How to generate quality demand with the power of your brand

Christina Bowles: Today we'll be focused on the root cause of sales and marketing misalignment and how to generate quality demand with the power of your brand. Before I pass it over to David, Chris, and Gabe a couple of things to note if you have questions during the session, please drop them right in the Q&A function of the zoom, they'll be answered at the end during our QA& portion. There will also be three polls today, so please keep an eye out for those prompts as well. And without further ado, I'm going to pass it off to David Pianin, a partner on Lippincott's marketing customer strategy practice who will take it from here.

 

David Pianin: Great thanks, Christina. We're so excited to be here with everybody to talk about a topic that our clients are increasingly asking us about, which is, how can our brand be better used to power demand for our offerings and a lot of what we talk about today.

 

We'll offer some practical solutions and strategies for doing that it might lean a bit more B2B oriented. But if you are a B2C company, these principles apply just as well in B2C context. So you're still in the right place. Don't leave. If you're primarily B2C, this is something that we think is relevant for any company out there trying to accelerate the demand generation engine.

 

We've got 60 min together and plan to use the first 10 min really diagnosing a common problem that our clients come to us with. Which is that our demand generation has seemed to slow down. Something doesn't quite seem to be working, and we'll talk about the root cause of that common challenge that our clients are coming to us with the bulk of our time together will focus on practical solutions for resolving that challenge. In particular, we're going to talk about opportunities to influence buyers with more meaningful content.

 

And we're gonna talk about solutions for getting sales, teams, and marketing teams at your companies better aligned by defining what it means to have a qualified lead and to Christina's point. If there's questions along the way, and we hope that there are hold on to them or drop them into the chat, we'll make sure to hold time at the end for Q&A.

 

So with that background, I'll go ahead and and jump in. As Christina mentioned, I'm a partner on the strategy team here at Lippincott and have the fun job of advising companies on how to generate demand through brand strategy, marketing, strategy, and deep authentic customer insight. And I'm joined by two fantastic colleagues of mine. I'll turn it over to Chris, who's not only a fantastic client advisor, but also a recovering CMO. Handing it over to you, Chris.

 

Chris Ciompi: Yeah, thanks, David. So hello, everyone. Thanks again for joining us. Dave's right. I joined Lippincott as a senior partner about a year ago, but before that I spent about 15 years in different CMO chairs and actually started my marketing executive leadership journey at Liberty Mutual insurance, leading brand and then leading the advertising by there. So I've had a heavy lean on financial services, but excited to be here with you guys today, and I'm going to let Gabe introduce himself as well.

 

Gabe Knapp: Thanks, Chris, thanks, David, for having me today.

 

Chris: Gabe Knapp, a partner in Oliver Wyman in our pricing sales and marketing practice. Actually started my career as a marketer at Microsoft, Dell and eBay so started on the tech marketing side, and then also did a tour of duty as an interim head of digital marketing for a major US airline.

 

Gabe: So I've been in and out of the chair of marketing so hugely passionate about this topic. And in my role at Oliver Wyman I help chief marketing officers improve their marketing effectiveness as well as improve their capabilities. To be able to do more modern marketing so very passionate about this topic. And then I also get to help sales leaders improve their sales organizations and optimize things around hybrid and digital selling. So a lot of really relevant topics today about how do we improve sales? Leads between the 2 teams looking forward to the discussion? Thanks again, David and Chris for having me appreciate it.

 

David: Great to have this group with you all again, not only advisors to our companies, but practical practitioners, and having applied some of what you'll see today on the ground. And so a little bit about Lippincott for those who aren't familiar with us, we just celebrated our 80th anniversary, and because of our time doing this type of work, we've had the privilege to build some of the most household names that you see on this page and many others, and have also helped companies build some of the most disruptive brands in existing and emerging categories

 

And we are part of Oliver Wyman, who is a leading management, consulting firm together. Lippincott and Oliver Wyman have over 60 offices across the world and we collectively have front row seats to seeing how some of the leading companies are managing their marketing teams, their sales teams and building brands that are disrupting industries. We serve 70% of the Fortune 500 and even more so within financial institutions in particular.

 

And so as Lippincott, we have quite a diverse set of capabilities that really blends the analytical rigor needed to get demand gen. Right, but also the bold creativity needed to make content and strategy come to life. Everything from helping our companies unlock growth opportunities, building brand foundations, designing and building new experiences, finding new ways to engage customers, and of course developing marketing strategies that actually work. And today we'll talk in particular about some of those pieces that you see highlighted in purple, what it means to build, compelling content what it means to build, demand generation, and how to go to market in a way that's efficient and effective.

 

And if I dive into the topic at hand, how can companies better generate demand for their offerings? It really starts by unpacking a common problem. We hear clients come to us all the time, expressing all sorts of pain, points, and frustration related to the demand for their offering, slowing down and describing the common problem that our clients face can start by introducing 3 key stakeholders. Let's simplify things for just a moment and think about 3 audiences. We're gonna first talk about the buyers who you all as companies are trying to attract. We're going to talk about the sales teams that are fixated. On closing the sale, finding the leads getting the deal done and the marketing team tasked with building, the reputation and packaging of your brand and of your offer. And the key challenge is that when it comes to B2B sales and marketing, these 3 audiences tend to not understand one another very well, and that lack of understanding creates a whole load of friction and inefficiency, and in particular it leads to each one of these 3 audiences. Feeling fairly disappointed. In particular, we often hear about buyers that our companies are trying to attract feeling quite unsatisfied with the way in which they're being approached by various companies. 66% of buyers. B2B customers expect the same or better personalization in their professional lives as consumers. We sit at home and on subways, looking at our phone, getting surgically placed ads that are perfectly tailored to what it is we're looking for. But for some reason, when you take your consumer hat off and put on your buyer hat on as a company.

 

These buyers tend to get approached with fairly generic, glossy, non personalized sales tactics that leave them feeling pretty unsatisfied. And so that's a challenge to address the sales team. What we see is 54% of sales team leaders finds that getting in touch with prospects is harder today than it was 5 years ago. They can't find the right people when they do find them. Those individuals don't want to hear from them. There's something going wrong in terms of the sales team's ability to get in front of the prospects that they want to find and marketing leaders tell us overwhelmingly that they feel their advertising budgets are being wasted on the wrong audiences. They don't know how to get their message in front of the right people, and that leads them feeling overwhelmed. And so fundamentally, something's awry when the buyers, the sales teams, the marketing teams, are all feeling like something's not clicking and in our experience helping our clients work through these challenges. More often than not, the root cause of those challenges tends to fall down to 2 forms of misalignment.

 

First, the connection between how companies are trying to engage with buyers tends to be misaligned. Buyers are looking for a certain experience and a certain approach when companies are coming to them. That is not at all what they experience. And there's a mismatch in the engagement model that companies use in the form of engagement that buyers are asking for.

 

Secondly, there's a common tension between internal to companies, the sales teams and the marketing teams. There's lack of coordination in defining what it means to have a qualified lead, how sales teams and marketing teams can work together to find the right prospects that we can go after and resolving these 2 tensions has meaningful upside. When we help our clients resolve these issues, we often find on incredible upside opportunity that can come from extinguishing the issues. As an example, when we worked with the client in the financial space by working with them to find the root cause of these tensions, and resolving them for that individual client, we were able to find Upside. That was 3 times their annual revenue growth goal, and that came from helping them think more broadly about who it is out in the market that they can be going after and prioritize outreach to by helping them better warm the leads that are already in their funnel, to make sure that the conversion rates go up, and also finding more efficient ways of engaging customers, which provides some excess hours that could be reallocated to more productive use cases. And so these tensions are holding many of our clients back from realizing the upside that is very much attainable.

 

And so we had mentioned at the upfront that there's going to be some interaction here, some polls to get a sense of the audience, of how you're all feeling and thinking about these topics. And so here's the first poll to pause, and the question for you all is these 2 tensions that I described the engagement model misalignment where there's an issue in the way in which you're going after buyers or the coordination model alignment, the ability of sales, teams and marketing teams to understand each other and work together. Which of these 2 tensions is holding your brand's growth back the most I'm curious to hear from you all. Take a minute or 2 and make your selection, and we'll see what everyone's thinking.

 

Chris Gabe, what do you expect to see? Is there a general lean one way or the other that you're often seeing in the in the clients that we're working with.

 

Chris: You know I I have often felt the most pain on the second problem there the coordination. And yet I think that the pain that I felt there daily, sometimes was taking my eye off of the other area and just sometimes assuming that I had that pretty well taken care of via market research and things. And I think I am seeing some of those same things that our clients. What about you, Gabe?

 

Gabe: Yeah, it's hard to predict with the crystal ball what people are gonna say, it's always dangerous in marketing but if I had to guess I'd say, Yeah, I've definitely seen both with clients. And so I'd expect to see a good percentage come back as both. But we'll see what people say.

 

David: Alright. Let's close the poll and get a sense of where the key challenges.

 

It looks like 45% of us say the sales and marketing coordination. Misalignment is really the crux of what's going on. But a good portion of you all say that it's really both of these issues, and so interesting to see that nobody said neither. This is clearly a pain point that you're all grappling with, and that's not a surprise. Many of our clients are grappling with these challenges, and so I'm sure you're all eager to hear about practical solutions to resolve them. And so let's dive into that and start pinpointing things that can be done to resolve each tension, and from there we'll go into the 1st tension around how to better engage buyers in the way that they want to be engaged, and the punchline for us. And you'll see this in the details that Chris will share is that it really all boils down to how to think about influencing buyers with more meaningful content, which is a much different and often more modern way of engaging buyers than what companies might be used to. So over to you, Chris, to take us through the details.

 

Chris: Awesome. Thank you, David. So let's just go to the next slide, please, and we'll start with another fact. And if you could scroll through the graph for me what we're looking at here. Everyone is a distribution of how B2B buyers spend their time. So that largest chunk, the top right purple part of this donut graph that you see there is researching independently online.

 

And I'll tell you that that tends to surprise people when I say it to them in early kind of client meetings, where especially at a sales driven culture, there's this idea that no, no, but when we meet with suppliers when they meet with us, right when the buyers meet with us. That's when we have these special moments and then telling them, well the B2B buyers, don't. It doesn't look like that's how they're prioritizing their time. They're only spending 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers versus when you combine how much time they're spending, researching independently, whether online or offline those combined. They're spending 45% of their time doing their own research with again, their largest chunk being that researching independently online. And before I move on, Gabe, are you seeing similar things at your clients?

 

Gabe: Oh, for sure. Definitely confirming and in fact, you know, last year, we really dug into that area with the 17% that you're talking about just to try to learn more. We did a survey or some research with a hundred B2B sales leaders. And what we found was pretty interesting. We asked them the question of what percent of your customers want to purchase digitally and not talk to our sales rep at all so pretty provocative question, and what we found was super interesting. Nearly 60% of the respondents said up to a quarter of their customer base did not want to talk to a sales rep at all, and so that has some pretty profound implications for your sales org design. How many reps do you need how much you investing in a B2B portal where customers can purchase digitally and then, of course, you know even more alarming.

 

You know, 22% said that a quarter to a half of their customers didn't want to talk to a sales rep at all. So, applying these across your sales organization thinking about modern sales, modern marketing. And how do we harmonize these? It's a pretty big insight that you know. Buyers are used to researching like Dave was talking about earlier on Amazon, you know, personally. And so that applies also to the B2B realm where customers are just wanting to be able to reorder on an easy to use. Great customer experience. B2B portal, and some don't want to talk to a rep. Some don't want to go to breakfast, lunch and dinner. They just want to be able to find what they're looking for and reorder it. So that has some implications for the sales force that we'll talk about in a minute.

 

Chris: Completely makes sense, and I agree is pretty shocking that some of them are down to zero. I think it emphasizes that there really just is a mandate to meet these B2B buyers where they are, where they spend the biggest chunk of their time, again, is researching independently online. So next slide, please let's talk a little bit about what that means. Right? That time researching online. I think it tells us that truly every brand today is in the content business. I mean, they have to be. It's the most important element that's driving sales. It's responsible, as you can see on the right hand side of the page there for driving almost half of the incremental sales driven by advertising. But it starts to beg a question if you're in the content business. How can you think about influencing your buyers with actual, meaningful content? Let's get into that. So next slide.

 

You need a content strategy. Obviously. But when developing it, we see that answering 5 key questions will focus you on developing that meaningful content. So let's just go through the questions. And then we're going to go through a little bit about each one in terms of a real life example. So in terms of the questions, what content types do we need in our library?

 

How should we develop our content? Who should represent the content? When should we publish the content? And where should our content show up across channels.

 

So there really is a lot to discuss within each one of these questions.

 

We're not going to get super deep on any one. But, as I said, I do want to go through at least one example within each question to kind of bring these to life. So let's start with that first question on the next slide, please.

 

If we start with this, what content types do we need in our library? Listen, when we work with clients, a diagnostic tool that we use is a competitive audit. It's not rocket science, but it does become pretty illustrative about what your 5 fiercest competitors are doing in terms of types of content that they're publishing. And then, also, importantly, how engaged are your target audiences in those types of content. So in this example that you see on the page. Here the Bar graphs represent the number of types of content that each brand produced over the course of a year. So, for example, look at Brand A,  they produced 21 podcast episodes. And look at brand D, they produced 200 thought leadership articles. Now on that alone it looks like brand D is winning right just in terms of quantity, but we do have the brands ordered on the page from left to right, in terms of high engagement with the content to low engagement.

 

And when we talk about meaningful content, part of the definition of that is, it needs to be engaging right what we're seeing here. It shows us that it's not the largest number of pieces of content that win. It's it is the quality of the content. How meaningful is it via that lens of engagement.

 

And when you think of engagement, just think of basics, time spent reading, thought, leadership, or time spent listening to podcasts, or even just attendance or attrition rates at webinars. Right? The variety of types of content is certainly powerful, but you shouldn't be tricked into thinking that more is more, it's not true. It's a quality over quantity game. So next slide, please, let's look at another example.

 

Staying within our what types of content question? Let's look at this. So we do heavy quantitative analysis with clients on paths to purchase that our B2B buyers take. And when we piece apart the moments of engagement that actually matter. We can help brands, then invest in creating content that moves the needle in terms of demand generation and in turn revenue generation. So let's look at one of those examples on the next slide. So what you see here is a path to purchase journey map that we created recently for our client.

 

And what we saw. One thing we saw is that targeted social media posts impacted 24% of the brand awareness lift of all of the brand's advertising efforts. It was the single, most important type of content expression for the brand in terms of awareness. So let's keep going down the path of purchase next slide, please.

 

We also saw that webinars for this B2B brand impacted 39% of brand familiarity lift again an important type of content expression for this brand to continue to invest in. And on the next slide. Finally, we saw that events and trade shows impacted only 2% of final consideration and purchase decision. And that really surprised the brand we were working with. They were using trade shows and events as a kind of a key mechanism to meet prospects who are already a good way down the funnel and invest in the time together and in person, time, and close the deal, but our analysis showed that their buyers weren't really being swayed by this, and so we recommended that the brand reconsider an investment in events as a mid and lower funnel tactic. Let's go to the next slide and move to the next question.

 

How should we develop our content? So the example we're going to go through here is, I'd say, a mid size online article from a global insurer, Zurich.

 

In a recent competitive audit we did. We noted that Zurich was following best practices for ensuring that readers would find their thought leadership so find it first, and then also in working to keep them engaged. Once they had found it on the finding the thought leadership. They really had a clear and strong SEO strategy. They considered Google, I would say, as a key team member of theirs as a person who is basically most likely to introduce buyers to their brand. When those buyers are researching independently online now in terms of engaging on content. Theirs was the most engaged content that we found in competitive audit. So let's look at some of the things that they were doing again. Some of this is back to basics, but it's often just overlooked.

 

For instance, you can see that they have a clear article title. It accurately describes the content. They also follow that with a teaser that helps push the readers further into the content they have an author displayed. You'll see on the right hand side. There. It's a branded. They've branded that person as a key subject matter expert; that helps to increase credibility, and it also helps to humanize the brand. So if we keep looking down on the next slide, you can see that they also included infographics. Those are included to provide greater context, to create a bit of interactivity with the reader, and even more engagement.

 

They also show related articles that are suggested to encourage the reader to spend even more time with the brand on other content that is likely relevant. And next slide, please.

 

Finally, more related articles are displayed, and in addition they display related products. Right? The brand is there to sell things after all. And in turn there's also a way to capture the readers information and potentially then generate demand for Zurich's products and services.

 

Okay, let's keep going.

 

Our third of five questions related to content strategy is, who should represent the content in B2B. It's key that the faces and voices you have representing your content are media trained subject matter experts, and that you feature them early and often. So let's start scrolling through. We're going to take a look at Sequoia capital, which is a prominent venture capital firm. They really show their people off, and you'll see right here on the left, right.

 

They start right on the homepage with features, and also how those subject matter experts have helped impact their clients in the middle of the page. You can see they have content that humanizes who those subject matter experts are. Yes, it's professional, but a bit of personality does creep in here right to help add dimension, that this is a real human being, not just someone trying to sell you something and note that these pages also include a way to get in touch again.

 

They are creating demand generation opportunities. Now, finally, on the right of this page, you can see that their thought leadership is heavily people driven, right? This content, they're putting out there, it is presented in a variety of approachable formats.

 

Okay, let's keep going on the next slide, please, and talk a little bit about when you should publish your content. We're going to go back and look at Zurich again and we're not going to get into the concepts in terms of when to publish about things like time of day. We're not going to go that far down. We're going to start a little bit higher level and talk first about anchoring your content strategy to tentpole moments in the year. So, looking at what Zurich does they focus on key global conferences like the World Economic Forum in Davos or the COP Global Environmental Conference. They also focus on key industry conferences like risk world. But what we see is that 10 pulse can provide part of the content or part of the structure for your content strategy, but not everything you need. So turn to the next slide to look that you're also going to need a more.

 

How do I say more? Always on strategy? So for Zurich as an insurer. They use seasonality of the weather, whether it's hurricane season, fire, season, winter storm season, they are publishing relevant content that is current and engaging to the frame of mind that their buyers are in.

 

And they're using the global seasons differences, whether hurricane season in the Us. Obviously, that's going to be different than flood season in Europe, which is obviously going to be different than fire season in South America. They are going to use the right kind of content at the right time for the area of the globe that they're talking to.

 

And finally, on the next slide here, we're gonna get to that final question about, where should our content show up? So this is one where, when you say that out loud, it's kind of just easy to say back as an answer. Well, I guess it should show up as many places as possible, but we don't all have enough resources to just make that occur. So it's just hard to execute on as many places as possible, and we suggest to clients often that you start with your owned media channels. If you can make what you own really strong then expanding to paid and expanding to earned from there becomes easier. So we're taking a look here in terms of case study at adobe. And what we see is a clear strategy that puts the adobe website truly, at the center. Like, as you see on the right hand side of this page. It's the center of their content ecosystem, and that ecosystem is working together to keep people engaged to keep their buyers engaged. But again, that center of things is that website. And it's basically the answer to the most basic of questions when you click it. Where do you go? Right? It is back to that website.

 

So next slide please, to recap quickly here.

Developing meaningful content to engage your buyer while they are researching independently online and reminder, that's what they spend most of their time doing. That requires a strong content strategy. And we suggest getting there via these five questions so as you're thinking about what those five questions mean to you. Maybe we do another quick, poll, David, on the next slide. So which of these questions does your organization struggle with the most to answer.

 

And, David, have you seen any of this at your clients that they're struggling with any of this?

 

David: All of them. Yeah, I think each one represents its own bit of a challenge for me. What the most common challenge tends to be related to what content types do we need in our library? And often it comes down to well, which audiences are we targeting in the first place. And what types of content are those particular audiences most interested in? Because if you try to write for everybody, end up watering something down to the point where it doesn't actually attract anybody. And so the way we often think about answering questions related to the what starts by deeply understanding who it is, you're targeting their segmentation at the root of that, and understanding for various audiences what types of topics are most likely to influence the behaviors that most need to be driving the business.

 

Chris: Got it makes sense. So in terms of the poll. How's it looking in terms of answers, is it? Are we ready to close it up, Christina. Let's see.

 

Gabe: While she's doing that, I would just add, you know, generative AI has such a great use case for content marketing if leveraged properly. And it doesn't mean like, you're eliminating anyone's job. You're actually increasing the amount of stimuli that you can put in front of an audience. So there's a lot there. You had adobe up earlier adobe at Adobe Summit this year. They talked about personalization at scale. and I really think that's what a lot of the MarTech is really helping us to unlock the combination of that. And Gen. AI to be able to put, you know, the right size. Tweet, the right size post on LinkedIn. Be able to do that at scale. So that's pretty exciting.

 

Chris: That's interesting. Yeah, it looks like David. Folks are pretty aligned to what you were saying, too, about in terms of what content types do we need in our library getting the most responses here? So okay, I think we're gonna turn to our next question. The next point of friction. I'm going to turn it over to you, Gabe.

 

Gabe: Yeah, thanks. Chris. You know, this is the second one we talked about earlier. It's really that coordination point between sales and marketing. And it was, you know, when we did the survey a few minutes ago, it really rated as one of the biggest, you know, potential friction points. So we're going to spend some time on it. If you're rewinding your minds back. You know, marketing historically, has been more of a bolt on organization to sales and B2B organizations where sales people are the rainmakers and marketing, supporting with, you know, sales, sheets, fact sheets, customer evidence, things of that nature, but more in a supporting role. And now today, in more of the modern age, you know, marketing is really equipped with very powerful MarTech tools to be able to pinpoint high propensity. High quality leads that are so important to a sales team.

 

And so what we're seeing is really the need for that partnership to go up and the need for that collaboration to go up. And I think that's a big improvement when you think about where sales was many, many years ago. In the old days they had salespeople, new sales, reps inside rails, sales, reps, call the phone book, and just go through. And you know blindly. Call now, it's more, you know, modern, you know, Google searches and things of that nature. But the ability of marketing to have a marketing qualified lead that is, you know, curated warm high propensity already showing some propensity to purchase is so valuable to sales. So we're going to talk about that today. And really, the main problem statement is around the misalignment between what marketing views as a marketing qualified lead, and when that gets handed over the proverbial wall to sales? Do they view it as a as a qualified lead or not based on their experience? And so that's really the crux of the issue. We're going to talk through today, go to the next slide, and so we did some research around this. And just, you know further to the point of just how you know marketing has evolved in our recent research. I mentioned earlier that we unveiled in December, or I guess, Q4 of last year of 100 B2B sales leaders. We found that 65% of them surveyed said that marketing qualified leads often result in a sales appointment and or a sale. And so sales leaders are realizing the importance of marketing and how that can really help them. And if you can get this symbiotic relationship right? There is a ton of value to unlock for sales and marketing leaders across the board.

 

Conversely, if we go to the next slide that the challenge there is. There's a lot of pressure on marketing teams really to cut, spend. And, Chris, I don't know if you want to comment on this, but there's just pressure around MarTech spend. And how do we improve ROI.

 

Chris: Yeah, I mean, there are marketers, certainly on the call, will feel there's always pressure on the marketing budget somehow, right? Sometimes, especially in difficult environments seen as a cost center rather than as something to invest in, etc. And this pressure on MarTech in moments where data is exploding more and more and more. It makes it very difficult to do what the sales team is asking to really prioritize and to target perfectly, and we don't waste any dollar. The CFO is worried about that and without those technological advances, you know, if we move to the next slide, my kind of story here is that you've just you've got to use what you have already even better, even more and better. So we're gonna focus today on something that truly every CRM system has. Right?

 

Whether you're talking about salesforce, Microsoft dynamics, HubSpot, whatever you're using it has some kind of lead scoring system. Now, each of these different CRMs. They use a different kind of slightly different terminology, whether Microsoft dynamics calls it a lead score. Salesforce calls it scoring and grading what whatever terminology they're using. The idea is the same.

 

There is a quantitative way to define what qualified is and in a way that both sales and marketing agree and are aligned. That last part can't be taken for granted. Every system can define what qualified is, and can do it in a bespoke way for you and your brand. But often it is only one of the two teams that are making that definition and that's where the conflict starts to emerge. So on the next slide.

 

We see that there's two main buckets to consider for your marketing qualified lead system.

 

There are buying authority markers, and there are moments of engagement now again, whichever CRM system you're using is gonna have different terminology for this. Dynamic says, components, salesforce says grades. But again, the principles are the same. There are buying authority markers, and there are moments of engagement. So buying authority markers are what we would call pieces of data that you can glean from publicly available sources. So things like job titles or core industries, your brand serves in terms of moments of engagement. Those are actual marketing owned touches that your buyers would have responded to again, basic things could be visiting your website clicking through on one of your E-Newsletters or attending a webinar right?

 

And then the question that emerges is which bucket is more valuable. And then also well, within those things you just listed, Chris, like which items within each bucket are more valuable than the other ones. It starts to sound complex. Again, there starts to need to be a waiting system, and this is where things can start to get hairy, but honestly, they don't have to.

 

So, next slide please, I'm a big fan of as with so many problems at work that this one, as with so many others, can be solved with basically a good old fashioned list.

 

Now, this list, as you can see, can get small and can get complicated. But it really is just, at its heart, a list, and it must be co-developed between marketing and sales to ensure buy in on both sides that that definition of qualified is shared by both teams. Now I do want to note that these lists that will be built into a system.

 

It starts to be like, Oh, gosh! Is this an algorithm? It is not. It is just arithmetic, it is just addition and subtraction. It does not have to be complicated to be valuable.

 

Also of note is that you can use negative scores, not just positive scores within the system. To deprioritize leads that come in with things like either a personal email address; something I used to hear from the sales team constantly is, this is a Gmail address. I can't reach out to them. It's not possible. Why is it here? Or god forbid you send the sales team by accident, a competitor who attended four of your webinars to figure out what you're doing and say that they are a qualified lead. You want to make sure those people are deprioritized so that you're not losing credibility as the marketing team with the sales team.

 

Gabe, do you see that stuff in market with clients.

 

Gabe: For sure. I think the tension is around, you know just the agreements between sales and marketing on what moves the meter on the sales side, you know it doesn't help if they send you a lead, and they clicked on an article, and they happen to be a marketing manager, and you're like, Well, that's great. That's not one of my buyers. So I need to really get aligned with marketing on what they're sending me. Otherwise we're wasting time, you know, trying to qualify leads that are never gonna to buy. I think the other thing that I see with a lot of clients is the emergence of affiliate marketing. And how important that is in the mid funnel.

 

You know a lot of these, you know, Meta media areas or affiliates. There's one in B2B called buyer zone for B2B services that a lot of times, you know, B2B companies will go and shop for computers or janitorial services, or something like that. So they're already showing intent to purchase. And some of those may enter into the funnel. And like, wow those are highly relevant. And the sales teams like really excited about them.

 

So how do those fit within the moments of engagement? And where are you out in the sales funnel and the marketing funnel. And then you know, where are you at from a buyer authority perspective. So those are a couple trends that I'm seeing.

 

Chris: Awesome. Thank you. And let's go to the next slide, please, and start talking about the system itself. Right? The lead scoring scheme, let's call it.

 

What we see in terms of starting to implement is that it's helpful to develop three. And again, I've seen this be helpful with buy-in from sales and from marketing, to say, in general, what I would say, and even just listening to you, say it back to me again. Gabe, just now is like the sales team tends to rely heavily on buying authority markers right? They want the right titles. They want the exact right industries. This sub industry is selling really hot for us. Now I want those, and those should be highly more highly prioritized.

 

The marketing team tends to be really focused on. Listen, the things that we're putting out there into the world. They're getting great engagement. This is good feedback for my team. It's showing that I'm providing Roi for the company. So marketers tend to be focused more heavily. In general, I would say, on those moments of engagement and then there can be a system that balances those two together. So we suggest developing three different systems and then testing to see which one will work best for you.

 

It might sound like, well, of course, balanced, is the answer. That's not actually always true. And the only way to know for your brand is to do this kind of testing and learning.

 

So let's look at the next slide, please. So to pressure, test these different scoring schemes. Right? We suggest doing a kind of bringing it to life with hypothetical leads. Let's look at three of those leads what they might look like. Next slide.

 

So here's Andreas, right. He's a CFO. He's got 10 years of experience at a good size manufacturer, he's got no moments of engagement so he's going to be very heavy in terms of those buying authority markers. On the next slide. Let's meet Manny, so he's a bit shorter on the buying authority markers right? He's not a C-level person, and the company he's at is smaller than the one Andreas was at. So maybe there's less even budget to be buying with.

 

But he has some really strong moments of engagement. So he's looking interesting from especially that moments of engagement category.

 

And then on the next slide, we can meet our final prospect, Susan. She's really nicely balanced between those buying authority markers and the moments of engagement. You know she's got the title. She has a really sizable company. She's got some moments of engagement. So let's see how they would have scored on a system or scoring scheme that we would create on the next page.

 

In terms of this scoring scheme. Andreas was the clear winner. And that's because in this scoring scheme we heavily weighted more towards those buying authority markers.

 

So then, we need to ask ourselves. Okay, well, is that right? You know, does it look right to the sales team? Does it look right to the marketing team? You want to have alignment. If it does look right, you've got a scoring system. If not, let's test one of the other ones that we were talking about, heavier on moments, engagement, or heavier on balanced. Because if we thought Susan was the best looking prospect here, we need to reconsider now on the next slide.

 

This is more about testing that system, so bringing it to life again. It's just arithmetic. And honestly, it's not hard to then take that arithmetic and program it into your CRM, you can't let perfection be the enemy of progress. You've got to just choose a pilot sales territory. Choose a salesperson who is a champion right for your lead scoring system and give it a go, and then you monitor the results and adjust as necessary.

 

Have you seen these be implemented, Gabe, successfully?

 

Gabe: Yeah, I think you're hitting a lot of the key points you want to test and invest is a lot of what we tell our clients. And then, after you do the test, you want to be able to optimize. And it's really hard you could set across the table from a sales and marketing person, and agree on what the score should be. But it's only until you see what's coming back and see how that plays that you really know how to adjust it, and sometimes, you know.

 

10 point score, 40 point score may seem reasonable, but then you start seeing what comes back. It's almost like you're baking a cake, and you're putting stuff in, and you never taste the cake that comes out of the oven. So you have to be able to optimize over time. And that's just part of the process.

 

Chris: That's great. Okay. Awesome. Next slide. We can't leave without saying AI again, because what's you know? A topic discussion without saying AI. We talked about Gen AI. Now let's talk about this.

 

Your CRM system very likely has some kind of AI assistant or AI tools that you can use. Again, it starts to sound complicated. My advice is, don't do it right away. Let the system start to build on itself, and when you have enough information, turn that AI system on, because it can help your scoring system get stronger.

 

For instance, maybe you undervalued how important clicking an email was. Your system will learn that the combination of clicking an email and reading 2 articles and attending a webinar is the fastest closing lead. Not only does it have the highest probability to close, but it closes the fastest, and it will start to tell you those things and start valuing those moments of engagement and also buying authority markers that are actually most important. So your AI system can figure that out and adjust accordingly.

 

Alright, back over to you, David. Let's do another poll.

 

David: Yeah, let's get a sense of how everybody's feeling about this process of aligning on qualified leads and curious when it comes to the parts of creating a qualified lead scoring system. Which ones, do you believe would be the biggest unlocks or roadblocks for your brand? The things that would be most difficult to actually achieve in the process of building one of these systems.

 

What would you expect, Gabe, to have most people struggle with when it comes to establishing one of these systems in their organization.

 

Gabe: You know, one of the ones that I've seen is just because you're coordinating across groups both sales and marketing. And then you also think about the MarTech stack and using CRM, and maybe that involves digital resources or resources from technology or the CIO group? It just requires cross team collaboration. And so I think that can be overwhelming to a lot of folks because they're like man. This seems very difficult to get set up. But as Chris was mentioning a lot of these tools that you're already paying for have this built in, and so why not leverage it or attempt to leverage it and start small, like I said earlier, test and invest. See how it goes. But then, you know, share the joy together of victory. When you have good RO coming out of using generative AI, using some of the AI tools that are built into your MarTech stack.

 

David: Well, let's see what others think. I think we'll close the poll, get a sense of what the major challenges tend to be, and it looks like many people described the process of creating a scoring scheme that marketing and sales teams are bought into as the most common challenge. I imagine marketing and sales teams come into the process with different objectives, and perhaps biases towards what matters, and so not a surprise that many on this Webinar feel that getting people on the same page is one of the biggest roadblocks.

 

Many others were also chosen, I think a clear segmentation of key buyers and buying groups is key. And frankly, that's a foundation of insight that will power. Many aspects of what we've talked about today, a deep understanding of who your target audience is, will guide the type of content that you create, how you score, whether a prospect is a qualified lead or not, etc.

 

Great. So I know we're nearing at the top of the time that we held. Let's summarize what we covered today and make sure we have a little bit of time to open it up for questions that are starting to come into the chat.

 

When we started this conversation we really talked about the root cause of decelerating demand generation, and how that often comes down to two tensions that exist in the clients that we work with. The first being about how organizations try to engage with buyers on their terms. And the solution there is really thinking about ways to influence buyers with more meaningful content, recognize that you're in the content business. And, secondly, when it comes to sales and marketing team coordination really align on a definition of quality. And there were some practical strategies that we had talked about. When it comes to influencing buyers with more meaningful content.

 

You've got to recognize the deliberate steps that can be taken to put content out in the world. Don't just throw content at the wall and see what sticks think about the framework that Chris introduced about the type of content we're creating. Who's the representative of the content where you place it, etc, know what type of content is most likely to move the needles that you need to move, so you could be very surgical in the topics that you choose to write about to make it more meaningful. It's not about quantity, it's about quality when it comes to content. And remember that Google is a key audience that's going to funnel traffic your way. And so think about what will raise your stature and search results and get more people visiting your content. And when it comes to setting a single definition of quality. Don't assume that everybody agrees on what qualified means, and it seems, like many of you, on this conversation, find that there's likely to be some disagreements between sales and marketing teams, on what qualified means.

 

And also consider adding some quantification to your lead scoring system. It doesn't need to be subjective. There can be art and science into how this system is created. And it's just arithmetic. It doesn't need to be complicated to be effective. And don't let perfection be the enemy of progress. Just get started, and I think you'll pretty quickly see the value of this type of structure and so hopefully that all offered some practical lessons. Let's open it up to some questions that I see flowing through in terms of how you can all use some of these practical lessons in your organization.

 

I'll start with a question that I see coming across, which we often hear from our clients, which relates to the role brand strategy plays in influencing approaches and resolving some of these tensions. How might brand strategy evolve the way in which you engage with buyers and design content?

 

And I'll start with some thoughts there which is oftentimes our clients agonize over the words on the page when it comes to articulating what your brand strands stands for getting the purpose or positioning statement right? Really ironing out the commitments. But then, when it comes to publishing content, the brand platform or positioning is put to the side. And we just write articles because they're things that we want to write about. You've got to remember that everything that you put out in the world should serve to reinforce what you want to become known for. And so, first and foremost, your brand strategy should influence the what of the content that gets created. And, secondly, you can think about your permission to publish what you become known, for as a brand can influence the scope of content that you could write about. Adobe is all about empowering creatives. They have authority to write about all things, creativity, not just about the technology or the software used to power creativity. And you see that in the scope and breadth of what they're writing about,

 

Chris, Gabe. Anything to add with regard to how brand strategy can be considered as a as a source of inspiration and focus for better engaging buyers?

 

Chris: My push would be what you said kind of right at the beginning. Don't forget that you've done all that work to help you create kind of defenses for what your content should be for your brand. Now to me it gets more complicated when you are really making sure that you are marrying that with exactly what the audience is most engaged with.

 

David: Great. I see another question coming in around the journey map, the buying process that we had talked about earlier, that Chris you had spoken to about the path to purchase, and how there was more rigor brought to the way in which we understand the type of content that influences decisions around the way along the way. The question is, how do you develop something like that? What's the process in getting to that level of detail?

 

Chris: So as you might imagine, it's extremely quantitative. It's one of the best examples that I can think of that marries what people say is important to them and what they say they will do married with what they actually do, right? So there is a large data set that is internal to the company about the path to purchase that buyers take. So the company will know, “okay, well, this person came in at least at last touch with this thing. Can I piece anything else apart above that? If not, that's totally fine. What can I piece apart below? They came in because they came to a webinar. What happened after that?”

 

Then you can start to piece apart also all of your website traffic, right? You talked and you should, you should. And we do talk to Google to say, Listen, yes, this analytics. But how do I get underneath the actual paths people took? Because you have the data and insight. So if you're an advertiser on Google that's available to you, that kind of data you marry, that with what people say is important to them. So through structured quantitative surveys, not qualitative, I would say. That's a different kind of discussion.

 

And what you want to then look for is, how do these two come together? Are there any points of friction about what people say is important to them in terms of the buying process and what actually is and you favor what actually is.

 

David: Relying on the evidence, the insight to really get you to what you should be talking about. Great. Another question that's coming in might be Gabe one for you around. The effort required to set up a scoring system like what we talked about, and the effort needed to maintain it and test and iterate it. Can you talk a little bit about what's involved in getting something like what we talked about established.

 

Gabe: Yeah, it really starts with identifying, you know, some champions within sales and marketing who really want to take this on. And you think about change management, finding those change champions or change ninjas, as some call them, to be part of a pilot, to take this on, to, to try to work together to collaborate on a lead scoring model and then the test and learn process. Now, the length of that can take some time, because it depends on the complexity of the model, the availability and the quality of data available, which can be, you know, based on our client base, you know, good, good medium or bad. And you know, a lot of people are still working on data quality issues as well as the resources that you're going to set aside to work on it. So I would say, you know, definitely finding a group to pilot with is a good way to start, and then, you know, it can take an a number of weeks or a few months to really stand up this capability and then iterating on it at least quarterly. Excuse me, at least quarterly throughout the year. To make sure you're optimizing and even more frequent is better if you can dedicate the resources.

 

David: Yeah. Great. And I think we might have time for one last question, Chris, this one might be best for you, which is a question about do's and don'ts in generating demand through LinkedIn. How valuable of a channel is LinkedIn? And how can marketers and sales leaders think about that as an avenue for doing what we talked about today?

 

Chris: Yeah, I think. I think it's extremely valuable. And I would say in two different camps. The first camp I've often seen with clients that they their funnel is what I would call kind of diamond shaped instead of being open and that diamond shape tends to be driven by a team that says we know who our buyers are. You know we're out there, and we know exactly who they are. We've listed them, and you just ended up kind. You end up kind of hitting them over and over again, and it gets really hot in this kind of diamond shaped funnel. It's like a kiln at a certain point. and LinkedIn can help you say, Okay, yes. You know, these people are your buyers. Can we help you expand to people who look a lot like that. But maybe you haven't considered, maybe you're telling us you only want to be with the Fortune 1000. Can we just expand that and test a little bit to the Fortune 1500. We don't have to go to the Russell 3000 if you're not comfortable. But can we just get the next 500 companies. So LinkedIn can really help with that very quickly.

 

The other area I think they can help with is retargeting. So again. That same thing. You know, you're at a company. You know your buyers. You've got your list. LinkedIn can help you match that data in an automated way. and they have about a 90% match rate to their profiles on their site. So then you can say, okay, I know these people are already kind of far down the funnel, or I haven't heard from them in a while, can I target them as a marketer with LinkedIn? And I haven't even gone into talking about something like LinkedIn Sales navigator. That was, I would say, fully a kind of marketing area gave anything on sales navigator quickly.

 

Gabe: I'd say the paid portions of LinkedIn can be expensive. But don't underestimate the content marketing pieces of LinkedIn that are reaching your buyers and nurturing those leads day in and day out I'd leave it there, given in the interest of time.

 

Chris: Awesome.

 

David: Thank you all so much. I think we're at time now. Hopefully, everybody here found value in the conversation we had today, and are taking away some practical lessons, and how to spin up additional demand for your offers in B2B, but also B2C context. So thank you all for coming, and hope to see you on the next webinar later this year.

 

Chris: Thanks everyone.

 

Gabe: Thanks, everybody.