Legal Ops as AI Orchestrators, with Donovan Bell of Intel

Hi, guys. I am here with Katya, co founder at Getup lead and a LinkedIn expert. They've been in business for 10 years and she's actually come from the marketing world, being a CMO at multiple companies. So I'm excited to have her on here. And my first question, Katya, is, yeah, you were a CMO before in house, and then you made the switch over to, to an agency and LinkedIn ads focus. What was it, what was it that you kind of saw as being a CMO that was. That led you to believe there was this opportunity in the market that needed to be filled with, you know, a linked ads agency that was focused on this. What were the pain points you were seeing or the opportunity you saw that really made you think that was going to be a great leap? Yeah. So thanks for having me, Justine. I'm really excited to be here. So, yeah, when I started my career in marketing in B2B, I. Yes, as you mentioned, I started as a head of marketing, cmo and actually one of the most frustrating things for me was, well, actually two things. One was keeping the balance between learning about on the client side, learning about when you are an agency, about the audience, your product, the industry. Meanwhile, we need to move fast and start launching campaigns quick, you know. So what I found is on one side, some agencies were like, okay, we are going to go deeply in your agency or sorry, in your audience, in your industry. But then it took forever to have anything running. And the other side, when agencies move fast, then I saw, okay, this is wrong, they didn't get that. So I, for me, it was like really very important to learn very quickly, very, very quickly about your product, about what you do, your audience. Meanwhile, you're moving fast and also keep learning because a very important thing is sometimes you do the overview and you learn everything at first and then you forget. But it's really important to keep learning because industries move fast as well. For example, on marketing there are many trends and nowadays many job roles, people say, okay, I'm in the past, I was growth manager then demand gen and maybe in six months people will put something different on their LinkedIn profile, you know, so also change the way you market your product because there are industries that sometimes the job roles have a specific name and in a year this changes. So I need to change the way I call out the audience on my ads. So yes, it's this balance that moving fast. Meanwhile you are learning. And also another thing that I, it frustrates me and even nowadays is these agencies not all Obviously. But they sell a solution or they stick to a trend and follow trains like blindly. Okay, now it's a dark social. Now it's only gen or not ungated, gated. And they said it, their solution is not like that. It's like, okay guys, perfect. We need to learn about everything. Everything is useful, but it needs to be personalized. You know, so this is what I found. That's a, that's a good answer. And some of the early stuff you were saying, I, I definitely see an experience so, you know, not moving fast enough. And so you're an in house, you know, know cmo and you're probably working with agencies, probably getting frustrated that they don't understand your brand. They're not moving fast enough or. And I think I see that a lot. Maybe they're smart and they're sophisticated, but they move so slow and no business like, you know, because once you hire them, like you're hiring them because you, you've spotted a gap, you spotted something urgent enough to put a bunch of money into it and you're kind of eager to like get this going. And I'm the kind of person that's like, I'm, I mean, should I just be doing this myself? Like, we can't be waiting a month to like launch a campaign. Like, you know, I could launch something okay. In like, you know, a couple of days. Like, so if I'm gonna wait a month, it needs to be like some glorious, amazing campaign. But it's not, it's like they're just onboarding themselves to you. So they're just slowly understanding who you target. Slowly understanding like what you do. And then they have all this set up and so yeah, that's really frustrating. Or they move really fast. But it's because they just have a framework or in template that they've put you into and you know, it almost doesn't matter the nuances of your business because you're, you're getting. Yeah. Lead gens and this. Exactly. And that kind of. Whatever. That's frustrating. Exactly, exactly. Also, I mean on the, on, on our side, we also have to set expectations to the client. I'm not talking on the, on the, I'm now talking on the, on the agency side because sometimes the client, like I need to y. Tomorrow. Okay. Yes, please. We need to, we need some time to, to. To get things done in a good way. But yeah, it's always like finding the, the balance. But moving fast is very important. Even though, even though for larger companies as well. So I find it like that. And did you guys have a LinkedIn focus even from the beginning? And if so, why? Because yeah, if you guys got started, you know, when you did LinkedIn, you know, wasn't this big platform that everyone was talking about that everyone wanted to be on, but it's looking like you saw that as an opportunity. So what was it about LinkedIn that made you want to focus on it way back before? I think a lot of people were, yeah. What caused that kind of insight and how. Yeah. Got into that. Yeah. So as we as a marketers, we've been always trying to find the opportunity, a new platform, a new tool, everything, Right. So whatever it takes to generate pipeline and drive results. So it was like very easy for us to understand because we've been always working on B2B on the B2B side, nothing about the B2C. So it was pretty obvious that LinkedIn was a very big opportunity. But it was easier because we started with the startups on this platform and the startups naturally, they tend to explore and they are not afraid to go into another channels. They naturally want to be on top of the new things. So for us it was okay, let's try with the startups. And when we got the results, it was easier to go to that more a B2B tech, traditional company to prove, okay, this is working. And it's pretty obvious because it's pure B2B and it was easier like that. I like that. And I guess that's similar to the mindset I had. Whereas it kind of logically made sense that okay, this is B2B, this is a platform. And I got my start on Google. So I learned paid search, I learned a little bit of Facebook, I learned, I started dabbling with LinkedIn organic. And then yeah, I had, I think there was a couple of little startups who were really curious about LinkedIn ads and it made sense and we would try it for them. But yeah, logically it seemed like it was going to be this platform that was like, it's the only platform I know of that you can actually target. Job title, industry seniority, geography, like I mean the exact decision makers who have budget and likely have a need. Like that's pretty interesting. But then yeah, it actually. Yes, exactly, yes. Because at the time that there was not any other platform because Facebook on the time meta, you can, you couldn't do that. Google is by term, not by. No, you cannot control the audience. So it was perfect the moment because also at the beginning there was not many competition, so it was easier to get the results. When we were a very few, it was not the same. Now the market is more mature. We are all on LinkedIn. It's different, but at the very beginning it was like everything was exciting. Yeah, it's, it's, it's been less exciting, but in different ways. I would say the, the LinkedIn thought leader ads that came out, that was a great format. I think I'll probably have a question later about Those and the LinkedIn company hub I think were pretty good movements from, from LinkedIn. I'll get to those in a minute. One question I want to ask you about, about campaigns or I guess just about accounts in general. So I'm sure, I'm sure you see you've been inside a decent amount of accounts in order to audit or taking on new clients. Can you tell us just a little bit about maybe some of the obvious problems or wrong setups or just areas of waste? I don't think people can hear this enough. And even if it's some of the obvious ones, it still is worth repeating because if you audit five accounts this week, I'm guessing three of them will have some of these. So I don't think we can say it enough. Yeah. What are the, the common mistakes? Areas of waste that you would rec. That you would point out that you're seeing when you step inside an account? Yeah. So actually surprising because even nowadays I, I get amazed because sometimes I'm auditing a. An account and I see, okay, they are still doing this mistake. But we are Bas because we do LinkedIn as always. So as an agency on our side you can tell that for us it's pretty obvious. But on the client side it's not that, not that obvious. But yeah, when someone doesn't understand the platform normally everything is wrong. The setup is run in general. For example, one of them, the most common mistake is the audience because or they want to target A tiny audience is not going to perform or a super crazy big audience and both streams are wrong. You need to find a good amount of audience size to have a good performance. Also mixing two completely different time zones and you're burning your budget in one country and then there's nothing left. When you want to target the other time zone and something that you maybe you don't think about when because you say okay, I want to target United States Australia, I want to target. Okay, but maybe you must to keep separated and not all, not also because it will be easier for you to compare results but also because you will be burning money when A country wakes up and then there's nothing left for the rest. And also for example in the SaaS industry is more like the approach for. But for example they want to promote free trials, they want to offer free trials, they want signups and prospects. But the objective is wrong because maybe they selected conversions and they are not going to get conversions just because Lindin said optimized by conversions. And also sometimes they don't have a product ready for a free trial and they are burning money on that. And maybe we have to rethink the strategy. It depends on how mature the company is and, and their strategy. Maybe they have something in mind but it's not going to work because maybe there's a lot of people that okay, they sign up to the free trial that I are offering but the product is not ready yet. The users get frustrated. Many mixtape that we can help with. That's a good answer. And there's a couple of things I heard in there. The first is the settings and the audience, the targeting. Just some of those things that are pretty foundational for like LinkedIn ads. Experts could be really off and you know, simple things like audience network or expansion or the. And or functions just being used wrong. The time zone is a really good one and I had ran into that like for ourselves really early. We're doing well in the United States and we do well in the UK and and so we had you know, campaigns with both of those and it took a little bit to figure out like all the like I mean especially with small budgets. Like you know, with small budgets, like yeah, the, the whole budget is going to be burned with sometimes within a few hours of like that opening and it makes sense like say you have a $20 a day budget or $50 day or even $100 a day. It's not going to be in play for 24 hours like and so if, if it goes for four or five hours and yeah, bidding started in UK and then eight hours late later bidding opens up. United States was actually my number one demographic and then UK was number two. But because I didn't separate them. Yeah the wrong geo and it's. You know smart marketers make silly not even mistakes. It's just like it's. They don't have the foundational like expertise. Yes. And always we are. We keep learning. So it's like. And everyday lessons. The other, the other thing I heard you say is you immediately already started crossing over into kind of like business strategy. So they came to you for execute. A lot of times they might Come thinking they need LinkedIn ads and thinking, I know my audience, I know my messaging. I need someone to execute this LinkedIn ad strategy for me. And then immediately what you were saying is already what you know, I experienced as well is like, okay, well, do you have, you know, do you have the right offer? Do you have a strong enough landing page? Do you actually have the right, like, audience segment? Because what you gave me is like, oh, I can serve anyone with a computer. Like, that's not gonna work. Like, be a smaller. And your budget is $20 a day or, you know, 100 a day. Like, we can't, you know, we're gonna have to like, maneuver. And so you immediately go from being channel expert to more business consultant. Or in your case, like, yeah, you came as a cmo, so you're, you're putting on that hat again to cross over from channel expert to marketing expert to business strategist. Because in a lot of cases, the startups need help with positioning, with messaging, with, you know, what's missing on their landing pages or website optimization. And that's always been a struggle for me as a marketer. No matter what you're selling is like, you know, my Original business was LinkedIn lead gen, but in order to do that, in order to get results, it's almost like you have 20 other things that need to be in place. So either I get really good at coaching consulting clients to do the 20 other things that I need them to do for me to be successful, or I get really picky about not signing clients who don't have that in place, or I get really good, like partners that I can refer them to or plug them in. But that is a very, that is a very common thing from my experience. Is that what you're saying as well? Yes, yes, exactly. This also what, when it comes that when it comes to, to bring value is important and it's where I see. Okay, so my past experience is helping me here because I also, when I work as a cmo, I do not really work with product, with a design, with sales growth. So you get involved in different areas. So you have to learn about different areas. And it's a full system, so it's really important. Then there are more mature companies, even more mature companies that they have like an idea on their mind that, okay, we are going to do this, but because of all the experience that you have. For example, the free trial thing, this actually was, was a case that I recently have with a company that have been on the market for a long time, but they want hard on free trial, they want to push free trial, but actually the product was not ready for that. Well, actually, when you are an agency, you are not only coaching about what will be the best message, the best offer, the best setup. You sometimes get involved in different areas as well. Yeah, it can be a little messy, but also those kind of clients. Well, if, if they're good companies that just need direction, sometimes that can make them really sticky. If they're an immature company and they just have way too much stuff that needs fixing, sometimes it can create like friction where it's like they just are focused on getting the result and you're focused on trying to get them the result by helping them, but they just, they think they're just purchasing like a result. And so there's, you know, a little friction there. Yes. One of the, one of the things I saw with you is Google, Google+ LinkedIn seems to be a good combination that you're familiar with. How do you. For those people that are comparing the two and saying, you know, because I, I see this a lot either from Facebook or from Google, how do you typically deal with that when they're saying, you know, I get leads, I get, you know, leads for $50 per lead on Facebook or, you know, Google's producing this and LinkedIn's producing this, like, why should I, you know, be putting money in LinkedIn or. Yeah, just comparing those two results, like they expect, they expect LinkedIn to be very much like Facebook leads or I guess transactional. Like, I should be able to put money in and predictably expect money out in very similar ways that I do with Google and Facebook, which do seem to operate a little more transactional. Do you, do you get that misaligned expectation on your side? And how do you, how do you usually handle that? Especially when you say, like, LinkedIn ads is too expensive compared to these two. Yes, the biggest myth lending us is very expensive. So, yes, this is very difficult. As you know, attribution is difficult because our company spending a significant ad spend every month and they want to have clear results. Okay, so we spend that. We want to see the list coming through LinkedIn, not on the other platforms. It's difficult. But there are different ways that you can navigate this. One is using more complex tools with your CRM. This is one thing that you can do also push and push and push. Hard on sales team to ask, where did you find us? This sounds pretty obvious, but it's not. And I see it every day that for us, it's like, obviously the Sales team is going to ask. Not that often because sometimes they are more focused and I don't blame them, but they're focusing, closing the deal, the demo goes perfect but they forget to help us to help the marketing team and, and to see and to get everything synchronized. So this is very important because many times the sales team start asking and we can see, okay, they find out they found on LinkedIn, they saw us on LinkedIn even though it's not perfect. Because sometimes the prospect, sometimes they just forget and they don't know because they are if, especially if the, if there's a multiple channel touch. The other side important here is the concept of incrementality. For example, if We've been running LinkedIn for a year, we haven't changed anything else on SEO we ranked the same, we didn't went up email marketing campaigns are the same or even though we are not doing that ppc, we are investing the same. But wow, surprise, the pipeline increased and the only thing that changed was LinkedIn. So obviously LinkedIn has an impact there, right? But it's difficult sometimes to. It depends on the client. But yeah, attribution is always difficult. It's very messy. And if you're an executive listening to this, I would say just know HubSpot is not an attribution tool. Google Analytics is not the end all be all of truth. And so yeah the clients, I do find it like it's mature companies and mature market, well, mature companies, mature marketers under a lot of pressure make seem to make HubSpot be their source of truth. That that's almost never a good idea. If, if you make HubSpot your source of truth and no lead that HubSpot doesn't attribute, you know, is, is worth it, then you will make very bad business decisions because LinkedIn like notoriously I think is one of the worst platforms to like show attribution for. Like if, if I have to prove impact or value or attribution of any channel, Google would be a lot easier. Facebook is a lot easier because you can run those, you know, lead gen forms on their algorithm. LinkedIn by nature is much more like SEO I think where you're building up momentum over time, you're occupying more mental space for people that are likely to buy in the future. It's not so transactional. And then yeah, attribution is pretty terrible because they're never, they're almost never just click the link and enter your website through the exact UTM with their campaign or fill out. You know, you don't just Want to run nothing but lead gen forms, they discover that lead gen forms are the one thing that HubSpot can identify 100% of the time. So now your whole strategy is based on what you can track versus creating a strategy and then figuring out how you can best track it and when. What Katya said is exactly right about simply asking where they heard from and yeah, it sounds really obvious or if you've never done that, maybe it doesn't sound like that's a scientific touch point but like asking the actual people, the humans, where they, you know, found you from, I have found is one of the most impactful touch points and I give that more credit. Like I look at that and then I look at channel attribution and then I look at maybe software attribution. But like I give probably more weight to where the client said they found us because it's going to be the channel that had the most impact. So maybe HubSpot might say it's Google, they say LinkedIn. And I'm guessing, yeah, these executives give all the credit to HubSpot. But like, I think that's a really good touch point and I try to implement that like wherever we can. Yes, and I totally agree with you. And also HubSpot has a lot of errors and many of leads are too direct and sometimes they cannot attribute a conversion or a lead because the ad was duplicated. I mean there's a lot of things that when it comes to attribution on HubSpot is wrong. And actually I totally agree with you. When I see a client is fully relying on what HubSpot says, I say, okay, I need a bit time to educate them. And also Google Analytics, well, GA4 has a lot of discrepancies as well with Google Ads. Yes, almost. Almost every time it seems that if I have a client that only relies on HubSpot, I feel like eventually we, we start making strategies that align with that. We start running more legion heavy. Usually results eventually start to slip and then, you know, and then that, that relationship fractures or yeah, if you can really get them to like, you know, see the light, have, have a better view, like you can get them around. But I see that happen a lot. And then what might happen is they pull the plug on LinkedIn. 90 days later they come back because yeah, obviously they pulled the plug on LinkedIn and numbers like fell off a cliff a little bit. And so now they finally have proven that LinkedIn had an impact by shutting it off, which is not the way you want to do that because then you lost multiple months of momentum. And then when you do start again, you're not going to see, you're not just going to snap back to the pipeline you had. Like, you're going to have to build it because. And yeah, maybe as soon as you shut LinkedIn off, you might have 30 days of like, still pretty good numbers because all that pipeline is still there. You're still going to close a decent chunk of that, but it's, you'll notice it. And that's. Yeah, that's not the experiment you want to do. Yeah, exactly. Let's see. Okay, we have about 10 minutes, so I'm gonna skip around. I'm gonna skip down to thought leader ads. I really like thought leader ads and I was a big fan of them. I guess even before they had thought leader ads, I was posting pretty aggressively, organically. And I had the idea, like, man, if I could just get more people to see these posts versus, like, I create an ad and it has like no likes, no engagement. It looks like an ad, it's from my company page. So one of the things I started doing was I would have one of my posts that did really well and I would screenshot it and then I would run that as a single image ad from the company account. And those are some of my best performing like, ads. And then they came out with thought leader ads and I was like, oh, finally. And then I was like, I still kind of like my old method because in a single image they'd click on the Read More and it would actually send them to like some of the times I sent them to the website, which they did not enjoy all the time. And then sometimes I would send them to the original post, which was a better user experience. But then, yeah, I actually think I, I think overall results were better when I sent them to the website. But the idea, the idea of thought leadership ads is, you know, you have personal posts from personal people and brands and even if the, even if it's the exact same copy and image posted from your CEO's profile versus the company page as an ad, nine times out of 10, you know it's going to do a lot better coming as a thought leader ads. So what's been your experience with thought leader ads? Is that something you recommend for clients and. Yeah. What's been your experience so far? Yeah, so I totally agree with you. It's a really good strategy in terms of building trust especially. Well, sometimes happens that when it's difficult when you have a company that the CEO doesn't want to appear on the ads, but there's always someone on the team that will be happy to post and share their knowledge. And I find that even though it's not the CEO, they perform well those thought leader ads and eventually even though these figures become like a personality on LinkedIn and they started their own brand. So this is one thing, another thing is I find it very, very important on thought leader ads to. Because sometimes we are always focusing on the product and okay, the pain points or just sharing knowledge. What is the objections of the industry, of our audience. And what I normally do to find new topics to help create content for these clients is I go to another communities, for example, another platforms, for example Reddit and I clearly see what's happening there because it's very funny because there is a role language is your audience speaking without filter and what's what they want, what they like, what are their concerns. And this is, I find it really impactful because when I took these topics and I amplified on LinkedIn the performance is always, well, it's normally very, very, very good. We have a lot of engagement and we create debate on the there on the ads and sometimes the clients freak out and say okay, oh, when they see like people, not everything, not, not everyone is. You say I agree with that. And they create debate. But they say always no, no, no, this is fantastic. I mean don't, don't panic. That's a good point. And I like the idea of using like Reddit to surface like either controversial issues or yeah, look at what your client is doing and solving. I'm sure if it's a good product and if it solves something like useful. I'm guessing, you know, there's people that either yeah, disagree with some of those points or there's just topics in general around that that you know, can be, can be split. And so I'm sure that yeah, company taking one side or another in inviting discourse or people to have other opinions. That's, that's nice. Put it on the CEO voice. On the CEO voice, the audience say okay, this is exactly what I, what I was talking about. This is exactly, you know, so it creates a connected moment. That, and that's, that's also just really good intel. That's, that's one of the things that we've been kind of looking at is like what other signals? What other like yeah, social listening or monitoring Reddit or competitor intel. Like I think AI is making some of those things a little easier. Like competitor research. I think used to be this really long human process of like visiting websites page by page, analyzing positioning. One thing I've really, like, found is, yeah, I, for, like, new clients or someone I'm, I'm working with, like, doing a kind of like a AI research phase where it's okay, tell me who they are, what they do, what they sell, how they position themselves, who are their competitors. Go look at those competitors. Come back. I feel like that already paints such a better picture of like, because a client comes in like, okay, this is who I am and this is who I sell to, and this is how we're different. That's what they say. But if you look at 10 competitors and they all say that they're, you know, unique in the same ways, then they're not. Like, so then the. I call it like the white space report that I do for some of these people, it's like, okay, of the, all the things that you said that you do after looking at your top competitors, which ones actually are defensible? Which ones are the things you actually are unique? You know, those are the things you should be leaning in on. And then, yeah, we haven't quite worked in a system of like, surfing Reddit, but I love that for the messaging, because who you're targeting and what you're saying to them, you know, that's a huge part of the strategy. Which, yes, they came to us for channel execution, but chances are they don't have that, like, very well thought out. If they do, that's a dream. Like, the clients who are like, here's our target lists, here's our offers and messaging, here's our CRM. And, you know, and then all we, we don't even need, like, leads or conversions or like, yeah, we want the leads, but sales team has a great process like those, those companies are going to do great and they're, they're going to be successful with or without us. So, like, then our job is like, you know, don't screw it up. Be good execution partners. Add some smart, you know, intelligence there that they, you know, might not have overlooked. But we're not in charge of their strategy. Like, we're not in charge of their brand strategy, which is a nice position to be in. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, we have, oh, couple minutes, so I'm gonna wrap up with. Let's see. Probably a final question here. What would you say, what would you say is the hardest part of running LinkedIn ads for a SaaS company is, is there a difference between how SaaS companies have to run LinkedIn ads versus well, yeah, I guess there's big difference between a SaaS company and like a service provider running ads. What are the biggest differences for SaaS specifically and maybe one of the biggest challenges of doing like marketing for SaaS companies specifically? Well actually it really depends on which type of SaaS you're dealing with because they're very different. It depends on. Actually depends. If you are dealing with a very big company that has been on the market for a long time and the tickets are. The average ticket size is very high. You probably have to structure the strategy in a different way. Probably you will know that it's very unlikely that someone is going to book a demonstrate from our lending ad for this very high ticket size. Sales cycles that are super long. So you rely on demand gen thought leaders. Most of your budget will go to thought leaders. Videos, content, creating a demand. Probably some signals that something that you could use is sometimes leave demos that the commit is not really there because it's less friction. Sometimes can work. If you're dealing with a medium size which is the target. The ticket size is not that high but maybe the product is a bit complex, you know that the free trial won't work. Maybe you have to push more between demand gen and also bottom of the funnel and retargeting with demos and the sales team have to be prepared for that. And sometimes when the SaaS the product is, the onboarding is strong and the strategy is more product led growth, you know that you can push the strategy for free trials because the prospect will do the onboarding and the product itself and the conversion will be easier without the sales team. It really depends on the company that you are dealing with. Normally larger companies hire tickets size doesn't care that much about leads. They already know that. Okay, we have a significant budget and we know that we need to invest more on brand positioning and also stay like the leaders of the industry. It depends, it depends on and the most challenging part it comes actually with attribution. I go back, I'm circling back to when we would been talking about the attribution and and when. But it depends because if the company is large and they have plenty of money, they don't care that much about that. It's really. Yeah. And so. And what I'm hearing too is there's a big difference between you know, if it's product led or sales led and there's some that are still trying to figure out, you know which path they're gonna go and they're trying to still solidify their product market fit and understand what demographic or audiences, you know, has the biggest pain that they can solve. And so yeah, the more mature, the more established the company is, the more infrastructure they have. It seems like our job gets a lot easier as marketers the less they have that figured out. I think that's there's this big gap where it's like, yeah, there needs to be additional expertise that is out pointed poured in in order to get execution. And a lot of times companies aren't thinking about that when they're looking for a vendor they're hiring based on expertise. What they really need is a strategic partner. Sounds like that's what you guys are able to provide at Get Up Lead for anyone who is likes what they heard, is interested in kind of reaching out, wants to either follow you or understand. Yeah. How to get in touch. Where can they find you, follow you or reach out to learn more about what you guys do. Yes, they came find us. We have our website, getapplet.com also our company LinkedIn profile on LinkedIn. But we are more active on our personal profiles. As Justine, you said before, we tend to see better performance when we share our knowledge through our own profiles rather than the company page. So sometimes the company page, we have it a bit like less, less up to date. But yes, on LinkedIn or the website. Feel free to reach out. It's Katya Gonzalez and getuplead.com but thank you so much for joining me. It was nice to see a real face to the post that I've been following along. So I'll see you on the feed and I think we'll do another session like this, probably the next couple months as well, if you're up for it. Thanks for having me, Justine. This was a real, real pleasure.