Edward Ford is the Demand Gen Director at Supermetrics and also creator of The Growth Hub Podcast with around 80 episodes under his belt.
On this episode we talk about:
- Building a demand gen team in a product-led environment
- Measuring and creating brand through data-driven experiments
- Differences between SaaS companies in the US vs EU?
- Do Performance Marketing need to sit in a Demand Gen function?
Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.
This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross & HockeyStack.
Edward Ford is the Demand Gen Director at Supermetrics and also creator of The Growth Hub Podcast with around 80 episodes under his belt.
On this episode we talk about:
- Building a demand gen team in a product-led environment
- Measuring and creating brand through data-driven experiments
- Differences between SaaS companies in the US vs EU?
- Do Performance Marketing need to sit in a Demand Gen function?
Are you ready to join the movement? Join our free slack community where some of the best demand marketers in the world share knowledge on demandgenerationmovement.com.
This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors Albacross & HockeyStack.
The best b2b SaaS companies in the world have made the shift towards a demand generation strategy focused on revenue and revenue. And Europe is falling behind. What about you? What about? Isn't it about time you made the shift? On this podcast, we interviewed leaders at the forefront of modern demand generation to help you make the shift and join the movement join the movement, we need to drop the MQLs and focus on what matters leading you into the future. This is the demand generation movement. And this is your host, Adam Holmgren.
Adam Holmgren:Okay, welcome to the demand generation movement. And this time, it's my pleasure to welcome Edward Ford. He is the demand generation director at Supermetrics. And the host of the former host actually on the growth our podcast. Thank you for joining us, Edward.
Edward Ford:Adam. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Adam Holmgren:And first, I just wanted to say that that you have honestly been a big inspiration in me, even starting the podcast, you have been like educating the European market around topics, such as growth and demand yet for for a long time, right. Something you have been doing since 2017.
Edward Ford:Yeah, we started this podcast in spring 2017. So around five years and originally launched it at my previous company. So that's the marketing agency called advanced b2b based here in Helsinki, Finland. And the company had always worked with b2b SaaS and tech companies. And we were expanding from the Finnish market into international markets. And that was always going to be the focus. And at that time, we were big podcast fans on the team. We listened to marketing podcasts, and we listened to SAS podcasts, but there wasn't really anything that covered b2b SaaS marketing, specifically. And so we saw a real opportunity to just take up that position and interview b2b SaaS marketers from all around the world and hear their stories and look at what it takes to grow a successful SaaS company. And that's where it started. And we grew the show, slowly, but surely, in the initial days, and then after I left to move on to Supermetrics, I agree to kind of stay on as host and have kept that as my, like evening and weekend project. It's grown quite nicely into over 100,000 downloads, and we have a lot of listeners. And it's Yeah, been a real pleasure to have been part of that. And And now, having worked on it for so long, almost five years, it was, I think, time to hand it over. So passing it on to a couple of new hosts, say and reata from the advanced b2b team. So excited to see where that goes.
Adam Holmgren:Yeah, and also excited to see what you will do next. Because you will have a lot of free time now on your hands. When you're not putting your weekends and your evenings. On to that, of course.
Edward Ford:Yeah. Well, we have two, two small children nowadays as well. Yeah. So we have assumed to be two year old and a three month old. So they definitely keep keep us busy at all times, not just the evenings and weekends. But so that's the that's been a lot of fun.
Adam Holmgren:Yeah, that's awesome. But currently, we start there by you telling the listeners a little bit about who you are and what you're doing now over at Supermetrics.
Edward Ford:Yeah, so briefly, myself, I have around 10 years experience in marketing and sales. And I've always loved working with tech and SAS. And I just saw that as a growing space. So when I had the privilege to be working in tech and advanced b2b contacted me about helping them grow the business internationally and set up the international business function and work with great Sass brands from around the world. It was an opportunity I couldn't say no to so that was where I got my my Sass education and a deep dive into working in SAS. And then from there, I just loved working with different SAS businesses and thought it would be great to go in house and kind of really take one one company and work on that journey. Because when you're in an agency, you you one of the benefits is you get to see many different companies, you get to work with different clients and solve different challenges. And you can learn very quickly. But then, of course, you have a limited amount of time to work with each client. And I thought it'd be great to just focus on one and see what you could do. And at that time, Supermetrics reached out and I was discussing with them and it just looked like a great time to jump on board. I didn't realize Supermetrics was actually a finished company. At first I always assumed that they were based in America. But then I found out their offices in downtown Helsinki right by the main station, which was a shock for me. And at that time, were about 30 people in the company. There were about three marketers in the company and it was a great time to jump in and still see that the startup phase of Supermetrics and now we've grown to over 200 people. And it's been a crazy ride. So far a lot of fun a lot of learnings and to be in the marketing space. So marketing to marketers is always good fun and working in data and analytics, which is where Supermetrics sits. It's, it's been a real adventure so far and looking forward to see where we go from here.
Adam Holmgren:Yeah, it's for sure a really, really inspiring journey you have had, I think most people in Europe have some, some sense of knowledge over who you are over at Supermetrics. And that that's, of course, a great, your built a great reputation. I think that's key. Now, wanted to go back to your, your podcasts, you have had it since 2017. You have been interviewing marketing executives from all over the world, really. And what we are trying to do here at the demand generation movement is really to look at okay, what are the difference in Europe versus us in terms of making that kind of revenue transitions? Well, how do you see kind of the difference, as you have been talking with so many b2b marketers across the world? Or do you even see any difference between companies in the US versus in in the EU?
Edward Ford:Yeah, I think it's a mix of yes and no. So I think I've been fortunate to speak with some great marketing leaders from some great SAS companies here in Europe and also the US. So it's kind of compare the two and I don't really see many fundamental differences due to Gio specifically, I think we both see marketing the same way. And as I said, I've spoken with lots of SAS marketing leaders in particular in America, in Europe, and it might actually be more of a SAS thing. But I think many people in SAS have focused on business impact of marketing and look at revenue. And I think it's probably because SAS businesses really rally around things like monthly recurring revenue, annual recurring revenue, everyone talks about revenue, and it's often a point of focus. So in our monthly all hands meetings at Supermetrics, it's the first point on the agenda, like Where where are we in terms of revenue? Arr? How is that looking and breaking that down into where it's coming from, and so forth. So, in that sense, I haven't really seen too many differences between Europe and the USA per se, based on the people I've spoken with. But I think it could just be that there are more American SAS companies out there. There's big tech hubs like Silicon Valley, of course, Boston has an incredible taxi in Chicago, Austin, and there are several others. I think there's probably more money in the system. This is my assumption, I would assume, but you just hear a lot more about American businesses. And I think, having said that, though, there are probably many American businesses within SAS and probably outside of SAS, who look at marketing in a more traditional way, perhaps they don't speak about revenue so much, looking at lead quotas. And I think they're probably European businesses who do the same. But even if you just take a moment to look out across the continent, there are some incredible European SAS companies like paddle in the UK hot jar out of Malta, Estonia has a great tech scene and companies like out funnel and pipe drive obviously get except in Sweden, maybe Supermetrics, from Finland and a few others and one of my favorites, Typeform in Spain. And then there are also some established big Silicon Valley names like intercom originated from Ireland, Zendesk in Denmark. So when you start looking at all these companies, you see that you know, Europe is really up there. And we're really competitive. And there are some great hubs. We spoke about the American ones earlier. But obviously, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Stockholm, the Nordics, there's some great, great hubs out there. And that being said, though, I one difference that I have seen, it could be more on scale and mindset. So American companies might just think, that much bigger, they might just think that more aggressively. And obviously, there's the culture of VCs and Silicon Valley, and Blitzscaling, which came out of Silicon Valley and California. And we often speak on more and more humble terms. And we often say in, in our team that you don't necessarily know what you don't know, when you're scaling. Because you've never seen what a large organization looks like. Or if you're not sure where you're heading, then it's it's very difficult to to kind of think on that scale. And if you've worked in early stage, or startup or scale of phases, you just don't know necessarily what it takes to really kind of build up to that size. And maybe there aren't as many companies and marketers who've, who've done it before who've already been on that journey. But one thing I'm seeing particularly in Ireland is that there are a lot of American companies who established the European or international base in, in Ireland, in particular in Dublin for for many reasons. Of course one of those is also I think the tax benefits that the Irish government offered But there's a great hub there. And there's some great people and people who've worked with those American companies and have been living in Europe and working in Europe, but have been exposed and experienced working as part of an American company and culture. And one great example is the Supermetrics CMO. So Gabby, who's a phenomenal marketing leader, she used to be Groupons, global CMO, based in Dublin, and was running a marketing team, which was almost as big as the Supermetrics entirity. So she's really seeing what big looks like. And she's seen that scale, and that aggressiveness and the speed at which you need to move while ensuring processor processes are in place. And I think as we see more European companies grow and succeed on a big scale, then that's more experience, it's more knowledge that is going to be shared and stay within our pool and ecosystem. And obviously, we just spoke before about the space and how it's growing and how many new SAS businesses are coming along. So I think we're gonna see compound effect in future and there's gonna be a lot of exciting things happening here in Europe.
Adam Holmgren:Yeah, and I think that's so that's perhaps the most interesting part now is that we are, we are really catching up in Europe, and we are almost producing as many and as great SAS companies as, as us are, even though we're a much smaller population. So I think that's really cool as well. But if we, if we look back a little bit and turn to kind of the basis that we are trying to, to educate the market over in this podcast, what would you say with your like interpretation, that demand generation and more revenue based marketing is to you?
Edward Ford:Yeah, yeah, this is an interesting question. Because I think if you ask marketers, what is demand? Gen. You asked 10, marketers, you might get 10 different answers. So another interesting thing is I'm not necessarily a fan of the term, I'm not fully sold on it yet. In terms of demand gen. I think I've always done what might be considered demand gen. But I've always felt that if you work in marketing, your job is to generate demand, doesn't really matter which team you're sitting in, or which function or what your job title is, at the end of the day, it's about generating demand within your target audience, and translating that into business growth. I've spoken with Bill makitas, who was the former CMO at Slack and Zendesk and was VP at Salesforce. And he's also not the biggest fan of demand gen, he actually didn't have a demand gen function in any of his teams that sort of distributed. But the way we look at demand gen, and how we break it down is splitting it into two parts. So demand generation equals demand creation plus demand capture. And this is something that a lot of people are speaking about, I think refined labs have really been driving this revolution on what is demand gen and how do we look at it, and we just break that down. So if you just imagine your total addressable market, some people are in a buying cycle, some people are not in a buying cycle. So the majority are probably not looking for a specific solution or in that buying process, even though they could be of course very interested in what you have to offer and the value that your solution will bring. Some people are so this is where you break down the difference between demand creation and demand capture. So demand creation being more of a longer term play, reaching the say, 95% of your total addressable market who are not in a buying cycle, figuring out how to reach them, what message and start building up that future pipeline, creating the demand so that then when people are in a buying cycle, you're there to capture that demand. And this is where you come on to the second part of the equation, the demand capture piece. So more middle and bottom of funnel marketing activities reaching the say, 5% of the total addressable market who were in a buying cycle, communicating your value, Product Marketing, positioning, a lot of middle and bottom of funnel plays through search or paid, and just having the to work together. And so that's sort of how we think about demand gen at Supermetrics. And speak about it in our team. And how we actually break it down and structure the team is that our demand team is built around our primary ICP, so ideal customer profiles. So there's several ways you can kind of structure a demand team and we've had many discussions in the last few months about how we should do it. For example, you could do it by region or geography. You could do it by by channel tactic. You could do it by funnel, but for us, we felt it made most sense to focus on the customer. I think marketing starts and ends with the customer. So building up demand teams for our primary customer segments. So we have obviously identified those An example being marketing agencies a highly important customer segment for us. So taking that audience and going out into the market, generating demand within that space, both from a demand creation and demand capture perspective, doing customer research, understanding our customers, figuring out the buying journey, who's involved, what does that process look like break down the funnel, look at messaging at each stage of the funnel, and then align with different activities, and then sort of execute, measure, optimize, and then tie back sales pipe into marketing activities. And that's the sort of direction we're moving in as we're getting demand gen up and running, since we've only made this shift about six months ago. So that's a bit about how I view demand gen, and how we look at demand gen at Supermetrics. And how we're kind of breaking it down and structuring it. And
Adam Holmgren:what kind of kind of roles do you include in in like such a team? How many people are you? And what are the like more specific roles?
Edward Ford:Yeah, so there are five people in demand gen team at the moment. And I think a good way to kind of start off here is to look at what is not demand gen. So demand gen is not purely performance marketing, it's super metrics or running paid campaigns. And what we basically do is look at, what kind of playbook do we need for those segments, we need to understand who's involved who we're trying to reach how people buy, and then figure out the playbook. And so we have a lot of generalists in that sense. Even though we have people who are maybe more specialized in certain channels, or could be having a skill set leading more towards the the numbers and analytics piece or others who are more on the creative and copy side. And really, it's up to us to kind of figure out how we develop those playbooks and what kind of initiatives we run, but then we also lean and work very closely with other teams within the marketing department. So demand gen sits, I would say, between the brand marketing team and the product marketing team, so our brand team is looking at the bigger why behind Supermetrics. Looking at messaging and understanding how that one global market responds to the space we're in. Whereas in demand, we're taking them more of a segment specific focus, and then breaking that down into what does this mean for ICP one, ICP two, ICP three, etc. And then product marketing kind of going the other way, taking messaging and positioning and aligning product with those different segments in the and personas, since we know that certain products align with with different people involved. And then we work very closely with our performance marketing team. So one thing that's quite interesting about Supermetrics is that we do we have a separate performance marketing team, which doesn't actually sit within demand gen. And that is perhaps where we differ than than many other demand functions. But obviously, our performance marketing team work full funnel, they work with the brand marketing team on brand campaigns, they work with us in demand on full funnel segments, specific campaigns, they work with product marketing on middle and bottom of funnel campaigns and with other other teams as well. So that's a bit about what we do and what we focus on and how we work with other teams within the marketing department.
Adam Holmgren:Yeah, that's very interesting, because I feel like one of the biggest misconception about demand gen is that it is performance marketing. And it's it's funny that you mentioned it also that it's, they might not even sit with you. But they of course, execute on certain demand activities, which I feel is yeah, it's completely right. But if we, you told you said that it was around six months ago or so that you you made such a shift, if we call it that, it would be interesting, because I, I know, we have a lot of listeners and a lot of people that work at companies, but have a hard time, you know, moving away from maybe a very measurable marketing strategy, Legion, if we call it that. Having a hard time to prove that demand strategy might work better. How would you what was your approach to, you know, shifting your marketing function in that sense? And how did you, you know, get the management on board if you said because that's always a big part of it. I feel like
Edward Ford:Yeah, so do you mean the transition from say, a sort of lead approach to a revenue approach? Yeah, yeah. So I think for us this wasn't actually a challenge, because we've always been focused on revenue. And what's interesting about Supermetrics is that we got to 5 million in annual recurring revenue without a sales team, or a single sales person. So revenue up until that point had been purely inbound. And then marketing and product driven. And so that gives us a bit of an advantage on that discussion, because we've already been able to grow the business to a certain size, purely through through marketing and product, and, and so forth. So what happened, then, is that we layered a sales team on top of that, to basically help scale and increase speed. And as we saw increased demand for Supermetrics. And larger companies interested in what we had to offer, we need to be able to support those cases, because not everyone can just show up at your website and fire in their credit card details. And then they're good to go. It's a lot more complex than that, particularly in bigger b2b buying cycles. And there was just a big opportunity there to better serve customers and to grow the business. And when I joined, we really just started the the foundations of the sales team. So there were three people in the sales team, the first sales hire had been made about six months before I joined. And so actually, there were more people in marketing and sales at that point. And sales assistant revenue was probably around 5% at that point. And obviously, that's been something we've been growing over the years. And making that shift from a purely self serve motion to then layering on a sales assisted piece has been been super interesting and figuring out how we better work together. And so the shift in that sense wasn't triggered from from that need, it was more that we had grown to a pretty big size. And as I said, we we kind of knew that to get from where we are now to where we want to go in the future, it's going to require a new mindset, coming back to the first point, and understanding, okay, we just have a lot of blind spots, we don't necessarily know how we should operate when we're, like 50 to 100 million arr. And what kind of building blocks do we need in place. So a lot of us had helped scale and kind of get things off the ground. And the the kind of scrappy startup mindset isn't gonna work. And this, the playbook you have in the early days isn't gonna work because of course, channels decline and kind of plateau at some point. And having someone who's seen it and understands what we that now need to do to get to the next phase is where that trigger came into to find a senior and experienced CMO. And then as part of that it was then about, okay, how do we want to structure the team? What kind of teams do we need in the marketing department. And so that was probably the biggest trigger for that shift. So we were lucky in that sense that we haven't had to battle to have this shift from from lead gen to, to revenue focus. But that being said, it's always challenging to to connect the dots and tie things back. And because you need to align so many teams, it's not just marketing, but its products, its support, its sales, CX, everyone's involved, as well. But I think it's it's Yeah, very much about the company and the culture. And I said earlier, that revenue is the first thing we look at in our monthly all hands meetings. And that kind of sets the tone for everyone to follow, since it's all about revenue at the end of the day.
Adam Holmgren:And it's a very cool journey. I think, you know, most companies probably go from more of a sales lead motion at the start into maybe more of a marketing lead eventually, buddy, and then maybe a product lead in the end, but you kind of shifted that and started from product lead and then added on to on to that.
Edward Ford:Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. And I would agree with that, I think from discussions I've had, and having spoken with many other SAS marketers that most would start sales, assisted or sales driven first, and then think, How can we layer on the self serve, and so forth? So yeah, we did it the other way?
Adam Holmgren:Yeah. It's really cool. And in terms of you said that you the first thing you look at usually our revenue at your all hands meeting, are there some others like metrics that are very important to you and to your team that you look at daily, weekly, maybe to get the guidance?
Edward Ford:Yeah, so we kind of look at what's happening. Further up the funnel to kind of understand this is probably what's going to be happening later on. So where in particular looking at trials on the Self Serve flow. So as I said, we have the self serve and sales assisted flow. So trials is one really important KPI to look at on on a daily basis. And then we look at it on a weekly basis, we have a weekly business review. And then we also have a monthly check in looking at numbers and relate those to marketing goals. And then from there, we also look at product qualified leads. So a trial can also be a misleading metric, in that, I could ask my mom or friends to just sign up for a trial to boost that number. So you need to ensure people are getting value from from the product and that you're reaching the right people. So product qualified lead adds a layer of quality to ensure that people are then not just starting a trial but also getting value from Supermetrics by completing certain actions, which would then trigger us PQ, L status. And then we have a few other points down the the self serve flow and the product team are heavily involved with a lot of experimentation in that funnel, and then on the sales assistant side, dare I say, the dreaded MQL that I know a lot of people are allergic to or there's a lot of discussion around this as a marketing metric, I don't think that there's an issue with it so long as you define it correctly. So it's not someone who's downloaded an ebook, or signed up to a webinar or subscribe to our email list. And then we just push them through a buying cycle. But it's someone who has directly reached out to sales with an inquiry to book a meeting, it's someone who has reached out and scheduled a demo of Supermetrics. Well then can also move from the self serve flow into sales assisted, depending on certain activities, or if people are trialing features or connectors from some of our premium tiers, which wouldn't be available through self serve. Or then if people directly reach out during the trial process to get a demo or understand more about what they can do with super metrics, or if they have questions about pricing and want to speak with someone. So those are the things we kind of look at as leading indicators. And then they kind of complement the the lagging revenue number, which kind of tells you what has happened in the past.
Adam Holmgren:So are our like gated content, something you do, or you simply on gating everything that you you have and spreading it to the to your audience.
Edward Ford:Yeah, so we have past $50 million in annual recurring revenue. And I've never created a gated PDF ebook. So if we speak about gated content as being something you just put behind a form in PDF format, then no, we haven't done anything there and haven't seen a need to get a nurture or found proof that that's works, or that's how people buy. So we very much taken the approach to just align with how our customers buy, how they search for information. So a lot of our focus has just been on understanding customers answering pain points, adding value, showcasing what you can do with Supermetrics, which is also why we have a free trial versus freemium in that when you start a free trial, you can experience the full Supermetrics, you can understand what it can do, rather than just seeing a sort of 5% version of of Supermetrics. I content strategy has always been searched first. So focusing on high intent, keywords, and really just focusing on showing people what they can do with the product. And so in that sense, we haven't really felt a need to get content in that sense for the sake of it, I think it always comes back to why why do you want to do that? And it depends how you define gated content. For example, if you have a webinar, where you ask people to submit their email address, is that in itself a form of gated content, but obviously there are some practical implications, because you also want to be able to send the link to people to then actually access that. Yeah. And then I know there are companies who might set up a one day or two day online Summit, where again, you would need to sign up and access that content. So is that a form of gated content, as opposed to just publishing all the videos on YouTube? So I think that con gated content exists, I think it's just not necessarily in the format people are traditionally thinking of when they hear the term gated content. So I think there's also value in having things behind a form and having people sign up but I think the barrier for entry is and the quality is just you have to be so much higher than, say 10 years ago when essentially what Could have been a simple 500 word blog post was just stuck together in PDF format. And then people would sign up and then anyone who signed up was pushed to sales and then be put into a buying cycle. So, yeah, I think we will definitely move away from that, hopefully. But yeah, so yes, I know there is some form of gated content, but not in the traditional sense.
Adam Holmgren:No, and I think that's always a fun discussion to have. I know, when I work with more complex, you know, CRM deals that can range up to sometimes, you know, 300,000, Euro deals. We used to, we used to have certain gated pieces. And at some point, of course, you are going to get some of these big deals getting attributed to one of these sources, and then it will be forever impossible to to get rid of those gated things, since people believe they were the ones that that made it happen, basically. But yeah, it's a funny one. And when we were just starting out 2022 years, close to q4, obviously, it would be fun to hear like, what are some maybe new things you are keen to try out now in 2022? Maybe new channels you haven't tried out before that you think are interesting him? Yeah.
Edward Ford:Yeah, I think this is going to be an interesting year for us, as we kind of, I really see it as the next chapter of our growth. And that's interesting. For me, as someone who's been super metrics for three years that I kind of feel like it's day three, not year three, because it's just a completely new start fresh slate, obviously, with Gabby, our CMO, working on new structures, adding a lot of new people. So we're going to grow the marketing team a lot this year. So I think a big focus for us is going to be a lot of like internal alignment and looking at processes and figuring out how we work as a team and managing internal stakeholders, which is a lot of the stuff that people don't necessarily find super sexy or glitzy. But for my experience, absolutely critical you get this in place. Because that really makes or breaks your ability to scale in a sustainable way. So that'll be one thing. And I think there's probably a lot of other things that are more foundational, more strategic, before we go into a sort of tactics and channels piece. So kind of coming back to the brand. And looking at is this where we want to go. And what was really, really interesting in the second half of last year, is that we ran a full funnel brand test. So when people speak about brand, and can you measure brand? And how do you quantify the impact of brand? We basically did that in a very, very cool experiment, because we felt that the current super metrics is something we want to go back to our customer base and see, does this really resonate? Is this where we want to go? does it align with our direction, because we have two kinds of audiences in that we have a lot of marketers and a lot of small companies who use Supermetrics and the current Supermetrics. If you go and look at it, it's kind of light, it's fine. It's pastel colors, it's animation, it's very SAS in that respect. And then also trying to reach bigger organizations and being in the data and analytics, space, trust, security, compliance are big factors. And people maybe didn't realize that we're as big as we are, because we weren't necessarily portraying it that way. So what we did, we wanted to test this. So we built very rapidly, two very different brands of Supermetrics. One was emerging. So super startup, he trendy fun colors, animations, graphics, and so forth. And then the other was very established, very mature, very rational, very simple. So two very, very different identities. For Supermetrics, we ran a full funnel brand test, we came up with a landing page, we ran, we built top of funnel ads on like video display, across different channels, we did middle and bottom of funnel, we ran nine tests and looked at the results and kind of got a clear read. So now we're kind of working on on rolling that out. And that'll be exciting to see come to life in 2022. So that's going to be like a really foundational piece that shapes a lot of what we do in marketing, and then obviously just aligning with with our company strategy and looking at where we see growth. And so from there, I think we will understand what kind of channels and tactics do we want to play around with but I think one area where we will be experiencing more is on paid social and particularly going more top of funnel with some of our creative campaigns and again, going back to the demand journey equals demand, creation, verse plus demand capture. So looking at the demand creation piece a little more critically and understanding what we can do there, verse, and then also looking at what's really worked well for us in the past and continuing there. So that's going to be good. And then I think also looking at key segments, focusing in on specific GIOS, we're at a place now where Supermetrics is ready to do that our sales team is actually structured and organized by geography. So marketing will be aligning that as best we can. So it's gonna be a fun year, there's gonna be a lot of things happening from foundational process and operations to strategy to brand to channels and tactics. So it's, it's going to be a good one, that's for sure.
Adam Holmgren:It's a super fun, brand test you have done for sure. And pretty unusual, I have to say, to even take that to believe it will be fun to see if Supermetrics develops into maybe the more traditional route, or if you become even more playful, then.
Edward Ford:Yeah, it's hard to see. And of course, I think it's a very Supermetrics thing of us to do to basically have this discussion on brand. And then we're like, well, let's just test it, let's let's run an experiment. And it was fine, because it was the summer vacation period, which in in Europe, and particularly in the Nordics, we like to have a long break in July, I think when you've gone through the Nordic winter, you understand why people just spend July in the countryside in their cabins. But we actually built not one but two brands. In the short space of time, we built out all these ads, ran the test, and kind of had a read on the results come the beginning of the autumn. So it was was super fun. But we'll see and also proof that you can measure brand. And obviously I'm using super metrics to to help quantify that. So yeah, that'll be a fun one for everyone to look out for. And
Adam Holmgren:also a great, great one. You know, you can you can do so many things. You don't have to be like 100 people in your marketing team. You can get all of that done by focusing on certain things. And doing maybe more. Yeah, quick rather than perfect. And learning from it, I guess.
Edward Ford:Yeah, exactly. So that's a definite mantra we have in our team that Dan is better than perfect. And we just did this ourselves with with the marketing and our incredible design team, who, who were just amazing at getting everything put together and took our terrible briefs in, understood what we're trying to say and made them look exactly like we we wanted. And it was also interesting to kind of put ego aside because you can often do what you want to do. And so to really push hard in both directions was, I think tough for everyone. But it was it was super interesting. And now we're rolling that out gradually NGOs and getting initial reads in different markets, both English and non native English markets. And and we'll see. So depending where you're located, maybe some people listening have had a sneak peek at some of our beta
Adam Holmgren:tests. Awesome. We will look out for it in 2022, for sure. And I wanted to end this episode, it has been great to have you at work with with one final question. And that is from your you have been talking to all of these b2b market, obviously, during the last year's, but what are one company or maybe person in Europe that you think are kind of at the forefront of either demand yen or revenue marketing, someone that we can check out and maybe learn from?
Edward Ford:Yeah, so I think I'm going to mention a company that I've always admired for a long, long time, even before I was aware of the concept of demand gen. And it's actually the first ever company I interviewed on the growth of podcast back in 2017. And that's type form. And I was chatting with a member of their growth team and looking at how they approach growth, marketing and experimentation and how they were tying everything they did back to revenue and key business metrics. And it was interesting, because when you look at Typeform as a brand, it's super playful, and it's a great brand. And they do some fantastic brand marketing. So then to get the insight on some of the other things they're doing as well, they have a really good combination of kind of growth driven marketing and revenue, focus marketing with a fantastic brand and also a great product. Obviously, it's essentially turning forms on the Internet into something dreamy and great to experience. And so it's it's a great company and obviously, being the first company I interviewed for the growth of podcast. I think they always have a special place for me. So yeah, I would go with Typeform
Adam Holmgren:Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you, Edward. This was awesome. Thank you so much for joining the demand generation movement.
Edward Ford:Absolutely. My pleasure was great fun to chat with you today. Adam.
Adam Holmgren:Thank you. See you later.
Outro:Thanks. for listening to this episode of the demand generation movement, the podcast where you can learn everything about demand gen and how to make the shift towards revenue. Are you ready to step into the future and join the movement? Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. This is your host, Adam Holmgren, signing off