#3: How To Build A Predictable Growth Engine with Steffen Hedebrandt from DreamData

Steffen: Hi, I'm Steffen. I'm the CMO and, co-founder of, Dreamdata. I'll be joining Christian and Søren on the Messy Growth Show, and we will be talking about repeatable growth, how to build a growth engine, how to make sure that it works, that you can track it, and, get to know what works in the future. And, hopefully you'll be inspired by this and, can go on and do better in your own journey.

Soren: Welcome to the Messy Growth Show, where we talk to founders and marketeers of software and manufacturing companies about their path to growth and challenge the conventional beliefs of what works and what does not to help you untangle the path to your growth. Your host on this podcast is Christian Jorgensen, and I am Soren Hansen so let's get started with today's guest on the Messy Growth Show. So welcome to the show, Steffen.

Steffen: Thank you Soren.

Soren: Taking the time to join us here on the Messy Growth Show. Before we start, perhaps you could give us, you are CMO at Dreamdata right now, but give us an introduction of yourself and a short description of your journey to where you are now as founder and CMO of Dreamdata.

Steffen: I'm happy to. I've been working in B2B companies in marketing growth stuff, related roles ever since I graduated the Copenhagen Business School back in 2010. So it's been some years now and all those companies has always been, Digital like software or stuff like that. Elance my opinions, as you'll hear today, is very much shaped by that. It's always been digital B2B companies. And what I say might not be true for all businesses, but I've, at least now I've told you that's how I'm colored in my opinion. Started out with a, like a extremely scrappy startup that failed, but learned a lot about online marketing, SEO, etcetera. When I was there, on to, what is now Upwork, which I think that's where I met Christian for.

Christian: The Elance Days, right?

Steffen: I, my story with Elance was that I read that the Four Hour Workweek book started experimenting with these online freelancers, and then as they were opening an office here in Europe, they asked whether I may might be interested in joining that team And having not made any money for the first one or two years after graduating, I thought, okay. Let's get some salary And that was that.

Christian: Sounds good.

Steffen: Then from Upwork, I moved on to Airtame where I was the head of marketing for three and a half years. And we went through this kind of, from less than 20 to more than a hundred employees And spending zero on ads to spending hundreds of thousand. Oh, somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars per month on ads or something like that. In that process, you start wondering, is this actually a good idea or is it not a good idea to spend all this money on advertising? First money you put in, you have a pretty good, causality understanding, did this happened, but the last 10, 20,000 you put in, you're a little bit more I don't know, And then at the end of my tenure there I happened to get introduced to what then became my two co-founders Lars and Ole The that claimed they had a somewhat of an a solution to these attribution questions that the had in B2B companies. I saw a super ugly prototype, but it could somewhat answer the questions I had been asking myself for a long time. Like, how long does it take from when we see a customer the first like a person, the first time before they become a customer, which are the good ads, which are the good pieces of content? Are we doing a good or bad job in marketing? And I decided that if I'm ever gonna be like a full-time entrepreneur. I said, okay, maybe now is the chance because there's two super smart technical people that have a solution to a problem, which I know to be very real And, we are four years later, now just raised this, series A round and, have a pretty solid b2b go-to market analysis, B2B attribution product with customers and yeah, all over the world.

Christian: Nice. Congrats on the funding round. That's always a bit of a tough journey to get on.

Steffen: It was historically bad timing of racing the money as we started by beginning of Q2 2022 and last year and everybody was, I think even the VCs will agree now There was a bit of a panic time. Nobody wanted to move on anything. It took all of the summer to get through, but now we're on the other side and have to start on the promises we've made.

Soren: In your view, Steffen, what does a b2b, growth engine look like, What does it consist of?

Steffen: Yeah so first of all I've mainly just tried this space, which is from a few employees up to like a hundred, 200 employees. So you're north of that amount of employees, then I don't know so much about that space. But what I've tried sometimes now is to, start somewhat from scratch and then build something up to at least scale upstage when I look backwards, particularly at Dreamdata, actually one of the most important things we've done has actually been you can say it's not a per se an activity but had it has been really to* spend time * *on defining * *who's our ideal * *customers who's * * the * *antithesis to * *our I ideal * *customers.* Because by doing so, all the other choices that you're gonna make afterwards, it's becoming a lot easierYou know for example we've defined it as B2B SaaS companies between, say, from the lowest and 50 employees up to somewhere around 2000 employees. And predominantly the marketers within these companies. And once you've really decided upon this, then deciding all the growth experiments, test marketing stuff becomes a lot easier because you can, you can match the idea up against would people from these companies actually find this attractive? Would they be present at this physical event? Would they be writing these things on Google? Where are they present, etcetera. So I've really seen that, how that have not only just aligned how we do marketing but the whole company that marketing knows who to attract. Salespeople are only allow only allowed to work on accounts that look like the ideal customers. Product only builds for type of persona. So over time, it helps set a direction for the company. Some of the, kind of my inspiration for this comes from Seth Godin, which is kind of a an old school marketer who had a book called Tribes, which I think works, really well here as a metaphor for why you need an ideal customer profile. Because in most company except if you're like Coca-Cola or IBM, you can't advertise to the whole world. You need to kind of spend the few money you have available, just being super present in front of your persona, your ideal customer So with a very narrow budget. You know if we use surfers as an example here, like people who would surf the water then like there's a few spots around the world, there's probably a few books, there's probably some influencers, there's a few tournaments, maybe a few events. And if you're just present at these places, you would actually look like a pretty big surf brand. Then by defining exactly who we're going for I would, think that would that's the fundamental for me. Don't be afraid of actually saying, we can't sell to these guys. We can't sell to these guys. It hurts. I know, it's really painful to say I'm not gonna sell to the, there, I'm not your market.

Soren: An acronym for that. It's called FOMO.

Steffen: Yeah.

Soren: Bring cold sweat on your forehead.

Christian: I was just curious because, you know, this is a very fundamental problem for pretty much any client I work with. The figuring out who's their ideal customer,and then this FOMO comes up and like, yeah, we should not sell to these guys over here. They're pretty much in panic about that every time. How did you get, without us going complete ICP focus on this, but how did you, with you guys starting, with zero customers and then growing, how did you figure out that it was these B2B, SaaS companies, 50 to 2000 employees and not, some, manufacturing companies or whatever, stuff.

Steffen: I think one of the components is when you're in a subscription business, then you who's most likely to be happy customers and renew their contract, that's a super important thing. So like you don't want your sales people just to bring in accounts that will churn after the first year's contract. So we, for B2B SaaS companies particularly they do a heavy investment in marketing online. Sales teams typically use inside sales tools like crm, calling email software, etcetera. And they also delivered their product digitally So kind of you have a, work with digital touches to kind of explain what's the customer journey. So we needed to find somebody who would generate a lot of digital touches of their customer journeys and who would open also to have a good deal of money available. Used to have that, last year and let, but let's see this year So there was kind of this fundamental. For the product to work well, we need a lot of digital reflections. We need tech savvy people. We need people who are likely to be happy customers as well, because if they're not happy customers, then we'll have a lot of churn and then we can't raise money afterwards either. Those kind of there's a few things that led us on the path to this.

Christian: Okay.

Steffen: Extremely hard sometimes if there's a customer who seems like they want to buy and you don't have a lot of customers, so sometimes you shouldn't take it. So other times you need to be practical and just, you know, get that deal signed and then try to make the best of it But it's.

Soren: I just, one and then to go back to, what a growth engine looks like?

Steffen: Yeah.

Soren: We, if we take different customers, not only will they ne they might churn, they might not, at the end when they are customers and we start taking feedback for product development and product improvement, then we skew the whole product by taking in feedback from not ideal customer profiles. And that can be expensive. It might, the product might end up being just as good and just as bad for everyone instead of being superior for a specific segment where word of mouth and raving reviews will come from. I think also where we in the future and how our product looks is hugely, usually depending on us having a icp.

Steffen: Yeah. I totally.

Soren: Steffen, let's get back to, visually, what does a growth engine consist of in your mind in terms of what you created at the first stages up the, up until a point in, as cmo.

Steffen: The way I would always approach building a growth engine will be to think about what would be a typical buyer's journey here for those that would be in market right now. It's not, you know, a thing you typically say one, two, 3% of people of your addressable market is buying right now So it's not, it's not the whole market. You should start out with I would start to try to grasp the people that are showing somewhere on the internet for buying So like, The old school you would call is bottom Funnel. Funnel So I would say, review platforms. If you've made your way all the way down to a category where you read reviews about certain pieces of software, then you're quite far in making a decision. You know create a profile on these platforms. Start collecting reviews there. If you have any customers, there's the search engines, both paid and organically. Think through kind of what are people particularly writing when they're the intent, the intention for acquiring a product like yours, would appear, and start covering those like there's no doubt in your mind that if people are searching for this, then they're looking for something like what you do. And that is kind. An engineer always needs running for us, particularly when we make software. There's a lot of these things we integrate with that have marketplaces. Example, HubSpot has a marketplace where you can click marketing and then analytics. If HubSpot uses this, messing around in obviously it's good for us to have a nice and shiny profile because they're quite far again in decision making. I dunno if you guys can think of other places you'd express, strong in-market intent, but that I would look through kind of what is my industry, how do, how is intention to buy express right now That is that kind of. First engine I wanna want to get.

Christian: Start with the low hanging fruits, harvest those and.

Steffen: Yeah exactly. And then from there on it's very much, I think you have to be very experimental because. It's different from company to company, which tactics work. Even though some company is performing some tactic and it works for them, perhaps it doesn't work for you. Perhaps you're worse at executing It can be, it can be lots of things But now that I think about it even before you start pulling in traffic to your website, need a website, need to start ex you need to make sure that *when people arrive * *to your website, * *that they actually can * *understand what is it that * *you do * *or why is it * *valuable * *what * *are the features?* So I had this case when we just started out, the three of us, there was barely a website I kind of just had to interview our CTO to understand why. What is it we do? What is the technology? Why is this valuable, et cetera. So you need to make sure that whatever wherever you funnel people, there's actually some good explanations of How does your thing.

Soren: True. And does that like align with the pains that they have? Your buyers? Do they get why this is a problem and can we communicate that in a way so they like, oh yeah, this I want to read more about and eventually get on a trial or a demo call with you guys. Like really understanding that it, again, back to the icp, understanding their language, their pains, their worldview, and also just their buying process. That's something Søren and I have been talking about a lot, quite lately, actually, more with the enterprise space that, you know, maybe they will not, like a big enterprise, will not just sign up for trial, because There's like a CFO involved, a legal department, whatever, in their decision process. And if you don't understand that, you're just gonna fail Yeah, so the pains and icp, because an ICP as an account, it's an organization, but organization we have personas. So then you have formal and informal decision makers, they, there are different owners of different pains we need to understand because. The buyer journey is really a great tool that you mentioned, Steffen, because it helps us understand what loops a client needs to go through, what information they need, the requirements and everything before they're able to buy. Those are great if you have that, it becomes, just like you said about the icp, it becomes fairly easy to create content and understand what content to create.

Steffen: I think once you get to a certain deal size, people have to talk with people. People have to get approvals So you should be thinking through after I've convinced like the first person I speak to what who are the people he or she needs to go through. Is it data security? Is it the cfo? Who is it? And then I, like, ideally I would start developing content that ever addresses the concerns of these like you can say, second tier stakeholders that you also convince.

Soren: Yeah.

Steffen: If we get back to kind of the pillars then, we've done A lot of paid advertisement where we try to step a little bit outside those like crystal clearuh intentions. I think nowadays I'm really a big fan of, LinkedIn. They have something a function called matched audiences in their advertisement, where you can actually upload lists of exactly the companies you want to run your ads towards. So if you have a well defined ICP and you know, people in these companies have these problems, then I think it's a great way to spend some advertisement money. Just forgetting about the tracking element of it, as long as I know it's these people in this company, in this.

Christian: Yes.

Steffen: Be all bad that they start to be exposed for Our brand. Obviously there's the secondary discipline is kind of can we track it afterwards? But it has to start with the right people and the right message. And then next step is then to try to it through some kind of tracking. I would say, oh yeah, growth engine. Retargeting, like make sure like the people that are easiest in this world to sell to is people who've been on your website before and that I would set up, first of all, install the tracking cookie from any kind of ad network. So it at least allows you the opportunity to get back to these people at some point if you want. Sounds like you've done that before.

Christian: If I could scale a retargeting to Infinity, would make a billion dollars. I mean, it's people that have shown in some. Especially if you filter your retargeting audience a little bit based on not just like a one second visit or whatever, some crap traffic a kid that accidentally clicked your YouTube, video because they watching something. But yeah, then it's definitely a good channel.

Steffen: We put out some benchmarks in the summer about the average customer journeys that we could see with our clients. And the first touch until a deal was, one was the average journey was 192 days, so like more than six months. It had an average of 31 sessions with the company as well. I think these components just highlights that. You are not done. Once you get the first click in from some company, you need to like continuously bring them back to your website, continuously inspire them with content, you have to kind of just be like always on producing great stuff that can help support the sales people all the way.

Christian: True. If you have a big enough, pipeline of people, you can basically set up retargeting, campaigns based on where they are in your funnel stages. So if they're like, this is their next step, like, you know, the CFO needs to approve on this, then you can basically run ads and nurturing campaigns, whatever stuff based on that. Like, get the calculator for your cfo, whatever, just to, you know, it out on YouTube Meta, whatever. LinkedIn, been doing that quite successfully. It's a bit overseen. Little trick, but you need to have a quite big volume of, people coming in because you need to have enough for making these custom audiences or similar on the different platforms.

Steffen: Yeah. We can then we can drill a little bit more into the website as well Just, kind of typically you can think about the website as kind of a fishing boat for your activities So like, you want to be able to catch as much of the attention that you are given as totally And, like when I started working at Air team they just had buy this product as the single conversion that they had on their website. So by our product, I'll leave the website and that would like, oh 0.3% of the visitors would do that, but with them, with little by little started introducinglike this microversion opportunities. With us. I think 1% chatted with us. We had this like pop up when one, what back when they were riffing, where one to 2% also submitted to sign up to the newsletter. We introduced a get a demo button, which, today's standard everywhere, but that caught 0.3% as So suddenly once you start to have all these micro conversions, then when you put in a hundred or a thousand or whatever you put into your website, you get a much more, you get much more value out of the website. And yeah, maybe the first fundamental thing is just to install this advertising cookies. So at least you harvest the data that you can then repurpose and.

Christian: True.

Steffen: Used to have a bad habit of whenever I saw a new company, run TV ads, I would go into their websites to see have they installed the pixels from other places, because I just knew if they hadn't, they're just like throwing money completely out of the window.

Christian: That's a fun little thing to do. Yeah, true.

Soren: This is, this is really key and it's not. Necessarily gimmick, or trick marketing. It's a matter of understanding what would create the biggest value for your visitor at this stage of their journey. So if they're trying to understand their own problem better, or if they're, they might not buy the service or the product we sell very often, they might need some guidance in terms of how to look at this product. What does it need to do to help me solve these problems? So define and test out what kind of insight and content the people will be willing to give their name and email address for so you get the first micro conversions and, can start supporting them on their journey.

Steffen: Yeah, I mean yeah if we get back to the kind of the growth engine like for me fundamentally it's more like a mindset, thing rather than it's, you said gimmick or like tactic. What I mean by that is that I view almost any marketing activity as some kind of an experiment. Like you have an idea, you try it out, you see kind of what is the return of it? Did it work, did it not work? If you're happy about what you saw in the first round, then you try to put in a little bit more effort, a little bit more money or resources into the idea if it still works, then you just. Keep adding resources to it because it's you don't have to find 800 things that works just have to find 1, 2, 3, tactics, that work. And then you have to sustain and scale these activities. If you do it by the book in those old growth hacking books, then you would once a month, once a week, once a quarter or something like that you and your team would write down what are all the ideas we have to things we could do right now? And then ideally you would also score them on like, is it expensive? Is it hard to do? What does our gut say? What impact could it be? I don't want to add too many because then it becomes too complex. But then you would actually, you would grab those things that would be easy to do and expect to have some kind of impact quite effectively. Then like little by little, you'd start carrying them out, see if they work, if they don't work, then you shouldn't jump to new ideas. Once you find something that works, didn't, you should actually be looking to, repeating these things. Can we scale it? You know, can we hire somebody just to own this thing? Because it clearly works. The reason why I'm emphasizing this is as I see these things as *when something works, * *that is what is gonna * *fund the * *next round of * *experiments *for you. Because we're in this world to produce sales for our company, produce revenue. So. Don't produce revenue out of what we do, then kind of we can't afford to do the next round of experiments that.

Christian: It's a very good point with the, like going deep, once you find something that actually works, then go deep on it because it's a pattern that I've seen happen a few times that people then at some point they just, go into squirrel mode and they see some new shiny, interesting object and they go for that instead. Like, Hey, let's do TikTok ads, or let's do, you know, whatever stuff. And then they leave behind these things that were actually on a path to, really improve the business and sales. And so being a little bit, narrow focused.

Steffen: I think it's super important. Actually, the next thing I'll just add realized is that kind of, when I say what works ideally, that means you make.

Christian: Yes.

Steffen: Least it produces proxies of what normally leads to money for me, it's hard to not think. Producing revenue with marketing. But some still, like have been in companies where the silos have been so big between marketing ting and sales, that they're not even being asked how many of those marketing leads did we sell to? Or like, how much money did we make from this campaign? And I think you want to be successful and appreciated as a marketer or a growth person in a B2B company at least you start by coming up with the narrative are doing these things so we get more leads. So the salespeople are busy and can sell stuff. And then you start telling this to the CFO or the CEO to explain them, we are doing these things because we want to sell more. And then the next component is you start to gather evidence, ideally hardcore, quantifiable evidence, but you might just have to start with. Qualitative stuff like screenshots or stuff like this. Hey, this guy mentioned us, he saw our ad here stuff like that. But you need to produce revenue. That the score card here is sales team selling something. It's not that we got another lead or we made an awesome campaign or people engaged with us. It's the company that needs to sell more.

Christian: Marketing needs to have a revenue goal. When I was taking my education at Copenhagen Business School, the narrative at that point. Marketing doesn't have a seat at the management table because they cannot show their results. And with meaning, results, meaning sales. And so from that point on, I always just been like, you know, I need to show my results no matter if they complete shit or what, or great, fine. But then we can talk about it. And it also stresses the marketing team to deliver good leads for the sales team because if they just, fill up the pipeline with 500 poor leads, then sales are not gonna actually close any deals. And then the whole organization is just, is just gonna struggle.

Steffen: You know another growth trick This It's and it is not like rocket science but you know making sure that the sales and marketing team. Feels like part of the same, process, like you know make sure that they sit in the same room. So when a lead comes in and it gets assigned to the salesperson, they can hear the salesperson saying, this is a fucking waste of time if I take this call. Because then you shouldn't bring in more of these leads. That is a waste of time like if you use the method for, like, if you would, lead if you think about presenting that physically to the salesperson, like, here's my mom. She wants to buy this very complex data product. Like, have a two hour call with her to see if, you can sell to her. You'll probably stop bringing in these kinds of leads because it doesn't match who the salespeople should be spending their time on.

Christian: True, of, one of clients, he was sitting 15 meters away from the sales team, but just decided to move. Right over and sit right in the middle of them just to get those insights. So that will, that will be just a stupidly simple change, but it will be a game changer for them.

Steffen: Yeah. But I think the responsibility is on both sides So like if salespeople feel the leads are bad, then walk into the marketing team's room, like physically or digitally and say, these are not good leads. I like to talk to these kinds of leads. Or you're on unsure in marketing, what a good lead is, then walk into the sales room and ask them who are the best, leads who would you like to have more to talk with?

Soren: Still keeping the ICP in mind.

Steffen: Hopefully that, if that is crystal clear for everybody, then they don't have to have this.

Soren: Yeah, we define our icp, we create our buyer's journey. Start figuring out where we can reach our ideal customers. Are they on a product comparison site? Those for SaaS products, right? Or are sites? Are they, can we reach them by paid advertising on one or the other channel? And then we create the content that maps up to the customer's buyers journey. What do they need? Do some experimentation on what it takes to get some micro conversions. So what about now we've done some MicroCon conversions. What is after that? Do we need some nurturing? Or how do we start getting in dialogue with the, with those that have shown interest?

Steffen: Yeah That's a good question And, I think it this really also depends on what is the, average of what you are chasing so like I don't know Christian was at Planday. They back in the day and the average deal size there was not super big. So you.

Christian: No.

Steffen: Afford a, super skilled salesperson to chase a deal that is, $200 a year or.

Christian: Oh is more than But.

Steffen: If you're selling something that is, has like a six digit con annual contract value, then the right solution is maybe just you know get that salesperson on this account and have him start chasing it. If you're on these like lower deal sizes, you might want to automate a lot of stuff where you just continuously stay top of mind classics could be like when they do convert the first time on a newsletter or ebook, you start having a flow of emails sent out to them. I would also connect to anybody who converts on LinkedIn. So once you who they are, go and press connect, start interacting with them there dream that we do a lot of this called, we call it social selling, but essentially it's just posting on LinkedIn two three times per week. What I've noticed lately is also like people in marketing B2B marketing, they change jobs so fast that the emails like if you collect a email, would almost rather collect a private email than a business email nowadays, because they change jobs so fast that email is useless within six months. So that's why you want to go connect with them on LinkedIn because. There's a likelihood that if there's a fit to your icp, they will move on to other companies. That's your icp. So it continues to just nurture the relationship with those people to where you stay top of mind with quality pieces of content, relevant things that you tell them.

Soren: Plus you will get notified that they actually did change job. And you need to look for new role at that account. You're trying to reach.

Steffen: That as well And then obviously then you keep your retargeting flow turned on as well. So they're constantly, I wouldn't say bombarded, but at least exposed or from, you are also sometimes in a direct competition with another vendor, but essentially you're just in a competition with everybody because everybody's bidding on LinkedIn to push their message in front of people. And in organizations, projects come up and there's a limit to how many projects one organization can handle. So say.

Christian: Sure.

Steffen: Legal software project comes in that might stop people from buying their attribution software right now because the data people can handle another project So this is like it is a fierce battle for constantly staying top of mind and being that project that is the next one that gets selected.

Soren: Keep in mind only two to 3% of your total addressable market looking for solving their problem right now. The rest is going to be a month from now, two months from now, three months from now. So nurture and be content with the natural situation you cannot up a readiness to buy it's not there. You need to wait to happen. So keep a timely perspective on your efforts, and do try to understand the people sitting on the other side that it's still only two or 3% at any given.

Steffen: Yeah I think here we're touching some like marketing fundamentals as well, like it's nice to catch those that are in market right now, but you're kind of a little bit actually already a little bit late to the conversation because in their mind they've probably listed 1, 2, 3 brands that they. Which they might go directly for rather than expressing a more broader category search. Like I think popular people call it domain creation nowadays I've had enough of that expression, but it doesn't make.

Soren: It branding. Be aware of what so, eh?

Steffen: What I what it has to highlighted this component for me that you need to be there before they are actively buying. And the way kind of we address that, today at Dreamdata is we have this ideal customer definition, and then we've built lists of, I think it's like 1,500 or so. No, maybe it's more B2B SaaS companies in Europe and America at a certain size, which we constantly run ads towards against the marketers who work in these companies. It's not kind of a, by our product right now, it's more like just.

Christian: Magnets.

Steffen: Yeah, like these are the problems you might have Here's the, here's the video, blah So the hope is that once that project move upwards, then we are present there the same we like, and this is connected to what I call social selling. So the account that we've named our people also that continuously connect to you have a hundred Connects you can spend per week on LinkedIn. So make sure you spend them towards your icp then if you continuously post stuff 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times per week, then these people start to know a lot about your brand. And hopefully that will make them one that they actually are in market come to you rather than your competition. So I think you're right, son, it's super important that, as I said, I start with those in market, but then be aware that the next component is to get in front of those that are most likely to be the next one that goes, in market.

Christian: Okay.

Soren: Good point about social selling and, be aware of, the deal size that, determines how much effort and, expensive.

Steffen: Maybe we should actually just jump a little bit into that because it's, it is, sustainable growth is extremely important. And what that means is that in your company, you need to establish what you're willing to pay for a certain business event, whether that's a demo or it's a new customer. And then hopefully the activities you carry out will cost less than what you're willing to pay for a new customer. And if you find those activities that are the activities you really should try to sustain, because here you've made a. I'm willing to pay 500, we're getting them at 400, so I should just keep putting more money into this project. Then sometimes you'll see projects where like, oh fuck, this doesn't make sense at all, so let's cancel these things. So it's boring stuff that actually makes up the growth engine. Who's the icp? What is the cost per acquisition we can spend, find stuff that works, sustain it, build a bank, like continuously build on these.

Christian: Yeah. And also just, have some budget assigned for just like experimental stuff, once you get to a level where like you have a pretty good predictable growth engine where you can just say, if I put in a thousand here, I get 10 out on the other end, that's great, but you also need to sometime, like at some point, that channel will just dry out and you cannot scale it more. It will just get like super expensive to get the next extra 10 leads. So then you just need to keep experimenting on the side with some budget aside, like, 10, 15% of your total ads spent budget to freestyle on random, stuff.

Steffen: Back in the day, I've also done my mistakes of just like completely shifting the budget out to the next experiment that I found interesting. And then you see just falling flat So that's all like it's hard earned lessons that sustained that stuff that works And don't like sh don't shift the whole budget before you're absolutely sure that it's the best decision. Start with those 10%, 15% as.

Christian: The scary part about that, if you do that, like switch your budget over sometimes it's not immediately that it happens. Sometimes it's like two, three months down the line and you're like, oh hell no. Like, we should not have done that.

Steffen: Yeah.

Soren: So continuous improvement instead of complete re-engineering. It.

Steffen: I have not yet managed to find, the silver bullet, least.

Soren: We can keep looking, but in the meantime we need to do continuous improvement.

Steffen: Yeah.

Soren: Definitely agree with that. So buyer's journey, icp. Create your buyer's journey for your ICP and really understand that because the more in depth you go with that and really understand who in the organization have what type of pains. You can speak to 'em, you can share content, and you can generate whatever you find by trial and error and test what of attractive information and content they would love to get for Micro conversions, and then figure out where to reach them. Paid channels, social.

Steffen: And.

Soren: At what? And certainly always have retargeting on, and it doesn't have to be just Google, it can be LinkedIn, it can be Facebook, it can be test out what works and what doesn't. And it depends on your audience. And you might be Steffen. So create your content, set up the micro conversions, and this is definitely a test area so you know exactly what they're looking for, what's the most desirable thing that they would love to give away there, name an email address for, or push the demo button or contact me. Social selling, not to forget, it's a way not only to reach out the customers, we'd love to have, but it's also a way to keep in contact and keep nurturing, and do test a lot with the messaging on that because whatever you post. Can be a dead end. It's a lot of competition out there. You want to create something that motivates people to engage, right?

Christian: True, but you also need to be, have the mindset of like, it. Let's just try and see what happens. Else you will never post anything, let's.

Soren: Steffen, now we have this, and if there's anyone out there like me that have a frustration of Analytics, something about third party cookies, and I'm not getting the data and Google Analytics are used to, beside the fact that Google Analytics can be a little cumbersome in actually getting an overview and some insight. And then I look for data in Google Adwards on LinkedIn, my email program. And I gotta make sense of all of this and understand some kind of buyer's, journey. And it's extremely hard and frustrating is opinion. So how do we deal with that? How do we get some level of attribution and what kind of attribution should we be looking for?

Steffen: I think I mean it's a good question and it depends on kind of your of resources you have in your organization. If we start from the low practical side of things then of all, think through kind of all the activities you guys are doing in your organization and think about is it actually generating Digi digital reflections of our activities? If our is our salespeople just like cowboys with their own phones, just calling customers directly, maybe we can move them into like a calling software. So it leaves a trace behind that somebody actually called this customer. Same thing if like customer success is just their Gmail inbox right now. Maybe it's time for Zendesk or Intercom or another piece of, customer success for, there might be a lot of activities you do today that is easy to get to generate digital reflections. That would, I think that would be point one and then next kind of attribution thing, and I would probably be looking for is asking where they heard about you, Both on sales calls on the website as they do their micro conversions. You can add where, how did you discover us? Or how did you hear about us? Or something like that. Like there's stuff you can do that it doesn't cost a lot of money that can help you understand a little bit more.

Soren: If you use a reasonable CRM system that doesn't have to cost a lot, like is free, that might give you some insights as well, right?

Steffen: Yeah, to some degree definitely then maybe you wanna start looking for what can be proxies for producing money that are not kind of the full journey, but just like it's a good step in the right direction. I'm thinking really much on either. Somebody who books a demo or signs up to your product. And again, now I'm thinking very much in terms of digital companies, but two things, if you push them upwards it's probably you probably won't sell to everybody. It's, but it's a good step in the right direction. But it's also so early in the journey that, you will probably have an idea about like you did A or B, and then more demo calls start coming in So I like these early indicators of the activities we do because we cannot sit and wait for 192 days to see whether it worked or not we need earlier signals. So want to focus on these conversions, demo call or free sign up. What are the kind of, what are the paths people just take to this?

Christian: Is it the right kind of people that are signing up and so on? Are they showing the right sim?

Steffen: Point well. Like, look, what is this email that is coming through here? Is that good or bad? And try to understand. Maybe in the CRM you can see this email had this, source or whatever. For example, when we, the problem though is that when you get a demo booked for our website, it takes an average of four visits and the last one or two visits are always, they came directly to the website. The session captured is somebody came directly and then booked the demo. And you cannot, like it's hard to scale people that coming directly to your website. So you need to the, like, what was the first of those four visits? And there's like there's no different ways of doing so But I think the main thing is that you. You start to think about that You need to own the tracking of your own website, like who's on my website, and store it in a place where you can continuously get access to it. Marketers don't even consider that. It's when they're looking in Facebook or LinkedIn or Google Analytics. Another company who tracks their data for them and owns the data and like they can just get shut out. The data can be sampled. They, you know, more legal measures will be introduced. And then you have no access to this data.

Soren: Do we need to consider for solving?

Steffen: Need to set up tracking that you actually store in a bucket. You own the, so there's, you know there's our product Dreamdata can do it for you, but there's segment, there's I think, what's it called? Tomo. There's like several of these Google Analytics alternatives out there where. You install their tracking stuff and then you make sure that it's also stored in a data warehouse that you own, because then afterwards you can start connecting it to the CRM system, the ad platform, email automation, et cetera So that like if we go from like the beginners is just start leaving digital reflections behind, start asking people, where did you hear about us? And then there's like the complex setuo of, tracking everything and like technically building buyer journeys, et cetera. So I wouldn't recommend people to try to do that at home themselves, because there will probably.

Christian: Don't try this at all.

Steffen: We will be, we will not get more customersbut if it's important to state that it's, you know, it depends on at which stage you're at. If you have 30 people in your company, it's much better to just be extremely active, do a lot of shit, rather than thinking about analyzing what's working. And then when you get to a certain maturity stage, then you can think about more advanced, analytics.

Christian: There's like a correlation between the, how much you would need, like the super advanced setup. Like depending on how long is your sales cycle, is it like, you know, a 9, 12, 18 month sales cycle, then you have really a big problem tracking that they follow and the way to becoming a customer versus like in, Companies I worked at, without mentioning in specific ones, a sales cycle could be one, two months and I was actually pretty. Smooth, just like dun. Less of a problem with attribution, but I actually like the, even though it feels like something that we would do, like early two thousands, you know, where did you hear about us? That kind of things actually does make sense because the, like Søren mentioned, the less third party cookies we have and the more social selling we do, where we cannot necessarily like a, make a direct link between, what was posted there and them signing up through direct traffic later. We need to go back to some of those of ways of doing it.

Steffen: Especially, I love things that are kind of low effort because then like you can implement these things in like a minute then it's done and you start to have this piece of information, whereas like bigger projects, that takes a lot of time. I typically stay away from them because it's more about, at least in the early stages of Marketing getting a lot of shit done rather than, trying to go for perfect with certain projects.

Soren: At the, at the which not, di divert ourselves with the big that are collecting data from all channels, because if it takes a while from first contact to actually converting the visitor and the prospect to a paying customer, so much time will have pass that we, there's no, we can do that. Let's focus on what creates micro conversions, what creates conversations.

Steffen: Yeah.

Soren: Book a demo or conversation. Begin that. No big complexity there. And you can usually get that in whatever tool you use if you're using a CRM system and email system or social in terms of, how many conversations you've got. So.

Steffen: The, even the simplest way I can put it is kind of, *if you're in doubt whether * *that something works or * *not, it's not * *working*. And then like, if you mess your, all your activities up against that, then you start to become aware that like we set up this Google display ad campaign. We where we're buying tens of thousand of clicks and we seen zero more emails per month coming in, then it's probably not working. Called a hundred people, none of them said yes to a call. Well, it's not working.

Christian: Been there, done that, burned the money.

Steffen: That's why. Listen to us on a podcast that for we have, we have tried a lot of stuff that doesn't work.

Christian: That's just how it is. That's part of the experimental side.

Soren: Let's say now we have discovered what, activities are coming. And what it delivers, that we are actually generating some revenue from set up. And we'd like to, now we can, we have income and have profit that can actually pay for a more, clean and better set up. So what is it that we can achieve with the, for example, Dreamdata? What is it that me as marketer, can actually achieve in terms of repeatable, revenue generated income from marketing activities?

Steffen: Yeah, so there's a couple of things that our customers are typically like. Some, there's some use cases that are typically quite interesting. If we start with like a paid marketing bucket. When companies spend a lot of money here in b2b, they have quite typically no clue about what becomes of that money that they've spent. In b2c they have this, you know, e-commerce, Shopify web shops that sends back an information. Now you sold the running shoe b2b, you buy clicks and then six months later, 12 months later, you see it appearing as closed won revenue in the CRM system. What we do is that we can help, sanity check every single click that you've bought, go into every campaign, every keyword, et cetera, and say this keyword produced, this keyword didn't produce pipeline. And typically start finding out that lot of the things that they spend money on, never, ever ends up producing, revenue. So if you look at it from like kind of a bell curve, a normal distribu distribution point of view, it, you start to become aware about the activities that you are doing that is quite clearly not impacting revenue then you free up those money to put up in, put in your pocket or in reinvest in other stuff that like seems to repeatably be working.

Soren: How do we know? That, a campaign did not lead to any revenue or had any effect in terms of touchpoint along the bias journey. How can we be sure that it had no effect?

Steffen: Yeah. I'll explain a little bit that technology then, because that is kind of the key component here Then. When we see a user for the first time and user here being just an anonymous id, we'll record, where did they come from? What have they looked at in decision when they're on the website and where did they come from? When it's from ad platforms, particularly from Google, they, it has a unique click id, which is completely unique to that one click, and we stored in this, click on this user and write it in our database. User came anonymously from this place. Then that user might have three, four more visits to the website and we'll just keep adding to the lock book while they remain anonymous. Once they then submit a form, which could be a demo call, newsletter, sign up, log into the product, we get consent to. Reveal, or not, no, actually not reveal, but connect their known identity with their unidentified identity. So now we know it's sun from the Messy Grove Show that actually clicked on the ad the first time, and that now pushed through the demo form. And then the next loop, we need to do is then to build or to sort the touches that you had, together with all the other touches from the Messy Growth Show. All the way through until you a close one account. And this is kind of, this is a fundamental problem that B2B companies face, is that we are se typically selling to teams or groups of people. And the ones that starts the journey is not necessarily the ones that signs the contract, you need to map them into the same Cause they're actually part of the same timeline. And the air platforms today are only looking at the different individuals. So spend some money book at them, call. But you never know whether that demo call was a, an account you sold to. So this process is what we help automate for our, clients. You bought all these clicks that which essentially, a cohort. And this cohort then yielded X amount of MQs later on, sales qualified leads, and later on, new deals.

Christian: It's a good point. What the, like the different people involved in the, in the buying process. Because I was using Dreamdata one of my previous clients, and I remember looking at the data and seeing like that the, like what you would typically call the champion or something. The person that actually had the problem down on the floor would sign up. And then eventually you would get a like direct traffic sign up, which was from the boss and that person would be connected to the closed one, deal. But you had to like look at it in context and say, okay, it was actually this guy here on the floor that started the conversation. But the boss that sealed the deal.

Steffen: That is really like a fundamental that you need to understand that you, the way to look to analyze it is you can go look at the deals you won last quarter, many people is associated to this, like deal in your CRM system. Then you'll probably see at least if the sales people are not super sloppy, you can see that 3, 4, 5 people are actually associated to one deal. That means that your marketing also, like the way you measure it, is very much impacted by this scenario. Like the CEO would never be the one that does the footwork of looking at review platforms, the list of vendors we should consider. They might come for the very last meeting and then listen, okay, they're not completely stupid. I'll sign the contract.

Christian: Good one.

Soren: All right.

Steffen: I don't know if that helps you kind of understand kind of.

Soren: I mean, it's fair to call it. Cookie less tracking, right? Because we are, no, we're using our own first party cookies now and.

Steffen: We.

Soren: Cookies to track users.

Steffen: We do, we do still set cookies, but it's first party cookies. And we track in the local store. The whole difference is that it's you as the company who's the data and not some other entity that is collecting their data.

Soren: Thereby we are GDPR compliant when.

Steffen: They if have accepted, that you start tracking we don't want to do anything illegal, but there are illegal ways of setting tracking as well, but we don't do that. I'm sure knows a lot of these technical leads.

Christian: My GDPR is like my favorite nightmare. Back to the days where you could just set cookies randomly. That was, that was good days.

Soren: We've been through what you Steffen look, to be a funnel and what our platform, needs to consist of to facilitate a repeatable revenue generation engine, to speak. And a few tricks of how we can actually, map that and how we can it without breaking the bank. Go easy in the, in the beginning you don't have the ability to correlate any marketing activity to revenue anyway. So find some, midpoint, some soft conversions, some micro conversions that you aim for measuring against. That would be your success criteria. Once you start. Generating revenue, maybe you can consider some bigger solutions. But again, we touched upon this a couple of times. It has to be profitable. So we need to consider what, basket size or of.

Christian: Deal.

Soren: Is before we and figure out that we are profitable we start investing, in bigger tools. So start small, experiment a lot, before you start scaling up on your tools and solutions. So appreciate your Steffen and.

Steffen: Likewise. So was super fun.

Christian: Yeah.