Episode 148: How to influence buyer journey with account based demand generation with Andrei & Vladimir

In the new episode of Fullfunnel Live we'll share with Vladimir Blagojevic how to influence buyer journey with account-based demand generation.

Join us to learn and discuss:

- How to influence 3 stages of the buyer journey
- The mix of content, channels and tactics you need to influence the entire buyer journey: Fullfunnel.io examples

RESOURCES
On-Demand B2B Marketing Courses: https://fullfunnel.io/b2b-marketing-courses/

Full-Funnel Insider - A Marketing Newsletter For B2B Marketers: https://fullfunnel.io/marketing-newsletter/

Join our community for B2B marketers - The Trenches: https://trenches.community/

Upcoming events: https://lu.ma/fullfunnel/events


Full-Funnel Marketing Content Hub: https://fullfunnel.io/blog

Vladimir on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimirblagojevic/
Andrei on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azinkevich/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is the Full Funnel bt B Marketing podcast, brought
to you by full Funnel dot io.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Let's start. Everybody is Wednesdays evening here in Europe, which
means it's time for a new episode of Full Final Life.
We did a quick research in our community last time
after our podcast with Emmy Loush from Charles Gates when

(00:31):
we discussed this life case study about Charles Gates ABM
program and more specifically the account based content that David
Ryan and we got quite a few questions about leveraging
account based content in your demand generation program and also

(00:52):
how to make sure that you have more accounts that
are aware of you? Right, you can't talk about accounts
that don't know you in a way that you want
to sell your product. We saw that it would be
forced to share the entire process how to influence holistically
the entire journey with account based demand generation. That being said,

(01:16):
where guys all joining us from let us know in
the chat I'm again a chat on from our office
in Villiarel and.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
A lot I'm from my home office in Olympia. I
think it's really good to chat about this because I
think what we hear a lot, I think every time
we speak to a new client, there is the same challenge,

(01:49):
especially when you talk to sales right, we lose out
on brands the target accounts are not aware of us,
and then okay, how can you actually create awareness of
these let's say target buyers. How can you make your
how can you make it relevant? How can you make
sure that they actually see your content? So these are

(02:09):
all the things that we're going to address today.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
We have a lot of examples, so we decided normally
they're in full final lives with don't prepare decks, but
just pick up maybe examples of infographics that support the
uh the topic of the podcast. But to then we
have literally a lot of examples, so we created a

(02:33):
small deck that we want to share with you. And
the first thing that we want to address right it's
the buyer journey. There were plenty of episodes and we
have in depth guided our blog about bar journey, but
the key point is how our customers are actually buying right.
I feels from the perspective of buyer or if you

(02:58):
have ever been a B to B buyer, right, you
can immediately recognize the patterns question, how do you become
aware of the brend right first before, because you are
not going to buy a random product that you have
never heard. And obviously the high is the contract value
of your product. The more let's say, the more trust,
the more credibility that products should have. So how you

(03:20):
become aware of that product?

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Right? In most cases?

Speaker 2 (03:24):
In most cases that happens through the social especially if
you're in the tech vertical. But what attracts your attention?

Speaker 3 (03:32):
Right?

Speaker 2 (03:33):
In most cases, it could be the comment that you
you know, Coligue left and you saw a post from somebody,
or that post appeared in your news feed that attracted
your attention and is part of your curiosity. Maybe you're
so irrelevant at not just a generic one, but relevant.
Add to that that resonates with your jobs to be

(03:54):
done right, That's one of the steps. The second one
is private chats. A lot of let's say, even vendor
evaluation of vendor selection of vendor awareness happens during one
on one conversations. When let's say I'm talking to lot.
Let's assume we need a sales tool, right, I might

(04:15):
reach out to a few sales directors of our clients
and ask them, hey, guys, what would you recommend for
this specific challenge for this specific need of what are
you currently using or maybe reaching out to our peers
from sales that we are connected on on LinkedIn right.
Quite often in the conservative markets, especially thinking about manufacturing, retail, pharma, etc.

(04:39):
People know each other, right, and they trust each other's
opinion way more than the content that is coming from
vendors right. But to be able to get into that consideration,
you need to make sure that these people are recommending you. Yesterday,
just to give a practical example, yesterday, what did a
quick research for one our clients on Reddit?

Speaker 3 (05:01):
Right?

Speaker 2 (05:02):
And there are a lot of threats that actually approve it.
We have never seen it, and we don't know these
people because on Reddit, you know how the titles look
like it's not the LinkedIn right, so you don't know
who is like whatever mouse Jeremy on Reddit right?

Speaker 3 (05:17):
Uncle?

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Then I don't know other weird you know, titles that
people might have. But that was like exactly the situation.
People come there, they ask in the community the question, Hey,
here's my specific challenge. Unfortunately I can't reveal all the
details because of NDA, but to give you an idea,
it was the practical threat. I have this challenge who
might I need to find a solution that will help

(05:39):
me really fast. And then that was a person who
recommended our clients product. Right, the next follow up question,
have you personally tried it? And then the person says no,
I didn't. By I have heard a lot of good
stuff and I saw some of the content. It seems
to be a really good right. And this is how

(06:01):
you influence what we call the dark social right, the
conversations that we're not aware of so to become, to
become to do appear in that set. And this is
how the awareness is being created. And lastly, similar to this,
we have internal awareness. Simple example there is like, let's

(06:22):
say I am the P of marketing. I know we
have an issue with our sales. We work in silence,
but we want to fix it. Right then I come
to link it in and like, I don't see any
piece of content, But suddenly the P of sales sends
me a Slack message saying, hey, did you see that post?

Speaker 3 (06:42):
What they're thinking about this?

Speaker 2 (06:44):
It seems that it's exactly what you were talking about,
how to break the silence between our teams. Right then
I check it makes sense. I start evaluating that product.
I start evaluating that vendor right, or at least that
vendor appears in my radar. So, in nutshell, this is
how the wire journey, This is how the vendor awareness

(07:04):
right occurs.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
These are the main.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Activities and channels and in most cases this let's say
trust and credibilities gained through the content. Now the question
is how to make it account based, how to make
it relevant to our target accounts, and how to ensure
that you actually influenced the entire journey, because okay, I

(07:27):
became aware of your product, but if we don't have
next meaningful nurture and touch points, that won't be anything. Right,
So you can't expect that just because somebody mentioned our
company or our product on radio, it will immediately trigger
the sales opportunity, right. You need to have holistic set
of different touch points and we usually breakice into different

(07:49):
levels of demand. So maybe what let's start with the
first part with the lean and demand.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
Absolutely, So basically what you see here we have here
an overview of three levels demand that your buyers go through,
and for each of them we have the level of intent,
sales cycle length. How the journey might look like about
are your goals to reach the buyers to the intent

(08:15):
at this level. So the first one is learning demand.
It is simply to say that if you look at
your buyers, they are not buyers for the majority of
the time. They are just dealing with their work and
they have a demand for content, demand to learn and
become better at their work, at their job. And so

(08:38):
this is what we call learning demand. They are dealing
with specific challenges, they want to know more about theirs,
maybe want to know what's happening in their industry. Now,
this is actually where a lot of companies actually don't
spend a lot of their effort. They don't create a
lot of content for this level because here they are

(09:01):
just looking for information that is relevant to what is
top of their mind. And if they're not yet looking
for a solution, the solution, if you start talking about
a solution, is not going to be relevant. At the
same time, what we know from experience but also recent
research from trust Raidius and the Pavilion community is that

(09:25):
eighty four percent of enterprise buyers will actually shortlist the
vendor they have discovered before they started the solution search,
which is in our diagram here. The second level solution emaents.
So the first level is very important and you can't

(09:45):
be just talking about your solution. You need to be
addressing the top strategic challengeset that your target buyers have.
What is the length of a sales cycle? Here, the
length of a sales title can be anywhere between six
maybe twenty four months, maybe even longer, until they have

(10:06):
actually experienced the problem high priority problem they need solving,
which will be the second step. And then obviously why
because the intent here is very low. They're not looking
for a solution, and they already give you a lot
of examples of how buyers might discover a solution, how

(10:26):
you may reach them. It is we're also going to
share other solutions, an examples, concrete examples, So I don't
want to go into those details just yet. So this
was learning demand. The next level is a solution event.
Maybe Andrew you can explain that part.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, absolutely, I would say I would love to drop
five cents here. I know that a lot of companies
they actually ignore this learn and demand. It's I feel
this is the biggest problem and to make it work,
you need to ensure that that content and then time
messaging is aligned with the jobs to be done of

(11:02):
specific wire persona. Right, and the more diversified is your
buying committee group. The more diversified should be a content strategy.
You need to have the key people who would be
talking about different you know, let's say pieces of content
that are aligned with jobs to be done of these
different personas. So that's the only one way. But let's

(11:26):
say what happens next. If you are focusing on that level,
you create the aware, You create awareness, right, you become
associated to the strategic channels. Sorry, you become associated as
a vendor that they know that could help with specific challenge.
But how to ensure that they trust your brend?

Speaker 3 (11:47):
Right?

Speaker 2 (11:47):
This is where the second level helps. It's the solution demand.
So we start talking with and also to make it clear,
this should be a balanced strategy. Right, we have a
of all of this content across our journey.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
The point here is that.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
Now we need to talk about practical solutions. On the
first level. Let's come back to our py of marketing
and we pay of sales. Example, we have a problem
of teams that are working in sellers. But more or
less we're hitting our targets more or less, we are
growing or whatever, maybe not that fast as we want,

(12:28):
but at some point there is clearly an evidence. We
analyze our historical crows and we see that we are
not going to hit our having the targets next end.
We need to do something around this. So then we
start looking for different solutions. What would be the best way?
And I would might look for the practical content that

(12:49):
and not the vendor, but the practical content around this.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
What would be the best way?

Speaker 2 (12:53):
Maybe it's a count based marketing and maybe if you
have because ABM has many shadows, right ex, A, B, whatever, like,
people call it anyway that they want for us, but
still call it old school account based marketing. Right, Let's
say they define AP, they don't have maybe a practical
experience of doing it, or they have done it in

(13:14):
the past and not efficient ways, so they are not
sure what would be the best way, so they start
digging deeper. Right, The point is that the problem is
already prioritized. It becomes one of the strategic initiatives, and
they want in depth content that explains how that solution
might work.

Speaker 3 (13:32):
Right.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
Typically, that lengths might depend on obviously on the how
high you try to climb, Right, if you're selling to
mid market or enterprise organizations, the cycle may vary, but
more less, it could be three to six months.

Speaker 3 (13:49):
Right.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
The point is that as your achieve at this point,
you will see the spiking engagement. You can track your
intent data and this is why you identify accounts that
aware of you and that's consuming your content. So they
are looking for the solutions and potentially they associate your
brend with one of these solutions. Right, this is the

(14:11):
key you want to be. You want to be associated
as a strategic vendor to a sudden challenge. And when
they finish their research, when they get clear okay, so
ABM seems to be the best solution, they start looking
for the vendors. And this is the shortest part of
the bar journey, right, the demand for vendors. So let's

(14:34):
how quickly that one.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
So this is where they are actually starting to consider
you as a vendor. So they're looking for a concrete vendor.
They're considering you. And your goal here is really to
generate sales call aid opportunities. And the way that you
do that is you want to make sure that you're

(14:57):
clearly communicating how you're different and buying. And if you
have done your work so far, you have identitfied like
Andrew just mentioned in the previous stage, you started to
identify those starget accounts that maybe have started checking you
out as a potential vendor or learning from you. You

(15:18):
will have actually start to understand what are the exact
challenges that they're looking to solve, what are their jobs
to be done, so that you can at this stage
go as personalized as possible and show them how not
only in a generic way, you your solution might be

(15:39):
a good fit for their situation. You know, for a
SaaS company of this size, this is what we can do,
and we can help in a specific way. You know,
we work like for example, if you would go to
our website, you will see a generic value proposition that
we you know, help be to be companies with high

(16:01):
ACV to generate demand and by implementing ab and marketing,
et cetera, et cetera. But if we are actually in
contact with an account or we have been researching the
account and we know that their challenge is I don't know.
I'll give a concrete example here is that they need

(16:23):
to generate twenty four million revenue and they have a
sixty nine million revenue a sixty nine million dollars pipeline gap.
And the reason why they have this gap is because
they you know, have let's say MQL and I think
what they said was kind of random acts of marketing

(16:47):
or something like that. Right, So, now we can craft
a very dedicated personalized value proposition. In other words, we
can create what is sometimes called buyer enablement content that
will help really communicate, okay, for those specific challenges in
that situation. This is how we can help you, and

(17:08):
this is you know, why this would be a good
fit and why also you might consider us instead of
our competitors. Maybe if you're selling a product, this could
also include some sort of competison chart. It would obviously
also include answers to the questions like do you have
experience in our industry? Obviously sharing case that is other

(17:28):
type of social proof. Maybe actually connecting them proactively with
some of your customers, some of your reference customers, and
you know, just offering them kind of advice free advice session.
This is something can work really well where they can
just share their own experience as they were basically working

(17:52):
with you, but or just solving the same kind of
problem that this customer has. So here you're looking at
a much shorter sales cycle. What's interesting actually is that
when you look at a lot of companies and ask
them what is your the length of the sales cycle,
they might say something like three months or even shorter.

(18:13):
And then what that actually means that in a lot
of cases it simply means that that's when that's how
they measure the sales cycle. They actually are talking to
accounts based on inunding, inbounding querries or referrals to accounts
that actually already sales ready have already pre selected them
as one of the potential lenders, a shortlisted them, then

(18:36):
they're and then of course the sales cycle will be
that short. So it's always important to understand like what
is the actual time? What are you actually measuring? And
so we are looking here at quite a short sales cycle.
It might be even a month three months. Again, depending
on a complexity of your procurement process, you might have

(19:00):
an opportunity which may still need a two months or
three months to close if you are dealing with the
very large organizations. And so again here just to summarize,
it is about buyer enablement, which is concrete content that
shows how your different we're buying for their specific challenges

(19:23):
as much as possible, personalized to their specific situation, industry, challenges,
type of buyer, and also obviously answering any objections they have,
showing social proof with case study and maybe like some
sort of comparison helping them understand, of course at a
later stage, also how you might help them generate the

(19:45):
ROI maybe some sort of a business case might be
part of that, et cetera, et cetera. So this is
how you would generate the demand on that level when
they're already checking you out. Now this is a high
level framework that will help you think about maybe you
can use it on the one hand to also evaluate

(20:06):
the type of content that you have. Do I have
content on that will help me to create this awareness
to the buyers? Do I have the content that will
help explain what our generate the awareness of the of
us as a potential solution to a specific problem, and
then also the buyer enabling content. But now we would
really like to give you a very practical framework on

(20:29):
how to actually create that content that you can implement
before the end of the year, I'm sure. And also
we want to share a bunch of examples and also
some cadiats like concrete examples, along with some caveats what
you need to be paying attention to so and maybe
you can share how to actually plan that content.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Yeah, First of all, I would like to summarize evers
and that we have just shared so in a nutshell,
if you look at the three different levels, right, what type.

Speaker 3 (21:00):
Of content do we need to have?

Speaker 2 (21:02):
We need to have a buyer persona specific content, right,
aligned with their specific jobs to be done, specific bar
persona challenges.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
Right, not just generic ones.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
Then we need to have solutions specific content for specific
buyer personas right, how these people could implement it? And lastly,
we need to have what what called the buyer enablement right?
How they could actually sell your product to their teams internally?

Speaker 1 (21:32):
Right?

Speaker 3 (21:32):
What might help?

Speaker 2 (21:33):
How they could argue why they should pay for that
product just to pay for that vendor. This is the
key now, the strategic document that we use. That may
be the next logical question that you have. Okay, but
how we are going to create the program based on
this high level overview, right, this specific for this specific need.

(21:54):
We always do the class decomposition. And maybe just for
a second, I will stop sharing my screw and here,
and I will the entire documents so everybody could see it. Right,
We have this what we call cluster decomposition. So we
create clusters the accounts that fit you. I just will

(22:14):
always remind about these clusters accounts that fit your ICP
but have the same challenge, right, so they belong to
the same use case. And for this specific reason we
do this ha listic decomposition. Right, what are the jobs
to be done of these people? What are their kepis,
what market trends related to our product? Do they currently

(22:34):
look at? What challenges do this face? What other reasons
of these challenges? And we categorize it, right, we put it.
We know that each question addresses one or one specific
stage of the wire journey, and it's aligned with the
level of demand for example, demand for content, etc. And
we completely understand that this content it doesn't mean the

(22:59):
buying intent, Like let's look at this podcast apps that
we clearly understand that everybody who is listening to us
live doesn't have a buying intent at the moment, So
we do it purely for educational reasons. Right that more
or less, you can put it into the category. It's
the mixed category. It's the demand for solutions slash demand

(23:21):
for content. Right, some of you might be on that stage.
Some of you might be on that stage now when
we create. When we do this breakdown, the next step
is coming up with different content ideas based on our like,
based on our class decomposition. What content should we create,
What content should we prioritize? What content can help us

(23:42):
to influence that buyer journey. And obviously you can repurpose
some of the existing content, right, you can pick up
maybe you have nice decks that you can use. Right,
maybe there are some good guides that you can use.
Maybe there was some keynote presentations that your leadership did
on industry conferences and you can pick it up. You
can use these ideas right to influence the entire bar journey.

(24:05):
When you finish this exercise, you'll have a plenty of
ideas that you can use, and then you put it
into a calendar. Right, you start thinking about olsfl scrawl down.
We have the idea of channels and activities. This is
where it's essential to get a feedback or input from

(24:27):
your subject matter expert. Right, the person could share and
I feel that it's one of the most undervalued steps
in the entire process asking Okay, think if I was
inter in sme, think back to your days when you
were working as our target buyer persona. Right, what channels
were you using, What did you hear your peers were

(24:49):
you using? What content resonates with you, what types of content,
what's the best way to engage with you? Or how
did you learn about different different vendors? Right, And obviously
that could be a company. Also with the inputs from
the customer research, you can run customer research and get

(25:10):
a lot of these insights. So in nutshell, you finish
it and then you prioritize, you create simple calendar, you
define Okay, this would be the like this idea, we
want to run webinar on this idea and we want
to ensure that all our prioritized accounts will invite them. Right,
or this would be these pieces would be an our
thought leadership program. This this is something that we want

(25:31):
to cover in our podcast. This is what we want
to share news letter. This is what we want to
create to recreate an our email nurture and sequence. These
post we want to use in our ads or this
specific message and these posts we want to boost. This
our sort leadership, ads, et cetera. Right, this is how
you come up with this holistic program. Next, you dive

(25:51):
deeper into the let's say demand for vendor. What activities
might help? What content do we need? And for this
reason obviously we need to dip understand the internal selling process, right,
what content can help specific buyer persona to sell our
product internally?

Speaker 1 (26:08):
Right?

Speaker 2 (26:08):
And then you define these activities so in natural this
would be the process. And then in a few minutes
will show with you the practical examples. But let us
know in the chat please if that makes sense to yourself,
put some SUP or put plus whatever you prefer. Just
cire us to hear your feedback, guys, And while you're typing,

(26:36):
just a very quick note for you. Yeah, thank you Karen,
Thanks Josh. We're also because thanks then I get to
see you, by the way a long time. One of
the things that I would love to quickly mention we
record very in depth and practical man GEN course and

(27:02):
which is in natural account based Demand Generation, which will
be live in January. And if you guys, it would
be the same practical as our flagship full funnel ABM course.
So if you are interested, I dropped a link in
the chat. It will be also in the podcast description,

(27:22):
so I can join the waiting list and will announce,
and you'll get an announcement when the course goes live,
so you'll you can have it with the early bird price.
That'd being said, Let's come back to our deck and
shere with you the practical examples. By the way, Josh, yeah,

(27:43):
additional contributor can the community sm is absolutely one hundred percent.
So I didn't mention this explicitly, but any type of
SME is great, either external or internal. Right, so both
of them create examples. Okay, so lasted decomposition, we just
tackled it. Let's move to the practical examples.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
So here we want to share a bunch of examples
of demand generation in action with some caveats. And to
start with, it's not really important, like a lot of
companies might focus at the beginning when they're starting to do,
especially during the awareness stages where you're still not expecting revenue,

(28:28):
might start to look at metrics like engagement, which are
definitely important, right, but also might discover this be discouraged
because they are not getting maybe especially in organic sense,
as much as engagement as they would like on their content.
And what I mean by that is, let's say we

(28:51):
might be running this podcast live every week. We might
be you know, sharing some content on LinkedIn in our case,
and you might get discouraged. You know, by some chance
you're starting, Ok, you have been doing this for a while,
so it's a little bit different. But maybe while you're starting.
I remember the first time we ran our live podcast,

(29:12):
it was maybe eleven people, if maybe not even fewer,
And but by the end of the podcast we get
such encouraging feedback. First of all, we knew that it
was the right type of audience, but also the quality
feed that was amazing, And this is what kept us
running in the beginning. But what keeps us running this

(29:35):
further is the comments like this, what you see here
is actually a head of marketing that reached out to us.
It's like really big everybody will know them, like a
really huge tech brand. And the way I love the
way that they had described this. So this was actually

(29:56):
a transcript from Discovery call saying, you know, after describing
the problem, he said, I've been following one or two
webinars that your organization is providing. Now people when they
said webinars we know that me in this live podcast,
because that's how a lot of people perceive these live
podcast episodes. We run webinars separately. Doesn't really matter right

(30:18):
how you call it. And he said, I also received
your newsletter and combination of what you said in the
last newsletter, and he said, at the moment, the pain
was really quite high. So I think that's very important.
Of course, so there was that trigger for them to say, Okay,

(30:41):
we have this high priority pain, or we have this
problem that is a threat to high priority business objectives.
This is the starting point of a lot of buy journeys, right,
and now your competent has resonated. You just spoke to
me about it, and we decided okay, it was the
end the year. It was also the trigger from the perspective, okay,

(31:03):
we need to plan the next year. It was a
trigger for him to reach out to us. So it
is about the relevance of content. The step that Andre
just shared with you about cluster decomposition, involving your SMEs
and basing yourself on the specific pain points of your

(31:24):
target account cluster based on the input from people who
have set in their shoes and the customers themselves, based
on customer input research excuse me, is essential, right, so
that you can have that relevance. Speaking about content, another
quick example is somebody reaching out to us this company

(31:48):
here as you can see what our core marketing sell. Also,
this is in our intake forma she said, we'll just
launched an ABM program recently, but seem to be doing
what you say not to do in your newsletter. So
you can see how very relevant content that is very

(32:09):
linked to their specific job to be done. And in
this case, the specific job to be done of that
CMO was we are starting in ABM program. I have
put my neck on the line. I'm expecting to generate
expecting to generate some results. Now you are saying that
these are the mistakes that a lot of companies. I
see that you're making these mistakes. Okay, let's let's explore that.

(32:32):
And a final example that I wanted to share was
just the reason that I like to share this was
that actually I got an objection from one on my client,
one of our clients, who said, ah, but you know,
senior leaders, you know from these enterprise companies will never
engage with your content. And I know marketing may be different.

(32:54):
And this is true, and not everybody is going to
engage with your content, but we do see this regularly.
We see this is like again a brand that everybody
will know. It's a huge, huge consumer brand who just
reached out to book calls simply because of a posted
here which again was relevant and spoke to their very

(33:17):
concrete challenges that I had at that moment. So making
your content very relevant. But also, as you can see,
what are the kind of channels I think, like when
you're thinking about the levels of demand and you're thinking
especially about awareness, you can be thinking about high intent
channels such as for example, you know specific Google searches

(33:39):
or directories and things like that. Here you're thinking about
channels that they are using for professional education, like you
can see in our case these were LinkedIn newsletter and
our live podcasts, which people subscribe to to learn, like
you are not attending this to learn, not to buy
from us. And this is exactly where if you're talking

(34:02):
about strategic challenges, you can get the attention of the buyers.
So let's share other examples with other caveats.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
I just wanted to address one of the things that
you mentioned, this bias that are but in our industry,
the senior buyers are not concerning the content. They I
often hear the arguments they are too busy and just
because of because of this, then it's kind of an
excuse to have bad content or you know, just post

(34:34):
sums and like, hey, go and treat our article for me.
It's like it's people are ashamed to promote what they
actually created.

Speaker 3 (34:43):
Right.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
So I'm asking, like I'm always given that question that
has a litmus test for the quality of the content. Right,
So you spend money and time and create and certain
pieces of content, right, And then like you for what
specific reason you're doing this? If you don't, if you

(35:03):
don't make sure that your target buyers are consuming it, right, So,
then it means that you need to improve a lot.
This is one of the things. And also coming back
to the initial point. Last week we had any and
our podcast Real Estate Sector. Right conservative market, for sure,

(35:24):
do people actively engage with the content? No, doesn't mean
that they don't consume it. Also, no, they consume it
and they consume it passively. And this is the key
for many conservative markets, for retail, for manufacturing, for consumer
product goods, for healthcare, for pharma, for cybersecurity, we see

(35:45):
it all the time. So the only difference with marketing
and sales sector is that first of all, these people
are not actively consuming content and I'm not actively liking it, right,
So you don't have the same sort leader in this
verticals as you can see in marketing and sales. The
second one is that most of the content is really boring, right,

(36:09):
Like it's it's really it's either low quality sometimes it's
good quality, but.

Speaker 3 (36:13):
It's not presented in a meanionful way. Right.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
Everybody is busy, So then I'm asking if everybody is
busy way than even producing that content if they're not.

Speaker 3 (36:23):
Going to read it anyway. Right.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
So the point the way I'm heading with this, make
sure that your content stands out, and that is that
much that is so in depth that it will it's
you're competent for attention, right, So it's so available that
people are willing to spend their time, creates the time
to read your piece of content, as simple as that.

(36:46):
So let's head to the other example that we have here.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
Right.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
Obviously, based on the number of touch points you have seen,
right and the real by our journey lengths, you need
to understand that this is a long term strategy sometimes,
but it's mostly coming from smaller companies and maybe especially
from tech startups or scale apps. They come and ask, okay,

(37:13):
so from what number of posts will start seeing sales opportunities?

Speaker 3 (37:20):
I mean I.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
Wish, I wish that process would be linear, and that
would be a specific formula that you can apply in
Google sheets that will calculate how many posts do you
need to generate sales opportunity? In natural this is not
how the bar journey looks like. And this is what
we have discussed already a lot.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
Right.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
The demand is created over time, over multiple touch points.
And this is a simple example that we shack quite
often out of curiosity. Was what once we attract one
of the sales opportunities? And this is maybe for America
it's SMD. In Europe it's definitely mid market company, I
will say, right, but here's an example of that company's journey. Right,

(38:05):
these are only visible touch points, eighty seven touch points,
one year of consistent nurturing. And then when we had
a discovery call, they mentioned the reason why we booked
it was you because in March twenty twenty three, you
can clearly see it. We signed up for your full
funnel signent. So we didn't know you before, but then
we started following you and we were in your news letter, right,

(38:27):
so time to time we were consuming that content. Then
that was a specific challenge which we were like, you
have seen it in the previous examples, right, and that
resonated a lot, so we started to consume your content
more actively and figure it out that you have a
lot of practical guides on account base marketing.

Speaker 3 (38:47):
Right.

Speaker 2 (38:47):
And then when they prioritized the challenge, we had an
opportunity to talk to them and explain how to implement
a achist of ABM and the man generation. So that's
the key, right, treated as an like all that work,
account based demand generation treated as an a system like
the system of multiple touch points that you need to run,

(39:10):
run it and it should be ever cream a long
term program.

Speaker 3 (39:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
So and here's a recent example, right, look, which is like,
I know that it's so ridiculous because sometimes people on
linked then they could pick up this simple example and say, hey,
how I generated you know, like an enterprise sales opportunity
from one podcast episode.

Speaker 3 (39:34):
But this is very cheesy.

Speaker 2 (39:35):
Let's put it like this, right, in reality, what could
be assumed as like, oh, they hosted the podcast with
the clients, so it immediately generated sales opportunity. In reality
means that this was a multi year nurturn, right. So
like you can see the person saying, I've been written
content by you. It was an emailt of lot an

(39:55):
undred four years, right, trying to apply it parts of it,
and that's the additor.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
This is how it looks like.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
And at certain points something reasonates with them, right, there
is a trigger point for their outreach, or maybe there
could be a signal. In other words, your sales team
could pick up that signal and do the outreach and
they will book the call. Right, So that could be
another example. But what seems to be one touch point
is an outcome of this influence on multiple levels of

(40:27):
demand right across the bar journey. And if you look
at so just once extracted the input on how companies
that come to us here about us, we can immediately
see that a lot of mentioned the content that they
always say the link.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
Then, but we know we did this research.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
We know that in most cases they subscribe to our newsletter,
that they came to one of these full final live
podcasts or to our quote, webinars, right and even despite
the fact that I mentioned Lincoln and now that it's
the EGA system that influences the by our journey and
this is how you need to treat it. The next part,

(41:09):
which is essential, I feel and loves to talk about
it is the dark what we call the dark social
But it's exactly what we shared in the beginning, how
your target accounts become aware of your product.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
So let me just quickly cover this example because it
was an example of actually a CFO that that's not
typical for us. See it is the CFO that is
engaging with our posts and reach and having a conversation.
But what was very interesting is that once we started

(41:44):
having a conversation. One of the things he mentioned already
from the beginning was, as you might see here, thank
you for fantastic diagrams are becoming well distributed on our
companies like channels, and by diagrams, what he meant was
the diagrams that we use when we're posting LinkedIn framework.
On LinkedIn, you're posting some frameworks probably notice is if

(42:08):
you have ever seen our posts, we frequently do that.
And there's just two points here. A quick point about
the diagrams and why do I mention that simply because
one of the things to consider when you're creating content is,
like aner mentioned previously, you're fighting for attention of your
target buyers. So how do you win that attention battle? Well,

(42:33):
one is by the quality of your content, but also
thinking about what is kind of a unique way in
which we can present content for us, it was diving
really deep into practical frameworks and illustrating that with the
diagrams that we use. So it's something that creates in

(42:54):
people's mind. Okay, when I see diagrams, I think of
full funnel. Anyhow, that was a side not the main
point here being is that I this conversation with the
CFO progressed into a sales qualified opportunity and that later
became a project assaulting projects. So it was a one
deal and during that process I had to speak to

(43:17):
five people from that company, five different buyers with different
roles of some executives sales marketing, and it was one
of the easiest deals that I want. And I attribute
part of that reason to exactly this remark from the
CFO that he was basically sharing our content on their

(43:38):
slack team slack and so it was basically educating our
target buying committee members with our content. And when I
spoke to those people, they knew me. Although I have
never seen them. I have never seen them on LinkedIn,
I've never seen them on you know, in our inbox

(43:58):
or otherwise. But they knew me personally, knew of course
Andrey and our brand. And that's how they knew. It's
the so called dark social And I didn't have to
explain and our approach to them or build any sort
of trust, et cetera. I could really focus on just

(44:19):
helping them understand how we might work together, how that
will be valuable for them, how it would look like,
answering the questions, et cetera, et cetera, which is a
normal part of the sales process. So they're already pre
qualified and pre warmed. Now this is interesting to consider. Again,
we mentioned this several times. You know, buyers may not
be reading or content like this might be an objection

(44:41):
that you get. But again, look at this, So we
never saw them, but yes, yes they were reading. Because
they were reading in a private slide that is not
traceable in your analytics software. It doesn't mean that it
doesn't happen. And I just wanted to share the next
caveat quickly because it's very much related to that example.

(45:05):
As I mentioned, I needaly, so I wanted to quickly
share the next one as well. The way that this
became an ex sales called opportunity was actually through what
we called all bound engagement. Now I'll first just take
a step back and explain what we mean by all

(45:25):
bound why is that important, and then go back to
the example. So, by all bud engagement, we simply mean
it is not enough to just sit and wait for
the buyers to come to you based on the demand
that your content and your activities have been generating. You know,

(45:46):
it does happen, obviously, and it happens over time. But
some of the best opportunities happened when we use this
initial engagement as a signal to start a conversation with
the target buyers, so kind of as a tigger for
an outbound approach. But when we say outbound in this case,
we don't mean like, you know, hey, you like my post,

(46:09):
do you want to hire us as a consulting company?
It is more like, okay, hey, you like the post.

Speaker 3 (46:16):
You know.

Speaker 1 (46:19):
The post was I don't know it was about let's
say a buyer journey and said, hey, we you know,
also have these other guys that I'm happy to share
with you. You know, are you looking to you know, map
out the buyer journey or your target buyers, like whatever
the conversation was in this case, it was something like that.
And over time I was samely offering more information and

(46:43):
we were just having a conversation helping him understand the
what he was trying to what he was trying to
learn from this content and think about how he might
apply this in their company. And eventually, obviously we just said,
you know what, let's just have a call and and
see how we might be able to help. So it

(47:04):
is essentially, first of all, not just sitting passively and
waiting for the people to come to you, but it's
also leaving them in control, which is to say, match
the call to action with the level of intent. Somebody
liking a post or reading newsletter is not the reason

(47:26):
for you to assume that their intent is to buy
from you. Remember, if they're probably at that first level
of demand demand for learning, So if that is their
demand to learn, offer meet that demand, offer them maybe
more learning resources or help them understand through a conversation
and advice what they're trying to learn, rather than pushing

(47:50):
them to buy, because that's not their intent, right. But
it also means that if they are going deeper and
they are mentioning that they're working practically on something, there
is no problem in offering that next appropriate step again
matching your call to action with the level of demand

(48:10):
that they are showing, right. And it also here is
a screenshow that it may look like it was one conversation,
but it wasn't. It was a lot of back and forth.
It took several months from the first outreach, you know,
based on him liking the post, and we had several
back and forth conversations. I think in this case it

(48:31):
actually went relatively quickly, but it still took I think
a couple of months, two months before they became a
sales qualified opportunity. So to summarize dark Social, the fact
that your buyers may not be showing up in your
stats doesn't mean that they're not listening. You really need
to make sure that you understand by talking to them,

(48:52):
by asking, Okay, how do you learn? How do you discover?
You know, really understanding how they actually go about learning
discovering solutions, but also then don't leave it a chance.
Combined inbound and outbound, it's going to be easier for
your salespeople to get responses if they're reaching o business

(49:12):
existing engagement with the right level of matching the call
to action with the level of intent, and it's going
to be a much better experienced for the buyers and
at the end is going to also lead to many
more conversations and many more opportunities.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
Well, what we want to share at the end as well,
if it is one of the most under leveraged tactics,
it's co creation with the virus, right, It's just first
of all, again spoke a lot about the problem was
the content quality, right, And the second issue that we

(49:53):
often here complaints is that we don't have an active network,
have a small network, and let's say we want to
involve our salespeople, but nobody knows them, so they might
be ignored.

Speaker 1 (50:08):
Right.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
So the easiest way to solve it for all the
reasons that we shared above is the co creation with
your target buyers and multiple formats interviewing them on your podcast.
What we did last week was and it's you can
leverage your current customers.

Speaker 3 (50:25):
Right.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
You can involve deals from the pipeline. You can even
involve charmed customers. You can involve target accounts right. And
you can run these collaborations and multiple formats. This could
be panel discussions, this could be private whatever virtual business
breakfasts right, talking about specific use cases. It could be

(50:46):
the simple content collaboration and posts. So for example, what
once wrote an article about marketing positioning for B to
B tech companies and we interviewed cmos of different companies
that belong to one of the positions and categories that
we're talking about, right. And why we're doing this for

(51:06):
several reasons. First of all, as we mentioned, peers like
peers content much more than when it comes from vendors, right.
And unless these vendors are recognizable and trustable, if you will, right,
they have enough credibility, then we'll leverage the network of
our peers just because I mean, if they are sharing

(51:28):
the engagement with you, you are expanded to the network
and you can pick it up and start conversations.

Speaker 3 (51:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
So this is one of the things to make sure
that you influence the entire Bayer journey. Because also the
co creation if you're the co creation was your clients.
Then you you basically saw the email, right that what
share it was you? It triggers sometimes it triggers the
sales process.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
Right.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
If you co create this your target accounts, you might
be assassated with them. So people by the fault, they
don't know your level of relationship with these target accounts.
They don't know if you are if these accounts are
customers of yours, right, But what they clearly see they
immediately make this link between your product and these accounts

(52:15):
and you become associated as a vendor. That solves challenges
for these types of companies. That's why it's so powerful
and that's why we highly recommend it, recommend.

Speaker 3 (52:27):
You to do.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
And lastly, again just not to say that it gives
more credibility to your content. And this this also tigers
this internal sharing and peer to peer sharing. Right, this
also leads us to the second category, amplification audiences. Right,
So aside from your clients and the side of target accounts,

(52:48):
you have niche media owners. People who are hosting small
you know, maybe just podcasts when I mean small nod
level of uh Jim Ferris right forcasts and they shouldn't right,
they have a niche podcast and your target bars might
be listening to it, which is fantastic, and these people
might be recognizable. All these people might have a small community.

(53:12):
These people might run a small newsletter, right, but this
newsletter is followed by your target accounts. So for example,
we know a lot of newsletters like these ones on
substack and they are just addressing the questions from technical audiences.
Or there is only ce aphone newsletter for CFOs, which

(53:33):
is fantastic one, so.

Speaker 3 (53:35):
That could be multiple examples.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
Next, we have partner brands and quite often, I mean
this is the lowest handing fruit, right, your partner with
one company, why not just join forces and co create
the programs and co create content, and just make sure
that your content influences the entire system, because your target
accounts might see it coming from your partner. You can

(53:59):
impact the new audience right And obviously, lastly the industry influencers.
So for a long time, I know that influencer marketing
was only for B two C, but in the last
few years was so a huge spike. A lot of
companies are reaching out to SUT leaders that helped with
the print awareness just simply because they understand it's first

(54:23):
of all, they gain credibility from that sut leader, right,
and also they get additional print awareness which will take
them yers to get on their own. So I think
one of the best examples we have seen is cognism.
Probably a lot of you have heard about cognism, right,
and they did a create program with a few sales

(54:46):
leaders including Morgan Ingram and those people who address who
are talking to the sales audience and have quite big networks,
so they were engaged with them running a lot of
podcast webinars, et ceter. Drastically impacted the pipeline and revenue right,

(55:06):
and also the engagers. I think this is the audience
that is less obvious and not everybody talks about this,
but this is the audience that might never buy from you,
but they could recommend you. Remember the example that I
shared about traded right, somebody asked and then then a
person replied, hey, check this product. Did you try this now?

(55:28):
But I have heard a lot about them and I'm
reading their content. These are exactly the engagers. This could
be you know people like an other case, this could
be marketing agencies and marketing consultants or sales coaches or
whoever right, So they will never buy from us, they
will never become our customers. But just because they enjoy
our content and they are also serving the same ICP,

(55:50):
it's worse to invest in the relationship with them because
they are recommending you right, think about the world of mouth.
So that's why it makes sense to investment of this
audience as well. And yeah, industry subtly, that's what quickly
covered it. So I think we have five minutes left

(56:10):
and we have a few questions from our community. So
Karen asked, what is the best content fuctuation middle of
the funnel? I think partial of a cover at it,
but maybe what you'd like to share a few things.

Speaker 1 (56:28):
I think if you're talking about middle of the funnel,
let's assume that these are the companies who are looking
for a solution, will be covered with demand for a solution.
When I say a solution specifically is that they have
a specific problem. They're looking for a solution. They're not
necessarily looking at you as a vendor, so that let's

(56:48):
call that a middle of the funnel. I think the
most important thing there is to explain your contin needs
to communicate and explain why your approach is a good
fit to solve their challenge. So I think Andrea was
using an example of you know, ABM. They may have
a challenge with marketing source triven you they're selling in

(57:11):
complex B to be while they may be looking at
different solutions. They may be looking at starting a demandgen program.
They may be looking to focus on enterprise customers to
grow their ABM could be a good solution, et cetera,
et cetera. You know, they may be looking at completely
different ways to solve the problem. And so you're teaching

(57:31):
them about the approach and solution. What type of content
can that be that those can be more, that can
be also longer form content doesn't have to just be
shorter form content or content that is completely for awareness.
Like it might be like purely on LinkedIn, it might
be like guides, it might be like webinars. Again, you're

(57:52):
not going to teach them about your product, but you're
going to teach them about the approach. Let's say again
EBM as a way to increase your market source revenue.
Where you're explaining the framework, you're explaining the steps, and
you are featuring your solution natively within that content. You
can still do that, and that's how you create awareness

(58:13):
of your solution, and I'll already start influencing their purchase criteria,
start thinking them, start helping them think in the right direction.
If we are going to take an ABM solution, it
should not make business stakes and it should be like
set up in this way so that later on you're
actually preparing them to actually consider you as a top

(58:35):
vendor based on this purchase criteria that you have actually
helped influence. Case studies that are another very good example
where you're sharing exact same similar company with exact same
problems and how they solve them again featuring your solution.
But when I say case studies, I don't mean like
a one two pager self promotional, self serving case study,

(58:58):
and a lot of companies website. I mean like really
behind the scenes, whether it's a webinar or an actual
written out guide or an interview with the customer where
they really go into that on explaining how they came from,
you know, being where your prospect is with their problem
to having a successful solution results.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
And I will quickly pick up the last two questions
about messods of target and small audiences were paid advertising
and how they reduce complexities of riaching buyers on so
many different channels. The answer is really simple. You don't
need to be everywhere. You just need to figure out
a few channels and excel at them. And to identify

(59:40):
these channels, you need to run the class to decomposition,
you need to involve your SME, and you need to
run customer research.

Speaker 3 (59:47):
As simple as that.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
Then you double down and you make sure that you
become you do just the best possible job. You don't
create mediocre content, you don't run mediocre activities, but you
try to excel at it. A call us that and
I saw a lot of great comments from you guys,
so thank you so much for this was fantastic comment

(01:00:08):
from Josh about handshake and for the distribution. I would
also like to address quickly comment from stuff and about
co creation, environment, life science. You don't need to Yeah,
maybe it would be hard to co create with your
target accounts, but you can involve your customers, or you
can do paid engagement and just pay a few short

(01:00:29):
leaders leaders. And this could be not short leaders in
a sense that they're independent that this could be you know,
people who are regularly given keynotes at industry conferences and
just involve them to pay for them and involve them
into your account based demand generation. So that could be
one of the best ways, plus partners as well. So

(01:00:51):
that being said, we have finished it on time. Fantastic questions,
fantastic engagement. Thank you so much, guys. Quicknouncement. Next week
we are going to talk about expansion programs and account
based marketing, so stay tunes next Wednesday, same time we're
going to talk about it and if you are interested,

(01:01:13):
sign up for our demand gen of course, see you
next week.

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
Cheers, take care,