The Demand Gen Playbook for Pipeline-Driven Growth with George Coudounaris

00:03 Welcome to Marketing for Marketers, a series where we interview the brightest minds in marketing to unlock the insights behind their marketing strategies. Today we're going to talk to George. George is the co-founder of the B2B Incubator and co-host of the B2B Playbook. George, welcome to the call. Sam, very excited to be here. Thank you for having me. A fan of yours, a fan of Dealfront. Looking forward to digging into it. Nice.

00:32 Thank you very much. So we've got a few questions. We're going to get into a bit of demand generation, talk about how we can use your playbook for driving pipeline growth and just in general, how demand generation works. sounds good. I'm excited to share. Excited to share. Let's dig into it. All right. So let's start with a simple one. I say simple one. This isn't that simple. How do you define demand generation and where do you see most companies getting it wrong?

01:02 Yeah, I think that's a tricky one when it comes to defining it. think the demand generation has really evolved as a strategy that leans on like the most timeless principles of marketing. Know your market, earn their trust and build preference before buyers are ready. So they come to you when they're ready to buy. I think it's about creating a desire to buy from you and not just chasing those who are looking right now. And so if you to really break it down into two kind of key components.

01:30 You take the B2B Institute rule that says there's 95 % of the market that are out of market, not looking to buy, and 5 % that are in market. Demand generation has two key roles and to help orchestrate both, how do we get in front of those people who are ready to buy now and convince them that they should buy from us while they're in market and to get in front of those future buyers too, the other 95%. So when they're in market, they trust us and we're number one on their list. That's really what demand generation is.

01:59 I think where most B2B companies go wrong is they obsess over those who are just in market, that 5 % who are ready to buy right now. They flood sales with low quality leads and probably do a lot of lead generation as well. And demand generation is not lead generation. I think demand generation has evolved beyond just doing lead gen. And probably when Chris Walker came in, he's the one who really phrased demand generation as

02:26 the savior from lead generation. So we weren't just shoveling leads onto sales, but we were getting back to really good fundamental marketing principles. And I think that's really where it has landed. think first of all, your view of marketing needs to know the market completely agree with. I've said this one multiple times of marketing starts with market, right? That's why it's in there. But for me, what I've noticed is I think it's the addiction to lead generation. That's where companies have struggled to get away from it.

02:55 because they're so used to leap coming in, that then when they move to something, may be the little bit more long-term, they really struggle with this switchover process and end up reverting back to old tactics. totally. And my thought on this is always, hey, if you run the numbers and you find that your lead generation is working commercially for your business and that the leads, however you're capturing them, getting past the sales are then speaking to them and there's like

03:25 good commercial sense there and they're closing deals and the customers aren't churning. I say play on. Nothing wrong with it. That's fantastic if that's working. But what normally happens is marketers are tasked on driving leads. What do we do? We try and drive as many leads as possible. That gets shoved onto sales. You now have a really expensive resource sifting through leads, trying to find out who's ready to buy because then they're measured on meetings booked or number of deals closed.

03:54 Then they then try and push through as many people as possible because they're under constant pressure to close that deal. More often than not, because marketing took a broad approach because they were meant to do lead generation. Sales closes them. They go to customer success. Customer success is like, what the hell is this? And they're just trying to put out fires all the time. like commercially that is not a great outcome. So I say, look at what you're doing. If what you're doing with lead generation makes sense commercially.

04:24 play on, but there's a good chance that it isn't because this model really came about from predictable revenue at a time where money was cheap, at a time where growth at all costs is what people were meant to do. And that's how we got here. really interesting point there are, think marketing often disconnect themselves from the rest of the business in a sense that it's all marketing who are just doing lead gender disconnecting.

04:51 In the sense that as you say, it's okay, your target's leads. So bring leads in. If all they're being measured on is leads, then they don't care if it turns into business or if it turns like what the customer experience is, are they the right fit and all that stuff? Cause they're just focused on that one metric. Whereas as you say, when you're looking more at proper demand generation, identifying your market, ICP, et cetera, et cetera, you are thinking of the whole customer cycle and are they going to retain? they going to be?

05:19 a valid customer in the end. Exactly. It all comes back to how you're measured. You can have the best intentions. You can want to move away from lead gen, but if you're measured on number of leads, that's what you're going to come back to doing. If you want your job, if you want job security. And I've learned Sam that we can't really make this shift from lead gen to demand gen properly.

05:46 without also looking at what methodology is sales using to go to market. Like it goes beyond just marketing. A siloed fix isn't the complete answer. If sales are still using a predictable revenue model, then they're going to be looking for people to call. And then that then goes back to marketing, like trying to fuel these big teams of SDRs to make these calls, to book these meetings.

06:12 And so if they operate on predictable revenue, it's going to be very hard for marketing to move towards a much more holistic marketing demand generation engine and away from lead generation. Yeah. All right. So when we talk about pipeline for me to bridge this gap, you want to start measuring yourself on pipeline. It's the closest metric to sales and to marketing. So how should demand gen efforts directly contribute to building pipeline? Is it possible to make pipeline predictable?

06:42 And are there any sort of key metrics that you're following to make sure you bring in the right pipeline? Yeah, I think first of all, pipeline should be a team sport. I think you can look at what pipeline has marketing source, what has sales source, but use that to be like data informed, but not data driven. At the end of the day, we're all trying to do the same thing. I think anyway, like.

07:08 Marketing just happens to be good at communicating on a one-to-many, one-to-few basis and sales is very good at one-to-one. You're going to probably need all three of those touches to take someone from a prospect to a customer. So it's a team sport, right? It's just a method of communication. That's really what sales is like. They're the one-to-one version of what we do and marketing is good at doing this one-to-few and one-to-many things. if you're selling it like a product or a service with a higher...

07:36 like customer value, average customer value. You definitely don't want to just measure based on marketing source or sales source. Like it's done together. Look, I do think that there are still some good metrics that we should look at. think there should be shared targets and shared revenue targets as well between sales and marketing. I don't necessarily want to break it down by whether it was sourced or not, but again,

08:04 Fair enough to look at it and it's good to look at whether it was influenced by marketing or not. But when it comes to demand generation, look at three tiers of metrics. If you're shifting from lead gen to demand gen, what are the tiers that you should look at? The first one are kind of leading indicators of success, meaning...

08:22 Are we starting to resonate more with the market? Are we answering the different questions that they have in their journey? Are we still starting to build trust with them? And you start to look at channel level metrics where we're having those comms with them. Are we getting strong engagement rates? Are we getting more brand and ICP traffic? Are we getting a growth in our ICP? And shout out to Leadfeeder. Deal front for being able to identify anonymously if you're getting more of your ICP visiting your website, month or not. Qualitatively.

08:51 Are people starting to interact with your content? Are you getting feedback from sales that people are starting to genuinely build trust and engage with what you're saying? Then we look to tier two, which is like more early indicators that we are becoming more aligned with sales and we are helping to push the business forward together. And that's looking at, we starting to generate more high intent opportunities as well? So opportunities that close like at 25 % or more, are we generating more of those?

09:21 Are we increasing our share of search? Again, are we starting to see in self-reported attribution that the different marketing investments that we're making are starting to show up? Things like your podcast, your YouTube channel, your LinkedIn thought leader ads, that kind of stuff. And then probably finally tier one, which is.

09:42 Looking at overall for the business, did we generate more opportunities? Did we generate more revenue? You can break that down by marketing source. You can break it down by marketing influence if you want, but again, just use that to be data-informed, not data-driven. And then of course, for the business as a whole, looking at seeing for our investments, did we increase the size of the overall pie? Did we drive more revenue?

10:07 taking into account a timeline effect. It's going back to your previous statement of pipeline being a team sport. I always find it crazy that we go like we, sales and marketing departments trying claim their own pipeline. This is marketing inbound and this is sales outbound. And I think last year I was on a podcast listening, or listened to a podcast with Alex, the founder of Reach Desk. And he spoke about Allbound and I thought.

10:36 Obviously it's just doesn't matter where it comes from, as long as it's come in and somebody's closing it. And I think as long as to your point, we can track these indicators and we know what's working individually. Why should we matter? Why should it matter who's getting the credit? It's a team sport, as you said. Exactly. It's a team sport. We're just saying the same thing, but at different levels of communication. So it just seems crazy to split up the attribution like that. But yeah, that's the landscape we're in, unfortunately.

11:06 Also just very funny that I don't think any salesperson is rewarded differently for it being an outbound opportunity versus an inbound opportunity. It's of like the mentality is why even track it? Well, yeah, there you go. It's interesting. It's very interesting. Legion versus Demand Jam, we've already touched on it, but the debate is always there. So in your view, what's the practical difference?

11:33 when it comes to driving revenue and pipeline for a SaaS business. think Legion really floods sales with people who filled out a form. And I think the difference is like your commercial approach. And I'll say again, if commercially Legion works for your business, go for it. Keep doing it. That's fantastic. But if it doesn't, and there's a good chance that it's not going to do that forever, you need to shift.

12:02 to demand generation because demand generation is not just about collecting the contact details of someone that you can find from a database anyway, who you probably should be aware of anyway. It's about making sure that you're bringing people to your business that already understand the problem, they trust your brand and they're far more likely to buy from your brand than anyone else when they're in market ready to buy. The issue is lead generation gives people that sense of control because it looks like we're filling the funnel.

12:31 But the reality of the commercial repercussions is it bloats your customer acquisition costs. It burns out sales because speak to any salesperson and ask them what it's like to receive materials from marketing that might be like an ebook. Or if a marketer has to go and call them themselves, like just go and see what that's like. And more often than not, you'll be sorting through people who

12:57 don't want to speak to you, don't even remember downloading the resource and certainly aren't ready to book a meeting or to buy from you right now. And so I think demand generation aligns marketing much more with the business reality of generating pipeline, literally by building buyer preference before that buyer even enters the funnel. And so that's why it's important to do things like getting your content, getting it in front of buyers.

13:24 not trying to trap them and pull them into your funnel. Like the buyers want to do the research on their terms. The Nan Generation is about giving them that access so you can build trust so they're educated and so they choose you over anyone else. I think this is another stat which came from the B2B Institute, was 90 % of buyers buy from a company they knew before they entered the buying process. And we focus so much on people in market. That's awesome.

13:54 You were only then reaching people who already knew you. So yeah, I think your market becomes very small if you're not at some point thinking of the people that aren't currently in market. Yeah. If you do the maths on it, let's just say for simplicity sake, there's a hundred companies you're targeting. The 95-5 rule tells us that 5 % of them are in market ready to buy right now. Okay. So now we're down to five companies. That other research from the B2B Institute and I think Bain also did research as well that said...

14:24 80 to 90%, as you said, will choose a vendor like that they've heard of before, before they came into market. So that means that if you're in market and you haven't heard of your brand, that they haven't heard of your brand, there's actually a one in a hundred chance that they will pick you. Right? Because it's 20 % of the 5%.

14:52 which takes you down to 1%, which is crazy. And it makes sense like why it starts to feel like finding a needle in a haystack because it is. Yeah. Yeah. And what's interesting with that, cause I've seen this happen is the first response is let's make our market bigger. Okay. Maybe we could sell to this vertical. Maybe we can sell to this country or whenever it is, but they think

15:20 Let's just expand out a little bit to make sure that the bottom of front of numbers make sense. And they don't think of how can we make sure more of that 5 % know us. Yeah, that's really interesting, isn't it? And then they're not thinking about who we really building for. Do you lose track of your ICP? Does your product suffer as a result? That's a, yeah, that's really interesting. Let's go and find more of those in market buyers, but just elsewhere. Let's just change this a little bit.

15:51 this tweet, the tweet, verticals just to make it work for us. when you're a marketer and the pressure is on, it's very hard to say no to that. Right? Like when the business, if that's what the business demands and if they are the targets that are set, it's all well and good for me to say you shouldn't do that. But that's a really hard thing to push back against. Yeah. think if you're ever in a position and I've spoken about this on another podcast, if you're ever in a position where you've done the maths and things don't add up.

16:21 You start to find ways of making the matter up. can, the pressure can be on and you're like, Oh, maybe if we close this many deals or maybe if we convert this much pipeline and you just start tweaking the numbers a little bit to make them work. And then very quickly you end up in a very bad position where obviously things aren't playing out the way you wanted them to. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's why companies end up also reverting back to things like

16:49 lead gen because you can do your pipeline math and you can do it from the, we can work backwards to a lead number and it makes everyone feel safe. It makes everyone feel secure, but it is not grounded in the reality of the market or how people actually buy. right. Oh, this is your, we're getting into your stuff now. Interesting. Oh, So the foundation of your B2B incubator demand, me just say again.

17:17 I shouldn't be trying to read them. I'm a terrible- Nah, you're doing great. I like, I'm thinking we're doing videos at the moment and they keep trying to me to read off a teleprompter. And I'm like, guys, I just make up my own words. That's the best way to do it. I reckon is just make it up. Like it's so hard to read off a script. Yeah. All right. This will definitely look forced when we, when we slip into this one. All right, George. So you founded the B2B incubator.

17:46 And I understand you've got these five B's as the five B framework. So how does your framework help demand generation? How can it help somebody or if somebody's listening today, how could it help them generate pipeline? Yeah, the five B's framework is something that I built with my business partner, Kevin Chen, as really a step-by-step system to help businesses, not just drive.

18:09 pipeline, but aligned with sales. So marketing can align better with sales and work together to drive like strong commercial outcomes without needing like a massive budget or headcount. It came about because I found that when I was getting into B2B, there was a lot of tactical information. There was a lot of noise out there and there were a lot of fundamentals and foundations out there too. And I've read so many books and learned from a lot of mentors.

18:36 I just found it frustrating because I felt like no one had really mapped it together as to what to do and when. And so the 5Bs framework was our answer to that. This is the order that you should do when you were going to market. And the 5Bs really gives the marketer like the right sequence at the right time is our hope anyway. And it starts with what we call be ready. Be ready is really about like just deeply understanding, defining and segmenting your market.

19:05 understand who you're targeting, understand what they care about, map their buying journey, make sure your positioning and messaging reflects that. And then finally, we've also added, make sure you catalog your market to understand who's in market, who's out of market, who they currently use as their vendor, get all that information too. And then that becomes your source of truth to begin with across marketing sales and customer success. So that is kind of like the first step to getting everyone aligned. We call it, be ready.

19:34 The second stage is what we call be helpful. And that is like a bit of an attitude shift for a lot of marketers, because I think if you take an attitude of like, how can we be helpful to our market? You start to think more about the buyer and doing things on their terms. And being helpful is really about, really about building the content based on all the information that you have in part one of the framework in be ready to make sure that we're

20:00 mapping out their buying journey, that we're answering questions they have at every single stage. That the people who are answering those questions are not the marketer, but the subject matter experts in the business. That content is getting out there and you're communicating on a one to many, one to few, and one to one basis. You also want to make sure that you're investing in long-term brand building here as well. you're top of mind when the buyers enter the buying cycle. So it's really about making sure that we're creating this engine that is subject matter.

20:30 expert led that answers all the questions that you know that your buyers are going to have at different stages and builds good familiarity with your brand as well. The third step is what we call be seen. So we had be ready, deeply understanding your customers, be helpful, build relationships of trust and be seen. Get your information in front of people. There's no point in building it if they don't see it. Basically just get it in front of them, however you can find out where they are and put it in front of them.

21:00 So if they're on LinkedIn, use paid media to get in front of them on LinkedIn. If they're at events, get there. If you need to use account-based marketing to take a more tailored approach to distribute that information, do that. Be saying is just get the information in front of people. You go ahead. was going say, think again, I've seen this mistake happen where people at that stage, they don't look at where I always say like, where are they hanging out? Where are these people? Is it LinkedIn? Is it Reddit?

21:29 I worked at a company where it was hugely Reddit. So there was no point advertising on LinkedIn. was like everything had to be done in Reddit. And I think that's often a mistake if people just go, well, everyone's on LinkedIn or everyone's on wherever. And they just stick to that one channel without really thinking of like, where can we be seen? Yeah. If you just pause and think about it, of course it makes sense, but unfortunately, I don't know why. Like I had someone DM it the other day saying,

21:58 What are the three best channels for B2B? I was like, what do you mean? Who's your buyer? Where do they hang out? Be there. Just get in front of them and prioritize, of course, the channels, right? Like you've got to look at what budget you have available. Maybe you don't have the budget to be reaching them on a one-to-many basis on ads. Maybe organizing round tables, showing up to events. Maybe that's a better way to get in front of people. Maybe having them to a webinar is a better way to do that. But just...

22:28 be the places where your buyers are. It's pretty simple. So they're like the three, I would say like fundamentals of our 5Bs framework. They're the ones that we teach as part of the B2B incubator. I'll just gloss over the next two. B2B better is more about optimizing your marketing processes, building feedback loops with sales, marketing, and customer success, and using those insights to refine your messaging, your segments, and your campaigns. So you stay relevant and you tighten what you're doing.

22:58 And be the best is really just one that we made for some more fun stuff, more advanced tactics that's normally reserved for big organizations. So we talk a little bit about things like neuro marketing and neuro marketing principles that people can dive into. These are all be the best are like kind of the one percenters or two percenters, but the big difference to what you're doing is going to happen in be ready, be helpful, be seen. think that's where most people miss. They'd miss those fundamentals.

23:26 I really like that with your framework again, you're constantly talking about knowing the market, knowing the customer, you're having conversations with sales and with customer success. It's not, you can really see the difference or somebody who's just chucking leads over the fence to somebody who's a strategic partner in the business. Yeah, exactly. And that's what we're trying to elevate marketers to become as well is yes, we want them to really grasp what are the fundamentals of marketing.

23:55 that they need to know, but also how do we elevate ourselves to be like drivers of business to help capture commercial truth and distribute it as well and work with people to push that forward as much as possible. cool. Good to good for marketing to come back the seat at the table and being the strategic, the strategic department. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think we've got a long way to go there.

24:21 But I'm hoping it's going to keep happening. think one thing that a lot of marketers struggle with is the balance between like creating demand or capturing what's already there. How do you feel about structuring? How would you structure the approach? Would you focus on both motions equally or is there a general rule of thumb? Yeah, I think it depends like on every business. It depends on if you're in established category, if you're in an established category.

24:49 and there's a lot of existing demand, then there's a lot of opportunity to try and capture as many of those in-market buyers as possible. Are you going to be able to do that as efficiently as the incumbent brand who's already there if you're a new competitor? Absolutely not. And you're probably going to hit a point of diminishing returns. I think if you've been a performance marketer and you've worked for a startup, you have felt this pain big time. Because like,

25:16 Just to get a little bit more niche for those who are performance marketers. And I don't know if you've been a performance marketer. Have you been a performance marketer before Sam? Yeah. Yeah. You'll get it right. Like you start off, you're doing like, you're targeting like long tail searches on Google ads, review sites. You're going after niche terms and it's doing super well for the business. And then of course, like demands come in because they want more and more of it.

25:42 But as you push up your bids, as you expand some more generic terms, try and service that traffic. Guess what? Like your costs blow out because there's more competition for those terms and you're competing against bigger brands as well. And there's a good chance that they have more brand recognition, that their costs are lower, or even if their costs are the same, they can wear it because they're a much bigger brand than you. And they've probably got like

26:08 many other products to sell people as well. Their total cart value is probably much bigger as well. So you're only going to be able to go so far if you're just capturing demand alone is probably the point I'm trying to make. Most organizations are going to have to push into more of that brand marketing, reaching those future buyers earlier on because it's at that

26:31 point where you're reaching future buyers and you're educating them and you're building that preference, it's a much cheaper place to market to them. And then when they come into market, they're more likely to pick you over someone else. And so like there's a financial opportunity to get in front of people earlier on. It's a bigger pool of people. So it's generally cheaper to market to them. So then when they're in market, we're not in this knife fight.

26:56 this bloodbath with all these other brands, just trying to grab those people who are ready to buy right now. So typically you might see most resources dedicated to like capturing demand. That makes sense. You got to do that. Reinvest the money into those who are out of market. And yeah, you normally probably start with an 80-20 split of capturing demand to creating future demand for your brand. And then over time, I think 60-40 is generally what people say.

27:25 with most of it going towards future buyers. Has that kind of been your understanding and your experience too, Sam? Yeah, it's interesting. A couple of things. One, like you saying about the performance marketing. I've been on both ends, right? Where I've been the bigger company and I've had the budget and I've been able to pick up the small guys and I've been the small guy. And I think as you were speaking, I thought of this scaling AdWords, like taking AdWords as lead gen and scaling that.

27:52 He's really hard because you do just start adding in more and more Vega Vega terms. Like it gets so vague that you bring in in rubbish. So if you aren't focused on that top of funnel piece and the awareness layer, I think you're, you're, you're going to plateau. You're going to reach a point where demand's no longer coming in. For me, I think the, the split it's always like he said, it's, it goes back to what said in the beginning. How well is the business running?

28:22 Are we achieving our goals? And personally, I like to get to a point where we're achieving our goals. We're in a pretty safe position. And then I start increasingly increasing the awareness part and the demand generation part. I did read and I'm trying to think, I think it's in the long and the short of it. I can't remember, but they say the optimum is 60 % brand, 40 % shorter. again, they're talking not specifically on B2B and I think it varies.

28:51 you get into B2B. But there is like a real focus that they prove the companies that are growing fastest and the most efficient are the ones that put up to 60 % into brand. So I think like specifically on demand gen, what you said, the 40-60 split works, especially if you've got that brand layer where there is some like purebred brand campaigns out there. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, excuse me. Yeah, absolutely.

29:19 I think everyone's realizing the importance of investing in brand like as soon as their company is able to do it. And probably you want to do it before you start hitting that point of diminishing returns too. And so your finance team, even your performance marketer normally has a decent pulse on how we starting to hit diminishing returns of at least like on something like Google search and Google ads, you can start to see.

29:46 Is our cat going above what we can afford it to be for the downstream revenue it's creating? And you want to make sure that you don't leave that too late because people invest in brand and yeah, it can work soonish, but if you think about it, we need to be in front of people long enough for them to come into market. And that means coming into market because they've decided to switch from another vendor.

30:15 Or they've decided that the problem is now painful enough that they want your solution. Yeah. And that can take time, right? If your sales cycle is six to 12 months, then you want to make sure that you're investing in getting in front of people and doing it for long enough. So by the time you actually really need those people to become customers, you've already built that trust with them. Yeah. I often think these things I'm going completely off script here, like long and a short of it, Mark Ritzen came out.

30:44 Did you know Margaret's son? Funny enough, he's an English guy, he mania of all places. He came out saying we branded this wrong. It should be called long because it puts people off. And I'm sitting here thinking, demand generation, the wrong name for this, because I understand we're trying to generate demand, but it almost, I don't know. It sounds like we're doing so much more than just generating demand. We're building for the future. We're ensuring we're top of mind. We are building brand. It's almost.

31:14 been branded in a way, all we do is generate demand. don't actually close business. Yeah, it's interesting. think that the role is evolving to become like more of an orchestrator between if you're lucky enough to have a separate brand team, like the orchestrator between the brand team who are reaching future buyers, your performance team, the people who are distributing that between PR and comms.

31:43 Like I feel like they're the ones who are really closely mapping what that buying journey looks like, how it normally ties closer to pipeline as well. And that's where I'm seeing the role evolve as that orchestrator between them. What the future is, whether that is just trying to encompass both a brand marketer and like a performance market or a sales enablement marketer into one role. I'm not sure that's what it is. Like I think at this stage, I still see that.

32:13 There is a gap there, like that there is a disconnect from what the brand team are doing and what the performance team are doing. I think that's like something that Mark Ritson talks about as well is your advertising is more effective when long marketing is long, like the assets you use are long and short marketing is short. He said, but there should be some interconnectedness between them. And I do feel like

32:40 This demand generation role is evolving to help create and maintain those connections in a way that maybe has been lost. The orchestration piece, think a hundred percent on the money. It's the one role in marketing or not the one, because you could argue product marketers as well, but it can dip into any. Terrible in the morning. This on the, they'll do a horrible outro of me as well.

33:10 All right, try again. Where were we? We were about orchestrating. Oh, think the orchestration piece is actually for demand generation, like a hundred percent on the money. Like the only other team I would say, which is across everything, is product marketing. When I think of my experience in demand gen and people in the team here at Dealfront, they are working with brand department. They are looking at events. They are working with content. They are working with sales and CS.

33:39 It is a real orchestration role of bringing everyone together around a key message and a key campaign and like the key market. So yeah, that part I think is often overlooked as well as how much they and bring the entire team together and almost like they're driving the strategy of the business themselves, the strategy of marketing themselves. think we're

34:06 Product marketing doesn't quite go far enough and it's fine because it's their role is product is obviously all about making sure that your buyers are really aware about the great benefits and features of your product and the use cases and all that kind of stuff. But I think where demand generation differs a little bit is they are very well aware of that, but they're also looking at how can we go one step further and build genuine trust between our market, which probably connects

34:34 what the content team is doing and like any field team are doing to the product. And like a great example that came out of the B2B incubator was a company that basically they were in the construction space, like very slow moving. They had a piece of software that really helped people be more efficient on construction sites. And they ended up creating like a 12 part

35:01 podcast, YouTube series that basically helped their ICP learn everything they needed to about labor operations, which is the thing that they solved for. They didn't really talk about their product. They talked all about the pains that they're experiencing, the solutions that you could use. And then their product became like the natural conclusion of what they were talking about in a sense of the pains. We've given you the solutions, but how dare we not.

35:31 tell you about the product. It's we're almost doing you a disservice by not telling you about it. And they don't talk about it every episode, but see how like you're connecting like the pains, like building trust and HubSpot do this really well, right? Like the number of certifications and education they give people before you're even ever a HubSpot customer, like they absolutely come top of mind and you absolutely feel like they understand you. so

35:59 when you go to a new organization and you choose your CRM, like they're definitely one of the ones that are top of your list. And I think the DemandGen role helps encapsulate that and that might've been missed without it. Yeah. Very true. And a really good use case as well. And I like that. The view of it, like you said, the fact that they, why wouldn't they tell you about the product? It's like, yeah, this is in your favor that we tell you. Exactly. How dare we? Yes.

36:28 So you have spoke about sales and marketing and working together and not arguing over retribution, but what role do you think sales and marketing alignment play in the generation or pipeline generation space? Yeah, I've been definitely learning more and more about this myself. Cause I think most teams say that they're aligned and when they say that they might do something, have a weekly standup meeting with sales, but real alignment isn't just a meeting.

36:56 And we said it before, like you can have the best of intentions. can have shared accounts that you want to talk about, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to like how you measured and incentivized. And real alignment looks like having shared goals, having shared market Intel, having shared accountability and making sure that the role of marketing and pipeline isn't just a handoff MQLs and for it to leave there and say all the best sales.

37:26 It's about helping sales having like more better relevant conversations with the right accounts. We've been talking a lot about Adam Mandarovitch's methods called close circuit selling. He's a two times chief revenue officer, is a seven times ex head of sales. He's broken national sales records in Australia, in North America, I think in New Zealand as well. And.

37:54 It's built on the simple idea that sales marketing and customer success should operate from the same map of the market. Because like currently we don't do that, right? often sales are targeting one list of accounts, marketing's got their ICP that we're targeting, but this is about let's understand the market as much as possible. And the motion should start with sales or if you have an SDR that reports into marketing.

38:24 Validating the market, which is again, going and having conversations to find out who's in market, who's out of market, what vendors they use, what objections they have. Do you have permission to circle back? That's then amazing information that you can then take to marketing. Marketing takes that information, can build trust, close knowledge gaps, get information back in front of those prospects. Sales then knows when to re-engage at the right time because you know that this person's contract is up in November.

38:53 So we can circle back in August. said they're happy for us to circle back to them in that interim. Marketing have been getting all their great product information in front of them, their great helpful content in front of them. And then that's like a beautiful outcome because like you're focusing your time, energy and resources on the right accounts. There's a very clear motion there between sales and marketing. Marketing can focus on doing what we do best, which is building brand, building trust, educating.

39:23 We don't have to then focus on shoveling leads onto sales. We're trying to say we know who is in market and who's out of market because sales have done that work. And what we've seen from it is it's just a much more efficient pipeline, which compounds over time. And the simple change is when sales are having conversations with the market, that rather than approaching it to try and book a meeting,

39:52 They're approaching it from the point of view of information gathering, doing it on the buyer's terms and circling back at the right time. Yeah. So hopefully that answers your question more as to how we think about sales and marketing alignment. guess my point is it needs to go beyond just meetings and it needs to go more into the architecture of what underpins them. And until sales go back and start doing this motion or someone's gathering this data, it's going to be really difficult for the two teams to fully align.

40:21 Yeah, I like the, like, I've done this in the past where, doing it right now actually, where you build a target list and you look through all the contacts on the list and all the companies on the list and you sit down with sales and actually say, look at this company. Do you think you could sell to them? Do you think they need our solution? And if you randomly pick some and there's no, they've got no need for it, then you're targeting. And I think like even getting to that level of like agreement. So.

40:50 before you even start your campaigns, it's okay. we bring you this company, do you believe they're a good enough fit to close? Otherwise, what I've found happened is I've had it both ways where marketing has just created the list on their own and it's as you said, it's made up on our ICP only. haven't involved sales or the worst in my opinion is sales have created the list and chucked it over to marketing and said,

41:16 These are the companies I want and is normally an England is normally just a couple of football clubs. They're, they're dreaming of selling to it's no, no relevance whatsoever. So yeah, I think agreeing on the market with them. then as you say that cataloging step is huge. If you could pull that off, powerful. I still very much believe that marketers should be the ones getting intelligence from the market. That's in our name. That's what we do.

41:44 customer interviews, customer research, that's in our wheelhouse. But again, just by virtue of marketing doing one to many, one to few communications, sales does one to one, they are sitting on a treasure trove of information that they can pass back to marketing. But they're only going to collect those insights if they're not just trying to book a meeting. Because if they're trying to book a meeting and they make that call and they get through,

42:13 And if that person is not in market because they signed with a competitor of yours three months ago, they're just going to say, no, thanks. I'm not interested. But if they change what they're doing and think about how can I get information and go, oh, that's great. Do you mind if I asked like, why did you go with them? What if you liked about it so far? How long is your contract for? Do you mind if I circle back at another time so you can compare when your contract comes up?

42:40 good information that we need to really gather. And so it's almost like a salesperson accepting the 95.5 rule applies to them too, not just to marketers. I like that. All right. One last question to close out, probably the big one, actually where everything that's going on at the moment. What are you predicting of the trends coming out for demand generation, B2B marketing in general? Is there anything that you've got your eye on? Anything that you're expecting to?

43:10 heavily disrupt the way we go to market? Oh, heavily disrupt. I think that the bar is still relatively low out there for a lot of stuff in the B2B world. think sometimes like in our LinkedIn bubble as well, you look at what people are doing and you think, wow, things are moving really fast. And then you step outside of LinkedIn and things maybe aren't moving at quite the same speed. think honestly on the trend and tactic side, just getting your subject matter.

43:40 experts to lead your content to be like the conduits and the spokespeople for your content or for the key information your buyers need to know is still going to be a huge unlock. Like getting genuine expertise in front of people so they see you are the expert. You do understand them. If your audience is on LinkedIn, like combining it with Thought Leader ads is like an amazing combination if we're talking about tactics. Probably.

44:09 One of the biggest shifts like obviously it's going to be around AI, especially with AI generated content flooding every channel. think to be honest, Sam, I think there's going to be a point where we saw probably what Google had done with VO3 and just how good it is. And what was, what's that saying? No, actually no, cut. That's a bad saying. I'm not going to say that. Patrick cut that.

44:40 Yeah. So if we look at what Google is doing with VO3, like all of a sudden we can't trust even our own eyes and what they're telling us because it just looks so real. And so if we stop being able to trust what we see in front of us online, I think there's going to be a big shift back to real communities, real connection, round tables, like that kind of stuff. think.

45:07 It's really going to go back the other way eventually. think we'll have a period of time where everyone's going to be leveraging AI and it's going to be amazing. Look how cool this is. Look at all these fun things that we're doing. But then you're just going to get to the point of, don't know what's real. I don't know who to trust anymore. I'm going to go back to people I know physically and seeing them physically. And I think that's where those communities are really going to thrive. What's your take on that? 100 % on the money. I think, yeah.

45:34 For me, there's two things and technically AI can be creative, but I do think creativity as a skill is going to start standing out. So people who find unique ways to engage with people or, or just to add creatives are at a whole new level. think that will start to stand out. But yeah, obviously we're doing our part in the community space where like, even if it pre-drinks at an event, like any way we can get people in front of people.

46:03 It's having a good return for us. I think it's, it is because people are getting spam left and center and there is so much out there and everyone can create the content now that we've gone back to needing that human connection to, really trust a brand. And yeah, I think that's only going to get bigger. Yeah. How do you stand out from the noise, right? You've got to be more personal and AI just means there's going to be more noise than ever. And so yeah, I can see.

46:32 Things going back the other way. It'll be really interesting to see how things play out. It'll be drinking whiskey in the office again in no time. think so. think so. George, this has been great. I've definitely learned a lot. It's really good to chat to you. If anyone wants to join the B2B playbook or they want to connect with you, how would they go about doing that? Yeah, just Google the B2B playbook.

47:00 searching George Koudinaris on LinkedIn or Google, you've got no chance of spelling my last name. So I think search the B2B playbook and you'll find me there. That's the easiest way. Good. Appreciate it. Thanks to you and thanks for joining. Thanks so much, Sam. Really appreciate you having me on.