Episode 158: Capturing demand signals with Daniel Zsolt Rényi

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗹𝗹 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻:

• Capturing demand and engagement signals to identify highly engaged accounts
• How to avoid account blindness in CRM
• How to match your playbooks with the level of demand

💡 As always, we shared examples and answered your questions, making this episode a must-watch for marketers and sales professionals alike.


RESOURCES

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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


 Daniel Zsolt Rényi on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/danrenyi/

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 everyone and welcome to the new episode of
Full Final Life. Today. Instead of my Da, co founder
of what we have, then Renny our long term partner
and yeah, unfortunately he doesn't have a shaved head, but
hopefully the episode would be equally good. We've been connected

(00:34):
to them for many years. He's a member of our
Full Final Academy and behind the scenes we were discussing
with them. The topic of today's episode how to capture
the signals how to feed ABM team. So if you
don't have ABMT marketing and sales teams with all the

(00:57):
engagement and intense signals, so define the best next actions
to activate your target accounts. The problem that well often
absorbed in B on bit to B markets right, that
a lot of companies they deal with account blindness. They
don't have a list, a cover view of all interactions,

(01:19):
all engagement with their strategic accounts. UH sells keep their
conversations and sales NEUH in sales loft. Similar let's say
sales development, software marketing maybe track something and the marketing
automation et cetera. But these insights are rarely cross shared, right,

(01:43):
and then the problem is that obviously, uh, the signals
are missed until it's a very obvious signal when where
kind of submits this web form on your website and
requests democult. So we wanted to show as you the

(02:05):
laybook or how basically you can capture the signals, what
signals you need to capture, then how to define the
best next actions because so far we have discussed during
the prior episodes the different levels of de month and
intent rights, the complexity of long sale cycles, and demand

(02:25):
generation for the long sale cycles. And then also was
then behind the scenes he is working on a very
cool workflow to automate that basically automate the intent and
engagement signals capture. And so this is what we want
to present all of you today. Then thanks a lot

(02:48):
for joining after this one intro.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
Everybody, good to be here, and thank you so much.
Sorry for the disappointment if you were expecting blood with
the shaved head. I asked Andre before the show if
I should have shaved my head and he said preferably,
but didn't get to it, so maybe next time.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
And yeah, thanks great great intro and.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Shout out to the Full Funnel Academy because that's what
Andre started with.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
I have personally.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Grown a lot from all the courses and the materials
that we have access to in the Full Funnel Academy
as well as the community itself.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
So I just wanted to say that.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
And I know that a new course is coming out
and I'm super excited to dive into that. But we
put our little agency's team through every piece of training
in boot camp that Andre and have offered and especially
in the inside the academy, so it's it's been super awesome.
And yeah, so back to the question of signals and

(03:53):
signal captures, I just maybe one sentence about myself, my
humble self. We are a B to B GTM agency
and like many out there, we help companies get bigger
and figure out GTM and then execute it. And what
we have noticed is that more and more we ended

(04:16):
up with signals. So we did a lot of GTM stuff,
meaning content, social media, LinkedIn, ABM, ad Z, you name it,
we did it, and we probably did too many things,
by the way, as a side note, but no matter,
the thing is that no matter what we did and
when we got very deep into execution. What we have

(04:38):
figured out is it once things are in place, which
are the fundamentals that you need to run go to
market for high ACV accounts. Once you have the fundamentals
in place and you start executing, there is still a
lot that can go wrong even if you have the
right playbooks. So I don't know if you've noticed this

(04:59):
entre but but sometimes you feel like you're doing the
right things, but something is still off, and we started
feeling that more and more. What that came down to,
we had to realize is that we were rowing in
a boat that had.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
Holes in it. So the boat was slowly sinking, but
we could still keep it going.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
But we knew that something was off, and what we
had to realize is that stuff is falling through the cracks.
So we were essentially losing a lot of the buyer signals,
which in the previous years, when the market was easier
and simpler, it wasn't really a problem because you could
get away with less. So truth be told, you know,

(05:40):
prior to twenty twenty three, twenty twenty two, everything was
way easier. You know, competition was a lot less. You
could do outbound cold outbound and even that could bring
some decent results or even good results.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
But for the past two years, what we're feeling and
what we're seeing around ourselves is that it's getting super tough.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
So we started focusing on the things that we didn't
need to focus on that much before because we could
get away without it. And and that came to be the signals.
So these were the leaks in the boat where water
was slowly, you know, coming up and slowing down the
entire boat and causing problems. So we're like, Okay, if
we don't fix this, then the GTM engine is never

(06:25):
going to be as good as it should be or
as good as it deserves to be. So that that's
how we that's how we ended up doing, uh E.
Spending a lot of our time capturing signals and making
sense of them.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
Yeah, that's that's the most important. Thank you, actually making
sense of them because in reality, if you'll speak to
almost any B two B marketing team, right David mentioned, Yes, Bosler,
we're kind of we have demand demand generation. We had
gole in place. We areund this were capture for a sample, webinars,

(07:00):
signups or around gated content, and we send all of
these to sales, and yeah, our sales team maybe tracks
inten data and they do the outreach. The problem is
that the playbook is very linear and standardized, right, we
try to treat because of us. Like you said, the
market has changed, right, and the competition is way more

(07:23):
complicated and the buyer journey is way more complicated. So
just purely picking up the signal and send an outbound message,
even if it's relatively personalized, it's not enough, right, So
you're not one email away from sales opportunity unfortunately anymore. Right,
So the key point is combining all of the signals

(07:49):
and making a conclusion what would be the next meaningful step.
And this is what we're going to discover in a
moment to discuss in a moment. Meanwhile, I saw a
couple of questions, so guys, feel free there is a
blog called Q and A. Feel free to post all
of your questions in that section and we'll make sure
that we'll cover all of them. Plus, we have received

(08:12):
a lot of questions from you when you signed up,
so we're definitely going to cover all of this. And
quick question to you, guys, where are you all joining
us from? Let us know in the chat again broadcasting
from not sunny Spain, Valencia region. Then where you based?

Speaker 1 (08:30):
I'm in Budapest, Hungary, and I just dropped in the
chat where John had dropped a pretty good question that
we're definitely going to get.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
To Martin the neighbor from Vienna. Yeah questions. Yeah, great
to see. Let us know, guys, where are you all
joinin us from? And meanwhile I will share my screen
and just share a couple of questions. First of all,
so let's quickly nail down Martin Valence. I got to
see a neighbor. So let's quickly discuss first of all,

(09:02):
what signals makes sense to track, right, and how should
we approach them? So when it comes basically, let's start
with account intelligence, right, what we absolutely must know about
our target accounts. So there are a couple of basic things. Obviously,
we want to make sure that we have the buying

(09:23):
committee in place. Right. You need to have in one
place all the buying committee members you as a team
need to engage or should engage. Next account enrichment, right,
you need to have basic information that nowadays likely you
can use software like click to enrich this. But anyhow,

(09:44):
company size, location, revenue, technologists, tech whatever. These are the
things that we need to have in place. And now
the signals, right. So the signals are basically divided into
two groups, account engagement. And you can obviously have first
part engagement data, right. So for example, like you signed

(10:08):
up for this live podcast episode, right, and we have
this data, we see that you have signed up some
of you have attended that life right. So this is
the first point party engagement data. And then we have
the third party engagement data, So website visitors of engagement
on different platforms where they could be you know, like

(10:30):
review platforms where they could be reviewing your product, et cetera.
And then we have the business triggers or potentially the
signals that tell you that there is a product need evidence. Right.
I don't want to call it buy and intent signals.
I think personally it's absolutely incorrect definition due to the

(10:53):
fact that the only buy and signal that I think
is true when the buyer reaches out to you and
requests a dema right, And this is the at least
the declared intent. The rest just the signals that tell
you that the account is likely to have a need

(11:16):
in your product, right and likely to be in the market.
So these are kind of the first things. Next, if well,
I will just pick up another slide for you, just
to show what types of data we can potentially track
and here we go, right, So from this perspective, right,

(11:39):
what kind of data we can track? That could be
again like all the engagement that has come, all types
of intent data. Right, So the engagement sign ups s
lead engagement with your content engagement if you post let's
say content and linked and share any social platforms following

(12:00):
your pages, et cetera. Right, So then that could be uh,
these blind signals, this could be anything like uh and
you or let's say, ex customer joint your target accounts
they announced some strategic initiatives that are related to your product. Right,
that could be like multiple signals that you can capture.

(12:24):
The most important thing here is to sit down with
sales and define what are the most important signals for us? Right?
What tells us you need to answer these questions? What
creates here? What signals will tell us that this account
is aware of us as a vendor? Right, what kind

(12:47):
of engagement this account should demonstrate so we can call
it a vendor account. Why that's important for a couple
of reasons. A lot of sales teams that I have
been talking to the regularly complain about lack of account awareness.
They simply correlate lack of account awareness to not enough

(13:11):
I applying coverage to low reply rates, et cetera. Right, So,
from that perspective, obviously we can even make debates around this. Right.
If I will ask you, guys, how would you define
account awareness? I bet that everybody who is listening to
us life would put different definitions of this, and there

(13:32):
is no kind of unified or standardized definition. The only
one good definition is that one that you made the
sales you a creed on specific criteria and then shake hands. Right,
That's the first one, And the second one is what
signals might be a product need evidence? What might tell

(13:55):
us that this account is likely to have a need
and our product, which means they are likely to have
conversations with us, Right, they are likely to engage with
any playbook that we are in, and they are likely
to apply to sales outreach, et cetera. That's the key.
So from that perspective, whenever you define it, the next

(14:18):
step would be defining this playbooks. Right. That aligned was
these signals. But I would love to ask you, then,
is there anything else that you would add to what
I have shared?

Speaker 3 (14:31):
No, I actually have a question.

Speaker 1 (14:33):
So I'm glad that you started with the fact that
you have identified seventeen sources of data in a BM
and I wanted to ask, because we're seeing this that
we think that the more the better, and I sometimes
fall into that track of communicating that. But then I
realized that any company I've looked at, there aren't that

(14:57):
many information in signal sources that are relevant that will
tell us the story. So it's not like we need
to because you know, we tend to think, okay, mapping
the buyer journey and getting the signals, and we tend
to think of like detective work and patches and traces
and you know, some hyper complex five thousand piece puzzle.

(15:19):
But it's really not And I wanted to ask you
if you are experiencing the same thing. But what we
see is that if you know your five sources that
are relevant in terms of signal sources that really signal
engagement and interaction and may I say intent, and if
you track and you make sense of those five six

(15:42):
however many sources, but it's not twenty six for sure,
then then you're going to be good. So I wanted
to ask you, like, how many signal sources do you
see on average? That really makes a difference in companies
go to market.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
And ABA would say that for this awareness threshold, it's
enough to define two three signals. And for the product
need evidence, it would be enough to define these two
three signals.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
You don't need to look at every single case. It's
just enough to analyze the patterns between your one deals, right,
and then you can see when you have like if
you do an export of all of your closed one
opportunity for the last two three years, right, definitely you'll

(16:31):
see the repetitive business triggers. That's the key. And if
you'll try to measure every single a signal, then you
will go nowhere. Basically, the truth is that the most
signals you are tracking, and especially if you don't have
robust processes, the more problematic it will be because you
will be you your team will be stretching too many directions, right,

(16:55):
That's that's the problem. There are tools, for example, like
common room, one of the recently let's say ABM players
and I know that on the web page they claim, Hey,
if he'll sign up, we'll provide a one hundred plus signals. Then, like,
the question is how likely you're going to track the
signals and run any playbooks on them? In reality? What

(17:18):
would be only possible if you do the same that
most companies did for years? Right? If they have most
signals also equals usually to moy accounts. Right, So then
the problem that they have. The more accounts they have
their target and currently, the more likely they would do
what we call one too many. Right, it's not really

(17:42):
personalized in so it's usually adds plus like some basic
personalization using you know, standard knowledge about the specific vertical
or domain, and that's it, right, And these playbooks are
purely about let's book a them, and let's book a
them and let's have a chat. Right, then was all
of other signals? If the problem that I'm observant was

(18:05):
the majority of teams they don't have time, and they
don't have time for minionful engagement with the accounts, especially
those accounts that are not ready to buy from it,
or at least not ready to buy from this specific vendor, right,
which means they need to invest a lot of time
into deeper personalization, deeper engagement with the buying committee, et cetera. Now,

(18:28):
what will happen if you'ld try to track a lot
of other signals? Right, so you say, okay, we need
to track at least ten signals. That's fine, But then
it means that you will lose the momentum and you
want do the timely engagement based on the information that
you have captured. That's the first thing. On the contrary,

(18:48):
you say, no, we want to track multiple signals and
then deploy the different playbox. Then in reality, sales would
ask to automate that process and it won't be much
different from traditional outbound right. The only difference would be, okay,
I have seen whatever, I have seen this, or you
know the standard sales script, I have noticed that you're

(19:10):
doing this, or I have said you're doing this. Let's
have a discovery, right, pretty much it and market and
what market, and we'll do market and would add that
account to the target and layer as simple as that,
nothing else. And that's not different from how the majority
of companies are running ABM right nowadays and the exact
reason why these programs are failing. So from that perspective,

(19:32):
especially if you don't have robust processes, and you don't
have let's say, and data owner and it could be
rev martech person, maps person or sales ops ports on whoever.
Until you don't have that person who actually holistically tracks
that data, qualify segments and presents to you, you are

(19:54):
likely to have a huge problem with capturing most signals.
So two three signals for when the awareness to three
signals for product need evidence would be good. And then
the most important part is how to capture the signals
plus how to make sense of them. So what I
would love to ask, Obviously you can the faster. The

(20:17):
first answer would be you can capture the signals manually, right,
and this is in reality a lot of companies are
doing this. But I would love also to share your process,
how you were thinking about capturing these different signals automatically,
and then we can discuss the how to make sense
of that data and how to define the right playbox.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
Yeah, a lot of stuff that you drafted in there.
One I think that we Before I answered your question,
I'd just like to underline it twice with bold with
a highlighter, that not all signals are created equal and
that it makes sense to differentiate between awareness signals and

(21:02):
demand signals.

Speaker 3 (21:04):
I think that's how you used it.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Because one of the things that we talked about that
I think makes a ton of sense is that traditional
signal tracking and signal capture where we'll assign a linear
score two signals, which means that an account can build
up a bunch of awareness signals, for example, clicking on

(21:29):
the newsletter, opening your newsletter, and if they do that
enough times, then the score in your system that you
track it is going to be very high, and you're
going to be like, whooho, look at them, they're hot,
let's reach out to them. And if you don't dig
in deeper to see, okay, how does this score build
how's the score built up?

Speaker 3 (21:50):
So what does it consist of?

Speaker 1 (21:52):
And you see that it's twenty seven newsletter clicks, but
like zero demo requests, zero bottom of funnel content, nothing else,
like maybe a few webinar registrations they register for every
webinar of yours, but it didn't attend any If you
don't have that nuance, if you don't have that understanding,
then you're going to think, whoa, this is a hot account,
when in reality it's not. It's just need, it needs

(22:14):
to be helped to the next stage and maybe figure out, Okay,
why aren't they digging deeper? Why are they stuck at
the awareness level? And so I think that's that's something
that isn't talked about enough.

Speaker 3 (22:26):
So I'm glad you brought it up. Okay.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Yeah, So let's get into the tech, shall we, and
the details. Okay, I'm not the one to like dive
straight into naden and make dot com, so you will
have to withstand just a little bit of thinking on this,
and I'm going to show you.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
I'm sharing.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
I'm trying to speak and share my screen at the
same time, which is which is always challenging.

Speaker 3 (22:58):
But now I got it. Okay.

Speaker 1 (23:03):
So yeah, So just a few concepts. What Andre talked
about is account blindness and the fact that you have
a bunch of signals and you're hardly tracking any But
the bigger problem is the intelligence, meaning making sense of it.
What do we know about these accounts and what do

(23:23):
we do with them?

Speaker 3 (23:25):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (23:25):
And the current state of outbound, which he has termed
account blindness, is that you have very disparate pools of
intelligence within your company, within your go to market departments.
So sales will have some idea, marketing will have some ideas.
Product is going to have ideas. They usually hardly ever overlap.

(23:48):
So not only is there too few signals and the
irrelevant signals not being captured, they are not made sense
of the proper way, they are sitting in different systems,
classic source of misalignment. And then what happens with these
signals is that, okay, whoever we can identify, well, we'll
just reach out to them and it goes straight to activation, right,

(24:11):
which is which is not ideal because very often it's
most often it doesn't make sense to do activation. And
then when you add AI to this logic, to this
metap to this system, then you get the spam canon
that you know you experienced today. So you add some
clay or apollo to this, then it's going to add
some personalization, but it's still going to be irrelevant. It's

(24:35):
going to have like dumb personalization, and it's you're going
to shoot yourself in the foot.

Speaker 3 (24:40):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
So this is like the current state of things. But
account intelligence, which which is the desirable state, is where
you capture a lot more signals and stuff is made
sense stuff, and the intelligence is on the one hand,
bigger than what we had up here, but maybe even
more importantly, there is like it overlaps. It's in one system, okay.

(25:06):
And when you have that level of intelligence, you can
make good decisions do we activate, do we nurture, or
do we just leave it alone when the time comes
when a threshold is mad okay. And so when we
talk about intelligence, it's usually the sources of signals. So
it's both capturing the signals and it's also having the

(25:28):
right playbooks and knowing what to do with them.

Speaker 3 (25:32):
And scoring is a big part of that.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
I don't know if we're going to have time to
get into scoring and everything, but yeah, just one more
concept or one more idea. When we bumped into this
problem as an agency, we started looking for tools naturally, right,
So we went through all the platforms and most everything,
and what we found was that the big problem is

(25:55):
that everything is like a point solution, meaning it doesn't addressed.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
The entire buyer journey.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
And by buy our journey, I mean something that is
like the bow tie which you see up here. I'm
sure you're familiar with this. Full funnel have a similar
model to this, but it's vertical it's basically where you
take a visitor or a prospect, a target account from
identifying to getting them interested all the way to selling

(26:26):
them and then retaining them and then hopefully hopefully maximizing
the impact. Okay, so all of the solutions which deal
with signals, they're going to be like either sales centric,
they're going to be somewhat marketing centric. And then you
have a bunch of AI driven stuff that is for

(26:47):
customer success and more for customer service. But the problem
is that this we found is going to just deepen
the misalignment between the departments. While because each of these
tools is going to put stuff into different databases, it's
going to feed off of different knowledge sources, and it's

(27:08):
going to create a mess, an AI powered mess, which
will be an even bigger mess because it's powered by AI. Okay,
so the thing that like before we started building stuff,
we arrived at this conceptually. So for go to market,
you have a bunch of knowledge sources. Okay, you have

(27:28):
sales calls, insights, you have your playbooks and processes, all
the full funnel stuff that you're learning. You have a
bunch of content that you've created, You have product documentation,
you have product marketing materials, you have your CRM, you
have your customer data platform, you have external sources such
as the Internet, and you have your LinkedIn connections and

(27:52):
competitor intelligence, you name it.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Like, there's a lot that you can argue.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
Is go to market now and go to market data
and signals is just a part of this.

Speaker 3 (28:04):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
So it's just a little thing here, it's just one block,
but you would think that ideally in a nice world
where everything is aligned, alignment happens partly because these playbooks
are shared and all the knowledge is shared and all
the information is shared and everybody can access everything.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
So that's why the stuff that we.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
Started building is not another siloed thing, but it's a
system that leverages existing tools such as make dot com
and a couple other signal capture tools that you will
know that I'll show you, and they're just getting all
the information from the right places. So you ask it
a question and then this intelligent little robot thing is

(28:52):
going to know where to look or you tell it
to do something, and it will know where to get
the information from and where to execute the task.

Speaker 3 (29:03):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
So that's basically the thinking behind this okay. And the
other thing that we wanted is to not build another
mega giga big SaaS platform because that's just not what
companies need. They already have tech. Honestly, if you have
a mature go to market team, you probably have more
than enough technology to cover everything here and to capture

(29:28):
signals and everything you might need like a few key
pieces of points solutions, but you have most of it.
So we found most value because like this system doesn't exist.
We found the most value in just building the underlying
architecture and then using the existing SaaS tools out there

(29:49):
to really make it work and put in automations and
put in agents.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Now, specifically when it comes to signal capture, most of
the processes are really workflows, okay, so it's not even AI.
Where AI comes into the picture is enriching and researching
accounts on the one hand, and then powering a chatbot,

(30:17):
which is which is a different story which I'll talk
about later, but I'll give you a few examples. So
the way we track signals is by setting up workflows
such as this one, okay. And what you have to
see here is that this is built on upspot mostly
and in the beginning of the signal.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
No, actually, I'll show you a different one. This is
even more exciting.

Speaker 1 (30:44):
So you can have most any signal source that comes
in through a web hook.

Speaker 3 (30:50):
This is a web hook.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
And this can be a webinar sign up, it can
be a newsletter, click, it can be it can be
any old thing. Okay, And then what's going to have
happen in these bubbles that you see here, this big
ass process. What's going to happen is that we're going
to take a look at Okay, based on the email
address in the name of the person or maybe the
name of the company, We're going to figure out which

(31:14):
company do they really work for, because very often you
can't get that right. So, for Andre, when you registered
for Andre's webinar today, you didn't provide your company in
the game. All you provided was a name in an email. Well,
we're going to use this agent and open AI to
research you on LinkedIn and see if we can find
you in hupspot. Then, depending on whether you are in

(31:37):
our hupspot CRM or not, we're going to either add
you or update you with the fact that you actually,
you know, registered for a webinar. And when that happens
scoring is occurring, meaning in hupspot, we have well, we
have a different workflow for scoring because it's a bit

(31:57):
more complicated.

Speaker 3 (31:58):
Than just scoring. Okay.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
But because here we checked out your company and looked
at who you are, we might decide that we want
to learn.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
More about you.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
So there's a little filter here that checks to see
if you are an ideal ICP fit based on your geography,
company size, and a few other factors that we have
researched about you here, Okay, And if you are an
ICP fit, then what's going to happen is that we're
going to launch this research agent which has a gazillion steps.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
It has like eleven steps through which it does deep.

Speaker 3 (32:37):
Research on companies according to our instructions. Okay.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
And this runs in a tool called relevance dot ai.
And what this tool does with the research is that
it puts it into a Google document and uploads it
on our Google drive.

Speaker 3 (32:53):
Okay. And what it also does is it's going to
notify the team.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
And the way it does that is it's going to
draw this link into a newly created deal in HubSpot.
I'm going to show this to you, so if you
go to our HubSpot. This is interesting that dashboards are
unavailable for some customers. Somebody fell asleep at HubSpot. Okay,
we're not going to go into dashboards. So we're going

(33:18):
to look at some deals. And the way we have
this setup is that when anybody falls through this and
this research is done, which which you saw over here,
then it's going to create a deal in the marketing
funnel into the engagement category or engagement phase. Okay, And

(33:40):
so it does that, and you know the Google document
that I mentioned that it's going to upload, it's going
to put it right here for the sales rep to
be able to access like straight away, so they can
just click this link, and there is the research that
the agent went into. Okay, Now what the agent research

(34:01):
is is totally up to what we tell it to research.
So basically, it can compile and research anything that is
on the open Internet, and as of a week ago,
it can even research stuff like images on Google Maps.
And so there's some crazy stuff that is happening right
now in this area.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
I'll just leave it at that.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
But what things we're specifically interested in is like a
company specific lingo map, so you know what like internal
terms the company is using because that's going to be
super relevant when somebody reaches out and we're gonna want
to dig into some industry trends that will we will
want to reference, and we wanted to reference everything, right,

(34:45):
So we're just because we know AI tends to hallucinate,
we want to make sure that it's going to provide
links for everything that it collects. And when this is done,
then here's a decision agent. Okay, so HubSpot is updated,
we know some information about a company, and here's an

(35:05):
agent that decides, okay, what should be the next step.
And in this scenario, based on what it does, Okay,
based on its decision, one of two things can happen.
One is that it's going to drop a notification into
a Slack channel saying okay, guys, here's this account.

Speaker 3 (35:25):
Check it out. You know it might be worth the look.
Or if it.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
Deems that based on the other CRM data that okay,
this company has engaged, it has reached the threshold where
there's clearly demand in the early stages or in the
later stages, and they're not just in the awareness stage,
then it can trigger anything that we have set up

(35:52):
in them list and craft a personalized email based on
again all the context from the CRM and anything.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
Else that we really feed it. So if you go
back to this.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
Concept here, so when we personalize, when we decide stuff,
we want to make use of all of this information.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
And of course not every piece of information is going
to be.

Speaker 1 (36:12):
Relevant, but like a lot of it is, okay, And
we want to make sure that the agent has access
to everything that we have here and it's going to
decide where to work because this is actually several agents. Okay,
so it's not just like one genius sitting up here,
but it's easier to depict it this way.

Speaker 3 (36:33):
Right. By the way, any questions up to this point
let me see the.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Chat, Well, have a few, but I think we can
cover them. I think what's important and this is brilliant, right.
So what actually we observe nowadays is that you can
pretty much capture any signal that is important to you. Right.

(36:57):
So earlier you needed to do it manually. You need
to invest time of your team member right to capture
the signals, then qualifying the signals, et cetera. So nowadays
you can make good workflows that enable you to capture

(37:17):
the signals. The most important thing though, I feel, is
how do you make sense of the data that you collect? Right? Again,
what we have discussed there is no problem to capture
one hundred signals, right. The problem is what do these
signals tell you and how you can leverage them properly?
What I have observed on LinkedIn recently, there are lots

(37:41):
of the discussions that the future of go to market
is signal based, right, levery signals, track them, et cetera.
But honestly, every playbook that I have observed is literally, hey,
I captured the signal. Now let's reach out out and pitch.
So that's which means that in some sense, right, in

(38:08):
some sense, it's justifies the broken MKL whatever you'll call it,
playbooks that companies were running forever, right because earlier for
m k L, it was enough to you know, have
an account signing up for your webinar or downloading negated content, right,
and then you can basically send it to sales and

(38:31):
ask to pitch. Nowadays you can literally tell, hey, here
the signals that we have captured, so this are engaged accounts,
go and chase them. Right. So that's that's the key,
And this is this is why I feel the kind
of all marketing and sales playbook or programs are failing down.
So from that perspective, I would if you don't mind, uh,

(38:55):
if you'll stop sharing your screen, I will pick up
my screen again, and well we can discuss these playbooks
and then you can also share because I know you
have pretty good workflow on automating it a bit and
making an advice on what would be the relevance next
step for the signals that you have captured or for

(39:16):
the information you have captured. Right, that's the go to
market team. By go to market, I mean marketing and
sales coude leverage. So again I will very quickly present
this slide. And this is a part of the New
Demand Generation playbook that we were recording with Flood. So

(39:38):
just to shade right, obviously we have I mean here
we have like four different actions or signals. You can
replace action with signals, right, So it could be for example,
engaged with the content on social right, so somebody liked
your post, assigned up for a product related webinar and
then these are two different things, right, So product related

(40:00):
if when you literally talk about your product, right, so
you like whatever if you're said in software. Right, you
pick up a specific use case or specific jobs to
be done, and you show how to run these jobs
to be done in your product. This is the product
related webinar on and this is like if we'll use
our marketing's land, this is small, like bottom of the

(40:21):
final activity. Right, so people who are actually interested in
your product would sign up now the top of the
final activity or something like this live podcast. Right, So
live podcast, it's not the webinar. We don't have like
tons of slides, et cetera. It's not like outline structure.
So it's more like community when we're talking about the

(40:44):
hottest things in go to market, right, So there is
no buying intent, right, and we're not talking about our
services at all, about our offer, and we're talking about
what like the again, specific challenge, specific trends, specific use case.
And here it's more top of the funnel activity where

(41:05):
the buying intent is low. Right. Again, I'm always saying,
I guess nobody who came for this podcast came just
because they want to buy from full funnel, off from
dance urgency. Right. Everybody came here out of curiosity because
you're interested in the specific topic. And then we have
these different signals like visited, high intent pages, like price

(41:25):
and book a demo, integrations, maybe like specific industry use cases. Right,
This is different level of intent and signals. But still
it doesn't mean that this is the buying intent. Right.
It doesn't mean that the intent is high. The only again,
for me, the only one signal that proves the high

(41:48):
intent is when a prospect either books a dema or
reach us out to you on any channel and asks
for the demo. Right, this is the high signal. And
from that perspective, it means that you need to adjust
your playbooks to this level of intent, to this let's say,
level of signal that you have captured. Right. The key

(42:12):
points are what we have discussed in the beginning. You
need to define with sales what's important for you to track, right,
What are the signals that you would like to track next,
What is the level of the buyer intent here? Right?
And then define what would be the next meaningful actions
marketing and sales can execute together to influence the buyer journey. Again,

(42:36):
I'm not saying opportunity generation, but the buyer journey. Because
if somebody liked your post on linked and you are
not connected to these people, right, it doesn't mean that
this kind of post like doesn't mean defined intent, right,
And you don't need to send connection requests and then
you know do pitch slapping. Right, You need to start

(42:59):
building the relationship with these people. So this is the key.
And there are obviously there are no let's say, there
is no universal rule of some what playbooks you should
run in that specific situation, right. For many companies, that
would be kind of variations of what you are seeing
on the screen. And again, the only one right way

(43:22):
to build this playbox would be sitting down with cells
and the creen, like, what is the level oft intend
the signal demonstrates, and what we can do together to
kind of build that really or to to influence that
by our journey? How can we move that specific account
further in the buyer journey? Right? That's the key. Now

(43:46):
the problem again, especially for the smaller teams. For the
bigger teams, that might not be such a complicated problem
because they might have gravops people, They might have basically
anybody ops it who is capturing this data and who
could make good sense of it. And because they are
selling usually to enterprises, they would prioritize the signals. So

(44:11):
the more or less there is some process in place. Well,
for smaller teams, it could be a bit complicated because
then you don't have enough time to track this. You
don't have enough time to capture all of these signals.
So this is where I would love as well then
to share his kind of workflows, what smaller teams can

(44:35):
can be doing to automate more or less Let's say
the next playbook definition. It doesn't I mean workflow doesn't
substitute the playbook itself, right, but the advice on how
or what appropriate playbook could be executed, this assumption that
you can also automate a bit.

Speaker 1 (44:55):
Yeah, this is awesome, Like I love this playbook and
you posted this or you share this image with me
yesterday and I was diving into it and I was like, okay,
how do we build this logic into the decision agent
because it's just so simple, Like when you were thinking
about how to enable and empower reps to do the
right thing and follow your stuff like a two by

(45:17):
two matrix is like, it doesn't get easier and simpler
than that. It's just I think it's awesome. Okay, So
specifically to your question, how we do this. I'm going
to show you the agent that actually does that, and
then we're going to see it in action. But first

(45:37):
I think like this is a good time to address
some of the questions that I'm seeing people drop through.
So Christian was asking, because it's super relevant, what are
the tactical ways that we capture company signals versus lead signals?

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Okay, we haven't talked about this that.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
We're doing account based marketing, but we still want to
differentiate between signals that companies are sending slash accounts and
signals that buyers or leads people are sending. Okay, And
the reason we want to do that is because it
is highly indicative of an account's interest and engagement if

(46:20):
more people are taking part in the buying process and
if more people are sending signals. So that is something
that we have to differentiate between. And it's not obvious
because a lot of the software that you have at
your company only focuses on leads and lead scoring and
lead this and lead that, and it doesn't really deal
with companies and it doesn't separate the too.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
Okay, So that's one thing that.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
You've got to score the activities of people and then
all the relevant signals and properties of accounts.

Speaker 3 (46:52):
Of target companies. Okay.

Speaker 1 (46:55):
And the kind of workflow, which is again back to
Christians question, like the kind of workflow that we deploy
is using some of what I have showed you in
make dot com what I'm about to show you in
an eight end. And yes, Clay can be a part

(47:17):
of this, and we are building processes with clay because
clay is a really good ingredient in this, but it's
not just that and it's not necessarily clay.

Speaker 3 (47:29):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
And yeah, John had this question, where do you recommend
we capture signals? And I wanted to address this earlier
on Andre that this this causes tech bloat. Okay, So
where we capture signals, in my opinion, it should be
in the single source of truth that is either your
customer data platform or your customer relationship management system, probably

(47:52):
the latter.

Speaker 3 (47:53):
Okay. Now, the problem with a lot of tech.

Speaker 1 (47:56):
Is because of the logic of how SAD companies work,
that companies want to take over as much of your
processes as possible. So everybody's going to want to build
a shadow CRM in their little point solution and try
to get you to use that. Okay. So if you
look at a LinkedIn tool, you look at most any tools,

(48:18):
they have like a mini version of a CRM built
in there, okay, and they're going to try to get
you to use that, and they're going to put the
data in there. But if you're like ninety nine percent
of B to B companies, you have a CRM which
is supposed to be fricking that, So you don't need
CRMs two, three, four, five, and twenty seven with twenty
seven different tools. You just fucking want everything in one

(48:41):
place because that that that's where the information.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
Needs to live. Right. So I am a huge advocate
of putting everything into the CRM, which is when I
was showing you these little bubbles and I'm just going
to share my screen again because I'll be showing these agents. Anyway.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
You saw a lot of orange hupspots and there's a
reason for that. It's because with the way that we
run things, most everything runs into hopspot. Okay, And yeah,
I was sharing with the wrong screen by the way
right now, but this is actually full funnel stuff, so

(49:22):
so don't look too closely. And so when we run
scoring and signals, we run everything into hopspot. Apply our
scoring logic through a Google sheet which we can alter
at any time, and we don't need to mess around
with that in hupspot. So this is something that we
like to take outside out of hopspot. But then based

(49:45):
on the signal, we score both the company and we
score the person, so the contact. So you can say
that here we're applying a score to the company, and
then we're applying a score to the contact, Okay. And
it's not always appropriate because there are things where when
you can't score the company or the contact, but whenever possible,

(50:08):
we score both and then we keep score for We
keep a total score for the company and in a
total score for each contact, and that tells us a lot, right,
So I'm going to show you the now back to
Andre's question, the decision agent, okay, and the way it
works is just share the screen over here. Yeah, I'll

(50:32):
just share the entire screen. I've noticed that that's the
safest option. So like when I share my entire screen,
I'm not going to accidentally start speaking on on a
screen or in a tab that isn't shared, and then
you know, people would drop in the chat later. And
I noticed on a live webinar like five minutes later
and that I'm sharing something that is I'm talking about

(50:54):
something that is not shared, Okay, So real quickly, I'm
going to show you this agent that does the decision making.
It is in this wonderful tool called N eight N
and N E N is also a workflow automation tool,
but it enables you to build your agent, okay. And

(51:18):
the way we do this is that here you have
a chat bot. Okay, because what we haven't really talked
about yet is how you communicate with this system. So
when we have something like this, how do you communicate
with this?

Speaker 3 (51:39):
How does that happen? So how do you tell the
bot what to look for?

Speaker 1 (51:43):
And you tell the bot what to look for via
a simple chat bot because that's the easiest way to
talk to AI. That's you don't need any training for that.
So our theory is, whenever possible, we want to be
asking questions and giving directions through a bot. And in
this case we have built it in Telegram, but you

(52:04):
can build it in WhatsApp, you can build it in Slack,
you can build it in a Salesforce app, in a
browser extension, whatever, it doesn't matter. You can build about anywhere.
This one's in telegram because it's convenient for us, and
you were speaking to the agent, and then it's gonna
call workflows that that dive into the you see, it's

(52:27):
called window buffer memory, and it's basically the summarization the
collection of all the instructions and information that you saw
over here. That's that's all in the buffer memory and
the way it works in real life. And I just
want to make sure that you now see this telegram

(52:49):
window that I just popped up, and no you don't. Right, Oh,
there we go. Okay, so this is the clear B
two B bot and and I can talk to it, okay,
And because I know what you know accounts we have
over here, I can I can ask it questions so
I can say, how has I don't know, yosh not

(53:16):
Ai engaged with our content. And it's going to take
it's getting faster and faster, just because the models are
getting faster and faster, and it'll take about half a
minute to go into hopspot and look at what's going
on with this company and just check out everything that

(53:39):
it has done and what signals we have captured from them.
And then right now it's biased towards actions, so it
might right away come out and tell me, like what
next steps we should take with this account based on
our recent engagement. And yeah, it's I think it's a
bit premature that it goes like straight into next steps.

(54:00):
But here you can look at this that Okay, this account,
it's registered for three but webinars put on three newsletters
da da da da. Then we told it to always
assess for our sales rep what's going on, like where
are they in the buyer journey? So it says, okay,
they appear to be in the early to mid stages

(54:21):
of awareness and interest and they are exploring resources but
having committed to attending live sessions right because it said
they have registered, but it doesn't mention.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
Clicks or anything.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
And again, so this is like from various signal sources,
and it's pretty nice to be able to access it
from just a single chatbot. And then it's going to
come with the next best steps. Okay, we've got to,
like I'll be honest with you, like we've got a
lot of training to do on these. In part we
want to be implementing the stuff that Andre just shared
with you, that decision matrix, which is really awesome and

(54:56):
some other things. But but but it's big deals, Like
it's pretty easy to train these pots. So it's like, okay,
because they're in the early to mid stages, We're like, okay, schedule.

Speaker 3 (55:07):
It's going to say, schedule a discovery.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
Call and it can help uncover challenges and you know,
send a personalized follow up with tailored content and who
it's going to recommend content tool of years of gen
to a GTM framework. Okay, because we have feded our
entire content collateral, like our PDFs, our LinkedIn posts and
everything else. And here it's recommending one piece of content

(55:32):
or offer access to record it webinars because obviously they
haven't attended webinars, but they have signed up because that
could look it's it's giving more reason, It's could help
address the timing issues and maintain engagement. And yeah, it
tells you like what information to look for because you know,
we have limited information on them. But I'm lazy and

(55:54):
I don't know about this piece of content, but I
do want to send it to them, so I'll just
see if it can take it up for me. Where
do I find this piece of content? And I'm hoping
it can dig inside and I don't know, send me

(56:14):
a link, whether it be a upspot or a PDF
or whatever else, and and then I can just you know,
copy paste it and then send it to somebody. Sure enough,
what is this twelve years to a GTM framework that's
in our LinkedIn content repository at the following link. Oh,
and it even gives me a summary of it. Okay,

(56:36):
how nice of you, twenty seven GM framework. Yeah, and
if I click it, sure enough, I will go to
this LinkedIn article, which is, yeah, the twelve year thing
that I posted about ten months ago. Okay, so yeah,
this is this is basically how it works. And then obviously,

(56:56):
you know the next step for us is to make
this souper detailed and sophisticated and feed it even more
knowledge and do it in a company specific way.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
So away does then answer your question?

Speaker 2 (57:11):
Yeah? Absolutely? The key point is what I believe we
can just sum it up, right. You need to sit
down and define what signals actually make sense to your organization,
and you don't need to make silent decisions. You must
incorporate a dependent on your company.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
Right.

Speaker 2 (57:32):
If you're a smaller organization, then you need to involve
both sales and your leadership if you work for a
bigger organization, mid size or enterprise, then it's just enough
to sit down with sales involve sales leader and define
what signals are important for you. Awareness signals, product need
evidence signals. Next, define what the signals tell you, how

(57:57):
likely they will define the state of the buyer journey? Right,
at least you can If it's hard, then you can
just think about, Okay, what is the level of intent
demonstrated by this signal? Right, what does it tell us?
And then you brainstorm what would be our next logical

(58:17):
steps to activate this account because not all signals were
created equal. Not all signals mean that you need to
send these people or companies that engage the sales and
ask them to pitch. Right, we all know that it
doesn't work. Unfortunately, the key is to define them. And

(58:39):
first of all, well I always recommend run this process,
run small scode pilot, run small code experiment, right, pick
up any playbook, because first of all, you need to
get a proof that it works before trying to automate everything.
And unfortunately, believe in this era you mentioned a couple
of times AI, but even before AI, everybody was like

(59:03):
technology based, Hey what technology? What software can we buy
to automate this, to automate this, But if you automate
broken playbooks, you get broken pipeline results. Right, So you
need to narrow, basically nail down the playbooks first run
them on your own, and then figure out how to

(59:23):
automate it, right, Because where automation helps, it helps you
to scale the proven motion. Right, then you can the
better would be your demand generation, the most signals you
will be capturing. The better would be your ABM. The
more let's say first party and hind ten signals you
will be captured, right. And the technology will basically feed

(59:48):
you your team with the real time insights and you
at the same time given you a halistic picture of
all interactions so you will be able to execute the
meaningful touch points. Because it reminded me about final story
when for example, that was a person to give you,

(01:00:11):
to give you a very good example. So that was
an enterprise account that signed up and I'm just talking
about one of the clients that signed up for the webinar.
And in reality, this account was in the pipeline, but
it was told due to several factors, right, And that
was a relationship with account executive that actually during that

(01:00:32):
week had time off, so instead of basically figuring it out,
and also they didn't look at the fact that ex
client actually was working for this account, So instead of
leveraging all of these factors, what marketing did? They send
it to SDR and SDR was cold calling that person

(01:00:52):
and it was a very awkward situation because that was
already a relationship and it's negatively impacted the relationship with
that account. Right, that's the biggest problem, and this is
what we want to avoid. We want to avoid this
account blandness, and we want to make sure that technology
enables us to see a whole picture and to find

(01:01:15):
the best next step to influence the bar journey. Hopefully
you guys enjoyed it a lot. We covered pretty much
Everson and the questions that you have asked. Next week
we have our annual full final signate. It would be
the sixth one. Then would be among speakers, so you'll

(01:01:38):
be able to all a lot more about the topic.
I know he has a pretty fantastic presentation, So the
links in the chat and hopefully to see you all
next week. Take care, guys, cheers, take care, takes a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
Bye bye,