Chapter 7: What account-based intelligence looks like in practice

Jasper de Geif: Welcome to another episode of the uncut podcast, a B2B SaaS marketing series that takes listeners from A to Z in demand generation. In this show, we'll teach you how to build, execute and scale a modern demand gen engine from scratch. It's brought to you by myself, Jasper de Geif, and my friends in tech, Ted Van de Berg and Jasper Hissink. Welcome, gents.

Ted Van de Berg: Good morning.

Jasper Hissink: Good morning.

Jasper de Geif: Good morning. So in today's episode we'll talk about account based intelligence. Pretty much the usual, what it is, its importance, how you should do it, and last but not least, also some examples. So starting off with the what gents, what are we talking about here? What is it?

Ted Van de Berg: It's a pretty new concept.

Jasper Hissink: That is the definition.

Jasper de Geif: That is the definition. It's a pretty new concept. But what is it in your view?

Jasper Hissink: I'd say account based intelligence is the understanding of where your accounts, which is, I think we discussed it in episode two, your target account list and icp, where those accounts are in their buying journey.

Jasper de Geif: Right. So you're visualizing the target accounts, the target companies that you want to do business with in order to gain an understanding, as in where do they sit or where are they in their buyer journey. But then map to like the funnel stages that you developed.

Jasper Hissink: Uh, yes, that's very way deeper. Smooth explanation. I'd say one maybe important context to the, to the definition is that it's based on behavior and not on form fails. Right. Um, and that may be something to get out of the way immediately. We don't per se look at form fields.

Ted Van de Berg: We look at behavior of accounts and then the behavior is first party data. So it could also be second or third party. But the main thing is that it's. The behavior is based on what you see happening on LinkedIn or the website or all the different platforms that you own. Yeah, product.

Jasper de Geif: I think that's a very good addition because if, if it would literally just be on form fills and obviously you have your sales funnel for that. And although a sales funnel is very interesting, it only shows you half the picture, the picture that you would get as soon as someone actually shows like identifiable interest, um, as in what's in your own CRM regardless. And this goes way before that. So before they raise their hand and submit a form, you already get an understanding of. Okay, how does the account behave compared to what you put out there through your marketing efforts.

Jasper Hissink: And maybe we should clarify that a little bit because you just mentioned first, second and third party data first for maybe some listeners that don't really Know the difference? What, what is that?

Ted Van de Berg: I actually don't know what. Second party data sounds fancy, but the first party data is what you see happening, uh, in your own, uh, platform. So what you collect on your LinkedIn account, uh, it's what you see happening on your website. Um, it could also be in product. Right. So maybe there's uh, like a 99% allocation of licenses. That might be a great data point to do something with in terms of like expansion or upselling.

Jasper Hissink: So first party data is the data that you own yourself or collect yourself. Third party data is that either get through a data broker, purchase from, from a different provider.

Ted Van de Berg: Yeah.

Jasper de Geif: Right.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah.

Jasper de Geif: Cool, cool. So perhaps to kind of like finish off this part, as in what is it and why do you benefit from it? It's, uh, it's very simple and powerful because it kind of points out through this chart that we previously discussed. Okay. Where do accounts sit across their buyer journey and the funnel that I have essentially created? And um, yeah, it pretty much points out, okay, which accounts do not have us on their radar at all. And I feel like that's where a lot of companies go wrong. They just want leads, leads, leads, leads, leads. It makes a lot of sense because that's kind of like their model. We get more leads in and then eventually there will be more sales. But, um, yeah, from experience, if you forget to do top of funnel marketing or demand creation, if you will, a lot of the accounts will just sit there in the unaware stage, have never engaged with you whatsoever. So getting a lead in would be very, very tricky. You get that visualized straight away. So you can kind of like start wherever you know your marketing needs the most work.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah, because why follow up? Question to you, why is that so important? Right. So for the listeners, instead of looking at who fills in the form, you ask yourself, where are you in the buying journey? But why is it so important? Why? Why can we not look at the form?

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, I think that's an excellent question. Um, one, you get to gauge interest, um, before the hand raiser, perhaps not even interest, but more so like momentum within the market because you can see at a glance. Okay, which accounts have heard of me, have shown interest, are researching me, are already a customer, versus like I said before, which ones are not on my radar at all. So again, you get the gauge momentum before the hand raiser. And the hand raiser always comes in only after like a long amount of time when there's actually intent. And I think another one that's really important is that it points out the real bottleneck, and we hinted at that before, um, kind of like, yeah, if there's leads but there's no movement. Right. What does it teach you? It teaches you that, um, apparently there's just no interest in your product because your product is just not good enough. So it's a product market fit issue or that there's a sales issue. But what it also tells you then is that getting more leads in won't solve anything. So the problem doesn't sit with, um, marketing in this case. It sits with either product or with sales changes like the whole dynamic in the, in the company as to, you know, what's the, what's the top priority.

Ted Van de Berg: All simple ideas are great. Uh, it sounds like a very simple switch. But then when you see it in real life, like having one common language makes total sense. But what we see, like 99% of the companies, you have two different languages that marketing and sales or the other parts of the business speak. Right. Uh, like marketing, you look at like MQL's, maybe website traffic and see what's the flow there on like a personal level. While sales always thinks about like the deals to close and account level, I think like having these ones line up like one common language and one place to look at is what makes it very powerful.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, I think there's, uh, pretty much one more as to why it's so important and it's that it essentially rallies everyone around one in the same metric. And you hinted at this a little bit before, like sales wants this, marketing ones that. But there's also the product team and then there's leadership. And this is essentially just one overview in which you can select one metric. For instance, I want as many accounts as possible, or more specific, 30 accounts in stage three for this quarter. And then you can just go after that with everyone with SDRs, with marketing, with sales. And if you reach that, one can say, okay, as a GTM team, we have done really, really well. And it kind of like, yeah, just takes away, I think it takes a lot, takes away a lot of misalignment that you see in a lot of companies as to, okay, what is relevant and how do we make sure that we collectively hit our goal.

Ted Van de Berg: And also from a planning perspective, like longer term, like having one source of truth where you would, uh, in a normal scenario do like a bottoms up and say, okay, this many MQLs will get this many opportunities and they are closing. You can now use this as your cockpit and calculate forward saying, hey, how. What are the conversion rates through the different stages. And then place your next year's bet on those, uh, on the, on that data instead of the lead to op, um, conversion.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah. So we know what it is, we know what it does. Would you guys say it's given enough importance inside of companies at the moment?

Jasper Hissink: My answer would be that. The straight answer, no. But that's also because this is very new. It's a very new way of doing things. I've yet to see people really putting this in place for like a client that comes on board with a muted. So I'd say no. But that's not because they don't think it's important. It's because they just are not aware on um, how to do this and that this is there.

Ted Van de Berg: Exactly. They have to go through their own stages of awareness.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah.

Ted Van de Berg: I think every company that I've introduced it for, it immediately clicks. It makes total sense. And everybody gets excited, say, hey, this is a missing piece of the puzzle that uh, we need to get working.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah.

Jasper Hissink: Ah, same.

Jasper de Geif: I did get the question once like hey, is this something you can build? But it was kind of like a side request from like an ops guy and this was actually a huge customer so we're talking like over 300 million in ARR. But it didn't come from the top, it just came from the operations leader and it was kind of like, hey, you know what, we have uh, probably some spare budget on this month's retainer. Can you go ahead and build that? And the answer was, well, also because we hadn't figured it out at the time yet, but hey, listen, there is companies that do that, that specialize in that. Companies like CS2 or Passetto perhaps and they charge the big bucks for that. If we have €500 left on the retainer for this month, I'm afraid I won't be able to build that for him.

Jasper Hissink: Big disappointment.

Jasper de Geif: Huge disappointment. But now we're two years later and they still don't have it.

Jasper Hissink: So.

Jasper de Geif: So that to me points out that even with like the biggest companies, SaaS companies here in the Netherlands, potentially Europe, um, this, this isn't something that is known yet as in that it could change how you really just operate as a GTM team, let alone prioritize such

Jasper Hissink: a big change as well. Right. Moving from something that is already sort of co departmental marketing, sales, leadership to normal life cycle stages to move to something like this.

Ted Van de Berg: It's such a, and to have like one shared cockpit that you can look all towards and say, as you were saying, Jasper, like Ral playing around I think that's a unique, uh, advantage for the companies that get on board early to take the benefit instead of like the marketing sales fight.

Jasper de Geif: I think this question was already answered to some extent, but it might be nice to dig a little deeper here. How come you guys think it hasn't been given as much importance as it probably should have been?

Jasper Hissink: Um, a good question because multiple answers come to mind. I think one thing is direct impact. Impact to business results is hard to sort of, um, flag, right, and say like, oh, we do this and then we will do this, this and this better. Right. That's such a project that is easy to, as you say with your example just now, it's a project that is easy to sort of push through the, to the, to the back of the line of priorities, um, be swapped out with something else.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah.

Ted Van de Berg: And like, also like the past convictions of, of companies, right, like marketing is there to generate leads, sales is there to close deals.

Jasper Hissink: Ah.

Ted Van de Berg: And then putting this into the mix, it's a total different paradigm in terms of like how to think about going to market and thinking about the market.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, I'm going to capitalize on that because I think that's indeed still where the industry is at. Um, there was this super, super tiny startup that wanted to do business with us and I was already a bit hesitant because the sales process hadn't been too smooth. But okay, we were still a tiny agency at the time, so, all right, let's bring him on and see if we can be of service. And then one of the first things he essentially says is, oh, yeah, so I scanned this HubSpot blog and it was all about subscribers and making them go from subscriber to MQL and then from MQL to SQL. And uh, we're going to get hundreds of leads, right? Because we're going to put out content and then these leads that we're going to get, we're going to nurture these.

Ted Van de Berg: I read about that.

Jasper de Geif: Marketing automation, this and that. So we're going to need a, a tool for that. And then we're going to have such a predictable model. It's going to be so easy to please investors. Our founder is going to be super happy because he loves that sort of shit where he can get to see in a spreadsheet how fast we can grow. And I thought to myself, oh boy,

Jasper Hissink: here we go again.

Jasper de Geif: But exactly that is just how the industry is still wired yet. And I guess it just takes a whole lot of time, um, for the industry as a whole to get adjusted to a new approach because even the articles from 2016 they still rank. They ask an LLM or they fill it out in Google. They want to see how it works. HubSpot is the source that they trust. So there you go then. That's the way they want to go.

Ted Van de Berg: I also feel that the, it's not so much an answer to like why has it been ignored? But it's also like implementing this way of working in uh, different companies is harder to game and it's more brutal in like showing what's going on because like a number of leads or a number of downloads, there are some ways to trick that and to get that up very very high. But to get genuine interest from the accounts that you actually want to target, that's pretty hard. So it's also like a, what kind

Jasper de Geif: of toxic companies have you worked for that?

Ted Van de Berg: Just the average.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah. Very relatable though.

Jasper Hissink: I think the question you asked before is, and I would like to summarize that in two points about why is it so important? I think to summarize that I think a lot of the behavior, buying behavior happens before someone fills in the form right before they actually want to talk to sales. And also the second part is super important that I think you've flagged is that it helps in prioritizing the sales team on what accounts to prioritize to reach out to. And I think those two things are crucial and why it's important.

Ted Van de Berg: One more ripple off effect that I want to add to that point is um, um, the insights or the intelligence that it gives can be also broken down in certain uh, subgroups. So this is maybe for the larger uh, companies uh, that work in squads that tackle specific industries or specific groups of industries. Having this intelligence for that specific pod can really bring down like uh, the tools to innovate for that group. So you can have like a multidisciplinary uh, group of people, sales, marketing, CS all together. Looking at the overview of like where, where does our industry stand? So you have a snapshot of the industry and where are the accounts mapped, mapped towards. So breaking it down from like a leadership overview like the helicopter view into the smaller ones and giving that to those individual groups can push out uh, a lot more innovation.

Jasper de Geif: Cool. So we're moving on to like the consequence and at first I'm going to be interested in, okay, what happens when you don't have such an overview in place, when you don't have such a methodology or amount of intelligence? What happens to these, to uh, these companies?

Jasper Hissink: Let's Start with the reporting. I think they will report on the wrong things like MQLs, ebook downloads, clicks, website traffic, the wrong vanity metrics. They probably report on and put important

Ted Van de Berg: and missing the momentum like being able to spot momentum early in different industries or if you're attracting a lot of interest, like the demo request, as we said earlier, like it shows up on the last point. But there is already a lot of,

Jasper Hissink: there's already a lagging effect.

Ted Van de Berg: Yeah. So uh, it can help you prioritize also to see like hey, we see some momentum in this industry, uh, let's capitalize on it and put uh, our best people on it. Or the other way around like hey, we don't see any momentum here. Let's put out uh, like uh, a joint plan to really attack that.

Jasper de Geif: You said something about the metrics. I think that's a good point perhaps to dive deeper a little bit. Why would it be problematic to keep on reporting on these?

Jasper Hissink: I'd say it's problematic to report on these because they're vanity metrics. Right. So they're and often lagging metrics. So you're just too late to understand what is really happening. Um, and one, it's really difficult to tie those things into actual revenue unless you, you have that predictability building.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, totally. What I think is also good and this, this answer is inspired on an answer that I got from a recent hire here who was in charge of leading the transition from lead gen to demand gen at a Pretty big Dutch SaaS company. And one of the things, it wasn't that long. One of the things that uh, he ran into is that he had to say a lot, trust the process. Because everyone was used to like a Legion world. Right. So you would throw in a couple bucks in a certain channel or a different channel or a different channel didn't really matter. And leads rolled out pretty much right away because it was all bottom of funnel sort of ads. But now with this new methodology, the demand gen methodology that you're going to create serious intent all of a sudden all of these leads didn't come at the same uh, speed. So as a matter of fact there was like uh, a uh, relatively big gap in which you're kind of like working the market and you're hoping that in turn it's going to result in a lot of hand raisers. So those with intent. But what are you going to do? The only thing you can say is okay, please trust the process. But then if the process kind of like lacks signs that it's you know things are moving in the right direction, then probably over time, people won't trust the process anymore. And then we all know what's next. They want to see some sort of proof. You don't have the proof, so you're under pressure. That pressure results into probably doing the wrong things. Results still don't prove, and before you know it, you're on your way out.

Ted Van de Berg: Yeah. If there's one thing you take away from this podcast, it's this point, I think now, like, to be able to, like you said, it's more often right, like, uh, allowing yourself to. To have you execute the strategy that you have in mind and like, having this as evidence and be able to show this intel, this level of intelligence with the wider company is so important.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah. You need a metric to go campaign with internally, because if you can't prove your worth, you're dead in the water. Like, you got to be a really, really, really big dog in order to have that sort of trust that everyone's going to be like, you know what he's got. And it also makes sense because there's just too much at stake. Uh, if companies, I don't know, they need to go public or they need to double in order to please their investors or whatever it might be. Even if you're like, bootstrapped, in that case, you need money in and you just don't have a year in order to wait for a certain strategy to work.

Ted Van de Berg: So, yeah, at a risk for a CEO to being able to, uh, take decisions based on data. Not seeing any data, but saying, hey, this is going to be fine. It's going to be okay. A CEO can't, uh, can't rely on it. It gets too big, as you said, like, it's too big of a risk. Like, he's betting the whole company on, uh, it's going to be okay. Which is not a great strategy.

Jasper de Geif: Oh, exactly. And I think all in all, you kind of want to be that strategic partner. And I think where a lot of marketing leaders get stuck because they don't have this, is that they only get to execute the promotion part. So scaling ads or whatever it might be, whereas as the marketing leader, you actually want to do the positioning, the messaging, you want to get the sense of the market, the buyer. We covered all of these things in previous episodes. Um, but if there's, like, while you're doing that, no sort of proof, like, okay, things are going to be improving, or you don't have a plan to show, like, okay, this is what I'm going To be working towards. You just end up stuck, end up stuck with the promotion side of things and you just become like this partner. But you can hardly call it like that. It's almost more like a slave of sales. Like, okay, get us leads and we need a yesterday.

Ted Van de Berg: I think the other point, like where we said earlier in terms like the shared language, like I said in meetings, where in two jobs before 150, 200 people in the go to market team marketing, uh, having to present like, hey, this is going to be the 2024 big, uh, big plans of the year. All these amazing campaigns. Like I was like mind blown. Like all the great things that the marketing team was, was doing. Super innovative, uh, super creative. But then in the whole deck, like 50 slides, like the one slide that got uh, the attention of the go to market team, like the sales and CS was a very simple journey from one account. And like the touch point that that account went through and ended up in a close one deal, like because that was the only slide that actually talked in a language that they understood on the account level and showing how marketing impacts, uh, the funnel or the sales funnel at the end. So having using this as a way to demonstrate or to share or to talk about the work that marketing is doing makes it super easy for to click like the heads of sales and uh, CS and LDR stakeholders.

Jasper de Geif: Dope, good one. So we're moving on to the chapter, the work and perhaps a good question to come up with or to start with is how did we come up with it?

Ted Van de Berg: I think we have to ask the Godfather.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah, go ahead.

Jasper de Geif: All right, yeah, I'll answer this one. So I went through a bit of a transition. So I used to be VP of Sales, um, at a big SaaS company here in the Netherlands. And then I started as a VP of marketing, um, for a company in the Americas essentially. And that already was like a pretty big switch. But the company that I used to work for was essentially active in predominantly the SMB space. And now this new company that I was going to be in charge for of marketing, um, was active in the enterprise space. So you're thinking of like 100k average deal size a year at least. And one of the things that I soon realized is that um, it just worked completely differently because we were active mostly in Spanish, Latam and Brazil. And one of the things that I saw is that people were very, very receptive to outreach and the way they were set up and it was a very smart move, is that they have had territory managers and they understood really well, okay, there's only, let's say 100 accounts that we can do business with. So if we hire four territory managers, then each of them has to manage 25 accounts and they can swing by or they can phone them up or they can go and try to make friends, use their network, whatever it might be. And that worked really well in the sense that like I said before, everyone was very receptive to chat. Didn't mean they would buy, unfortunately. But what it did mean is that everyone had an understanding of the software already because everyone was willing to sit down and get shown the software. Which is also where the tricky part kicked in for me or for marketing in general. All of these accounts were already in the sales funnel. Very few of them signed right away because it's an expensive product. But I started thinking to myself, hmm, hm, I was hired here as a marketing leader. They want to see result. All of these accounts are already in the pipe. It doesn't make any sense for like other people within these accounts to then go request a demo because pretty much the ones that have a say on whether to start using such a product or not have already seen it. Um, so how do I prove my worth? And that was a pretty tricky question to answer. I, uh, before I started I had read this book, I think it's called no forms, no calls, no Spam, something like that, by uh, by six Sense. And it explains the concept of an account based overview. It's just that, uh, A, their product is extremely expensive, B, according to many, it's actually a very shitty tool and C, it's a black box. Right? So you don't get to understand, okay, how do these accounts then move and does it have anything to do with the work that I did? So I thought to myself, okay, what if we built that um, ourselves internally? And I started testing with a couple of tools. But it turned out to be very tricky. As a matter of fact, I didn't figure out how to do it up until I started working here at Unmuted. Yeah, that's kind of, um, how it started. Trying to prove my worth in an enterprise realm for the marketing team to also get some credit.

Jasper Hissink: So basically it's also asking the listeners now if they sort of recognize themselves in the situation that you just described and how then now they can go and implement and prove their worth.

Ted Van de Berg: You have to go through the pain right before to realize like, okay, this needs to be fixed. I don't know how, but like, if this gets fixed, life will be easier.

Jasper Hissink: Well listen, because that is Going to explain everything in detail right now.

Jasper de Geif: There we go. Take notes. So, yeah, how do we build it? Starting with questions, are we looking to get answered when it comes to building or implementing this playbook, um, would you

Jasper Hissink: say a good first step is defining your funnel stages?

Jasper de Geif: Absolutely, yeah.

Jasper Hissink: Do you have a clear ah, funnel that you follow?

Jasper de Geif: Yes. But let's take one step back and try to answer the questions first. Like what are the things that go into the playbook? Another thing that I was thinking of is, um, what are the enrollment criteria for each stage and how do I make these stages update so you actually get to see kind of like in real time what is happening in your market?

Ted Van de Berg: The buts and all the bolts and nuts. Yeah, I think the first thing in terms of uh, what to build, like where to build. I think that's a key decision that you've made in the past and I think that is also key to success is that it's all in your CRM or it's all in HubSpot. Like if this is not some kind of a separate tool that lives somewhere else, you have to log in. Uh, you have to figure out it's already in your, it's built in your CRM, like natively. I think that's a key when you start, like start in the tool that you already use.

Jasper de Geif: You just um, started about stages and m. I think that's an essential part of this playbook. So in your view and experience, which stages should be there?

Jasper Hissink: I'd say you start from unaware. Basically they don't know who you are. Not looking for you. Second, first one is company aware, like the most basic version of aware. I'd say then product aware is that they have seen your product in some kind of way, engaged with it. I'd say I personally add another one. Product conscious is that they actually in depth looked at your product. You can look at session duration and, and, and those things like that. Um, you can either then move directly to in market, which are hand raises and then in going into the sales process in decision phase, purchase phase, become a customer. I know some of you sometimes add a researching phase in there as well. Right. Um, that. I think it could be v1.5 or

Ted Van de Berg: whatever as a stage before in market. Right?

Jasper de Geif: Yeah.

Ted Van de Berg: Between product conscious and in market, you could add research.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah, maybe you can elaborate on that. I, I don't really use that stage right now, but maybe you can add to that what you mean by research.

Ted Van de Berg: I think it also depends like how many accounts you're going after and like how detailed you want to be. And for every company could be different. So for some companies you want to have multiple stages. There might be uh, like a deeper level of uh, intelligence you want to go through there like a researching maybe makes sense. But you can always uh, like build on top.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, I don't think it necessarily matters a whole lot whether that stage is there or not. There's probably reasons to be found for. Okay, for this company I would like to include it, and for another company I wouldn't. What I'd be very interested to learn is what are some of the enrollment criteria of some of these stages that you just mentioned? Like when should an account move into that stage based on what sort of behavior?

Ted Van de Berg: I think in a V1 in terms of the intelligence that you feed into it. So let's say company aware, for the companies that I work with and that we implemented it is that we look at, hey, is there traffic from the prospect company to your website? So you are connecting it to stitch, uh, snitcher to be able to upload that, that information. So you can see, okay, hey, this, this company has been on our website, so they are company, uh, aware. And the other criteria is to look at like LinkedIn engagement. Ah, see, hey, have they seen yet? Have they clicked on ads? Have they engaged with ads?

Jasper de Geif: All right, and um, how do I make these stages update? Because I think thinking of stages, it's a matter of creativity, then thinking of enrollment criteria, that should also be somewhat easily done. But things get a whole lot more complicated when you actually have to build, um, under the hood whenever things change. So what are kind of some of the things that we need, um, in order to make this happen within your tool?

Jasper Hissink: I'll try to explain my answer to your question and you correct me if I misunderstood. But, um, as also what that said, I use snitcher to collect web engagement data, sync it to HubSpot in HubSpot properties. Like for instance, what is the company record session duration on a website?

Ted Van de Berg: Yeah.

Jasper de Geif: And that was partly the answer that I was looking for. Essentially just work with properties.

Jasper Hissink: Right.

Jasper de Geif: So create these properties within your tool

Jasper Hissink: to store this sort of intent data.

Jasper de Geif: Exactly right. And then the second part, um, to this answer would be workflows. So that A, you could um, get these properties filled, but B, that based on certain behavior you could also update stuff, push it to a dashboard, whatever it might be.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah. So to give you a concrete example of the stages of diamond, you have product aware basically means that can we see in snitcher that someone visited the solutions pages or feature pages for a certain amount of time. And then product conscious is basically us saying, okay, they need to have really looked at it in depth. So then I look at. Did they actually come back to the website multiple times? Overall I have a session duration of more than, let's say three minutes and checked the product pages. So that is based on workflows, what you just said. You can actually look at those properties like, okay, if these properties now reach these values, then enroll them in the next stage or push them to the next stage.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, good. You already mentioned Snitcher a couple times. I think they'll be very happy with that. Um, it also ties into the next question. What tooling do we do we need for the V1?

Ted Van de Berg: It's HubSpot snitcher fibler.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, I would say that's actually the more in depth answer. I would say you would for sure need a CRM, you would need a marketing automation tool, you would need an IP reveal tool, you would need a dashboarding tool and you would need six

Jasper Hissink: lens user gems, common room, all of

Ted Van de Berg: them, all of the ends of skills. That's it.

Jasper de Geif: And probably also, I'm not sure if this is a category but kind of like uh, some sort of ad engagement reveal or something like that. So companies that happen to engage with your ads so you can take action rather than just sit there and think, oh, that's nice. Now what I think the first thing,

Ted Van de Berg: what you said, like the properties are very important one to understand like having those uh, extra properties, uh, and being updated or being able to store data in terms of like timelines or dates or values and updating it through workflows like that's a key, a key one. Some of the integration tools also to be able to collect that uh, collect that data longer term perhaps to go

Jasper de Geif: one by one and explain some of the choices that we made in terms of our stack. Why you were very explicit about that. Why would you go with HubSpot over any other CRM?

Ted Van de Berg: I think it's most like, I don't know, we know how to build it in HubSpot. It is also in terms of.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, but you're hitting the nail on the head there because how come you know how to build it in HubSpot?

Ted Van de Berg: It's user friendly. Right. Like if you want to do this in Salesforce, you need a whole army of consultants building on the, on the back end to be able to get this done.

Jasper de Geif: Absolutely. I think one of the most important things is that HubSpot actually comes with this. And it's something that a lot of companies preach but can't actually deliver on all in one solution in which you have a sales stack, a marketing stack, a CRM and so on. And I think having these two combined is vital here because it's not only about properties. You can build properties with ease in Salesforce but it's very much about the marketing automation part in which you connect workflows with properties. And that's always where things go south in uh, Salesforce because Marketo is clunky to say the least. And the integration with HubSpot doesn't always work or becomes very very expensive. So to have everything in one is probably um, ideal. It comes with the dashboarding obviously automatically as well. Um, in terms of a traffic reveal tool, Jasper you said snitcher 100%. There's also other options such as lead infofront, leadinfo, lead feeder and there's probably

Jasper Hissink: uh, I believe now has one.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, exactly. Why did you make the choice that you made?

Jasper Hissink: I like Snitcher a lot because there are also friends of Immuted. I honestly think they've built a very powerful tool and I think they have a very nice tool. I think it's very useful that they for instance sync the session duration directly to um, to a uh, hotspot property. Um, so they have automatic syncs of properties already basically all the elements you need to build this workflow. But I do have some clients that are very much Netherlands based for instance very target very small companies in the Netherlands. And I think Lead info then is

Ted Van de Berg: also uh, a solid or combining them like you don't have to pick one,

Jasper de Geif: you can also have both. I actually don't think they are an option.

Jasper Hissink: Lead Info not no, they're kind of like this.

Jasper de Geif: Not at least now they can be an option going forward if they develop some stuff. But as a matter of fact I tested the Both of them, LeadInfo and Lead Feeder and some of the essential information that I needed they simply couldn't push to the CRM and if it lives in their own tool but not in my CRM I can't use workflows in order to make, you know, put things in motion. So not with Lead Info. Perhaps I should have, I don't know. But with dealfront leadfeeder I had various calls in order for them to build this and help me but you know how it goes. It just took too long. Um, and then I suggested um, Lead Feeder nonetheless to a customer in my portfolio at the time. They still are a customer actually. And they're like, you know what? It's actually a bit pricey. I found this other tool named Snitcher. It's a Dutch tool and it seems to do exactly what you want to do with it, um, you know, for our company. So there was a tip by, uh, Gimondi from Sinons Shout out here. And because of that tip, I soon saw, hey, this. Their integration with HubSpot goes way deeper. So this might actually allow us to finish the playbook. And that's exactly what happened.

Ted Van de Berg: So you can stack them on top, but you always need a snitcher at the basis.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, that's the cure. Exactly. Otherwise you just won't have the, uh, data in your CRM in order to activate this whole funnel. One thing that we forgot, some sort of notification tool. Because you want to activate your sales team ideally as well, and create some sort of visibility as to what's happening because of marketing's work. Um, depends obviously on your stack, but I think Slack will be the go to. Yeah, maybe.

Jasper Hissink: You mentioned that you need a dashboarding tool, but maybe you can very quickly explain what you show on the dashboard like that.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah. So if you happen to go with HubSpot, of course, then you don't need a dashboarding tool because it's part of the suite. But at the end of the day, you're collecting a bunch of data in order to update your stages. And once these stages are updated, you want to see these visualized in your dashboard. And yeah, you want to see in your, in your dashboard. Okay, what are kind of like, um, where do they sit in your funnel in real time. But you probably also historically want to see, okay, at that point in time we had so many accounts in stage Y through, I don't know, back in February 2023, for instance, to see, okay, how have things progressed over time. You probably also want to see, let's say you identify, ah, company aware as like the main metric for this month because we have too many companies in unaware and we want to show that we can get people, uh, that we can make sure that, um, you move

Jasper Hissink: companies from unaware to company awareness.

Jasper de Geif: Exactly, exactly. That we gain that sort of awareness, that we can accomplish that. Um, so you make that like your main metric and you say, okay, I want to see 30 of them in this quarter. Then you can build that into HubSpot and set that as like your target and then essentially refer to that in every meeting that you have with your leadership peers.

Jasper Hissink: Yeah.

Ted Van de Berg: To create the excitement. I like the um, sending out these messages in Slack, like, we know that works for like inbound demo requests or other updates. Like, it's great to see these things in real life. Who is on the website, like, what's going on, like, having that, having, um, that implemented creates the excitement. Also say, hey, there is something happening or something is moving.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, we mentioned a couple of of them already. I think indeed is a very, uh, interesting question because it's kind of like the end product. What am I now supposed to see in this dashboard? And I think other ways to go about target setting as well is for instance, the amount of funnel advancements. Because let's say you have 10 funnel stages, then it's really nice to get, I don't know, 30 accounts, like I said, like we said in the aware stage. But it's probably also good to get a grip of, okay, how many funnel advance do we get overall? And if someone goes from unaware to aware to company aware, to product aware and so on, that's three funnel stages off the top of my head. And you can do that across all of your companies and then essentially get a feel for the momentum that you have in your market. So if in month one you have 20 funnel advancements and in month two you have 25 and so on, you probably get a feel for, okay, if I'm scaling kind of like my spend on my team or overall cost, does that do something for the market that we're trying to win over or not?

Jasper Hissink: Yeah.

Ted Van de Berg: Uh, then the key difference there is that there's less lag between the signals you would get from these dashboards or like seeing the account funnel than it would be from like a demo request. If you're looking at like form field. Yep.

Jasper Hissink: Am I allowed to maybe because we've spoken a lot about things that you can do with this. Um, can I summarize very quickly what people should take away, take the stage? Right. Let's say step one is you decide on your, your funnel stages. We've given some examples. Then you translate those stages into behavior, like what thresholds are there to reach the next days. Then you build the infrastructure either with a Fibler Snitcher lead info, um, within your HubSpot. Then you report on that in the dashboards. As you also said that the different things you want to see, and the last thing is what you also mentioned is use Slack or whatever to actually activate sales and decide, okay, if this happens, then sales should do this, this or whatever.

Jasper de Geif: Excellent summary. Thanks for that. So how do we know whether it's

Jasper Hissink: Working money in a bank.

Jasper de Geif: Money in the bank. That's always a good answer. Perhaps the answer could be a. There's the technical side of things. So you get to see, okay, there is a dashboard and there's accounts in there that show up and we're seeing movement. So from a technical point of view, it's working. When would you say it's also an actual success beyond kind of like the technical setup?

Jasper Hissink: If you're able to prove that going through the funnel actually relates to intent, that is a very important one. That if you say, okay, this company is now product conscious and you are going to activate sales, for instance, that they also actually show higher success rates in their, let's say, outbound strategy.

Jasper de Geif: Absolutely, yeah. And I think that's one side of the equation. The one that I'd like to add is actually seeing your leadership team refer to it, making that the go to metric for essentially the board when it comes to gtm, um, uh, performance. And I think especially that one is very, very important because it kind of causes that sort of alignment that you would really like to see in your leadership team as to, okay, what is the priority and how do we spot whether it's working or not?

Jasper Hissink: I like that for me, it would

Ted Van de Berg: be like, on the workflow itself, so that it spurs communication between marketing and sales. For me, it would be a success if, like, sales comes over to market to say, hey, uh, uh, we see these accounts sitting in there, like, what do we think about doing xyz? Uh, and the other way around, that there is this. That it fosters this communication between both departments and that you look at the same.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah, it's almost time to wrap up. Um, the next chapter is the example. And I know that I have a reasonable one, but perhaps you guys have an even better example.

Jasper Hissink: I don't know what your example is, so you can go ahead.

Ted Van de Berg: We will be the judge.

Jasper de Geif: Yeah. All right, kick it off then. So there was one company active in predominantly the SMB space. And, um, they were going to expand into Germany, and funding was kind of running out, so they didn't have loads of time left. So this expansion better be a success. And at first it also appeared to be a success because marketing was generating leads and, um, through the SDR team. Actually, a lot of demos came through, roughly 50amonth. So a couple months later, we had given over 100 demos at least. But to everyone's surprise, not a single conversion had taken place. Not a single sale was made. And that's obviously where things get very, very interesting. But also tricky because leadership and everyone that wants the company to thrive now starts to feel the pressure. Like, okay, we said Germany was the next big thing, but we're not seeing any revenue yet. However, the investments are big in marketing spend, in account executives, in SDRs. How do we turn this around? And the usual response is, we need more, more leads, more this, more that. And I think that makes a lot of sense because it's always been like that. But through this dashboard, we were now able to point out, like, hey, listen, there's only so many accounts in this market. We are in touch with pretty much all of them. 80% has seen a demo. Like, people are very receptive to it, but there's other problems because people are not signing. So we dug in and we found out that A, the product just wasn't ready for it. There was a local German competitor that was just better. So it was a product market fit issue. And B, even for the ones that were kind of like, you know, I like the product, there was a trust issue because we didn't have any German customers. So that changed the whole priority from we need more leads to, okay, we need to make the product a better fit. So perhaps we can one way or another get one of these customers in at like a lower license fee, get the feedback they want to share, um, in order to make the product better. They did make the product better. And yeah, as a result, more customers started to come through, more quotes started to come through, the trust started to build and it actually did slowly but certainly become a success.

Ted Van de Berg: I'll say 10 out of 10 example. And also need to admit it, but

Jasper Hissink: it was a good example.

Jasper de Geif: Appreciate it, guys.

Ted Van de Berg: And also giving you the ammunition, like having the ammunition to go into like the um, uh, management team or like the boardroom and uh, bring a piece of information to the table that will change, uh, the course of the company.

Jasper Hissink: That's a completely different way to look at it that probably no one in that room had ever thought about looking at was.

Jasper de Geif: It was mind boggling in a way because the conversation had just always been about leads, leads, leads, leads, leads. And suddenly was just so crystal clear because we're talking about seven markets that they were focused on, right? So you don't really have top of mind, okay, how many accounts are there and why are we working and is the product to fit and do we need certain integrations or whatever it might be. But this just pointed out, it was like a five minute conversation. Like, shit, we have spoken to pretty much all of these accounts. None of Them have decided to work with us.

Jasper Hissink: Marketing is not the issue.

Jasper de Geif: Exactly.

Jasper Hissink: Very. One quick example and, um, I'll make it very short. We often run marketing campaigns for clients, right. And then often, if you ask them, what is the success? When is this campaign a success? Yeah, Demos I barely see. If you run a campaign for a month or two that you get 20 demos out of one campaign, it's just not how demand gen works. Right. But using this to sort of benchmark, um, and measure the effectiveness of a campaign that you launch a campaign with. Utms, do you're able to track that campaign and see, okay, because of this campaign, are people moving through these, uh, ABM funnels. Right. And how can you compare that or benchmark that to other campaigns that you run and sort of measure the effectiveness of campaigns that you run? Way better to look at it. Okay. This is a Successor. We get 10 demo requests out of this. But actually look at. Okay, how are the companies, the target accounts, behaving through the. Through the funnels of these campaigns? Very smart way to do it as well.

Jasper de Geif: Right side note, uh, I think you can only do it pretty much after you have kind of like set up this new approach. Because probably if you're like five years in, these accounts have a certain stage and you want to be able to see. Okay, because of this specific campaign, they have advanced, right?

Jasper Hissink: No, but you should be. Maybe. But maybe you can see. Fair enough. If they're already all, let's say in market, it doesn't. It doesn't matter. No, but if you have a campaign where you want to move people from unaware to, let's say, any of the stages of marketing, then oftentimes marketing leaders want to see demo. So they want to move from underwear to in market, skipping five stages, but adding these stages in between, allowing allows you to also show like now this, this campaign is actually pretty successful. But yeah, good side note, if you do that on everyone that is already in market, no, it doesn't work.

Jasper de Geif: Love that. Thanks for the clarification. So that was, um, today's episode. Um, the next episode is about the historical mother of all demand capture channels. The quickest way to result,

Jasper Hissink: the only way to result.

Jasper de Geif: Thankfully not. Okay, so in the next episode, we'll be sharing our tips and trips when it comes to setting up that channel and making it a success for your business. Looking forward to seeing you back then.

Jasper Hissink: See you next time. See you next week.