It’s one thing for a CEO or Sales leader to proclaim “We need more leads!” and something altogether different to generate qualified demand. Most marketers have experienced some level of unrealistic pressure to just make leads happen. Advertising or sponsorship spend can buy eyeballs. But by themselves, these tactics won’t build healthy revenue.
So what’s a growing business to do? While new leads are critical, they aren’t the only avenue for healthy revenue growth and profitability. And getting to qualified, scalable net-new lead inflow takes strategic focus, trial-and-error, and most importantly – time.
Join us for a recorded webinar conversation, featuring a panel of experienced B2B and B2C marketing leaders – as we deep dive into demand, explore the role of marketing across the entire buyer’s journey (not only in the lead stage), and help you consider your surest pathway to healthy growth this year and beyond.
Key Takeaways
- There are no quick fixes in the demand generation process – it takes time and patience.
- Demand generation creates awareness and interest; lead generation turns prospects into warm leads.
- Prospects usually need 7 or more interactions with your company before making a purchase decision.
- Focus on your existing customers for faster demand generation results through up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.
Links & Resources Mentioned
- Gartner Says 80% of B2B Sales Interactions Between Suppliers and Buyers Will Occur in Digital Channels by 2025
- The power of the Authentic Mindshare™ and CMO peer community
- Does your business need more leads? Balance quick wins with building a demand generation strategy
- Demand Generation 101: Build a foundation for a strong program
- How to build an effective on-demand marketing team
Webinar Transcription
Welcome and Introductions
Jennifer Zick: Hello, everybody, and welcome. Welcome to today’s Webinar. I am Jennifer Zick, your host and today’s moderator. We’re thrilled to have you here with us. And if you happen to be based in Minnesota, in our hometown community, I hope today you’re finding yourself somewhere warm, cozy and safe. Three of the four of us are here in Minnesota, and then John is out in California making fun of our blizzard and enjoying his lovely sunny weather. So wherever you are in the world today, we’re delighted that you’re spending this hour with us, and we’re grateful for that. You’ve landed with Authentic® here for our Authentic Growth™ webinar series. And if you’re not familiar with us, I just want to take a moment to introduce myself and then introduce this wonderful team of panelists today.
So, as I mentioned, I’m Jennifer and I’m the founder and CEO of Authentic. We are a community of fractional chief marketing officers that works with all different types of businesses around the country and sometimes beyond the US, helping them to Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently take the next right step in their growth journey. We mostly work with businesses between 5 million and 100 million in revenue. And for those businesses, we become part of their leadership team as the head of marketing on a fractional or part time flexible basis. And we’re usually with them on that journey for one to two or more years, helping to build a strong foundation, helping them feel confident about the mix, the hires and the resourcing to create a really strong marketing engine, foundation and program.
And we just absolutely love doing that work for businesses that are B2B, B2C, E-Commerce, distributor, and all different kinds of industries. So today we are going to cover a really important topic that touches down in every one of our client relationships, and that is demand generation. And those of you attending might have been drawn to the title, I hereby demand, because if you’ve ever been in a marketing seat or biz dev seat inside of a growth business, you’ve probably felt the pressure of creating demand, sometimes within the context of some unrealistic expectations or high hopes or wishful thinking. So today we’re going to try to demystify the concept of demand gen, really break it down to what it means and how you can create it and how you can manage expectations in your business.
And I also want to recognize that today we have a really diverse audience of attendees who represent entrepreneurs. They’re revenue leaders, marketers, agency partners, and perhaps marketing leaders within larger corporations. So we’re so grateful you’re here, and I hope that all of you get something tangible of value that you can walk away with, start a fresh conversation, or implement some new ideas inside of your business. But I did want you to understand that for most of the work we do at Authentic Brand, we’re working with the executive team of these small entrepreneurial growth businesses. So much of what we share today will come through that lens. So with that, I want to get into the fun part of the conversation and introduce you to my esteemed panelists.
And within this webinar growth series, we often draw upon our CMO experts, and sometimes we bring in third party participants. Today, this is an all Authentic team. So I’m delighted to spend time with each of them, and I would love to allow them to introduce themselves to you. So, Barb, I will start with you, let you say hello to our audience.
Barb Bertsch: Hey, everybody. I am Barb Bertsch. I am a fractional CMO and I have been with Authentic since 2017. Coming to you today, my background is really focusing on B2B professional services for the most part. So that’s really kind of how I. That’s my vision for this topic today.
Jennifer Zick: Thanks, Barb. Ruth, over to you.
Ruth Glaser: Great. Thanks, Jen. I’m Ruth Glaser, and I’ve been a fractional CMO with Authentic for about three years. And I have worked with both B2B, mostly in the technology space, as well as B2C clients. Direct to consumer and e-commerce is where I spend most of my time. But regardless of the industry or the business model, demand generation is a priority for every single client I work with. So I’m really excited for our conversation today.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Ruth. And hi, John.
John Ryan: Hi. I’m from California. Thank you. And it’s great to be here with my colleagues. They’re amazing. They really are. My background is all B2B. I’ve been doing this for over 30 years at different levels in different places, and consulted for dozens of companies. So I’ve seen a lot of stuff and hopefully I learned something along the way and I’m happy to be here.
The Difference Between Lead Generation and Demand Generation
Jennifer Zick: Thank you, John. One more little housekeeping note for our audience today as we jump in on this topic is if you look at the control panel of your webinar environment, you should see a Q+A feature as well as a chat feature. I want to call your attention to the Q+A feature as you’re listening in today. If you have a question that you’d like to pose to the panelists, we’re going to try to create some time at the end of the conversation to address some audience questions. So we would love for you to plug your question in there. I will be keeping a peripheral vision on the q and a as it’s coming through so that we can pull through some of your questions and hopefully give you even more value today.
So all right, let’s dive in and get started on this hot topic. And Barb, I’m going to start with you. Since I picked on you first for intros, I’d like to just level set with the audience. And I’m going to start with you, but I’m going to invite Ruth and John to chime in on this too, because I think sometimes this is an area that’s a little gray. How would you define the difference between lead generation and demand generation?
Barb Bertsch: Great question. The difference really is that demand generation is designed to create awareness and interest. Top of funnel lead gen really helps you turn those top of funnel prospects into more warm leads who eventually you hope become customers. I find it to be a little bit of a loaded question.
There’s a lot of dependencies, like how much brand awareness does your company already have? How far along are you with some of those foundational elements that we find necessary to level up your marketing technology, metrics, messaging, buyer’s journey. Do you know who your buyers are? Do you know who you’re targeting? Have you spent the time developing buyer Personas? How are they finding you all that to say that the difference is, really, do you need to first build brand awareness to create the demand? Or can we move right into lead generation? Can we effectively find some low hanging fruit to gather up some quick wins? Like how much are you willing to budget for these efforts? So there’s all these questions that kind of go hand in hand with this. And finally, are you willing to experiment in the approach?
Marketing is full of experimentation. As we all know, there’s not a one size fits all approach to lead gen. If all these elements are in place, gathering leads down the funnel can have a much quicker turn, I think, on the sales cycle than if we’re working on what we like to call spray and pray approach, doing random things. We get direction all the time from leaders that say, hey, I just saw this, can we try it? And it’s not attached to any kind of business strategy whatsoever. And it’s like, how do you respond to that?
And as a buyer today, it’s becoming increasingly more and more important that we personalize their experience. If I get something in my inbox, we’re busy. Our inboxes are inundated, and our attention spans are short. So if I feel somebody’s marketing doesn’t apply directly to me, I’ve moved on. I’m unsubscribing. So with demandgen, you know what is like when that’s dialed in and people are excited about your brand awareness is dialed in, the leads are going to come quicker, and the sales cycle will be shortened. So that’s kind of a long answer to the question, but I do feel like it’s pretty loaded.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, there’s those. I see those terms often used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Ruth or John. You want to chime in on how you see that concept play out with clients you work with?
Ruth Glaser: Sure. I agree with everything Barb just said, and I tend to think of lead generation as the bottom of the funnel. And demand Gen is everything that it takes before that to get to lead generation. And I think people often conflate the two and want to skip right to lead generation without having done all the necessary steps to create that awareness and that demand for your product or service. So that is where, you know, a lot of times I’ve seen when we come in, that’s where we need to focus first because the tactics might be executed and they’re not getting the results that are needed. And it’s because we haven’t laid that groundwork yet to create that integrated marketing strategy that’s going to ultimately yield those leads. Absolutely.
John Ryan: Yeah. I think every company has its own cocktail, right? And so Barb was exactly right when she went down the laundry list of things that need to be done. You can’t get to where you want to get to without doing what Barb told you. So what she’s. What Barb and Ruth are leading to really is a marketing effort that is like running a lab. And you take those things that have the highest probability based on your experiences and that unique situation you’re staring at. You say, I think I’ll start with this, but I’ll scale later. But I’ll figure it out now. But then I’ll scale later based on the process I figure out. But everything that Ruth and Barb are telling you are absolutely necessary for you to optimize your marketing dollar.
Timeframe & Expectations
Jennifer Zick: And this leads us really into the next question, which is like the money question. Every CEO and CFO I speak with who are struggling in their organizations with what we lovingly call random acts of marketing, they’re feeling the pain. Marketing feels like the black hole they’re throwing money in and wondering what they’re getting in ROI. And they want to know, after experiencing some of that tactical pain, how long is it going to take? Like, yes, maybe we need to create demand and. But what we really need are more at bats. We need leads. But the four of us on this call and many listening, they know that creating demand takes time. So, Ruth, why are there no quick fixes to this process?
Ruth Glaser: That is a great question. And when we run into it all the time, it would be great if all it took to be successful was to build a really quality product or offer a great solution or service that people would immediately be aware of and want to purchase. But it’s never that easy, right? It’s not like a field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. It takes a lot of work to get people aware of it and understand what it is we’re offering. So we have to help people know that you exist, what the offering is and what it means to them, why they should care about it at all. In marketing, we talk about something called the rule of seven, which some of us think should be like the rule of 15 or the rule of 20.
But essentially what that means is that it’s going to take a prospective buyer at least seven interactions with your brand before they make that purchase decision. So those interactions, or touch points could be anything from, you know, seeing you at an industry event, watching you on a webinar, getting an email, reading a blog, you know, all those different things, all those different tactics that we do, it’s going to take seven of those before somebody is ready to buy. So to create those touch points, like I said earlier, it’s going to take an integrated marketing strategy that’s consistently reaching the right people.
So your target audience, and it’s speaking to them in a way that resonates with them, and that takes time to plan, it takes time to execute, and then it takes time for those brand interactions to actually occur, to ultimately get the results you need. And this is all assuming that you’ve already got that solid foundation built so you already know who your ideal customer is. You’re not trying to be everything to everyone. You know what that customer’s pain points are and how your solution uniquely solves those and is better than what the competitors are offering. And you’re delivering this info in places where your ideal customers are and in a way that really resonates with them. So none of that is something we can do in a week, right? It’s going to take time to get all of those things to occur.
Jennifer Zick: John and Barb, how would you respond, or how do you respond on this question of, you know, how quickly can all of this happen? What are some of the experiences you’ve had or cautionary words that you would offer?
John Ryan: Well, I have a cautionary position I’ll take, which is you’re dealing with the most sophisticated buyer that’s ever existed. These buyers are more informed than we could have ever imagined by 2023. And for a lot of us who grew up in the tech industry, like myself, we used to get away with a lot more sloppiness than you can get away with today. You better be on point. You better know who your buyer is. You better know what the pain is that they’re dealing with. You got to know what they’re aspiring to do, and you have to speak to that. They don’t care about what we’re doing as a vendor. What they care about is how we’re going to benefit them first. And so the faster we get to that and we start educating them so that they are prepared to be a buyer.
In B2B, Gardner says that 83% of the buyer’s activity has nothing to do with you, the vendor, only 17% does. So we have to take a lot of effort to convince that buyer that we’re there to help and educate them, make the best decision, and from a consultative standpoint, not from a transaction standpoint. So just remember, the most sophisticated buyer the world’s ever seen, whatever you learned 20, 30 years ago in marketing isn’t true anymore.
Barb Bertsch: Yeah, and I would just piggyback off of that. I mean, Ruth really did a great job at covering, like, holistically everything that we need to be looking at. I would just say with respect to the buyer’s journey, it’s never been more important to revisit that, because what you need to do is we have to have content built out for each phase of that buyer’s journey. And making sure that you’ve got a platform for, like, every single piece of content that you need, whether it’s a blog, whether it’s a case study, and it’s, you know, case studies are difficult. They take a long time. So it’s really level setting on, like, okay, this year, we want to focus on XYZ. We need to revisit. Did our buyers change? Did their journey, and how they’re getting to us change?
Think about COVID. Like, that changed the way a lot of people buy. They don’t necessarily want to talk to anybody anymore. So we have to find ways as marketers to get at them in much more creative ways and provide value for them along their entire journey.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. And I love to jump from moderator to co-panelist now and then in these conversations because I of course came from a marketing background and lead this team of brilliant marketers, but also because Authentic is drinking our own champagne as it relates to this topic and building strategic marketing foundation. One example of that is that when I started Authentic and it was just me and a vision for growth, I knew that if I wanted to create inbound demand, that I would need to start creating content, quality content, regularly, consistently for a defined audience, and that it would probably take three years for all of that consistent content to start to organically generate some inertia. And that was exactly true. It took three years of building a team, delivering great content, continuing to do that today.
And now Authentic has grown through mostly inbound demand as a result of that. But that’s a long tail journey in terms of investing for growth and it is a true investment. And so I speak with a lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs who want to live in the land of the tactics and want marketing to come in and rebuild their sales deck. But that’s just one piece of content, right? And above all of that is that foundation you talked about so beautifully, Ruth. And we’re going to dig in more on what that means in terms of setting up strategic health for the marketing engine to build demand. But let me tee off the next question. I’m going to come to you, John, on this.
How Marketing Aligns Through the Customer Journey
Jennifer Zick: How can marketing take a lead role in not only fostering demand across all of those customer life stages, not just at the top of the funnel, but so let me rephrase this a little bit. Marketing is often thought of just as lead generation, just as bringing in the leads and sales will take them from there and then we’ll move them through the organization. But really the role of marketing can be really strategically supportive of the entire customer journey. So can you dig in on that a little bit with us and help us understand how marketing aligns through that journey?
John Ryan: Well, Barb sort of already answered the question, but I’ll go over it again.
Jennifer Zick: Give us your perspective. We’re going deeper here. Dig deeper.
John Ryan: Yeah, could you get some dumb cmos I can be on here with? I’d appreciate it. Now look, hey look, so the thing is that from the top of the funnel down to the bottom of the funnel, marketing has to be involved. Marketing has to look at itself as a revenue engine who is collaborating with sales in order to create revenue at the end of the day. So to think of you as a I’m going to throw it over the wall and walk away. That’s nonsense. That’s 20 years, 30 years ago type stuff. We don’t need that. And no one, you’re not going to survive thinking that way. So the way you want to look at this, amazingly enough, is talk to your current customers. So if you go to your current customers and you say, why us? Why did you choose us?
What was it about our company that stood out versus our competition? And who else did you talk to? And you start digging in that and start asking the right questions, then you can start building the right content that fits the journey along the way. Whether you’re at the top, which is around awareness, whether you’re meeting them, where they’re going, where your sales team is doing discovery, and they need supporting artifacts to help them be successful, that needs to be done, too. And then when they get down to decision time, what content is going to help them make a decision? Like, for instance, I don’t know, a happy client that did a video testimonial.
So when you start thinking this way, because here’s the thing everybody forgets is that when you go into a large organization, you’re not talking to the person you’re talking to. You’re talking to a buying team of four to eight people. And guess what? When you walk out of the building, who are they talking to? They’re talking to themselves. So the more you arm them with the right messaging and the right marketing pieces so that they can communicate and get happy with you, the better off you’re going to be and the more velocity you’re going to see behind a sales opportunity.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Let me add another dimension to this question as I lob it over for commentary from the rest of the team here. We’re currently entering 2023 in a time when we’re in the midst of what I would call a recession sensitive market. And we’ve been talking amongst our CMO team in our mindshare meetings about the need more than ever to focus resources and efforts on client retention, satisfaction, advocacy, growth, while of course, keeping the wheels going on net new demand creation and lead generation. But knowing that the top of the funnel might be filling a little more slowly right now while people are in a state of hold off on big decisions. Right. So let’s talk about the role of marketing even after they’ve come through the bottom of the decision funnel and now they’re a client. How can marketing be creating demand within existing customer relationships?
John Ryan: Well, I’ll just say one thing quickly, Jennifer, and thank you for saying that, because you sort of teed me up for something I wanted to talk about, which was trust. And the issue is, when you’re doing business development, there is that trust is a currency that’s trying to be developed at the front end. The thing about your customers is you already have that. So then your opportunity is to. To optimize that relationship with that customer, to look at other ways you can help them because of that trust, and then take that trust and turn it into things like the video and case studies and everything else, so that the new people can see that and say, oh, they trust you. I should too.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. I call that amplified trust. Right. Harnessing the power of trust and amplifying it to other audiences. Ruth, it looked like you had something to add here.
Ruth Glaser: Yeah, absolutely. I was actually going to touch on exactly that. That part of marketing that is often overlooked, where it can help quite a bit, is post sale. So it’s about increasing the lifetime value of a relationship with a customer. So in the B2C world, it’s really about delivering on the promise that you made in marketing. And actually, that’s true in the B2B world as well. Right. So we’ve sold a product or a service.
Now we need to make sure that the customer is happy with what they’ve purchased, and we can do some things to help measure and facilitate that, help onboard them, help measure after the fact how they’re feeling about it, and help to build that loyalty and advocacy that we can then translate into some of those tactical pieces that John mentioned earlier, customer testimonials and videos and so on and so forth. And the other thing that, especially in the B2C world that we can do is look at ways when we have a customer who’s already trusting us, who’s already happy with us, what are the upsell and cross sell opportunities that we can do to that already engaged customer base? It’s a lot easier to market and sell to that group of people than to go out and find the new folks.
Jennifer Zick: The rule of seven or 15 or 30 touches has already been applied in that relationship. So now it’s about the right touch at the right time to extend that trust. Right?
Ruth Glaser: Right.
Barb Bertsch: Yeah. And I would just on that topic say that I think that in the world of marketing, we’ve tended to be better at nurturing those current customers on the B2C side than maybe we are on the B2B side. Well, there’s definitely some opportunity.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. And I think perhaps one of the reasons that’s true, Barb, is that in the B2C landscape, there often isn’t a sales organization. It’s marketing driven down to the customer experience. In a B2B world, you usually have a pretty robust sales organization that’s part of that lifecycle. And historically, as John talked about 2030 years ago and even still today in many organizations, there’s this sense of now on the sales side. Now I own the relationship from the point of sale forward and I’ve spent so much of my time and energy educating entrepreneurial teams to think about one revenue organization that we need to be working together through all of these customer touch points.
Marketing Across the Entire Customer Lifecycle
Jennifer Zick: And it’s very self-defeating culturally to award credit only to marketing for this activity or only to sales for this win, when really we need to be building that demand, winning the business and serving the business together hand in hand. So we segued really naturally into the next part of the conversation, which has to do with those three pieces. So I’m going to back us up a little bit to articulate this and step us back a little bit differently into the same topic. So a lot of the businesses we work with are not super mature when we start working with them from a strategic marketing perspective. So we do a lot of education with them about what components need to exist in a healthy modern marketing function.
And talking about three really key focus areas for how budgets should be established and teams should be resourced and activities should be organized. And we talk about three categories like creating brand awareness in the market, starting to create those trust engines, creating demand generation, like becoming a magnet to pull people through into experience, and then customer retention, which were just talking about. So those are kind of three big buckets. So right now, as you think about the clients you’re working with and the clients you have worked with, do you find that when you step into a growth company, they might be stronger in just one area or one dimensional? How do you help them to think about bringing marketing across all those dimensions of the life cycle?
And I’m going to just bring that back to Barb again and ask you to walk us through that. What are some of the conversations you have with clients and thinking more holistically about the role of marketing in customer lifecycle demand?
Barb Bertsch: Well, as I was saying earlier, even if you have your brand awareness dialed in, there’s still this need to actively continue doing brand awareness, which in effect will generate interest or demand and thereby create leads. But one thing that we haven’t touched on, well, we have touched on, we just started touch on is customer retention. And I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking about that here because this year is one of the more important times for companies to focus their efforts here. And as we were talking earlier, we really just need to continue to nurture and provide value-added content at every stage so that they can continue to understand the value of the relationship and what we have to offer them. And I think both John and Ruth touched on cross selling and upselling.
You know, what do we already have that we can focus on to get them to buy more of or to buy differently with the economy the way it is today? Both Forrester and Gartner have mentioned that the number one areas for cmos to be focusing on this year is customer retention. And they’ve been predicting this since last fall. And they’re saying that more than half of the US consumers are going to reduce their online spending this year. It’s a big deal. It’s grabbing new customers. This year is going to be a bigger lift than working to retain the ones that you have and getting them on board to buy more and just remain with you in what they’re buying today and helping them understand the value and what they have today.
So the low hanging fruit in your organization and many this year is going to be current customers really taking the time to nurture those relationships and build and add value with that. Don’t have a marketing loyalty program in place, perhaps this is the year to implement one. So marketing plans really need to include as part of that strategy all those foundational elements we talked about, like the buyer’s journey, revisiting the buyer’s journey, revisiting your content library and determining what you need to continue to add value to the customers that you have while trying to bring in and demand, or create demand and bring leads in.
But finding out where your customers are hanging out today might be different than where they were before from here, just developing a much sounder, more efficient strategy to capture those leads, which then can obviously bring a quicker return on your marketing dollar investment and shorten that sales cycle.
Jennifer Zick: Well, I want to come back to you, Barb, on something in terms of practical advice for small businesses that have been sales driven, that haven’t thought about having marketing come alongside and support existing customer relationships. I want to put a pin in that for a minute because, John, when we were talking about this upcoming webinar, talking about this topic, I think it might have been you that talked about how to grab the attention of a more high intent buyer versus a lower intent buyer. Am I remembering correctly that we talked about that?
John Ryan: Yes. Yes. And thank you for remembering it was me.
Jennifer Zick: Okay.
John Ryan: I think when we look at the, in your mind, if you’re holding the idea of a funnel, then I would split the funnel and say one side you’ve got the low intent buyer and those people are like tourists. They’re going to bounce off your website, they’re going to come to your website, they’re going to make you feel like something’s happening. It’s not happening for a long time. The people you want to get in front of are the high intent buyers. And those people will send you signals and they might send you signals through HubSpot. They might send them as a marketing automation platform. They might send them through Zoom information. If you’re using that and they’re taking certain actions and those actions are letting you know, hey, I’m getting serious about this.
To me in 2023, this is what I was telling the team in 2023. I think if it were me, that’s where I probably spent a disproportionate amount of my time and resources going after those high intent buyers.
Setting the Foundation for Marketing and Sales Alignment
Jennifer Zick: Being more discerning with your resources rather than chasing everybody who looks like they’re touching into the brand. I think that’s wise. And Barb, I want to bounce back to you real quickly on this because I’ve seen you walk into several of our client accounts that have been founder led sales driven. They may have had a marketing coordinator, but they haven’t had a strategic marketing leader. And they may not have a well organized, modern sales team. They might be territorial, not wanting to share their data. They might not have a well organized CRM that gives marketing even visibility into the customer situation.
Like, how have you walked them through the journey of letting marketing have a seat at the table to help themselves? What are some of the things that need to exist for that to work?
Barb Bertsch: I think really engaging with them on the overall business strategy and helping them understand, like, okay, well, help me understand your goals. And, you know, if it was 2023 and we’re talking about their business goals and they’ve got a goal to increase their customer base by 25 or 30%, I might ask them to dial that back and let’s talk about the state of the economy and how do you think we’re going to do that? Because here’s what I’m seeing and I think I would start the conversation there. I really want to make sure that leaders are allowing marketing to have that seat at the table because we need to attach whatever strategy we’re doing to what the business goals are. Does that answer your question?
Jennifer Zick: And I think I would supplement that by saying, in my experience, a lot of entrepreneurial businesses have grown by throwing a target number at the wall and let’s all work as hard as we can to hustle our way to hit that number. Without understanding all the leading indicators and the metrics and the KPI’s that actually should help to guide and shape your growth goals and vision.
So I think it’s been really critical in our growth business and with our clients to have marketing working with sales to really look at the data and the performance history and the marketplace in order to set realistic goals in terms of what can we expect in terms of new demand, in what new audiences can we possibly reach, at what pace based on our historical ability to do that and our current reality in terms of resourcing, budget and appetite for growth? Ruth, I haven’t heard from you in a while. Is there anything you want to add on this note before we move to the next little segment?
Ruth Glaser: Well, I was just thinking back to the original question of focusing across all the three main areas of brand awareness, demand, gen and customer retention. And I spoke earlier about Cross sell and upsell to the existing customer client base. But the other thing to remember is that we can market to them as well in a way that’s providing value. Not every communication is a sales communication. There’s an example of a company that I’m fond of, the work that they do, Databox, it’s dashboards to easily digest your marketing information. And one of the things that they do on a regular basis is they release new templates for how to create your dashboard and there aren’t charges for that. It’s just a free thing that they do to continue to evolve the value of their offering.
And I think especially in today’s economic climate, those are things that marketers can help companies look at. How do we continue to add value to the customer base that we already have and delight them before we’re trying to sell them more, or additional or the next big sale? Looking at providing value versus just the transactional aspect of it too, I think is something where marketing can definitely play a role.
Jennifer Zick: I love that. And in a really tactical, applicable case point on that, we’re seeing more clients. And even at Authentic Brand, we’re making the choice to give away more content to the broader market and remove some of the gated forms and the things on our assets that we thought were helping with lead, gentlemen, a couple of years ago. But in reality, when brands are willing to give generously of their wisdom and their resources, creating that trust, that actually becomes that magnetic force of demand is so much easier than putting obstacles in the way of the people who want to learn whether they can trust you. One example of that at Authentic is we’re in the process of un-gating all of our recorded on demand webinars because they’re free for anyone who registers in the first place.
We don’t want to create a barrier to people accessing this valuable content, and we want to. We want to build that trust faster, more seamlessly, and we actually want to help them, whether they ever work with us or not. We want to be helpful. So those are great opportunities to think about your brand and the trust that you’re creating.
John Ryan: Yeah, I think I could jump in a couple of things. Number one is I love what Barb said about making her way to the strategy table, because I think that when organizations basically tell marketing, people, stand up against the wall, you can’t sit at the big person’s table, you’re asking for trouble. So I went, I remember a prime asset meeting I went to 25 years ago where somebody came in, the product manager and said, we’re going to sell this many units in the next year. And I said, that’s not possible. And I went, and I’m a very optimistic person, but I wasn’t crazy. And so I said, here’s why. Because they had too much competition. They weren’t the leader in the category. And I was right. And it was good because we basically looked. It wasn’t, they weren’t going to do poorly.
It’s just, don’t get crazy. Look at your category. How much competition do you have? Understand, it is what you’re doing, because marketing and sales cannot fix a bad product or reputation. And so these are the kinds of things we have to understand. It’s not. There are no silver bullets. We are working as a team across the company. It is a one revenue team. What is it that each of us will be doing to help? I think that’s very important. So thank you. I just want to jump in and say that because I thought what Barb said about getting into the strategy discussion is spot on.
Lead and Demand Generation Opportunities
Jennifer Zick: Awesome. So good. And we could go deep on this topic, but I want to cover the whole range of what we set up for today. I do a little bit of a flip of the coin here because we’ve just doubled down on enforcing that. Nothing about demand gen and subsequent lead gen is easy, fast, magical light switch faucet. Right? Like these are the things that everybody wishes it would be, but it’s just not. And so the other side of that coin is that there are probably a lot of marketers and salespeople on this call who are under the gun, under pressure from upper management to produce results, to find low hanging fruit, to do the stuff that quickly drives demand.
So let’s think about those folks and feel their pain with them for a moment and think, how could we help them look differently, maybe at their situation, to find some opportunities to move a little more quickly on demand gen and lead generation. So, Ruth, where have you seen some faster successes in this area?
Ruth Glaser: Yeah, well, first of all, I want to address the concept of low hanging fruit because my understanding is that you still have to climb the tree to get to it. So there’s still a lift. It’s not like a switch that you’re just going to turn on, but there are some more tactical things that you can get started more quickly as you’re developing all of those other strategies that we talked about earlier. So if we haven’t beaten this horse to death, I’m going to say cross sell and upsell existing clients. That is always my number one way to quickly generate leads or demand. The second tactic that I use are referrals, and you need to be really intentional about that. So you have to ask for it. You have to. In some cases, you have to be incentivized for it.
In the B2C world, for example, I’m sure you’ve all ordered things online and you get an email to get 20% off your next order if you refer a friend. So things of that nature can be very effective. And again, it goes back to focusing on making sure that you’re delivering on your original marketing promises and you’ve got happy customers, and then you can ask for referrals and then I would say, doubling down on what’s working. So we’ve done this in multiple clients that I’ve had where, let’s say that we have an ad campaign that’s bringing in good prospects or resulting in good sales. You need to spend more on that. And sometimes it’s surprisingly difficult to convince the controllers of budget to do that. But if you invest more on something that’s working, you’re going to get better results.
You’re going to make more money on it. You have to keep a really close eye on that, however, because you’re going to reach that point of diminishing returns. That would be another way that I would go about it then. This last one is something that I just recently rediscovered, and that’s reusing efforts or redoing efforts that have worked in the past. For one of my clients, we had created a really nice and valuable piece of content a couple years ago, and just a few weeks ago we repromoted it on LinkedIn, and that resulted in immediate conversions and immediate new leads. And it took really nothing more than making a post on LinkedIn, sort of promoting that piece of existing content. So, you know, look at what’s worked in the past. What can we maybe dust off and re-deploy and do again?
And then in the B2C world, I think people frequently sort of revert back to, well, let’s offer a promotion or a sale, which is nearly always going to generate some quick sales. But I do want to put a little caution on that, because you don’t want to train your customers to only buy when the product is discounted. And we work really hard to build up our brand and build up our reputation and the value of the products and services that we sell. So the promotions I would just be very cautious of and use them very judiciously. So those are just a few things that I have seen be successful. The other kind of comment I would make about it is that they can’t work in isolation for a long time. They’re not sustainable or scalable.
So you need to make sure that you’re doing all those other things to build out that holistic marketing strategy and execute that plan, rather than relying on a Google Ad campaign that brings you some good results for a month or two.
Barb Bertsch: Brilliant.
Lead Generation for Sustainable Demand
Jennifer Zick: Well, and I want to hear from all of our panelists on this topic, but I have one more kind of question that I think would segue beautifully here and keep us on time. And that is, and I’ll start with you, John, on this, because Ruth teed this up beautifully with the word sustainable. And a lot of the work we do at Authentic Brand is about creating sustainable, healthy growth, which means doing the hard work. Right. How can businesses think about lead generation programs that are generating sustainable demand and helping them reach their growth?
John Ryan: Okay, well, first of all, I don’t like following Ruth because it’s hard.
Jennifer Zick: It is hard.
John Ryan: Look, Ruth’s right. When you get in, when you get with the customers, I’ve heard this many times of customers saying to a vendor, I didn’t know you did that. The communication we think we’re getting through is not getting through. And there are tactics that you can use underneath the understanding that you need to segment like crazy, you need to be fanatical about segmentation. And then once you do that and you get your list cleaned up and you’re practicing good hygiene, then you gotta take a look at what kind of tactics we can employ. And some of those Ruth went through, Barb has touched on some. Some of them you could have some fun with. You can give it a try. So, for instance, if you’ve got someone in a B2B high ticket item world, advertise to them on LinkedIn.
Reinforce what it is that you’re doing from the sales side with something from the marketing side. This is how marketing and sales can work hand in hand. So there are trigger events. So for instance, people change jobs, get promotions, what have you. They might leave one organization if your customer goes to another one. And what happens anytime a sea level person goes to a new organization? Well, they better make a difference in 90 days or we hired the wrong person. So that’s how that goes. So when that person goes to that other team, we want to be there and say, we’re here to help any way that we can. Because again, we already have that currency of trust between us.
But as far as consistent revenue, you’re going to have to prioritize and figure out what things that you know are working again. Talk to your customers. How did they find you? How did they hear about you? First, I trust, and I don’t trust automation. I think it’s good. It’s good to know. But you know, you’re trying to trust their memory as to what happened. Well, I think if you ask them person to person, they’re going to remember. They’re going to tell you the thing they remember the most that made the biggest impact. And that’s more of a human approach. And with a lot of social media, you can’t track anyone.
So I think from an overall standpoint, what I would say, especially as a startup, is do a few things really well and as you move along, start looking at other things you could do to sort of round out your strategy.
Jennifer Zick: Yes, I love that. Do a few things really well. And I think that’s where a lot of the businesses we work with have gotten over their skis and their ability to even consider how to go to market strategically, because they have been trying to be all things to all people and treating all revenue as equal growth opportunity when it’s not. And so at the end of the day, as fast as marketing moves and changes, and as many levers as there could be to pull around demand general and lead Gen, the fundamentals have to be in place. And that is a clear understanding. And Ruth already spoke about this, of who matters to us, why should we matter to them very clearly?
And then how do we intersect their universe in a natural habitat in a way that adds value before we’re selling anything and earns trust so that we can become, you know, be on their radar for consideration. And then when they’re part of us and they’ve decided to engage us, then how do we over deliver on our brand promise and not lose trust by under delivering or breaking that brand promise. Right. That is the story of marketing, really. There’s a million ways we get it done, but those fundamentals still are crucial. I want to let Barb and Ruth kind of cycle in on any last thoughts here before we turn it over to some really great questions coming in from the audience. So, Barb, Ruth, anything you want to add?
Barb Bertsch: Yeah, I would say think about our internal customers as well. You touched on this earlier, Jen, building that alignment with sales, working with your sales team to gather that voice of customer through their eyes and what they’re seeing in the marketplace, because things change dramatically year over year and really starting to build that alignment together and them to trust you and what you’re going out there trying to do, helping them have some, you know, empathetic value around what you as a marketer is trying to do. They’re only going to have that if you’ve at first built a relationship with them, listened to them and tried to implement some things and ideas that they’ve got around how they’re going to support the growth goals or what they need from marketing to support their growth goals and why.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, it’s definitely a feedback loop that has to exist. I call that the connective tissue. And in most companies, depending on what kind of company you are, sales, marketing, customer experience, product design, whatever those things are, there has to be that feedback connective loop because we’re getting different insights based on the lens we’re looking through in the relationship. Right. Ruth, anything you want to add, just.
Ruth Glaser: To reinforce what both you and John said. And this is very counterintuitive, I have found in a lot of smaller or growth organizations and it’s to get really focused. So while you may be able to do all these great things for all, you know, all kinds of different audiences really hone in on who it is that, you know, you are focusing on, where are you making the most money? What are the best candidates? And instead of trying to be everything to everyone, knowing where you can be the best thing to the best audience is really important.
John Ryan: I think that’s great, Ruth. And what I would say is either get focused or your investors will.
Audience Q+A
Jennifer Zick: Oh, strong words, John. Strong words, but true. Very true. Well, and with that, I’d love to flip the script a little bit and bring in some questions from our audience. And thank you, audience, for interacting with us here. These are all great questions. I am going to start with one that we actually see quite a bit in our line of business, which is a lot of the growth companies that we work with, they’re either going to grow by making acquisitions or they’re going to grow by being acquired and integrated at some point. So what are your thoughts and tips on creating a successful strategy? Managing a company’s brand? And I think all of you have been through this in your time with Authentic or before.
So managing the company’s brand after acquiring one or two other companies, actually, we just did a webinar on this for the audience member that asked that there’s a recorded webinar on managing through m and a on our sites. So if you want to go deep, go there. But let me ask the panelists today for your thoughts.
Barb Bertsch: Can you ask the question again, Jen?
Jennifer Zick: Yep. Yep. Tips on creating a successful strategy, managing a company’s brand after they’ve acquired one or two other companies.
Barb Bertsch: So I think, first off, figuring out, you know, the brands that were acquired, how can we, as marketers, collaborate with the other marketers within those organizations and create a team with, you know, a variety of specialties to add value to the organization in different ways, teaching and training and building up everybody and building one team if the other, if the acquiring, if the companies that were acquired don’t have marketing jumping in right away as a marketer to learn as much as you can about those two companies that have been acquired and adding value immediately through building a strategy, understanding the business goals. Now who do, what are we, you know, are we rebranding? There’s so many questions that we can step in and add value right away. Yeah.
Jennifer Zick: And I would, we could, this could be a whole different webinar, so we won’t go all the way down this topic, but I would say whenever you’re integrating two different businesses, no matter how closely aligned they might be to begin with, you have to start back at the beginning of articulating the brand and then solidifying the foundation and redesigning the go to market strategy. You start at the beginning, like, has this acquisition redefined our purpose? Has it changed how we articulate the life changing impact we’re bringing to the world? If so, we need to redefine that purpose together, and then we need to redefine who matters to us, and why should we matter to them in new ways? And then the right mix and then the right tactics. Right. Easier said than done. It’s not a simple task. It’s a long term initiative.
John Ryan: But a lot of, there are a lot of companies that aren’t very good at it, and so that gives you an opportunity if this happens to you. I’ve been on both sides of it. You have to have a really clear cut plan. You got to work that plan every day, every week. You have to make sure things are happening with the people that need to be communicated with. You’ve got a whole communications part. You’ve got the whole visioning part, which is what you were talking about, Jennifer. And then you’ve got the organizational part. So it’s complicated. You need a clear cut plan. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of discipline. But if you do it right, you come out on the other side of a stronger organization.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. All right. We have an awesomely active audience today. And audience, I’m going to apologize right now that we can’t get through all of your questions, but I’m also going to offer my inbox. By the way, all of the invites you got for today’s event came through my email address. So if you have a question we don’t get today, feel free to throw it into my inbox, and I will try to get some CMO input for you on that. I’m going to jump over to Jim’s question in the Q and A. We’ve talked a lot today about the buyer’s journey, including, John, your comment about it, often including a committee of four to eight people who are going to make that purchase decision. So when you look at those four to eight people, they all represent different functions within the business. Right.
And the composition can be variable by vertical or companies within a vertical. So how does a marketing team best approach all those stakeholders and all the content they might need from a crawl, walk run standpoint? Where do you start with that? It’s a matrix.
John Ryan: I love this question. Thank you. If you take a look at the buying team, you’re normally going to have four or five different Personas involved, or four or five different roles. You might have the buyer, you might have the business buyer, you’re going to have the solutions buyer, you’re going to have the tech buyer, and then you’re going to have the financial buyer. All these buyers are different Personas working together to decide if you are the right choice. And so, for instance, I might get excited about the benefits you’re talking to me about. That doesn’t cut it. If we get to the tech buyer and the tech buyer says, I can’t integrate this with everything else we have.
So all these people have to get together in this imaginary meeting that’s happening over time where they’re talking to each other and they’re saying, oh, yeah, sure, it can do that. Okay, fine. Oh, it can’t do that. We need to dig it into some more. So this is like a super conversation going on inside the organization between four or five different Personas that are taking care of their needs within their department as it serves the organization, and they’re working with each other to make that final decision. And so you gotta serve all of them, because if they get into a meeting and one of them says, this doesn’t work for me, you’re out.
Ruth Glaser: Yeah, you know, I’m encountering that right now with one of our clients because our known Persona that we work with is a marketing leader. And we have discovered through our work with these various marketing leaders that they have an internal audience that they need to sell on the solution. And so we have moved from just trying to get the awareness among our target Persona to how do we help them sell within their organization? What tools can we provide to them? Can we be in meetings with their group so that we’re presenting and addressing some of the, in this case, like John said, technical needs, we run into security issues and compliance issues a lot.
And so empowering and giving tools to a prospect so that they can then sell on your behalf internally is also a role that marketing can play and really has to play in these complex selling situations.
Jennifer Zick: So true. Okay, there’s another question here I want to get to, and it’s a powerful question, and we face it every single day, and it’s from Maryland. And I’m going to start by answering Mary to say, part of the reason the Authentic Brand exists is to help address this question at the C suite level. So here’s the question. What are your tips or tricks for level setting the C suite in reality? And that might be about the market opportunity, the product challenges the competition. When you’ve got a C suite who’s given a big goal, but you might have some insights that tell you that might not be achievable. How do you level with them, especially if you’re not in the C suite? Any tips?
Ruth Glaser: You know, data, as much data as you can use to show, you know, what do they say? Past behavior is a predictor of future results. So make sure that you’ve got an eye on the right metrics so that you can say, well, we need x number of visits to our website, that translates into x number of downloads, that translates into x number of qualified leads and so on and so forth. So at any time you can use data to support your argument. That can be really helpful. The other panelists are a lot smarter than I am and have quoted Forrester and Gartner and studies of that nature. And some of those kinds of credential insight groups can be very helpful in level setting and helping the c suite understand what to expect.
Barb Bertsch: I think Ruth is spot on, and I always go back to this buyer’s journey, and there’s plenty of templates out there that kind of, if you don’t know how to build one, that really showcase to a senior leadership team all of the steps that it takes to bring somebody through a funnel. You know, we’ve got a very basic funnel, let’s say awareness, consideration purchased. There’s many more facets to that funnel that you can build out in a matrix to kind of showcase. Like, here’s all the hoops we have to jump through before we get to that point. So I think, you know, that’s usually been pretty eye opening when I’ve leveraged that within a senior leadership team.
John Ryan: Yeah, I mean, I think. I think everything that Barb and Ruth are saying is correct. I think that you have to over communicate. You’re going to have to over communicate. Don’t assume they get it. Keep going back and talking to them again, reminding them what the metrics are that you’re driving and what data you’re using to root point. And you just gotta say, you know, look, you know, it’s the funny thing. I think it’s because people in marketing have fun every now and then, and there are other departments where you don’t see them having so much fun. That’s obvious to everybody. Although I think they have fun in finance. I don’t know what those people are doing, but I do think they have fun.
But they have, you know, you have to build a finance department just like you have to build a marketing department. There are financial responsibilities and accountabilities for the organization that must be met. The organization can’t move forward. Same thing with marketing. We’ve got to build it appropriate for the market, appropriate for our organization, and it takes time.
Jennifer Zick: Boy, I wish we could answer all of the thoughtful questions that our audience is bringing forward. And I’m sorry we’re getting to the point where we need to put a bow on today’s content and make sure everybody gets to their next meetings on time. But I just want to say, every time we talk about demand, we end up with a lot of participants in the conversation. It’s a real hot button topic and it has been for a very long time and it probably will continue to be. And if I had a dollar for every time a CEO or CFO told me, hey, if you can just tell me how long it’s going to take from the time I put a dollar into the marketing program until I get X ROI dollars out the end of it, then we’ll have an unlimited budget.
But those same CEOs and CFOs give it 90 days to prove out, even though we’ve said it’ll take 18 to 24 months, right? So this is the cycle of insanity. We hope to help solve that Authentic Brand. And if you’re living in that cycle of insanity, we would love to be a trusted partner with you on that journey or a resource. All of our content is free and ungated, so tap it and let us know how we can help you. And thank you for spending some time with us today. And thank you to my panelists and CMO friends. I just love learning from you every chance that I get. It’s a joy to be with you. So with that, we’ll wrap up for now and make sure this recap gets out to all of our registered attendees. So thank you all so much.
