Content ROI: How B2B Teams Measure & Optimize for Success

Outro VO  00:06

Welcome to revenue rehab, your one stop destination for collective solutions to the biggest challenges faced by marketing leaders today. Now head on over to the couch, make yourself comfortable, and get ready to change the way you approach revenue. Leading your recovery is modern marketer, author, speaker and Chief Operating Officer at Tegrita Brandi Starr

Brandi Starr  00:34

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of revenue rehab. I am your host, Brandi Starr. And we have another amazing episode for you today. I am joined by Steffen Head brand, Steffen is the Chief Marketing Officer and co founder at Dream data, a revenue attribution platform that collects joins and cleans all data to give an insightful value to your business. Steffen is the subject matter experts in a can in connecting marketing activities with revenue, he has an exceptional growth mindset is data driven by heart and loves all parts of scaling the commercial side of the business. Welcome to revenue rehab, your session begins now.

Steffen Hedebrandt  01:22

Such a fantastic welcome Brandi, thank you so much for the interview so far.

Brandi Starr  01:26

Awesome, I am so excited to have you all the way from Denmark. I love when I get to talk to people in different parts of the world. And we're going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects today. But before we jump in to that, I like to break the ice with a little whoosah moments that I call buzzword. banishment. So tell me, what buzzword would you like to get rid of forever.

Steffen Hedebrandt  01:58

And it's a really, it's a good one. And there's probably many, but I'm the one I've thought about just intuitively was the the people tend to say the MQL is dead. And I really, really disagree with the with that statement. I think the reason if if the MQL is dead, it's because marketers have forgotten what the MQL stands for, which is a marketing, qualified lead. And that means like, if you actually care about that middle word that you put in quality stuff that you give on to the sales team, then for me, it's actually a really great measure. Because you know, if somebody comes in have this certain quality, you can expect XYZ revenue three or six months later. And it's also still a fairly early indicator. So when there's still some causality between we did a and b and then see is the outcome and you can quite fast, you know, change course, if you don't like what you're seeing. So if you're actually studying what quality the qualified lead has, then it can actually be a really, really good input to producing revenue. So it's just it's the marketers who have stopped caring about the middle part of that term, the quality that has diluted, what a marketing qualified lead is. So this is my, my effort to bring back the MQL. Because I actually think it's very useful if you care about the fact that it has to be quality input to your revenue team.

Brandi Starr  03:39

Yeah, it is one of those things that I see in marketing a lot. And I think I see this in business a lot but but heavy in marketing is that when people are getting something wrong, and not doing it, well, it's like a new term has to exist, like you can't just fix the problem, because I think where that MQL is dead came from is because at one point, you know, people forgot what the queue meant, like qualified was, you know, they have a pulse. And you know, they read a white paper, so they're ready to die. And so that part was very much like broken. And instead of actually just fixing the way that we're leveraging MQLs it's like there's this quest for, there has to be a whole new term. And it's like, people just come up with new words for what technically is the same thing. And it's like, you just just like fix what it is. And like, let's just stop trying to come up with new words.

Steffen Hedebrandt  04:43

So it's become popular to say, like, split the funnel as well. I don't know if you've heard that one. But where people? I would say almost mansplain knew that there's a difference in quality between an ebook and somebody requesting a demo, call But what were you doing before? Were you handing over every single email you found? So and give, give that to the sales team? No.

Brandi Starr  05:07

I mean, at one point, that is what was happening, like, I can remember early in my career, when, you know, I was like, you know, technology was really just starting to get a foothold. And we could actually measure a lot more. What I mean, literally, it's like they are alive. It's an MQL. Like, so at one point, that is what people were doing was, they downloaded this ebook, so let's put them in front of sales.

Steffen Hedebrandt  05:36

The marketers who disregard the quality component, they should be forced to do their own demo calls, based on what they bring in. If they actually have to sit in those meetings of super low quality, they would stop at doing those things immediately. Because it's a waste of time.

Brandi Starr  05:55

Yes, I was gonna say I love it. And now that we've gotten that off off our chest, and I think this buzzword actually kind of ties into our topic today. So tell me, what brings you to revenue rehab today?

Steffen Hedebrandt  06:10

Yeah, what we talked about was to talk about how you can use content as a as a revenue driver in b2b companies. I absolutely believe you can. But I think it's, it can be complex, it takes alignment, it takes like deep knowledge about what your company do, it takes patience, and so forth. But we can see amongst our customers and like for ourselves, that content can be a very, very strong driver of revenue.

Brandi Starr  06:39

Yeah, and this, this conversation comes at a perfect time, my last episode, Episode 67. With Lindsey Hawkins, we were talking about the content ecosystem, and like really how to nail that, and we got on such a good discussion, that we kind of ran out of time to talk about the ROI of it all and what it really matters. So for those that are listening, if you haven't listened to Episode 67, after, after my conversation with Steffen, definitely go back to that one. Because this comes as a really timely discussion to really continue that conversation. I believe in setting intentions, it gives us focus, it gives us purpose and most important, it gives our audience an understanding of what they should expect from our discussion today. So tell me, what are your best hopes for this discussion? What do you want people to take away?

Steffen Hedebrandt  07:38

Tough one. Maybe we should try to define what we mean by content? And what type of content do we see working? In our two companies? How do you create alignment in your company about what content to produce, but also the expectations that comes along with it? When is it that it's going to impact? Because it can be very slow sometimes. And then probably, we can finish that off by talking a little bit about how you can talk about revenue coming from, from content at the end of that.

Brandi Starr  08:23

Awesome. And, you know, it's one of those things like I think as b2b marketers, we know we have to produce content, we have content teams for creating, we've got tools for creating content experience, you know, we've got all of the things like content at this point is a key foundational element of everything that we're doing. And where I feel like there is a bit of a challenge, because we are always stretched thin, and you know, different priorities and pulled in different directions. And you talked about figuring out what content to create, and where to put those resources, it is really difficult to measure the effectiveness of content. And it gets, you know, we make some assumptions. You know, I've seen some people that are able, you know, they've got systems in place to track content consumption and how that ties to opportunities. But those are far and few in between where people have got that level of tracking. And so I'd love to hear your perspective on you know, and I know in your company, you do a lot around measurement and attribution. I'd like to hear some of your thoughts around, like, what are you seeing that people are doing to measure content in a meaningful way?

Steffen Hedebrandt  09:49

Yeah, I think first of all, for many companies, you have to think about content contribute contribution a bit as you're only gonna see the tip of the iceberg. So so you have to kind of appreciate the tip the tip of the iceberg, once you once you see. So that can be like some of the early sign you'll typically see is that if you do high quality content that really resonates with your audience, then you'll start seeing it being mentioned here and there. So that might be in sales conversations, the salespeople will be told, Hey, actually read this post, it was great, I really learned something. Or it could be that it starts getting shared on social media, on Slack channels and stuff like that. And these things are very, very hard to measure in a quantifiable way. So my first advice would be to, you know, just start a folder on your computer where you, you take a screenshot every time you see mentioned for your content, because that's going to be very convincing. Once you get to budget time, it at least if the folder is full of people saying this was great, I love listening to brand the show or stuff like that. So keep like a qualitative screenshot folder, every time you see content mentioned, that's a very, very, very low practical way of measuring the value. Then if we move a little bit more into the, I think what you can call the more technical part of of measuring content, which is what we can what, amongst others what we do at dream that but just talk a little bit about what you need to solve to actually measure value of content in a b2b perspective. In a b2c world, you typically have a visit on our website, perhaps it came from organic search on Google, they come to your website, they find the running shoe that they're looking for, then they buy them running shoe, everything happens within the same session. So Google Analytics can tell you you sold something. But in b2b, were in a totally different world. There's typically, you know, when we sell something, a dream that there's an average of five people involved in a deal. The person that starts the, the journey of the customer is rarely the ones that signed the contract. Whereas most content is produced to start the journeys, which automatically detach it from the revenue component. So what you need to solve to actually connect content to revenue in b2b is that you need to have an account based timeline. So you can see every person that is part of this customer journey, where did it start from? What content did they consume, and then as they ship over the contract to the CEO, for signature, then you can still take the revenue from the CRM system and send it back to if it was a content piece that started that journey.

Brandi Starr  12:54

Yet, you hit on something that I think is really important that I don't see as many companies actually addressing is, you know, in b2b, everybody knows that there are multiple people involved in the buyers journey, there's all sorts of numbers, from five to seven, you know, in terms of how many people that is it and what that looks like along the way. However, it seems that most companies really are only developing content for who they deem the ideal buyer. And, you know, in some cases, that is the person that signs the contract, in some cases, that is like, you know, the champion. But it I don't see as many companies actually investing in developing content that supports each of those people. Because those are the people that don't show up in the CRM, they're not, you know, whose sales is engaged with, and from what I'm hearing in what you're saying, and just some of my own experience, like this is a gap if we don't have the right information, to support the whole journey. We're, you know, we're, we're kind of failing there, and I'm using strong language and saying failing, it's not, you know, fail. But, um, that is that that sounds like it's a really key piece. In building your journey. Go ahead.

Steffen Hedebrandt  14:28

I think it's a super good reflection, Brandi, and I think, I think you're right that many people neglect this discipline. But in fact, in b2b In many cases, you will see that first you need to sell to one person and then that one person needs to go back to his or her company, and then resell your product. And if you if not create if you don't create any content that helps this person going back to his company, and selling your product to the rest of his team, or her team. And then it's going to be super hard to succeed with the deal. And I think that is it can be neglected. So you want to like low practically, you just want to go to your sales team and say, when we sell, which job titles do you hear that people have to go and get on board internally? Once you've done that statistic, then you have to go look back at your website, or wherever you have you have information about your company and think, are we actually addressing the concerns that the CFO might have here? Or like, should we create a business case for the CFO? Or is there a data protection officer that is going to be worried about what happens with our data or so all these different personas that play a part in the, in the customer journey, you kind of need to enable that initial pain solution, person that found you to go back to the rest of the company, and sell.

Brandi Starr  15:59

I love that, and I want to because I know I can go down the content creation rabbit hole, just because it's something that I'm passionate about, I want to bring it back in terms of return. I love your idea around the screenshots, that's something that we do internally, is we're constantly screenshotting any sort of feedback to be able to identify, you know, what's working well. And so in thinking about how we go back and identify what people are actually using, you know, because that's like, the if I think about why do we need to measure content? It really comes down to how do we keep creating the things that are held, you know, going to drive revenue, and not waste times? On the thing time on the things that don't you know, it's less about, you know, how much money is this white paper, you know, generating, but more, should I be creating more white papers? So, are there different ways that you look at the return? Because I do think, you know, there's like, this natural mentality of wanting to put a, this piece of content generated this much revenue, and it's not that clear of a line. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts around the mentality of ROI on content? And are there different ways we should be thinking about it? Or is that direct line to revenue? What is best?

Steffen Hedebrandt  17:39

I think like, if you're like, in the ideal world, you'll be able to link everything you do to revenue. So you can make full term rational decisions about what's best, and what's what, what's best to do. But for many, many different kinds of go to market functions, that not necessarily always possible. That said, I think the reason why you want to be able to link these activities, to revenue or to sales pipeline or something like that, is for you to be more effective to spend your time better. So if you have, let's say, you have 50 pieces of content, you would like to understand which of those 50 pieces are the really the ones that drive the majority of your sales pipeline. So one, you can, like focus on creating more of that type of content that clearly works through you can save all the time you spent writing a lot of other stuff that had no value to your business, as well. And then maybe thirdly, which is a bit more of a defensive discipline, but you will also have evidence that you can go to your know if it's the CMO or the CFO or the CEO that you need to, like I got this headcount of three content creators, how can I defend that we keep investing in content. And that is a challenge. I felt myself in a company where I didn't have that connection between creating content and actually also driving revenue. That, you know, for many b2b journeys, it's going to be six to 12 months. So like, getting started with content, you know, first you have to figure out what is it that we need to produce, then you need to release it, then you need to draw attention to it, whether it's through ads, or through organic search or something else, it takes time, all of it and then only from the point of time when the constant content is consumed, does the journey then start and that might be six to 12 months from now and now you're looking at a 12 months headcount of a content team, which you know, especially in these turbulent times can be quite hard to defend as well. So it's, it's also for you for your company to know that the investment and bet on constant being the right thing is kind of confirmed so they keep their We need to do more or less of it.

Brandi Starr  20:03

Okay. And I agree, like, it's crazy how, as leaders, a key portion of our role is making sure that we can defend the investments that we're making, whether it's in headcount or budget, etc. So thinking about like being able to measure and to optimize if, you know, if I'm a company where we're producing stuff, but we have not made a lot of effort to actually be able to measure or validate what is working, where do I start? Like, where, you know, how do I get started in actually putting some meaningful ROI behind my content production?

Steffen Hedebrandt  20:52

Yeah, so we've already mentioned the the screenshot parts, I will not talk more about that. But what you then need to do is you have to think about how journeys happen through content, in order to understand what is it that we need to call a track until you win customers. And I think the first component we see our customers needing is the fact that you have tracked what's going on. So that means that a visitor comes to your website, consumes an article that you've written, that needs to be recorded somewhere in a data warehouse that which you own and have access to. And then you need to link that session together with a user who you actually know who is. And then you need to link the user to an account who you know, is. And then lastly, you need to see whether you win these accounts or not. So that you can see that when you win accounts, it touched all these pieces of content on their way to being one. Now you can look at that in to perspective, meaning let's find content that starts journeys that we win. Or you can look at it from the hindsight perspective. When we when customers, these are the pieces of content that people consume along that path. The ladder is very often neglected. Because it's not, it's not the SEO article that you create, because you found a keyword that you want to bet on. But it's an article you read as you do your personal due diligence about whether Can I trust, you know, brand new, or can I trust this piece of software. And that is like, more, it's the about page, it's the integrations paid search the community page, and all these kinds of pages that, you know, never see a lot of traffic, because it's not where people start their journey. But it's those pages that people look at as they're evaluating whether they can trust your company and brand, to becoming a customer. And but both. So both of these two things, what starts, the journey isn't what people consume, as they buy, you can only produce that if you track everything that goes on your on your website, link it to a user, link it to an account, and then link it to revenue in the CRM system. So it's a quite a can be a technical path. But I can tell you, it can be done now. Maybe 510 years ago, it couldn't. But there's including my own company. There's a lot of vendors out there now that that actually does have some quite interesting solutions to these things.

Brandi Starr  23:37

Yeah, and I love that I want to dive in a little bit more there, because I think this is the piece that people really need to hear. In that. It is, you know, it does come back to the technology. And it does come back to the effort. Because we do we have all of these disparate systems that are collecting things, you know, collecting data points, and those data points on their own. I call them interesting facts, like the fact that someone got to your website from this, you know, SEO key word, that is an interesting fact. But until we can actually make the connection between that and all of the other things, you know, do they become an MQL? Do they actually turn into an opportunity? Is there a place that, you know, this thing falls off in opportunities, like I've seen as we've worked with clients, you know, certain places that they're really optimizing on, whether it's a key word, or a key feature or a key pain point. But then as you get into the opportunity cycle, it's like it's generating a lot of opportunities, but those are the ones you lose. So you know, if you're just really looking at volume, it's like, oh, we need to double down on this because it's crazy. Getting a lot of opportunities. But when in fact, it could be like, you're really focused on something that your competitor does way better, which is why you spend all this effort and then you lose. So it is really like connecting all of those dots like I think about when you know, when you're a kid, you get to connect the dots exercise, when you look at it, and there's no lines, you have no idea what it is, you're like, oh, that could be an ice cream cone. And then you connect the dots. And it's like, oh, no, that's a unicorn. And so it really is the same thing. Like right now, I think most marketing teams have their systems set up to identify all of the dots. But what you're talking about in terms of getting it in a data warehouse, you know, having that anchor metric that you can use to connect all the pieces together and actually paint a picture. Like, that's really what's going to unlock that ROI on what's happening.

Steffen Hedebrandt  26:02

That was really well put brand new. And I think just maybe like one flavor, more that you remind me about is that you need to have fought through the flow of what happens to the leads, once you collect them. Because if the salespeople don't chase them, you're never going to see any any return of it. If it just lands in some dark corner without anybody paying attention to it, then we can have done the best content in the world, but no contracts are getting signed. So do have a conversation with the sales team about when we get an email, what should happen to this email? Are you gonna call them? Are you gonna write them? Or do you want us to automate some mails or talk through that process with the sales team?

Brandi Starr  26:46

Yeah, that that is, you know, that marketing and sales alignment is one of those buzzwords that most people, you know, kind of eye roll when you say it. But there is so much that rides on those conversations between the teams in making sure that we are all doing things that make sense and actually are working towards the same goal. So I really liked that I also really love the point that you made around, you know, thinking about the content that starts the journey, and then the stuff that gets consumed along the way. And those are the things I like to call the journey accelerators. What are people doing to, you know, when they are trying to, you know, get started and figure out how to solve something, but then what are they consuming, that are helping them move through. And I do agree that most people focus on the things that get them into the journey, because again, as marketers, you know, we're chasing the MQL, or whatever term you're calling it these days. But like those journey, accelerators are just as important, if not more important to increasing deal size, shortening velocity, or increasing velocity, all those sorts of things.

Steffen Hedebrandt  28:09

Yeah. And maybe just one last point, before we round off, then I have one tip, maybe that like, make sure there's always somebody from the marketing team that sits in on the weekly sales meeting. Because you want to hear what is it that the salespeople are talking about? What are the questions that they continuously receive from customers? Because I would almost say, if you just hear a salesperson getting asked just once a question that you don't have an answer to on your website, you should go back and write it down and say, since person shouldn't answer a question that our, that our website could have addressed. And if you sit down and write a quality piece of content, you have a much better opportunity of answering elaborately to one question then one salesperson have to remember everything in his or her brain. So sit on the into the weekly sales meeting, and just sit and listen to what what are they being asked by customers, and then see whether you actually covered this questions on the website.

Brandi Starr  29:11

I love that. And I know that is one thing that has been like super helpful for us because, you know, especially as consultants, it's like, you know, the the answers are not as defined as if you're selling a software, it's like, does it do this or that? Like, that's pretty straightforward. But being able to have a salesperson, give a short answer, but then be like, here's this content piece that dives deep into what you're asking, because that is something that people can share as well of like, oh, yeah, like they're experts in this, like, here are all the details. And not just the short answer, you know, provided by someone in sales.

Steffen Hedebrandt  29:56

You know, like we talk here like, we just did a podcast on this top that you asked me about, here's 30 minutes go listen to that. That's the answer.

Brandi Starr  30:05

Yeah, exactly. So lovely. So talking about our challenges, just the first step, and nothing changes, if nothing changes. And so, in traditional therapy, the therapist gives the client some homework. But here at revenue rehab, we like to flip that on its head and ask you to give us some homework. So you've already given us one thing, which is we need to have someone from marketing sitting in on the sales meetings. But I'd like to ask if we're focusing on the measurement piece, if there's someone listening, and they're like, you know, what, we aren't even measuring the tip of the iceberg. What's their first step? What's their one thing that they should do next, in order to try to move the needle in the right direction?

Steffen Hedebrandt  30:50

I think it really like the first thing you need to do is to be curious, like, be curious about whenever you when a new customer, try to understand what path did it take? Even if you don't have the data than true, then still try to come up with the narrative of what happened here. Like, try to explain what happened be curious about? Where does our revenue come from? Try to establish kind of a math piece of, okay, it's we do A, B, C, D, and then money comes out. And that conversation continuously just keep asking that question, what is the correlations between what we do and where revenue comes from. And then hopefully, that curiosity then leads you into seeking into more advanced solutions. But it starts with you being very, very interested in how your company makes money. So you can do more of what makes your company money and less of what is kind of a waste of time.

Brandi Starr  31:50

I love it. So we've come across with a number of actions. So if we're not already screenshotting, places where our contents mentioned, we're going to start doing that get us a good folder, we're going to make sure that we've got somebody in marketing who is sitting in on sales meetings to identify content that needs to be created. So wherever they're talking about something that we don't have something, we want to fill that gap. And we're going to lead with curiosity. And it's so interesting, because this is not the first time that Curiosity has come up as the action item. Because there is a lot of good that that comes out of when you are really digging into your revenue and how your business works from a place of curiosity. Well, seven, I have enjoyed our discussion so much. But that's our time for today. But before we go, how can our audience connect with you? And I know that you know, you're the co founder of dream data, and you also have a podcast. So make sure to give us the shameless plug on if anybody you know if this has resonated with them, how can they work with you as well?

Steffen Hedebrandt  33:00

Yeah, and thank you, Brandi for being such a great host. I come to LinkedIn and connect with me. It's Steffen Hildebrand. at LinkedIn, I'll be happy to answer any kind of question you might have there. If you're curious about these b2b customer journeys and stuff at your company, yeah, of course, we have a technical solution to it that I think could be interesting to try out. There's, there's a free product with now that is basically a b2b alternative to Google Analytics, which is completely free to try out. So here's an open invite to go for that. It's dream data.io. That is our website.

Brandi Starr  33:40

Awesome. Well, we will make sure to link to both your LinkedIn and dream data in the show notes. So wherever you are listening or watching this podcast, the information will be there so that you can connect with Steffen as well. Thank you so, so much for joining me. I have thoroughly enjoyed our discussion, and you've given me some ideas for our marketing team as well.

Steffen Hedebrandt  34:05

Thank you, Brandi.

Brandi Starr  34:06

Awesome. Well, I hope that you have enjoyed my conversation with seven. I can't believe we are at the end. We will see you next time.

Outro VO  34:17

You've been listening to revenue rehab with your host Brandi Starr. Your session is now over but the learning has just begun. join our mailing list and catch up on all our shows at revenue rehab dot live. We're also on Twitter and Instagram at revenue rehab. This concludes this week's session. We'll see you next week.