Episode 155: Demand Generation In Action: Real-world Examples with Andrei & Vladimir

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is the Full Funnel bt B marketing podcast, brought
to you by full Funnel dot io. Let's dive.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Several cavids when it comes to demand generation implementation. We
have received a couple of create questions from our community
and most of them were, Okay, can you show how
the demand gen works any practical programs because in for

(00:36):
many people, demand generation could mean multiple things. Right, you
can ask them be to the marketers and they would
provide different definitions from like and gate Everson deliver value
and the pipeline will come on to like. Oh, that's
like a sophisticated strategies of our demand gen function in

(01:00):
places just basically running ads everywhere. Right, So we want
to share the practical examples what actually demand generation means,
and aside from this, cover a couple of questions from
the community about dark social about measuring demand gen, and
then next week we want to host another episode basically

(01:25):
covering all the typical concerns and questions where hear and
from sales and from leadership and sharing with you examples
on how to tackle the specific let's say objections whenever
you hear them. As always, we kick it off with
my dear co founder of Vladimir and we have prepared

(01:47):
adact that we want to navigate you through. Feel free
to ask any questions in the chat. And the first
thing we would love to ask you guys, where you're
all Jena's from. Let us know in the chat.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
So as always joining from Spain, the Valencian region, myself
the city of Valencia, Andre, Villa Real. And while the
folks are typing and sharing where they are calling Aye
Paul from London. I wanted to jump into the first

(02:22):
example here Andre, if you can just help me like this, yes,
before we start sharing concrete examples or like we called it,
the real world demand gen examples, I wanted to share
this objection that we got from one of our clients

(02:42):
when we were working on the plan for their program,
and the objective, the objection for those who are listening
went on something like this. Oh, the examples that you
share here are very optimistic that actually the ICP leaders
decision makers are going to personally engage with your content,

(03:08):
and that they will write to you and tell you
what they think and then spend time to go back
and forth with you. This doesn't happen. This is not
how real life works. Unfortunately, as Andre promised, we'll dive
deeper into other kinds of objections that you may get
from sales and from the executive team during our next episode,

(03:32):
but we wanted to dive more deeply here. Actually, based
on this example, we excuse me, based on this objection,
we develop these examples to show how this actually does
work in real life. Right, and I get this, right,
I get it. As Andri mentioned, if the advice about

(03:56):
demand generation is kind of like show up and createvel
you or ungate all of your content and wait for
the demand to be created. Of course we know this
is not enough, and that's why we need to share
these examples, also with some caveats. But what would be

(04:18):
interesting for me If you have any other objections that
you get, please share them in the comments. We might
address them now and definitely will dive deeper into those
objections next week. So without further ado, let's just jump
into and share the first example of how it actually
works in real life. And here what you can see

(04:43):
is actually a snippet from a sales called transcript. It
was a sales called discovery call that I had with
the head of marketing from a very large, decently large
think more than fifty k employee high tech enterprise that

(05:07):
reached out to us and there was an inbound opportunity.
I had a conversation, I had a Discovery call, and
what's interesting, you can't read this probably, so I'll just
like read some highlights from the transcript of that call.
He mentioned that I think I've been to one or

(05:28):
two webinars. Usually when people say webinars, they mean these
live podcasts as you're attending right now. And I also
received the newsletter and it was a combination of both
the last new newsletter, and he said we were just
at that time evaluating where we are, and it was

(05:52):
at the very right moment and the way that he
said when the pain was really quite high, so I think, etcetera, etcetera.
So what I wanted to really highlight here A couple
of things that are read from this comment is relevance.
So he said the pain was quite high, and the

(06:15):
content that was shared was about those pain, so it
was hitting them where it hurt. It was extremely relevant
to their situation. So we can talk about that, like
why no amount of bottom of the funnel, middle of
the funnel, top of the funnel, call it what you want.
The content is going to cut it if it's not

(06:38):
really very well aligned with the pain and the challenges
that your target accounts have. We have frameworks we shared
and we can dive more into that in a moment.
But this is like the first thing. The other thing
is we haven't seen this gentleman at all. We haven't
seen him on a LinkedIn, we haven't seen him really engaged.

(06:58):
We do have like more than twenty two thousand newsletter subscribes,
which we don't monitor daily, so he was probably there.
Maybe we saw him attend one of these events, but
I never really noticed them. And it's nothing actually unusual
with that because actually a lot of senior buyers will

(07:22):
be quote unquote silent. They will silently engage and will
only raise their hand or start a conversation when it's
really really relevant for them. And another thing that you
can observe, they're not going to do this right away.
They're not going to do the right way until They're
going to wait until it's reveling. But also it took

(07:43):
probably I don't know in this exact case, we don't
have the data, but I'm sure it took multiple touch points.
It took probably multiple months, and we know from data
from other prospects that it can take up to two
years before they're ready to reach out to you. I
don't know, Andrew, if you have other thoughts about both

(08:04):
the objection that I shared and the example here, if
you have any other reflections, and maybe also about a
practical solution for okay, how can you make sure that
your content is relevant and that it's seen multiple times
by your buyers.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
I actually wanted to add a few points about this
specific opportunity in our organization, and I'm not saying necessarily
that it's the right way to do things, but for us,
we don't really care about like multi touch point attribution
because we know this very well. We have observed data
and we're not like we're particular on what influences the

(08:45):
decision making process, right, But specifically for this opportunity, it's
started actually from our full Funnel summit. And how did
I know about this sixth sense? They have partnered with us,
The sponsored the last summat and they actually reached out saying, hey, yeah,
so we now that you guys are chatting with this company.

(09:08):
They haven't minded the ABM platform for them, so that
was kind of the trigger point for me. So from
that point, SIMUT was the top and coming back to
the let's say market and slamk you mentioned top of
the final, middle of the final, et cetera. Right, Full
Final SIMAT is the activity that we'll do first for

(09:31):
our community. And by the way, we're going to host
already six annual full Final simmat in one month on
twenty fifth, twenty fifth, thirty six, and twenty seventh of March.
I dropped the sign sign up link in the chat,
so you guys can join us. We'll do it every Yeah,
and obviously for our company it creates a huge print

(09:54):
awareness a lot of people. The way how we were
the speakers, the way how we validate the content the
presentations is really much above the expectations that people have
they share and this is what attracts the attention of
these target accounts, right, So that's the key. Then, like

(10:17):
what mentioned that was no visible engagement. This wasn't the
person who was like in a comment and our LinkedIn
us or who was coming for these events that he
has mentioned, right, and he was actively participating, asking questions whatever,
never ever saw any significance engagement. But this is the

(10:39):
reality and this is partially an answer to the dark
social of I mean, dark social could be another story,
but this is basically this is a point that validates
that the major part of the buyer journey is invisible.
You have no idea what's going on. There is no
engagement intense signals from these accounts. But it also doesn't

(11:03):
mean that nothing happens. A week ago, we hosted an
episode about our account based content strategy and basically this
is the breakdown. This is what you need to have
in place to holistically influence the bar journey of these accounts.
That's that's the first thing. The second one about coming
back to the relevance and the quality of that content. Right.

(11:25):
One of the key principles that we take is we
flip the funnel. We don't look at the keywords. We
don't ask Chudge a Pity to brainstorm and hopefully after
my today's post, less people would be doing judge it
Pity created content the jogs aside, So we don't. We
don't ask Chudge a Pity to create content plan for us. Instead,

(11:47):
what we do we analyze the calls with our clients,
We define the repetitive patterns and then together as flat
we create the best possible answers to these questions. Right,
we don't care honestly about how many organic views will get,
et cetera. Because the key point, like we always share

(12:08):
this litmus test, and I think this is the corner
stone pillar for your demandsion program. Right, is your content
good enough that your VP of sales would be willain
to send this, let's say, piece of content article PDA
for whatever in private message to the strategic account or

(12:28):
the key enterprise prospect Because if the answer is no,
you know that your content is bad, as simple as that.
And the second answer is if you are willain to
spend money on promoting this content Sometimes obviously companies can
go nuts and do the distribution of mediocre content, but

(12:49):
obviously we're not talking about these companies. Right. The key
point is are you sure that this content is so
good that this content will actually create awareness? And how
nor the strategic accounts? Right, that's the key If your
answer if your answer to those two points is no
or you're not sure, then it means that your content

(13:10):
needs a significant improvement. Right. So these are the key
points about the content part. Right. And content also is
a kind of corner store pillar of any demand generation program.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
A quick comment. Excuse me, Andrea, I just wanted to
add a quick comment there. So what you said, we
don't really care about the organic views and engagement. And
I'm sure that a lot of you have noticed that
LinkedIn has reduced engagement for a lot of people while
maybe promoting more you know, vertical videos and other types

(13:51):
of content that is popular. What I wanted to share
about that was that actually, as the engagement of our content,
we have seen the same what's going down. Actually our
pipeline state the exact the same in terms of the volume,
but the quality of pipeline has improved. And still the

(14:14):
majority of people who do contact us mentioned that they
first discovered us via our LinkedIn content. So just wanted
to drop there. It's about the quality of engagement, the
depth of engagement that you're engaging your icps. Now, I
wanted to use this opportunity here, this second example here

(14:35):
to highlight one very practical framework that might be helpful
for you when you're thinking about what kind of content
to create, and it is what we called cluster decomposition.
So what we do is we constantly evaluate all our
opportunities and best clients, and we segment them into so

(14:58):
called account clusters. Are account clusters, those are groups of
accounts who have similar challenges, who have a similar use
case and similar challenges. For example, the previous one was
about let's say, kind of traditional marketing based on mqls, PDFs,

(15:21):
gated webinars and other content that is not effective anymore
and companies are looking to increase their marketing sourced revenue.
In this case that we are sharing right now, it
is about it is a different kind of cluster, which
is companies who are have an existing ABM program and

(15:44):
are looking to quote unquote revaent it. This was actually
a word one of our clients used, and we always
like to use the words of our clients. So the
first thing that you always want to understand when it
comes to your ICP as it relates to your demand
generation strategy is not so much the thermographics and the

(16:05):
technographics and other characteristics which are extremely important for their
ABM program, right but you want to understand these use
cases and challenges as they relate to those use cases.
So somebody who is struggling with marketing source revenue and
in effective marketing will probably have you challenges that are
related to how they're working with sales. Maybe sales is

(16:27):
ignoring their leads, maybe they have lost trust of the
sales organization. They will have challenges in kind of like
proving the value in their organization. They will have challenges
like I said, like their marketing needs not converting into sales,
et cetera, et cetera. Somebody who has started an ABM

(16:48):
program will have challenges related to if their program is ineffective.
So they belong to this other class that we have
another set of challenges as they are maybe struggling to
get the results that they are hoping from that program. Okay,
So just wanting to share this very practical framework. So

(17:08):
you start by segmenting all your best top customers into
segments based on the use cases and shared challenges. So
these could be organizations from different industries. This could be
sometimes right same industry as well. And then you identify

(17:29):
what are the challenges that they are related that these
accounts share, and then you do what we call challenge
decomposition or a cluster decomposition. And we always have a
series of questions that we ask ourselves, So questions such
as okay for these strategic challenges that they have. What

(17:50):
are the actual root causes of the challenges? What are
some of the we call them false solutions or mistakes, like,
what are some of the ways in which companies are
trying to solve those challenges that actually don't work? And
then we ask ourselves, you know a number of other
questions and speaking of mistakes, speaking of quote unquote false solutions.

(18:16):
Here you have an example of a content that is
exactly written for the cluster of people who run excuse me,
companies who run ABM programs and are looking to improve
their program or suffering maybe from underwhelming results, and it
is about taking those challenges, breaking them down. And one

(18:40):
of the questions answering the question what are the false
solutions or the mistakes that companies make. So you will
see a lot of times that we will talk about that.
We will talk about the typical mistakes, such as the
case here, which was the newsletter that Andrew wrote about
the unobvious challenges that kill ABM programs. These were exactly

(19:02):
the quote unquote fall solutions or mistakes, and where he
really went into a lot of details and breaking them down,
and we got quickly after that after he published very
soon after and re published this on a newsletter. We
got a submission in our mailbox saying, what are the

(19:23):
kind of challenges that you're looking to solve and the
prospect she said even strategy execution. We launched an ABM
program recently, but seemed to be doing exactly what you
say not to do in your newsletters. So just wanting
to highlight that example to show how we think about

(19:44):
creating content that will impact your buyers using this practical
framework of the constructing, decomposing, excuse me, the account clusters
and the challenges, asking ourselves the questions about those challenges,
and then creating a content that's aligned on that. And
here is an example of how this might influence that.

(20:06):
And I think there is another interesting point to be
made about content here. I think I don't want to
dive into this example. I think it's just to show that, yes,
sometimes the icps do engage also on LinkedIn. I don't

(20:30):
know if you have anything else interesting to highlight about
this case, because I know that you know the history
of this account. It's an account that we have been
working on for quite some time, but in different because
it's such a big company on different geographies, et cetera.
So it was I think from that perspective interesting to

(20:51):
see how demand generation can work across across the different
buying centers of your target account. But yeah, I think
maybe you have more insight into that.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
And day, I would love actually not to dive into
this example, but summarize a few a couple of important
points about content, right, just to make it as a
summary to everything that we have.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
Shared.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
Content is a cornerstone pillar of successful demand generation. Your
content should match or should pass the slidmus test. Right.
Your VP of sales is willing to share it with
the strategic accounts, and you're willing to spend money on it. Next,
the best content comes not from the keyword research, not
from the II suggestions, but actually from analysis of your

(21:38):
calls with prospects with target accounts, and you create content
that will help these people. And lastly, you need to
accept the fact that the nurture it happens invisibly. You
have no control over it, and you have no control
of everybody in B to B has no control over

(22:01):
B to B buying process. Right, But what we can
do is just accept that fact and make sure that
we have the content in place that addresses ever and
from the jobs to be done, industry pans and the
things that are interested to your buyer persona to specific
points when they have a need and you have enough,

(22:22):
let's say, arguments why you should be selected. The entire
point of this, I remember you once set this in
one of the LinkedIn posts. It doesn't matter how we'll
define the demand generation. What matters is actually that we
get into considerations set of our target accounts, and we

(22:43):
are also associated as a solution to the strategic challenges
to these account So when the buying trigger occurs, they
think about you. That's the key, right. So lastly, you
need to have the distribution layers of this content in place,
right as you can say, we have the newsletter despite

(23:05):
all the kind of funny advice that news letters have
that and nobody is reading them, so we have we
have distribution layers that are aligned with the channels how
Bars mentioned us, So we kind of try to distribute
content the way they prefer to consume. But it doesn't

(23:27):
mean that you necessarily need to replicate the strategy. It
doesn't mean that you need to create linkdin content a
lunge podcast, because every single market and community tells you
that you need to persuade CEO to to lounge a podcast.
It's the ultimate, it's the whole, It's the holy grail
of demand generation. Right. Obviously, no think about We always

(23:50):
mentioned they think about the channels through what you can
influence the the barge journey of target accounts. Sometimes it
could be in the association. Sometimes it could be industry
thought leaders right, or even journalists. Sometimes you could initiate
the kind of micro community on what'sapp or slack or whatever. Right,

(24:14):
that could be multiple ways, and for you, the key
is to understand what channels actually will help you to
distribute the content. I always share this example that we
have experience in an earlier early stage of full Finnel
Data your Journey, when we had a company that was
selling to HVAC engineers of manufacturing companies. These people even

(24:38):
don't have linked and profiles, and if you'll open Facebook
or Twitter or whatever, it quite often won't find them. Right.
So if you'll try to run at or create content
on linked then you'll waste time, so you'll be speaking
to nobody. Right, So you need to understand the channels
through which you can distribute that content. That's the key.

(24:59):
Now the second part, sir, I just wanted sense. The
second part here that you need to accept is that
you should you shouldn't treat it as one time campaign. Right,
will do assumption, will measure the cliques whatever. Right. Unfortunately, again,
nobody has as well spoken control over the B to

(25:22):
B buying process, and you'll never know when the buy
intrigger will happen. So for you, it should be the
same evergreen process. That's basically it should be actually the
evergreen process that you run daily, that you run regularly.
It's the same advice if you'll go to any doctor

(25:43):
and the doctor will tell you that you need to
have a healthy diet, right if you don't, if you
want to avoid all the diseases, et cetera. Right, Or
that you need to do to do sport activities regularly,
if you want to stay healthy. Right. Nobody is questioning this,
and you don't question a cap What if I will
do just three times and I won't have six apps? Right?

(26:03):
So should I quit it? Or should I should? I?
Should I continue? Right? Obviously we'll do the things until
the end of the life. But the business life perspective,
for some reasons, we want to find shortcuts that we
can do once I will better setup AI agents that
will do it instead of us. But in reality it

(26:25):
doesn't work right, So you need to deploy this program
for the long term. And that's that's one of the keys. Sorry,
I just wanted share the subs, but feel fit to
jump in.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
No, not at all, not at all. I think what
the folks are seeing who are watching us live. Here
is an example of an eighty seven touch points journey,
which took about one year of nurturing to create an opportunity.
This was act in this case using dream Data. Hockey

(27:04):
Stack is another solution that provides multi touch attribution and
will give you the account based attribution as well. We
don't like Ondry mentioned. We don't often look at that.
We look at it to see if we can share
some cool examples with our audience more than to make

(27:25):
our decisions. And I would like just to highlight what
Andre already mentioned. Focus on a few key channels and
consistently creating native content for those channels. So instead of
thinking about funnels, instead of thinking about you know, top

(27:48):
of funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel,
et cetera, et cetera. It's much more effective to think
about how can I make sure that I am doing
my activities on my different channels regularly and that they
are of high quality? So how can I make sure

(28:09):
for example, Andrey mentioned we are using primarily LinkedIn news letter,
we run these live podcasts, right, how can I make
sure that we run them every week and don't skip them?
How can I make sure that we create a post
for every work LinkedIn post for every working day, and
that our newsletter goes out every week. This should be

(28:32):
the focus because as you can see on this example,
it can take a long time. These are eighty seven
touch points that are measured by the marketing attribution software,
and who knows how many other touch points internal conversations
and chats and in meetings that are happening behind the

(28:53):
closed doors that you're not even aware of. Right, So
if you need, if you accept this, then the question because, okay,
how can I make sure that no, not, how can
I make sure that I have then an eighty seven

(29:14):
touch point email sequence, whether that's a nurture sequence or
email outreach sequence, but how can I make sure that
basically I have content that is going out regularly? And
consistently on my channels. I think this should probably be
the top questions that most teams should be asking themselves

(29:36):
instead of asking themselves about, Hey, what is going to
be the ROI of this specific piece of content or
of this specific activity? Right? Hey, what is how can
we you know, scale this process through AI agents or

(29:59):
whatever other kind of things that companies might be asking
and solves? So I think, think about think about this.
And one last thing that I wanted to mention about
this long term strategy and thinking about it as an
evergreen process is to share another practical tip. So we

(30:22):
use this approach that we call weekly cadence or weekly
content cadence. We use it with our clients, we use
it ourselves. What is a weekly content cadence is essentially
thinking about a theme for the week or a key
topic of for the week. So let's say this week
we want to write about sales and marketing alignment. We

(30:45):
can we have if you remember what I said previously,
we have our breakdown of this topic and the challenge
is related to sales and marketing alignment. We know that
we can talk about, you know, the different levels of
sales and marketing alignment. We can talk about specific challenges,
we can talk about symptoms versus root causes, we actually

(31:07):
have a post about that, etc.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
Etc.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
So now we have done our homework, we know the breakdown,
and then here's what we do. Let's say for that
week we agree, in our case between Andre and myself, Okay, hey, Andre,
you can post about these topics. I can post about
those topics, and then we'll make sure that the same

(31:31):
week we have our live podcast is going to dive
deeper into sales and marketing alignment the same topic. We
are going to actually use some of the assets. As
you are seeing right now what we're doing. We are
using one of our LinkedIn posts and the assets we
have created for that LinkedIn post to support our live podcasts.

(31:55):
This is something that we will often do. We will
take the different diagrams that my we might have produced
for those LinkedIn posts of that week and used them
as an asset during the live podcast. This will we
will get a lot of questions from our community that
will allow us to dive much deeper into the topic
and make our content even more relevant, addressing the questions

(32:19):
that our audience has. And then we'll take all of
that and package it into that week's news letter. Right,
So for example, last week, I think two weeks excuse me,
two weeks ago, we have done a live podcast about
account based content. Before that, we have posted about it.

(32:42):
We had also one of our clients share a case study.
We took all of that and produced a four thousand
world article which I dropped also here in the chat
about account based marketing content. So again, think about a
weekly cadence which will help you not have to reinwin

(33:04):
the wheel every time. That will help you kind of
align the different the content on the different channels and
will hopefully help you also be more consistent in your strategy.
So this was one thing that I wanted to share,
and it was.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Just I was just smiling when you said, like about
eighty seven emails. I just imagined, imagined for a second
board medium and say, you know, somebody from key leadership asks, okay,
how how how can I measure the success of how
our nurture and canons? Oh, the country will measured well

(33:40):
on e mail fifty two. So Jack aside, sometimes I
mean the attributional session could be really driving companies and
a drown direction. And that's why I feel ever so
that you have shared absolutely spot on. We need to
understand that there is an equal contribution of all exercises. Again,

(34:05):
so we speak between ourselves a lot about sport and
you know, the the food, the health and lifestyle. So
it's if I can give an example it just imagine
for a second, if you'll ask, oh, so did my
squads or push ups actually contributed better to my health?

Speaker 1 (34:25):
Right?

Speaker 2 (34:25):
Maybe I can quit some of them and just focus
on more on this double down right way. You need
to do all of them because otherwise, but it won't
be developed equally. So the same I mean, but you
need to understand what exercise is actually helpful, right, So
the same is here. So I just wanted to share this.
And aside from the kind of understand the and the

(34:53):
the fact that it takes years, right, we need also
to keep in mind that this again just highlighted this
invisible engagement. Right, it's one of the arguments that you
just need to especially in the beginning. You need to
show that this is this is how actually we are buying.

(35:14):
Quite often when companies resist to invest more time into
these activities, right, or they start questioning. Ever, and you
need to have internal conversations. So even launch an internal workshop,
discuss and how did we make the last uh, you know,
expensive purchases as an organization, Right, you can introduce your CFO,

(35:39):
your HR, your VP of sales, depending on what software
or what vendor your brought internally, right, what influenced it?
How long did it take to from from from the
day when you first started talking internally that some things
could be improved? Right, how long did it take and
what actually influence your decision? How did you select it?

(36:02):
I think this one, this is this is one of
the keys to to to overcome this or to handle
this objection internal like you can see this again another
example a person and it's a funny that we have
the screenshots over coming the objection that it sounds funny,
but these viars will never reach out to you, right

(36:25):
and contrary the worldwide global prints uh sending these emails
to us. So that's that's why sometimes we are smiling, right,
and the person shares that have been written ladyers and
mind content for years, but never ever we have seen
anything or even like a small send you guys, the

(36:46):
content is helpful right until we receive this email. This
this is the reality. This is another thing that you
need to accept and well.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
I wanted to maybe share one again, very very practical
tip here related to this example. So the person reached
out to us after we did a live podcast interview
with one hour clients, and I think this is what
I just wanted to highlight again. Talking about demand generation,

(37:17):
one of the best assets are case studies, and case
studies are difficult to create for a lot of companies.
It takes a long time between their internal content team
taking that, you know, like maybe their sales team or
the CS team, finishing successfully the implementation, then communicating that

(37:42):
to the content and content team, like getting that on
their agenda, finally deciding to produce the content content case study,
excuse me, then going to the company the customers company
to get them approval, doing the interview. It takes months.
Sometimes it takes up to a year before you actually
have a case study. And then unfortunately, these case studies

(38:06):
are kind of a run of the meal, self serving
a little bit about a client and their challenge is
very generic, and then a lot about our solutions. It's
a content that nobody really consumes. It's like there to
do a kind of a check to check it off
your checklist. I've created a case study, and one thing
that I've heard repeatedly from salespeople we need more good

(38:29):
case studies. So it's interesting that you have this need
for good customer stories and case studies that salespeople can
use in their conversations, and that it is so difficult
and time consuming to produce them and then ending up
with the result that is not so good. So this
is like a recommendation that anybody can implement, is if

(38:53):
you can get your customer to appear, if you have
a podcast, doesn't have to be a podcasts can be
a webinary, it can be any other a type of collaboration,
and you just interview them about the project and you
let them share their story that is usually broader than

(39:14):
just the product and the features that they used of
your product, et cetera, what you typically see in the
case studies, but actually to tell the whole story. Okay,
this was the situation our company, and this is what
we were struggling, and this is what we tried previously
and it didn't work out, and then we decided to
do it in a different way. And then like okay,

(39:34):
but we weren't sure because we needed to make sure
that our team was ready and whatever. Like you hear
the whole unfiltered story, and this is what customers want
to learn. They don't want to learn about your features.
They want to learn about these practical things. If I
need to implement this, what will it mean? Who will

(39:55):
I need to have internally to support me? What will
you do as a vendor versus the what I will
have to do in my team, etcetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Really hearing those details and seeing how this really looks
like in another company such as yours. So the whole

(40:15):
long story short is, we don't have that problem with
case studies. We just interviewed our customers. It takes us
literally the forty five minutes or one hour that we
spend with them during our live podcast and bomb we
have the case study. And as you can see in
this example that we're sharing here, when we did this

(40:38):
recently with one of our customers, Amy Lush from Child's Gate,
we had immediately somebody reaching out to us. So these
are very very effective. Again, of course, this is not
to say that case study is the heck and that
this is what generated the demand for sure not.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
As you can see the email not the case study.
It was the podcast. That's why everybody assays you need
the podcast.

Speaker 1 (41:06):
There you go. So I just wanted to share this
as a practical, practical remark talking about demand generation. Focus
on case studies, but don't make it complicated and then
ending up with the result that is not as useful
for demand generation. Try to just collaborate with the client
and share their story, share their success, share the details

(41:30):
and integritty behind the scenes details of the implementation. This
is going to be much much more helpful for other
prospects and for your demand generation efforts.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
So we have my examples and let's cover the questions
that you also guys asked us about the dark social right.
So we spoke already a lot about the invisible part
of the Bier journey. And also, if you guys follow Plaia,
here is something started publishing the reports from the interviews

(42:03):
with cmos, Citos, et cetera. Interim. Basically, I feel the
intern and Stereo it's all possible senior buyer personas, but
the insights are really create and apparently we all know this.
But the starts prove that he spoke to one hundred
and fifty b to b cmos about how they actually

(42:25):
buy and what does the like when the research process,
the majority of people mentioned that they start they don't
start with Google. They start with referrals, peers, and if
they're part of any community, they do it. And obviously
the first conversations are happening internally, right, They basically speak

(42:46):
to the calleques, Hey, what this could be the solution?
Did you hear anything? Right? And when this conversation actually happens,
suddenly people start collecting different insights. Right, something has three
or this conversation. So somebody is active and linted, and
somebody is subscribed to the podcast. I mean somebody subscribed

(43:07):
a news letter. Somebody is a part of the community,
somebody has attended the webinar, right. Different. I don't necessarily
think that the band committee groups agree on whom to
follow on linked in or what events that right, people
do it all this lesson coroniously. And then when they like,
when they have this conversation, then people start sharing what

(43:28):
they have seen, what they have learned. Right, And this
is what actually influences this so called dark social right.
They see the post, they pick it up and they shaid, oh,
basically you mentioned this challenge and I have seen this
great post. I thought it might be availuable. And this
is how the awareness happens. Another example, somebody catches, you know,

(43:49):
like a great piece of content, and this person is
a part of a community and let's say CMO community
or whatever pavilion, and then this person comes to that
community and shares hey, guys, I recently read a post
about this and that, so that might be available for
you like, And this is how the distribution happens. Right,
So we just need to understand this and this is

(44:12):
the only way to influence it. You can't influence dark
social without content, right, But also you need to keep
in mind that there are ways how you can proactively
do it. Quite often we're here the objection. Yeah, but
I mean, let's say we'll sell them to it audience.
These people are not active on social they have their

(44:34):
own communities, and sales people are not allowed to marketing
people are not allowed to join these communities. What can
we do in this case? Obviously, in this case, you
need to join the efforts with your subject matter experts
who actually have the same titles as your target barer personas,
and you need to implement a couple of other, let's say,

(44:57):
approaches that belong to the MA generation program. This is
what we call the proactive demands gen. Right, not the
best one, not just running the ads and expecting that
the people will come. But this is what you need
to do with your sales, with your subject matter experts. Right,
you need to start all bound distribution. If you will.

(45:18):
Inbound it's the when you publish it organically, when you promoted,
et cetera. But then you need to initiate conversations. We
always say that the best sources of let's say the
best the best channel of distribution is your eye, your
sales reps. They have conversations with target accounts, and you

(45:39):
create this piece of any piece of content in any
format to actually influence, right, or to nurture your target accounts.
So for sales it's essential and basically the key point.
Whenever they have an opportunity, they need to use these
pieces of content to ignite the conversations. As you can
see in this example, this is one story, right, but

(46:02):
let's say that could be if and then if you
are part of any meaningful community, you can do it,
or your subject matter expert should be doing it. Like
in the case of it, communities or healthcare whatever. Right,
another option though to become because to earn, to earn

(46:25):
an opportunity to distribute her to engage, right, you need
to create some sort of visibility and some sort of
trust with these people. So there is another way how
you can do it and influence it. It's just basically
the content co creation with your target accounts was basically
with this bar persona. So I think it's it could be.

(46:48):
It could be a great story.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
To shelve lot absolutely so. Here what a lot of
people think when they think about content co creation. This
could be different examples. It could be some sort of
an industry research that you're running where you're interviewing your
target accounts and prospects and maybe other influencers, let's say

(47:13):
in the industry. It could be a podcast where you're
interviewing them. It could be maybe a webinar that you're
running together with them with a partner. You're running that
with a we mentioned previously with your existing customers, kind
of a life case study, et cetera, et cetera. Well,
when people think about demand generation and content co creation

(47:35):
in these forms, they usually think about, Okay, I'm going
to create a piece of content. I'm going to promote
and distribute this piece of content. This piece of content
is going to actually do the awareness creation in the
demand generation for us. And while this is true, and
while this is part of part of the goal, there
is one very important aspect to content co creation that

(47:58):
we see a lot of companies mess and this is
what we call the micro networking and has a lot
to do with what Andrew was saying with dark Social
and how can I get we hear a lot of
companies are struggling to kind of increase their footprint within
their target accounts. And what I mean by that is

(48:18):
to influence more members of their buyer journey, of their
buying excuse me, center of the buying center or the
buying committee, right, and the quote unquote micro networking is
a great way to do it. So let me just
explain very briefly what I mean by that. So, in

(48:38):
this case, one of our clients decided to launch a
podcast where because you say the podcast podcast is coming again,
by the way, it doesn't even have to be thata liabrary.
You can do the exact same thing by co creating
team posts as simple as that or community posts or

(48:59):
the example that Andrew shared earlier today was about this
HVAC industry which is like very very obscure and not
active on social There the client partnered with the association
and they did content collaboration with the association and the
people from the industry. By the way, the more obscure,

(49:21):
the more niche community is, the fewer buyers, the fewer
online activity there is, the more opportunity there is. I
always think back of a story when I actually had
an opportunity to visit one of my first clients invited
me to visit their customer. Excuse me. It was a

(49:44):
manufacturing company, and the director mentioning director of the company
and the chief of it spent three hours with not
just with me, obviously, they didn't spend that time just
to show the marketing consultant their factory, but actually the

(50:04):
prospect of my client. So there was somebody else. There
was another factory who was interested in buying my client software,
and their existing customer invited the prospect for a visit
and spent three hours with them, showing them everything, how
they implemented, how they're organized, et cetera. And I was
like there and I was I just had to ask.
I was like, but why, I mean, I know, you're

(50:27):
running a manufacturing plant. There's always something going wrong. You
have to stop the production, there is a problem, you're
late on orders. The clients from all over the world
are calling your ecals whatnot, and like, they're really one
of the most busy people who are by the way,
not active on social And I astill like, why did you
do this? Why did you take like three hours of

(50:48):
your such a business schedule, And he said, you know what,
Unlike you, you're like a marketer. You go on LinkedIn,
you easily connect to with other marketers. There's tones of content,
there's tons of opportunities for you to network and learn
about how the others like you are dealing with the
problems that you have. And for me, this is not
the case. This is like for me, a unique opportunity

(51:10):
for us, like as a company, or a unique opportunity
to meet with others, with our peers and learn from them.
So the ole story is just to show like, when
you have even like the most niche community, creating that
platform from them where they can learn from each other.
It doesn't matter how niche it is, it doesn't matter

(51:32):
how you know, small the audience will be, but you
will be able to use this micro networking. So let
me explain what micro networking really is. So you are
interviewing a target account, somebody from the industry. In this case,
a client decided to do a podcast doesn't end to

(51:53):
be a podcasts and in their case it were actually
citos it kind of profiles which are typically very difficult
to get. However, what's very interesting about this type of
profiles They again, they like to learn from each other.
They like to learn from it. They trust other experts.
They don't trust vendors, they don't trust sales, they don't

(52:16):
trust marketers. They trust their peers, and they want to
know how are they dealing with the problems that they
have as well. And so in this case, they were
interviewing them and they were sharing them. So where does
the magic happen? Does it happen because they saw an
interview from another dude from the industry? No, the magic happened, Well,

(52:37):
it can happen in three different ways, and I will
share this specific thing that happened here. So, first of all,
I'm interviewing Let's say Andrew is working for a target
account and is, or somebody's interviewing me on a podcast.
Let's say better, let's say somebody's interviewing me on the podcast.

(52:58):
Now that person the interview, the interviewer can now share
this podcast with Andre as well, you know, my colleague,
So colleagues of our guests might be interested to learn
you know, hey, you know we just did this podcast
with lad and he was sharing with me all the
cool things that you and your team Andre are doing

(53:19):
at Full Funnel, and I just wanted to drop here
and share this with you. It's a perfect opportunity for
you and the salespeople to connect with the other buyers
within the buying committee. Also, they're peers. Other icps in
the industry would like I said, especially in this kind

(53:39):
of niche industries, I really want to learn from each other.
So it's again an opportunity for this micro networking. Actually,
you didn't even have to go and connect with them proactively.
You should, right, But even during this interview, let's say
I'm interviewing let's say again, I'm interviewing Andre for my podcast,

(54:00):
and I see that Andrea is connected to Carrie. Let's
say from our audience, A Paul, all right, and I
can just say and I let's say that I want
to also build a relationship with Carrie and maybe like
she's working for a target. Sorry, Carry, I don't think
that's the case. It's just effective example. I might actually say, Hey, Andrea,

(54:23):
I saw that you're connected with Carry Foster. Well, thank
you for the wonderful interview just gave. I say her
connected with Carry Foster, do you think she would be
a good fit for, you know, for the next guest
for our podcast. And let's say Andre says yes, Then
I could say, would you mind if I just emailed
her with you in CC and just share that we

(54:44):
just did this podcast. Why would he say no? Like
it's a public information anyhow. So it's kind of like
we talked about dark social as something mystical, but you
can actually influence that dark social by using this creation
to network micro network with the other colleagues from the

(55:06):
same company, So the rest of the buying committee and
there other icp, your target icps who are connected to
your guests. The example of Cutty right and basically get
quote unquote referrals. It's not referrals in the sense of

(55:28):
a client referral referring your product, but actually referring you
your content or getting in a relationship and a conversation. Now, actually,
in this very specific case, there was even a product
referral and maybe Andrew, you know this better. I lost

(55:50):
some details. You can maybe just wrap it up there
and with that example and maybe share some other insights
and about it.

Speaker 2 (55:59):
Yeah, I would just drop a few things about the
dark social part because in reality this was the activity.
Let's say, well, let's let's make a step back and
discuss why we even do this activity if it's if
it's if it doesn't drive pipeline immediately, right, So why

(56:21):
we spend time inter in that person and then publish
this podcast if we can't convert this person in the
sales opportunity? Right Again, as we spoke, so peers and
especially in the closed communities, and this is the technical vertical, right,
peers laughed alone from their peers, right, So what happened
actually next that person he doesn't he's not such leader,

(56:47):
he doesn't have a huge follow and he maybe have
like one thousand connections and LinkedIn. But when he published
actually a short sneapet, that post generated like around two
hundred likes, a lot of comments, and this is. I mean,
obviously this we can say the vanity metrics, but I'm

(57:08):
just sharing how that's in nutshell. The engagement from that
one post was better than probably last and posts that
was published by our client. This is the only one
reason why I'm sharing this, But what actually happened is
way more important. That was a person in a network
who actually had a need. Who had a need like basically,

(57:34):
the person needed to ramp up the technical team. They
were all in out new projects and they didn't have
capacity to do it internally. So he reached out to
this podcast guest and asked, hey, I have listened to
this episode Fantastic Insights, and I checked the company that
interviewed you like are a client of them, So this

(57:57):
is first of all you can see what have like
fantastic perception this simple activity creates because people they don't
understand if your guest is a client or partner whatever.
They immediately think, okay, somehow they have association with your
company with your print, right, so there is some level

(58:17):
of trust. And the guest said, no, we're not clients.
But I also chatted with the guys and asked about
that technical you know, capabilities, the experience the case studies
and for me, they seem to be very robust vendor.
So after this, the person went and submitted the website

(58:42):
form on the website of our client. And how do
we know this because again the trade marketing team during
the discovery, they asked about the buyer journey and they
have collected all of these insights. So this is one
of the stories that we always share, right but without
this activity, never ever you would be able to create
this opportunity. Obviously what you see the is at jet

(59:04):
that's another story. So it's basically it all started from
the engagement with the city, but the opportunity actually came
if I'm correct, yeah, in the half late So for
us it was a long term project and for us
apparently it was nice to see and the podcast itself

(59:26):
it was just the introductory opportunity, but it wasn't treated
as an opportunity or whatever. I trapped for guests, you know,
to peach your services. So we did it for these
two reasons, connecting with these people, but also co created
the content that the industry is actually willing to consume.
And this is another huge benefit of the demandsion program.

(59:50):
So lastly, we have and maybe just to wrap it up,
we have this amplification audiences right as a basically explanation
part why we don't need to create the content only
internally or only with let's say, with the potential clients.
We need to engage with multiple assets and somehow we

(01:00:14):
already mentioned this, right. These could be associations, this could
be industry communities, This could be partner companies that serve
in the same target audience but selling non competent products. Right.
And whenever you start these collaboration, so first of all,
you gain the credibility from you kind of borrow a

(01:00:36):
part of the brand of people or companies you co
create content with, right. And next you merch the distribution,
You create multiple touch points, and you gain access to
the untapped audience that you couldn't create awareness in a
different way. I feel that one of the most interesting things,

(01:00:58):
let's say non obvious audiences here, I engage ours. So
I would love to lastly ask you a lot to
describe engagements and why it makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
To absolutely absolutely I think this is something that marketers
actually forget. True marketing is marketing to the whole market.
It's marketing not only to the decision makers. You's somehow
in B to B is something that we do and
that a lot of companies tend to do, and it

(01:01:28):
is about marketing to the complete ecosystem that is surrounding
your decision makers. And another way to think about it
is that people are channels two. So if you're asking yourself, hey,
you know, our audience is not very active on social
or maybe it's not engaging in the same way as yours, right,

(01:01:49):
it's very difficult to get to them. Well, a lot
of these examples that we are sharing today are exactly
when you can't reach those decision makers directly, you reach
them via people and maybe brands that they actually know
and follow. So the one specific example, the example excuse

(01:02:14):
me under you called out the engagers. So we spoke
about buying center and high in kame influence. We spoke
about you know, working with partners leaders. But engagers are
simply people who are in the industry. They're active online
for example, if you're in a community or on LinkedIn

(01:02:34):
or wherever, and they are connected to your target buyers.
So they will never become your customer. They are not
your ICP. They're just people who are from the industry
connect to your target buyer. Why do they matter? While
they matter because they're connected to your target buyers and

(01:02:58):
they through they're in engagement with your content, the target
buyers can discovery. So the example here that is maybe
you can see it. It says how did you hear
about us? And the answer is a marketing connection of
mine reposted your content on LinkedIn. I started following because

(01:03:18):
it's simply the best B B two B A BM
content I've seen. So that's exactly the engager like engager,
somebody who is engaging the content that we share, he
or she reposted our content and that's how their connection
was an ICP target buyer, That's how they discovered our content.

(01:03:40):
So people are channels to Whenever you are thinking about marketing,
think about it more broadly than just marketing to the
decision makers. And also if you're a salesperson and you
are working with marketing and you know using content to
engage with your target buyers. Also don't ignore other people

(01:04:04):
in the industry who are active on social communities, et cetera,
because as you can see, they can create awareness with
your decision makers and other buyers too. So with that,
maybe it's a way to also wrap it up with
these examples that we share today about demand generation in action.

(01:04:29):
Hopefully you got some good new insights. We didn't want
to share the standard demand generation you know, high level advice.
We wanted to get into these nitty gritty and obvious
examples here, So let us know if you're still with us.
I know some people had to look out on the hour.

(01:04:52):
Please let us know what you thought of this, if
it was useful. You can also just share and turns
up or turns down in the comments. And next week
what we want to do is, I know that a
lot of you are struggling, not because you don't know
what to do, but you're struggling because your colleagues, maybe

(01:05:13):
the leadership team, may be sales team together their buying
and they're having objections as to why you should you
do this kind of demand generation or ABM, and they
don't see directly the link to the pipeline and revenue.
So next week we want to dive deeper into these objections,

(01:05:35):
the most common objections that people get from leadership and
sales and how you might address them, how we address them,
how our clients address them with our clients, So to
stay tuned and see you next week and don't forget
in only three four weeks at the end of March.

(01:05:56):
The last week of March, we're doing our big Summy
this time, twenty p people are going to join us
live as this one live, but you will not only
be able to interact with us, but also with other
amazing B to B leaders such as John Miller and
a lot of actually our clients are decided to also

(01:06:18):
join us and share their unfiltered case studies. Many other
people are going to share their key studies and programs
what actually works in twenty twenty five. I'm super excited
about it. So thank you so much for coming and
see you next week in another full funnel life.

Speaker 2 (01:06:38):
Thanks a lot guys here in one week.

Speaker 1 (01:06:41):
Take care, cheers bye,

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