Podcast 🎧: How to use data to understand Customer Journeys
Dreamdata’s CRO Steffen Hedebrandt sat down with Innovabuzz Podcast host Jurgen Strauss to discuss all things B2B Customer Journey.
In the episode they cover:
Why tracking as many touchpoints on the journey as possible is crucial to the data-driven approach.
Knowing your data helps improve customer experience.
Why you need to cut loose what isn’t working and double down on what is.
How becoming data-driven needs a cultural shift, and stories help achieve this.
The continued importance of a human touch throughout the customer journey.
and much more…
Listen to more episodes of the Dreamdata Attributed podcast here.
Jurgen Strauss:
Welcome to the InnovaBuzz podcast where our job is to help you build visibility, professional credibility and connection with your ideal client by putting a human at the center of innovative marketing, so you can build and strengthen an engaging, enduring relationship with your ideal clients. I'm Jurgen Strauss from InnovaBiz. and I'm honored that you're here with me. If you haven't joined our wonderful marketing transformation community yet, go to InnovaBiz.co and collect your free gift as well.
Jurgen Strauss:
Do subscribe the to the show and also leave a review because it helps others find us. Let's get into today's masterclass on this InnovaBuzz podcast.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Start having narratives about what you do and why that leads to revenue, I think that's the first step you need to take in order to become driven by revenue and as opposed to vanity. Being able to explain why are we doing these things.
Jurgen Strauss:
Welcome back. I hope your week's been fantastic so far, awesome in fact. Now, if you haven't yet listened to my recent conversations with Janet Neil of Superb Woman Inc., and with Dr. De Wayne Vrenn of MediaScience then go check them out. It's well worth listening in. But stay here, listen to today's conversation first.
Jurgen Strauss:
I'm really excited today to have on the InnovaBuzz podcast as my guest Steffen Hedebrandt who's the Chief Revenue Officer at Dreamdata, a revenue attribution platform that collects, joins and cleans all data to give an insightful value to your business. Steffen is a subject matter expert in connecting marketing activities with revenue. He has an exponential growth mindset, is data driven by heart and loves all parts of scaling the commercial side of a business. A notorious growth hacker with a successful track record of scaling businesses and building teams, he knows the pain points of rapidly scaling marketing and growth first hand.
Jurgen Strauss:
In our conversation today Steffen talked to me about improving customer experience by knowing your data. We talked about using stories to instigate change and Steffen emphasized the power of ruthless prioritization and focus. Without further ado then, let's fly into the hive and get the buzz from Steffen Hedebrandt.
Jurgen Strauss:
Hi. I'm your host, Jurgen Strauss, from InnovaBiz and I'm really excited to welcome to the InnovaBuzz podcast today, all the way from Copenhagen in Denmark, Steffen Hedebrandt who's the Chief Revenue Officer and Cofounder of Dreamdata which is a service that collects all of your revenue related data, joins it up and presents it in a way that's clear and insightful, and adds value for your business. Welcome to the InnovaBuzz podcast, Steffen, it's a real privilege to have you as my guest.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Thank you, Jurgen, and that was a pretty good pitch for what we do at Dreamdata. I appreciated that.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah. Well, we'll dig into that a little bit more in a moment, but I like to ask all of my guests at the beginning, what's the impact you're making in the world?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So I think we help particularly B2B marketers solving all this data stuff that is part of their life, and making it easily accessible so they can spend their time on thinking about which campaigns should they make, how should they plan their communication, what projects are working, what projects are not working, and liberating them from having to spend tons of time just sitting inside of tools, spreadsheets trying to figure out what's working. At Dreamdata we say that what's working is that we take all searches we can find on B2B accounts and then we link it into what revenue did you make on this account. So hopefully it becomes clearer over time which activities you should do more of and which activities you should do less of.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, I like that, that's fascinating. I heard you describe Dreamdata once as a way to measure the impact of marketing, and particularly in times of crisis or difficulty, where marketing often is the first thing that's cut and we don't really have a way to say, "Well, if you cut out the marketing then six months down the track here's the impact, we're going to be wishing we had done it." But it'll be too late to show that with data.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I've tried that myself actually in my past company, when cashflow was a little bit hard and we're kind of from one day to another, "Let's cut the marketing spend in half because might stop the bleeding." But what you risk doing there is that all the seeds that marketing is planting that you want to be harvesting, three, six, twelve months later if it's heavier B2B, you risk cutting that off and then you might not feel anything for the first month or to. But at some point your salespeople are going to go like, "Hey, where's all the leads that I used to work?"
Steffen Hedebrandt:
What we're trying to do with Dreamdata is to make that whole full customer journey available which for B2B this is very typically six, 12 months or more, so you don't risk cutting down on the activities which actually produces decent revenue for you.
Jurgen Strauss:
So tell us a little bit more in specifics, what are some of the data points that you look at and you integrate and pull together? And how do you display the interactions between the different things and then relate it to that customer journey?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. I will try to, so we work purely on actual digital touches, so our tool is, you can say, for business that are leaving a lot of digital traces. Meaning that if your salespeople are today just sitting with their own phone and calling customers, as opposed to using like a calling software that tracks which person from which account and which point of time was called, then if you do this kind of behavior when you don't leave any traces then our software don't really work.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So you want to be in your organization making sure that everything you do leaves a trackable trace, which means if you send a mail, make sure it's recorded somewhere. If you call someone, make sure it's recorded. We have a tracking script that you put on your website so you can see every person arriving to the website and will store that in a database for you. They will remain anonymous until they actually submit a form where they give us consent to look at what they did. But inside this information about every user is also what other channels they came from when they arrived to your website, so was it particular ads? Was it a podcast that was posted somewhere and then the user clicked on through your website?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
At all of these digital touches, Dreamdata tries to make a database hub for it so if you have a CRM system, an email tool, you have a customer success tool, you have your website, maybe you even have some outreach software that the salespeople use, all of these things Dreamdata plugs into and then try to organize all the touches that the account had into one common timeline. So you don't get five, six different silos of touches that can be pretty hard to make sense of. I don't know if that explanation made sense to you.
Jurgen Strauss:
Well, yeah, it makes sense to me. I guess I was curious, it sounds a little like you can go into Google Analytics for your website and you can set up a whole lot of tracking URLs to determine which visitors come from social media or which visitors come from email for example. But that involves building out that whole pathway and everything, so does Dreamdata pull all that together for you?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yes. So actually I think this Google Analytics, now I might risk getting a little bit technical, but I'll try to stay out of it. So Google Analytics is a good tool if whatever you sell can convert on first visit to your website. You click somewhere and then you end on your website and then you buy. In that scenario Google Analytics is actually pretty good.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
In B2B you are typically selling to a team, to a buying community, it's taking a long time and Google Analytics has no clue about the money you receive from the customers a year later, than in the first click, and it's not able to join that account journey in any way. Google Analytics is purely looking at individual devices. So even you, Jurgen, if you arrived to the website first from your mobile phone and later in the day from your computer you would look like two people. Which very easily leads you to wrong conclusions and so that's why we've been developing Dreamdata to help particularly people who sell in complex B2B environments, what's going on because it's so complex.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I'd be the first to admit that we are never, ever going to tell our customers 100% of the truth. No one is going to do that. But we're giving them a statistical framework where they maybe go from knowing 5%, 10%, 20% of what's going on to maybe knowing 60%, 70% or 80% of what's going on, and that's enough for you to gain confidence to scale activities. It's enough for you to have confidence that this stuff is clearly not working so I can shut these things down. How does that sound?
Jurgen Strauss:
No, that's good. So I guess I'd kind of like to explore a little bit, what are some of the learnings that we can take out of the data that we have and by pulling it all together with a tool like Dreamdata, in terms of that customer journey? So you described some customer journeys that can be quite complex, so there's a salesperson speaks to a representative from a potential client firm and then there's a relationship established. But then in terms of making a purchase decision, that person, the potential customer company has to possibly internally do some selling or has to act as the champion internally and other people are making the decision. So there's a whole lot of pathways that lead, ultimately, hopefully to a decision that's a good outcome, but yeah. So how does Dreamdata pull together the data that helps inform and teach us more about what's going on in that journey and where things are maybe not working as well as we like?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
A really good question, Jurgen, and I think this is a case where you need to combine data with experience and gut feeling. What we do for you is we make all the digital touches you've recorded available. Now, what's important of those things can be opinionated. Some of the things that we can tell people is that, "The very first time that this account arrived on your website was from this ad campaign. You spent $10,000 on this ad campaign and you made zero money of revenue on all the clicks in this campaign, so this campaign was not a good idea for you. But we have this other campaign that you spent $5,000 but it actually made you $20,000 so you probably want to pour more money into that campaign."
Steffen Hedebrandt:
It might also be particularly what we've seen during COVID and everything like that, that webinars has exploded and everybody's doing them. A lot of times what we can see amongst our customers is that webinars are rarely their first touch on their journey, but it can actually help that journey progress. So you can see that maybe some deals had stalled, you hosted that webinar, the customer maybe learned a little bit more and now the deal is progressing again. So it's about identifying those moments that, if it's starting the journey or moving from one pipeline stage to another, or it could be things like...
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That's something I use Dreamdata for every day is to look at, "Oh, now this account that's been ghosting me for two months is actually back on our website." And then I can see, "Okay, it's that guy from this account who's on our website. So how about I timely reach out to him and say, 'Hey, Jurgen, I can see you're back on our website and you looked at this page. Is there anything in this relation that I can help with?'"
Steffen Hedebrandt:
In general it's about you're sitting on a data gold mine, but if it's not available you feel like, "No." In a democratized way, then you can really utilize all that data that you're sitting on.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, I think you make a really important point there that we have all this data and whether we like it or not, the internet and all our activity on the internet is recorded somewhere. So we might as well pull it together and be intelligent about how to use it for understanding how to interact better with our customers or potential customers, right?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. And just to disclose, I've always been, since I left university more than 10 years ago, I've always been working in companies where digital and internet has played a big role. So I live in my own little bubble that internet and digital is the main driver, which it definitely is not in every industry. Just so people take it with a pinch of salt, what I say, because I live in my own digital silo as an approach to marketing.
Jurgen Strauss:
I do think though that one of the things you said there is really important, and that's understanding that particularly in a B2B environment in where you have a lot of different people involved both from the company supplying something, a service or a product, and the company who ultimately buys that service or product. But there's all these different touchpoints that need to happen to build that relationship to get to the sale and then going beyond that, particularly in larger companies, to implement a solution to actually... It's not just about buying a manufacturing machine or buying a software solution, it's about implementing that and then getting the best use of that so there's followup stuff as well.
Jurgen Strauss:
So the whole customer journey from the point of getting to know what the problem is, getting to know what solutions are available to building the relationships and getting the information to be able to make a decision to then implementing that. There's so many different touchpoints and having data around that I think is hugely valuable.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. I just checked out now, but I can see for whenever we do an average sell of the Dreamdata software we have 37 sessions on our website. 37 sessions, you, you know? So you've just got to keep communicating to people, and there's so much complexity. And I really agree what you say, because we sell subscriptions at the end of the day, so we might get that order form signed but if we don't keep people happy, if we don't help them understand our product they will not renew that subscription. So we need to monitor, do they log into our product? Is this something that they won't understand? Is this something we can explain them? Can we help our stakeholder implemented in his organization? Like classical change management way of thinking about issues.
Jurgen Strauss:
All right. You use the term attribution quite a lot in some of the podcasts I've heard you speak on. Tell us a little bit about what that means and why it's important.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. So attribution, I don't know if it's just a marketing specific. I don't know if it's just marketing that that word is used for it. A simplified explanation would be to say, "If I do A, does B or C happen?" Attribution is about understanding when you do stuff, what happens and what we're talking about when we're talking about B2B attribution it's about understanding when you win deals, what are the things that took place before you win the deals?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I'm really obsessed about knowing these things because I want to repeat what's working. I want to stop doing the things that's not working, and then sometimes people get overly data driven and leave behind common sense about what the numbers are telling them. My advice on how to use our own software is that take it with a pinch of salt, if the data that Dreamdata provides confirms your gut feeling about this thing is working, then it's probably time to put more money into that activity. But at the end of the day, attribution or me, first of all, is about getting every touch in your journeys in a database because any kind of model you will apply will essentially be wrong if it's applied to 5%, 10% of the full customer journey.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
But when you do have the full customer journey or 60%, 70% of it, you want to be looking at attribution. If you do these things, do you do produce revenue? If you do these things, do you not produce revenue? I want to win, so I want to repeat the things that are working. Is that a doable explanation?
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I like the idea, stop doing the things that don't work and keep repeating the things that do, and be really clear. Particularly when it's kind of a complex chain of events rather than just, "Here's this one thing at this one time that works and I'll do that." But we're talking about a customer journey that is very complex, there's lots of different branches on that journey and so it's like-
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yes, and I think the attribution market is also different whether you talk B2C or B2B because in B2C you can actually produce enough data to say something pretty conclusive like, if you have a web shop and when you sell products and you have a million visitors from ad campaigns, then you can actually say it's this ad campaign, it's this email and then you sell your shoe. But in B2B there is multiple stakeholders, there's different timeframes, there's different industries so you can never get to that truly, truly statistical valid data model for attribution but you can get good indications of what's working, but you can never get to the certain detail that you can in B2C because B2C has 100X of data and a lot similar journey.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, that's right. I mean the key thing is generally there's one person making the decision, right? And that's the person that ultimately buys or not. Whereas in a company case the [crosstalk 00:22:20]-
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Might not see that person that buys because the person doing the research has a boss that has the credit card.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, what are some of your tips for people to get started with understanding this concept of that there's actually quite complex customer journeys involved in getting ultimately to a sale and how they can start to visualize them and collect data around that before they even engage a company like Dreamdata?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah, that's a good question, Jurgen. I would actually start very, very simply by looking through my daily activities in my company and thinking about are these things leaving digital traces or not? The first thing you need to do is build a repository of data traces so looking through are we just calling from the phone or should we use a calling software? Is customer success sitting in our Gmail inbox or can we get a piece of customer success software?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So going through every piece of activity you have and making sure that it actually leaves traces, because that is the foundation for actually doing data driven stuff. Then I would say two more things. One is that the management should demand two things from the employees, one thing is that first of all they need to have a narrative about why are we doing this in order to produce more revenue? They should be able to tell a story about, verbally, "I'm doing this because these things are going to happen and then we're going to get revenue." Then the second thing that they should ask the employees is then, when they've told the story to bring proof that it's true, that, "Now we did these things, it left those traces and at the end of the day we made more money."
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Then the last component which is the simplest of things you can do is that when people reach out to you or when you sign order forms with customers is ask them, "Where did you hear about our company? What was the first time we got on your radar?" And that simple qualitative question can tell you a lot about things that are working. So instead of all this high tech thing, it's actually something, very tangible things you can do to become a more data driven and digital organization.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, okay. That's really good advice. And I often say to people, "Where did your clients find you?" And I'm amazed that hardly anyone actually checks in. I don't know, you get so excited I suppose, you've made the sale and you forget to ask, "How did you actually find out about us? Where did this journey start?"
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. We're trying to enforce that our salespeople at Dreamdata also do like a post, let's say interview, where they do ask these things, "Where did you hear about us? What could we have done better in the sales process? What did you appreciate in the sales process?" So trying to qualitatively understand each customer, "What did you like about us? What didn't you like about us?" And there's a ton of learnings in that like, "The salesperson was a little bit too pushy." Or all these small flares that you actually want to know.
Jurgen Strauss:
Great, I love it. Now, you mention making sure that you're actually starting to collect some of this information in a way that there is a digital footprint there that you can then use that data and connect it up to learn from it. If somebody doesn't have a lot of that in place, what's a best practice approach to that? Because one of the things I see, you can get a CRM, a Client Relationship Management software, you can have a sale software, you can have a call software like you mentioned, then of course we've all got email of some form, we've probably got websites of some form, there's probably a heap of other stuff. What I see a lot of businesses doing is kind of, "Let's take this thing, I think that'll work, and then let's take this other bit. I think that'll work." And then before you know it you've got all these different systems that don't talk to one another.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. It's hard, particularly if you kind of have a heritage of not being highly digital, which I really advise people I think just to get consultancy help. But don't hire consultants you don't trust or have recommended from other people. I think the hardest thing is to... The dumbest consultancy service or money I've spent has always been on stuff I don't understand myself, so if you're implementing a new IT system in any form get an advisor you trust to help you out, checking the guys that are going to execute the project. And don't be afraid to ask simple questions like, "How does this connect with this thing? Does it support what we do? Does it actually fulfill the description of what we told people to produce for us?" But I think you're probably even a bigger expert on this than me.
Jurgen Strauss:
I've probably just lived through a few disasters.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah, happens sometimes.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, okay. There's one thing you said earlier I'd like to explore a little bit more with you and I know you're very strong on this, as are we, and it's the idea... I mean I love technology, but I'm also frustrated by a lot of businesses that abdicate any interaction with humans to the technology. So whether that's getting help from customer service or whether it's an invoicing question, whatever it might be, or actually getting help with onboarding of a new bit of software or service and it's abdicated to the technology. So how do you, as a technology company, how do you find that balance between using the technology to save time, to do more than what you can just do with manual human intervention and at the same time balance that human connection and the relationship aspects?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That's a really good consideration. So I think me being in B2B I, maybe disproportionate to B2C, appreciate or values the human relations that you can build by one person to another helping a customer out, because each account can be super valuable so you don't want to risk that they feel that some B2C is kind of like try to get in contact with Google or feedback, or something like that. Forget about it.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
It's going to be hidden behind endless of forms and do it yourself articles. In B2B I think you're really doing it wrong if you're not trying to speak with people and understand what's going on. From one of my, I guess, favorite brands are chat bots which I think is now overly used, it shouldn't be used in B2B unless your volume is enormous because I have never had a good chat bot experience. I just want to ask a question and then I want a human to answer my question.
Jurgen Strauss:
[crosstalk 00:30:40]
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Whereas I guess in B2B where again the outcomes are much more simple, then it might make sense for a chat bot. But yeah, I would be really careful about over applying technology when it comes to interacting with, yeah, potential customers.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, I agree with you on the chat bots. I think there's clever ways that you can use some of that challenge. I've seen clever chat bots where somebody actually there's a person comes on a video. In fact we've got a kind of a video that pops up instead of a chat bot on our website and people can respond with their own video or audio or just type a message in. But I've seen chat bots that operate like that and ask you a bunch of questions, and then you have one or two rounds of questions where if it's a standard question you get the answer. But if not there's then a way to actually connect with a person directly so there's a bit of a filter there. So I think there's ways to use those tools, but you're right, that's one of my pet peeves that people use them to disconnect rather than-
Steffen Hedebrandt:
But technology can do a lot of good as well. There is video stuff where that instead of you writing a mail that can sometimes sound a little bit rough or a little bit frank, then you can record a video of yourself where people can see you smile and you explain stuff and does kind of build a relationship with you without you actually being synchronous speaking.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yes, that's a really great example, I think, of using the technology. All right. Well, you've given us a fascinating insight into what Dreamdata can do and how it can relate to a genuine complex customer journey that involves lots of different people, and you talked about B2C. I mean it's still human to human, isn't it? Even though it's an organization and there might be a lot of different people, but it's still human to human so it's the relationship.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
100%. Yeah.
Jurgen Strauss:
Okay. I think it's a good point to move onto the Buzz, which is our lightning round, where I ask the same five questions of each of our guests and the idea is that you'll give us really insightful answers and inspire the listener to go and do something awesome.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That's right, [crosstalk 00:33:12]. Yeah.
Jurgen Strauss:
Okay. What's the number one thing you think anyone needs to do to be more innovative?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
For me it's writing every idea down. So I don't act on all of the ideas right away, which I'm the type of guy that get many ideas and I act pretty impulsive on like, "Now I want to execute these things." But they tend to get better if I just write them down and then once a week or once a month look at them and try to say, "Okay. What's actually the priority now?" So adding a bit of structure to your idea explosion is for me one of the best ways to not necessarily more innovative, but producing ideas that's valuable.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, I like that. I have what I call a brain dump board, so when I have ideas, I mean the first reason I write them down is often I'll forget about them again later on and that might be a really good idea. Or I do what you do, I get excited about something and just jump straight in rather than think about it, and forget about what's important right now.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
It takes some strains on the team sometimes to live with such a person.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, so I have this brain dump board and then I visit it once a week at a certain time and have a look at it, and think, "Oh yeah, I'll just leave that one there for now." Or there might be something that I can use that, and that'll help with this particular area of focus we've got going right now. Okay. What's the best thing you've done to develop new ideas?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I want to approach this as getting good or impactful ideas. So setting only a few goals, executing only a few ideas I think is oftentimes the best thing to do because if you spread yourself too thin over too many projects, too many ideas the outcome is just not strong enough and you get stressed by having seven different projects running and you get dissatisfied by not seeing them working. So write all those ideas down, ruthlessly prioritize what are actually the most important ones, what are the easiest ones to execute and then get them out of the way before you open up a box of new ideas.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, I love that. Ruthlessly prioritize, really focus. Great. Okay. Do you have a favorite resource? Other than Dreamdata of course which you use quite often.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Obviously I think I've constructed my Twitter and LinkedIn feeds nowadays to be one big explosion of ideas, and then there's some website, a community called GrowthHackers.com which have a weekly newsletter where they send you a digest of the best posts of the week. Which, I quite often find that there's some really good innovative stuff in there.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, I think I was subscribed to that for some time and I was reading that, so there's fascinating things that come up in that. But I've recently gone on a ruthlessly prioritization of my email inbox in unsubscribing radically.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
[crosstalk 00:36:52]
Jurgen Strauss:
So I suspect that that might've fallen victim to that one as well.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. I feel like I've been through the same process, getting less noise in my life, deleting the social media apps that I don't use, don't receive all those ridiculous newsletters that you don't use. I think it's a great advice.
Jurgen Strauss:
All right. The best way to keep a client on track?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
The best way to keep a client on track? I think again help simplify what's important. The client might want 10 different things, but those 10 things are not all equally important so keep a closed loop communication and then continuously remind people that you cannot do everything at once, and ruthlessly prioritize what's most important first. Make sure that the relationship starts out realistically, don't set too high expectations just to fall short just after the pay order is signed.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, I love that. There's a theme there, isn't it? Ruthlessly prioritize. But also the setting the expectations upfront so that [crosstalk 00:38:11]
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. I think we initially I dreamed that I kind of... As a founder you just want somebody to buy from you. We learn little by little that subtle expectations make it more clear what the product does, because then when you start onboarding people their outcome is just much better.
Jurgen Strauss:
Great. All right, and what's the number one thing anyone can do to differentiate themselves?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
So I'm going to steal a quote that I saw from a CMO at Gong, which has been scratching my mind for some months now, which is, "Different is better than better." And finding comfort in that, instead of you striving to be going from 90 to 95% performance, maybe 80% performance is good enough if you are clearly different in your industry, if you communicate, if you look, if your voice and tone is different. Find comfort in that, instead of competing on the one or two percent performance, than being different whatever that is, visually, verbally, design wise, product wise, is better.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
"Different is better than better." I think it's kind of a mind boggler, of course you cannot fail completely with your product because then [inaudible 00:39:40] and bad. But instead of competing for one or two percents, don't be afraid to stand out a bit.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, I think that quote encapsulates a lot of stuff really because it almost gives you permission to embrace your own uniqueness, don't try to be like somebody else and try to emulate them. So for example, "There's this other bit of software that does similar stuff, so I will just do that stuff better." Well, no. I'm solving a slightly different problem, so we will be different.
Jurgen Strauss:
All right. Well, thanks, Steffen. This has been really great. Now, where can people find out more about Dreamdata, about you and maybe even reach out and say thanks for what you've shared?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. So DreamData.io is our website. I am pretty active on LinkedIn so check out my profile there and you can follow me, and I try to post almost daily nowadays. So everything related to this B2B dimension, or actually customer journey attribution, those stuff you'll see a lot of if you start following me on LinkedIn.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah. You can learn a lot more about that, and we'll have links in the show notes to all those places so that's great. All right. Do you have some parting advice for our listener today, Steffen?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think just if we go back to what I said somewhere during the show, start having narratives about what you do and why that leads to revenue. I think that's the first step you need to take in order to become driven by revenue as opposed to vanity. Being able to explain why are we doing these things, why does that lead that to a better place, I think that's a good team discussion. It's a good discussion just with yourself, why are we doing the things that we're doing? So I think that would be my advice.
Jurgen Strauss:
Yeah, yeah. I think that's quite a powerful question sometimes that can lead to surprising outcomes. All right. Finally, Steffen, who else should I get on this show and why?
Steffen Hedebrandt:
I think you should get my good friend Beau on the show. He's a serial entrepreneur who just stepped down after running a successful digital agency for 10 years and he's now pondering his next step, and I think he's a very reflected guy which I think you would have a great conversation with.
Jurgen Strauss:
All right. Well, we'll get an introduction.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. I'll send you his LinkedIn profile, and happy to introduce if that becomes something you want to do.
Jurgen Strauss:
Excellent. Yeah, we'd love to connect with him and then we'll invite him onto the show, have a conversation with him as well.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
That would be cool.
Jurgen Strauss:
So thanks so much, Steffen. It's been a pleasure to talk with you today and learn more about Dreamdata and how collecting all the information that's available and connecting it together, and then drawing on that to get insights into what's happening on the customer journey, and what we can attribute back to activity that we're doing. So it's been great education for me and I'm sure there's lots of value in it for the listener, so thanks again.
Steffen Hedebrandt:
Yeah. Thank you, Jurgen. I really appreciate it.
Jurgen Strauss:
All the best, and stay in touch. I hope you enjoyed that informative and insightful conversation with Steffen and took something away from his episode. Steffen's intense focus on using data to understand the customer journey, the various customer journeys and keeping the touchpoints human was a big highlight for me. I'd love to know what you took away from Steffen's episode, leave a comment below the blog post which you can find at InnovaBiz.co/steffenhedebrandt. That is S-T-E-F-F-E-N H-E-D-E-B-R-A-N-D-T, all lower case, all one word. InnovaBiz.co/steffenhedebrandt. You'll also find contact information there for getting in touch with Steffen as well as links to the Dreamdata website, to his social media pages and the other resources we spoke about in our conversation today.
Jurgen Strauss:
If you liked this episode and got value from it, then please share it with other people that it might help and tag me in on that share so that I can thank you with a special. Steffen suggested that we have a conversation with Beau Muller of software agency 24 on a future InnovaBuzz podcast, so Beau keep an eye on your inbox for an invitation from us to the InnovaBuzz podcast courtesy of Steffen Hedebrandt. Tune in again to the next episode of the InnovaBuzz podcast where we've got yet more fantastic guests lined up including Kurian Tharakan, author of Seven Essential Stories Charismatic Leaders Tell, and we welcome back Jonathan Callanan, strategic marketer, course and community builder.
Jurgen Strauss:
Thanks for listening to this episode. Make sure you subscribe to the show to be reminded of new episodes. It's free to subscribe. Leave a review if you like, if you don't like it I'm okay with that. I'm asking you to leave a review because it helps other people find this show. Go to InnovaBiz.co to join our marketing transformation community and access a free gift my team and I made for you. It's the Marketing Master Mini Class. We want to give you everything you need to transform your marketing into a human centered relationship focused growth engine. Until next time, I'm Jurgen Strauss from InnovaBiz. Remember, be awesome and keep innovating.
