DA (03:31):
Hey, Andy, thanks so much for joining me today. How are you doing?

AC (03:33):
Yeah, I'm doing well, man. Doing well. Thanks for having me on.

DA (03:36):
Based in Austria, right?

AC (03:38):
Yeah. Based in Austria. I've been here for the past 12 years. Clearly not Austrian as you can hear from my voice, but yeah, this is where I've done a lot of my growing up let's say.

DA (03:49):
That's fantastic. I definitely want to go visit there someday. I just hear so many amazing things about it. So it's on my, it's on my top visit list for sure. Thanks for joining me today. Really excited to have you and Leadfeeder on the show, a company I admire, have used before really exciting. But before we jump into tactical stuff, why don't you explain a bit about Leadfeeder when it was founded, who your customers are and what you're doing uniquely in the marketplace?

AC (04:15):
Sure, no worries. So Leadfeeder, we've been around since the initial technology began in 2012 and then following that was this part of the technology was sold onto a large telco provider in Finland. That was the analytics part. And that was an original company, which was called Snoobi, which was founded by our founder Pekka Koskinen, in Helsinky in Finland. And then part of that team then stayed together and then founded, what is today Leadfeeder. That's that's gone back a bit now. So we're pushing on almost 10 years now. And some of the things that we do basically, it's a very simple technology. We recognize the companies that are visiting your website and based on those companies, we can tell, okay, how many people from that company has come look at the individual user journeys on your site from that company, what pages they've been looking at, how long they've been there for, where they came from, which campaigns are performing.

AC (05:14):
So I mean, it's quite simple, but great sales intelligence. And also from a marketing perspective, it's quite interesting as well. In terms of our core users is two different types of users. You've got your marketing users, which I can start with, which is seeing very simply if the content that you're producing on your site is driving the right accounts. So I think nowadays most marketing teams will be focused on some form of account-based targeting and with that as well you obviously want to double down on your content creation and make sure that the content that you're creating is driving the right type of companies and the right type of eyeballs to your site. With Leadfeeder at a quick glance, you can see which type of companies are coming. You can take it, you can do it by industry breakdown, or you can also look at it per company as well.

AC (05:59):
So it gives marketing a real feel for what content is working, what content isn't working. From a sales perspective, there's the obvious use case of seeing which companies are visiting the site and what they've, what they've been interacting with, which helps sales teams and even SDRs as well, help structure how they do their outreach. And that can be in any, any stage of the funnel. Really let's start with the top of funnel. So, with SDRs, for example, or BDRs. So (inaudible) teams or inbound teams, whatever you want to call. Those guys will use Leadfeeder data to understand, or to prioritize which companies to follow up with first, in any given day. And you can break that down or segment within the tool in terms of which types of pages that those companies have been interacting with. So we look at, we call it a measure of intent.

AC (06:49):
So what's their intent to actually want to pick up the phone from an SDR. And that will be based off things like pricing, page views, particular products that have been viewed, a number of page views, how long they've been on the site and so on. So really gives you that level of understanding of the traffic that's coming to the site and then enabling the sales team to then prioritize based on those companies that are a little bit harder than others. And that also goes down when, when things actually enter into a sales cycle as well, it helps salespeople understand exactly what the company is that they have in a, in maybe in an opportunity phase, what people from that company have been looking at. So that helps them then scope the conversation for (inaudible). So if you're going in for a second let's say a second conversation around a specific, around a potential deal.

AC (07:37):
You'll go in with a bit more information in your back pocket. Having seen what the people from that company I've been looking at on your site. So which is typically covered by marketing automation tools only though if you have someone that has filled out a form and typically across your website, you're only probably going to have something like 2% conversion rate. That means like 2%, two people out of 100 people are going to fill out a form and therefore you recognize them. We make up the rest of that. So if you're in a deal, typically in a larger deal sizes, you might be selling to six, seven, eight, nine people. You'd want to see if, if one of those six, seven, eight, nine people have come to the site and what they've been looking at. So that's basically a synopsis of what we do and who our buyers are.

DA (08:21):
That's a great synopsis, really great overview and a super valuable tool. I think you guys are doing something really amazing. It's so helpful for marketing and sales teams. My only question that comes up is, you know, we've tried to do this type of campaign before with an automated email outreach, to people who had certain sales intent. Have you guys seen a winning campaign from the outbound side of things? Are you seeing more you know, positivity from video or is there like an ABM strategy? Is there anything specific you've seen that has been really winning with that outbound, the sales kind of angle there?

AC (08:57):
Sure, if we're talking about like Leadfeeder and using Leadfeeder together with an outreach cadence, I think there's, there's a couple of things you should be doing. My first piece of advice is to not just focus on one channel, so go a bit broader than the one channel. So you should be looking to contact the right people by email first and foremost, but also via LinkedIn. And also eventually via the phone if you can, if you have contact details for the phone. But some of the things that we like, we see work in well, if you want to then dig into those channels or, is that start with, let's start with the email or even across the board. You want to make sure that you're targeting as many of those, whatever your ideal customer profile or your ideal buyer is on those accounts.

AC (09:42):
So your ideal persona rather than customer profiles. So who are the people that typically buy from you. And based on the content that they're looking at, based on what you're seeing in Leadfeeder, is there any indication for what type of user that could be? So if you've got a couple of different types of buyers, so if you've got for example, you're selling to somebody that's very technical and then maybe salespeople or marketers based on the interactions or the behavior on your website, is there any indication to show you that that person might be falling into one of those brackets? Right. Typically it would be because people have different interests. Then what you want to do is, is from Leadfeeder we have a contact function in there, which you're able to dig through accounts to see or to get the contact information for specific types of types of profiles.

AC (10:29):
So we'll have based on job title, for example, and what you can do from that is you can extract a number of contacts based on certain roles. You can then either push them directly into your CRM, or you can do it directly via Leadfeeder, and that you can push, push an email out to those guys. That's then like going a little bit broader across all of those profiles. While at the same time we also have a connector with LinkedIn. So see those profiles of those individuals in LinkedIn and then do your automatic outreach to those profiles as well. There's a pretty interesting tool that's just integrated with Leadfeeder as well. We've got an open API, so we've got a lot of integrations, but there's one particular tool which is called Salesloop.io which is a LinkedIn automation tool.

AC (11:15):
So basically you can, you can automate LinkedIn InMail and all you need to do really with what it is in Leadfeeder you can create a custom feed. And we call them custom feeds, but it's simply just a segment. So you can segment based on a number of different factors, whether it's behavior on your site, or if it's specific firmographic information. So what industry they're in, whatever it might be. You can even base it off of ownership and the CRM tool. So we've got connections with Salesforce, HubSpot, et cetera. If let's say I'm calling on a specific account in the CRM, I can go and create a feed off the back of that. And then every time that somebody from that account visits the site, I can trigger an automation, whether it's a notification or something else. But in the Salesloop example what we've seen work quite nicely is that we've been creating custom feeds and then putting that information directly or connecting that information directly with Salesloop.

AC (12:09):
And then every time that somebody falls into that specific feed, based on the criteria that we've set, it then triggers an automated LinkedIn request, right? A LinkedIn request plus an automated message within that. That's actually the results from that have been very comprehensive. We've tested it in some of our markets in Europe, and we've seen some really, really good results from it actually, and managed to book a number of meetings off the back of that as well. So that paired with the email plus afterwards, then maybe following up with a phone call is always the best way, but I think if you want to automate it based on what you said there, David, a mixture of email, plus that LinkedIn automation via Salesloop is something that we're seeing good success in.

DA (12:56):
That was a really great answer. I think that's such a great idea to bring in LinkedIn. Obviously LinkedIn is getting busier and busier with those outbound reach outs. I'm seeing so many myself, but I think the key here is that you're not just spamming cold leads, you're utilizing that criteria and those filters to talk to the people that are already coming to you and checking things out, like your pricing page, they know more about your business. So it's more of a warm reach out, like you said, to get those meetings. I think that's fantastic. And when did you actually join the team? I know it's been almost 10 years since the company kicked off, but when did you join as CMO?

AC (13:30):
I joined a CMO in November, 2019.

DA (13:33):
Nice. That's awesome. So about a year and a half. When you joined, obviously the company was already going product market fit was already there. What was the story behind product-market fit? Did, was there ever a struggle to figure out those two different segments or was it pretty, pretty simple to roll this out?

AC (13:49):
It was interesting. So early on what the guys did was because they had sold the analytics piece from Snooby, which was the original name of the company. And then sort of went out one day with a different, like a different bit, which is now Leadfeeder. They had funding. So they took the money that they'd made from selling Snoobi and pushed it into Leadfeeder. And with that, what they were able to do was basically release a free product onto the market for, I think it was 18 months to almost two years. So the theory was let's push something out, completely free of charge and get as much user feedback as we possibly can. And then following that, like, we'll just keep doing iteration after iteration, after iteration, and then start to reach out to our existing user base and start finding out, okay, how much will people be willing to pay for this? And then start charging.

DA (14:48):
Obviously a dangerous strategy for anyone bootstrapped, but the fact that they had the funding from the sale definitely makes sense there, or if they were funded from a VC.

AC (14:57):
Exactly. So, I mean, look, yeah, it was, it was a risky approach, but it paid off dividends.

DA (15:02):
Yeah, no, that's huge. I mean, that feedback is the key what a unique way to do it though. And it was great that they had that sale. So that's, that's fantastic. Well, what I want to do is I want to dig into some of our topics today, some of the tactical things that you guys are doing behind the scenes to grow Leadfeeder, and I want to kick it off with one of our favorite topics, obviously at Demio, which is webinars. I know you recently decided to give it a shot here in 2020, 2021. How did you guys get into the webinar game? What were the goals behind it and what did you do to get the results you got?

AC (15:36):
Okay, so yeah, we started doing webinars back in March of last year when the first lockdown appeared. So it was really just out of, out of luck actually, because you know, the same as most other companies, we had decided that we wanted to just sort of tighten the belt a little bit because we weren't sure what the next months were going to bring just due to COVID. So with that, I started reaching out to people in my network. One of those people was Alex Olley. Alex is a founder of a company called Reachdesk who do direct mail. Alex was in the US at the time, I think this was around the 14 to 15 of March and we were just taxed. And I just asked him, Hey, has your, how has business gone for Reachdesk? What, what's happening over there at the moment just based on the current global, you know, issues.

AC (16:27):
And he just said, yeah, it's a little bit tough or whatever, but, you know, he was trying to get into New York at the time because president Trump had just started closing the border. So he was trying to get back to the UK where he's based. So, well, let's talk on Monday. Maybe we can do some content together. And we decided we just had a quick chat on the Monday, said, let's do a webinar. The webinars should be focused on something that salespeople are struggling with at the moment and let's think about what that could be. The most obvious thing to me was creating pipeline. So how are you going to create pipeline and, you know, coming into Q2, into Q2 because we're talking mid-March so Q2 was just around the corner.

AC (17:05):
It was a couple of weeks away and salespeople are going to have targets, pipeline targets to reach in March. So we said, okay, well, let's create a webinar, just, you know, based on how, how to, how to start, how to keep creating pipeline during uncertain times. And like, you know, we were just using best practices and stuff that we had learned in the past. We couldn't read the future obviously, but it was a really interesting topic based on a pain point that we knew a lot of people would have. Okay. So we launched out on the Tuesday and by the time that the Thursday rolled around, we had like 670 registrations. It was just, you know, and we'd only, we didn't pay, we were like, we didn't pay for any of those. It was all free. So we did some, some just pushing out to our network, our user base, our lead base, and then also pushing it out then on LinkedIn and with that, it just, you know, it exploded.

AC (17:58):
So and that was, you know, by the time Thursday rolled around, we had, I think 500 people showed as well, which is massive show rate. So following that, I was like, okay, this is obviously a channel to be, or this, there's always something to this. So I just said straight after that, on the, on the Thursday evening, I called my head of demand gen in and was like, okay, we need to do another one next week. And he was like (inaudible) let me just take a look into my, into my, into my Rolodex here and see who I can pull up. And I, funnily enough, Aaron Ross, I don't know if you know Aaron? Aaron and myself, had been speaking for, you know, a little bit of time. And he reached out to me the week prior to that specific webinar and said, Hey, I love the content that you guys are doing.

AC (18:45):
Be really interested to jump on board and do some content together. And I said, well, okay, well, that's interesting. So I pinged him and just said, Hey man, like, do you fancy doing a webinar next week? He was like, sure, let's do it. So again, we spoke on the Monday, launch on the Tuesday, by the time that the Thursday rolled around, we had like 2000 registrations, I want to say 2000, was it the exact number was 1916. Right. So so close to 2000, this is a little bit, little bit less than 2000 registrations. But again, with no money spent, like we, we used the Leadfeeder database and the Predictable Revenue database which. Is Aaron database, and we've got almost 2000 registrations and over a thousand people showed up all at once and then the webinar system broke down because it wasn't able to take that much pressure.

DA (19:34):
Guess you weren't using Demio that's, you know, just throwing it out there.

AC (19:38):
Yeah. So we, we, we ended up changing platforms in the end, but we just kept on iterating on a week in week out. It was, it was a lot of, you know, okay, who's, who are we going to, who are we gonna be speaking with next week? But man, we managed to, we did that over the space in the year of last year. And starting in March up until the end of December, we had managed to secure 15, over 15,000 registrations for webinars. And it was as simple as just getting interesting people on, that weren't talking about boring things. Like

DA (20:14):
Topical, right? Like topical exciting topics.

AC (20:17):
Yeah, exactly. Like I find, I see a lot of people do this type of stuff on LinkedIn where they really want to go product heavy. And be like, Oh, you know, come on and see a demo of this specific feature, which has its place but I find a lot of tech companies expect audiences like crowds to gather at those things. And like on last year, like Salesforce or Mark (inaudible), or massive tech companies, they even struggled to drive a crowd to things like that. You need things where people are going to get value from it. So our thing was always, let's try to give like three to five things that people can take away from this and actually implement completely free of charge. And it has nothing to do with Leadfeeder. Right. And Aaron would give those tips and we had Dale Dupree, Katie Dorsey, Daniel Disney, you know, just people that have a good following and that we're able to give people things, tangible things to take away. And it just worked, you know, people wanted to listen. It was interesting and it flowed and it was fun. People enjoyed it, you know, instead of it being, you know, I don't know, very high level topics around, I dunno, AI and so on, like which, which other people are doing. It's just putting people to sleep. And I just wanted to avoid that.

DA (21:31):
Yeah. Fun, engaging thought leadership topics you're bringing in. Good. I would even almost call them like influencers in the space, right, with a good network. When you're doing the reach out to those guests to come on and do that thought leadership type of event with you, what does that reach out look like? Obviously, like you said, you reached into your Rolodex, but are you like (inaudible) leads? What, what is kind of the win for them that they're, that they're signing up with you?

AC (21:57):
So I started my career as an SDR and I felt a bit like in the past year I was being an SDR again, getting, just trying to get people on for webinars. So in terms of the outreach, how that worked was, I was like just reaching out to people on LinkedIn. I was sharing a lot of content on LinkedIn myself. A lot about the success of them as well. So that gathers people's attention like posts and screenshots of our registration numbers and so on from the tool itself and so on. That got a bit of attention. But then just doing a cold outreach to people like with Dale Dupree, for example, I got his attention by sending him a video of me at walking the dog in a vineyard, you know, and showing him like, Oh, I have (inaudible) that is around where I live and so on.

AC (22:39):
And he got back to me immediately. He's like, that's awesome. Let's do something together. It was little things, you know? But then in terms of, for them as well for the, for the presenters, like we shared the lead list obviously and we also promote them. So we promote them to our entire database as well. So we've got a database now of probably over 50,000. Back then it wasn't as many it's been growing. I think giving people a platform and knowing that the numbers are going to be decent, like there's not many companies out there that are able to drive a good crowd to a webinar on a regular basis. You know, a lot of companies, I've been in a lot of webinars where you get 20 to 30 sometimes if you're lucky. I've been on other webinars where they get five to 10, you know, it's, we started to gather a following on us and that really helped to secure the speakers as well. So they were, they were getting a bit of a, a bit more promotion for themselves as well, you know.

DA (23:34):
Absolutely. I think the core thing here that you're saying is you've kind of found where that value was for them. So in the list, in the promotion, in having an engaging event where attendees are showing that was such a win for you, once you had that momentum, it's easy for you then to secure those great guests. By the way, I think you mentioned Vidyard, big shout out to them. I think they were our last guest on here, a great platform as well. So that was a really great idea. And speaking to that, I know you're also using LinkedIn in some strategic ways for account-based marketing as well, kind of similar to how you're saying you reached out with a video, you know, how are you using LinkedIn in your approach to do ABM? You know, it's something we've talked about time and time again, here on the podcast, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn. There's just so much value there. I would love to know how you are utilizing it to maybe secure guests or to just drive new meetings and sales.

AC (24:24):
Super. Yes, LinkedIn is great. And it's super simple how we use it. So when I first joined Leadfeeder, I came from a background which was focused on enterprise sales. So we were able to do, were able to be quite broad in terms of how we did our targeting or not how we did our target, but how much we spent on on bringing in new customers or how much we marketed towards specific customers. Leadfeeder is a different model. Like we're a volume model. So we've got thousands of paying customers, each paying a small amount every month. So it was, it was a little bit different in that we, the concern was that, Hey our customer acquisition costs need to stay super low. So anything that we're doing really from a marketing perspective needs to be focused on bringing new trial sign-offs because we offer a two week free trial. And based off the trial, then what happens is that people then enter into the sales process.

AC (25:21):
You know they get assigned to a sales person, or they buy directly via the product itself. So our sales team was predominantly setup for inbound. So, but they only follow up with leads that will come in by, as a sign of a trial signup. Now, what we're proposing, what you would do on LinkedIn would be very much content downloads. I wouldn't ever push somebody directly to a trial or a demo request or whatever it might be on LinkedIn. And you'll find very quickly that that won't work. But we started to grow our outbound team in the past year and the outbound team were really just doing just that, trying to find reasons to pick up the phone, to call people. So I just said, well, why don't we try to create some more gated content? Because previously we didn't have a huge amount of gated-content because of that approach to driving everything to trial signup, my thing was like, let's try to, let's try to engage as much as we can as many times as we can with prospects, whether it's for free or paid.

AC (26:25):
Let's try to keep the costs down obviously, but if it's an in outbound we're typically going for a larger deal size anyway. So I just said, well, let's take our open target lists, push those into LinkedIn. And then also have a piece of content, which is, you know, based on our two different user profiles. So which are sales and marketing. So we actually created, we started by creating eBooks. The first ebook was ABM For Marketers and then Account-based Selling for Salespeople. It was essentially the same ebook, which has a different cover on it, really, and like a slightly different. And we just started targeting those accounts that the outbound team were targeting. So what we started to find very quickly was we were starting to source conversations, new conversations for the open team. At the same time, we were also starting to reignite older conversations that had gone cold.

AC (27:19):
So actually some of the biggest deals that were won in the company last year actually came from those LinkedIn campaigns that we were running. And we weren't spending a huge amount of money on them. Like you're talking sorta 30, $40 a lead, just for those specific profiles that you want to be interacting with in those specific companies that you're already targeting. So it's by no means like a real, like difficult in-depth form of account-based marketing. But it's account-based marketing, nevertheless, because you're focusing on the same list that the sales team are focused on. Therefore, you're like you're both helping each other, let's say, and that's worked really, really well for some, for the past year.

DA (27:57):
I don't think there's any reason to over-complicate strategies like this. I think it's a great strategy. It's allows you to track and see the results. And also, like you said, it has that alignment. My question is going to be deeper into. Maybe it was an executive conversation, but you mentioned that your cost per acquisition had to be lower because your average revenue per user was lower. How did you guys decide on what that enterprise plan would be? Did you guys end up creating a bigger package type that you could sell with salespeople easier? Did that ever kind of resolve itself?

AC (28:30):
So, yeah, like it's multi-faceted right. So there's obviously upgrades and pricing data, you know, based on it. So we, we do pricing updates once a year. It's about, probably about a 15% increase year on year, which automatically brings the price of the product open also than the average revenue per account also goes up based on

DA (28:53):
You white, white glove people forward? You just, you upgrade everyone?

AC (28:57):
No, no, no. So we don't look great existing business immediately. Going forward when they move on to new plans, then we'll upgrade the pricing as well. Obviously we don't want to to just upgrade everybody's pricing that doesn't make, that would end in a lot of churn. On a, on a yearly basis, we do upgrade our pricing. This year we had about a 15% increase, which automatically then up the price as well. And saying that like there's the accounts that we'd be focused on would be based on a couple of things. For the outbound team, it would be based off the, the traffic that's gone to their site. So we'd look at Alexa ranking as a real sort of guiding light in most of the US. Europe can be tricky with Alexa ranking. To understand exactly how much traffic they're getting to the site, because for us, our pricing is based off the number of companies that we recognize that are visiting your site.

AC (29:46):
And obviously the more traffic you get, the the higher number of companies that are recognized. So with the outbound team, as I said, those guys are chasing those higher value accounts. And then on top of that, there's additional products that we're about to, we're going to have two major product launches this year. One of them was coming very soon or does a part of it, which is already available, which is our our rest API. So basically you can take the, all of the IP database from Leadfeeder basically and essentially license it for a year. And with that, you can do a number of things on. You can, for example, take instant information from companies that are visiting your site to recognize, to say, okay, for example, if you're using a personalization tool to push that content onto the, onto the front end immediately.

AC (30:46):
So you would take, for example, Leadfeeder is coming to your website, David, you would then immediately serve content, which is applicable to Leadfeeder, and that could be anything based off firmographic information or based off company name or whatever you want it to be in. That's that's in real time. On top of that, we also offer the database for companies like account-based marketing providers that want to further their targeting using, using IP targeting. Because a lot of it, a lot of what they offer up until now is cookie based targeting. And we're finding now that with the, with the IP-based targeting, that it just offers a higher match rate to those companies that you're looking to target with those new products that we're launching. That's gonna open up a much larger deal sizes for us, because that will be more focused on the up mid-market low tier enterprise clients. Whereas in the past with the, with the core product that we offer, we have a lot of small to medium-sized businesses, which we're very happy to work with. And then also some mid-market enterprise, mid-market companies as well. But as I said, those new products that will be opening up a new bit of business for ourselves there in terms of the average deal size.

DA (32:02):
I love that. And that would almost be from like a business standpoint, like some horizontal scale mechanism where you're actually able to bring in new, like cross sell opportunities or new opportunities there for, to increase that average revenue per user. So a great strategy. And then looking back over the past year and a half, we've talked about, you know, three really great strategies that have been working for you guys. What about hard lessons from things that didn't work out? Any, any craziness that went on in 2020 that you learned from?

AC (32:29):
Of course. There was a, there's always plenty of craziness when you're trying to do lots of things. I think in the past year we were trying, trying many, many things. I'm just trying to think of some of the stuff that, that didn't work. We did some changes to the website, which, you know, took up a lot of time and we didn't test them well enough and it didn't work. So we needed to revert those changes very quickly. We worked on some messaging that, you know, it just, it didn't resonate. And like looking back on us now, in retrospect, there's things where I said, Oh, we definitely, the process for that wasn't in place. But I think if I had to do it again yeah, of course with that in mind, I'd do it differently. But if I had to gone back and being in the same mindset, I don't think we would have been able to do it any different. Just based on resource and based on how quickly we wanted it to move.

AC (33:18):
I think the important lesson was though that when things didn't work, we managed to recognize that very quickly and then make changes very quickly. Can be very frustrating for teams obviously. If you've been working on something and it doesn't work out, then you need to go and revert very quickly. But at the same time though, if something isn't working and the numbers aren't, aren't pointing in that direction, then you do need to move quickly on it as well. But going forward to, for also as a team, we'll be doing a lot more testing I would say. Testing and a lot more multiple testing at the same time. We're looking at how we can, how we can get more out of our website, which is already performing very well, but how can we get more out of that quicker? And it's about doing many tests all at the same time, rather than just running one test for a month and then figuring out if that's working or not. This is something that we're looking at going forward.

DA (34:18):
Yeah. Those multi-variate tests are hard though, just simply for the fact that you start to question which change you did affected, you know, the results and stuff like that. So I definitely agree. And I think the key that you're setting here that I'm hearing a lot from everyone kind of looking back at 2020 was the adaptability and the ability of marketing teams to be agile and be okay with change. And also the mindset like it's okay, that things don't work out. Like we're going to try it. We gotta be fast. And then we're going to revert if we have to and try something else. But you know, it's a really good mindset to have in the marketing team. And Andy, what I want to do now based on time is I want to flip over to our lightning round questions, five quick questions that you can answer with the first, best thought that comes to mind. You ready to get started?

AC (35:03):
Let's go for it.

DA (35:04):
All right, let's do this thing. What advice would you give for early stage saas companies starting marketing today?

AC (35:13):
Execute. Execute, execute, execute. A lot of, one of the core things that I see from from founders that I speak with and they already have maybe one or two marketers on the ground is that they don't, the marketers themselves don't really know what to be doing. Right. Or they don't have enough like they don't have enough, they don't deliver enough. So with that, I'd say, I give the core example. Okay. Joining Leadfeeder as I said, things like ABM, people were like, we can't do it. So the person that was here is no longer with the company would have said to me, Hey, I don't think ABM is going to work. And I said, well, let's just try it and deliver it and see what happens. Let's just go and execute it. And we did it and it worked and it drove revenue. And it's super simple.

AC (36:03):
It doesn't need to be something really like, you know, top level stuff that's made for, you know made for a, for a massive enterprise organization. It can be super simple, but just get stuff out the door, you know, eBooks, for example, are another piece that founders are always, you know, trying to push the marketing team for. And the marketing team are thinking, well, we don't have enough resources to do it. Those ABM ebook that I mentioned early on, like I wrote that because I had some knowledge and I just churn it out in an afternoon. And then we put it together and got it at the door within a week. So it doesn't need to be super perfect, but it just needs to be executed

DA (36:40):
For our listeners, a phrase that I throw all the time is the MVF right. The minimum viable funnel, what can we just get out? We can tweak it. We can build on top of it. But to your point, just getting things out is the key, because if you overthink it and you over complicated too early, you won't even get that experiment out. So it's a great piece of advice. What skill do you think is vital for marketing teams to improve and build on today?

AC (37:02):
The question is if this is gonna be a scale or not, but I think alignment with the sales or with the revenue function.

DA (37:08):
Like communication even, right?

AC (37:11):
There you go. There you go. Communication. I think like one of the core issues that I see across the board is that many, many marketing teams don't even talk with their sales counterparts. And like a very simple question that a marketing leader can ask,, if they come into an organization or even a CEO could ask their marketing team was what day of the week do you have your one-on-one with a member of the sales team. And typically the answer is, what do you mean? Or when was the last time, when was the last time you had a one-on-one with a sale, but somebody from the sales org and typically it's all in our last team meetup or whatever it could be. Which is. Which is a problem.

DA (37:52):
Yeah, definitely alignment, something that we talk about, about a lot on here. And I think it's such a great example of where communication is so critical for your business. You have to be aligned to move quickly and do the experiments like you're talking about, you got to have that alignment. Our next question. What do you think is the best educational resource you'd recommend for learning about marketing or growth?

AC (38:17):
There's a, so there's many, many sources I think. So let's stick with podcasts. For example, I think, the Demand Gen podcast is, is something that's really helpful. And you know, I've, I've been listening to that offer a number of years. And I just, I think it's interesting to see the names that they've managed to get on there as well. It's a long list of people that are focused on that one topic, which is around demand generation. And that is typically the number one problem is demand generation or lead generation, especially at early stage startups. How do I get in front of people and how do I get them interested in my product? And that's about creating demand. And then I think LinkedIn is a great resource, to be honest. There's so many people to follow on LinkedIn and people are very like very open to having a chat on LinkedIn, you know, and like the people that I learn from every day, is just people like Dale Dupree or Morgan Ingram or Aaron Ross, or Michael Hanson from GrowthGenie.

AC (39:24):
Like there's, there's so many, so many areas in which you can learn and with that, there's a great community as well I have to say. Like, I've actually over the past year managed to make a very nice community for myself as well with those guys. And we, even myself and Michael Hanson set up another group ourselves called the B2B Collective. And with the B2B collective is just a mix of sales and marketers that are interested in learning from one another. And we have a Slack group and in there, like people just interact with one another. We have probably under a hundred members or so. We're quite picky with who we have to come in because we just don't want it to be open to everyone. But yeah, if people are interested in joining the group, it's completely free of charge, but yeah, just ping me on LinkedIn.

DA (40:11):
We'll definitely put a link to your LinkedIn as well, so people can reach out and friend you after this episode, but I love that. What about a favorite tool you can't live without?

AC (40:20):
There are many. So, so obviously obviously Leadfeeder is something that I use quite a bit, actually. So it's yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's eating our own dog food. We use that all the time here. Slack is the tool that I need that I use the most. I think I'm a real soccer for Slack and I've got many different groups in terms of companies that I'm associated with or organization Slack, whatever, whatever they call them. My Slack is constantly blowing up all the time.

DA (40:56):
Is that ever a massive distraction for you?

AC (40:58):
When it is I turn it off. So I find myself what I've started to do now is I've based on actually something that I've read recently. So I read a book from David Goggins. I don't know if you know David Goggins. So his book, I can't remember the name of it, but I've read it recently and he recommends splitting your day open to 20 minutes segments and I've started to do that. And I've given my myself the time, the 20 minutes in every hour to be able to look at Slack and interact on Slack. And then the other 20 minutes that are in my area, I'm dedicating to order things. And I wake up in the morning and I build out my calendar based on my to-do list for that day and break it up into those 20 minutes slots. And so some things get 40 minutes. Other things just get to 20. But with that enables me to just put some Slack time in.

DA (41:54):
I love that. Yeah. That's super helpful. I mean, that's one of the hardest things with Slack, right. It's just getting overwhelmed in there, but that's an interesting, like kind of time management system. We'll have to check that out.. And I haven't read his book, but I've heard a lot of good things about it. All right. Last question for you. Brand business or team that you admire today?

AC (42:14):
So I think this one will cover all three of the above is Gong. I don't think I need to go into who Gong are, they're the hottest ticket in the tech scene at the moment, but everybody's loving them these days. They're, they're great. You know, I think the tool itself is, it works. Okay. Like, so they're an enterprise tool that actually offers value almost immediately to all of their customers. Their customers are super happy with the, with the results that they're seeing. Super quick time to value. Their marketing is top class. The guys are so approachable. Like we at Leadfeeder have done a bit of work with the guys there, from with their sales on marketing teams. I I've been speaking a fair bit with their, with their CMO Udi as well, super approachable guy, but like, what they've managed to do there is, is really just put themselves on a rocket ship. It's insane what's happened over the past year. I think they even find it hard to believe it a bit themselves, but I think just obviously the business has boom and the product is great cause they're seeing great results. The brand is, you know, Udi's brought it really, brought it up to the next level and the team all super approachable, everybody's focused on interacting on LinkedIn. They're all offering value. So like these guys know what they're at.

DA (43:35):
It's amazing. I think a lot to learn from them how they built it. It also is a great reminder that a really strong product with good value will always be, you know, something that's easy to market, right? Like for all the marketing conversations that we have, the product is still the key thing. So they're a great company. I'm really excited. I always talk about them as far as like a marketing resource, but you know, thank you again for sharing that. Andy, thanks so much for jumping on the podcast, talking today about Leadfeeder, what's working over there really appreciate your time and sharing so much great wisdom with our audience.

AC (44:07):
No problem at all. It's been great being on David.

DA (44:09):
Andy, thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day.

AC (44:12):
Thank you. You too.
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