Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Those of you who've been with us before, you know how this works. There's barely any intro. We're going to jump right into it. We also possibly, Jason, have too many questions, so we'll do the best we can in 25 minutes.

Let's do it.

Awesome. Thank you for joining us. If I was to do an intro of all of his accolades and awards, we would be here for the 25 minutes. So I'm going to introduce him as someone who's been in the space probably almost as long as me in B2B demand gen. But more importantly, Jason is running Avani Media and he's based in Nashville. And I'm going to jump right in with the first question, and we preface this, Jason, can you start with what, in 2022, what is the relationship like for a B2B agency with rapidly growing tech companies and B2B brands?

Yeah, I think it's interesting because I think there's a few models out there. The vast majority are retainer-based. Done a lot of conversations around where I sit on the retainer-based conversation. I think you've got some that are in, and this is probably growing in popularity, the project-based, "Hey, come do this thing for a set cost." And then you've got some that are more in a fee structure, like, "Hey, it's not necessarily a retainer, but we'll just show up and take whatever percent." 15, 30, whatever. And so that's the general landscape from a relationship standpoint.Now, I think depending on where you sit in that sphere, I think there's definitely the intricacies of how that relationship plays out. So let me give you an example.

Where we sit, so we don't do retainer, we're basically just in this project-based. In some cases, if a client wants us to be a fee-based company, we can, depending on how they want to pay, totally up to them, but really we just want to show up and be an extension of their team and staff it with the folks that they know that they need to work with and that they get to work with on a day-to-day basis as a complete extension of their team.Which means we're in Slack with them, we're in all of their tools, we're behind the firewall, we can submit tickets to their marketing ops teams, all those good things.

And I think that works really well, at least for our clients and how we operate. I'm sure there's people that work well on a retainer basis, but for us, we want to make sure we've got to show up every day and bring our A-game and really earn that business every day. And quite frankly, I just like doing that. I think it pushes us to be better and better and grow whatever it is, to grow 1% incrementally every day will get us the massive returns in the long run.

Exactly. And I think you already touched on this, but I think it's an important shift. And by the way, these things take time. Gone are the days when you would pitch for an agency record for the next three years, and then that's largely where retainers came from is, "Well I got to staff this." Even if you don't buy advertising. I'm not sure if you were alive back in the eighties, if you don't buy advertising, "How do I make money? Well, then I got to pay my staff." But having the same agency for three years is not the norm anymore, so I think the whole focus on performance, let's really get to it, is-

Yeah, I think you're seeing that not only from the performance of the media that you're spending and being way more ROI heavier, performance marketing heavy, which I think has cons. I think there's plenty of value in doing things that can't be measured or can't be tracked via attribution. That's a separate conversation. But I also think there's a lot, especially the big agencies still stuck in the retainer or the hourly cost per FTE method.

And I think that too has diminishing effects because you're all of a sudden just saying, "Hey, I need you to burn through these hours and do work," where I want to tell my team, "Hey, however long it takes to put out the best work for the client, that's what we're going to do because that's what we signed up for and that's what we agreed to with them." We would never agree to do sub part work. If that means we can do it quickly because we've got a bunch of experience in it, great. If it means we've got to work a little bit longer and crunch a little bit harder, then so be

Yeah, exactly. And just to be really candid, we've both worked, like I just said, on your case over a decade, for me more than two. We've both worked with agency staff and past the first few years, even on the agency side, marketers aren't interested in what they have to do. They're even past the how. It's all about the why, right? How do I optimize this campaign and the channel selection and the personas and the targeting based on the why of what the client's trying to achieve as opposed to got to write three emails today?

Yeah, exactly. I think if you could move past the, "Hey, I need to place this buy to make money, I need to write the three things, I need to spend two hours or 0.7 of an hour to make sure we hit our staffing goals," it's really about what are we trying to achieve? Why? Who's the target? Are we even targeting the right people? Does the client know that you can't get a thousand leads out of Finland from enterprise companies because there just aren't that many? And the reality is a lot of that information is hard to come by and some of us that look at data and databases all day know that and know it off the back of our hand.

But what we've started doing is just aggregating as much, what we'd call, it's a TAM, the total addressable market analysis for the customer to say, "Hey, this is what it looks like for you and for what you're trying to target." Now let's dig in a little bit and say, "I know you're going to tell me you only want senior database developers, great. There's only this many so we can certainly go after them, but there's just not that many in your target market, so why don't we expand?" Because when you expand you're going to get some of the other decision-makers, you're going to get, maybe they're an influencer, maybe heck, they actually might be the decision-maker or the actual final purchaser in some cases.

So I'm going to remind the audience because they always forget that this only goes 25 minutes. This isn't an hour-long webinar. We shouldn't be doing hour-long webinars anymore. So please get your questions in or the time will run out. But I'm going to zero in on something you just said, Jason. This is such a valid point. Like you, we set expectations with clients and this is I think why Avani and Lead2Pipeline have gotten along so well, why we've grown together so quickly is because we set expectations before engaging a client or even a specific campaign of this is what you're looking at as far as the fit and this is probably the performance you're going to get.

We're happy to do it for you, but we really don't see any other option than what you're looking for. And I have a very specific question around that, about what you just said, about these almost myopic goals sometimes that's set. What do you think about the expansion of the number of leads or number of contacts within a buying center for a B2B campaign, especially for strategic wins like ABM versus limiting the number of people that you want in a particular account?

I think it's really interesting. I had a really interesting conversation with some of the folks over at 6sense about this, and I think we probably share a very similar opinion. It's like the more that you can engage at the account, the better. The problem with that is if the client and their entire martech stack and how they do lead scoring and how their reps are comped and all of that, if they don't believe and scoring or looking at the totality of the engagements at the account level because they're going to look and we've got some accounts who say, "Hey, I don't care that 10 people engaged with my content or whether that was a white paper they were on and they watched a video, they did all this activity, they went to my website, I don't care that 10, I want that one person who did 10 things."

But I don't know that that could be somebody just digging in. Would you rather have one person do 10 things or 10 people do one thing or 10 people do three things? I think my argument would be you'd rather have the 10 people doing a few things rather than one person going super deep because that means you actually have true account interest versus just somebody who was sent to research and that's just one person. They're probably not at that buying stage, they're just trying to understand what you do. And maybe they're still way early in their process

Right. And I think we're going to double down on this, especially if you think about the reality of an enterprise purchase. So I'm going to put aside the fact that someone can truly convert themselves into a trial status. Even if you're buying, say cloud hosting or optimization or highly technical product, most companies we work with have got to that point where they can convert someone who's viewing into actually using the product, but that usage is not going to deploy. They can't actually deploy across their company or introduce it into their product unless they actually work with a sales person.

I think it's like you saw Slack who is a great use case where the freemium model works really well, you get in, but it's really hard to deploy that past IT. It's really hard to get true enterprise adoption until you, and they didn't really see this, until they brought in a sales team and were able to help. It's not so much ... Sure it's selling, but it's really about helping their users tell the story and answer the questions. Whether that's legal procurement, IT, security, SecOps, there's so many facets, especially the enterprise companies that I think you've got to not only think about, whether you have a freemium user or not, think about nurturing that at an account level knowing or at least having a hypothesis as to what questions they're going to have to answer for each department to get through.

Because otherwise you're just going to keep, and I think you see this with some clients where they just go straight after IT or straight after marketing. Which is like that's fine and I understand, but is there not some value to, if you're dealing with potential PII data, that you're going to have to run through legal, you're going to have to run through security. There's a lot of people that you would like to know who you are as a company, that way they're not like, "Who is this? What do they do? I'm going to have to go do research on this thing now," and that's just going to slow down your sales cycle.

Exactly. And I think most of us that have been doing this a while, and especially like you said, if you're really coordinated with your sales team, you know the reality of you might have three to four key decision makers, and I think again, it's worth mentioning and we'll come back to this, most people don't realize that millennials are now part of that decision making, especially the research and product evaluation. They're the one delivering a recommendation to the director or VP, but your legal, your InfoSec specifically within IT, your procurement and sometimes even HR or HR policy, each of these folks in the buying committee have only a slice of attention to your specific deal. So if it's not pre-packaged and perfectly presented, that's a month right there.

And a lot of that goes if you're an enterprise seller, your goal would be to craft and pre-package something for that HR person or for InfoSec that it's like, "Hey, this is what I believe we're going to run into. This is what I believe maybe your questions are going to be. I'm going to try to answer as much as I can up front and do a lot of the legwork, and maybe I've got to bring in my lead engineer on this."

And maybe that's a video. There's a bunch of different tactics and avenues to get there, and I think that's the finer points of it's really account based selling. You've done the marketing and now you're really trying to get in there and close the deal. But yeah, I agree there. There's just a lot that has to be done in order to keep that deal alive and keep it moving at a quick clip because otherwise with so many people involved, you're just going to lose it.

This brings us, you got there organically, I didn't even have to ask, is as we talk about account-based X, ABX, the marketing, selling revenue recognition, attribution, everything, are you seeing clients? And you don't have to name them, Jason, and we won't either for this conversation, but are you seeing clients that are having success in the middle to bottom of the funnel with that committed approach over months with buying committees?

Yes. I think it's got to be a full strategy. I don't think that ABM just as a tactic, it's definitely not a channel, really works because you've got to have commitment from the entire org. And so I think if you said, "Hey, we know these are the 30 accounts that we really want to go after," it's about, "Okay, when we start at the top, what are we doing? How are we driving awareness? How are we going to move them into consideration? And then how are we going to continue to drive more personalized and case study whatever it is to get them into the bottom of the funnel?" I think we're seeing success there. I think the challenge with ABM is that you've got some, A, let's just touch on martech explosion, from a stack perspective I think there was 15,000.

There won't be after the economic cycle we're going through, but what I think you're seeing is you'll see companies spend a whole year setting up ABM or ABX cadences and programs for 10 companies. I'm like, "You spent all year, three people just doing setting up, you didn't even run it for 10 companies." It's like that is probably one end of the spectrum. You've got other end of the spectrum which is, "Hey, we do ABM," and that's loading up a list of a hundred thousand companies and just I'm like, "That's just targeting. I don't really think that's anything to do with account-based marketing."

And again, we've all seen this, right? When you get a list of literally 3000 ABM, you're like, "So if I get someone who's not in your 3000, you don't want them?" It's like, "No, we do. What are we doing here?"

Yeah, that's not ABM. You're basically giving me, "Hey, I like the way these companies look." Great. That's cool that we can build a lookalike model because that's really easy to do and probably more valuable. I think that goes back to the whole, which I think is outdated too, the bank qualification, but you're telling me you don't want somebody that told me, "Hey, they're buying in 14 months," because you only want people in 12. I'm like, "They just told me they were going to buy in 14 months from now." So I think it's the same line of logic that runs afoul for some folks.

Well, you just did it again, right? You moved into the next set of questions here, which is the transformation. We talked about the transformation of teams on the marketing side, then the transformation of the buyer, the B2B buyer who are buying faster but largely on their own timeline, not yours. They don't want to be spoon-fed. And now the third piece here is the transformation of the data. As we progress from BANT and we start to look at, just like everything else, the explosion of intent data, help us understand from your perspective and how you're advising clients right now, what's the difference between behavioral data or engagement versus intent?

I think the word intent has been blown up to encapsulate a lot of things. So on one end of the spectrum, you have people who have behavioral data who've just relabeled it as intent because fundamentally to them they mean the same thing. I don't agree with that. I think behavioral and contextual targeting can do wonders and works really, really well.

I think on the other end of the spectrum, you have folks who are looking at data usually that looks like somebody made a purchase and then they're trying to map back the activities that this person went through and saying, "Okay, if we have enough of those people that follow a similar journey, can we start trying to find people who are at the third point of that journey and figuring out when we think that they're going to buy or when they're actually going to be in the stage at which we should tell a vendor about it?" That is really hard to do.

The problem with intent signals or just intent algorithms, I've built one of them, is that you don't have what we would call a negative signal. So you're just saying, "Hey, yes, they keep doing the things that I want them to do, I want them to do," but you don't ever get the signal that says, "Hey, they bought," because that data is really hard to get to. And so I think intent data is good. I don't think it's the end all be all. I definitely think it is great to be fed to sales to help them figure out, "Hey, what accounts should I be prioritizing with this BDR or even at ease who are doing some hunting?",

I saw something really interesting where I think it'd be a good idea on how you split up books of business for salespeople, but from a marketing perspective, what I always tell publishers who try to upsell me on intent data is if your intent data is so good, it should automatically be used because you would be making more margin. You would have to do less things to get me what I want. Whether that's a click, whether that's a conversion, whether that's a lead. And if you can't do that, then is it really that good?

Exactly right. And the irony here is, for me, this is the fifth bear cycle, bear market that I'm going through. I've seen this before. The irony is this has happened with the valuation of other marketing data before. Before intent, we had social. Before social we had mobile, and before all of that we just had website data. And again, for many people listening, they're like, "There was a time before websites?" Yes, we used the phone a lot, so we used to see people. I really do think that's a really good point of not all data is indicating intent, but to your point, it's going to take probably another year or two before you really have that confidence in what are those positive ending behaviors towards purchase and retention that are actually then in retrospect indicating a bottom of funnel opportunity very high intent.

Yeah, I think the other challenge with intent is whether you're just looking at the tagged data on websites, I think there's so many channels that are left out of the intent stream. What is sales doing? What are the vendors marketing teams doing to help nurture these people? Some of these things will just never be known and as they probably shouldn't be, but I think there is validity to some intent models. I definitely think that. I think are you looking at the account level or at the individual person? That is a really interesting debate. I think that could go on for a while.

And then I think what we advise our customers is you likely need to pick something and stick with it. If you subscribe to all of them, you're going to have a bunch of competing information. And I think you look at the likes of 6sense, they're trying to integrate a lot of these and build in not only your historical data but also what the intent signals are feeding. So that could be interesting, but I think you've got to pick something and say, "Hey, as an org, this is what we want to go with." Because if you've got things that are conflicting, sales is just not going to know what to do. Marketing won't know what to do if they've got multiple intent feeds, which one do you trust? Which one do you believe is right? This account is surging here, but not in the wave cycle or whatever the other one is here.

And again, some of this comes back to psychology, really knowing your buyer and beyond the persona, actually knowing what they do, who they talk to. We recently had PeerSpot and they were talking about the value of people looking at reviews. Duh, right? That's very detailed information. If you're comparing solutions at that level, that's a pretty good indicator that you're considering something.

And I think knowing the buyer is huge and I think there's nothing better than just actually talking to them, which it is crazy, but I'm like, if you just went around or you went to a city and you invited your target's IT pros, you said, "Hey, come out. I just want to learn. I'm not here to sell you anything. I really just want to understand how you think about things, what you do." So I'll give you an example. We were up in Chicago, this was years ago. I was at an event, there was a panel of three IT pros, and I'll never remember, somebody asked something about a white paper, do you read them? What do you do? And this woman, I kid you not, she was like, "I collect them, so I'll download them and I save them to a spot in my email. And then I read them on Friday nights."

And I'm like, "Hey, so now you've just learned that maybe they don't read them right away." Maybe everybody's got a personal preference or some people say, "Hey, I don't do that," or, "Hey, I want to listen to a podcast, or I want to listen to the video. I don't watch it. I listen to it." So I think you've got to go in and question all of your assumptions about your ICP and say, "Hey, these are people. How do they engage with what we are trying to do? And then how do I sort of reverse engineer how they operate with how we are going to market?"

I love this. I remember I was part of a very large networking company's very large marketing department, and we had the CTO of one of our leading clients at our all hands. It was a very similar situation. We asked, "What do you engage with," because right there and he said, "No offense guys. I know you spent a lot of money. I haven't read one of your white papers in the last three years. In fact, I stopped reading when I became a customer because you know when I have a question, what I do? I call the salesperson. Isn't that what they're paid to do?" And you just heard this collective gasp in the marketing audience.

It's crazy when you think about, hey, the customer marketing team that's just there to market to our current customers, those efforts probably shouldn't be the same as going after your white space customers. They likely are want to be treated very, very differently. One knows who you are, they've already bought, they've got connections inside and the others might have no idea who you are, but you can't just treat everybody the same.

Perfect. So I'm going to wrap it up and if there are other questions we bring in, Jason, actually, there's a couple we won't get to. I'll follow up via email and we'll just answer them individually. Okay.

Perfect.

I don't want to leave people out just because we do keep to a time limit. Everyone's busy. So there is the idea, we've moved past the purchase or transactional mentality to the customer lifetime value, even for non-traditional SaaS products is a customer has a lifetime value, even if they only buy once a year. But from a marketing perspective, for your creative, for your campaign, for your channel assessment, when does a campaign end?

That's a very good question. I think most of our clients subscribe to like, "Hey, once the last dollar is spent in that campaign." But I do think, and this is what we are advising clients, the campaign is not just this box that you build and you put dollars towards it and it's over. It's what does that messaging look like and how long are you nurturing this person? And that doesn't just mean email, it's what other touch points, how else are they staying? Is it the community they're involved in? How did they come in? And it's also the sales resources about that specific campaign. I think all of that is super critical.

And so I think some of those campaigns can go on for two, three, four times as long as the actual spend lifecycle of that campaign, especially in an enterprise technology that might not be SaaS where your time to close could be pushing 200 days. And so you can't just assume like, "Oh, this is two emails and I'm sending them to sales." They're trying to spend $200,000 on a supercomputer, that doesn't make any sense. So how do you build that in? How do you make sure everybody is aware and how do you give sales, and the next step in that sequence, a playbook is that this is the campaign, this is what we're trying to do, here's how it's different than other things and what we'd want to expect that of it.

And again, Jason, you mentioned it earlier, the best way to learn this is just have the dialogue. Listen, just listen to what is working for them, how they're buying now, speaking of the next thing to do, we've got to bring you back, Jason.

I'd love to.

I feel like we didn't cover half of what we wanted, but are there any closing thoughts heading into the second half of '22 and into 2023 as folks are fighting for their marketing budget and showing that attribution? Any closing thoughts to all our marketers out there?

Yeah, I think overall you're seeing CPMs decrease. I think you'll start seeing now is the time to capitalize on the market. I think you've got less advertisers in the space. You can get share voice for a lot cheaper than you could. And I think you'll find that companies are still buying technology. It might take a little bit longer like we saw at the very beginning of the pandemic, but now is the time where you can go acquire new customers at a fraction of what you could before.

Love it. You heard it directly from Jason. Thank you so much Jason, and thank you everybody for joining us. We will see you soon. Take care now.