way that I was approaching it. The redirection of spend, the allocating it into the different areas to still ultimately deliver the other end.
- [31:09]
B
Basically yeah, I'll add a little bit and Sam, feel free to answer, ask a follow up. But I think the part of this, and Alice, you let me Know if this is what you did. But when you, when you make this change and you route it to a CFO at a later stage business metric like qualified pipeline or revenue, when you move the metric from MQLs to there, it really will. It'll help you make that transition because as Alice said, then you can continue to hit that target without people being all that concerned. When MQLs go down by 20% because the pipeline numbers staying the same or growing. So shifting the focus of the company is another way to facilitate the change.
- [31:51]
E
Yeah, I guess the takeaway for me is really no more additional spend. You're just redirecting the spend that's probably been under the guise of being effective in the old lead gen model.
- [32:00]
B
So. Yeah, that's great.
- [32:01]
E
Thanks.
- [32:02]
B
I love that. Great question, Sam. Okay.
- [32:06]
C
Could you dive into what the hardest part about making the transition from lead gen to demand gen is? I feel like we get like a
- [32:13]
A
lot where to start. Like, I think we've kind of brushed over it really, haven't we? We said like, it's all very well that getting bind to do it, but actually doing it and like how you set it up and like how you're going to go about it is probably the hardest part. And we've had a lot of learnings. Yeah, goodness. There's too many for whatever time's left. But that was definitely the hardest bit. And it all honestly came from just listening to Chris and listening to refine labs. And I would literally whiteboard it out my team and we called it Project Chris Walker actually. And we were just trying to work out from everything. We were listening to what they were doing behind the scenes in paid. And it would be little snippets like the conversion window that you should have on a LinkedIn ad. The goal that you should have when you're running these awareness, what we call awareness campaigns on LinkedIn. How to group your audience. Should it be everyone all in one or should we be segmenting down into like Personas and into regions? Like, all of these were unanswered questions and we did a lot of trial and testing yet to get to kind of the right recipe. And we didn't know what the split should be between content, thought, leadership, product ads. We knew we wanted everything to everyone, but like, how much of everything to everyone? What's that split look like and how should you go about setting that up? And then also what does the split look like between converting the 1% and raising awareness in the 99%? All of that was really hard and we Just had to like, yeah, get to work kind of exploring it for ourselves and trying to figure it out.
- [33:44]
B
I'm going to take this a little bit off topic, but there was something at the beginning that you said that I want to dive in a little bit more on and then we'll get back because I see Kim and a couple others have great questions here. You at the beginning mentioned that you recognized that the MQL model was going to become unscalable. Right. And it becomes unscalable for a couple of years. Main reasons the marketing spend that's required in order to generate that many MQLs. At such a poor conversion rate of winning like 1 out of 500, the marketing spend becomes unrealistic. Right. You can just build it into a spreadsheet and you can see that. But more importantly, I believe is actually the amount of headcount that you need to follow up with these leads, get them into meetings and close them because of how inefficient it is and sort of flip that out so that people can understand once you make this change and Instead of converting 1 out of 500, you're converting 1 out of 25 or 1 out of 15 or 1 out of 8. What that really means to your, the overall scalability of the business. Right. The all of the commercial, the headcount you need in sales, the headcount you need in MDRs, SDRs, how you spend your marketing dollars, how you think about resourcing the marketing team. Everything changes because of the scalability and efficiency. We'd love if you could add a little bit more color to the scalability aspect.
- [34:58]
A
Yeah, I mean, I'll say as well, like just to give it some more insight. So what was happening was what we were being asked to sign up to was an MQL target per rep. And so it was something like 400amonth. And what was happening was my team were becoming handcuffed. Like we have to hit those 400 mqls a month otherwise the MDRS aren't going to hit their quota. We're getting all this noise and like everything was successful, super painful. So there would be like panic stations mid month. We'd have to like, I don't know, sort of like turn on the tap on like certain really high performing MQL campaigns that actually we knew weren't conversing at all in Salesforce down the funnel. But we just had to hit that MQL number and so that the whole thing decided to feel like completely wrong and it just didn't Feel like there was any world in which this was going to scale to the level at which we were being asked to. And I think a lot of it was that it became the conflict and the conversations around, okay, what do you want me to optimize for? I can optimize for MQLs and I can absolutely sign up for that and say I'll give you 400 mqls per mdr because I know how to do that really well. Can get $10MQLs on LinkedIn, that's fine. Clickbait, whatever else. But I know inside Salesforce in the CRM, they're not converting, they're not coming in at SQ at the same rate. And ultimately we're wasting all of this reps time. And that once we started having that conversation, I think it becomes a lot more obvious to everyone where things need to shift.
- [36:27]
B
I think it's so powerful too some of the things you mentioned, because I literally hear the exact same things from everyone. Right. We know that these aren't converting, but we're halfway through the month and we're only 30% of our MQL targets. So let's just turn on content syndication, let's just turn on broad match Google search. Right. There's like certain things that people do and they know perfectly well that it doesn't work, but they're, they're forced by the targets that get set at the CMO or executive level that they literally just have to do it. Love that. Okay, let's get to Kim. Had a great question. Let's talk through this one.
- [37:00]
C
Yeah, let me bring her on to elaborate a bit further.
- [37:04]
A
So I have a question. We have successfully started off with our KPI as marketing source revenue and opportunities, which is great. We never got on that MQL hamster wheel, which I'm happy about. But our CFO and CEO are constantly asking for better leading indicators and don't feel as if traffic or engagement is sufficient. I don't either. It feels like there's something in the middle here that we need to report on as a KPI to show leading indicators of success. Even though we're doing great this quarter, we want to make sure no one's freaking out about next quarter. So when you transition alice off of MQL's down to marketing source pipe and revenue, what did your leading indicators become? Yeah, so first of all, it was direct demo. Velocity was the number one thing we were tracking. And then we were tracking how those direct demos were actually converting into qualified opportunities. And we can actually see that result within we have a very fast sales cycle on the commercial side so we could get a very eyes on view on that within a 30 day window and then the actual value of those opportunities and all of those metrics just went up and they continued to go up and they actually continued to go up today as well. So even if we this happened literally last month we were asked by the board to spend more so we were given an additional 100k to spend in one month and they added that revenue target onto the same month which obviously doesn't make any sense and there's like we're never going to get the revenue in month that we actually get to spend but you know whatever, it's fine. So I said look it's fine. I know that we don't want to have an over complicated module but what I'll be able to report back to you after March and what we can look at to see if that spend has actually been successful is the value of the pipeline that we've generated, the velocity of the sales qualified opportunities and the velocity of the direct demo requests in relation to that spend and ultimately if our cost per SQO has remained stable so that we understand that we aren't seeing diminishing returns on that spend and we haven't hit the threshold at which we would start to see those. So those were the things that I kind of signed up to be able to report back on within a month period of having that increase. Spence, I hope that answers the question.
- [39:13]
B
I got a couple more that you can give a shot. Kim, Alice. I think that answer was perfect and pretty much covered what I would but I'll give a couple more that I think are more leading indicators which Kim might find useful. So I think Alice mentioned direct demo requests. Right. So have I would just call them overall demo requests and then if you back out you can sort of like build a couple of our metrics that lead up to that. So what what I call high intent page views is an interesting one. As long as you're not running paid traffic to them can be a really good indicator. So how many people are actually going to your demo page. Another one could be how much direct traffic is coming to our website and is that growing? I found that to be well correlated with overall outcomes. And then there's a new one that I'm just brainstorming here. I don't, I've never tried this for myself but I, I in theory we, we do do this at Refine Labs is if you have your entire ICP and you're running in a paid model. I don't. It's share of voice isn't the right metric, but it's close to it of how often are we touching our icp? And so you can look at that through the frequency metric inside of ad platforms. So that could be another leading indicator. And so we're targeting somewhere between like 6 and 12 touches per month per person.
- [40:31]
C
Okay. We got a question from the YouTube stream. It's pretty vague, so take it in whatever direction you want to take it in. Let's see.
- [40:40]
A
Okay.
- [40:41]
C
How do you get sales and marketing to agree on attribution not being split by the team? That's very vague. But take it in whatever direction you think would be most helpful from the attribution line.
- [40:55]
B
So I think the question's rooted. I'll try and interpret the question so people know where I'm coming from. So in 2017, when I worked for a company, there was. Even though it didn't impact either team's compensation or anything like that, there was unnecessary battles of, like, did sales source that one or did marketing. Right. Or like, it came through a demo request, but sales visited that account 62 days ago. And so we're going to attribute that to sales. And it didn't impact anyone's comp. It didn't do anything. It literally was so unproductive to look at it that way. And what I help the company do is reframe why we split them out. And it's not marketing versus sales. It's is the buyer coming to us or are we going to them? And it's all rooted around where how is the buyer entering our pipeline? It's so much more objective, it's so much more clear, and it makes a lot more sense. And then it eliminates a lot of this friction. Right. So if we had examples of a buyer coming into our demo form and asking for that, like, we would attribute that to inbound. If there was a cold email sequence that had started that, it was clear there was a cold email sequence. The buyer clicked on it, looked at the website, submitted a demo. Instead of replying to the email, you can get that to automatically tag as something like outbound to inbound. So there's a way to automatically attribute that stuff. But I think the short answer to your question is reframing it from which department sourced this to how did the buyer enter our pipeline or come to us?
- [42:21]
C
Okay, let's throw one more in the ring. What are the most common objections that the CEO and CRO will have when making this change and how do you navigate that?
- [42:33]
A
I'm happy to go like what I came up against. So my CEO basically said, well, I believe that while content MQRs may convert at a lower rate, I believe they impact inbounds. And there's a level of things that you can't measure in terms of their value. And so how do you counteract that was how I went about making the shift. Number one, proving it out, but number two, explaining to him how much more powerful that content and how much more likely it was to impact people if it wasn't gated and also if it was shared in the channels that they live in every day, it was easier to consume in those channels. It was optimized for in feed consumption if we were actually paying to get it in front of our audience more readily. And when you start talking in those terms like, it's quite difficult for them to argue that actually doing that would be worse than putting creating all this friction in the process for someone to go and read the content. And also you can just ask them like how many times have you gone to a website, downloaded a piece, a PDF, a piece of content and just like left it on your desktop and never actually read it? Versus you've seen a LinkedIn post that was really compelling and you've actually shared that in a Slack channel somewhere or you've taken a snippet from it and actually utilize that to help you in the job that you do every day.
- [43:55]
B
Love it. Nothing to add there. That was great. Cool. Well, it looks like questions have come up. I am reading the chat here. People have been loving this. We got messages. Such great insights here. This episode has been gold. I love the open sharing. So helpful. Alice, I want to thank you a lot. I was looking forward to this one because of like I mentioned, just so many, I think so many people are going through this right now and through your experience, I think people have learned a lot and so just want to shout you out and say thank you for joining us. I know people got tons of value and obviously I love spending some time catching up with you. So thanks for joining the show.
- [44:30]
A
Yeah, thanks everyone. Happy to answer questions like LinkedIn wherever you want if you're going through it and if I can help. So yeah, great chat.
- [44:38]
B
Awesome. Thank you everyone. We're back here for the Demand Gen Expert series every the first Thursday of every month at 12pm Eastern. And so looking forward to seeing you for our episode in May. See you all soon. Thanks everyone. Have a good rest of your week. Bye. Hey everyone. Really appreciate you tuning into this episode of the State of Demand Gen podcast. I just wanted to take a second to say to all the listeners out there, we just crossed over 40,000 listeners across the world to this podcast and so super grateful and super happy that for all of you, really appreciate you tuning in, attending the live events, engaging on the LinkedIn content, and now watching us get started up and engaging on YouTube and Tik Tok. And so thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you. And if you haven't already, if you've gotten value from the podcast, I would really appreciate if you go to Apple Podcasts in the review section of this podcast and leave a quick review or a rating. It would mean a lot to me. Thank you very much and we'll see you for the next episode.