#EP171 - How to Make Sales Love Your Marketing, with Kate Neuens

In this episode of the Marketing Freaks podcast, Jon sits down with Kate Neuens, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Frontegg, to explore the complexities of B2B marketing in businesses with long sales cycles.

Jon & Kate discuss the challenges of aligning marketing and sales, the impact of different lead generation channels, and practical strategies for overcoming pipeline stagnation. Kate shares her experience in optimising demand generation, leveraging data to improve decision-making, and implementing automation to streamline processes. 

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how to improve communication, collaboration, and shared accountability for pipeline success.
• Discover how to keep prospects engaged and moving through the funnel with targeted content and automation.
• Understand how these elements work together to fuel demand generation and long-term growth.
• Gain insight into how different lead sources impact conversion rates and how to align expectations with reality.
• Explore ways to use data and automation to prioritise high-value leads and improve efficiency.

Transcript

0:03: Well, hello everyone, welcome back to the Marketing Freaks podcast. 
 0:06: This week I'm talking to Kate Neuens, senior digital marketing manager from a business called Frontech. 
 0:13: We're talking about B2B, how it can get complex sometimes when you're working with long sale cycles. 
 0:19: We talk about how to get aligned with sales in the business you're in to drive proper revenue growth. 
 0:26: We talk about leads getting stuck in the pipeline and how to free them up. 
 0:30: We cover loads and loads and loads of elements when it comes to B2B marketing and sales. 
 0:36: So I really hope you enjoy this episode. 
 0:38: If you do, please come and subscribe on your favorite podcast player. 
 0:43: Without further ado, let's get started with the episode. 
 0:47: Welcome to the Marketing Freaks podcast. 
 0:50: Thanks for having me. 
 0:51: You're very welcome. 
 0:53: We're gonna be talking about B2B marketing, how it can get quite complex, and how you make sure what you're doing aligns with sales and really like the, the bottom line and benefits for the business. 
 1:06: So that's kind of the crux of the conversation today. 
 1:09: So I'm really looking forward to diving into that. 
 1:12: Before we get into the detail, do you want to give us an overview of who you are, what you've done, and your world within B2B marketing? 
 1:21: Yeah, definitely. 
 1:23: So, I've been in the B2B world about 5 years. 
 1:27: Before this, I worked in higher education at Harvard. 
 1:30: I was in FinTech,, I worked at Cars.com for a while, so like a big enterprise B2C company. 
 1:37: And then I moved into cybersecurity at a company called Beyond Identity, and that was like my first big foray into B2B marketing. 
 1:47: So, you know, working with like, like we talked about like longer sales cycles, bigger buying committees, aligning with sales, you know, it's a whole different set of KPIs and since then I've really been enmeshed in the cybersecurity world,, mainly focusing on digital marketing. 
 2:03: My, you know, big skill sets are SEO. 
 2:06: Content marketing, paid search, paid social, all of that. 
 2:10: And so I bumped around to a couple different companies, but I'm currently at a company called Front Egg,, where we do customer identity and access management, and I'm a senior digital marketing manager here, and I've been here since September and it's been great. 
 2:25: Awesome. 
 2:26: What is it you like about B2B? 
 2:29: Yeah, so I like, so I like kind of actually the complexity of it, of it, like, you know, that it requires a lot more collaboration internally. 
 2:39: I, I find, you know, like I never had to really work with like when I was at Cars.com, I never really had to work with the sales team, you know, I didn't, I was, you know, I was on the SEO team at Cars.com and we were just like our insular little team didn't really have to. 
 2:52: You know, branch out a bunch within the organization, but working in B2B marketing, you know, I'm talking a product, I'm talking to engineering, I'm talking to sales. 
 3:00: It was really a lot more of a cross-functional effort, which I really enjoy. 
 3:04: I feel like too, there's a lot more opportunity to, like I say, saying cross-functionally, working together and, you know, aligning with everybody and the challenge. 
 3:14: Of making sure everyone's rowing in the right direction is something that I never experienced before. 
 3:19: And it's been really exciting and invigorating and made me, you know, tap into different parts of myself and my skill sets, you know, there's hard skills involved, there's soft skills involved. 
 3:30: So it's much more of a dynamic environment, I find, than the traditional B2C environment. 
 3:38: Yeah, I think you really have to. 
 3:40: Not, not that you don't in B2C, but within B2B, you really have to get under the skin of the business you're working with and understand, like, the sales process, you know, what a customer goes through when they're going through that sales process, what the objections are, you know, there's so much you need to understand. 
 4:01: Whereas B2C is often. 
 4:04: More black and white an instant. 
 4:06: For sure, like I never knew what a product roadmap was before I came to marketing, you know, I've just learned a lot more and it's forced me to get out of my comfort zone a lot more than the traditional B2C marketing. 
 4:19: Yeah, and I think it's, I, I think that's really enjoyable. 
 4:23: Like I love that that process of OK, what is it about this business? 
 4:27: Like what, what are they offering, like how do we translate that into. 
 4:31: 30 characters in an ad headline and where does that fit into the sales process? 
 4:37: I do really enjoy that. 
 4:39: Did you, did you find any challenges with kind of working closely with sales, like getting sales aligned with what you're doing, getting yourself aligned with what sales are doing. 
 4:50: Talk me through that because it's easy to say on paper marketing should be aligned with sales. 
 4:58: Easier said than done sometimes. 
 5:00: Very much easier said than done. 
 5:02: Yeah, it was something that was interesting that I've noticed that a lot of the B2B companies I've been at is that there's always been this. 
 5:09: It always starts, there's this odd kind of tension between marketing and sales where they almost feel like they're slightly competing against each other, which is obviously counterintuitive to what you're trying to do, right? 
 5:21: We all need to be going in the same direction and that we should all be going towards the same direction of getting more sales, getting more leads, all of that. 
 5:28: But there does seem to be often this friction that's found between the two teams, and where we've had a lot of success with kind of alleviating that tension is often comes down. 
 5:37: Frankly, to the leadership that's involved, and they kind of set the pace. 
 5:41: So sometimes you need to manage up and talk to them like, hey, we need to re-establish a better relationship and all of that. 
 5:47: But, you know, I think a lot of it comes down to communication. 
 5:51: So something that we did at my previous company is like we were sitting on separate sides of the office and they brought us together. 
 5:57: We started sitting together, which was really great because then we would get to hear the calls that were going on. 
 6:01: It was easier for sales to come over and talk and have questions with us. 
 6:05: It was just, it was honestly a bit about like just breaking that ice and just starting to talk to each other. 
 6:11: And then, you know, walls start coming down, the kind of the frustrations or frictions starts to alleviate, you know, we started having monthly meetings or, you know, a lot of times if you're not communicating either, sales doesn't know what you're doing. 
 6:23: So sometimes sales is sitting over there going like, what is marketing doing? 
 6:25: Like, I'm not getting a lot of leads this month, and that's very fair for them to be thinking if they're not actually hearing what you're doing. 
 6:32: So we'd have monthly meetings with going like, hey, here are the updates we're making the website that we think are going to help conversion rates here, the events we have going on, all of that. 
 6:40: So we, and also with sales people like listen, their number one goal is hitting quota, right? 
 6:45: So sometimes you have to overcommunicate and that's OK, like, so we would do weekly meetings, we send follow up emails, we do like a weekly slack, like just kind of, you know, summarizing what's going on. 
 6:57: Just really I can't emphasize. 
 7:00: like how much you should really overcommunicate with sales cause like I said, their number one goal is quota as it should be because that's what's going to drive the business forward. 
 7:07: And so you need to be supporting them and helping them. 
 7:11: And so sometimes I think marketing can get in this mindset of thinking like, oh, well, we've already told them once what's going on. 
 7:18: It's like, no, sometimes you need to reinforce like what's going on and, you know, encourage them repeatedly to like, hey, make sure to invite people to this event and things like that. 
 7:27: But yeah, I really think it comes down to communication in whatever form that may be, whether it's, you know, what works for your business environment. 
 7:34: So like I said for my previous company, it was literally putting us all in the same room, we'd have a monthly meetings, you know, whatever works for the type of environment you have that like that the communicate communication style that works for them. 
 7:46: So it might be slack, it might be email, it might be in-person meetings, but yeah, I think just starting that communication can help ease that. 
 7:54: and kind of those walls. 
 7:56: And I said, and then also starting those communications with, with sales, you know, sales can be sitting going over there going, what is marketing doing? 
 8:03: And marketing sometimes also thinks the same thing about sales. 
 8:06: Like what are they doing? 
 8:07: How many calls are they making? 
 8:08: And the more you start communicating, you can start actually hearing like, oh, you know, they're having trouble because this particular script isn't working or something like that. 
 8:16: And so just starting to open up those lines can really help a lot. 
 8:21: Definitely. 
 8:22: And have you ever, have you ever been in the situation where you're working with sales and then as, as a marketing team, you're working on, let's say a new idea or a new initiative. 
 8:35: And the sales team are used to leads the phone, and they're ready to buy, or they're almost ready to buy, or they've got a brief and off you go. 
 8:46: First is, let's say you're putting out content. 
 8:49: Through organic channels or you know performance marketing, and the leads that are coming in are slightly more top of funnel, they need a bit more nurturing, but they're still valuable. 
 8:59: Mhm. 
 9:00: But sales are used to more immediate opportunities. 
 9:04: Have you ever been in that situation and have you ever kind of had to really try and almost. 
 9:10: Change the habit a little bit. 
 9:13: Yeah, yeah, I so I think we've we've run into those issues definitely where, you know, there's the complaints like, hey, you know, they download a white paper, they're not ready to buy, what am I gonna do with this league kind of thing, and that's, yeah, I think definitely changing the habits around that, and I think that's a combination of marketing and sales. 
 9:31: So there's things you can do on the marketing side side to help nurture. 
 9:35: So maybe it's having a custom email nurture campaign for them or introducing more webinars. 
 9:40: To your sequences or things like that where it's, you know, bringing them, educating them more, bringing them further down the funnel, and,, getting them more up to speed, but also communicating to sales, like, hey, this isn't worth a call right now. 
 9:53: It might be worth an email or something like that in a certain amount of time. 
 9:58: And there's also things you can do with marketing ops to help with like scoring of leads so you can work with them to go, you know, wait until they hit this scoring threshold before we do a call and things like that. 
 10:08: So. 
 10:08: I think kind of combining both kind of the science of marketing with, you know, the marketing ops and the scoring and and the sequences and all of that with as much as like the personal touch, you know, and just making sure that cause the worst thing you can do to turn a lead off is like they download a white paper and then you're calling them right away. 
 10:25: Like they're not ready to buy. 
 10:26: So it's a, and I think this once again goes back to the communication about when you're introducing a new type of lead generation effort express, you know, explaining the sales like, hey, these leads are. 
 10:36: They gonna be coming in, but they're not gonna be ready for a call just yet. 
 10:39: They're not gonna be ready to book a demo. 
 10:42: This is gonna take some time. 
 10:43: But and then also explaining like we have these lead generation efforts going on, but we also have more bottom of the funnel efforts that we're working on. 
 10:51: So just expressing how you have multiple channels going on, so that, you know, sales is always happy that they're getting quality leads with the understanding that, you know, these leads are quality, but they're just not at the point of buying yet and it's just gonna take time. 
 11:05: Yeah, it's like, hey, we're doing this activity, it's gonna generate leads, but they might be a bit different. 
 11:11: Yeah. 
 11:11: Don't worry. 
 11:12: Don't worry, it's gonna take a little bit of time, but that's why you should always have a a variety of channels that you're working with so that you're not stuck just waiting for these leads. 
 11:21: Like if you do if the content syndication. 
 11:23: a good example. 
 11:24: Like, I,, you know, those leads come in and they're pretty cool to begin with. 
 11:28: It's gonna take time, you know, it's gonna take them attending a webinar, maybe downloading another piece of content, you know, maybe meeting up with you at like an event that you're attending or something like that before they're ready to have a full blown conversation with a sales team member. 
 11:42: Yeah, 100%. 
 11:43: Can we talk about channel mix for a bit? 
 11:46: So you mentioned things like SEO,, what's in your current channel mix and how do you? 
 11:53: I guess view each one from an expectation and a KPI perspective. 
 11:58: Yeah, this is really good time with this question because I just set KPIs for all my channels which just recently. 
 12:05: So I mean the tried and true theory when it comes to SEO versus paid is like paid search is that paid search is immediate and SEO takes time and there's truth to those to those sentiments, right? 
 12:18: SEO takes time to build up that foundation. 
 12:21: You know, there's things you have to do from a technical perspective with your website. 
 12:24: Like, for example, if you have major issues with your website even getting crawled, like you're gonna have trouble ranking, you know, you know, and it takes time to build out a good, good host of content on your website as well, and obviously there's more tools now to help speed up process, but you know, you don't trust AI generated content just off the bat. 
 12:43: You still need a reviewer for all of it and everything like that,, and then there's the off-page aspect of SEO as well like. 
 12:50: Building links, like all of that stuff takes time and you know, the cliche about SEO is it's a sprint, it's a sorry, it's a marathon and not a sprint. 
 12:57: And I, and that's really true. 
 12:58: Like I think Google has even said that once you really start seriously going down a road of SEO efforts, it's gonna take about 3 to 4 months before you start seeing results. 
 13:08: So you need to lay that foundation, which I that's why it's so great to mix the SEO and page, so you start building the foundation for SEO while you start building out your page channels. 
 13:19: So, Like, and it's, I don't think it's necessarily true that you just like turn on paid and it's automatic. 
 13:24: Like there's things that definitely go into paid search like you need to work on the quality of your landing page, or keywords, all of that, but it's definitely more instantaneous than SEO. 
 13:33: Now when I think about KPIs for both, I mean, there's always the tried and true KPI of leads generated, how many of them are getting demo scheduled, and how many of them are then becoming SQL SQOs, SQLs, whatever you call opportunities, whatever they might be,, but I And then, but the one thing that we pay attention to with SEO is honestly the number one KPI is traffic, because that is going to influence leads, that's going to influence demos. 
 13:59: I mean, it all comes down from traffic, so I mean usually they correlate pretty well. 
 14:02: The more traffic you get, the more leads you'll get, so we definitely need to be considering growing traffic, number one, like that's how I look at it. 
 14:10: But then there's all those things that go into building traffic, like we're talking about like building out content, link building, making sure your technical foundation is good. 
 14:17: , with paid social, paid search and paid social, like with paid search, I'm always keeping an eye on the quality scores of our landing pages, you know, click through rates, all of those good things,, and then also there's with organic, you do tend To get more qualified leads, right? 
 14:36: It's people actively searching what your brand does. 
 14:39: For example, like egg, one of our things, one of our top keywords is user management solutions, like people searching for that keyword, very highly correlated with quality. 
 14:48: They're actively searching for a solution. 
 14:50: With paid leads, you can, there's always a usually getting those quality leads a little bit more of an uphill battle, but just a little bit more of a struggle. 
 14:58: You have to be paying attention to your keywords, you know, if you're doing broad match, like, you know, on like some bad keywords can get in there, some, you know, some you're like how did this make it and all of a sudden we're getting like B2C cus B2C customers and things like that. 
 15:13: So I also one of the KPIs I look at is how many of the leads are actually going from lead to MQL as a KPI and that helps me also understand the overall quality and strength of the program. 
 15:24: Yeah, absolutely. 
 15:26: But I guess it also depends what you're doing in between, right? 
 15:28: Because,, let's say you're building out content with SEO and a lot of that content is much more kind of informational type content. 
 15:40: Like the type of content someone would read when they're really starting to think about a solution, but they don't know what they want yet. 
 15:47: versus, you know, running a PPC ad or getting a very high intent landing page, right, right up there for someone who is, yeah, user management solutions. 
 15:57: I want it and I want it now, like, you can expect a direct lead from that. 
 16:03: But you can't expect a direct lead from. 
 16:06: Someone who's just starting to research the topic for sure they're both, they're both valuable, right? 
 16:10: Both very valuable. 
 16:11: And to, and the other thing, like, you know, for example, one of my past companies, I set up a glossary of like regular like cybersecurity terms at our website, and I would sometimes get pushback about it, be like, who's gonna land on a glossary item defining man in the middle attack and convert. 
 16:28: I was like, really nobody, but this content also serves other purposes. 
 16:32: something that my coworkers are really sick of me saying, but I say it all the time is a rising a rising tide raises all ships when it comes to SEO. 
 16:40: So these glossary items, while they aren't really going to be conversion centric content pieces, they help in a number of ways. 
 16:47: They help with the overall expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of the site. 
 16:51: You're establishing yourself as an expert on these on cybersecurity on these topics in general, you know. 
 16:57: You know, we, so we have a loss I'm a man in the middle attack. 
 17:01: Our product helps stop man in the middle attack. 
 17:03: So we're just helping build, you know, in Google's eyes, helping them understand that we really understand and know this topic really well. 
 17:09: And another thing is that these pieces can be good organic link building generating pieces. 
 17:14: So then, you know, if someone's writing about man in the middle attack, they want to reference and,, you know, a source article, they link to our site, and that just helps the overall authority of our site go up as well. 
 17:24: So sometimes like, I think a lot of people start thinking too that like, oh the content on our website, it's not converting and but that's not always the purpose of an organic piece. 
 17:33: Like you said, it's informational, it's educating, it might be link building, so you don't want to just rewriting content thinking of converting. 
 17:41: First of all, you're not gonna be, I don't think you're gonna write really good content in that mind anyway, but it just you have to be thinking about how is this rising tide gonna raise all the ships. 
 17:52: Yeah, exactly. 
 17:53: And when it comes to your sales process, like currently, like, how long roughly does it take from someone who,, let's say they've, yeah, they've entered the funnel at the top through to being assigned new customer. 
 18:09: What sort of time length are we talking about roughly? 
 18:12: Well, I'm gonna share an annoying answer. 
 18:14: It says it depends it depends, right? 
 18:16: So it depends like if they're well, yes, as an SEO, but so, you know, obviously if it's an enterprise client like a much bigger company, that's a much longer sales cycle. 
 18:27: I mean that can be 6 or more months. 
 18:30: If it's a small startup, I mean, we had one that closed in like 2 weeks. 
 18:35: So it all depends really on the size of the company and the size of the buying committee. 
 18:40: , but I mean that's we're, we're kind of tried and true,, when it comes to. 
 18:47: I mean, we, we don't break the mold when it comes to buying cycles. 
 18:50: If it's a bigger company, it can take longer, 6+ months. 
 18:53: I would say we average about 2 to 3 months, but it all depends on the sales cycle. 
 18:59: I mean, it all depends on the size of the company and how big the buying committee and how many, you know, people have to evaluate the tool and all of that stuff. 
 19:06: Yeah, which is, I think. 
 19:08: Typical in that there's, you know, sales cycles, you can look at an average, but it varies so, so massively across the type of opportunity for most companies. 
 19:19: But, so when you're running your marketing activity, and let's say you're driving webinar downloads, content downloads, some like really high intent inquiries, how do you make sure that. 
 19:35: You're, you're looking at that kind of sales to MQL and then signed revenue, which might be 12 months down the line. 
 19:43: So how, how would you join the dots between your marketing KPIs and your like the business' sales KPIs? 
 19:51: Mhm. 
 19:52: Well, yeah, I mean, so I kind of work backwards, right? 
 19:55: So I look at a closed deal. 
 19:57: OK, so our sales, so the way we go is you go lead AQL MQL, SQL, opportunity, and then there's all the stages within opportunity, so stage 1 through 8 and then and then closed one. 
 20:12: , so what I often have done in the past is I just work backwards. 
 20:17: So I start going, OK, like, all right, so how many SQ like how many So we like start like I usually just start with opportunity or like closed one and be like, OK, so how many opportunities did we need to get one closed one and then how many, you know, SQLs did we need to get the opportunity and then how many, you know, so I just keep working backwards and so that helps me understand like, and then the top line metric like we talked about with organic is a traffic, like, OK, ultimately we need to see this much traffic. 
 20:45: If we want to see like a 10% growth in closed one that I need to. 
 20:50: Extrapolate all the way back to traffic. 
 20:52: With paid, I can look at like the number of leads like that we'll need and things like that. 
 20:57: So just kind of understanding, getting a really good understanding too of those conversion rates between stages is really important because you can just say like, oh, we need to increase like opportunities by 20%, then we just need to increase leads by 20%. 
 21:12: It's not always that, so you need to understand that what happens between each stage. 
 21:16: And then I think what's also. 
 21:17: Really helpful is one of my past companies, we did a really deep, big deep dive with sales about like, OK, what is happening between SQL the opportunity? 
 21:26: How long does that stage take? 
 21:27: Why is it taking so, why is it taking so long? 
 21:29: Why is it short? 
 21:30: You know what, you know, and understanding what are the pain points there are the things that we can be providing that can that can help speed that process up,, you know, is there friction involved that we just currently have no control over, you know, so I think like really diving into. 
 21:45: Those conversion rates between stages will really helps you understand what you need to produce as a marketer to help get ultimately that and revenue metric of closed deals. 
 21:57: , and then also just like I said, having a really, you know, I keep going back to communication with sales, having a good understanding of like, where are they running into problems with moving something from like stage one to stage 2, stage 3, all of that stuff. 
 22:10: So I've, I've had, you know, conversations. 
 22:13: With my past one of my past companies about like, you know, we really need more industry centric, like one pagers that I can share. 
 22:20: I think those will be really helpful. 
 22:22: So, talking to them about those, you know, easy pieces that they can have to share to just help speed things up, help educate the customer, all of that. 
 22:31: , I think it's really helpful, but yeah, I, it's too many people just think like, oh we'll increase leads by 20% and that will mean a number of opportunities to close deal go up 20%. 
 22:43: It's not that simple with B2B. 
 22:45: No, definitely not. 
 22:46: But then if you increase, if you can work with sales to increase the conversion rates and ratios that pipeline, everything you put in at the top gets infinitely better, doesn't it? 
 22:58: Yes, like. 
 23:00: We've been doing a lot of work currently,, and, and my, my current company our own sales process and all of that, and we brought the SDRs into the marketing team, which I think is really, really helpful, yeah,, I've been at companies where that's just a no go, and I've been at others where it's been it's automatic like STRs are within the marketing team, and I think that helps a lot getting to be on the same team as SDRs because you get a much better pulse on the quality of the leads. 
 23:28: So if you're, you know, your weekly meetings, you can just say like, you can just get a good, you know, talk to the. 
 23:34: Dana is our SDR and just be like, OK, what's been going on? 
 23:37: Are they even picking up the phone for you, all of that stuff, you know,, so that's been really helpful,, as well. 
 23:44: So I would encourage more companies to bring STRs onto the marketing team because it just, I mean, they are the front line, they're on the front lines with your top of funnel leads, and they really help you understand if they're, if you're even hitting the mark with what you're bringing in. 
 23:59: And they're getting instant feedback, instant feedback, you know, which is so helpful, but I assume on a very practical sense. 
 24:09: In your CRM when an opportunity comes in, you, you make sure it gets stamped with, OK, this has come through organic search. 
 24:16: Here's the landing page that's come through, or it's, this has come through BBC. 
 24:20: Here's the campaign that's come through. 
 24:22: So when you do start reverse engineering back, you've got a record, a clear record of what, what you've delivered from marketing. 
 24:29: Is that a fair assumption? 
 24:31: Yeah, yeah. 
 24:31: And we've been doing a lot of analysis too, around what Type of campaigns we're running on paid search that are producing the more, the most opportunities, you know, and so we've been finding a lot of our brand campaigns, not surprisingly, do really well, competitor campaigns, all of that, they do really well, not shocking, those people are very high intent if they're looking for a solution that's like that literally searching for us or for a competitor. 
 24:54: But yeah, we're getting a much better clear clear understanding of what Working what's not. 
 25:01: And, and it wasn't that it wasn't getting done before. 
 25:04: I think there were just so many things going on with with we're a startup, right? 
 25:08: And there's people are spinning 8 plates at once trying to figure out. 
 25:12: And so we just took the time to be dedicated to really analyzing what's going on in the sales process, what's happening exactly when a lead comes in, what's happening, you know, how are we analyzing the success of it and so. 
 25:25: I think with a lot of startups, you can kind of just be heads down, just working on getting through your task of the day, just trying to move things forward, and it's sometimes it's really helpful to step back and take a look at the bigger picture and it and it's been helping our process be so much smoother and things are moving to opportunity so much quicker because we took that step back, really analyzed, oh, like, oh, here's a friction point in the process, or here where things are falling through the cracks, and it's, it's been infinitely helpful for us in our process. 
 25:55: That's amazing. 
 25:56: So what, as a, as a marketer or a marketing team, for anyone who's listening to this that's working in marketing and they're talking to sales and sales are going, OK, great, we're getting leads in, but they're all getting stuck between. 
 26:11: MQL and SQL or whatever stage it's at. 
 26:15: What do you, like, give me some practical examples of what you've then gone and done as a marketer to help un jam. 
 26:23: The jam. 
 26:24: Yeah, yeah, definitely,, so like for I'll just use an example of like one of my past companies MQL to SQL. 
 26:31: So SQL we defined SQL as when a demo has been scheduled and completed. 
 26:36: And so MQL, they're high quality, they've met the scoring threshold to meet MQL status, but they're not quite picking up the phone, they're not setting that meeting, all of those things. 
 26:46: So something that we did that would proved really useful is that we did these demo webinars,, and so it was just, that's a really easy low friction way to get people to come in and see the actual product. 
 26:58: Now something we did because anyone can run a demo webinar, right? 
 27:02: And it doesn't sound super exciting to. 
 27:04: See just like, you know, your product getting walked through. 
 27:07: What we did is we offered a giveaway to everyone who attended live and attended all the way through. 
 27:13: So something we did that was really successful is everyone who attended got a Stanley Cup, like, you know, the big old not not the hockey one. 
 27:21: I don't know, but you know, I'm holding it right now, my big old water cup. 
 27:25: Yeah, and you know, we were a smaller startup, so it's not like we had this huge email database of like a ton of M. 
 27:32: Well, so we knew it like we had, we kind of did the math we're like, well, everyone attended and like, you know, you know, not everyone who register is going to attend kind of putting the like, let's say like 50% people who register show up, what would the cost be? 
 27:46: And it was beyond successful and it was, and in the end, it was very low cost and the return on investment was incredibly high. 
 27:54: So you get like, I know a lot of people do like gift cards and things like that, or hey, we'll buy you lunch and all those things. 
 28:00: I have found that the gift cards aren't as they don't get as many people to act as like an actual physical item like that you're gonna you're gonna mail to them. 
 28:10: So, you know, we said, hey, we're gonna be doing this demo webinar if you attend live, we also had other criteria like you had to have a certain job title and and all of that and we also said, hey, you have to live in these couple countries and all of that. 
 28:22: So you set up your criteria, you put in your disclaimers, all of that. 
 28:26: Get the you, you know, make sure you attend live, all of that, and then we and then it was actually really great. 
 28:32: We, and you would think like people, you know, we had some concerns with the company like, oh are people just going to attend and not even pay attention. 
 28:38: It was one of our most engaging demo webinars, people are asking questions, we had to like stay on later. 
 28:44: I mean, and then the And then it was just such a great way to like say like, OK, here's the form that you're gonna go to fill out to get your Stanley Cup, and it's a great way for the SDR or the AE to start the conversation about like, hey, you know, OK, you know, you can send emails like, hey, it's shipped. 
 29:00: Oh, it should have been delivered, you know, it's just like these little touch points that opened doors that weren't there previously, and there is something to be said about people do feel a little bit indebted to you to like maybe have a conversation of like. 
 29:11: You know, a lot of people were like, oh, I got it for my wife, you know, she was so excited, you know, or whatever it might be, you know,, and so that was really, really successful and it's something we're gonna be trying at our current company, but we continued it, so we did it with Stanley Cups and then we did another session during the summer where we're like, oh, everyone who registers gets a pickle ball kit and things like that. 
 29:31: So, you know, you don't have to spend a lot of money. 
 29:34: You can even like send like little like the next thing we were going to do, but I left the company before we did it. 
 29:39: it's just like a little outdoor speaker that was also a charger, you know, these don't have to be super expensive, but there's something about the physical item that's much more personal than just like the gift card that you email over. 
 29:51: And like I said with the physical item, there's a lot more doors that open where you can, it's you say, hey, like I said that it's shipped, it should have been delivered, you know, let's talk, you know, and yes, there will be a certain set of people that will just never respond, take your free Stanley Cup and never open an email again. 
 30:06: But there it in terms of the conversion rate from MQL to demo it was incredibly successful and in terms of pipeline contribution, it was also a really great ROI. 
 30:18: That's awesome. 
 30:19: Do you think there's a lot to do here about. 
 30:22: I guess approaching things a bit more creatively and thinking a little bit outside the box and you know, remembering that. 
 30:31: People in the pipeline are still normal human beings and if you can make it interesting or appealing. 
 30:39: You stand a much greater chance of progressing them through, right? 
 30:42: No, yeah, for sure. 
 30:44: I mean, I mean I think that's that's really great like you bring that up and my my current CMO likes to remind us all the time, like, hey, these are people at the end of the day, you know, we were,, we're currently running CTV ads and we're kind of trying to decide what channels should they should they should be on and I was in the mind of like, well, everything should be like tech orient. 
 31:02: and you know,, sci-fi channels, and he was like, OK, these are people too, like, you know, they might want to watch Office reruns too, you know, and so yes, it's good to remember like their people, they have normal interests, you know, they might like tennis, they might like video games, they might like reading, you know, it's important to remember that and also the same emotions that connect with the B2C customer also work with B2B, you know,, I've done a lot of work on link building pieces and getting people to pay attention to those and, a lot of the same emotions that, you know, and thinking about the kind of emotions that are going to drive sharing of content, you know, whether it's humor or a or anxiety or fear or things like that, it still works for B2B, you know, and thinking, just thinking about those emotions that you can tap in and and imagery that can really catch the. 
 31:51: I or make them laugh. 
 31:52: Like one of our most click through ads at my last company we used Tan in the ad, you know, and so just, yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's adding a level of personalization that people really appreciate too. 
 32:04: People don't like feeling like a brand is talking to them. 
 32:07: They feel they want to feel like a person is talking to them. 
 32:11: Definitely, definitely. 
 32:13: And I completely agree with all of that because it's, it doesn't, it get, it can get so boring so quickly and so stale and so corporate and so, you know, average that making something look nice or making something actually appeal to another human being makes such a big difference. 
 32:33: So all completely agree with everything you said there. 
 32:37: It gets to wrap up. 
 32:39: This has been a really great conversation, but to wrap up, like let's say you had to pick one, maybe two. 
 32:46: really key things about B2B marketing, like, what would you say those things are? 
 32:51: Like, these are top of my list, the most important things you must think of or do if you're in B2B marketing. 
 32:59: Well, this one isn't gonna be shocking based on our conversation, but having that open communication with sales is absolutely crucial. 
 33:06: I have seen it break companies and I have seen it make companies, you know, and it especially I've I've worked in a lot of startups the past couple of years, especially in startups, you cannot have silos. 
 33:20: There's just no room for it. 
 33:21: You and you can't have these internal battles. 
 33:25: There's no time for it. 
 33:26: There's no room for it. 
 33:28: So whatever you need to do to break, you know, the wall or the friction between marketing and sales is absolutely crucial. 
 33:35: Like sales needs to be supported. 
 33:37: I know sometimes people feel like, oh, all we do is help sales. 
 33:40: Well, like, yeah, it's kind of crucial. 
 33:43: Like they're the ones, yeah, they're the ones closing deals that are going to keep the lights on in this company. 
 33:49: So whatever you need to do to help support them and create those lines of communication, and oftentimes too like. 
 33:55: Like, the more you open up with them and the more you can talk to them and and collaborate, the easier it becomes and it becomes less of, you know, this tedious chore you have to do, you know, in the end, like we're talking about B2B are people too, like sales are people too, you know, they, they, they're not, you know, these egomaniacs, they're just trying to like make sales and, you know, help keep the company afloat. 
 34:17: , I think also the other thing, and this is kind of boring. 
 34:22: But data hygiene is really important. 
 34:25: Like I've, you know, I'm one of my last companies, I walked in and I just said there was like no MQL scoring threshold. 
 34:33: There were all these like, you know, it's just like even simple simple thing like there's all these testing leads and the and you know we were using HubSpot. 
 34:40: I'm like it's taking up a lot of room in our CRM for the current plan that we're on, you know, or, you know, things are, you know,, you know, God loves sales, but sometimes they aren't the best with falling process. 
 34:52: So the more you can. 
 34:53: Automate things as well, helps with data hygiene. 
 34:55: So, you know, not just letting people pick like what the lead status is. 
 34:59: It should be part of a workflow that you have set up, you know, all of this really helps, like, not only,, you get a better understanding of the quality of your leads, but like if you need to start, you know, segmenting your audience and, you know, you, you wanna start sending emails to a certain like cohort. 
 35:16: If you don't have clean data and you don't have a, you know, properly set up CRM, you're not gonna be able to do those things. 
 35:23: You're not gonna have a really good insight into how are we doing with our leads, how are they progressing, you know, we've talked about being able to measure the MQL, the SQL, and if that's just getting decided by a sales person's gut reaction. 
 35:39: That doesn't help you really get a good understanding of how things should be progressing or how how to measure it scientifically, you know, so you need to have workflows set up based on criteria, scoring, all of that to really help you analyze how leads are progressing and how your marketing activities are actually working. 
 36:00: Having a good m person, having a good mops person is very underrated but highly critical. 
 36:06: Oh yeah, it's, it's The data has to be fundamental to everything. 
 36:13: Absolutely everything. 
 36:14: So what we're saying is, talk to sales and have good data. 
 36:18: Yeah, clean up your data, talk to sales. 
 36:21: Brilliant. 
 36:22: , look, Kate, thank you so much for joining the podcast. 
 36:24: That was a really good conversation and thanks to everyone for listening in, and we'll see you next time. 
 36:30: Thanks. 
 36:33: Thank you so much for listening to this episode. 
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