Demand generation in B2B: Insights from NetApp and Thermo Fisher Scientific

Speaker A: Hi, welcome to the B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast. And today we are talking about demand generation in B2B. How companies run it, who is involved, what is challenging right now and how. AI of course AI is changing the

Speaker B: process teams, whenever they have a single asset, I don't know, white paper on ebook, they're so excited about it because they put so much effort into producing this content and they believe that yes, that's the holy grail that will solve all the problems.

Speaker C: You know there is uh, I would say never, uh, never going away dream, uh, the sales team that you know, all this stuff with leads, uh, generation and lead progression is okay, but uh, we don't really need that, we need appointments.

Speaker A: It's a big dream for everybody that this example of shut up and take my money, that leads will just come and just give the money.

Speaker B: The best demand gen campaigns, uh, they're built around uh, bias problems.

Speaker C: Every time you can talk to the customer, you should know, uh, it's like tip, uh, of the iceberg and the underwater. It's uh, many campaigns we keep free, engaging and it's team job and team effort to get customer ready even to talk to you.

Speaker B: I think in this whole race to be visible, uh, in the LLMs, the objective is basically to make sure that uh, they pick up the information about the company the way you want it to be rather than your competitors, uh, are presenting it or um, other social media.

Speaker C: It's really important when you talk about targeted demand to define so what is really we handing over what is our product and set up uh, the expectation of the sales team. Right. We are not making magic, any magic. So our goal is to put you in front of the customer, in front of the pro prospect and the rest is your job.

Speaker A: Hi, welcome to the B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast. And today we are talking about demand generation in B2B, how companies run it, who is involved, what is challenging right now and how. AI of course, AI is changing the process and I'm very excited to have such brilliant B2B marketing experts with us with me today. And let's start with the introductions. So please introduce yourself, uh, your role and how demand generation fits into your current marketing strategy. Uh, let's start with Irina.

Speaker C: Yeah. Hi. Hi everyone and thank you for having me here. So my name is Irina Chernova and I'm IMI, uh, Targeted Demand Manager at NetApp. NetApp is uh, uh, intelligent data infrastructure company. Simply speaking, we are producing uh, hardware, software and uh, cloud solutions for data storage. And the NetApp is one of the leading uh vendors in this area. So our targeted demand is structured as a last mile between strategic demand in the Vs, uh NPR and uh so putting uh the sales reps uh in front of the customer. This is uh the last mile. There we progress in the leads. There we engage them in the different activities and contact so finally they can see the uh sales uh teams. And now finally we can convert them to an opportunity.

Speaker A: Thank you Irina. Yeah. As we discussed before we started the recording that it's not a mystery anymore but demand generation is and that you found found a very um, illustrative explanation of what it is. So thank you. Rina. Alexandra, please introduce me.

Speaker B: Hi everyone. My name is Alexandra Savina. I'm Demand M generation manager at the global marketing team within Proteomics division of part uh of the Thermo Fisher Scientific. And part of my role is to develop and execute global demand generation programs that translate scientific and product priorities into targeting marketing campaigns. So to together with our portfolio team by defining the audiences, shaping the campaign journey, uh coordinating digital channels and the nurture activities and making sure that uh leads uh then appropriately followed up by the sales rep and contributed to the pipeline development. Of course.

Speaker A: Yeah. Such an important job. Thank you so much Alexandra. And the first question to both of you is um, could you share an example, maybe some case study. Uh we are Demand generation worked really well at your company. Yeah. Who would like to start?

Speaker C: Yeah, I can start. Uh, so uh, I can tell you about one example. Uh when the existing activity and this was the engineering led activities was turned into uh demand generation engine. One of the most successful uh in the company. So if we look at the results so on one of the local team, one of the country team, they are uh having this monthly cadence of, of technical webinars dedicated uh to different kinds of storage uh solutions and use cases. And previously it was mostly for the existing customers. But uh, when I took uh it over from the uh webinar team I decided that this is a good piece of content. This is a good source of content that we can use for uh targeted demand. So I turned it uh I edit the targeted demand component such as follow up emails and invitation and structuring and uh so enriching the target audience. So make sure that we can cover the whole marketable uh contact that would be interesting in such content. And we uh saw the really uh raising numbers uh as we see the results including the pipeline creation and even pipeline conversion. And eventually when uh we just developed this activity and I built a trust with an engineering company with the speakers I started shared with them uh all their uh statistics, all their results, uh, which topics performed better uh than the others. Because we also use this recording, we recorded the webinar and we use it on external platform for uh lead acquisition uh purposes. So so we started this exchange. What works? Well so we uh finally came to uh the different approach uh from the engineering team. They started adding some content for the new customers and prospects and we also started uh using the other media platform like for example LinkedIn. So to expand the audience and nowadays it's uh considered globally for the company. It's one of the most successful, successful targeted uh demand campaigns and like uh general activities because it's a cadence and it's ongoing process. So I think that that's very good example first of integration between the different teams and the second is example of uh using and repurposing the content.

Speaker A: Yeah, I especially loved that you used some really great uh content and scaled it to different audiences because it was only for some internal for current clients. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken. Yeah, now more relevant people can see it. That's great. Yeah. So thank you. Rina, Alexandra, would you like to share uh, your story?

Speaker B: So in my experience what I noticed that uh the best demanding campaigns uh, they built around uh bias problems or what like the young they questions, specific questions that people are searching for the answer rather than kind of product features or like specific assets that you might have. So one of the best examples of the demand gen campaigns that we've had was built around um kind of educational topic around uh proteomics, had a webinar hosted with uh our internal speakers. It was hosted on the third party platform. And then uh based on this webinar uh the team uh created the white paper that was syndicated through various uh third party channels uh quite frequently. We then also created the blog post which was formed into social media activity. Uh so it has been quite a

Speaker A: long

Speaker B: three, four months. But then when we kind of use this pretty much the same recycle the same content but use various touch points, various channels and various kind of various sources to then we saw quite a significant impact on the pipeline. Even though uh, the team uh was quite hesitant to kind of start uh this webinars with internal speaker it turned out to be quite a successful activity.

Speaker A: Yeah, sounds really great. Thank you so much for sharing. Uh so my second question to you is about some maybe not very successful case studies. Have you had a demand gen program that didn't go as planned and what

Speaker C: did you learn from It I can start as well. So because uh, you know there is uh, I would say uh, the never, never uh going away dream within uh the sales team that you know all this stuff with leads, uh generational lead progression is okay but uh, we don't really need that. We need appointments. So that I would like that uh we run uh a uh few appointments with uh, for 20 uh suppliers. So we run a little bit of uh appointment setting campaigns with a few suppliers. And what we found out, it's not the best for us at least for our company, for our customers and for business. It's not the most successful, successful uh format and not the most successful activities because uh, even considering that it was done in the uh country there we have the biggest market share and the biggest awareness. It's still called leads and it's still uh, really confusing uh for the customers and for the sales rep. It's still uh, you know that still people don't really have an idea. And sometimes uh, on top of that we have different uh issues with the suppliers themselves about the discipline, about how they understand the concept of the meeting, even how they uh work with their ah CRM. And the other stuff is for example there is no opportunity to integrate the supplier CRM um due to different kinds of data privacy uh aspects uh with our CRM. That's why it's really uh. I wouldn't say it's a good engine for us. Maybe for the other company it would work but not at the moment, not for our business. I would consider it the less uh successful campaign and still good old customer journey and nurturing the leads, then pushing them through the funnel, engaging with the proper content in the proper time works um, much better than just calling to the customer out of blue and doing this over the hands of the other people.

Speaker A: Yeah. When we actually generate demand, not just leads. Thank you Irina for the example. Alexandra, would you like also uh to share.

Speaker B: Yeah, maybe the two examples I have in mind. So uh, when I started in the role, what I also I saw a lot that not only in this company that uh, uh, the people like the teams, whenever they have a single asset, I don't know, white paper on ebook, they're so excited about it because they put so much effort into producing this content and they believe that yes, that's the holy grail that will solve all the problems. And uh, so obviously they start pushing for the kind of like syndication, let's advertise it there, let's use it there. And um, what I observed that whenever you're Taking this kind of single, um, asset approach, it never, uh, it never showed a good result. So it should. Even though, like the asset might be really good, but it still should be built into the entire ecosystem and the infrastructure and customer journey. And you should also be thinking, okay, what is, what are the key messages that we are trying to convey, uh, with this asset? What is, what is the customer problem that we are trying to resolve? So whenever they will start reading or even sharing the data before they download this piece of material, what is, what is this therefore for them? And what I'm always, um, asking also my colleagues is like, would you share your data? Ah, to get the access to this resource? And I think it's a kind of good, uh, stress check. And then maybe another example that really didn't work very well from the very beginning. But this lesson, uh, for us to learn is. So we built two, uh, landing pages, um, very educational. And you had a few call, uh, to action buttons on the same page. Uh, we had some materials that were ungated and some materials that were gated. And we thought, okay, this is so cool because people can learn a lot from one page. Um, but the mistake was that we built it as landing page. So these types of assets should be built within the website because this is when you start investing the money into the traffic. Uh, then you can get to get the maximum of this and then what we also learned that sometimes too many call to action buttons, even though you have very valuable materials, is not the best approach. So there's, well, there are too many options and not necessarily the best scenario. So sometimes you need to reduce the amount of content and maybe think about like the journey that has first beat your chair X and then when people are progressing, you share the bit Y. Um, so now these pages will be part of the eventually of the website.

Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you so much for the great examples, Alexandra. And I think all of them were about, um, seeing content as a part of the system more strategically. Yeah. Than just, wow, this is a great piece of content. We need to promote it more strategically and wisely. Yeah. So thank you. And my next question to you is, uh, how does demand gen run in your company right now and who's involved, how it works. Yeah. Please share the process.

Speaker C: So in our company, targeted, uh, demand is a part of field marketing. So, uh, as you can see, I'm responsible for IME for the whole region. But, uh, so we are very compact team, uh, who works together with the area marketing, uh, manager. There are the people who is responsible for the all Aspects of marketing in certain areas like let's call them country or it might be multi country area. So we have in our company we have uh separate strategic demand which is supposed to create awareness and generate uh acquire some leads for us. But we also do uh lead acquisition specifically uh specifically for me because strategic demand works worldwide. So also we are very well integrated with the other uh teams like uh event because whenever uh we have and uh like we for example we have event which is taken care by the event team but event follow up is on targeted demand side. So we take all the content, we take all the leads uh that were acquired during this uh, this campaign and we spread the content to divide the marketable uh data uh database which is available within our company. So we make sure that no content is getting wasted. So also we have communication and of course for communications for us is a big uh source of content because they include uh PR and they include analysts uh relations. Uh social media is considered uh. It's already they serving us uh with a spreading with extended uh our uh uh our targeted demand campaigns to the social media. Of course uh and specifically in our campaign we are responsible mostly for uh digital engagements with some exception, maybe some like high uh level, very individual uh in person events. But I think that uh it's very rare uh case but mostly digital that focus on lead acquisition and lead uh progressions. And of course we have our KPIs uh that is uh pipeline created and one pipeline. So that's how we structured.

Speaker A: Great. Yeah. Many teams and a lot of orchestration between different stakeholders. Yeah, I can imagine.

Speaker C: 90%, 90% of my job is orchestration actually. Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you for sharing.

Speaker C: And also yeah of course it's. We have story and we have a digital team who work with us uh like on the deployment of their campaigns. We are not doing uh any campaigns with our hands. So we just do the brief and then we send to digital team who does. They're really routine workforce.

Speaker A: Yeah, sounds great. Thank you. Rina and Alexandra, could you please.

Speaker B: So in our case so we are in the P6 the Proteomics Division is a part of the huge organization and we are quite a small um marketing team. So I think the um end demand generation is kind of considered as a part of the um one of the activities that the marketing team is uh executing and working on. So uh I'm mainly collaborating with um therapeutic area segment area. So basically people who have the knowledge and who are responsible for producing the content and who are aligning also with the sales organization Kind of trying to understand what are the needs, who are the potential customers, what are the ideal customer profile that we should target, what are the accounts that the sales team is interested in. And then, uh, while my role is then mainly to kind of brainstorm with them on how, um, we better build the campaign flow, uh, what are the best channels that we should use, um, what are the best vendors that, that we should go. And um, I'm also managing the advertising budget for the team. So this is all in my head and I think, um, the. Another big piece of this entire process is the analytics afterwards. So basically saying, okay, so this is, this is what we had, this is what we've done, and this is what we've got at the very end. So. And uh, then the numbers are reflected in the, um, dashboards.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you, Alexandra. Also a lot of orchestration and coordinating different teams. Yeah, so great. Uh, and I would like to jump to the tools you use. Of course, AI is important here. Everybody, I think, on every podcast now is talking about AI. So, uh, let's start maybe with, um, AI, how you use it in demand generation, uh, campaigns and in the processes in general.

Speaker B: I think that, uh, when you speak about the demand generation, any other marketing activities, you should never start with the tools. You should always start with the goal, what is this that you're doing and why are you doing? And then the tools, uh, come in as the second option. The purpose of AI is not for the sake of using AI. So it's your copilot is the tool that can help you at the various stages, uh, of your work. So it can help from thinking about creating the briefs, uh, to uh, the actual execution or AB testing, um, but, um, I wouldn't probably separate it or kind of take it out of the context, uh, because otherwise it's becoming a tool for the sake of the tool.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. We need goals first and. Yeah, and AI just helping us to

Speaker B: achieve, to arrive there.

Speaker A: Exactly, yeah. And what kind of tools? This is an additional question to Alexandra. Uh, what kind of tools do you use? Um, like AI, AI related, or maybe some other tools?

Speaker B: I think that most of the standard marketing tools like the marketing automation tools or the CRM tools, they uh, in one way or another, they, they have this, um, AI, um, um, element, uh, integrated and in some cases it's uh, in the beta version. But still it can already kind of, um, help you advance in uh, your work, uh, a few steps ahead. So for example, our marketing Automation we're using HubSpot as the marketing automation tool and quite recently HubSpot launch the AI visibility better um section of the website. So it's quite interesting to see how the, how your brand is then cited against the competitors. What are the prompts and how you're appealing in the prompts. But again it's not the tool for the purpose of the tool. It's what is it that we're trying to learn uh using this tool that's for sure.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh it's more for analytics. So I've heard that you're mostly using AI for example for analytics and for uh creation of like co creation with AI. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: And then yeah. So the yeah and the analytics basically helps you to see the visibility, the brand visibility and the positioning of brand against the competitors.

Speaker A: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Alexandra and Irina, could you please also share what kind of tools do you use and how you specifically use AI for demanding.

Speaker C: So I think that I won't be unique here. Of course uh speak about the tool. I absolutely agree with Alexandra. The tools are the tools whether they AI or not. And uh as you already mentioned we are 90% of our uh job is orchestration so so of course we are using the real. Utilizing the other like either uh people or AI uh like products what they, what they done. Uh we are like at NetApp we are using Copilot. Of course we have this license so we have our internal uh Net AI uh tool that is a uh combination of uh different uh AI tools uh external AI tools and internal tools. Of course AI uh is a part uh of our I would say job uh since long time ago because we have uh uh AI Uh I think that's uh. It was iq net IQ something like that. But uh it was uh. In the very beginning it was collecting information about the performance not the data of course the performance of the storage systems installed within the customers. So we called it uh auto support so we could the customers could be notified in the uh beforehand what how they uh. Is it a time to upgrade? Is it a time to fix something? Like it was proactive and little by little we started using for collecting uh these statistics and using in for uh for our marketing purposes and for the. For the customers. So at uh demand uh at targeted demand we mostly use it for yes content co creation for analytics. I use it also uh for my uh day to day job. Like for example I want to have a meeting uh set up a meeting with with ah A multiple like with it's with a few People. So I can use Copilot for finding the time slot and organizing it. It's very handful because uh, when you need to orchestrate, you need to, to have those calls and you know sitting and looking uh, for their time slot that would be, would work for everyone. It's like waste of time. Uh also I use it for drafting the plan for campaigns for example. So now uh, we are planning campaign with distributor. We have value proposition and then put it to play a little bit around uh the plan uh and how it can be structured. So I try to use it every time uh when I for example I a little bit stuck and. Or I need some draft. Yeah. For the drafting. It works really, really good.

Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you so much. And what kind of other tools like maybe demand gen automation or something like that do you use?

Speaker C: I think that it's already built in uh our systems for example in Marketa. So since uh automation I think uh, even uh, in a different task uh environments like Asana, it's already built in. So of course you can you know you, sometimes you, you, you might be not noticing something but it's already there. And of course uh, since marketing should be really integrated with the sales we are using the same uh so we are using our marketed tools and we are using this sales tools uh as CRM for example salesforce.com and uh, we might uh have the different view but uh, more or less we have the common areas, the common environment that the sales um uh we can share with each other. Also we are uh very widely using uh Power bi, but it's mostly for analytics for the dashboard which is really helpful when it comes to the uh, to the KPI, to the tracking of campaign results and so on.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. To make it visible for everybody be on the same page. Yeah. Great example. Thank you. And uh, Alexandra already a little bit mentioned uh the topic of AI search and uh, I'm just wondering how maybe you're changing your approaches to demand gen, um, to be more visible for AI search when people are looking for something, asking AI questions. So do you do something different or no?

Speaker B: Well uh, it's an evolving topic. Right. So um, uh there's lots of content on what to do and how to do but I doubt that there's uh, one person who knows how exactly what exactly should be done there. So it's uh, learning by doing and testing. There's a lot of testing here, uh, maybe a few things. So we've implemented uh, uh a few files uh that should be now on the back end of the website, like uh, frequently asked questions, all the uh, LLM txt files that give an idea about the company, uh and then step uh by step also collaborating with the team, making sure that when they produce the content that the content follows the structure and whatever. We're working on the. We do a lot of blog posts for example, even though it's a scientific content. Uh, so I'm trying also to work with the team and explain them like try to present the content in the kind of this natural language uh mode uh as uh, as you would talk to ChatGPT yourself. So if you would ask the question how would you do it? And uh, what type of answer would you expect? So this helps uh, to translate in some cases quite complex scientific ideas into um, kind of a little bit more digestible narrative that hopefully uh, the algorithm uh will pick up and uh, provide the answers about the company the way we want them. Because I think in this whole um, race to be visible uh, in the LLMs, the objective is basically to make sure that uh, they pick up the information about the company the way you want it to be rather than um, your competitors are presenting it or um, other social media platforms for example presenting it. But it's an interesting uh, learning journey.

Speaker A: Yeah that's for sure. We are all learning how to do it And I love the idea of faq. If someone doesn't have it yet on the website for example, I think they should build one. Yeah. And uh, for the idea of the, a little bit of empathy so that you can think about people who are asking questions to LLMs. How would they ask the questions and what kind of answer they would want to get. So it's also a great tip I think. Thank you. Alexandra and Irina, um, you like to also to share uh, what you do for AI search to make more visible for AI.

Speaker C: I think it's the same. I'm not much uh engaged in AI search uh because as I said my uh, my part is the last mile. I'm working with the leads and of course we have a special uh team that is dedicated. That's why they are working and reworking continuously the website and all the last changes. They are related to this uh, transformation from co to AI search of course. But I think that uh, it's more or less the same. It's more or less the same and of course I think that's on the stage of the value proposition, on the stage of messaging. Uh, we definitely need to build it based on the customer needs. When the customer pain points which already should Resonate that what uh, the customer search for what else? For sure, you know, with uh, search engine or AI.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, completely agree. And let's talk about um, how we assess the investment in demand generation and how we plan uh it and prioritize. The first question here is how do you choose which accounts get demand investment? Uh or maybe you approach it differently

Speaker B: this year I can start. So um, we don't start with uh, right away with the account. So uh, we have the specific therapeutic areas that we work on and we have specific segments also within those therapeutic areas that are um, that we are trying to target. And uh, and obviously the alignment. I think the alignment first happened m like on the like higher level and with the sales organizations. Right. So what, what are the priorities? Uh where do we expect that uh the business will grow? Which um, which market segment will grow? Which uh therapeutic area uh will grow and where like where the grants are, uh, where the funds, where the corporate funds, uh where they, where the national fund funding is going on. So for example if it's an oncology in our case, so uh, that the market segment will receive the bigger proportion than for example, I don't know something else. So I think it all should start with uh. Yeah with business objective and where the business see the um, the potential in the growth. And then based on that when, when, when we start kind of going into the lower level of the like campaign execution and campaign planning. Let's see what is, what is this that we already have in our database? Right. How big is the segment in our own database and what else can we do? And uh, whether our segment um, um like already our customers or we have some dormant account and then we speak about the investment into advertising and collaborating with uh third party vendors. I'm also trying to understand like the, the size of the database that we will be working with. Uh, what's the percentage, what is the seniority level and uh starting kind of taking this as the, as the first step and then um, testing because I think uh you can have all the best analytics and all the best metrics but uh, in some cases things don't perform the way you want them.

Speaker A: Yeah. It's always testing and always experiments. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing. Yeah. The. It makes a lot of sense that it starts with the business goals and with some research the market and then uh, plan the dimension, uh next steps. So. Thank you Alexandra. Irina, would you like to continue?

Speaker C: Yes. Uh, I think that uh, we are using uh a little bit different approach because our work based on uh Specifically on target account leads because uh the customer profile for NetApp is it's really specific. Uh we are limited by the size of the company, the size of operation and because it's related uh the volumes of the data they need to store and manage. So that's why it's very specific. Uh the second is marketing is aligned with sales and as I mentioned we have pipeline as a KPI is one of the KPIs. That's why we are only targeting the accounts that are target uh account for our sales reps. Of course we have segmentation. We have different uh different segments depending on customer size on the uh sometimes it's on a industry or vertical priority. Of course we have a biggest customers, we have smaller customers and depending on that it's direct sales or channel uh uh channel uh sales about yes we are working with target account list for some campaigns we really narrow down uh the target account list to run for example the industry vertical specific campaign or uh run the uh like you know area campaign or the other campaign. That really requires more I would say uh so more targeting and more specifying the uh target Persona or uh target uh companies. So also we have all kinds of intelligence uh to see the propensity to see which customers uh really they searching for our solution to solution like at NetApp for the data storage solutions. Who like is uh like uh likely to buy within the I think that 6, 612 or or 18 uh months. Uh so that's why it's mostly on target account list. It doesn't make to be honest doesn't make our job easier because they of course they are not perfect as Alexandra mentioned. And of course sometimes it takes too much time to sell us to define the target account so we don't have much time to execute. So that sometimes happens. That's a beauty of target account list. First it sharpens the focus but at the same time it requires uh more job and more integration with uh the sales.

Speaker A: Yeah and a lot of research as well on the each account.

Speaker B: Research.

Speaker C: Yeah of course.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for sharing Irina. And my question uh to you both is about pipeline and revenue. How do you tie demand gen um activities to pipeline and revenue actually.

Speaker B: So we have the KPI. So we have the, we have the KPIs and the metric. So and I believe that each company right defined uh its own vocabulary what is considered to be as the new prospects, new leads, new opportunities and then the progression of them. So and uh each steps, each step can be measured. Um we measure them in Salesforce and uh at the end of this this uh journey uh you can see the marketing contribution to the total opportunities created and the dollar value attributed to them. And the one opportunities um like marketing is not completely responsible. We are impacting the uh1 opportunities. But the key uh KPI probably for us would be the pipeline.

Speaker A: Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And Irina um how do you.

Speaker C: Same here. Our major KPI uh is pipeline. So since uh they are getting a certain uh percentage of the marketing budget which we need to supply the certain percentage of the uh uh of the pipeline. Uh but uh. So we are uh considering all types of uh opportunities. For example we have so called lead generated uh pipeline. So for example we have a lead. So and this leads gets converted into opportunity and that's opportunity like either one or not. But we also uh have this indirect influence in pipeline but it's not influenced sometimes we have so called uh account uh account uh generated opportunities that happens that for example and of course in B2B for example we have a few uh individuals uh from the same company uh who engaged uh in different activities and engaged with the different kinds of uh content from us but differently. And eventually for example the opportunity created by their partner or by the sales rep. But it was really initiated and much influenced uh by the marketing activities. That's why we have lead gen uh generated pipeline and lead source pipeline. Sorry and uh uh account source pipeline. And these two parts of pipeline get into one uh pipeline result. Uh we used to have sales qualified uh as a pipeline. We used to have sales ready as pipeline. Now we are measuring that because we need to track our results to see how it works in terms of conversion. But our major uh KPI nowadays is uh pipeline itself like number of opportunities and uh ah the total amount.

Speaker A: Yeah. Sounds uh great. And I especially uh love that not only uh the leads that you brought directly, you can count them but also the other leads needs that uh marketing influenced. For example they attended some webinars or uh read the content or something else. Yeah. It's also important because a lot of

Speaker C: work and it's resonate with B2B approach because when you work with uh a big uh customer it's not the only individual that they're working within a customer. Of course it came from account based marketing. But as we can see this approach works uh works uh for their big uh big campaigns as well. Yeah.

Speaker A: And people internally they discuss solutions. Yeah. They make decisions as a group not just to one person. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So we've talked about the metrics, um, and I'm really interested because I know that in demand generation uh, you need to have different touch points across the marketing journey with lead. For example several um, webinar registrations, several for example they've got some white papers, they read some articles, they attended an in person event and so on and only after that they become sales ready. And could you also uh, tell us more about that, uh, how many touch points and what kind of touch points? Um, a typical B2B lead needs to become sales ready.

Speaker B: I think it will depend a lot on the industry, on the sales cycle of ah the specific industry because in our case the sales cycle is quite long.

Speaker A: So um, in your experience in your

Speaker B: industry the sales cycle is quite long. So it's going to be. There will be many touch points before uh, before the lead will materialize in some sort of opportunity. Uh, um, yeah that also depends on the, on the product because there are like within the portfolio we do have products that the sales cycle even though it's long, it's going to be shorter compared to some others. So hard to say, I wouldn't go with the average but it's definitely never a quick one. And then uh, I think another kind of complexity or at least in our industry is that we for example we don't have the E commerce element uh not on the website but and also as the kind of, of uh, as the tool for example on the website. So it's also kind of the limitation uh to directly uh measure marketing contribution because once you have obviously the E commerce on the website it's quite easy then so you can track all the kind of touch points, all the steps before person actually committed to the purchase or at least added the product to the purchase. So that's uh, this is also making the difference. So yeah in a nutshell it's uh, it's long, it's never single and uh, in many cases there will be one person who starting this journey and then it will be completely another person who will materialize in the opportunity because within especially the bigger accounts there's a group of people who's uh, who's making the decision.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense. So yeah, definitely many touch points in the long sales cycle. Yeah. Irina, how does it work for you?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's similar. Yeah it's very similar because uh, in our industry the purchasing cycles are pretty long. It might like for some depends on the segment of course on the industry. Like it might be from like three months to like two Years and of course during this cycle uh we engage uh the people from the accounts maybe many times. And of course uh, it depends on the even even on the country, on the culture. Like for example in uh, in Ukraine people really approachable for the first contact. You know they really easy going with the conversation and they engage very easily. But it doesn't convert uh the same good into the opportunities because it takes, might take longer time and conversion is lower. For example in Germany people are pretty like it's cultural pretty shy. It's really taking takes time to get the attention, to get the trust. But as soon as you get the trust it's easy. It's not like that of course. And uh, of course we are B2B and uh, of course buying committee consists of many people. But since you get the trust it's easier to engage them with the content. It's easier to invite them to the events for example. Then of course uh, it's visible on the conversion as soon as, as a trust is built. I think it depends even uh, uh like the country uh on a segment but usually it's long. But I would say that for example there are different kinds of engagement and of course there is uh, uh a big probability. Uh for example uh, for the engagement on the consideration stage. For example you have, have the people they sign up for individual workshop or people sign up uh like register for the event. Or for example uh people uh ask for like play with a calculator already like online calculator. That means that it's really signed that it's like opportunity is uh just around the corner. Of course we can read by the behavior, by the signals. Of course you never sure but it tells like gives us a little bit of idea how soon the uh. Our sales teams can already engage with the customer and create an opportunity.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's for sure. And I really love the example of different cultural uh behavior in different uh countries, different cultures. Yeah, thank you for that as well. And uh, we are uh going to the end of our uh podcast episode and uh, my question to you is um, maybe there is a question that I didn't ask but you think it's very important. And for the demand generation topic and you would like to add something, answer this question. What do you think?

Speaker C: Yes, yes and no. I would say that uh demand generation is a kind of uh, invisible part. Mostly invisible part because for example the sales team, sales team can notice the event. Sales team usually tells so creative a you know place the ads on the big banners and gives out the uh Takeaways, uh, different kinds of giveaways for the customers, different spark. But what I usually tell uh, when I present in front of the sales teams, I said them um, every time you approach the customer on NetApp event or maybe not NetApp event and they start speaking, talking to you like having a discussion. You should consider that it means that we engage with the customer a few times. The customer has an idea who we are, what we are doing. And the customer already, especially in some countries like uh, German speaking countries for example, they already have an idea and they are ready for the dialogue with you. Otherwise you can go to the airport and start talking with the uh, strangers. If it's the same results, maybe, maybe so uh, our job is for that. But every time you can talk to the customer you should know. Uh, it's like uh, tip of the iceberg and the underwater is many uh campaigns we keep freeing kitchen and it's team job and team effort to get customer ready even to talk to you.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah it's a good point. It's a lot of work. Yeah. To make them sales ready.

Speaker B: I would agree with this point. I also had a conversation the other day with um, my colleague who moved from the sales to marketing and she was saying like uh, I didn't realize that uh it's going to be like that complicated. Uh and it's always marketing is always is uh blamed of not either providing enough leads or not providing good leads or not providing the right content or not sharing it in the right moment. So there's always um, there's always an easy occasion to blame marketing for not doing something that is going to meet like the sales expectations. So yes indeed there's a lot of um, kind of hidden work or on and hidden kind of operation in some, in some cases hands on work to make sure that there is this awareness. And the customers when they are already at the event they can come to you both. You can come to yourselves and say like oh we've heard something about you. So probably someone did something. Uh so these people kind of learned or read or somehow started kind of even considering this.

Speaker C: Yeah, downloaded the paper, whatever. So the webinar somewhere. Yeah, I have an idea. I also would add this uh, stuff like that because we are the targeted demand. We are on the edge between like uh, we generate the leads, uh like including hot leads and now leads. And for example we have the BDR SDR so it's called differently in different company that call to the leads uh for the uh, for the meetings and hand them over. To the uh, to the sales rep. And sometimes sales rep are um, not really, you know, happy. There is no opportunities, there is not much money. And I tell that we need to define the you know where. So we hand you over the leads, which is the person who want to see you. But unfortunately nobody comes and nobody picks up uh, the BDR call for example, and says like just take, shut up and take my money. And exactly tells how much budget do they have? It's your, it's your already it's on your side. It's, it's sales magic. You need to get it. Uh, unless BDRs are really trained for that. I think it might be for uh, ISRs, which is uh, internal sales rep job. But it's really important when you talk about targeted demand to define so what is really we handing over what is our product and set up the expectation of the sales team. Right. We are not making like, we are not making uh, magic. Any magic. So our goal is to put you in front of the customer, in front of the uh, prospect, at the rest is your job. So that's it. And believe me, it takes much effort, much time to uh, explain it to the sales teams.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for that because I think it's a big dream for everybody that this example of shut up and take my money. That leads will just come and just give the money without any. Yeah. Sales. But yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It's very important that we have this limited responsibility and uh, sales need also to do the next steps. Yeah. So thank you so much for coming today and for sharing your insights, your very valuable insights with me. And I uh, really appreciate all the practical examples and perspectives you share today. So thank you so much and yeah, have a great rest of your day everybody.

Speaker C: Thank you. Have a good day.

Speaker B: Hm.