How FullFunnel.io helps B2B companies to boost their sales? | with Founder Andrei Zinkevich

Hello everyone.

Welcome to the Founder series by Team Wave and our today's guest is Andrei Zinkovic who is the co founder at Full Funnel IO. Full Funnel IO helps B2B companies by working with their sales and marketing managers on generating qualified sales opportunities from list of target accounts, increase deal value and shorten the sales cycle to hit their next revenue milestone. Thanks a lot for joining us Andrei.

Thanks a lot for having me. Always a pleasure to join such a great podcast.

Yeah, thank you. My first question would be what is Full Funnel IO?

FullFunnel IO is my consultancy company. They operate with B2B service based and tech companies that have long and complex sales cycles. And as you mentioned, we use a mix of different strategies that are aligned with the way how customers buy and in this complex B2B industries. The reason why we called our company Full Funnel IO is because our key, let's say methodology is full funnel marketing which actually focuses on the entire customer journey, on the entire customer life cycle. Starting from the awareness when the, let's say problem occurs or even at the stage when customer doesn't know. Customer doesn't know they have a problem or a challenge, but they realize something is not working on and basically they start searching for different ways how to solve this particular challenge. Not product related. And basically at this stage we started doing demand generation and Full Funnel leads us through the entire journey until the expansion, until we have happy customers with who we can grow the business, who can generate us referrals, who can give us recommendations, you know, agree to be a public case study, et cetera. So it's a market and across the entire customer journey.

Oh great, great. And when you talk about marketing consultancy, there are many marketing consultancy, right? Marketing agencies. How does FullFunnel IO set itself apart from those?

Yes, exactly. The key differentiator here is our niche expertise. As I mentioned, we work only with a very narrow market with a very narrow vertical. Basically we serve two verticals. Tech companies like Enterprise SaaS, hardware etc. And service based companies like software development, let's say financial consulting or manufacturing consulting, etc. These high ticket services, let's call it this way at what unites these verticals, they all have long and complex sales cycles. Sales cycles longer than let's say 8, 9, 10 months etc. They deal with buying committee so they usually negotiate with multiple people. And what else unites these companies? You can't just set up ads in Google account, set up Facebook ads and passively wait for leads. So it doesn't work that way. It requires completely different skill set and alignment between marketing and sales around 1, let's say playbook that helps to generate these specific accounts. And that's why it's important. As I mentioned in the beginning, we have a mix of different tactics and that's why it requires a little bit broader skill set. So you must be skilled at account based marketing, at demand generation, et cetera, so you'll be able to actually grow these businesses. This is a key differentiator and as far as I know, not so many agencies or consultant firms are focusing on this particular segment.

Oh, okay. Initially like when we talk about this company started at 2017, right? So at that time how did you try to get the first traction of customers?

Okay, so I started basically I had a local, I started consultants on my local market and I was serving local countries. So it wasn't like a global wide business like it is now. So I was blogging, let's say for since 2010 and I had some customers, you know, that requested me to help them with penetrating to North American markets, to different European markets as well. So I had this positive case studies, references, etc. And at 2017 I decided to start, let's say this global company. So I switched somehow, like let's say productized my services, hired a team, trained them, so they started to, let's say they continued that business on a local market. While I was thinking about how, how to attract my first customers. Like the biggest benefit for me that I have had, case stud, which of course simplifies, let's say the launch of a new company and to get some traction. But again you need to deal with the situation that nobody knows you. And of course in a global scale it's way harder to get traction than on the local market. So my first idea was like what should be the lowest hanging fruit? How can I connect with like minded people? First of all, how can I connect with more B2B market across the globe and how can I connect with different, let's say, let's call it the broader way with different B2B founders. So I decided probably the easiest way would be creating a community. And I created a B2B marketers and founders community on Facebook. And basically what I was doing, I invited some of my connections to join this community. Initially I invested lots of efforts into that community. I was reaching out to people manually know, asking about what content resonates with you, what topics would you like, you know, to chat about in this community? Can you recall, do you know anybody who might be interested in this community. So I was asking people, you know, to invite their friends, colleagues, clients, etc. I was inviting these people, you know, and next step, I was thinking about like where my audience might be hanging out. So I made a list of different Facebook groups and what I was doing. I was introducing myself, you know, of course, not just coming as like a stranger, you know, who joins the community and immediately pitches something. So I was engaging in the conversation so people knew a little bit about me. And then I was saying like guys, I know this is like a broader, let's say the topics for this, your community are broader. And I want to create a community which will be solely focused on B2B marketing. And basically I was, you know, given some idea what exact topics I want to cover, like who would like to join? Just if, if it. It was a web, like if moderators allowed me, you know, to post a link, I posted a link for that community. If no, I just was simp asking like who is interested? Leave a comment and I will pay you. And this is how we got initial members and all rest is the history. So I was, you know, routinely sharing content in that community, doing live sessions. I started my podcast, which is called Full Funnel B2B Marketing Podcast. And I was doing live sessions so people from the community could jump in, you know, ask my guests questions, et cetera. And this actually helped me to get this traction, you know, the initial awareness and the first clients. So all the clients were coming, you know, from this community and manuscript so that. That another asset I was working on. So I started just an email newsletter without even having a website. And this was like, let's say two channels that helped to get distraction.

Oh great. Actually that is a very unique way means like through Facebook community you are trying to reach out to a lot of people during this pandemic time. What were the changes that you noticed like in the market or how the industries reacted to?

Yeah, okay, this is a good question because you know, pandemic changed everything. I don't need. I think we don't need to devote too much time because there are lots of articles on all of these things. Basically I want to share what I have noticed in the industry. Just to share with you since the first lockdown. With my co founder, Vladimir Blagojevich, we ran a market research Talking to almost 200 B2B companies with complex projects products. So we reached out to our customers, we reached out to several accelerators in Europe with who we collaborate and basically reached out to members of revenue Genius community and we have figured out some interesting facts. I think I will share just some key takeaways from it. So the takeaway number one is that canceled events and trade shows increased the focus on outbound activities. But what's important that don't generate results. So our respondents stated that it's hard to get people to respond, you know, and it's the fluid of COVID driven desperate marketing attempts by everybody. I recognize this quote done by one of our respondents. This is how he described these activities.

They meant to say that the outbound marketing was not working for them.

Yes. So they told that it simply don't generate results because everybody, you know, increased the basically double down on outbound. So the takeaway number two was that the sales cycle length increased and buyers actually became more critical, you know, started to involve more people. And respondents told that it takes longer, you know, their buyers, it takes longer to decide. The takeaway number three is content blindness, which means that it's extremely hard to generate target traffic, not just a traffic because you know, you can pay Facebook or Google or LinkedIn or whatever and generate some traffic, but it's extremely hard to generate target traffic or motivate target accounts show up to the virtual events. And the reason why, because our respondents told there is an oversupply of webinars and online content. So that's why we call that content blindness. Next one is that marketing qualified lead cost significantly increased. And again our respondents told that MQL's marketing qualifier leads don't convert to sales opportunities. Basically the conversion is sales miserable. And the last one, companies experience a high churn rate because of bad product adoption because customers think about the solution or service as a fancy add on, you know, but not as a part of operational processes. So companies that were not able, you know, to make a great product adoption experience the high churn rate. So these are five, let's say takeaways from that survey. And regarding the challenges, you know, if that might be interested, I have, I have stats from it. So the number one challenge they stated is that the biggest challenge they have is alignment between marketing and sales. Next one is slow response to outreach campaigns. And the challenge number three was target and the relevant decision maker. So basically these are the challenges that Pandemic actually produced. And these are, let's say the negative outcomes in terms of. But at the same time we have noticed several trends. I think it makes sense to share some trends that we have seen. One of these trends is basically from my point of view is that 80, 20 or so called Pareto Principle becomes a dominant principle in marketing of complex principles products. And the reason why, because again I have shared these challenges and this is why it becomes critical to narrow down your position and narrow down your marketing message. Narrow down your focus on 20% of verticals or market segments that generate 80% of revenue. This is critical. And last year we have experienced two great besides full funnel IO, we have experience to create case studies with our customers. So one of them is drone management platform. And basically because of differentiating themselves and narrowing down their focus, they were able to shorten the sales cycle and increase the average deal size five times. And it also helped them to get a new investment round. And another case comes from the let's say from the custom software development industry or let's say service based industry. So this was let's say a commodity provider provided one size fits all custom software development service. And because of narrowing down their position and because of focusing on the best industry and reposition themselves to DevOps as a service for growing startups who uses Kubernetes, if I'm correct, they were able to after like six months after this repositioning, six months after narrowing down this focus and running dedicated marketing campaigns to this particular market, they were able to grow monthly recurring revenue by 50%. So this is one of the key trends I see this narrow position. There are some other trends and I think it totally makes sense to mention that shift to revenue operations and full funnel marketing becomes inevitable and what it means. First of all, it means that marketing, sales and client success teams must be aligned around several things like ideal customer profile, like qualification and disqualification criteria for account list building. So it prevents situation when sales start complaining that marketing is generating low quality leads or client success team don't work on proper onboarding and don't do in depth interviews that gives insights for sales about the key initiatives of the customers. And so sales don't have this critical data for deal exposure, warm up and activation campaigns. This is critical because sometimes you know, sales are prospecting some accounts and marketing is running some virtual event that is completely disaligned with the sales activity. So next one content plan. I think that by default content strategy content planning belongs to marketing and they rarely involve sales into content creation. But from my point of view this is like the lowest hanging fruit for teams alignment because if sales are involved in the content creation, it would be much more easier to involve sales in the content distribution which is critical. Our goal is to grab the attention of our target accounts with the content. Correct. And that's why this is the goal of the sales and basically if we create the content that resonates with the needs of target customers or prospects, if it answers their questions, etc. It would be much more easier for sales to promote this content, to reach out to target accounts with this content and get this target traffic and last one, engagement scoring. It's critical for leads hands off. So marketing team doesn't send email subscribers or people who attended webinar or people who attended people who downloaded some ebook, you know, some sort of gated content to sales. Because if person downloads ebook doesn't mean they have an intent to buy. They, they're curious about some information but they, when they get a call, you know, from sales team or some let's say pitch email, then they are just disappointed and they are wondering why are these people reaching out to me you and actually this situation triggers the infamous marketing and sales war. When sales start complaining about low quality leads and marketing starts blaming sales that they don't know how to sell, et cetera. So this is critical and as I mentioned as a natural part of it, if teams are aligned around content strategy, sales becomes involved in demand generation. Basically once we were doing this research, we were asking sales leaders like if there is one thing marketing can help you with, what would you like this to be? And they told like we want marketing to make sure that our customers are aware about our product. And I was wondering like I was following up with the question, okay, so marketing can work on that part but, but in terms of sales, can you do anything and what is important for you? How would you like to be perceived by your target accounts? And major part of them told we want to be perceived as advisor, like as a trusted advisor or expert, not just another sales rep. And this is why it becomes critical that sales should start working on their, let's say personal brands. I don't like this world too much, but let's call it as it as it's called. So they should work on their personal brands, they should work on this demand generation. They should create some content and the lowest hanging fruit is LinkedIn where they can start connecting with target accounts, sharing this content involve this target accounts and conversations. And this is probably the only one way how to do it. Just to give you some recent stats, I noticed a post by Casey Graham who is CEO of Gravy Solutions and he told that once he insisted his sales team started to share content on LinkedIn and connect with target accounts. They noticed in commands they noticed that 45% of sales calls were mentioning that they saw posts of sales team of Kravi on LinkedIn. So that's why I think this is the best social proof why sales should be involved in the demand generation. Not only prospecting and lead generation activities and as well it becomes critical that would be involved in content distribution. You know, this is, this is actually the easiest way to deliver value. We all know that sales should, you know, if you'll read any given post on B2B marketing and sales, I believe like in 90% of these blog articles that would be one phrase saying something, you need to deliver value and you need to build a relationship with target accounts. Agree? Yeah. So the only one question which I always ask how to practically deliver this value and build this relationship. So lots of people are talking about this but not so many actually understand how to do it because you know, especially if you have a title like sdr Business Development manager, VP of Sales or whatever, something sales related people start, you know, they have like let's say they expect by default that the pitch is coming. You know, at some point this person should, should be pitching me. So how to build this relationship. And basically content is the easiest way to do it. Like to give you an example, when I was promoting a recent case study about ABM campaign that generated 300k in revenue, I was chatting with some of our prospects of let's say it wasn't even prospects. So the that fits our ideal customer profile. And we were chatting, I got acquainted with a person and then I quickly reviewed their website, what they are doing and noticed that they are doing IT security and consulting services. Just to give you a practical probably tip for your audience. I was reaching out and saying something by the way, I noticed that your company provides IT security and consultant services. I recently published a case study how did I help a custom software developer company to generate 300k in sales pipeline from one campaign. And I was sharing not just the link to the blog post, but I was sharing a link to my LinkedIn post. So I didn't take them out from the platform and it wasn't, it didn't sound salesly you know, so they could check a short video on this topic. And then I was following up like one day later like if you have any questions feel free to drop them and let me know if you would like to read the entire case study. And the person was replying to me like yeah, I'm interested and that's it. You know, this is how you start. You can start to involve your target accounts into content consumption and then you have multiple ways how to proceed. You can ask like what was the most valuable part? Would you like to jump into call and discuss. You know how to implement the same ideas for your company. And this is how you generate sales opportunities from content distribution. Lots of marketers can't sort of can't expect explain this process to sales. And that's why I told in the beginning this playbook, you know from content creation to opportunity generation should be universal for companies some other trends. So sales should leverage intern data and social selling. As an example of social selling we can take a previous example how to generate these meetings. When it comes to sales intent data, you can install software like lead feeder albacross Happier Leads that tracks actually that provides IP identification data. So by IP they can identify what companies visited your website, what specific pages did they visit, how much time did they spend, etc. So you'll know what you know. You can immediately identify companies that fit your ideal customer profile and add one of your campaigns. And again if you have this playbooks sales can start to work on connection and activation parts. You can use LinkedIn data like LinkedIn Professional Account gives your data who exactly visited your profile.

Andre, one second, I would like to interrupt you here. So my question was that is LinkedIn one of the best Because I heard that you were mentioning again and again LinkedIn.

Right.

So is LinkedIn one of the best platforms where B2B can like share their content or talk about talk more about their content and get their leads.

So it's not limited only to LinkedIn probably so far LinkedIn is the best by default for B2B companies. But what I suggest to do, you know you should always host in depth interviews with your customers and simply ask like what social media do you use regularly? What let's say what forums communities you are an active member of and you can identify? Maybe you know some people can say I'm like an active member of revenue genius community on Slack and you understand that they might not be hanging out on LinkedIn and quite often, you know I don't want to say that LinkedIn is let's say a silver bullet for everybody. So in some particular just to give you a more precise example for this drone management company I mentioned, we have identified let's say old fashioned forum where their target audience hangs out and this becomes your platform where you should be an active member. So the only way how to figure it out is just to talk to your customers. But let's say by default LinkedIn is the best one for B2B organization okay.

And as many entrepreneurs would be watching here. So I also saw that you are the founder of ADVISE and the co founder of ROI Plan, right?

Yes, exactly.

I was very curious to know how do you manage all three of these companies? Like is there. Yeah. So how do you have, how do you handle it?

Okay, so advice. This is the first company I mentioned in the beginning I started my. So this is a local inbound marketing agency. I was like when I started my entrepreneurship journey, when I switched off from my corporate day job, I had two projects. Basically I was doing consultancy like as a freelance consultant or whatever we'll call it. And I was creating in parallel a new project which was called CEO Club but in local language of course. So I had a co founder who worked with me on that project and at one point we even compete with Forbes on the local market. So we had the same traffic and we were basically selling native ads. But this is another story. So just to make things short, when I decided to in 2017 to launch Get Leader, so that was a previous name of full funnel IO. So when I decided to launch a Get Leader, I sold my share in that CEO club project and I was thinking like, okay, I had like around 20k substance subscribers to my newsletter, you know, for this local market. And I was thinking what we can do, like how we can serve these customers in the best possible way without me. So during this CEO club I have identified that companies, you know, they are not buying ads, they want to get opportunities, they want to get some leads. And basically what we were doing, we were doing native ads for them, like done for you native advertisement on our platform. So we were writing in depth case studies. You know, I have hired like a couple of good copywriters and then we were promoting these articles in different communities, we were running some ads to them, etc. Etc. So I decided probably if we were doing, we had lots of positive case studies. So I decided it can become our natural service as well with providing, let's say product marketing advice related to B2B marketing companies. So I just, when I sold my share, I took all of my team to advice and this is how they operate and without me. So basically I'm just let's say a founder of this company. But I have CEO who manages all the processes. So it doesn't take. So let's say naturally I became an advisor to that company after it advisor to the company. So as for the full funnel IO, it takes my major part and I have our plan. So this is a SaaS product. It's a marketing planning platform and so far we have created mvp. So it didn't take basically we started to work on it in January last year. So it's like one year project and what we was doing. So I started it as a side project because I understand, you know, Google sheets don't let's say fulfill my planning, marketing planning and orchestration needs. So I wanted to create a software that would be helpful for marketing teams to align it with sales with executives, to share the most important numbers, etc. And explain marketing activities and campaigns in the easiest way. So last year I was just in terms of validating the idea I was doing bunch of user tests. So presenting the beta test, the beta version, then the let's say MVP first version and after collecting lots of feedback we are almost ready with like final mvp. It will be ready like in one week from now. And yeah, so that would be another story. So if I didn't take too much of my time, my time because it was only related to let's say user test conversations with potential customers and feedback to development team and let's say 90% of time it was development. But yeah, the things will change slightly this year.

Okay, great. And my next question would be have you read any recent business books that you'd recommend to our audience?

So as for the business books, my favorite one is 8020 in sales marketing written by Perry Marshall. I believe it's not only for marketers or sales. This is something that everybody who is in any kind of business should read. Again it aligns with 8020 principle that I shared in the early beginning to help you to identify the best activities in our the highest possible roi. So this one next one I think the one of the greatest books is the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chad Holmes. This is great for marketers for sales to understand the sales process not only from the perspective I have a target market and I need to spam them all, you know or generate some opportunities from these customers. It helps you to think about out of the box how to connect with people, you know, different sorts of campaigns. You can do this non sales status. So this one as from the recent books I read I can recommend how to generate Meeting with everybody by Stu Heineke. Lots of great examples of direct mail campaigns not better creative direct mail campaigns that help you to to grab attention of decision makers even from Fortune 500 companies. And the last one, the key pillar system by Praying Margolis. This is I believe this is fantastic for everybody. It helps you to identify the key pillars or the key activities that you need to routinely execute every day to hit your sales quota. It's very similar. You know, if you'll go to a gym, like you won't see immediate results or to a fitness center, but if you'll be going three times per week in, let's say in a six month row, you'll see your muscles are growing, you are in a better fit, you know, you have a better body, etc. And the same is here in sales and marketing. You won't see immediate results, you know, from creating the content and let's say posting on LinkedIn, something that we have touched today, but doing it like six months in a row, you'll see how lots of inbound opportunities are coming, you know, how your target accounts are connected with you, etc. So these are the books I highly recommend.

Okay, great. And my next question is, which is the project management tool that you like a lot and you would recommend?

That would be disappointing answer. But still it's Google Sheets because the reason why we used lots of software, Asana, ClickUp, Trello, and all of them have pros and cons. But the reason why we finally switched to Google Sheets is just because it's probably it's my fault. But it's hard to get this. Like once you have a bunch of different software, it's hard to have a dedicated software for this one. But for advice team, my team manages everything in Asana and the reason why is because one of the first hires was a project manager who is in charge of actually orchestrating, you know, managing everything in Asana. And that's fine.

Okay, great. And the last question would be, what is your advice for the future aspiring entrepreneurs or people who are currently into entrepreneurship?

The first thing is that you don't necessarily be an entrepreneur. It's totally fine to do whatever you love to do. And just to give you an idea, when I was like, when I was living in Poland and Krakow, I was attending a guided tour. We have a salt salt called Salt Minery near Krakow. And that was like an old man who is like probably 65 years old, but he was so passionate, you know, he was sharing the stories and we were like this excursion was around two hours, but we were, you know, we were just simply following him and listening him for two hours. And this is the best example that you don't necessarily, you know, be an entrepreneur. You can do whatever you love and it's totally fine. So that's the first thing. And the second one, if you want to be an entrepreneur, Just start doing something that's probably. You'll have lots of pitfalls, but you know you can. What can I recommend is that you need to just focus on what you love to do. You need to focus on your customers and serve you know them in the best possible way and never stop learning. So the more you learn, you know, the more books you read, the more courses you are person, the more mentorship you are taking, the better your results will be. I can say that my career initially in enterprise and corporates was so great just because I had great mentors. And later when I started my entrepreneurship journey, I can say that lots of people who were my mentors helped me a lot. So it wasn't just only my achievement. So lots of people helped me and that probably would be the best advice. Try to find these people, try to find these books, courses and never stop learning.

Okay. Thanks a lot for your insights, Andre.

My pleasure.

Yeah, and everyone's watching it. Actually I was recently following Andre's LinkedIn page as well. So there are lots of interesting posts regarding B2B marketing and ABM. So I was going through all the posts. So anyone who is interested in those fields, they can surely follow. Andre. That's it. Thanks a lot Andre.

Thanks a lot for having me. Thanks a lot for great questions. Loved our chat and help the chat with you more in future. Yeah, sure.

Thank you.