In this episode of the FINITE B2B marketing in technology podcast, we sit down with Kartik Krishnan.
Kartik is an experienced B2B marketer, and currently leads B2B growth marketing at the Founders Factory incubator, working as an advisor to lots of interesting B2B technology companies.
CRM is a challenge for nearly all marketers and businesses of every size, and Kartik has developed a great framework for breaking down CRM to make it as straightforward as possible that you can read more about by clicking here.
Our host Alex Price sits down with Kartik to hear about his work and the CRM framework he has developed for leveraging CRM.
For more information on the FINITE B2B Marketing in Tech community, visit finite.community.
In this episode of the FINITE B2B marketing in technology podcast, we sit down with Kartik Krishnan.
Kartik is an experienced B2B marketer, and currently leads B2B growth marketing at the Founders Factory incubator, working as an advisor to lots of interesting B2B technology companies.
CRM is a challenge for nearly all marketers and businesses of every size, and Kartik has developed a great framework for breaking down CRM to make it as straightforward as possible that you can read more about by clicking here.
Our host Alex Price sits down with Kartik to hear about his work and the CRM framework he has developed for leveraging CRM.
For more information on the FINITE B2B Marketing in Tech community, visit finite.community.
Hello and welcome to the finite podcast. So today I'm sitting down with Cartek Christian and concept. I met originally at one of our finite events here in London that we were hosting. Uh, I think actually our first final event. Um, he's just one of those people that when you sit down with someone and you have a conversation and you just feel like you're both on the same page and singing from the same chemistry, I just thought this guy is doing that needs to get him on the financial cost. Concepts really interesting starts his career at Google working people. They're commanding some really big accounts that have led demand generation on FITO poncho, a range of other technology businesses, and mal is the growth theater founders factory, which was started by Brent Hoberman Henry Lane Fox and offensively helps lots of really interesting businesses, scanners and incubator concept really overseas and solely responsible focusing with the B2B side of things at founder's factory. And we had a chat a little while ago about how important CRM is and how context developed this really fascinating framework for leveraging CRM without getting completely bogged down overwhelmed over-complicating things. So, yeah, I really looking forward to single contact caring about what he's been up to his story, but then also digging into CRM for B2B tech companies. So yeah,
Speaker 2:Enjoy the finite community and podcast a kindly supported by nine, three X, the digital agency working exclusively with ambitious fast growth B2B technology companies visit ninety-three x.agency to find out about how they partner with marketing team and B2B technology companies to drive digital growth.
Speaker 3:Hi, thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Looking forward to talking with you, we're going to be talking a lot about CRM today and this great framework you've been developing for leveraging CRM, but before we dive into the detail stuff, I want to start just with a bit of background about yourself and how you ended up getting into marketing and kind of why you stopped off along the way. So I'll let you start wherever you think is most relevant. Sure. As I think I was telling you offline, it's a fairly serendipitous story. In some ways I was doing, I did chemistry and molecular physics and then a one-year mathematical finance degree on the back of that. And I was thinking box tech. Yeah. However, not at all in the marketing line of things, this is a Nottingham university and, but this was also in 2008, 2009, when the Lehman brothers went down and therefore there was very few finance jobs, if any. And so job hunting was difficult. I was just traveling in India, ended up randomly going to the Google offices, seeing it's a wonderful place. Kind of like just applying to kind of get interview practice almost because I enjoyed the interview process. Is that all right? I got the job, which office, which we're sitting Hyderabad in the Southern part of India. So I went there
Speaker 4:To work on what was, I mean, me like a completely new product, new concept. Ad-words okay. But I guess that was the foundations in digital marketing. That's where I got my digital marketing now and it was fun. Um, you know, Google's a great place to work and AdWords is obviously we all know how important a tool it is. And this was the early days, 2010, where, I mean, it had been established to some extent, but I think it was going much more mass market. Like people were shifting budgets away from other offline channels to, Oh, we should be using ad-words. And I was part of that journey of educating them on how to use it from SMEs to enterprises. Okay. Three and a half years into that. I just thought there's more, I want to do more broad things. So I did my GMAT got into doing an MBA at Cambridge, did my MBA and kind of like figured that actually startups as the place for me, just being able to bring like a broad range of skills and not just do day-to-day marketing bits, but actually see the bigger picture and, you know, work with co-founders and things. Yeah. And that's where I finally ended up working with on FITO was significantly on fetal at that time had only 15 people. I was employee number 16 and, uh, was, it was in the space of background checking. And if you looked at that all logos and stuff look fairly boring. I think, I don't think I'm the co-founders of mind me saying that are very corporate focused and things like that. But as their scale, they've gone to having a very cool startup vibe. They also turn from just doing background checks to ID verification, which has been used by like Uber Deliveroo and all these other new age on demand companies. So that was all really fun. But what that meant for me was going from being this ad-words and Facebook and paid social kind of lead generation inbound lead generation guy to really more understanding the source of the leads and understand the quality of the leads and also doing some outbound work. So I had a outbound team at, on sales team, not your typical, uh, job description of a marketer, but great learning experience. Again, I got to see exactly what makes a business take, what drives that revenue at the end of the day. And so that was really bad.
Speaker 3:Interesting. So you quite quickly went from specialists in one kind of channel in terms of paid acquisition to a much broader set of responsibilities. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I guess I'd always shown like, well, you mentioned it some analytical capabilities. So when, when, you know, when I was driving leads in the question was always, well, that was a tiny mom and pop shop. What's the point where we're going to get two checks out of them. That's not going to move the needle in terms of the revenue we need. And so I was incentivized to kind of move us towards getting bigger leads that would be more meaningful. And I figured that the only way we could almost be able to do that meaningfully is by having a good CRM to understand what the source of different leads and then what those leads end up doing with us.
Speaker 3:Interesting. And what was the, I mean, we're going to dive into Sierra, I'm a lot more detail. What was the, you know, how big was on feeder when you first started? What was the Aaron Thomas CRM where you really building from the ground up? And there was very little, yeah, there was very little,
Speaker 4:They were using a thing called candy, which is more of an IP address tracking tool, which had some kind of list building functionality. Um, I did quite a bit of extensive research at that point to kind of see, and I I'm, I think I'm glad that I was able to quickly understand that there is a CRM piece and there's a marketing automation piece and we'll come into this later, but that's, I think I'm glad that I had that distinction in my head because oftentimes when you try and do both with one thing, you have the neither. So for the CRM piece, I knew I was optimistic, able to scale to being a very big company. And we wanted to have, you know, the most robust platform that's used by as many as possible Salesforce. So that began our relationship with Salesforce on that side, on the marketing automation side, I again, wanted to be able to do email nurturing and be able to understand source of leads. Yeah. But, uh, I wasn't sure that this was going to be the perfect fit for us. So we use the thing called Act-On, which was one of the few ones that would give us a month to month contract. Okay. And six, eight months of that was, well, first we went through yeah. Email nurturing is helping us to, we can do a little bit more with this and all we've leech reached our limits of using Act-On without doing a heavier, bigger integration. What do we want to reconsider? And that's when we adopted HubSpot back in 2015. Yep. So again, quite a while ago, and I've seen HubSpot evolve from being kind of more, just pretty much just on the marketing automation side for inbound marketing to now of course they've enabled CRM. It was the whole service hub and things like that. So yeah, that's been my journey with HubSpot.
Speaker 3:Cool. So take us through to the here and now where your working at founders factoring, tell us a bit about the role, basically what fan's factory is and, and what you do with businesses that are incubators or accelerated at farmers factory.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I've been working here since Jan 2018. Okay. I found this factory and it's actually is an accelerator incubator for startups backed by eight big corporates as of now, but super to expand further, that includes the likes of Veeva, easy debt guardian. I'm an S most recently. And essentially we're trying to scale some startups that are in those companies sectors. So retail, finance travel, and at the same time also build new companies from scratch. So almost the idea is how can these companies innovate? What can they learn from us? What can we help them do that will help them be innovative and not be disrupted in that spaces.
Speaker 3:And your dad's day is focused on the B2B side of things and then really advising businesses and farms factual on the growth side of things.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we have a team of five, four senior growth marketers and a brand marketer. And I'm one of the growth marketers who does, I'm more focused on the B2B side as you rightly guessed. Yeah. So what that looks like is on a day-to-day basis. So on the one hand we are helping. So when I say accelerating some companies, those startups, which have like two to 10, 15 people typically, and have probably found some product market fit and looking to scale those operations. So then it's putting in more campaigns giving them the plumbing and the infrastructure, typically a lot of CRM also to help them scale that. Then on the other hand, there's also these incubator companies where it's almost like this is what the initial concept is like, this is where we have somewhat funds on validation, but how can we improve this even further? How can we better product market fit, understanding how can we do some competitor analysis? What can we do to find our own niche and how do we then take that to the market? So go to market strategies, all of those pieces.
Speaker 3:Cool. So very diverse. And I guess you've just got to see so many businesses from the inside and watch them scale in different ways.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the best parts of the job in terms of, well, that cliche of no two days are the same, but specifically, I mean, I get to see different types of businesses, different business models, different types of co-founders as well. So that's also an entertaining piece of like, you know, very junior younger marketers doing this, Oh, sorry, founders, rather than doing this for the first time versus some seasons, you know, multiple, uh, they started multiple companies in the past. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So when we first chatted about recording this podcast a few weeks ago, just before you had sent me piece of your brand on LinkedIn, which was crate cool. And me got the title, correct framework for leveraging CRM without getting intimidated by the possibilities. Um, I think the word intimidated is pretty apt. I know that for us, whenever we were working with CRM with clients, it's one of those things that often times people just don't know where to start. And it's the biggest thing that keeps them up at night across the whole of their organization, and really feels like the blockers are getting marketing right. And it's such an integral piece of the puzzle. So we'll dig into business, more data, but I think you've, you've managed to create something which actually makes it pretty easy to figure out what the route forwards is with CRM. Tell me a bit about how you kind of came about creating this as a framework and why you're inspired to kind of package it up and try and distill it down so effectively.
Speaker 4:So at Johnson, as I told you guys, my journey with on FITO understanding what CRM could do, what it would take to get there and understanding what the marketing automation side of that looks like. And then now having access to like all sides of the startups. And I can see that challenge as well. When companies get invested in they're often asked, what is your, what is your tech cost cost of acquisition, but in a B2B context, that is a hard thing to say, because you could spend only 10 or 15 pounds getting some kind of leads per lead, but you, you might be needing to spend a hundred, 200, 300 pounds to get the kind of leads that you really need that are going to be the, you know, deals and elephants and whales. Yeah. So it's, it's hard. And it's often also the other thing you have to move away from is a single touch attribution, right? There's almost no B2B sale that can ever happen. That is based on one ad where that it's always going to take multiple touches. In fact, my, my theory on this is that it's not even, it's not just true in B2B. It's almost true in B to C if you really get granular with it. Right? So with all of that, you need, the backing needs to be, you know, this lead came from here. These are the other things that have happened to the lead since then. And now they're at this advanced stage and that's what we'll call a success for the marketing side of things. Indeed, if you won't even take it further, this is in a B2B context. But if you wanna take it further then, like this is where the lead came from. This is what we, all we did to push it through the opportunity stage. This is all that it took to get it to sales. And now it's a revenue generating client in the first year of January, raise this much money. Now let's understand the attribution that we've had. And now let's therefore say that these channels are working well now definitely let's repeat on those. But in the meantime, we might have to be experimenting on all kinds of other channels as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So for you, it's really getting the business and the perspective where in those all works and what doesn't, and it's kind of the, that's the key to CRM, Vienna, I guess you working at farmer's spectrum, particularly so many businesses of different sizes and scales at different stages in their journey that that carries different value at different stages.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. And that's what, you know, seeing companies that are trying to do SME sells to doing enterprise sales. I can tell that across the board, this is important across the board. You need to know that your top of the funnel is being filled up and that, you know, you have a good process for how to handle leads in the middle of the funnel. And then the other piece on CRM is this often forgotten category of we engage with them either we spoke to them and then they dropped away, or they just go on cold for one reason or the other whenever through the process, what can you do with them? Well, you know, too often, they are just disregarded, you know, there's too much of, let's get a hundred new leads every month and stuff like that. Well, you've got some people who you've spoken to the boss who are engaged, who know what you're about, the timing wasn't right there for one reason or the other, you need to be finding a way to keep them warm and go back to them. And the only way to do that is by having a clean well-thought-through database where it is a single source of truth for your sales and marketing teams, such that they're able to understand who is in what bucket and those buckets need to be. Well-defined
Speaker 3:Maybe we should jump to that. Now I know it's towards the end, but I think it's one of the most interesting things. And I actually had our last final event last week, the whole sales and marketing alignment thing just kept coming up. And I think there's so much demand for that. There's one of our next topics, but interestingly, I won't feed. It sounds like you had outbound salespeople in your team, as well as inbound marketers. What's your perspective on, on how I guess an effective CRM implementation can really help bridge that gap between marketing and sales teams and then get them working more effectively together.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah. I've had reasonable success with this sitting down with sales and marketing teams and trying to clearly define what is the lead? What are the Salesforce, a Montessori first or the marketing qualified lead? What's a sales qualified lead. And when does it become an opportunity such that we hand over the beta? And that is a very powerful colonization. That is the kind of validation which, you know, you found a certain thing about this when business leaders sit and think about this, they have a very clear picture of we're going to get 50 leads in this stage. And then we're going to try and convert that many. Yeah, no, let's break it down further. And then also as you sit and you have these different buckets, and as you understand who's going in, what bucket, the combinations that, that generates no, those people cannot be sales-qualified because these are these criteria. I, it tells you a lot about your product market. It tells you who you're really trying to sell to. And like when sales are saying, no, we can't sell to those guys. Marketing gets a lot about, okay, this is the kind of customer that we're actually going to it. And that's, I think that helps a lot with redefining shaping those personas, the target audience, quite, quite well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mike, Greg, I'll give you, I know whenever we start a new website project or marketing project, we have a sales questionnaire that we send to this house to him. And obviously all of our projects are led by marketing, but the amount of insights we get from sales teams is just phenomenal. And it really feeds back into the content strategy. It tells marketing where they need to be, and then what kind of content they need to be producing, what questions they need to be answering. Yeah, I've definitely seen the power of the two being closely aligned, but what happens when you come up against maybe a more traditional organization where sales might be slightly more old school and sales might think that sales office first and marketing is kind of on the sidelines or actually we don't even need marketing. We're happy to setting up.
Speaker 4:Firstly, I guess I would, to be honest and say that I've been fairly lucky in working with what you call new age companies, but there's less of that rigidity. But even when that does come up, I mean, I've always felt like prove the value of use cases and show early wins. So in that sense, it's always a good kind of conversation around, look, you have these sales targets, I'm only going to be here to enable you to hit those targets. What kind of leads do you really want? And then literally again, having that close foundation around, it might just be that one particular lead. We handed it over. We were pretty excited about having done this work. You know, we patted ourselves on the back for getting this lead in all our paid marketing was considered a success that week because we got 10 of these leads in and one of them has been handed over to you. Why didn't it progress? And that back and forth with hopefully only yield, okay. That's the reason to in progress. But if you gave me slightly different types of leads, I would be able to be successful. And that I think bridges that gap quite well. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Interesting. So coming back to the framework and the posts that you've done, and I'll make sure that there's a link to this in the notes around the podcast, but, um, you effectively kind of are segmenting how people should implement CRM based on number of contact records, really as kind of the lens through which to look at, how to approach CRM. Tell me a bit more about that kind of approach,
Speaker 4:Right? So there's two elements to this. I think one is, if you think, firstly, if you think about how the, how a lot of the successful companies in the CRM space are pricing that on the packages it's on per contact basis. So that it's all get me through. And I think your B2B SAS stuff, like what is a sensible way to bucket these things, as I've been saying a lot about bucketing things, but you know, if you want to start grouping things, do it in the way that the, the successful companies are doing it. They're basing on context because look, they're, the context means more leads means more chances for you to scale and grow if the leads are good. So that's why on a contact level basis. The other reason, I guess there's also sits well for me is that well, so again, I've been exposed to all these small companies, but they all come with notions that are like, we've heard that with CRM, we'll know exactly who's done what on the website and we'll know exactly who has engaged with us when, and we can start firing off these amazing personalized campaigns or the other piece that we've mentioned a few times, the attribution side of things we want to know who came from where, and we should have this full, clear picture. Well, definitely it's one of these instances of garbage in garbage out. You've dumped a whole lot of contacts. You don't know why you actually put them into your CRM. You certainly don't know much about what's happened, but then the journey since then, you've got a few data points about the visit your website, but that's quite meaningless really. And you certainly don't know clear picture of what were the different touch points that you won't attribute back to it. So with all of those things in mind, I thought I'll break it down, but contacts and start to define what you, and, and again at the early days don't want the full, you know, you don't need a Ferrari to be driving along on one of London's roads, really? Sorry, sorry for all the super rich, but then yeah, you probably want a Prius and you scale up when you're starting to access the better roads you're trying to get onto the motorways. So when you have thousands of contacts and you have to do really scaled marketing campaigns, you need all the bells and whistles. You need to have proper automation firing, but only at that stage in the early days, it's almost beneficial to really think about doing things in a slightly more manual way, because then you really had to see, I find out that email, what was the impact of it? Learn those lessons in that early stages. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So you really, you started by segmenting on maybe a hundred to 500 contact records, then 502,000, and then really it's in the 2000 plus or be that, that you're, you're talking about introducing more complex workflows and automation and segmenting more personalized journeys. I guess what's been your experience of implementing those much more automate automated workflows. And when have you started to see them be most effective.
Speaker 4:So definitely you need that scale. You need to be sending to a few hundreds, if not thousands through a float before you can see the impact of the workflow. So before that, you'd rather be sending them out, one-to-one trying to personalize as much as possible and not building the sophisticated machine for it and rather doing it. And seeing what words, what is resonating trying to, you know, optimize your emails in that stage, all your touch points calls and all those kind of pieces. But as you start to scale, you want, you just don't have the time to sit and engage with hundreds of people separately. So you kind of have to rely on some level of automation, but yeah, as I say, you pushed through hundreds, several hundreds of contacts. You start to get a flavor of, this is what the conversion percentage for this is. So this is, you know, HubSpot has it well where you set a goal for each workflow, right? Or in any of these automation software, you're encouraged to keep looking at the results of what is your, what your workflow is degenerating. So then you slowly get a sense of when I have these three touch points overall, it produces this. What if I tweak two of the touch points, the ones that have the higher open rates, and then you start to optimize that and you can start to get to a point where without having to do too much, you haven't sent out a hundred emails. You've just hit a few buttons, but you're starting to be able to tweak and improve your message, improve your machine. So that over three to four month time span, it's not going to happen overnight. You are starting to build out what can be quite a sophisticated machine. That's doing this while you sleep as well.
Speaker 3:The benefit. Yeah, that's the dream. That's the dream
Speaker 4:Automate ourselves all out of a job. So I go sit on the, the hummus.
Speaker 3:So what about, I guess I know that for us, his name and see that the landscape of tools and technology that exists out there is enormous. And we will, we will know that we've got the name of the big graphic that the guy produces every year with the chef market deck, more like 7,000 different things on there. And then only a few years ago there was like 10 or something.
Speaker 4:I actually refer to these numbers in a slide that I did recently. It was 150 in 2011, it's 7,000 this year MarTech company. So you can imagine the crowded density of the landscape.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I mean, there's a whole nother debate to be had around are marketers becoming technologists. And what's the modern day role of a marketer. But in the short term, how do you begin to start working your way through all of these tools and technologies? And as you've already talked about, we've got sales, CRM has, we've got marketing automation and all of these products and are kind of trying to bring everything under one roof and overlap them. And I guess different tools, uh, come in at quite dramatically, different price points based on functionality. It might be appropriate different, you know, different stages of the journey, but are you better off just getting the superpowers, Salesforce Pardot set up from the offset, if you know that you're going to be hitting right. Levels of growth eventually anyway, versus autopilot, which is like a cheaper version of HubSpot, for example, where do you even begin?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I walked a few companies, so that journey here and, um, for one thing, by the way, we've refined our set because at the end of the day, you can keep digging. And as you said, there's always overlapping tools. There's the, in some companies use InterCall, which you wouldn't think of as CRM, but if you think like they aggregate all your leads in one place, you can, you can do a bit of lead data. You know, you can put in more information, you can do segmenting. So definitely it can start to act like a CRM, but I would say for like bit more offline data inputting for doing collaborative work, it's not great. Okay. Right. So what I'm going to say is, and by the way, touch upon this in my article, as best as I can. But, um, if you, I think call down the potential options, start to think of the, in you get a sense of like the top in a particular category. Then if you can try and understand where they came from. So, you know, we know that HubSpot binders of inbound marketing, if you think in my marketing is going to be the life and blood of your company, probably go with it from the early days. But if you don't think that that's gonna be such a big piece. So you've got a very enterprise deep tech kind of sale where the universe of companies is only about 300, 500. There's no point you're trying to ramp up to getting 10,000 leads a month, right? So, or even unreleased. So you're almost looking at a smaller, more simple CRM sales, CRM focused thing. So in our world, then as I say, I found a sector, we've got some discounts at play. So that also helps that that changes the dynamic a bit. So we pretty much are varying between kind of using pipe drive with a bit of MailChimp or something for the very enterprise companies where even in the long run there, unless they completely pivot their universe of potential leads is not in the thousands. If the universe of potential is, or if they've already got a significant marketing team and they have the ability to put a lot of content out there, eat, do start to do more inbound stuff. We talk about HubSpot and only in rare cases, when we think that there's a specialized use case, you've got some complex products and stuff which will not sit well within the HubSpot framework, which is pretty rigid in some ways, Salesforce with its unbelievable customizability, therefore quite intimidating. It can be handy to tread carefully and you'll probably spend quite a bit of money and time configuring it. So that for me is like three different buckets. Yeah. Please don't by any means, disregard any of the other options. Wondered if you have a discount from any of the other ones, go for it, but this is the way I look at it in my head. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Interesting. When you talk about discounts and something that came up at our last event on the panel was actually just getting inside these tools and playing with them or getting to use them. And often in the context of marketers having to sell their solutions back into founders or CEOs at CCP level, they're looking for budgetary, sign-off on using different tools and tech. And a lot of these platforms operate kind of freemium model, which is quite assessment and ask people then do you find that's a good way of just kind of building the business case and exploring the different,
Speaker 4:Well, it can be dangerous, right? That that's the whole point of freemium, right? You get, you get roped in and then India. And then next thing you know, you're paying a five pound a month bill, but no, and helps, or it can be dangerous like that, but really what I, what I'm trying to say with my, um, my article as well, is that only by certain features. So by the ones that allow you certain access, if you go back to my part about on FITO, I think I, I was good that we only bought act on, which was only going to give us a month to month thing. So that kind of kept us honest about, is really producing value. It's not like we signed up for a 12 month contract and we may as well have it on in mandate. If it's not producing any value, we will shut it down. Right. So that is one piece. And then the other thing is around, what are they about? What are they, where did they originate the origin story for them? And therefore what clientele have they, you know, got so far and the best case scenario is when you, so HubSpot does set you up with another company of a similar ilk and get you to speak to them. That can be quite powerful because you can really learn a lot about what you could potentially do. Similar companies are doing. So use that. And finally, I think there's another piece which is around. So we talked about freemium and stuff. So a lot of our B2B companies that we work with are SAS. And what do you want to be doing is, I mean, Saturn fused the dynamic space, you're always competing. So you want to be working with best in class in some ways to be learning from them. If you can take lessons about how to turn freemium customers into paid, activated customers from a marketing SAS company, then that's only going to be meaningful for you. So kind of like if they're doing well in their spaces, what can you learn those lessons for yourself? And also more broadly if they're servicing customers like you, then you can probably learn some other things at meet ups or by one-to-one interactions once in a while. And that's all the way you decide. I think so it sounds like you, do you agree? Do you disagree?
Speaker 3:I do agree. I think, yeah. I think it's, yeah. Everything you say makes sense. I think it's just gradually working where, and, and getting used to these tools and working your way up as the, is the key attribute because we mentioned it already. I guess the fascinating thing for me of attribution talking to clients often is that, and even today I had a, I had a pitch where the marketing manager literally said to me, we pick and choose the metrics that we show the C-suite because actually they don't really understand digital anyway. And so they're actually kind of fine with that. And we pick month a month or works for us, which is kind of staggering somewhat in itself. But I think it's not uncommon across pretty much the vast majority of businesses. So I think this is kind of a two-fold question around communicating attribution and I guess kind of KPIs and metrics more generally, but also managing expectations in timely, both above and below and to the sides. How do you approach that?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I completely sympathize with this person. I I've probably been there myself and the truth is, yeah, it's hard concept sometimes. So we all know paid marketing can get you all kind of leads. But then I think if they have more of those conversations around, Hey sales guys, we brought these leads in name them. What has happened with them that really like granular colonization can open up a lot of insights, right? So that's one piece that'll give you the connectivity with sales and probably sales is probably closer to the revenue. So you can build a better story from that, right? The other pieces that, you know, particularly in B2B marketing and to a large extent, even in B to C marketing, things are not instantaneous anymore. I mean, in B2B, it never was. You, you have a bit of consideration of anise and then only after a while of consideration, do they actually go ahead and buy? Right? So there's cohorting that you need to do your leads that you generate today are not going to turn into customers anytime soon. So if you're producing a report at the end of the month, there is a sense of like, we, we have generated these leads. What is the value of them? Well, not so much right now, but last month leads have produced more value. So this starts to pick on the more complex side of things. But again, salespeople, I think will be your partners in this. They will tell you that. I mean, you should have that honest conversation with them. We generated these leads and we can understand that you haven't been able to convert them into customers overnight or in the two weeks. Even some enterprise sales cycles are six months, 10 months, but at least when you have like established the conditions of running joke within you guys, like what's happened to that one particular lead that we're very keen on. That's a huge deal for all of us. Well, six months down the line, they'll say, Oh, that guy who brought in that lead or help bring that lead through all their campaigns, that's brewing valuable. And when that condition happens, I think you've just unlocked a bit more, you've proven your value and you've unlocked potentially more new budget.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Interesting. So I think it, yeah, I agree. It's communication isn't necessarily at the heart of this and being, being open and transparent
Speaker 4:And you feel like communication is not there, then at least a good CRM will help you do this, where you log that, that lead originally came from this source and three months on the line, whereas it's sitting well, it's halfway down the pipe as expected almost six months. It's still not happening yet because it's an enterprise sales is so many varying moving pieces here. It's just not happening. But then ones on the line, it does happen. You go right back to it and you say these, this is the touch points. Let's and I know it was painful. We want to reduce that 10 months down to eight months next time. But let's at least say that these channels, these very, these specific touch points are quite meaningful.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So one other thing that you covered in the, in the post, which I really liked, and I am a massive believer in is approaching things in campaigns, um, and kind of breaking things down. So that, that, that kind of like size. Tell me a bit more about why you think that's effective and the way forwards.
Speaker 4:I think that again, sorry, I've said this a few times, but relevant, definitely coming from a B2B mindset. But I, as I interact with companies here that are working in B2C, I think it's relevant in B2C as well. Is the notion that again, because journeys aren't instantaneous paid search does not directly lead to sale over like instantaneously. There are multiple touch points. The more you understand the different touch points, the better. And one of the ways to bring together the touch points is to team them. You still have campaigns is to have that notion that in this week we were majoring on these messages and those messages had to be distributed, not just with a piece of content that we just left, or we put on our block, we need to push out emails on the back of it. The workflows need to kind of be there to email our people. We need to be putting it on social media. We will, might even run an event around it. Those three, four things sit under one campaign. And when you, again, 10 months down the line, you, when you call it close that big, huge client, and you know, everyone's celebrating you say it was because of that event that we ran 10 months ago. That was part of the touch points. We also did a lot of emails in the interim. We've kept sending our newsletters all through the spirit and that's, what's kept them warm. So now obviously we continue doing all of those things. The campaign was that event let's give a lot of success. Uh, you know, let's give a lot of success back to that. Yeah. And that's also to the newsletter
Speaker 3:That had been ongoing and all those pieces. So these different campaigns have come together, but they're all branch under various campaign umbrellas. Yeah. I think you had it in the notes, stopped doing things for the sake of doing them, which I think is, is a real risk in any marketing, right? Like it's so easy to just go off and suddenly find yourself doing something that actually isn't delivering much of it. There were a ton of investment, I think today with so many channels and so many different mediums through which people can communicate as marketers. It's like, what, why did you start that sense of prioritization is so, so hard. But I think if you break it into campaigns, you can very quickly look back on what you've just done. Right. And reflect on whether it's worked. And if you have month by month, even week by week, you can, you can learn. Whereas if you've just got everything kind of ongoing side by side as separate channels and workflows, then at what point do you reflect on what's been successful? I mean, who's the marketer like in the fifties, I said, I know 50% of my marketing budget is doing something. The rest is not, but I don't know which 50%, well, I say it to you that now thanks to attribution tools, we can get closer to knowing which other 50% and indeed, you know, it's only spend on the 50% that is actually generating it. But at the same time, as you say, there's so many more channels, there's so many more touch points, attention spans are shrinking. So it's like we got some or we lose some, so attribution's better, but know that there's more channels and know that there's much more you have to do to engage the user, engage a potential customer. So you better be aware of splitting your budget, knowing that you have to try different channels. And campaigns is your one way to kind of be on top of that and kind of at least accumulate things under these teams, umbrellas of this is all to do with this kind of content, or this is all to do with this type of this week or months worth of pushing. Yep. Yep. I think that's a great way of approaching things. Cool. Well, I'm going to make sure that we've got a copy of this framework saved and linked to from the podcast, I think is a really, really awesome live. I think for anybody that's either at the very beginning as a business, but you know, even some of our clients are much more established, but still at the start of that CRM Johnny. And I think this is a super effective way of, of looking at things and making things bite sized. So it's, it's, it's interesting or ironic, but like you asked me to be on this podcast and I had just written this article almost completely separately. Yeah. It aligns. Well, I must've you giving up your time to chat through it. I'm sure everybody in the community is going to enjoy listening to it. So thank you.
Speaker 2:Cool. Thanks for listening. We're super busy at finite building the best community possible for marketers working in the B2B technology sector to connect, share, and learn. Along with our podcast. We host a series of events here in London. So make sure you had to find night's dot community to subscribe and keep up to date with upcoming events.