Going Where Google Analytics Has Never Gone Before with Steffen Hedebrandt

Speaker A: This podcast is sponsored by Speakerbox Media, where we hand build podcasts just like this one to create online communities for brands like yours. If you'd like to learn more, head over to speakerboxmedia.com the essential thing is

Speaker B: that we help B2B marketers connect their activities to revenue. Simply put, that allows you to do more of what works and stop what doesn't and that saves the company money, help them grow faster and markets as keeps their job.

Speaker A: Welcome to the B2B Growth Hacks podcast, the show that helps entrepreneurs like you unlock opportunities for growth in business. I'm your host, Sarah Smith, and this is B2B Growth Hacks, a podcast powered by Speaker Box Media. Welcome back to another episode of B2B Growth Hacks. I'm super excited about the conversation today. Today we're talking B2B rev attribution, and I have none other than St. Stefan Hedebrandt of Dream Data with us today. Stefan, thank you so much for being here.

Speaker B: Yeah, I really appreciate the invite, Sara. Um, I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Speaker A: We are going to dive right in because we have so much to cover. But there was this shocking statistic I saw from Dream Data about how long it actually takes a B2B company to get through their sales cycle. Tell us what that is.

Speaker B: Yes, we have customer journey data from thousands of accounts. By now. What we basically did was to say, okay, let's just try to pull out some average numbers that we see. Obviously there's different nuances in different industries, countries, etc. But overall we could see from the first touch to an account being one, it took an average of 192 days, an average of 32 sessions. This fact, it might not surprise you, but you should definitely change how you think about planning a year in a B2B company because things just take so long time, so you need to start really early. Like now it's September and it's already in theory, if those numbers were our statistics basically valid, it's too late to add more deals to close this year. That's probably bad news for some and, uh, maybe others have started their activities in good time. I think related to that thing, what you typically see companies, when you ask them what's your customer journey? What they reply you with is actually when did an account enter your CRM system and when did it convert? But that's actually not representing a full journey at all. What we could see is that kind of if you put the known phase together with the unknown phase, the unknown research phase would typically Be like one or uh, one and a half X of the known face. If you and your company have a narrative today about that the customer journey is around 90 days, it's probably more likely to be 180 days or more.

Speaker A: Yeah, that is shocking. That shocked even me to learn that. And you're, you're either sitting in your chair right now and you're completely bummed because you don't have enough leads or uh, potential deals in your pipeline to close that sales goal before the end of the year. Now's a great time to get after it because we have some more information to talk through about how we can be better at. And you said it this way, I really love that. Understanding your historical customer journey. Not the phase that when they enter the CRM, but even prior to that, walk me through a little bit of your philosophy on that and dream data's

Speaker B: thoughts out of my own experience. The way you become successful at your work is uh, at least a shortcut to it is to understand what did you do in order to do more of what actually produces pipeline and revenue and stop doing what doesn't. By looking at, by having all your account journeys available, it gives you the opportunity to look at what are the things that we consistently see present when deals are successful. Are we doing a large chunk of activities where we're throwing in a lot of cost without that ever yielding any revenue, then we want to cut that off. So if you constantly jump between let's look at the worst things we're doing, stop those, what are the best things we're doing? Constantly shift the resources from poor performance over to the better performance. Then over time you get to a good place.

Speaker A: Hey, that's the goal is find which plays are the good plays and keep running the good plays and do away with the plays that don't work. And that changes based on team members and different team dynamics and different skills of your team. But uh, the data is important in making those decisions and if you don't have that, you're not able to leverage the insights that you get from it. So how do we mitigate bad spend? All of us are spending in places that we shouldn't be. How do we mitigate bad spend in this area?

Speaker B: Good question. So I think the first thing you need to recognize when you're in B2B is that ah, all the ad platforms that you're using, or most of them at least the Facebook's, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. They're not wired to understand what's going on in a B2B company, they'll tell you, how many clicks did you buy, how many impressions did you get? If they're lucky, they can tell you this converted into a lead or an email, but essentially they have no clue what goes on those 192 days later. And that means all the information that you're receiving from these companies are if not scattered or they're at least not very valid in terms of understanding what actually takes place. And that's the solution that we're trying to bring to people with dream data is that you can have all these ad platforms that are great for running ads. And then once the traffic arrives at your website, we will store where did it come from, what did the user do on the website? And we will glue the user to an account as well. And then ultimately when you do win that account, you get that revenue component from the CRM system. If you're in B2C and you're selling running shoes, there's like a click Nike running shoe and then the uh, webshop gives you the money, whether it was a good or bad deal in B2B, that almost always have to come from the CRM system. So you can now join what was the ad spend on specific campaigns together with real revenue. And this is probably how you want to be, be running your ads.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. There's this idea, and I've heard it a lot more recently, this idea that we're looking at vanity metrics, they're only surface level. And if we're not attaching those to revenue and being able to actually map them backwards towards not just when they visited Facebook, but the very first time they hovered over our website. Not just when they booked a demo call and they entered the CRM, but how many site visits had they done? Did they click on an ad? If you're not doing that, then you're missing out and therefore you're inefficiently spending.

Speaker B: And then I think actually we need to add one more level of complexity to it. I'm sorry. So what we have talked about here is just a narrative of straight line from one person. But like for example, we can see when we sell we have an average of five contacts per account. That wouldn't be surprised if that's quite typical for most B2B. Let's just say Sarah clicks the ad and converts to an email. But then Sarah has four colleagues that are also part of that buying committee. Then that calls for the need of producing something we call an account based data model. And what that means is that we think that the, uh, accounts are buying as teams. So Sarah is not just an individual, she's actually part of a company. So we have to take the timeline you actually want is all the touches of the account and not just of the individual. And what that represents in terms of a problem is that it might be me who started the journey, but then it might be Sarah who signs the deal from all the ad platforms perspectives. Then you had cost in generating an email and then Sarah came and signed a deal directly on the website. And there's no connect between those two things in the ad platforms or in most CRM systems. And that makes us marketers look like people who are just wasting money.

Speaker A: Yeah, we don't want to be there.

Speaker B: No. And as a marketer you're not able to actually do that, connect and say, these are the successful campaigns, I want to double the budget on them for sure.

Speaker A: And that's what I mean by if we don't have access to that prior information and things like this, uh, CRMs now allow you to label, oh, what's this person's role? Are they a decision maker, are they whatever. But actually attributing that from all of these different platforms, it's so baseline. So it's almost like, how can you make these decisions without this type of tool or other B2B attribution tools this, that help you compile this data?

Speaker B: I think it's.

Speaker A: Now, obviously this is a great tool to use, but tell me some of the common rebuttals for this tool and why people may be apprehensive to use this.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think if you browse LinkedIn weekly, you'll see people by bashing attribution and saying it's a hoax or misleading or anything like that. And we couldn't be more, uh, far from far from that. What we're really just trying is to say you have a ton of data silos in your company. Let's extract the data of all of those and unified and have a nice clean timeline of any account. And then we look at what are the things that are consistently present here and what are the things that you consistently seem to be doing wrong. Then we're not trying to make up something that's not there. We're just trying to say this is what is there. Obviously there's more. We're never going to get to 100%, but we can at least make sure that you're aware about the data that your company sits on scattered across these eight different data silos. Like your CRM, your customer success tool, your marketing automation tool, your website, etc. There is the limitation that we cannot take anything in that doesn't leave a digital reflection. I think most of us knows that. We ask our friends if they have recommendations for stuff or you meet at a conference or stuff like that and things like that. You cannot easily out of the box make part of the equation. So look at the data, make sure you look at all of it and then apply common sense to the conclusions after that as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, and having a good understanding that the tool you're using isn't 100% and building the systems in place. I don't know one great salesperson who doesn't come back and add notes into their CRM after a conference or after. So in making sure that you're practicing and in the interest of creating um, systems that help you make better decisions, there's a fix for that or essentially there's a solution for that. And here's the thing about data silos. We don't even have to argue whether those exist. It is common knowledge that sales and marketing can be that teams have long been on different pages. They use different tools, they have different preferences. So alignment in a business starts at that level. Therefore you already know there's data silos that exist. There's information that's not being proactively shared across the board. And that's one problem on the company building side. But that's another problem on the revenue generation.

Speaker B: Typical example would be our customers would be using HubSpot for marketing automation and then the salespeople would be using Salesforce. If the marketing people is then getting measured on amount of leads MQLs M that they produce inside of HubSpot, they just have to take off that box. Now we've reached a thousand. But thousand is completely as you said earlier, Sarah, that's a vanity number because it's how many of those 1,000 end up in Salesforce, how many of those becomes late stage or even one businesses. So that's what we're trying to do with dream that we want to take the data out of those two systems and make into like a joint timeline. Because then you can start to say my thousand leads yielded x amount of sales qualified leads or one opportunities, et cetera.

Speaker A: Yeah. And just spills over to how long has this customer stayed on. We obviously you want customers who are longtime customers. So that's important for customer retention and measuring that as well. Not just who came into the pipeline, tried us out and left. But that's part of that historical customer journey, um, and mapping that from beginning prior to when you enter into to your CRM and then all the way to whether that person continues or leaves. And in addition what you said between different decision makers and teammates. So I love the power that these type of tools bring to sales teams and marketing teams and executives. It feels super empowering to have information.

Speaker B: I can give you two, like tangible things that I would wish I had in my last job and what we now have for DreamData. And so first example is with content and the next one is with paid advertising. In my last job I went out and hired a content team of I think it was four people. Writer, a designer, videographer and a manager of that team. What I had to a speaker box, what I could report on to the management to defend this headcount was really oh look, organic traffic is going up or m. My SEO tool is saying we rank better. That's great, but we can't really pay any salary with these things. And when I met my two now uh, co founders, they had ugly prototype where we could throw in our data and then suddenly what we could start to see is that there was certain articles that we had written that six months later became deals that we won. That disconnect would was impossible for us to defend inside of things like Google Analytics, which most people also have installed on their website. And that left me as a manager. I don't know if I intuitively think it's the right thing to have this big content team producing stuff. I have no way of defending it or showcasing that it's really worth anything. The same thing with your paid ads. You acquire so many clicks. But how many of these clicks and campaigns, etc. Are actually worth money? Google Ads, LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads. They have no clue about the revenue component for a B2B company.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. And one of the things we talk about just as a, uh, podcast agency and a content agency is not all attributes are built the same. Either some attributes or are proactive in nature and some actions are reactive in nature. So for example, scrolling and clicking are very different than someone subscribing to your podcast or subscribing to your weekly newsletter. And understanding the difference between those things is super important in the interest of what you're talking about. Starting a podcast and looking for positive indications, is your CEO getting invited to speak more often? Are you getting more LinkedIn visibility with your target customer? So some of these things that these, these tools don't measure, you can measure internally and use A tool like Dream Data to help back up some of these insights, like you said, some of these inferences as a marketer, as a salesperson, that you're doing certain things and you have an inkling that this is working, but really attaching that to measurement so that you can map it to revenue.

Speaker B: It's important to say that there's stuff that is easily measurable and then there's stuff that is harder to measure that doesn't exclude one or the other from being valuable. You say yourself, listening to a podcast, who's listening to it, can be a hard task sometimes to prove, although it's super value because it changes how you think about a company. Whereas like a click on a Google Ad leaves, that's what's called a click id, and then you have that click id. So let's say like on these qualitative disciplines, we do a lot of these as well. Because for me, advertising is about, you need to hit the right people and with the right message and then you track what you can track afterwards.

Speaker A: Yeah, it should be iterative.

Speaker B: Yeah. And for podcasts or activity on LinkedIn, etc, maybe sometimes you need to do like, uh, a more qualitatively approach that you take screenshots or the sales people anecdotes that they always mention, the podcast when they have sales conversations, etc. Does it make sense to run a niche podcast for your industry where listeners are really interested in this topic? Yes, it does. Can it be hard to measure? Yeah. So we need to support it with qualitative measures on that. Uh, we should probably continue to do these things.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. I'm going to pivot here a little bit because I really think that there's so much value. And also understanding if you're developing products or in your experience with building this particular, uh, software, some of the challenges and kind of things you overlooked and some of the things that have gone well. I think when we understand how something is, is built, then we can infer with using the same tool how it can function well in our business. So I'm gonna hit you with the hard one first. Tell me what didn't go well in building this and what's been challenging.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say there's two main things that I think back on. One thing is that initially you had to buy our product and then we would build it for you afterwards because we hadn't automated things, etc, initially. So it was kind of book a demo call. Trust me, it's gonna work four or five sales meetings and then sign a Contract. We pivoted away from that by the start of last year to offering a free trial and a free product. And that has made a huge difference for us. Nowadays the popular term would be product led. And like, what we experienced was that when we went into competition with the established brand in our industry, we would often lose because we had no proof that our product was as good as theirs. They have more reviews, more cases, etc. But once you go product led, you can actually look, I'm just going to show you it works. Put in your data here and then transition into trying the product. And if you like the product working, then you can sign a contract with us. And the way we got started on this, I think is worth just a short notice. Uh, what we basically just did was we went to our pricing page, we added a row that was called free. And when you click the free row, what would happen is you would literally just had an email pop up. You want to send an email to Lars, which is our CEO. So he received every free request when then manually created the account and emailed that person back that now there's an account ready for you. And he did that for. I, uh, believe it was almost 200 free accounts before we always, like, started to automate the process. And I think this is a great way to launch things. Start super low cost, scrappy. See if anybody actually reacts to it. And once people reacted, you have your proof that you can actually go do more of it.

Speaker A: Yes. He's talking about ungating your product, guys. Value. Providing value to the customer ahead of time, because you know that what you have on the other side of that is worth money and the people who get it. And they will pay for it.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: Love it was that conversation. Let me ask you this, because this is always a rebuttal and I always hear this. The CEO doesn't get it or what we're doing. You know, the CEO just isn't behind it. My answer is always, if it's leading to revenue, the CEO will get it. But I'd love to hear your input on that in this concept of data. And maybe a little bit what you're talking about here, which is that's a major change for the company. Opening up your product for free.

Speaker B: Yeah, he's a former VP of product, so he knows that kind of thinking and has been well trained in Silicon Valley. Valley groups produce value. So we produce value. It's a guy called Marty Kagan that is the fourth leader there. But I would say in terms of what our product does In Dream Leader, it does sometimes represents a bit of a challenge to educate our customers and their sea levels in what it is. Because B2B is complex by nature and we cannot undo that and be a CEO. CFOs like to ask, what's the best channel? Let's go spend more money there. We get the first click here and then they go over here and then here and here and here. So are you asking for the first touch, the last touch, which revenue stage do they need to go to, etc. There's quite a lot of complexity. It's not a simple thing to answer. But the CEO and CFO wants a simple answer. They're asking, they just want to make more money and that's great. It's just not that simple. And that's like an educational challenge we have. We need to introduce new numbers in a business they've been used to looking at things. In Google Analytics world, we're saying no in Google Analytics. I don't know if most people know, but it's Google Analytics is reporting on the behavior of individual devices, just devices. So our uh, first touch, your last touch in Google Analytics is just this single device did something. But what actually takes place is that Sarah has a phone, a tablet and a computer. She's also part of an account with five other contacts. So now we're looking at 15 different devices over a span of six months and 32 sessions. So when you're looking at Google Analytics, you have no clue what's going on. But the CFO still remembers when he had like a startup 10 years ago, we could use Google Analytics. Sorry for the banter, but I think I'm just trying to explain a little bit.

Speaker A: No, I think it's a good point and I talk about this often too, that if you're doing something different or unique, then this one size fits all tool that everyone's using to measure, we'll use a Google Analytics should not be the only attribute that you're measuring. There has to be more to the story. And that's basically what you said, there's more to the story. This value that it's giving you is based on what? Honestly, let's say this, what Google finds valuable, not necessarily what is valuable for your company. Yes, they've opened up their tool to allow you to measure, but they're measuring what they find valuable. How are you utilizing that? The tools that you have to figure out what you find valuable and reassigning the importance or structure of those, the data that you're getting.

Speaker B: Yeah, I've seen, I think most people who've been buying ads on Facebook, uh, have been surprised by how little you can see. If you ask Google Analytics and if you check Facebook, they will say, oh, we're adding massive value as well. So there's also big publicly traded companies that have an interested in making people spend more money on their platforms. And I think maybe there's actually a separate point here is that you should be owning your own data and not be like trusting these biased big vendors. So I think that's the whole rise for first party data, meaning data that you own and collect in your own data warehouse will only continue to grow larger as you realize I actually need to own this and I need to sit on top of it and do my own analysis so I don't get into what's more valuable, Facebook or Google. If I look at my own data, I actually know.

Speaker A: Yeah, counting on these platforms to measure what's important for you, counting on them to consistently keep the historical data there even I think sometimes that goes over. We have access to these products so we just sometimes don't think in terms of at any time that these companies want to deny us access to a certain dashboard or take away a certain visibility of a certain tactic they can. It's a scary thing and I think it does provide this big case for you need to own your own data, you need to be investing in data and Dream Data is one of the great options available to do that. So tell me what's went well in building Dream Data and building this B2B SaaS product that you guys have successfully built?

Speaker B: I think the essential thing is that we help B2B marketers connect their activities to revenue. Simply put, that allows you to do more of what works and stop what doesn't and that uh, saves the company money, help them grow faster and marketers keeps their job up. So I think that is what's gone really well. What then is extra nice is that we are able to offer this product for free and people like small companies can actually just come and use it. We make the data openly available for you so you can put it other places again. So it's a quite happy with how it works now and it's the product I wish I had four years, five years ago in my last company.

Speaker A: Yeah, you created a proof of concept before you developed and introduced the premium freemium option actually. And you didn't build it if people, people weren't willing to engage with it or pay for it.

Speaker B: I think like for anybody I would really advise them to go search to see whether they can make some kind of free product where it's all about moving people a little bit forward in the process. So it's a very harsh thing to come to a website and you have to talk to salespeople. Maybe you can just convert them to a free sign up, a um, newsletter, sign up, uh, ebook download, something like that. People who are just interested in your company needs a way to just continue to follow you without having to sign that order form yet.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that you guys made it very easy in removing barriers for people to try it. You said it was one simple swift movement. You came, you gave your email and you coupled a personal touch with that that was very intentional.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker A: So we could go on and on about the importance of this and all of the amazing information around data, but obviously being in the this space, are there any resources that you could point us to, point our audience to, to learn more about the Importance of data? B2B attribution when it comes to data,

Speaker B: honestly, I think we our own blog. A couple of times per week we release blog posts related to this topic. Anything from like, how to avoid dirty data in your CRM system to how do you act on the data, how you analyze content, et cetera. So we've set out on uh, an educational path of the market, trying to explain why running an account based business is different from a B, uh 2C scenario. And if you listen to what we say, you will actually grow faster and save money while you do it.

Speaker A: Yeah, who doesn't want to do that? Let's end on that. Grow faster and save money while you do it. Stefan, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge today. If anybody wants to connect with you further, how do they find you online?

Speaker B: Definitely LinkedIn, where I spent, uh, maybe too much time.

Speaker A: Also, something you might not know about Dream Data is they are meme ninjas over there. There is. I'm not going to give away it is, but there is someone there who produces the best memes and I promise if you're active on LinkedIn, you've seen them. So go check out Dream Data's LinkedIn page as well. Stefan, thank you so much for lending us your knowledge today. We are super grateful and appreciate it.

Speaker B: Uh, thank you Sarah. And I'll make sure to tell him that you mentioned his memes.

Speaker A: Please do. Also, I'm gonna throw one last thing in here today because I think it's important to say this. Obviously I'm in the podcasting realm and Stefan's team actually reached out to me to be on our show and I'm going to tell you this. People go back and forth about whether starting a podcast is a great idea or not, and here's what I'm going to say. We look for high quality guests, but it is a treat when they come to you because they have great knowledge to share. So if you're a CEO, if you're a product lead, you're a sales, a market marketing lead and you have knowledge on your team and you're looking to share it, reach out to people, get your knowledge out there to inform people about your product. It's free marketing. That's all. I'm gonna end on that.

Speaker B: I agree, Summer.

Speaker A: Thanks Stefan. Have a great one. We hope you enjoyed this week's episode. If you'd like to know how to get involved and share your story, head over to our website@ah b2b growthhacks.com also while you're there, subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss the latest conversations happening here on B2B growth hacks. This podcast is sponsored by Speakerbox Media, where we hand build podcasts just like this one to create online communities for brands like yours. If you'd like to learn more, head over to speakerboxmedia.com.