SPEAKER

Christian Klepp, Steffan Hedebrandt

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for B2B marketers that helps you to question the conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry, and take your marketing to new heights. Each week, we talk to B2B marketing experts who share inspirational stories, discuss our thoughts and trending topics, and provide useful marketing tips and recommendations. And now, here’s your host and co-founder of EINBLICK Consulting, Christian Klepp. Welcome, everyone to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast where you get your weekly dose of B2B marketing insights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I am joined by someone on a mission to solve the problem of B2B revenue attribution. So coming to us from Copenhagen, Denmark, Mr. Steffan Hedebrandt. Let me see if I can get this right. Hej og velkommen.

Steffan Hedebrandt  00:52

Thank you. Pretty good Danish you got there.

Christian Klepp  00:55

Thank you. I could almost be Danish right. Almost.

Steffan Hedebrandt  00:58

Almost. Yeah. The name could even go. I would say.

Christian Klepp  01:01

Yeah. And I know what Hygge is. Right? That’s also important. Very important.

Steffan Hedebrandt  01:08

Hygge.

Christian Klepp  01:09

All right. Great to have you on the show Steffan. And and I mean, this is a super important topic and B2B marketing. So let’s get this conversation started. 

Steffan Hedebrandt  01:18

Yep. Absolutely.

Christian Klepp  01:19

Awesome. So Steffan, you’re clearly a very data-driven, B2B marketer who’s passionate about everything that’s linked to driving revenue. So in our previous conversation, I remember you talking about something that I believe is super important for B2B marketers to understand, and that’s how to map the customer journey towards revenue. So, I think that last part is very crucial, right? So towards revenue. Talk to us about why you think that’s so important.

Steffan Hedebrandt  01:49

So good question, Chris. I think in general, if you want to kind of repeat what’s working, if you want to scale the good stuff, and stop the bad stuff, then it’s important to know what’s worked like; which path do the accounts that you will take towards becoming a customer. So it sounds fairly simple, but you know, of all the activities you do, unfortunately, most stuff actually do not end up becoming deals you win and revenue you generate. So that’s why it’s so important to be looking at the accounts that do take a path all the way through your sales pipeline, and you win them. And typically, you’d be trying to look for things that are repeatable stuff you can do, again, whether that’s a webinar or video, click on an ad or certain things, you want to be identifying  all those stuff that are consistently present when you win deals, or it could be like a demo call or stuff like that. So look, simply speaking, when we just want to try to understand when we do win deals, or when we at least generate our sales opportunities. Which activities did they go through? And can we do more of them?

Christian Klepp  03:11

Yeah, I mean, you’re absolutely right, it on the surface, it does sound very simple. As a as a marketer, you look at that and say, Well, of course, you should be doing that way. But I think and that’s also part of the reason I am assuming your company exists, because in reality, it doesn’t always work that way, right.

Steffan Hedebrandt  03:11

No.

Christian Klepp  03:15

There’s distractions, because as we know, especially, and I’m interested to get your thoughts on this, I feel marketing has evolved into something that’s actually highly complex, right? Because as marketers, you’re kind of expected to know everything.

Steffan Hedebrandt  03:46

Yeah. So we can just open the box a little bit to why this is not as simple as it sounds. And so I come from a B2B background. I’ve never actually been working with with B2C companies. So as a listener, you should also be, you should know that this is how my world looks like and I’ve mainly been working in in companies where like the digital part has been playing the main part of the company. So it’s a highly digital B2B go-to-market kind of thinking that I have. Just a couple of weeks back, we released some benchmarks from Dreamdata, where we looked at the average customer journey of, I think, around 400 accounts with us. And what we found there was that the average B2B customer journey had from first touch to being 192 days in between. It had 32 touches, and more than two people were always involved when people win deals. And when you start seeing these things, then it gets more complex to understand what’s going on. And this is a this is numbers from when Dreamdata have done all the hard work of collecting all the data from the different data silos that lives within. So B2B company would hopefully have a CRM system, it will have a marketing automation tool, it might have a customer success tool, it might have an outreach tool, it will have ad platforms, it will have a website and ebooks and all these things. And typically, all these things generate data into like a point solution, into like a data silo. And it gets very hard to understand what’s actually going on. Even if you’re just to stitch together the journey of one account, but if not, typically, you’re dealing with tens or hundreds or thousands of accounts simultaneously. So it becomes very, very complex. From a data point of view, you need to understand just this one account, who is associated with this? What are they doing in each of our tools, and, you know, you can easily be deceived by some things that looks to be starting a lot of journeys, but if there’s never a revenue component along with it, then it’s actually not a good activity. But there are so many ways that this, it can be very, like what I started explaining simply can be actually be quite hard to do, because it’s not just that easy to get an overview of, of a customer journey. Does that make sense, Chris?

Christian Klepp  06:29

Yes, yes. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think the world is overwhelming, right? Because there’s so many things happening. You know, those statistics you brought up are incredibly interesting. So 192 days, I was like, Yeah, okay. Yeah, sure. I mean, definitely, you’re talking about the cycle or the decision making process, you know, last thing, or it takes a matter a couple of months, right, when we’re not even talking weeks, months, right? Because I think you’re seeing that report by Gartner about the B2B buyers journey right? It’s not linear. It’s over the place. Thirty-two touches was interesting, because I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day, it was from a research from Forrester, they were saying at least 27. Yeah, it’s not completely off. But you know, it kind of swings between 27 to 32. Right, in terms of the touches. And again, I think it was also to your point, it really also depends on the organization. It depends on the industry, because it’s so broad. Right?

Steffan Hedebrandt  07:35

Yeah, I think the conclusion remains the same that, expect complexity in B2B. And I think this is important to recognize that because all the tools that we marketers use every day, the Google Analytics, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, Facebook, ads, etc. All of these platforms are really not good at explaining what takes place in a B2B context. They are built to actually understand a B2C scenario, like one person who clicks this ad comes to your website, purchase this shoe. It’s not built to understand this person starting the journey, then he had a boss and they had some quality insurance, then the CFO joined the journey, etc. So when you look at your ad spend in as a B2B marketer, in these platforms, you have the cost component and the activity, which is to click on the ad. But you don’t have the revenue component because the CRM system sits on this. So you can’t in the same e-commerce kind of way, compare costs to the revenue, you will need to use perhaps a tool to this or at least know that you should think about the numbers you’re looking at differently. Or maybe you can establish approximate track for what could become revenue later on. Typically, you know, a very early stage proxy metric could be a newsletter signup, but better have perhaps a demo call and maybe even later on a sales meeting as well. You know what I mean? So, you want to be like, find ways to kind of, if you cannot connect to the full journey, then you can at least connect to a step in the journey that is further down, and just a click on the cost.

Christian Klepp  09:34

Exactly, exactly. And, you know, some of the things you’ve brought up in the past couple of minutes. That was a great segue into the next question. And I’m sure you will have no problem answering this, but like the common mistakes and misconceptions you’ve seen out there, and more specifically with the to back to the topic of mapping the customer journey towards revenue. So what are some of these mistakes that you’ve seen and how should these be addressed?

Steffan Hedebrandt  09:59

You know what, like a typical rant would be that people, you know, care too much about collecting leads? Because I think, per my own experience as well, you know, you can run ebook ads on LinkedIn and get people to download the ebook, but it’s still pretty far from becoming a deal…

Steffan Hedebrandt  10:04

Absolutely. A download doesn’t specify intention to buy, right?

Steffan Hedebrandt  10:27

No, not at all. And so like this, it’s this thing about, you have to recognize that, just because they do the first step of the journey does not necessarily mean that they will do the last step of the journey. A different example of this is that on our page, we have a bug bounty program. That page actually converts people into emails quite good. But it’s because it’s those bug bounty people who come in, and they convert, because they want to make some dollars for finding a bug in our system. None of those actually go on and become sales pipeline, or, you know, deals we win. So you can generate all the emails in the world. But if they’re not really actually your ideal customer profile, then you’re probably never going to make any money out of it. Another set of benchmark, if you want, that are quite interesting to talk about, as well as that, typically, when you ask people about their customer journey, what they’re actually often referring to is their sales journey. How long does that take? Because we can see across all our accounts that the known and unknown time, or like the research phase, versus the identified phase, is typically the same length. So if your salespeople are normally saying that our customer journey in our company is three months, then that probably means that the user has actually spent or the company has spent another three months just doing research about you. And this matters a whole lot when you’re trying to you know, get together a budget for how are we going to hit the revenue we need this year, or I’m trying to understand if my experiment is working or not, then if you get that, like measurement off wrong with with three months, then you might risk stopping stuff that is working well or stop stuff, like continue stuff than you shouldn’t have stopped a long time ago.

Christian Klepp  12:29

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I love the points that you brought up. In fact, I think it will almost merit a separate podcast episode just on the topic of collecting leads, right? We keep seeing this. And, you know, I suppose it’s also partly because of the systems that were set up that you know, marketers and salespeople are pressured to collect as many leads as possible. So it’s this whole playing the volume game. But as you just mentioned earlier on in the conversation, the process is long, right?

Steffan Hedebrandt  13:04

Absolutely.

Christian Klepp  13:05

And more often than not, a lot of these guys are just giving up too early in the piece, which means it’s one thing to collect the leads, you would probably even argue collecting the leads is the easy part. Right? It’s the part about nurturing the leads that eventually leads them to conversion, right to become a paying customer. That’s the hard part.

Steffan Hedebrandt  13:27

Yeah, I think also like another thing is kind of, in these companies where the divide between marketing and sales becomes too large, that’s when you’re really gonna have the problems because, like, for marketers, the best way to improve the return on your ad spend is to be good friends with the salespeople. Because you can produce as many sales qualified leads as you want. But if the salespeople are not actually picking up the phone and speaking to the leads that you produce, there’s never going to be a revenue component to your work. And then on the other side, if you’re like, if you’re a salesperson, and you’re annoyed by the material that marketing produces for you, well, then it’s also your duty to go into the marketing room and tell them: Look, these are the accounts that I like to speak with, they convert faster, they’re of a higher quality. Or we consistently get being told the five or ten questions, and I always have to explain this to people because there’s no information about it on our website. So, like these things that you are consistently meeting in the market, make sure to go to tell that to your marketers, because then they can produce material that are not like one to one, but one to many instead.

Christian Klepp  14:49

Exactly, exactly. So to your point, it’s to bridge this disconnect, right or to or to bridge that gap because what you’re talking about is clearly that there’s a gap being created. between the two sides or, you know, they’re not working together, they’re not talking to each other, then there’s a disconnect. The salespeople end up not using the materials made by marketing, because they don’t find that useful. Right? Those kinds of things. Yeah, no, those are those are really interesting. Those are really important insights. Talk to us about a, you probably heard many, but like, talk to us about one challenge that you and your team have managed to solve in the past 12 months related to customer journeys.

Steffan Hedebrandt  15:26

I think we experienced a little bit this like classic thing with the smaller accounts can be just as hard to win as larger accounts. And this has kind of been something that we’ve also been, you know, slowly realizing, at least for tool of our nature, that you want to have a lot of stakeholders using the product. Because when contract renewal is, has come up, and you know what your one stakeholder has left the account, then it’s going to be a tough situation to renew the contract. It’s also just from the more you spend, the more value, you also get out of, you know, an attribution tool like ours. And for us, that also correlates with us being able to, you know, charge a higher fee, if that account is larger then it’s relatively not as expensive. So I think it’s this realization that we probably want to shift our ICP a bit upwards. And to do so speaking of the customer journey, we’ve also shifted the you can say the… you know, acquisition strategy a bit as well from being very Google Search ads heavy, and to more using matched accounts on LinkedIn, where you can kind of upload a list of accounts that fit your ideal customer profile, and then you can run ads towards them. It’s not as click-driven as the Google search ad, which means it’s also a bit harder to prove that it’s working. But we’re going with the notion that if people work in these accounts, and they are marketers here, then the value of them seeing our ads must be worth it. And these accounts are then larger than our traditional accounts has been so far.

Christian Klepp  17:23

You were talking about the, you know, this challenge that you guys faced, and this approach with the LinkedIn ads, and I just wanted to know how you came up with that approach, like what was the data telling you that you came to that conclusion that you should use this approach.

Steffan Hedebrandt  17:39

It’s better to have a larger account, because you know, the value we bring will naturally be larger. And we’ll get some work with more people and a company that has more resources to also act upon the information that we give them. Yeah, I think in general, kind of this ideal customer profile focus has just been very valuable for us. It’s also speaking of like the data, you know some of the first accounts that we signed, they have also churned. And we’ve found out that there is such a thing as an ideal customer profile, also for our company. And what that means is that it’s like, who’s willing to pay for your product, but also who’s going to be happy or being accustomed with you. Because if you’re in a subscription business like ours, it’s not enough that you’re a good salesperson that can push the first deal through, you also need to be able to renew the contract. And we initially sold to a couple of large hardware manufacturers. What we experience with them is that even though they might have a significant ads digitally, the sales model would be like resellers and Channel Sales. And from an attribution perspective, that can be a challenge, because you have a lot of cost. But it can be hard to understand where the products actually end up in the end, which led to those being harder to renew and us spending time and resources on somebody who might actually not be a good fit for our long term development. So, that was definitely one place where the data was telling us to save your time and resources, and going in a different direction.

Christian Klepp  19:25

Exactly. Thanks for elaborating on that further. I thought that was really interesting. You’re probably not going to have any problem answering this question, but the importance of actually having the right strategy and conducting the right research before you create or map the customer journey. Can you talk to us about that?

Steffan Hedebrandt  20:12

Yeah, absolutely. If we go back to the kind of thinking on ideal customer profile, I think this is something that should be strategically aligning your whole company. You should agree upon, like having inputs from sales, from marketing, from product, customer success, etc, on who’s really the ideal people for us to work with. And then we need to, you know, from a marketing point of view, focus on starting journeys with these companies, salespeople should then like, you will always get leads that are not good fits. But you should make sure that your salespeople only work on the accounts or try to sell to the accounts that looks to be like somebody who looks like they will be a happy customer with you, your product team should then also only be spending their resources on trying to build product for those who you want to be your ideal customer profile. And if you can see your all your CS resources is actually going into somebody who’s not fitting what your strategy really is, then the whole company just gets misaligned. So I think it’s like, you know, a customer journey is also like, in touch, pretty much any department in a company for a customer life lifecycle. And that one needs to be rooted in, in a certain strategy. And then every part of it should also go into, like fitting that customer journey.

Christian Klepp  21:38

Right. Exactly, exactly. What What about external validation? Or rather, what I mean is like, also, you know, of course, you’ve talked to your sales and your customer success and so far. But what about doing these research with existing customers or prospects, you think it’d be important to work?

Steffan Hedebrandt  21:56

Yeah. So we’re also going to have one of these venture funded companies. And when, when you’re that you also need to be able to paint a fairly large market, preferably like a billion dollar market in some way. So that was also kind of as we… now we say, our ideal customer profile is B2B Software as a Service company. But before we dared settling on that we needed to, you know, validate with macro data that, can we actually identify enough accounts here to actually build a really large company. So what we practically did was, we did like two things. One, we looked at how many, like for the biggest CRM systems out there, how many of those would have B2B customers that painted a really large market, I think it was, like 22 trillion or something like that, and then being more concerned. Now, a billion probably,

Christian Klepp  22:57

Still pretty big.

Steffan Hedebrandt  23:00

And then we said, Okay, if we then really narrow and just look at B2B SaaS companies, we could still find like, 40,000 accounts out there that, like, if we can win 5% of that market at our current deal size, we’ve built a really, really large company. So those macro data was part of confirming that you can build a big company here. And then we’ve typically been be targeting the marketing departments of these companies. And then through our customer, our early stage customers, we knew that we were solving a big problem for them. And I also, myself come from a B2B marketing background. So I know how big a pain this problem is, and how much money can be wasted if you don’t recognize it. And, you know, but the potential upside is also huge. If you do understand it.

Christian Klepp  23:49

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. 40,000. That’s, that’s quite a substantial amount.

Steffan Hedebrandt  23:57

I wish we could speak to all of them at once.

Christian Klepp  23:59

Yeah, well, you’ll get there, I’m sure. Okay, we get to the part in the conversation, Steffan, where we’re talking about actionable insights. And I know a lot of the things that you spoke about in this conversation are not things you can do like, you know, overnight, but there are some immediate steps that you can take to improve the way you map customer journeys towards revenue. So what are those steps? What are those quick wins? And what should marketers focus on?

Steffan Hedebrandt  24:28

Yes, so I think like, in general, you can only kind of analyze what you can measure. And what I mean by that is that if your company is as such not generating any digital reflections of your activities, it’s going to be hard to do any customer journey analysis. So, think about all the activities that your go to market team does and consider whether it generates digital touch today and whether you actually get, you know, get that touch stored somewhere. So simple example if, if your salespeople are just using their phone and dialing today, well, then it’s very hard to understand the effectiveness of this phone call. But if they use a calling software, they can just press click from in that application and then it leaves a note. On this day you talk to this person from this account for this long, then you start to generate some data there. The same thing goes, If you ship emails through a tool that is not able to relate to the store, you know, who received the email, which account do they belong to, etc, then it’s very hard to understand that. And so we can continue, like just making sure that every single thing that you do actually leaves the little trace. And this is kind of an exercise you want us, you have to start it before you need it, because it’s going to take some time to build this data, then if you go like a super low, practical, high quality thing you can do, is always to do post sales interviews, or like post sales questions, send the mail, or book a meeting with those who just bought and talk through the sales process, or like the buying process? And get them to anecdote. Where did you find this? What were you looking for? What was good or bad, etc. And then you can sort of if, if you do a couple of those, then you pretty quickly find some repeatable patterns in activities that you can go back and do more of. And you’ll probably also find stuff that you can just improve. Demo call button didn’t work. It was hard to get in touch with you.

Christian Klepp  26:43

Yeah, no, those are some really great points. And I love I love that one. The first one you brought up like start it before you need it.

Steffan Hedebrandt  26:50

Yeah, it’s annoying, but that is the case.

Christian Klepp  26:54

Yeah. No, but otherwise, you’re just gonna be reactive, right? We all know, it’s the complete time waster. Right? If you are doing every single thing.

Steffan Hedebrandt  27:02

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. And the second best time is now. Right.

Christian Klepp  27:14

Oh, I did remember you saying that. That is a quote that is so appropriate for your industry. I think any industry to be honest.

Steffan Hedebrandt  27:22

Yeah, probably.

Christian Klepp  27:25

But, those are some great tips. And onto the next question, which I think is directly correlated, because you know, we’re talking about metrics. So what metrics should marketers focus on to make sure that what they’re doing is working? And this is, this is an interesting question, you know, that I’m posting to a guy who is, you know, whose core expertise is around revenue attribution with your probably your answer is gonna be like, Okay, well, how much time do you have?

Steffan Hedebrandt  27:55

But no, it’s, I think it’s actually, so it’s so popular to say that marketers should be measured on revenue, and they should, but most companies don’t have actually not velocity to be properly measured on that. And so you need to find a metrics where, you know, there’s enough velocity coming through every month. And for me, that kind of is, we call it a sales acceptable lead, which means that somebody booked the demo call and they fit our ideal customer profiles. So, because this is a process that you as a marketer can be pretty much in 100% control of, whereas, like, you cannot be in complete control of whether the salespeople gets the deal signed, that DAE had a bad day, when that perfectly came in and so forth. So, for something you can like proactively control, I would suggest to like, look at something like a sales acceptable lead, which would be leads that fits your ideal customer profile.

Christian Klepp  28:57

Okay. Okay. I think that’s, that’s, that’s definitely fair enough. Okay. Some top industry trends or shifts that you’ve seen in the market that could directly impact the way marketers are mapping customer journeys, maybe the top three trends that you’ve seen.

Steffan Hedebrandt  29:18

So far, but we this week, we just put out some new benchmarks on the shift in ad spend. And yeah, we have like, in total, we have like 1000 accounts or something like that. And we could see that more than 50%, since this year, has shut down their Facebook ads, and a bit less had shut down their LinkedIn ads. But only a few people have stopped their Google ads. So I think like trend wise people are like, they are fleeing, fleeing from these top funnel, hard to measure channels and finding a safe harbor in the Google Search ads where you at least can control what does the keyword say? And what’s the intention behind a click on this keyword?

Christian Klepp  30:08

Yeah, I did see that post. That was incredibly interesting.

Steffan Hedebrandt  30:12

Yeah, I think that’s a big shift. And hopefully then there’s also this big movement of which I think is a good movement and the people start to talk about when should we do demand generation and when should we try to capture demand? Instead, and you know, back in the day you would call some of it branding and some of it marketing, etc, blah, blah, blah. But I think it’s important to remember that there’s just a limit to the amount of demand capture you can do right now. So you need to go out and run advertising in front of people who look like they’re likely customers. So hopefully, they can become customers at a later point. And part of this is also recognizing that you don’t just need to generate 1000 or 10,000 emails, you need to generate 200 highly qualified sales leads. And then that also means that you can stop running those cat videos on Facebook, and then doing something a little bit more conservative right on point on what you’re actually doing. So those that do convert actually come through with the right intention.

Christian Klepp  31:30

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, the cat videos, I probably wouldn’t recommend for B2B.

Steffan Hedebrandt  31:36

Might give you a lot of emails, but it will not give you a lot of revenue.

Christian Klepp  31:41

Yeah, or impressions. Like what how many people look at this, but then at the end of the day, it’s like, okay, but then converted sales is nil, then that’s probably not a very good sign. Yeah. Okay. Right. Um, so this next question, the status quo, in your area of expertise that you disagree with? And why? I think,

Steffan Hedebrandt  32:05

Yeah, so let’s go back to the ad platforms, the Google or Facebook or LinkedIn, the B2B marketers really, really, really need to recognize that they have no clue about the value of the clicks that they provide you with. So you need to find ways to understand the value of the traffic that you’re acquiring. Whether that’s sending conversions back into the ad platforms, or whether that’s to have a go-to market data platform like ours, that can actually explain you the clicks the value, that’s up to people, but do know that when all the money you spend inside of these platforms, you need somewhere else to actually understand whether it’s valuable or not. And I think it’s not being talked about enough because the ad platforms had no clue about what’s happening in a B2B CRM system.

Christian Klepp  33:02

Well, I mean, it goes back to a point of a previous guest of mine brought up right that these platforms don’t actually understand your business, right?

Steffan Hedebrandt  33:11

No, and not at all.

Christian Klepp  33:12

And these salespeople, take your pick whichever company it is, right. They are incentivized to upsell their services to you. Right? Because that’s how they get compensated.

Steffan Hedebrandt  33:26

I’ve seen there were situations where, you know, you would look inside of Facebook ads, and it would look like a huge success. And then you open Google ads, and then we’ll be like, well, okay, Google says to test zero value and, like who’s right. I think that depends on you, as you say they’re they have to each of their motivations to, tell different stories.

Christian Klepp  33:47

Yes, yes. As well. I mean, that’s, that’s how they’re incentivized, right. They’re incentivized to sell you as a company or kind of a service or a package. Right? Whether you need it or not, it’s probably a different story. Okay, fantastic. So, Steffan, you know, this has been awesome conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So quick, introduce yourself, and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Steffan Hedebrandt  34:12

Yeah, so I’m Steffan and I’m one of the cofounders of Dreamdata. I’m the CMO. So anything marketing related questions, people are very like, welcome to hit me up on LinkedIn. And I’ll definitely reply. Yeah.

Christian Klepp  34:28

Fantastic. Fantastic. So Steffan, thanks so much for coming on the show. Wait, let me see what was it in Danish Tak.

Steffan Hedebrandt  34:36

Yeah, really good.

Christian Klepp  34:40

The actor, the actor that played Ivar the Boneless in the Vikings is Danish, right.

Steffan Hedebrandt  34:45

Exactly. He does that quite well.

Christian Klepp  34:50

But um, thanks again for your time. So take care. Stay safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

Steffan Hedebrandt  34:55

See you, Chris. Thank you for now.

Christian Klepp  34:58

All right. Thanks.