Kelly Lindenau: All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome into the next session of the 2024 Strategy and Planning Series. We are here today with Live Teardown, an enterprise demand generation planning masterclass.
My name is Kelly Lindenau, and I’m the editor of DemandGen Report, and I’ll be moderating this session today.
Before I welcome in our speaker today, I have a few housekeeping items to run through first. So, like I just mentioned, I’m the editor of DemandGen Report, an online media outlet dedicated to B2B professionals.
We provide a variety of resources covering the latest trends in sales and marketing, including special reports, news updates, contributed articles, and webinars and webinar series much like this one, among other things.
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And now I’m super excited to announce that we are headed back to Scottsdale for the 2025 B2B Marketing Exchange West event. The B2B Mex team is already hard at work crafting the agenda, and registration is now open.
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Okay, it’s finally time to meet our speaker today, Ross Howard. As the Product Marketing Director at Inbox Insight, Ross specializes in creating strategic engagement solutions for B2B marketers.
He enthusiastically discusses how content, data, and buyer behavior align to drive growth for companies. Ross is obsessed with all things marketing, technology, and the burgeoning AI content revolution.
He has worked in roles across sales, marketing, and product management, all focused on helping companies deliver accelerated growth. So it is clear that we are in great hands today. So Ross, want to take us away here?
Ross Howard: Thank you. Everybody else for coming as well. I’m really excited for this session. I think it’s been great. So, an enterprise demand generation planning masterclass. I’ll let you be the judge of that. But what we really wanted to do today is give you a framework for planning your demand generation for 2025 and a few tips along the way.
Why I think that’s important is growth is getting hard. Sales pipelines are stalling. Cut through is difficult. Alignment’s getting more difficult as fingers get pointed. This is data from Ebster and Pavilion for their Date of Sales, which gathers together real feedback from chief revenue officers about how they’re doing. And it stood out to me as something that is…
I’m hearing anecdotally from our customers that the finger is getting pointed at marketing as the people that can change the game here. Like, how can we improve the pipeline that we are feeding sales and how can we turn it around?
Well, we’re going to talk about that today. So what we’ll cover in the session is how to set goals, how to identify your ICP, how to size your available market, how to use intent data to drill into that market, and then running integrated programs to reach and convert people while we jump in and out of real world examples.
And that real world example is not quite a real example because of NDAs and not wanting to share any sensitive client data. So, we’ve made an anonymous company, Acme Cybersecurity. And I want you to use your imagination, right?
You are now the marketer at Acme Cybersecurity, and you’re facing up to a big challenge. Sales are slowing in both your core USA region and field markets due to economic pressure and budget cuts. And so, you need to be looking at a localized strategy to support those global teams.
Increasing sales velocity and good fit leads that are going through to your departments and, you know, need to be engaging not only the users of the solution, but also the economic buying persona that is, you know, under budgetary pressure.
That’s a lot to do within our plan, but we’re going to try and, you know, tackle that as we go through, with that, with real data and with real examples as we would go through that process. The need is net new customers to drive that growth.
We’ve got to focus on how to get new people in through the door in this session rather than retention-based growth. And the goal is $1 million in new marketing-sourced revenue. And how we would approach that, or the way that a lot of us were taught, myself included, would be to look at the funnel. Right?
How do we get people from awareness to consideration, decision, retention, advocacy? That’s, you know, AIDA is another one. And how do we move people through that process with our brand?
We need to start rethinking that approach based on the latest data and B2B buying behavior. And we need to also make our planning more efficient than ever so that we can handle having cut budgets and increased cost of growth.
So that funnel, as steps in a spreadsheet, looks a little something like this. And if we were to set our goal at that million in revenue, we would want to be working back from how many deals we need to win.
In this example, using an average transaction value of $50,000, we need to get to 20 deals. And further up the pipeline we go, there’s a certain amount of drop off at each of those funnel stages that we should be tracking. Nothing massively wrong with this from a model perspective.
However, once we get into how customers actually buy, suddenly our way—a decent way to organize your go-to-market—doesn’t quite line up to what needs to happen anymore to convert a buyer.
Buyer behavior is changing as they engage with more pieces of content throughout their buying journey; over longer periods of time spent researching online without you knowing about them; and with more people within the decision-making unit or the buying group who need to be educated.
So, 10 buyers doing 10 hours of research a month across 10 content sources or touch points—that’s a lot of ground to cover. And to increase account penetration and engagement with those buyers, we have to be thinking about how we plan differently.
Another, you know, when we look at that previous funnel model, we have to think about the rates at which those leads convert and how they’re different from one another.
So you’d likely have an inbound model with people coming to your website or coming in through PPC. Those leads tend to be less targeted, but they tend to convert faster because they’re further through the cycle before they speak to you.
So there’s a lot of, you know, buzz around demand creation and trying to increase that volume. But if we’re trying to create a million in incremental revenue, we can’t necessarily speed that process up as predictably.
Then we look at outbound content leads. Okay, you know, which companies you want to go after. How do we increase the engagement from those companies? It’s going to take longer for you to nurture them.
It’s going to take a while for you to get in front and convince them of your value or your brand if you’re unknown to them. But you can increase volume there, and you can control the levers of how many people you go after.
And then you have your enterprise ABM motion, right? How are we going to get into the FTSE 500? Everybody’s going after them as well. They likely have incumbent suppliers. Their conversion rate’s going to be lower, the sales cycle is going to be longer, the volume of those leads is lower because the number of companies you can go after is physically lower. But they can be huge in value.
So we have these different tracks going on within our organizations, and we need to work within the, you know, across those to deliver value in each of those streams and somehow make it work within one consistent plan while thinking about that buyer journey.
And so, let’s review what we were talking about a second ago. You know, we know that we need to generate a certain number of those deals if nothing was changing in the win rate. The thing that’s changing here is the introduction of that MQL column, and I’ve set it to three contacts per account because that’s something our customers will book a lot of the time with us in cost-per-lead programs.
It’s a very common number to try and spread your budget, you know, between depth and breadth, to do three per account. So I’ve used that as the example here. With nothing else changing, suddenly you need to engage a lot more people within that decision-making across your budget, and that pushes the budget you have per MQL lower.
So when we think about how to afford to do more within the unit economics, we really need to be thinking about the lifetime value of that customer. So rather than look at 50k average transaction value, if we start to think of it as 50k to acquire a customer that’s going to stay with us for two deals at an 80% retention rate, suddenly that’s a 90k customer. And that gives us a lot more to play with.
When we think about sales accepted leads, or SQLs, we have more budget to play with to make a lead really care about us, really engage with us. So we’re more likely to get to the outcomes we want. And that pushes the economics more favorably with us to think, “How much can we invest to get back?” if we think—if we widen our time horizon and start thinking long-term growth rather than short-term quarterly results. But we’re still closing the same deals, we’re still adding the same value.
Word of warning: don’t just jump into this without warning anybody. This needs to be something that your CMO is bought into, that your CFO is bought into, and that the whole team gets behind.
As an idea of where do we need to be in all these percentages and all these numbers that makes sense for your business, but I would advise you think about it in terms of how much engagement can you afford to drive within a company, and are you seeing the benefit of that later on?
Okay, so we know that we need to generate 20 deals. Who are those 20 deals going to come from that’s going to benefit us the most? And that’s when it comes to finding your ideal customer profile.
The best way, I would say, to begin this journey and start tipping the odds in our favor is to look at your CRM data and your historic customer wins. Starting from what are the most positive customers you have in terms of those core metrics:
The sales cycle being lower, the value of the deal being higher, and a large enough segment (we’ll come onto next). Within there, look at the job titles of the people that are not just signing the contract off at the highest level, but also the champions within that deal process and the people most involved with your product. So you can build out a persona framework of the people involved and the pain points that they need to manage.
So in our cybersecurity example, I’ve picked out legacy network security that they need to update due to regulatory or compliance pressures, meaning that they need to migrate to a new solution. Very common, quite broad. It will be different for whatever your product or service is, and it will be attached to the roles and pressures of those job titles.
So really nail down: how can you identify (from either sales prospecting or lead gen or outside of the business from other markers) what the maturity is of that organization, what type of pain points they indicate, and if you can’t get that information looking inside your system at deals you’ve closed and what you learned about them, looking at the type of company and then finding more of those companies is still a realistic way to get more of the best people to work with in the future.
As we start to look at those more explicit data points, one that’s useful is technographic data. So install bases: what they currently use, what they have either that you will need to integrate with or that you will need to replace, or a gap within their system—having no [solution]—at all. Okay, I know that they need to have a ransomware solution in place because our solution helps with insuring against that, whatever it might be.
Making sure that you understand the landscape that you’re selling into can help you narrow down to the ideal customer. Then, of course, you need to know which geographies you want to be targeting and which industries you have the highest success rates with and the best case studies with.
And more importantly, what company size or revenue bracket do you support the best? That’s a lot to… Katie. These slides will be available, and we’ll send on the recording. But if you think about that in the pyramid to the right-hand side there, you’ll think about it in terms of value at the top.
Narrowed down: my biggest deals with my fastest sales cycle with the problems that were most painful, and then you’re widening out to other people who have that challenge that you can predict, that you can identify with that lookalike.
As you begin to size your market, make sure that that is based on real data from your CRM; whatever data you’ve got from your marketing automation platform; or from research vendors or partners you may want to work with.
And also, if you can combine it with that qualitative, anecdotal view of customer stories: why they bought from you and what you bought—what they bought from you—within that profile of company; what that looks like again and again. At ACME Cybersec, it’s: we have a certain amount of data that matches that ICP that we’ve identified.
Let’s look at it across the relationship that we have with them. And so, I’ve split it here into Brand Aware. That might be signals like they’ve subscribed to your emails, they’ve downloaded a piece of content, they’ve engaged with you at a trade booth.
Who do you have that is data that’s early within their relationship to you, but that you can contact? Solution Aware might be people that have gone on to prove to you that they know what you do and that they have more of a need for it. So they’re looking at the case studies page or buyer’s guides or technical requirements documents, the product materials.
You know that that takes you into a Product Aware category where they may be selecting or choosing between, or you may have profiled that person and had a conversation with them about their needs before. And then your customers—we’re not going to focus on that this much this session—but there’s always, you know, customer marketing alignment where you, as a demand generator, you need to understand who you could be cross-selling and upselling to.
Now these numbers at the bottom indicate, okay, you have a lot of people that you’ve engaged in the past that you can go and nurture, to that you may be able to go and revive or engage. But is it enough to generate the 6,600 leads we needed from the previous slide, right, from those MQLs?
Unlikely. At a decent open rate, click-through rate, and across the different digital devices you could reach, just farming that audience is probably not going to get you to target. So now it’s where you should start.
But you need to think about who is out there that you could reach. And then you have the opposite problem: there’s too many people to go after. Right. You know, if you have… even with your ideal customer profile, there is a lot of ground to cover, and you’ve got to choose, in your planning for next year, where the best accounts are and how you can find those individuals that you can have sales conversations with.
A model that I like for this is looking at Total Addressable Market, and then drilling down into a Serviceable Addressable Market, which is: of that TAM, who is it that you can really help the most based on those ICP signals and the type of company size, type of maturity that you have? And then within that, what’s the realistic segment that you could obtain?
So your Serviceable Obtainable Market is understanding what’s reasonable with your budget that you have and forecasting the number of deals that you’re going to land against it. What’s the right size of companies for you to be going after to create the deal flow that you need.
So let’s look at that as an example. So this is database queries that I’ve pulled against the… the ICP that we’ve been talking about in terms of 500-plus employees, IT security or network security, specific job titles within the regions that we discussed.
I’ve left out technographic for now because there are a lot of solutions that the vendors (this was based on) sell. What contact data is available is not necessarily… you’re going to have to go to a partner potentially, or a database vendor, or use somebody else to get this information if you don’t have it within your company already.
But it’s a really important part in the planning process to know what is reasonable and know how many people are actually available for you to go after. So with these counts, we can see that actually 70% of the addressable people that are relevant to us are below the decision-making threshold that we care about.
We want to be communicating to at least managers for this campaign in order to generate sales conversations out from that demand. And so, we know we’re focusing on 30% of the audience.
And then, in terms of our regional or field campaigns, we have, you know, we can size the market more accurately across which countries hold the highest opportunity for us or how much penetration we need into supporting a niche European market. So, good news, right? We have enough data out there to run a program to hit the lead volume that we needed to hit target.
The next question is going to be: how do we get to the best leads from that 6,600? Intent data… I’m going to redefine it quickly because there’s a lot of vendors out there pushing different types of intent data that are gathered in different ways with different algorithms.
A useful way to think about it in customer conversations that I’ve been having is: buyers researching your topic area on your website or other websites. The signals that they create grouped together—that’s intent. It breaks down into proof-based—you know, they did that, that exact person did that, they have those history of those actions—or probability-based. It’s highly likely that they are interested in that topic area.
And that can be based on AI, machine learning lookalikes, any of these clever modeling technologies that are available from ourselves and others. Those are there to help you be… to predict the interest levels and intent of a company in order to generate those best leads. Mixing that in with the proof is always best.
And another piece of advice or question that I get often is: do I have to buy this as a technology solution? You have to have some other piece of tech that does this for me. How do I do it?
If you think of your first-party intent layer as those known individuals with proof and those unknown individuals who are coming to your website, if you think about it from the layer of: how can you capture those signals and store them from yourselves?
So companies hitting your website—if you’re using any of the tools that use IP address matching or a data graph to say these are the companies that visited your website—if you can store that information, you can use that as sales triggers, as planning tips, as a way to recut your data in your CRM or your marketing automation platform.
And it gives you knowledge about the quality of traffic you’re driving to your site and to your content. There’s tons of vendors that do this. That was the top eight that came to mind. But there’s plenty of them out there.
What you’re aiming for, though, is knowledge of what these companies—which companies have come to the site. If you can then combine that with a one-to-one, individual-based tracking solution, where you’re gathering first-party data, consented opt-ins of people that have engaged with your brand.
That’s going to help build up your long-term nurture pot, and it’s also going to help increase the number of touch points you’re getting into those accounts during their research phase, during their buyer’s journey.
It will also help you capture explicit, zero-party data. “What is your biggest challenge right now?” Somebody tells you that—that’s the best type of intent you can get. How we do it is through Insights for Professionals, which is our website and content platform, our hub and product that combines and tracks content via the format of the content.
So, was it an upper-funnel, educational piece? Was it a mid-funnel white paper or long-form webinar? Was it a lower-funnel buyer’s guide or comparison journey website? And combines that into a model where we crunch numbers around how often they’ve come to the site, how often they’ve engaged with the same companies and the topics that they’ve engaged under, to allow us to make predictive choices around who the best vendors to show them would be in future journeys.
We then validate that with an additional layer of data from third-party vendors. Bombora’s highlighted on this slide. We use them and a few others in order to understand what the company is doing elsewhere on the web as well as within our ecosystem.
But there’s no reason you can’t set up a structure like this on your own corporate website or your own content hub outpost. What you’re really looking for is: who’s coming to the site? What are they doing? What am I learning through that process that gives me more information to make data-driven, insight-driven planning decisions and get the most out of my budget?
What that looks like in reality is a load of keywords. So we tag and match to all sorts of different topic areas. These are real tags from an IT security campaign.
As people engage with content on these topic areas, we are associating them and their company to these topic areas.
Now, when you’re choosing them, in order to decide how to plan, you need to be thinking of three things. One is the problem area where that ICP needs the help the most.
Remember back in our… in our triangle, we were looking at what are the pain points that this particular segment of my market that is most ideal for me has. Focus in on those pain points and attach them to these keywords.
The next is looking at, okay, so there’s a trending keyword here, but is that the one where I need to generate pipeline? Does that match my demand generation objective or my product launch objective?
Making sure that you’re choosing the keywords that have the most interest and also have the most benefit to you as an organization, and then also making sure that you have something valuable to say to that person.
So, if the keyword is something that is really trending and it’s an area where you need to support, but you don’t have enough content to produce, market, and engage your audience with, you’re going to fall flat because you’re not able to capture that intent.
Making sure that you have a good balance between these three things is really important to getting the most out of this planning exercise. What it looks like when you get it back is all sorts of data points that you can use to understand more about who’s in market for a particular topic area.
So, three here that we break down, that we give in our planning and end-of-campaign reports and target countless health checks and all sorts of different deliverables. Essentially, it shows you funnel stage, who’s doing research at the moment, and how much research they’ve done up to this point. So, it gives you an idea of timing.
Another useful one is competitor intent. So, within those keywords, not only are we tracking who’s in market for Zero Trust, we’re also tracking who is looking at Sophos vs. Bitdefender vs. Rapid7 so that we can understand who of your competitive set you need to position against, understand what their messaging is, or have different battle cards or resources that you can provide that audience.
And the other is trends analysis over time. So, there may be really popular trends, but they’ve stopped growing. And there may be trends that are growing in popularity and spiking really fast. That allows you to see the way the market is moving and make sure that your creative teams, your content teams, and your planning accounts for what you should be talking about as well as just the content you have today. Remember, the objective for this is the cross-section of that market.
So, we had those huge amounts of data that we could go after to generate our leads. We should be using these topics to build lists of companies.
Lists of individuals within those companies comes in time and is often part of that predictive layer. But something that’s really going to help tie your planning together, and I’m sure a lot of you do now, is having a clear target account list that’s been refreshed based on this data. For each campaign, it helps you get the best leads you possibly can within that volume that you’re able to generate or trying to generate. But it can get really complicated, right?
So, if you add in region on top of that list that we just looked at, and then persona, and then different product categories, it can get very complex, and it can split you apart in terms of what you’re able to achieve.
So, making sure that you have a balance between the complexity of managing the campaigns and splitting down too granularly and, in a holistic sense, how are you driving the value of your content into the market? How are you helping people get to those 10 content touch points over time while they research should be—you know—you don’t want to lose sight of the overall goal.
Now, this is a real example of a client plan. Names have been changed to make sure that we’re not giving anything away here. But you can get some mega spreadsheets across, right, where you’re trying to understand how much reach can we get into different markets across different channels, split down by the type of content topic area, the type of persona, the type of region, all of those things.
So, making sure that you’re planning proportionately to what the goal is, but that you can get to this level of detail is useful if you’ve got a lot to orchestrate. Where we end up—three things that you should end up at the end of that process—is a clear, ideal customer profile where you know who the perfect fit customer is for you; a serviceable, obtainable market where you know how many of those customers there are out there and individuals that you should be targeting; and then a target account list of the people within that SOM which are most engaged at the moment in researching your solution.
If you get those three, it’s going to make your campaigns far more productive and efficient, as you’re going to be engaging the people who are most interested in the audience with that budget into the accounts that are going to pay off the best. The buyer’s journey split into problem, solution.
Brand awareness is something that we’ve been speaking to customers more and more about because the research needs are different at each of those periods of time. One stat that stood out from our recent buyer research report was that 72% of the audience said the average purchase length for a B2B tech buying process was one to six months, regardless of solution.
It skewed slightly longer in the enterprise, as you would expect, but not so much that—you know—outside of that. So, really, you’ve got six months to catch these people’s attention and make sure that you’re the front-of-mind resource and the brand they trust the most during that journey.
Where they are doing that research is not always on your site. So, while you’re thinking of your demand generation planning as paid activations or organic to bring people to your website, we also need to think about what outposts they’re currently engaged on and what they trust.
So, as part of the research, we asked the audience, “Which social platforms do you use for work-related content?” Now, unsurprisingly, LinkedIn is the top platform for work-related content because it’s this whole thing.
But what was really interesting to me was how high Facebook and YouTube were within that, and the targeting capabilities within those platforms and the remarketing capabilities within these platforms are really quite good.
They’re improving all the time. So, as you think as a B2B marketer about your plan, don’t be afraid to put B2B content in what might be a downtime or B2C environment, because really those professionals are still within your ICP, they’re within your SOM, and they care about work even out of hours, which is available in the Linked Tech report as well.
So, having a look at what those other social profiles are will give you a mix of channels that can drive down your media cost and increase the amount of touch points you can get against the audience.
The other places they’re spending their time is third-party impartial environments. So, if there are publishing environments where people are going to where they trust resources or where they can compare brands across in the same environment, they can see lots of content from lots of different brands. Sponsoring those environments, partnering with them gives your brand additional trust because they’re already trusted more than a vendor and also allows you to access an audience that you otherwise couldn’t generate leads from. So, that additional value of increased trust and increased reach is really helpful for delivering those demand chain campaigns.
Once you know which outposts your audience spends their time on and where you want to try, we have to think about how much content do we have to distribute to these people.
So, auditing the different types of formats of assets you have across the different stages in that buyer’s journey and also for the different personas within your buying group is a really important part of the planning process.
I’m not going to spend that long on it today, but making sure that you have enough content to fit each of their information needs about the different product lines, topics, and people you need to speak to will help you balance out and engage more people of the different group that you are going to need to ultimately make that purchase decision.
The other thing I would say here is: don’t forget about localization. Right from our objectives before we were targeting Germany, France, Netherlands.
Localizing is really important for increasing your cut-through as well as making better relationships for the salesperson to follow up with. It shows you care about their market, and it also boosts all of your stats. So, it’s a really vital part of the planning process to audit.
How are we saying this to people? And do we know enough about that local market? Then, when we think about that content process, how can we execute and push the content to market?
Content syndication is a mainstay of a lot of plans still. There has been murmuring of moving away from MQLs, but actually a lot of the customers that I speak to not only still have it in the plan, they still rely on it because it’s a really firm signal that somebody is interested in a topic area and you actually know who they are.
The other ABM tracking that we talked about earlier is good for understanding which companies are in market and giving your sales team signals to action. But a lot of those sales teams aren’t sure what to do with a signal, and they still have to break in cold to a company that might not want to talk with them yet. So, but by combining your target account list with making sure you’re generating a certain amount of content engagement with an email address attached to it, with additional profiling questions attached to it as to what they care about, is still a really rich way to get attention from that company. Leads to begin to nurture and extra data about what that company cares about so that you can do better nurture programs and make that company more engaged as time goes on. Integrating that into a full-funnel program across multiple channels is going to get you better results.
What that looks like for us is multi-touch integrated nurture. So, what I mean by that is people that come through to your landing pages, people that download the content, engage with them across the multiple channels where they spend their time and the email addresses that you can reach them with. And once you get that action, don’t stop there.
Make sure that you are not only delivering them email, drip feed, and social selling, but you’re also using your paid layer to reach other people from within that company that you need to engage because you have a strong signal that someone there is interested. We need to think about how we can widen that out to the other people within—you know—the seven to 10 people within that decision-making unit on average. That can be way, way more that you need to cover to get groundswell and to get them talking about you and to get that whole company trusting you, making sure that you have integrated campaigns is the best way to do that.
LinkedIn being the top of the list for that media, I wanted to put this in there. Now, we use LinkedIn for clients for B2B of all different natures. It’s an incredibly powerful tool. But if you are just using that to try and hit that lead volume, it can spiral costs quite fast if you are going cold to the audience.
So, what we’ve found is if you can build in a layer of engagement on other channels first: the account-based engagements, people reading your content, coming to the website, the lead gen based engagements as they download assets and fill in forms for you, and use that to inform the LinkedIn remarketing piece, you will see much better engagement from that, and you also won’t skew your plan towards over-delivering because you can’t frequency cap on LinkedIn and you can’t day-part it.
So, you are going to be serving, a lot of the time, the same creatives over and over again to a very small group of people for quite a lot of money that they don’t necessarily engage on that channel anyway. It’s far better to use it as a holistic engagement and education play around channels designed to chip away at your lead gen target.
And then what do we get from the display media? Part of this, display allows you to deliver highly targeted, highly trackable impressions at high volume. So, the ability to get more and more brand touch points in front of the audience is a benefit from that channel, and it’s now baked into a lot of account-based marketing solutions for that reason.
However, we see that we beat those benchmarks that you can get just running ads to the audience if you, again, combine it with full-funnel delivery next to really valuable content. So, this is an example of an IT security campaign that we’re running.
We can see top-performing accounts by the number of impressions we’ve delivered to them and the number of clicks we’ve had, top performing banner sizes and creative sets that we’ve used to engage the audience.
This is the breakdown that I would advise that you have so that you can see how to optimize and improve over time on the messaging you’re delivering to the audience, but also to feed back to sales and back to the marketing team around how to double down on the accounts that are clearly most interested or most reachable so that you can engage them further by tying all these channels together. Each one is more than the sum of its parts. Where did we end up?
This is a hell of a slide. Bear with me. I’ve added in the additional channel layers that we were talking about there, the traffic and the display impressions, because I wanted to see that as a holistic plan.
I’ve broken it out by region based on that market coverage from sizing our obtainable market before. And that gave me a set of target accounts from within those countries and the lists of intent analysis that we did of people that were interested in our topics.
So, those are our target accounts per country by size. Within there, we know how many of those accounts we’re going to aim for: 15% of the total list size that we’re going to try and reach and convert leads from.
And we’re going to aim for three leads per account, and we’re going to aim to get 20% to download additional assets. That overall increases the cost, right? We’re generating more engagement per account, so our overall media spend goes up a bit.
But actually the additional lifetime value that we get back and the additional engagement from those accounts more than pays it back. So, what—you know—ideally, by going after companies with bigger deal sizes, historically looking for those within our ICP, we expect to increase the average transaction value of the deals that we get from companies that we’ve closed during this process.
As we look at engaging more people within the buyer’s committee, we look at increased win rates because we’ve educated more of them, and more of them trust our company. So, we should be watching the drop-off between SQL negotiation; that should improve as well, right?
As there are fewer blockers and more people within the company are more engaged, the time to close deals comes down. More deals close, and as we look at—you know—”How can we increase engagement without increasing the cost per sales accepted lead?” we can be more efficient with that spend and our sales accepted lead cost stays roughly the same. But the good thing is our revenue here doubles because we made those improvements to the amount of win rate and to the average transaction value.
We get $2 million instead of $1 million. That’s what we’re all here for. So, the idea of this planning session is: if you can engage people multiple times within an organization, if you can change your demand generation planning based on what will enable buyers to make good decisions with you, you’re going to see that uptick within your end results. I think I should take a breath. That’s it from me, Kelly.
Kelly Lindenau: Yes. That was an awesome presentation. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. You did spark some great questions as they were coming in. So, we’re going to move over to our little Q&A portion. So, the first question that I grabbed for you is: How can I better understand the specific pain points of my ideal customer profile?
Ross Howard: Well, that is an excellent question. So, pain points within the ICP, some people split this apart, but I actually think they’re quite tied together. So, developing personas of who buys from you and who needs your solution the most is really important. Having a document or a data-backed artifact in the business that says, “These are our customers, and this is usually what they suffer from,” is really important. That can change, and—you know—certain problems increase in frequency depending on the type of company because they all share things that are in common. So, analyzing—you—once you’ve identified your ICP from what matters to you to which accounts do you want to grow into, what type of companies do you want to win, speak to sales and customer success. New tools which will do AI transcription of ALD call recordings can help you get a lot of data quite quickly that you can then search and wade through and use LLMs to summarize for you, which will let you know, “Okay, of these particular companies, when I look back at how we’ve engaged with them, this is what mattered to them.” Then you can feed that data back to your content team, to other people within your department, to brainstorm how you can engage them further.
Kelly Lindenau: All right, awesome. So then the next question that I have up for you is: how can I plan out how to personalize my campaigns?
Ross Howard: Cool. Yeah, the personalization, I think, is dependent. Somebody gave me some really good advice recently, which is like, just knowing someone’s pet’s name isn’t personalization, right? What they’re really looking for is like relevance, that you can solve their problem and that you’ve been proven to do so before. So, when you’re personalizing, making sure that you have personalized the message that you send out to them, the destination that they’re going to based on what’s actually likely to matter to them as a segment, as well as—you know—changing the imagery on your landing page to be about their industry or changing the website automatically to say which company they’ve come from, that stuff, it has—you know—does prove to increase your effectiveness of conversion, but really it’s about increasing the likelihood of relevance and having great examples. If you can then take those great examples that—you know—break them into segments and match it against the nurture pathways that you’re using, that makes it more tangible, right? Okay, a company comes in of this industry, here’s my content lined up that I know those industries care the most about. These are the people that I’m going to deliver it to across their company. If you get too complicated with that, it can become quite unmanageable in your CRM workflows and in setting up loads of different line items in your DSP, and it can be hell to manage, right? So, try and find a balance of two or three personas that really matter in two or three types of company and start from that.
Kelly Lindenau: All right, perfect. And then the next question I grabbed for you is: how should I tailor my demand generation strategy to meet the needs of different regions?
Ross Howard: Yeah, I think “speak to your people in those regions and the customers in those regions” would be my advice. Get really close to the people that are in either your field marketing team, if you have them, or event marketers that go there all the time or the sales teams in those regions. Because it can be, there may be different language or messaging that you could be using for that region that’s going to really help increase your campaign performance. Or there could be stuff that a translation agency or machine translation isn’t going to pick up, like certain people within the German market will use a lot of English loan words if, for some—for some topic areas within B2B and not within others, they’ll have their entire own way of speaking about that. We didn’t know that until we hired somebody into the copy team from Germany. You know, like there are ways that you need to sort of have that regional and national localized insight that’s going to really help you speak like you are part of that world. Having either partnered organizations or people that can support you through that process to customize and localize your content and translate it where it matters is really helpful because it enhances your credibility, and they likely already have an audience there that they can engage on your behalf. And, you know, another thing I would say is like, at least translate the—like—ads, right? At least translate the email copy. We still get given quite a lot of content where the brand doesn’t have the time or the budget to translate the full white papers. They don’t necessarily have a subject matter expert that’s going to film the whole webinar in French, right, who’s from that market. That’s understandable. But try and at least reach and communicate to that person to grab their attention in the language that they’re most comfortable in.
Kelly Lindenau: All right, perfect. Then we are coming up on time, but I want to grab just one more question before we sign off for the day. That one’s going to be: How can I improve campaign visibility and performance when working with third-party lead vendors?
Ross Howard: That’s a kick-ass question. “Pick trustworthy partners” is a bit of a glib answer, but like, really make sure that you’re working with people who give you information like, will have an open conversation with you, that when they’re onboarding you, they’re talking to you about compliance, they’re talking about process, they’re asking you good questions about your plan and about your content rather than—you know—”Yeah, I can get you 3,000 leads off your data sheet” without asking you anything about how, why that should happen, right? Making sure that there’s that connection and partnership and transparency is really important. Another way that you can ensure that happens is to set like quality benchmarks and really be clear on the SLAs that are in place, like, what should a lead look like, when should it come to you, how often are they going to come across, and what information are you going to get? And just making sure that there’s an easy process that if you’ve—if they’ve not met that for any reason that you can reject that lead and that it doesn’t count to any guarantees that you have with that vendor. Having a really clear set of rules around what good looks like will help you both be more comfortable, and it will help make your campaigns better over time. And another thing I’d say with that is looking at your own lead scoring internally. If you have lead scoring set up in your CRM or marketing automation can help work out—you know—”Are these leads—do these leads look like they’re going in the right direction over time and going to convert?” Otherwise—you know—we provide lead scoring with our leads to help customers decide how to nurture them and which ones to prioritize and help them partner with their sales team so that they can have an educated conversation around what is—again—what is that quality, what is that performance, and making it visible to not just marketing but the wider revenue team to see what they should be doing and make sure that they’re driving meetings, pipeline, revenue.
Kelly Lindenau: All right, perfect. So, unfortunately, we are out of time for questions, but if you submitted one and we didn’t get to it, don’t worry, we will provide follow-up answers via email. So, that is a wrap here. Before we sign off, I would like to remind everyone once again to please take our survey so we can continue to enhance these events and tailor them to your liking. Again, thank you all for tuning in today, and another big thank you to Ross for that awesome presentation. We do have another session airing shortly, so I hope to see you all over there. And if not, I hope you all enjoy the rest of your day.
