Podcast 🎧: ABM Conversations
Dreamdata’s CRO Steffen Hedebrandt sat down with The ABM Conversations Podcast - for B2B marketing professionals host Yaagneshwaran Ganesh to discuss all things Revenue Attribution and ABM.
In the episode they cover:
The ingredients that go into attributing revenue
What ‘attribution to pipeline’ means, and how it differs from standard revenue attribution to deal closed-as-won.
Attribution models and how to select the right attribution model for you
How to map the customer journey for a B2B SaaS company
Using revenue attribution platforms to execute and measure ABM programs
Understanding the time to revenue metric
and much more…Check out the Dreamdata Attributed Podcast here.
Transcript:
Yaag:
Hello and welcome to another brand new episode of, The ABM Conversations Podcast. And this is me, your host, Yaag. In today's episode, we are going to discuss revenue attribution in B2B marketing and ABM campaigns. As always, we've got the best person to share their insights on a given topic. Today we have with us, Steffen Hedebrandt, the founder and chief revenue officer at Dreamdata, all the way from Denmark. Steffen has spent years working as a marketer, trying to accurately measure the ROI of marketing campaigns and investments. Just like many of us here, Steffen turned his frustration into a creative outcome. After a lot of struggle to find a software that could help him get his attribution right, he finally decided to build one for himself and that's how Dreamdata came into existence. So without stealing the limelight from him any further, Steffen, welcome to the show. How are you doing today, brother?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Thank you so much, Yaag. I'm very happy to be here on the show. I'm actually a co-founder, because you can say I'm the commercial part of the founding team. My two co-founders, Lars and Ole, are the other people behind the technology. So I'm just a guy who felt a lot of attribution pain, and when I actually saw somebody who had a good solution, I said, "Let's make a team here and let's build a great product."
Yaag:
Amazing. Sounds good. And I'm so happy that you're here today, so let's get started. Everyone in B2B marketing is contributing to growth in one way or the other. For some, it is about creating quality content that drives highly qualified traffic, for somebody else it's about demand, generation branding, what have you. Simply put, all these activities contribute to revenue, or at least it should. And to know if you're contributing or not, you need attribution. So, Steffen, I would assume that pretty much everyone who are our listeners understands the basic of what revenue attribution means. So I think that's a great place to start there. So what would you say are the factors or other components that go into attributing revenue?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Good question, Yaag. So I think the first discipline when we're trying to do this is that we need to use all the information that is available. There's some discussion on the internet that, "Hey, you shouldn't do attribution because you can't measure everything." I think that opinion is super wrong. I think you should measure as much as you can, and then apply some common sense to that there might be a few missing things from the picture, that is impossible to track, like word of mouth, or the volume of a brand or somebody meeting at a conference and then talking about you. That's all good. You cannot measure everything, but you should measure as much as you can. And when I say as much as you can, I'm thinking about every digital touch that one account has with you, and that count consists basically of people and the interactions of what the people does.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And the way that we see the world in Dreamdata is that there's, there's two components that you can be tracking. There's everything that goes on, on your website, where people are initially browsing anonymously around your website. And at some point they identified themselves, through a form, through a demo call, an ebook download or something else. At this point of time, you'll get consent, or ask for consent, to look at, what did they actually do while do they were anonymous, because this will enable you to see what were the kinds of campaigns that actually led them to your website. Was it organic search on Google? Was it a review website, like Capterra or G2, or was it an ad that you put up on LinkedIn, or Google, or Facebook, or something else? All of that will be recorded in that anonymous ID if tracking is at least set up as good as you can.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
As we've identified you, we want to associate you then to an account because a company buys as a team, not as an individual. So it's all good that you have your own individual actions, but you need to understand those actions as a relationship within, you can say a buying team. So it might be Yaag, Steffen and a third person that is actually purchasing the software. If I'm only tracking what Yaag is doing, then I'm missing two thirds of the picture.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So what we then do with the person that we've identified now is that we actually associate him with an account. And the first place you would probably start to look at in a B2B company is your CRM, your Salesforce, your HubSpot, your Pipedrive, your Close, or whatever you guys use, Microsoft Dynamics. Then you can go take that user that you have now identified, and see if you can actually find him as part of an account somewhere. And if you can do that, then you can resolute him to the account as well.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So you have your online behavior, you have your CRM, but that's not all the parts that actually touches the account. So the exercise that your listeners should be doing is to say, "What are all of the tools that we use when we're acquiring customers? When people are buying from us, what are all the tools that they actually touch?" That will typically be your CRM. It would also be your automation tool, where you send your emails from. It can also be a customer success tool, like Intercom or Zendesk. It can also be an outreach software, like Outreach.io, or SalesLoft. You might also have a piece of calling software, that your sales people actually use when they call up somebody. And so it continues. There's a lot of different tools that actually touch accounts.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
The good thing about it is that all of those tools do something pretty nice. They provide a good service for you. The problem is that they are generating tons of data that is siloed inside of each of these tools. This means that it's very hard to stitch together a customer journey that happens over multiple visits to your website, multiple interactions with the tool, and even across multiple people.
Yaag:
Right. And one of the things that you're saying also gives me a perspective, maybe help me if I'm understanding this right, sounds more like a CDP kind of an approach, where you connect all these things together.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Totally. It is just totally the right thinking, Yaag. We operate, you can say, a little bit like a CDP as well. We record what people are doing when they're on the website, but the difference between what we do and a traditional CDP-like segment or something similar, is that we actually give this individual that you've tracked context, basically say that he's part of a buying journey for a B2B company. And we start looking at whether there's actually money recorded on this account. So the CDP is great at tracking the individual. We're saying, "Okay, great that you've tracked the individual. Now let's go look at if we can find touches other places, let's go see if we can find revenue." And if we find revenue, like a closed won deal, then we can go back and attribute for every new [inaudible 00:07:53] through that journey.
Yaag:
Right. Right, right. That makes total sense. You know what, Steffen, the way Dreamdata came into my radar was when I was launching my book, called, The Revenue Marketing Book, sometime last year. And since then, I've been following your journey pretty much very closely, because this whole sub domain of attribution is of great interest to me. And as much I've known you guys at Dreamdata, your primary focus has always been revenue attribution, that is, what channel or what sort of activities, say, initiatives, contribute to revenue outcome. But somewhere in March 2020, you guys launched something called, Attribution to Pipeline. And that's something that I want to dig in next. What does attribution to pipeline mean? How does it help? Does it help in understanding the funnel velocity, or where does it actually contribute?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Good question, Yaag. So if we start by why we deliberately stress the word revenue attribution, that means we, as a B2B company, people who've worked in a B2B company knows that it's not just about marketing attribution, when you want to understand what makes the deals happen, because you cannot close a six or seven figure deal with a Facebook ad or search ad, or something like that. That's going to take a lot of Q&A with your customer success team, it's going to take a lot of meetings for the salespeople. So when we talk about attribution, we actually want to give attribution to every touch that is meaningful, not just the ones that starts the journeys. There's other tools that are only looking at, you can say, the journey starters. We want to look at all the touches.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So if we put that aside, then when we talk about attribution to pipeline, what we're looking at here is that you can do attribution to a won deal, which is essentially, at this date, this account reached, "Won." You can also do the same thing if you have a more granular pipeline. A typical software as a service example would be that you have a bucket that is called, "Leads". Then you have a bucket that is called, "Marketing qualified leads." You might have a next stage that is called, "Sales qualified leads," and maybe even another one that is called, "Sales accepted leads." Something like that. What we are doing with Dreamdata is basically saying that for each deal that reached a certain stage, we'll tell you what were all the recorded touches when they reached this stage. So that's meaningful if you have only a few deals that are actually won every month, that might that you're an enterprise, large company focused, so you only need to close a few deals every month. Then there's not a lot of volume to look at there.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So it's just basically what we're talking about, when we say attribution to pipeline, we want to enable people to look at, what can marketing do, then, to provide sales qualified leads, because that has more volume and it's easier to impact for the marketing people. But essentially we have timestamps for when accounts arrive into every stage, that means that we can tell you what led from first touch until you hit that deal stage. Or it could also mean that you can look at, say you have a marketing qualified lead. What actually makes it move into a sales accepted lead? And then you'll look at all the touches recorded in those two time periods. Does that make sense?
Yaag:
Yeah, I was exactly going to ask you that, because when it comes to measuring pipeline, one of the mistakes or one of the things that I have learned the hard way is that we invest on something, and we start looking at attribution immediately, but the attribution can happen over a longer period of time. So how do you keep track of that?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Oh, this is a really good question, Yaag. So essentially our mapping of the account stays alive after the fact that you've won the account. And that is helpful in the way that, if you, at a later point, identify a device that you hadn't identified at the point of time when you actually won the account, then we'll just go back and add those touches that we've now identified.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So say somebody started the journey, recommended it to his boss, his boss bought your product. Now that that boss then invites you to that software as a service product. Then we get to see that, he was actually anonymous before. Now, we identified him when he locked into the product. That means that we can now take all the touches that he had while he was anonymous, and plot into the account's timeline. So this means that you get to discover more people that were actually part of the journey. And we are not like the CRM original source fields that just replaces what was there before, when you were blind. Now we actually put them into a timeline, so you can actually view every single touch that that was recorded. It's not like this override, "Oh, this was a sales lead, now it's a marketing lead." No, we will show you all the touches, and then you can have your own opinion about what's important.
Yaag:
Right? Right. Yeah. That makes total sense, and also thank you so much for going into the details, but let's also take a step back and get back to the revenue attribution part. Having you in today with us, I'm not going to miss the chance of having you geek out on that. So generally speaking, when we marketers talk about attribution models, per se, we are always talking about things like, say, first touch attribution or last touch attribution, linear model, etc. But you seem to look at it more holistically, say something like single touch models or a multi touch model attribution, or even a full path attribution. And this is something that is very important for our listeners as well. So feel free to go as deep as you can. If you can give us an overview of what are attribution models, and maybe if you have a list of factors that go into helping one select the right attribution model that works for them?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Before we go into the attribution models, let me just stress that an attribution model is only as good as the data that it's applied upon.
Yaag:
Can't agree more.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Because if you only have 10% of all the actual touches, then whatever attribution model you apply, it's still going to say something completely bullshit. Or it's going to mislead you, it's going to make you do stuff you actually shouldn't be doing. So the first and foremost thing you really need to obsess about is getting all the touches into one data model. So say we actually have all the touches available that was part of an account converting. Then when we start to talk about attribution models, it's a, I don't know if you call it a mathematical model for what's important.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
If we start with the simple stuff, models is that, say you made $10,000 on an account. If you use a less touch model, you say that all the other touches didn't matter, the only touch that matters was the last touch on this deal. That might be, somebody had a meeting with you or he arrived directly to the website and then he signed up to pay. We, as B2B marketers, we know that there's no chance on earth that somebody arrives and on the very last click, he signs up for a 10 K or a hundred K deal. It's just not going to happen.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So looking at the last touch is probably not representing the truth. It's not even close to representing the truth. Then you can go the complete opposite and say, "Okay, let's give a hundred percent of the $10,000 to the very first touch." Well, but given what I've just said, that's probably just as wrong.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
But I have to admit, I come from a B2B marketing background and I love dimension tactics. If I had to choose between the first and the last touch model, then I would go for the first touch model. And the reason why I want to do that is that you want to be able to find out, from everywhere, where can we actually acquire new customers? whether it was a call, whether it was an email, or whether it was something else that actually provided the last touch is not that important for me. What's important when you grow and you scale is that you can actually acquire new customers. So using a first touch model can help sometimes exaggerate the truth, but that can help sometimes, helping you understand where you can actually acquire new customers.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So if you're sitting in a growth and dimension role, it's important for you to understand, is there a certain ad campaign that I can put more money into, and then realistically expect us to profit more? Whereas the salespeople are probably more looking at, "Is it the best thing I can do to have a meeting with people? Or should I just let them organically sign up through the product or something else?" So those are the two extreme models, where you say, "All credits to the first touch," or, "All credits to the last touch."
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Then there's a ton of other models that you can apply. Another simple one is to say, "Let's do it linear," which means if there's $10,000 and there's 10 touches, then we give a thousand dollars of credit to every touch. Are all of those 10 touches equally important? Probably not, but it can help sometimes identify campaigns that played a role. And by, "Played a role," meaning that, say you're software as a service, and then somebody signed up for free to your product. You don't actually activate the account, but they have signed up. Now, let's say a month later, you host a webinar that is actually super relevant to what your product does, then the lead signs up to this, or the guy who signed up for free, he actually signs up to the webinar. And then after the webinar he becomes active and then a month later, again, he pays. Then it's actually nice to know that you can activate the free signups with a webinar, and then see them actually becoming customers at a later point. Does that make sense, Yaag?
Yaag:
Yeah, totally. Totally. I was going to ask you, anyway, that the moment you start about a linear model, I was going to ask you that. Pretty much, every step is not going to have the same weightage, so it's going to be distributed.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah, exactly. And then you can go onwards from there and get more complex. So we have what we call a double V-shaped model, which is 30% to the first touch. The very first time you arrived at the website, 30% to the first time you convert, and then 30% to the last touch, and then 10% to all the rest of the touches. That can be a way to say, "Okay, first touch is important. But there's also other things that are important."
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Another classical one would be to say a U-shaped, which is 40% to first touch, 40% to last touch, 20% of the rest of the touches. You can hear about how silly it sounds when you start talking about importance of attribution models, sometimes, in B2B companies, because, first touch, last touch, but there was a 1000 touches in between. So you should know what you are using the attribution models for when you look at them, that's how I would put it.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And then there's also two more I want to explain. So one is that you do a custom attribution model. That is, for a few companies, some people know that this exact event is super important for our business, for whatever reason, then we will over-exaggerate and say, let's maybe give it give 50% to, if somebody signs up for the newsletter. This is just a forced example, but then it might get, let's say 10% to the first touch, 50% to the newsletter sign up, and then 30% to the last touch. Is it meaningful? I don't know, but maybe there's cases out there where it actually makes sense to do something custom.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
The last one I want to touch upon is the one that sounds very flattering, that is called data-driven attribution models. It's inside of Google Analytics, and who doesn't want a data-driven attribution model? Data-driven attribution only, in my opinion, makes sense if you're talking B2C, meaning a world that is much more simple, where it's one person clicking an ad, signing up to a newsletter, buying a pair of running shoes. The amount of outcomes and the amount of people involved, the amount of timing involved, is simple.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So you can actually detect some kind of path that is meaningful to repeat, because what we should think about is that attribution is all about identifying stuff that we can repeat, something we can do more of. If you look at B2B, there are three months, six months, 12 months involved. There's two, three, four, five, six stakeholders involved in all your deals. They view different blog posts, they come from different channels. Now, if you were to give an average of that, what the hell are you going to use that for? Because it's going to be so diverse that there's no meaningful pattern to take out of it.
Yaag:
Right? So even in our sector, where a majority of our listeners are into B2B SaaS, even in SaaS, what happens is there are the different models, right? So one is a segment where it's completely product-led. So you come in, you sign, you start using. And then there's also other set of B2B SaaS products, which I would call it as a product-led but sales-assisted. So the sales immediately takes on. And I think even if you block SaaS as one domain, you cannot have one model for all companies. Is that correct?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
You need to use all the attribution models. You should not act after you have watched one attribution model, because it's only showing one part of the truth.
Yaag:
Right, right. Totally. And for all B2B SaaS players, I also like to think that the understanding of customer journey is at the heart of all things attribution. And I know that you like to think of the whole customer journey mapping exercise, like getting cheat codes in a video game.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That's correct.
Yaag:
Yeah. So give us your thoughts on, how would you go about mapping the entire customer journey for, say, a typical B2B SaaS company?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. If we start from the very beginning, you need to go through a digitalization process in your company, meaning that if your salespeople are just cowboys with their own phone, that just calls up people and nothing is recorded.
Yaag:
Hopefully that's not happening anymore.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. You need to get them to start using a piece of calling software, because every time they hit call, you'd see who was called up. Which account was it? How long did they talk? Maybe it was even recorded, so you can listen to what they did. The same thing for if you do all your customer success work in your Gmail, and there's no categorization of what's going on, only associations to accounts, then you need to move all that activity into a customer success software. And then, little by little, you go through every action of what you're doing in your company and make sure that it leaves digital traces, because when everything is leaving digital traces, then you can actually start to look at a customer journey.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
You can also think about it another way, is that, picture somebody, some account that wants to become a customer of yours? How did they actually get to know about you? Well, you can use traditional physical newspapers, and then they read that newspaper and leave no digital touches at all, if they come and become customers. You can also use other channels that actually do leave digital touches, like ad platforms, search engines, review websites, etc. So I'm not arguing here that you shouldn't do newspaper ads or fiscal events or something like that.
Yaag:
It's good to compare all of it.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
As that account passes through your pipeline, from lead to MQL, to SQL and so forth, you need to ensure that you actually store every touch that takes place. And then the way when everything is actually leaving digital traces, then you need to put it into the same database, the same data warehouse, where you can actually start to model the data into won accounts timeline. And as I said earlier, the critical thing here is to actually make all these individuals be part of the same account journey, and not just people who are operating independently. If they are operating independently, then you get into this typical B2B fog up that is, marketing just looks like a cost center because some people start the journey and all those people have bosses that have credit cards. So you spend a lot of money starting demand, like this account, we touch eight people, and then the ninth or 10th person is the person with the credit card. So all the other touches looks likes an expense, and then somebody came directly and gave you money. See, that's a problem. And that, you won't scale your activities out of.
Yaag:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I'm so happy that you brought this account point because as the next jump off point, I also wanted to ask you a little more about attribution in terms of a typical ABM scenario. As such, revenue attribution in B2B marketing drives people crazy, and then there are more layers of refinement when it comes to ABM. And I feel that ABM attribution is more complicated, because at the outset you start with a bunch of accounts, say about a hundred accounts, that you're going after. Now, you have to track the engagement of these accounts across, say, a lot of ad platforms, if you're using something like a Terminus or a Metadata. And then you have your email outreach programs, and then you have your web forms, which could be inbound, or which could also be, again, through some process. And there are all these various sources.
Yaag:
So talk about this from a Dreamdata standpoint. How does a revenue attribution platform like Dreamdata help in making an ABM execution successful?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Good question, Yaag. First of all, we'll give you an overview of every account that has any touches. So that's good. That enables you to see whether your ad campaigns are actually impacting deals that you win. Now, if there's, let's say, a hundred tier one accounts or specially targeted campaigns, then we can help you, if you have defined those campaigns in your CRM and look at your ad campaigns and see whether it actually impacts this cohort of accounts. But there's definitely stuff that you probably never can identify. Say you send a physical gift to all of those hundred accounts. Well, you can market it as a Salesforce campaign that all of these accounts received, or at least had a package delivered, because UPS says so.
Yaag:
The typical taco campaigns.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. Was this package ever opened? Did it actually ever arrive at one of the contacts? I ask you, how would you typically measure these ABM stuff? Or what are the normal success criteria in your world?
Yaag:
Right. So normally for me, I think my topmost criteria starts with, say, first of all, I even think about, "Do I need this ABM campaign at all?" Right? Say, if the ticket prices anything below five K per month, in terms of USD, then I would not even go to the ABM. I would rather look at a typical demand gen model. But the success criteria for ABM for me is more like the kind of accounts that are coming into the system. I think that's the first point. And then it's also about the MRRs that it drives to me. So these are the two success criteria for me.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think what revenue attribution also helps you do is that it helps you look beyond the 100 accounts that you have identified. And that is good because, even though you might be a very skilled marketer, those 100 accounts might be wrong.
Yaag:
Yeah, that's happened [crosstalk 00:29:05].
Steffen Hedebrandt:
For me as well. With revenue attribution, you actually get to see the journey of every account. And very large accounts might actually come from, you can see, intent and persona-based marketing, like your Google Ads, your Facebook audiences, your LinkedIn campaigns, etc. Then you want to be looking at, of those, let's say you just do an analysis of the top 10% biggest account that you brought in last year. Where did those 10% actually come from? Were they part of the ABM program that you ran, or did they just come from a Google search ad on a particular keyword that is relevant for you? If the journey actually started from these kinds of intent and persona-based campaigns, none ABM campaigns, well, then you should just go out and raise your spend on those campaigns as well.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So I absolutely don't see any contradictions. I only actually see complementing when I think about revenue attribution and ABM. One thing is identifying the journey of all accounts, and then you can flip that to look at the top 10 or 20 accounts, and see if there's repeatable tactics there. Then obviously there are some accounts that would be killer brands for you to sign, or they must be a big deal size, that you can say it's basically you're building some more money on them. So sending them physical gifts, giving them phone calls by reps, or I don't know what other tactics there are, gifting them and taking them out for dinner and so forth.
Yaag:
Well, now with COVID all those things are not happening anymore. And it also makes sense. For me, when I look at a normal, say, when I look at [Omar 00:30:54], right? So one of the fundamental things that I tend to think of is when I get a lot of inbound requests, though our conversion would be high there, but MRR on inbound leads is always going to be less than the MRR that comes from our outbound leads, right. So that's why we are even taking the ABM model or even doing outreach that way. So yeah, the kind of things that you talk about, getting the accounts, right. Or even, from there, looking at all these models as complementary makes total sense.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And we can also, if, say, you give us the names of those hundred accounts that you want to particularly track? Well, then we will give you a periscope that looks only at the touches of those 100 accounts, and then you'll start to see whether that custom-tailored landing page, or that specific digital ad with that brand name and your brand name, did it actually convert to anything, or all the accounts that you actually send the physical mail? Did any of those convert or not? So you can isolate those 100 and then get a better view of what actually happened. And you can do it in this revenue attribution perspective, meaning that, say somebody from that account actually chats with you on Zendesk, or Intercom. Well, then you can actually start to associate the movement in a positive direction of that account to the ABM campaigns that you did.
Yaag:
Right, right. Absolutely. And while we're talking of attribution and also the kind of tools that you're using, let's also throw a little light on some of these free tools. For example, every startup tends to begin their tracking with something like Google Analytics, which you also originally spoke about. And there, you're trying to attribute your goals and traffic, not much deeper than that. So when it comes to handling a typical B2B buyer journey, what, according to you, are some of the limitations of a tool like GA?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That's a favorite rant of mine. So I think GA was great 10 or 20 years ago, because there were only so few devices, I think. Nowadays people have three or four devices connected to the internet. Back when every person only had one device, it was somewhat useful. I think GA is actually still great if you're in B2C, because a lot of B2C stuff happens less touch. Like, "Click the ad, you bought the product." B2B is a team sport. You're selling to a team, you're selling as a team. That means that there's a long time involved, three, six, 12 months easily. There's a lot of stakeholders involved.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
What you have in GA is the actions of individual devices, it's not even linked to a person. And it's definitely even far from being linked to an account. So I bet that you, Yaag, have bought something where you started the journey on a phone and finished on a computer.
Yaag:
Yeah, yeah. For sure.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
What are you going to look at in GA? What can it possibly tell you, that you can use for anything? Well, you can look at, "Did I create email signups for my campaign?" That you can look at, but email signups, it's not a B2B game. A thousand leads might be the worst waste of your salespeople's time, because they come from, let's say you've made a lead ad campaign on Facebook, with a very cute cat. Well, why would you ever give those 1000 leads to your salespeople? You need to track those campaigns that actually go very far down the sales pipeline, and Google Analytics have no clue about what's going on in your CRM. They have no clue about the actions of your salespeople. Their Google Analytics is completely only looking at individual devices, and individual devices has nothing to do with, and only a single session. So not even if the same device comes back a month later, then they'll be blind again. So please, please, please, please, please, if you're in B2B, do not rely on Google Analytics.
Yaag:
So happy to hear this. And also I love this example of marketing leads that are disappointing salespeople, because it happened a couple days back, where I did an ebook launch and we had about 500 people download our ebook on the same day. And the first thing that I did there was that reach out to my account executive and sales rep. And I said, "Hey, please, don't reach out to all these people. These are just, no, no, no, no, no."
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Sorry, yeah. And let me give two examples. So you can actually write really great content that you get to rank in Google. I've had this experience myself, where in my old company, we did comparison articles between our product and the main competitor. When you look inside of Google Analytics, at best, you can see organic traffic going up a little bit and you can see some email conversions, but what if the account is signed six months later after that conversion? You'll never know about it. And I'll tell you what it looks like, it looks like that the writer that you've hired to write all these articles is just one big expense for your company that never ever provides any revenue.
Yaag:
Yep. Yep.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
You cannot pay any salary with organic visits.
Yaag:
And it does not even tell me what was the keyword that they came in based on, even if it was organic?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. So what actually was one of the things that made me fall in love with my co-founders is that I could see in my old company that these very narrow articles comparing our product to the competing product, three and six months down the line, they were actually part of journeys that become won deals, not journeys that just started with going to organic visit. No, they were actually part of juniors that actually became won deals that were worth a lot of money. And those two points, you can never connect without this kind of CDP thinking. I want to track the user from the very first touch onto the very end touch. It's the same thing with the Google Ads. You'd have all your expenses on one person, and then this person has a boss that has a credit card. So you'd look like the idiot that just wasted money, and you actually did start the journey, but you could just not prove it. And you cannot put more money into stuff that you cannot prove.
Yaag:
Yeah, absolutely. And as a segue, I also have a rant for this entire Google Analytics, because I feel that a lot of people just in the race for organic keywords, they are spending so much on building top of the funnel content, which does not convert, or which does not do anything, other than send you lots of traffic, and 90% of the time, these are irrelevant traffic.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yaag, I can tell you, we have the data to prove it. Across all our customers, all of these top funnel articles, they're a waste of time, because visits never, ever end up becoming customers. We have a big article about fruit, but if you have a customer who wants to buy a cherry. So there's no kind of connection there. The articles that perform the best are the ones that have the highest intent, if you search it. "I'm looking for an alternative to this established brand. Oh, you have an article there. Okay. Then I'm actually very close to purchasing your product."
Yaag:
Exactly. Yeah. One of my biggest disappointments was when HubSpot came up with an article on, "How to create a GIF," I was like, "What's wrong with you guys?"
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Oh man. Yeah. I don't know how that ever can convert to a customer, if you're big enough and you have enough time to wait, those very top funnel, very just branding articles, yeah, well maybe they make sense, but if you're a startup, scale-up, with a knife to your throat, and you need to drive revenue and you need to thrive growth, then you want to be looking at intent as that-
Yaag:
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that brings us to the next segment of our podcast, which we like to look at it more like a game show, it's called, The Rapid Fire Section. I'm going to show it. I'm going to show it five questions at you. And these questions are pointed, these may be short questions, but your answers need not be. And I'll try my best to put you on the spot. So are you ready for that?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I am. I'll do my best to answer.
Yaag:
All right. So here's question number one. You say that a time to revenue is a factor that often surprises customers. Can you expand on that please?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yes, I can. So what, typically, B2B companies are great at measuring, the sales ops people, is from the point of time where we actually have an email that converted, until somebody buys your product. That whole process is stored inside of the CRM system. What we talk about when we say time to revenue, we say from the very first touch that the account has, and all the research that it does, that the person does until, they identify themself, and then the traditional sales cycle, that's what we call time to revenue. And we typically see that the research phase is two weeks of the known time, so they're operating on unknown for two weeks of the time of the known time. And this impacts immensely, if you're trying to plan to hit a budget. If it's October and your journey is six months, or actual time to revenue journey is six months, then you have no chance of actually impacting the budget with more ad campaigns.
Yaag:
Yep. Yep, totally.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
It might also be that you're trying to understand whether a project, a growth initiative, a marketing campaign was good or not. Well, if you're trying to judge it in the same month as you make it, and then you even know that it's going to be six months before it becomes revenue, well, how are you going to fairly judge whether it's a good or a bad experiment?
Yaag:
Yeah, totally, totally. That makes a lot of practical sense, and I think even everyone who's listening to this are going to retrospect and maybe it's going to help them budget better, or at least wait for things to compound before they make a decision.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I did this is my old company, Yaag. We were spending around a hundred thousand euros on digital ads every month. I knew the journey was three, six or 12 months, but I was still judging my ad spend in the same month as I made it. I didn't have anything else I could do, but it's stupid when you verbalize it, because it doesn't make any sense.
Yaag:
No, but sometimes it happens. Right? So everybody is under the pressure of delivering to a revenue, or everybody's looking at you for some predictive numbers, and you have to give something.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. Exactly, and then I think this is also an education journey you need to go on, together with your top management. This is how things are connected. This is how we make money. We cannot sell a six figure deal with a Facebook ad, and so forth. You need to educate each other. And then they say, what are their needs, and you need to explain them, how long does it take for a campaign to actually convert.
Yaag:
Absolutely. All right. So let's move to question number two. So when you hire a content writer, what's the number one quality that you look for? I almost have a pretty good idea of what you might say.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So you can say there's two things. One is ability to write. Do you write great English? But then I would say the next thing is, ability to explain stuff, simplify. Because what we do in Dreamdata is, I cannot explain to my parents what we're doing, but hopefully we can write it in a way that if they read it, they will have some idea about it. I think that's why also love the discipline of actually writing, is that if you have enough time, you can actually do a really good explanation that most people will understand. And I think that's also the power of content, that you can get your message out to a lot of people that will actually get to understand what you do. And I see that's a prime marketing task, is that if you have some very, really, really fantastic engineers, you still need to explain to the world what it actually is that they're doing. I think that's the task of good content, that's explaining why this complex thing you do is valuable, so people can understand it.
Yaag:
Yeah, absolutely. All right. So here's question number three, and this is something that you already touched up quite a bit. So you have the story of where you were not able to make your Google search ads, your spend on adverts, look profitable. So what was missing and how did you crack the code?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So traditionally, when you look inside of Google Ads, I think everybody who's listening here will know what you see there. It's clicks, it's CPM, it's click-through rate, maybe goal conversions. But basically all those campaigns are missing the central component. You should optimize all your activities, and that's the revenue, is deals won. So when you think about it, if I say it out loud, "How will you make a decision on which campaign to scale without knowing which of those campaigns were part of journeys that became revenue?" It's impossible. I have never, ever made Google Search ads look profitable inside of Google Ads. So what's missing? It's revenue. And that's the link that our revenue attribution platform can help you connect. You take all the click IDs from Google Search ads, and then you go look inside of the closed, won deals, whether those click IDs were possible to associate with those accounts.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And then you can actually scale. You can spend more money based on clicks that gave you revenue in the past. If you have a low search impression share, if you're only buying 20% of the clicks right now, maybe you should try and escalate that to 60%.
Yaag:
Yeah. Love that. All right. So moving on to question number four. Yeah, this is going to be interesting. After president Al Gore, it was your inconvenient truth that hit a lot of people hard. You said, "Being great at SEO. Can't get you through the next funding round." I want to hear more on that.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah, that was another LinkedIn post. So the reason why I wrote the post is that, perhaps I just needed to remind myself about this, because I really love the SEO and the content game, because that idea about that you creating content, and then you just lean back and people come to your website, and then it's easy to sell. I love that notion. I use HREF to see, are we manipulating Google correctly so we can [crosstalk 00:46:47] more than visitors to our website. But when you look across all our Dreamdata customers, organic traffic as a first touch is one of the very slowest channels, meaning that it takes six months for somebody coming organically until you make revenue.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So what I wrote on LinkedIn was particularly minded for funded software as a service companies. These companies typically raise money for 18 or 24 months, something like that. If you then break that, if you start by saying, "From a first visit to a won deal, if that takes six months, that's one thing." But first of all, you need to do your keyword analysis. You need to hire a lot of great writers who can write the posts. Then you need to do a lot of, first of all, you need patience for those posts to climb up through Google. If they're not climbing up through Google, you need to do link building. And still, if you were to be successful, you would have had to pick exactly the right keywords to address it.
Yaag:
And then the intent of the keywords is whole another story.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Exactly. So when you put all of these things together and you're a funded software as a service company, that's the industry I know, then if you're counting on SEO to be the driver that will get you through to the next funding round, it's just not going to happen, and you will run out of money before SEO provides enough value. Obviously there're cases out there where this is not true, but generally I think this is a true statement, that you cannot bet on SEO, at least in B2B. There's community-led writing, or content, where a place like Facebook can suddenly, a million people creates an account, then you get a shit ton of SEO. But for, let's say a revenue attribution platform, like Dreamdata, there's only so many articles that you can write, and you're competing in a very competitive space, and we're never ever going to get enough leads out of SEO, like somebody searching, somebody coming to our website, booking a demo, and then converting to a sale.
Yaag:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then there's also the whole other side, where our typical VC-backed company spends tons of money, and burns money in ads. That's a whole different rant. That's not the scope of the subject, but yeah, that's [crosstalk 00:49:19]-
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah, and you might well be wrong with the ads as well, but at least you get an answer faster, because you can get in front of the right intent. Whether that intent actually converts and so forth, whether you're a good salesperson, that's another story.
Yaag:
Yeah, absolutely. All right. So here's the final question of, The Rapid Fire Section. Do you practice ABM at Dreamdata? And if yes, what are the metrics you track?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So we don't do it as of yet, to go for these very, the six-figure accounts, the big accounts. What we do is that, the best fit customer for us is software as a service companies. So we have a defined list of software as a service companies. I think it's at almost a thousand companies. And out of those thousand companies, we, on LinkedIn, can address the marketers of the companies. So trying to prime a little bit, trying to plant a few seeds with articles that people can hopefully be exposed for. Right. And then we actually do follow up with, you can say, traditional BDR work, where we try to send them mails, try to connect with them one-on-one on LinkedIn. Try to give them a call, if we can find their phone number and so forth. So you can say that's kind of our ABM approach.
Yaag:
Yeah. But that also makes sense, in a sense. If you holistically look at ABM, it's just doing B2B marketing right. So, that way it makes a lot of sense.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So we are bigger on traditional intent and persona-based targeting at the moment, although I wish that we had some capacity to do ABM as well. I think the problem about a lot of the ABM stuff is that it really needs really large accounts to target. So we typically address the 50 to 500 employees, I would say for 500 employees is at the very low end of an account that you would target through traditional ABM. So in a hundred-person company, there's maybe one head of dimension. In a 2000-people company there's maybe 20 people, or 50 people with something like that role. That means that even though that the one person says no, then there's still 20 or 50 more that you can address with your campaigns. That's not the case when you do a traditional SMB targeting.
Yaag:
Yep. Makes sense. So that brings us towards the end of our episode in today's, ABM Conversations Podcast. But before I let you go, Steffen, I want to ask you if you have a parting message that you would like to share with our audience?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Oh yeah. So people are very welcome to follow up with me on LinkedIn, and ask me questions there. And then, if you're interested in what we've talked about here, we have a free option, on Dreamdata.io, where people can connect their CRM system, and then we'll start explaining them how they sell to their accounts. So it's just, you sign up for free connect your CRM system, and then we start telling you stuff.
Yaag:
Right. So I was going to ask you next as to how people can connect with you. And you've already answered that, but if you can give us a little bit heads up on, what are the kinds of things that people can reach out to you?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Oh, anything related to what we've talked about here, really. I'm all in on growth, marketing, B2B stuff, attribution and so forth. Just connect with me and I'm happy to answer most, I won't say almost any questions.
Yaag:
I love that. And for the listeners of the podcast, I can definitely say that I follow Steffen on LinkedIn and his content is probably one of the best, one of the meatiest content out there. And thank you so much, Steffen, for spending almost an hour and deep diving on things related to revenue attribution. It's such a deep topic and I'm so happy that we got to discuss things in detail. And to the listener of the podcast, that's that from us today. And until we connect with you the next time with another guest and another topic, this is bye from me, Yaag. Have a good day and take care.
Outro:
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