Podcast 🎧: Revenue Attribution Matters
Dreamdata’s CRO Steffen Hedebrandt sat down with Love Selling Hate Sales host Joshua Wagner to discuss all things Revenue Attribution.
In the episode they cover:
How revenue attribution connects all activities with revenue
Dispelling the “marketing only wants credit” myth
Sourced vs. Influenced Leads
Revenue not Marketing attribution is the name of the game
A renaissance of buyer journey mapping
Reconciling marketing and sales as a CRO
The importance of content and thought leadership in sales
All-bound sales and the power of LinkedIn
and much more.
Transcript:
Josh Wagner:
Nobody went to school for sales. Each of us has our own journey. A journey that ultimately reveals the two opposing forces: the art versus science, the relationships versus the metrics, selling versus sales. What side are you on? This is the Love Selling Hate Sales Podcast.
Josh Wagner:
Well, welcome to the show. Today's guest is Steffen Hedebrandt, who is the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Dreamdata. Steffen, thanks for joining the show.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Thanks a lot, man. I'm really happy to be here.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. So, Dreamdata is a revenue attribution platform, and obviously revenue attribution is one of those topics that has a fair amount of fire around it on LinkedIn and the social channels. What made you co-found a revenue attribution platform?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think pure pain from my past.
Josh Wagner:
Okay. What kind of pain?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So I used to lead a marketing team for a company called Airtame. That was basically a screen-sharing device that we sold to schools and businesses. And was there from 15 to a little bit below a hundred employees and zero spend on ads to around a hundred thousand euros per month on digital ads. And initially you have a pretty good clue whether it makes sense to put in more money. And then when you're fully ramped, all the different platforms, you'll go a little bit like, "Yeah, I don't really know whether this works or not."
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And so, ended up becoming really, really interested in actually... I come from a school where you do marketing to impact revenue, otherwise you don't do it. And I really, really, really want to prove that what I did made sense, but it became harder and harder, as I said, as you scale the team, you go for bigger, bigger accounts. So, it takes longer and it becomes more stakeholders involved in the deals and so forth. And after I've been there three and a half years, and meet my two co-founders, Lars and Ole who, they're the senior VPs of product and technology at a company called Trustpilot also a Copenhagen-based platform. And they had been in kind of similar situations like me from a product side where I was on the marketing side of this thing, where at Trustpilot it's a review platform.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And every month that platform would generate maybe 5,000 account signups for free to the platform or more even nowadays, but still it was whenever they sold something, they would be applauding the salespeople when they've pulled in revenue. But they were like, "We cannot say that 5,000 new accounts every month is worth zero." So, what they had actually solved as an internal prototype there was, "We're going to look at every single touch from the point of time when somebody signs up until that they receive revenue, that we see closed won accounts."
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So that was the kind of initial thing that they fixed. And I put my data into my old company. And I was like, "Damn. This is actually showing stuff I have never, ever been able to prove." And let me just give one example and then I'll take a brief...
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. No problem.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
A year before I had set up a content team, because coming to the realization that you cannot sell to Fortune 5,000 companies with a Facebook ad or a Google ad, it needs a lot more. So, we started developing a lot of different content. So, I hired two writers, a videographer, a designer, and then a manager for that team. And little by little, you can start. And with a setting in Google analytics, you can start to see, "Hey, organic traffic is going up, that's nice." But you can't pay any salary with the organic traffic.
Josh Wagner:
With organic traffic, that's right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So, I couldn't prove that this was actually valuable for the company. You can maybe track some conversions and so forth, but it was only with this connection about when does people come from the very first time to a website doing research all the way through to deals being closed one, three, six, 12 months later that I actually had the proof that the investment in content actually made sense. And I think that made me really hooked on trying to... If they can solve this with this very oddly technology right now, if we wrap it in nicely, this is actually solving a real pain for a lot of people.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. And while you were talking, you hit on a pretty important hot button issue, I think. So, you're trying to prove something's working or not working. Right? So, that you can understand what's driving revenue. And I think that's the altruistic view of it and that's the right lens. But then you also try to touch down that idea of taking credit, right? Like the sales team's getting the pat on the back. And I think there's this view that marketing's just trying to find a way to get credit for something. How do you dispel that myth?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So I think first of all, just touching upon... I think you should think about an attribution platform like RSS, it's not telling a hundred percent truth. But you're looking to get a statistical framework for something that takes you from knowing 10 or 20% of what is going on, to knowing 60 to 80% of what's going on.
Josh Wagner:
Okay.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Because if you make decisions out of that, you're most likely still improving your business. So, you'll never see me saying that this is representing a hundred percent of the truth, but I will say that you should strive to take any kind of data available and get it into that account journey or that customer journey of every account. So, you can actually see, "Okay, at least what kind of have we available." And then you can make decisions from there. And I think this is the fruitful discussions we help provide to some of our customers is that, particularly if they're very sales led by nature, is that you can have a conversation about, "Okay, these were the deals we won the last month. These are all the digital touches we recorded." A hundred percent true that you converted that deal you did the last third of that journey. But he actually came to this webinar, he read this blog post, he listened to this podcast, et cetera. Getting the pen to the paper is the most important thing, but it's still... B2B deals doesn't come overnight.
Josh Wagner:
Sure.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
They come from somewhere. And I think for me, that's the most important thing about finding that resource where you can actually stimulate deals because you want to do more of what works you want to find where can you plant some more seeds that ended up becoming the leads that the sales people want to work on.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. And I think that's the story you want to tell to the executive team, right? You want to be able to say, "We're going to invest in marketing as an organization. Don't you want to make sure that we're investing in the right things?"
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. And I think marketers should strive to prove that they have impact on revenue because when crisis comes around, shit hits the fan-
Josh Wagner:
Exactly right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
They're going to slash that marketing budget with 50 or 70% because you have no proof right now that those two dots are connected. Journey started; journey ended.
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So I think a modern marketer with all this tech available should really strive to be able to explain what was the very first touch and what was all these touches that lie between the deal starting and the deal closing.
Josh Wagner:
For sure. So, what are your thoughts on the concept of sourced versus influenced revenue? Because that gets to be a little bit of a sticky situation when it comes to [crosstalk 00:07:53] sales teams.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. I heard this on LinkedIn yesterday, actually. Could you, to me define what you mean by sourced versus influenced?
Josh Wagner:
So in my mind, right? And again, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm thinking someone in leadership, puts a bogey on marketing's back and says, "You're responsible for a million bucks in sourced pipeline." That means a net new lead, a net new account that marketing's responsible for bringing into the business. Whereas influence is that net new leader account wasn't brought in the door by marketing, but marketing had touchpoints along the way that influenced the deal.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. I think if you want to be the most valuable, it's about actually sourcing those leads, not just touching the leads. That's coming back to what I said, that you should do marketing to drive revenue, not just have a touch along the way, because at the end of the day, you can't pay a salary with the organic visits.
Josh Wagner:
Exactly right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So I mean, both parts are important and they're kind of typically part of the same journey. But if I had to choose, I would definitely say it's about marketing actually setting up those demos for the salespeople, getting those people to attend the webinars so the BDRs can call them up and so forth, speaking of attribution models. I care because I'm a B2B marketer by nature myself. I care mostly about those models that favors the first clicks because it's those kinds of models that actually tells you, "This is where we can actually get more deals from, this is what you can do more of." Whereas you can say typical linear model where you just say, "All the touches are important."
Josh Wagner:
Right. Yeah.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
You're not the driver of the revenue if you're just touching the deal along the way. [crosstalk 00:09:56] There's a little bit of a caveat here, if the account journey is say, two years or something like that, who cares, who remembers where the first touch was?
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Maybe it's super relevant that you get them into three webinars or get them to come back and read four blog posts along the way. But if you put a gun to my head, I would say it's about sourcing new deals.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. So, I think now you're getting into something that in your current role is an interesting thing, right? So as a marketer, you're interested in sourcing new leads that you can deliver to your sales organization. Now as a leader of the sales and marketing organization, right, how do you make sure that those leads are defined the right way, that sales teams going to work them, they understand the playbook for what this means when marketing delivers a lead? Because there's that disconnect oftentimes, right? Where marketing is flipping over these leads and sales is just, "This is garbage. I don't want to work this stuff." So, what are you doing to combat that?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That's a really good question to ask. So, I think coming back to what we do at Dreamdata, we're obsessing about calling it revenue attribution and not marketing attribution for this sake. Because as I said, who cares about somebody clicking one Facebook ad, if it never becomes a sales qualified or sales accepted lead or whatever we want to call it? When we speak about revenue attribution, we're saying that any touch along the customer journey matters. So, whether it's your SalesLoft or outreach BDR work, or it's the center's intercom customer success work, or it's actually a demo call with a salesperson.
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Or it's a webinar organized by marketing. First order of agenda is to get all the touches into one journey because then you can make a better decision on, "What do we actually think?" Any attribution model is wrong if it only has 20% of the data.
Josh Wagner:
Right, right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So you can apply whatever to that. So, what we do at Dreamdata is that we help people... Sorry, for pitching my own company-
Josh Wagner:
That's okay.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
But what we essentially want to try to say here is that we don't care about leads or marketing qualified leads. We want to look at the deals that actually reached sales qualified lead, or sales accepted, or, the very best high LTV at the end. And then you want to look at what were the touches that the accounts that you actually won had.
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Because this is a correlation between who can the sales people close and what ad campaigns, BDR campaigns, or whatever it is led to those accounts, those 20 accounts that were the best accounts, what path did they take?
Josh Wagner:
Yeah.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So yeah. So, by following the deal from the very first step and all the way through to closed one, then you become also able to see the patterns of what actually makes up a good deal.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. I think that buyer journey mapping is something that is really coming back into favor these days, especially when COVID stopped all the live event stuff, right. And people really needed to re-engage in different ways digitally. You have to really look at those buyer journey maps holistically. And like you said, right, if you have a two-year sales cycle, that journey map is a lot different than a 45-day lead, demo, close, sales cycle, that's going to happen fairly quickly, right? So really understanding how your buyer ebbs and flows and weaves through that cycle can help you inform what those different touch points need to look? Right. So, at some point you're designing those touch points off of what the buyer's behavior is.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And I think it's also about the notion of making marketing responsible for revenue or making marketing responsible for proving pipeline generation.
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So you don't just get a shit load of, "Here's a lot of email addresses and phone numbers. Go, good luck salespeople with those." Because then they end up spending their time on just low-quality stuff. And if you want to piss off sales people you just give them low quality emails or phone numbers.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah, exactly.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So you want to be measuring all your marketing efforts based out of those you actually created a deal for, that you think you can win within three months or whatever is reasonable within...
Josh Wagner:
Right. Within your cycle.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. And if there's no system today, then just say sort of, "If you cannot prove revenue of what you do, then I'm going to fire you in six months." Something like that.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. Exactly. So, I think one of the things that's interesting is, from my experience anyway, the majority of the CROs that I talk to come up with a sales background. Right. And you come up with a marketing background, how is that playing for you, right? In terms of your sales leadership role?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think I have come to the realization that there's so much, I don't know about sales.
Josh Wagner:
Sure.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Sales is really, it's a craft and there's so much stuff you can read and you need to practice every day to become really good at it. Whereas I used to come from this marketing background and say like, "Hey, I'm giving you a good leads. Look at the velocity of the marketing qualified leads." And not understanding why sales doesn't just close every lead.
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And particularly where we do... Our ICP is 50 to 500 people, software as a service companies. And these deals take everything from three to 12 months or something like that, depending on the company and the bureaucracy at the customer.
Josh Wagner:
For sure.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And there's so many small details to making a deal happen. I've been really surprised about that. Have they validated the business case? Have they validated the technology? Have he aligned his stakeholders? Have you offered a use case so he can see proof? Have you ever talked with your customer? There's so much craft to being a good sales person, that has been, at least, eye opening for me. So on the other side, I do have to play the strengths, and I also do understand the mechanics of marketing and where actually you can source cheap leads, but I've really gained a lot of respect for complex sales cycles. And you cannot just make deals happen overnight. If you know an average sales cycle is six to 12 months, now with the time you need to act, if you want to hit this year's budget.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. It's a huge point of validation, right? And it's one of those things that I think as a seller, you want to hear from your leader, if they're coming from the other side of the house. I guess on the flip side, what kind of insights can you offer the sales team with a marketing background? What are you teaching them that they may not have been thinking about before?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So it's a little bit special for our product, because we are selling to the VP marketing, the sales, the Marketing Director to CRO. So I represent pretty much the persona of who we're trying to sell to.
Josh Wagner:
That's awesome.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so I know what makes most people tick, at least the dimension thinking marketing leaders. So I have a pretty deep knowledge about what we're selling and why we're selling it to them. But this falsehood is the thing about stepping into leadership is that you probably don't want to be the best person. You want to hire people who are the best at whatever they do.
Josh Wagner:
Totally.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
But I do feel bad sometimes that I am not a better sales coach or I don't have these kind of five, 10 years of VP sales experience, which would be nice. But there's also a craft about just organizing workflows, talking about what's the smartest thing to do, and then sustaining that people actually repeat the processes that works.
Josh Wagner:
So how do you combat that in your business? Right. I mean, I think at some point sellers do need to have that one-on-one coaching. They need to have those people that understand their world are you hiring middle leadership roles that you can tap into to perform those functions for you? How are you closing those gaps?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So we've been closing it, actually, basically trying to hire a sales coaches, sales directors who's been selling into the same market as we've been doing. And that's another flaw of myself. I've been really surprised by how long ramp time is, if you're selling a fairly complex product then you cannot expect those salespeople to just switch on and work, it takes time to understand the product. Like, "What are the dynamics here? What am I typical... ?" It's maybe worth mentioning, we're kind of a seed stage company. So we don't have a long history of how we do stuff. So it's [crosstalk 00:19:17].
Josh Wagner:
Sure. There's not a lot of process built.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah, exactly. So the RAEs has just been thrown into a kind of a war zone and have to learn on the fly. And I can definitely see the value of just continuously writing down, "What is the process? Why do we do it this way?" Trying to repeat it, but I've really been surprised by how long ramp time is needed to perform.
Josh Wagner:
Well, I think that ramp time is exponentially longer if you don't have a clearly defined process. And within a sales organization, you can literally win and lose deals based on your process and following your process.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
100% I think actually now, thinking a little bit about it, what I've then taken from what I know about marketing is that you can actually do really, really good content that will enable your sales people to do and look better in the conversations. So, the path we've set on with our writer and designer is that they need to write a good response to any objections that the customer might have, "Should I buy an account-based marketing platform? Or should I buy a revenue attribution platform?" Then we write a really, really good long reply to this, or, "Should I build or should I buy?" Then we make a really, really good article about this.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So, the sales person, that sort of [inaudible 00:20:41] people we have to ramp in sales, they would have all this material available to educate themselves, but also, they can expect the buyers to come in, to actually have read these pieces before. So, the questions are more easily digestible for new AEs. So, and I think that's a way to combine sales and marketing thinking. And as we started out the company, I understood what my technical co-founders had figured out, but if nobody had this information documented or they would be able to read what it actually is, then I would have to do this long explanation. I would have to ask for two or three hour demo every single time that we would be selling the product.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. I mean, the concept of thought leadership, I think is highly underrated when it comes to bridging the gap between marketing and sales, because those thought leadership pieces are really good, organic searchable things that people can find, right? Especially if they're keyword rich and things that, but they're also really good validation points as a seller. Like you said, "Well, how have you dealt with X, Y, and Z?" "Well guess what, our CEO wrote an article on that, that might help you understand that." And you don't have to get too much into the weeds as a seller, but you have those validation and proof points that are out there that you can bounce off of as a sales individual. And I think in our business, right, I'm in a services-based business, but our CEO went really heavy on the thought leadership play early on, a decade ago, in our business. And as a result, we've built up a repository of content that's second to none in the industry. And we can use that throughout marketing, throughout sales, whatever it may be.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And most people are lazy by nature and if-
Josh Wagner:
Yeah, right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
If you can make sure that when the customer comes to the demo call, at least they've had the opportunity to educate themselves on any question they might have, then that sales conversation is just going to be a lot easier. I think another example of, it's good to have this marketing background is you understand that the dynamics of each of these social networks, like Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera. What we've seen lately is that we were building an outbound function now selecting some accounts, call them, email them, connect with them on LinkedIn, et cetera.
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And had really a dry spell initially when building this. And I think this-
Josh Wagner:
It's tough.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
It refers really well to the title of your podcast, because when you go directly forward and say, "Let's set up this demo and let me sell you this product." Guess what? You don't get an answer.
Josh Wagner:
You get a lot of push back, yeah.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Particularly when you go to market towards people who do this every single day as well.
Josh Wagner:
Right. Exactly.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Which is the VP markets and the marketing type of people. But what we've seen then is that now we're starting to go super heavy on the social selling. So, we do an intensive 14-day sprint getting in contact with these selected accounts and personas, but then we say, "Okay, if they didn't react by now, then we're just continuously going to expose them with just three, four, five LinkedIn posts every week." Because they're connected to you, and they will ask, they little by little start to consume all the content that your product does, then they come back two months later and say, "Hey [crosstalk 00:24:12] talk now." Yeah. So, there's this funny kind of, you don't want to be sold to, but you actually need the product, so you come back when you've consumed enough content about it. I think that's super interesting.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. And that whole idea of outbound versus inbound, the lines are blurred, right? I mean you just said, you could be out bounding somebody with some specific messages. And in my opinion, if you're out bounding, it better be pain focused. You shouldn't be talking about your product at all.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
We've started to call it outbound inbound now, because you select the account, you try to get them in to talk. If they don't talk, just...
Josh Wagner:
Keep feeding them.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. Keep feeding them. And then they come inbound.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah, exactly.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
But they actually started with being an outbound account with an impersonal...
Josh Wagner:
Yeah. It's all bound for sure. And I've seen that a lot, even in our own efforts where, as a seller you're running plays, you're running cadences against different personas within a target account. And then all of a sudden you get an inbound, you get a form fill. It's like, "Oh shoot. All right."
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. I think we're in B2B. So, it's all about accounts and there's different ways to address these accounts. And you can, say you select some accounts, then you go for them sometimes with ads, sometimes with phone, sometimes with email.
Josh Wagner:
And you could argue, right, that all those outbound efforts, if they turn into an inbound form filled, well, now you've got that person in a better position for a discovery call than you would have if you caught them off guard, right? When they've raised their hand and said, "Hey, let's talk." Now you could really engage in meaningful dialogue. It's up to you as a seller then to put your [crosstalk 00:25:49].
Steffen Hedebrandt:
LinkedIn is so incredibly powerful at the moment. All pieces of content, just get a ton of reach. And if you just keep putting out good, relevant stuff, and then you connect with everybody who liked your post, that you don't already know, little by little, it just starts snowballing. And that we see quite heavily now.
Josh Wagner:
Well, give us some examples of the types of content that you're putting out on LinkedIn? I think a lot of people would be interested in that.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. So, it's, I think we're still learning here. But I do a lot of screenshots from our own product and then tell a story. Obviously, I make stuff anonymous. But what, for example, we're able to show is that whenever I win a deal, I always do a new post. I anonymize it. And then I show this customer journey mapping of, "Hey, here's four stakeholders that took six months to convince, to buy our product. That deal size is this, it took those four months. It started with a Google ad and then the sales person had eight meetings." Or something like that.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think people actually, they love seeing those people actually mapped into a timeline because they know this is what's going on, but because of all their data sitting in different silos, they have no proof of it. Or it could be ranting on why original source in the CRM is such a stupid thing to obsess about because there's going to be four people and you can overwrite the original source and this outbound people will write outbound. And then the marketing person to say, "No, it's my ad." And so forth. So, we try to keep it pretty topical and fairly... Don't post stuff that is just of low quality.
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Put out good stuff every time and then it becomes a muscle that becomes easier and easier to use. Nowadays it'll take me five minutes, 10 minutes to do that LinkedIn post. And then I know, "Okay, I've planted today's seed, I can go on to other things to do." But there's no right way of doing it. We are not so... There's also people that go to very contrarian wrote, where they're completely black and white about stuff. And I think that doesn't reflect my own nature, so I don't want to do that. But there's those people who say, "Don't attribute anything, don't measure anything." Because you are not [crosstalk 00:28:12].
Josh Wagner:
Yeah, you can't be real.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. But it's, "Dude, just because you can't measure everything doesn't mean you shouldn't strive to take- "
Josh Wagner:
Measure nothing.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah, exactly. And that style, wouldn't be the style of the way we think about stuff. But it gets a lot of flame and then [crosstalk 00:28:29] et cetera. So, there's good reasons why you want to go down that road. But I think put out stuff that you think is quality yourself and then write with your own voice. And then people start following and liking what you do.
Josh Wagner:
Well, I think that's a great idea, right? A lot of sales folks, the individual contributors out in the field, they don't know what they should be putting on LinkedIn and they don't want to make it sound pitchy. So even as a marketing leader, being able to package up those wins, like you said, in some sort of quick hit story, that then they can use their own voice to tell that story. I think that's really powerful, right? That's something that marketing could be using to enable the salespeople on social.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And I think there's this kind of topic of building in public, don't be afraid of just telling you, "Fuck, I called 85 people yesterday and it didn't work."
Josh Wagner:
I've got nobody.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
You know what, there's sitting a million other SDRs out there who would love to hear that story. So, share mistakes, share stuff that works, try to add value to you in that way of... That would just be my notion and just this thing about don't create, just document what you do, because people love following that journey of stuff that works and stuff that doesn't work. Like yesterday, I put up that I'm researching pricing pages and that got 5,000 views by one day later. It still says B2B revenue attribution. Dreamdata.io in my title. So-
Josh Wagner:
Yeah, it doesn't matter.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
This is not driving demand a hundred percent, but it's [crosstalk 00:30:05].
Josh Wagner:
It's awareness, for sure.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah, yeah. And it takes me five, 10 minutes to do.
Josh Wagner:
Exactly. Yeah. And the idea of being able to just pull stuff from your day, that's what I would do for a while. As a frontline seller, you're on the phone all day talking to people, talking to customers, talking to prospects. And you can take a snippet from a call and make that your post, right? The dialogue you had, the things you talked about. That's great content.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I used to go this way, then I went this way on the call. It worked, what do you guys do?
Josh Wagner:
Yeah, exactly. Even topics. Right. Or objections that customers put towards you. Those are things that you can really dig into.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. And I think you just need to realize B2B sales takes hundreds of touches to convince anybody. So, whether it's account-based ads, phone calls, emails, organic posts, LinkedIn, you just got to touch them with quality stuff so many times. So just start grinding on it.
Josh Wagner:
Absolutely. So, shifting gears just a little bit, right. What would you say to a marketer who's looking, they want their career trajectory to be that CRO type of role, right? And leadership. What would you tell the marketer who's looking down to go down that path?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think the most important thing is what changes my own behavior the most is feeling pain. So, the first, what is that one year of one and a half year, I did all demo calls myself.
Josh Wagner:
Nice.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
And I heard all the rejections to why you shouldn't buy our product.
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So that gave me a long list of content we need to make. And a lot of different slideshows and just sitting in the shoes of an AE makes you-
Josh Wagner:
No right or wrong.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. And you think, when I look back at my old job as a marketing leader, I did not visit customers enough. I didn't really get enough under the skin. And you need to walk some weeks and months in the shoes of the sales people to really understand where it hurts. What is the problem here? What can marketing do to make sales people's life easier?
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So that's why nowadays all the marketing we do is purely around the needs of salespeople. Then when we do put up that blog post it's optimized, so Google will like it and it makes sense to buy traffic for it as well. But it's addressing a sales objection that is valuable for us to do. But in general, people learn in different ways. I need to feel pain to really understand, also some of the sales coaches we've hired, they look through videos of every single demo call. I didn't know that was a discipline there's pre-call plans as well. I didn't know that was a discipline.
Josh Wagner:
Right.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Poor sales interviews. I didn't know that was the discipline. So, there's so many things to learn, if you come from marketing, that you are not aware about as a marketing leader.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So, I guess look into your network and see if you can find any successful sales people. And just start talking with them or go spend a couple of hours every week with the Sales Director in your company.
Josh Wagner:
Yeah, put yourself in their shoes.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Honestly, ask him, "What is the biggest problem you have?" And then figure out how you can support it with marketing, because it's going to be really painful if you just jump straight into the sales role. But just spend more time with your marketing leader right now, spend more time with the AEs, go out, drink beers with them and get them to tell the truth.
Josh Wagner:
I love that. Yes. Spend time in your customer's shoes, spend time in the AEE's shoes, do the ride alongs and help them solve problems now. And that'll pay dividends in the long run.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Like within a couple of weeks, you'll know what are the top three things that they complain about all the time and you can go back and fix it.
Josh Wagner:
Yup.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
It's like, "We don't have any cases to share." "Oh, well, okay. I can fix that. And I can just email a few customers or- "
Josh Wagner:
Sure.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I don't have this sales rejection blog post, I can write that. So just have a lot of conversations with the salespeople.
Josh Wagner:
Awesome advice. All right. I know you've touched on it a little bit about Dreamdata, but give us the 3 second elevator pitch on Dreamdata?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I'll try my best, but yeah. So Dreamdata is a revenue attribution platform for B2B companies and our best fit customers are B2B SaaS companies, because there you have all your marketing spend online. You have your demo calls online and you close your customers online in a CRM system. So, you can do a closed loop attribution. Where we are the best is when you have a MultiTech stack. So, you have your HubSpot for your marketing, you have your Salesforce for your CRM. And then you, maybe you have an outreach BDR to the store. We put the straws into all of those buckets, and then we pull it over into one joint database where we take all the touches that every account has and put it into one data model. This makes you able to go, "What was the very first touches on this account, during and what was the very last touches?" No matter the stakeholders or time involved in the deal.
Josh Wagner:
Awesome. Steffen, thank you for joining the show. We really appreciate having you.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I hope I was not too under-qualified as a sales leader to be here. I did my best.
Josh Wagner:
You were fantastic. I love it.
