Building Trust Through Thought Leadership & Lead Nurturing with Julie Smutko

Julie: I think thought leadership is so important because it really gives you the opportunity to build trust with your ideal customer profile. Again, I think so much ties back to that helping will sell, selling won’t help. If you can establish your brand as an expert, as a thought leadership in the space, then your ideal customer profile will inherently look to you and go to you when they need help with their job without feeling like “Oh, Verse is just going to sell me if I download this piece of content, it’s not going to be worth it.”

Intro: Welcome to Demand Bites, the podcast where B2B demand generation leaders find the strategies they need to grow. I’m your host, Ross Howard, Director of Insights at Inbox Insight. And in just 15 minutes my guests and I will uncover what’s broken in the B2B buyer journey and provide real-world strategies you can put to work right away. So whether you’re looking for an innovative demand generation technique or expert advice on accelerating sales, this podcast gives you the tools you need to succeed. Ready to identify, educate, and convert your ideal customer profile, or at least learn how other people are doing it? Let’s dive in.

Ross: Julie Smutko, Head of Demand Generation from Verse AI. Welcome to the podcast.

Julie: Hello. It’s great to be here.

Ross: Thanks so much for coming on.

So Julie, you’ve had a fascinating journey leading up to your role of Head of Demand Generation at Verse. Could you share a little bit about your journey and your career in marketing?

Julie: Yeah, so as far as I can remember back, I’ve always been very interested in marketing, or at least what I thought was marketing at a young age and advertising. My kind of exposure to it was seeing movies of people in ad agencies and I was like, “Oh, I want to do that.” And so I kind of made it my life’s goal to get into an agency. And then I got into an agency and I was like, this is not what I want to be doing.

So I kind of found my passion in, in-house marketing and demand generation. I think my introduction to demand generation was with my last company, TSIA where I was hired on as a content marketing strategist. And then they brought in a head of demand gen who kind of built out our demand gen function. So I was there experiencing that as it was happening, which gave me just a ton of insight and knowledge into what demand generation was, and how to really build and scale that engine.

So I was with my last company for eight years, working my way up to becoming the Director of Demand Generation. And then, a year ago I found Verse and I came over to Verse to lead the demand generation function for their team.

Ross: Awesome. Yeah, full circle. And what’s it been like building out that function? How did you go about it?

Julie: All right. So I’ve been at Verse for about a year now. And we’ve done some really cool things in terms of just building out the marketing function. I was talking about identifying gaps in the processes. And so we’ve built out some pretty cool lead scoring processes, lead nurture programs, really building out the content engine at Verse.

So when I created the strategy for this year, it was all around brand awareness, lead generation, and thought leadership. And that was really everything that we did went back to those three pillars. The ultimate goal of driving, building pipeline and driving revenue.

Ross: Fantastic.

You mentioned thought leadership was one of those pillars. Why do you think that is so important and relevant in today’s landscape?

Julie: I think thought leadership is so important because it really gives you the opportunity to build trust with your ideal customer profile. Again, I think so much ties back to that helping will sell, selling won’t help.

If you can establish your brand as an expert, as a thought leadership in the space, then your ideal customer profile will inherently look to you and go to you when they need help with their job without feeling like, “Oh, Verse is just going to sell me if I download this piece of content, it’s not going to be worth it.”

So I think that just building that initial trust and that rapport with prospects is huge, before just kind of like going in for the kill, as they say. I think brand trust is number one.

Ross: Let’s talk a little bit about what happens once that lead is generated.

Somebody’s come to the site, they’ve engaged with the content, they’re beginning to trust you, they become a lead. How do you hand that lead off to AEs or SDRs at Verse? How do you manage that process?

Julie: So when it comes to lead nurturing and lead handoff, we have an automated lead nurture program built out, and it kind of depends on the source of the lead.

So if a lead organically comes to the website, they fill out a form to get a piece of content or maybe they submit one of the ROI calculators or something, they’re going to go into our automated nurture program. They’re going to get scored and then once they engage up to a certain point, they will be handed off to an AE.

If they’re just plugging away and they’re not engaging a ton, but they are engaging here and there, we’ll continue to nurture them until they get to that point where we feel like they’ve showed enough intent (going back to lead scoring) that it makes sense to hand them off to an AE.

If somebody comes to the website and they’re requesting a demo, I think, I mean, common sense, that’s going to go straight to the AE for them to engage because they’ve set that appointment to talk with that AE for whatever reason that demo is missed, that’ll trigger them back into an automated workflow.

And then marketing will come in and try to help the AE save that. If the lead is disqualified, depending on the reason, if it makes sense, like let’s just say they don’t have budget at that time, we’ll continue to nurture them, keep them warm through automated lead nurture.

We do content newsletters monthly just to keep Verse top of mind for them. Again, everything that we’re doing in terms of lead nurture is all around that helping will sell. so our nurture tracks are not super salesy. It’s like, “Hey, here’s this piece of content that will help you figure out when the best time is to contact leads”, stuff like that.

Or we did a webinar on compliance you should check out because the laws are changing that kind of thing. So I think that that’s the approach that we take, we try to make sure that we’re not just getting, taking leads based off their first engagement, throwing them over to sales because nine times out of ten, they’re not ready.

So we want to make sure that they’re warm and they have had a really good introduction to Verse. They have an idea of who Verse is, what Verse does, how Verse can help them. They’re familiar with the type of content, thought leadership that we’re producing, so that when they do eventually get on the phone with an AE, they’re like, yeah, I have a good idea about who you guys are. And ideally they’re raising their hand on their own. If not, sometimes it does make sense for the AE to reach out based on their engagement.

Ross: You mentioned that you were scoring the leads. What’s your qualification scoring method? Is it just on number of engagements or is there anything to do with what type of company it is?

Julie: Yeah so when we created our lead scoring program, we’ve got the demographic, we’ve got firmographic and then we have behavioral. So for the demographic, we’re looking at title, and level and account. Are they high enough to be a decision maker? Are they just an influencer?

For the firmographic we’re looking at company size. Can they afford Verse or are they a very small startup company? We also look at number of leads that they generate because that’s one of the indicators for Verse is if they’re a company that generates a significant amount of leads, then Verse would probably be a good solution for them and make sense for them financially.

On the engagement or behavioral side we’re looking at any and every interaction they could possibly have with marketing, down to specific pages that they visit on the website, clicks in an email, blog posts that they engage with, content that they download, did they watch a demo video, did they submit an ROI calculator form, and everything is weighted based on what we feel like their intent could be as well as kind of just some anecdotal conversations with the AEs.

When we created our lead scoring program, we wanted to make sure that marketing wasn’t just doing that in a silo because the other side of that is really the AE component. So when we built out the actual scores for all of these, I think we’ve got like at least 30 different engagements that we’re scoring on again, ranging from a click in an email all the way to submitting the form to go into the demo hub. We vetted that with sales to make sure that they felt that like, okay, this engagement from my experience has indicated that they are ready to talk to somebody on our team.

So that’s the way that we approached lead scoring. And I think that once you launch your elite scoring program, it’s important not to just set it and forget it. You need to constantly be looking at the qualified leads that are getting triggered and sent over to sales, making sure that they were ready to talk.

If you’re consistently seeing that the leads are getting over to sales and nothing is happening beyond that, then you probably need to go back to your lead scoring, kind of the values that you’ve given these engagements, and you probably want to lower them a little bit because you’re sending them over to sales too soon.

So that’s the way that we’ve approached lead scoring.

Ross: So you’ve mentioned the ROI calculator a couple of times. Are there any significant pieces of content or campaigns that you’ve been running that have been really successful for you?

Julie: The ROI calculators are really exciting. We created three of them based on kind of our three, I don’t want to call them differentiators, but saving time, saving money and making money. Those are the three things at its core that Verse can help you do.

So we created calculators based on those three things and kind of pitch them that way, like, oh, if your number one focus right now is trying to save time, check this calculator out, see just how much time you could save with Verse.

And we’ve got some really cool kind of math behind those calculators based on what our actual clients are seeing in terms of their results. Craig on my team was just like a wizard at putting these together when we were creating them and he was kind of doing all the dev behind it. He would open up the code and show me.

I’m like, Craig, this is great. It’s not making sense to me. I see what you’re saying, but like, this is just like so crazy complicated, but on the front end it’s just so clean and beautiful. So we were really excited about those and we’ve been seeing a significant amount of leads coming in from people who are actually interested in the Verse product.

The other really cool piece of content that we’ve created is a demo, a video hub. So you submit a form and it takes you into this page where we’ve got, our main demo video. And then that video was broken up into six different videos just based on a quick snapshot of what you might be looking for.

And what has been really cool with that is we have seen people submit that form go into the demo hub and then submit a form to actually take a demo with an AE. So that has actually worked really beautifully, which makes me so happy because that’s exactly how it was intended.

We were a little bit worried about the demo that it might cannibalize our efforts and people might go in and, watch the demos and not talk to an AE, but then we realized if people are doing that, if they’re watching the demos and it doesn’t go further than that, they’re probably not a great fit for us.

In those cases we still can hand the lead off to the AE so they can start to do a little bit of research, and they’ll initiate contact if they think that that person is worth going after. But we found it’s kind of weeding out the people who are not a good fit for Verse regardless. So it’s kind of working on two levels, which has been really cool.

And then the best times to contact leads, we saw great success with that piece of content that has by far outperformed, I think everything else that we’ve created this year in terms of gated pieces.

All of our content that we create that’s gated, I won’t say all, I’ll say most of the content that we’ve created that’s gated is based on actual Verse data, what we’re seeing going on with our clients.

So it’s kind of like an apples to apples comparison, but for whatever reason that specific piece, the best times to contact leads, that has just been a huge winner with our ideal customer profile.

Ross: What are some common misconceptions about demand gen that you’ve encountered?

Julie: So I think some common misconceptions about demand gen is that it’s quick, it’s easy, it’s a hundred percent trackable. All of those are not true.

I believe in quick wins in the sense of low hanging fruit, like tackling things that are easy to kind of like check off your list. Like if you’re coming to a new organization you can do a quick audit on the website, find a couple things that are broken or, if you just move the CTA or the form up higher or something, you could help conversion on that page.

But generally I don’t think quick wins are a thing in marketing. I think when you try to do things quickly, quick wins, I think a perfect example of that is like just dumping a bunch of money into paid to get a bunch of leads and looking like a hero.

Generally those are going to be crap leads and they’re not going to turn into anything. So I think that one of the misconception—that things are quick and can happen quickly—not true.

Ross: Julie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you and Verse?

Julie: So you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. You can go to the website, Verse.ai to learn all about Verse. Give us a follow on LinkedIn as well. And yeah, it was so great to be on Ross. Thank you so much for having me. This is really fun conversation.

Outro: This is awesome. Thanks very much. And that wraps up today’s episode of Demand Bites.

Thanks for listening. I hope the insights provided today are able to help you power up your own demand generation efforts. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, make sure to hit subscribe so you’re always up to date with the latest strategies. If you’re looking for more insight, stay connected with Inbox Insight on LinkedIn and join a network of marketing leaders driving the future of demand gen.