B2B Demand Gen with Kaylee Edmondson (brightwheel, Chili Piper)

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This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by my friends at Metadata. Yes, they're my friends. I'm working with them right now. Hey Metadata, what's up? Metadata helps demand gen marketers automate paid campaigns and drive more revenue. If you work in demand gen, you know how running paid campaigns can create so many technical, mundane and repetitive tasks? You got 17 tabs open in your browser? More like 170. You're jumping from LinkedIn to Google to Facebook. Plus there's all the audience creation, creative and testing variations. It can be an entire job just to keep track of this stuff and make sure it all is running properly. And with humans doing it, there's bound to be a lot of wasted time and potential for mistakes and missed opportunities through AI and automation. Metadata frees you from having to manually do these tasks so you can spend your time on the work that matters most, strategy, creativity and the experimentation. Demand gen teams use metadata to excate hundreds of campaigns without ever logging into. Ad managers, automatically monitoring their campaigns and optimizing for pipeline and revenue and drastically scaling their performance before needing to hire more people or hire an agency. In the last two years, metadata has automated 92,000 campaigns and influenced over 2 billion in pipeline for customers like Zoom Ramp, Pendo and ThoughtSpot. ThoughtSpot generated 5 million in pipeline in their first few months at a 1 to 6 spend to pipeline ratio. There's a stat right there. Write that one down. That's a stat that will get you promoted. If you're a demand gen marketer and you're running paid campaigns today, you really should consider using metadata. You can learn more about how the metadata team can help you do humanly impossible marketing. Marketingtadata IO that's metadata IO and make sure you tell them that you heard about them right here on the Exit 5 podcast. Exit. Exit. My guest on this episode is Kaylee Edmondson. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Exit 5 podcast. My guest on this episode is Kaylee Edmondson. She is director of Demand Gen at Brightwheel. All right, you and I were just catching up. It's great to catch up with you. You have a new role now. I think a lot of people listening.

Will know you from Chili Piper.

You have a new role now at Bright Wheel. I want to talk to you about both of those things. So first let's go back to Chili Piper. Can you just give some context of like when you join the company, what the stage of the where they were at when you joined, all the way to when you left. Let's frame it with that and then we'll go in and I have a bunch of follow ups on that.

Yeah, let's do it. Okay, So I joined April 2020. So literally like accepted my offer right as the world was changing, which was wild but exciting at the time. They were post series A. They had a CMO in place. It was their first marketing leader, first like full time marketing hire. They had a CMO in place, hired me to run the demand gen function which at the time was like completely untested new waters for them. They had a content head and a pmm, a product marketing manager and that was the crew. So pretty lean, pretty light.

Wait, let's stop, let's stop there for a second. So they had grown without demand gen. What?

Without marketing? Let's say without marketing. So purely outbound sales, cold calling, grinding, which was insane at that time. They'd been around for three years, almost four years, no marketing function in place. And I remember actually in like one of my first company, All Hands Nicholas, who's the co founder and CEO, had actually said, I guess it wasn't one of my first. Maybe it was like three months in like, wow. I think we've actually hired in a crew that can figure out how to make marketing work for Chili Piper. They were completely convinced that marketing wouldn't work for that brand just because they hadn't ever found a way to make it work before.

Interesting. What do you think led to that belief? What didn't work? Because like, I think you see it on the surfaces. Like it's a B2B SaaS tool. There's literally 10,000 of them. I've seen marketing work at a bunch of different companies. Were there specific beliefs there?

Yeah, I think there were specific beliefs. I think one, the CEO comes from a sales background. So he's like, I understand sales. I know sales, like the depth and breadth of all the things that we should be trying or should be standing up. Obviously Chili Fiber itself, the way the product works creates lack of a need for an inbound SDR role. So he was just like very into operationalizing and questioning the status quo for how you should run and operate a sales motion. And with that came a really deep love and passion for growing a scalable outbound motion. And that was the priority for the first couple of years for the company. Then when growth had not doubled or tripled one year, he was like, oh, hmm, pull up. Maybe this is the time we should start looking at adding a marketing team. Which is when we all started joining. So we all joined within maybe like a three month stint between January to, I guess four months, January to April of 2020. And that's when Nicholas was like, oh, okay, let's see if we can like pull a marketing lever to make this work. They had had like ad hoc contractors or freelancers in and out for short random stints on like a project basis before we started joining. And I think that they didn't see a huge, you know, hockey stick up into the right. Which is just the. Oh, it doesn't work.

Yeah, it's. I mean it's tough like being in that, which most people are in this. In this, I guess, but like being in that like venture backed SaaS World, it's like you could grow 125%, 150% in a year or whatever. It's not enough. You got to, you know, triple, triple, double, double. And so it's like, it can be a crazy place to be.

Exactly.

You come in to run demand gen. What do you do? You come in, the company's got a little bit of a brand, they have revenue, they have customers. Take me into like you joining and figuring out like, because I think this is a big question for what does it mean to do Demand Gen? Let's talk tactically about like, what did you come in and do?

Yeah, absolutely. So for me it's all about understanding at least what little they already know about themselves. Right. So they had HubSpot at the time, which was great. They had HubSpot for their MA and Salesforce for their CRM. So obviously getting access and diving through what data they did have. All data comes with caveats. Like, no SaaS. Company is like the exception there. So understanding their caveats, understanding gaps in data, figuring out at least surface level, like what has worked for them, where traffic is flowing today, all those things is like ground zero. Obviously they had some operational improvements that happened like within marketing ops, which for the longest majority rolled under me, which was just me. So I started with like a marketing ops brain almost just to understanding, like, hey, all of our data and all of our systems aren't really talking to each other at all points. Like, GTM isn't really set up. We don't have triggers firing. There aren't accurate tags. All of that. Right before I can even go do anything, I need like a decent, like, I don't even think that I'm asking for like the moon, but just like decent foundational structure so that we can see early signals on if things are hitting or not hitting. So step one.

Wait, let's stop there for a second. I've changed my opinion on this. Like, I used to be like, oh, just come in and like do. But now it's like, oh, no. I've seen twice through mistakes that I've made. Like, oh, the value in like, yeah, you do need to have. It doesn't have to be. I think that the part that gets hard though is like, people go after this quest for like the perfect funnel. Like, okay, let's go from having no demand gen to like this perfect revenue funnel. And I used to be like, let's just go fast. But now you 100%, you have to have everything set up. You have to be able to track that. But can you just talk about like, how do you shrink that down and. And pick because you can't come in and as the new head of demand gen or whatever you were, and spend Six months trying to measure the funnel. You, you got to come in and like actually do some things. So did you shrink that down and like ship a m of the funnel or something?

Oh, for sure, for sure. And I think, like, look, I mean, I literally posted a thing today about like attribution is fake. It's literally made up, which I do believe. But I think you can at least draw some like, high level, like directional insights from data and attribution, for whatever it's worth. So the great thing about HubSpot is that it's like really out of the box. It comes with those six, like direct fields, three that track first touch, three that touch like track last touch on like a dynamic basis. So like baseline workflows will help get you to where you need to go. Leveraging those six fields like first touch, last touch view is really all you need to get an early indicator of, like, this is what's getting people into our database and this is what's getting them over to sales. Boom, Boom. Make sure all of those six fields are syncing in through salesforce to like your lead object, your contact object, your opportunity object, all of those things and you're done. That's like less than half a day of work. Build some initial, like quick and scrappy reports that show you first touch view, last touch view over whatever period of time you feel is like roughly accurate. Everything's going to have caveats. That's why I think it's important to like touch base with the people around you to figure out like, oh, hey, you know, in January we didn't really know what we were doing, so like we turned HubSpot off for a while. So like, anything before January 2020, don't look there. Cool, great. Build a report January 2020 forward and say, that's my source of truth for now. It should give you high level enough to be like, oh, LinkedIn's really working for us. Or LinkedIn organic is like the thing. What are we doing here? What can we do more of directionally? And then just like, don't marry yourself to it. Just know that that's your thing. Run.

Love it. That was so good. There's so many truths in there, which is like, I like how you talk about. That's a really good framework, which is like, you're not arguing over if First Touch or Last touch should be the attribution model for the company. You're using them both because you're just going to look and say like, hey, of the last 100 customers or whatever of every Customer that we closed last month or last quarter. Show me first touch, last touch on those. So. Oh, oh, interesting. It seems like a lot of people read our content. Oh, interesting. It seems like this thing drives a lot of conversions. Then you layer that on with talking to other people. This is where, like, a lot of people miss the strategy stuff. It's like, attribution is great, but attribution doesn't give you what you need to stand up in front of the company and articulate a marketing strategy. And so now you've gone and done all your research, now you're like, okay, hi, I'm Kaylee. I have a hypothesis on how I think we should go and do marketing now. There's not some magic numbers like this attribution report told you, you know, six, and you go do that. You have to be able to articulate the strategy. Right?

Exactly, exactly. And I think that that gives you good enough insight to run. Right. Stand up in front of your peers and say, like, with some level of conviction. These are the things I believe in. Let's go run. Let's ship a couple MVPs across the board to figure out if we can, like, either fail fast and like, oh, okay, that's not the right path. Moving on to the next one. Or maybe we find three winners in there that we really weren't like, pushing for before.

Yeah, you mentioned talk to others to, like, throw out the data sources. When, when I had joined Privy, we had been like doing this initial dive into what you know, and the company had existed for a while, so there was a lot of data. Some of it was very trapped and hard to find, which we realize. But there was like, traffic was like 50%, like hundreds of thousands of page views lower than it was because of some like, referral button that they decided to change. And so it's like a perfect example where we would have thought that that was inflated by, by a lot. Okay. So you come in, you do this initial assessment, you get something in the funnel working, you stand up in front of the team and then what? Like, you talked about shipping some of these MVPs. So you made your assessment of the data. What were some of the early things that you did? Give me some examples of, like these MVPs that you ship to start, kind of building demand at Chili Piper.

Yeah, so I think there are definitely long term plays and like short term wins everywhere. No matter what your, like, history or your baggage is that you're trying to uncover when you're starting out a new org. And for us, like, Quick Term Win was definitely standing up paid programming. So they had dabbled in it before. They'd had an agency at the time. But like nothing was really like quote unquote working. And it's because this agency was so disconnected from like who our buyers were, who our customer was. So I will say like the grass is greener or whatever. I had a good opportunity because our primary buyer at Chili Piper is Demand Gen Marketers, which is great for me because I understand these people. I have the same pain points. So it was really easy for me to dig deep and understand like, wow, this messaging is really terrible. That's why this ad isn't working. Or like, wow, this seems really canned or like inauthentic, like what are we trying to get these people to do? Why are we not providing any value in this ad? There's so many directions we could go with just with that but standing up like capturing existing demand on Google Ads. We weren't doing it. We weren't doing it well at all. They were bidding on like top of funnel and middle funnel keywords and weren't optimizing for bott. Bottom of the funnel keywords where people are actually showing intent to buy. So step one, that's easy. Low hanging fruit.

What were you driving to, by the way? Like, can you just give quantic content context of the funnel? Like were you driving to book a demo? What was the.

Yeah, yeah. So like capturing demand on Google Ads, definitely driving them to get a demo all day and yeah, leading them to a page that's simple, not a lot of distractions. All the things like all those best practices just weren't happening. So yeah, we just needed to operationalize and make sure that one we're even surfacing on all like buying intent keywords. So like all the variations of like software, app, tool, solution pricing, all competitor tags. Right. There are a lot of competitors in that space that were like adjacent to us. So like let's make sure we're showing up when people are trying to, you know, or are showing frustration like calendly support or whatever. Right. Like we should probably be there. All of those things were just like low hanging fruit. So we needed to make sure we were showing up there. Getting them to a page that's customized for whatever it is they're searching. Not a one size fits all landing page solution or else your conversion rates are going to be shit.

How do you do that?

Customize your landing page. Oh, build yourself just like a good mvp. That's like here are the body of work that I need on each section and then clone that thing for every campaign initiative that you set up within your Google Ads. Customize your H1 and your H2. The rest of it should really be supportive. So like, you need a social proof, you need some testimony, you need your value props. Those should relatively be the same on all. So really the body of work is just that above the fold hero to make sure that it's customized and tailored to whatever the thing is they just clicked on.

But you're talking about like not just like three variations, you're talking about like 50 variations of a landing page.

Depends on how many ad campaigns you have running in Google. Right. For us in the beginning stages, it wasn't that many. Right. Like we had a competitive campaign that had maybe like six subsets in it. So that's six landing pages. Right, Got it.

Yeah. I like that you can have a template that has 80% and you're changing the 20% each time.

Yeah. Right. MVP. Right. And you can definitely like evolve that over time. But those are things where you can get some quick wins on the board and go ahead and capture that demand that's being surfaced today that you're not capitalizing on.

Are there ways that people can do that? There's got to be a tool that does this at scale though, right?

Honestly, maybe. But like even at my biggest company, like I was at Campaign Monitor a couple of gigs before, we did it manually there too. So like, I don't know, maybe there is. I'd love for somebody to like ping you and let us know, but.

No, it's good. I'm learning a lot just from your, your thought process, your. Your thinking if you're going to go and run campaigns at these. Yeah. Okay, so you found low hanging fruit. That makes sense. There's probably a lot of like SEO cleanup SEM actually, let's talk about SEO. What was your approach to SEO? Because this is something that I love talking about. But I've missed on because I've always been struggling to like grow so fast now that I've had a hard time taking, you know, X grand out of the budget and putting it to SEO. So what did you do with SEO?

So in the beginning we did nothing, Let me say for a really long time we did nothing.

Probably intentionally.

I don't know, I might be like you, where I'm like, let me take some learnings. I have struggled with understanding the value of SEO. So like before Chili Piper, I worked for Campaign Monitor where SEO was a real thing. There, there are a lot of People searching for email marketing and that is a real need. However, when you come to somewhere like Chili Piper, there are not people searching for it. So naturally on my like list of priorities, it doesn't make the cut.

And it's so much of like the companies that you and I are involved in and work around. It's like drift. We had the same thing. We were trying to create something new and so we didn't have an early SEO strategy around like live chat. And that was because we were intentionally trying to not be live chat. I realized that was a mistake that I made later where I could have been capturing that demand. But. But I think at the time you're like, or you know, however Chili Piper talked about themselves, whether it was like inbound SDR scheduling, whatever it is, speed.

To lead, like whatever it is, there's just not a lot of search volume there. And so you know when you're doing your initial dive through the data and you're like, wow, okay, there's like not a lot of existing demand organically. So like, let's capture what we can through paid, spin up some paid ads and like, let's move on to like greener territory. There's so many other things that are still in this like low hanging fruit category and SEO just wasn't one of them. Like at the time I was very much of the mindset. It's like, well, if you're not selling like white T shirts on like an E Comm brand, then like we're not going to like really see this move the needle and we have actual goals that we have to meet tomorrow. And like SEO isn't supporting that. So of course it was just me. We had limited resources, we had a content person and a PMM and that's it. So like we needed actual content to support and fuel the demand gen function and we needed our PMM to partner with us so that we could understand what's happening with the product was coming on the roadmap. So I was like, we don't have anybody for SEO. So it just wasn't a thing until substantially later when we had a like formal function within content marketing, a function within demand gen. And for that, my partner, that was our content marketing director actually had a really solid SEO background and I did not. So I was like, skill set, you win, you get to take it. And so she actually ended up owning it and standing it up.

And do you think that was the right approach?

Did you learn at the time? I feel like it was the right approach. Now could we have fought a better, like put together a better case to get external resources to have somebody come in and start at least on the technical side for SEO. Yes. Because I will say to your point earlier about you kind of change your tune on like needing marketing ops, like needing a marketing ops foundation. It's kind of a similar sentiment to where we had gotten to such a point where everything was working really well, except like our technical SEO audits were just like red flags across the board because we'd never prioritized it, nor did any of us really understand the potential impact that was actually hurting us the entire time. We just never like saw it until we had enough like budget allocated to come in and have an external party come and say, guys, y' all are really doing bad here.

Well, it's almost like you could like make that part of like ops, I guess in the beginning, which is like as part of the website. We need to revisit like SEO and technical structure and all that needs to be baked into how we do this.

Yeah, yeah. 100.

And you could probably just like take on. I think my learning is like, there's probably like a balance which is like, do you need a full like gangster SEO strategy in the beginning? Maybe not, but you need like the hygiene, you know, you need to brush your teeth twice a day, you need to work out, you need to eat. Right. And so like you need to that your team and your content. You should know, you should have a keyword strategy, you should be thinking about title tags and all that stuff. But you might not need like a super insane SEO strategy. Right?

Agree. Yeah. And I would say absolutely, like, if I could do it over again, I wish that I would have had that mindset in early days. But it was so, and maybe this is like more common than not, but it's like so easily overlooked because it is that long term play. And at the time you're like, well, I need to meet revenue goals tomorrow.

So this is also why, like this is a just a perfect, this conversation, like a perfect example of how there's so much nuance in marketing advice and like, yes. AM I on LinkedIn writing, like very definitive takes about things like, of course. Right. But like the reality of it and I've probably said like, you know, I, I 100% would hire SEO first again, like, I'm sure that's out there somewhere, but it's just, it's so relative to like the company, your role, your budget, your timeframe, pressure from your boss, this, that what your competitors are doing. It's like it's impossible to know. And so I think today's episode is.

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It's, it's like this first principles type of thinking that you're talking about which like assess the situation, place some bets and let's go.

Yeah, yeah, it's all about placing bets and we did not place bets on SEO in early days, so there's some learnings to be had there. But like after that it was really understanding, like, yeah, what are our biggest levers that are going to move the needle? So SEO didn't make the cut. We moved outside of Google Ads onto social to try and understand like where our people hang out. Naturally they're all on LinkedIn which turned out to be great. We were already doing pretty well on LinkedIn in terms of just like, I don't know, I guess like guerilla marketing, trying to grow our following. But in early days it was all for the brand, which I also think could be interesting for us to chat about.

Let's talk about it now. Yeah, I was gonna, let's dive deep into LinkedIn anyway. So were you measuring like, like were you seeing this just as a feeling thing like on LinkedIn with engagement or were you looking at like chiliper.com and you're starting to see more referral traffic from LinkedIn?

It was a little bit of both. Right. So like in those early days when I was doing that like data dive, HubSpot had actually surfaced that we'd seen a lot of hand raisers that were coming from organic LinkedIn, which was wild to me because I'm coming from a world where like almost everything's driven direct response from paid. So to already see early signs when they didn't have any paid levers going that actually organic LinkedIn is doing things for us. That's when we were like, okay, well let's capitalize on paid low hanging fruit and then really spend a lot of time on organic social. Which is wild because I'd never had a lot of passion for organic before just because it wasn't the like quick win situation. But it was like, well it's already there, right? Like the proof is in the pudding, it's working really well and nobody's really trying. So early days we were all in on like growing our company profile, which don't get me wrong, is still going great today. Like they are absolutely crushing it. I think when I started one, when I started our email database was 800 humans, which was lower, like too small to even run an AB test on email. And our social was less than that. So like 250 or 300 followers on LinkedIn, which is crazy today. Fast forward, they just hit 25,000 last month. So I mean, that's crazy growth.

And how do you know if that's good?

It's all this is like not going to go to any, like, marketing leaders, like, favorite quotes list, but it's all based on qualitative feedback, honestly. So the amount of people that come to us in a demo and say, oh my gosh, I heard about you guys on LinkedIn or I follow you on LinkedIn, your content is super helpful, or whatever, all of that started getting surfaced. One, at some point in this timeline, we purchased Gong and started like implementing flags in gong recordings to understand which phrases were like, really throwing higher signals than others. And we of course always ask, like, how you heard about us. We implemented it like on the form at some point in time too. But before we got to like validate that, we were researching Gong recordings and almost all of them were like, oh, we heard about you on social, we heard about your podcast. We follow such. And so. And it just became like a huge obvious like, wow, this will never show up in attribution, it will never show up in reporting, like traditional reporting in a Salesforce report. But it's all over Gong. Like, this is the only thing people are referencing. So we have to do more of this and more importantly, we have to hire people that believe in this so that we're like, I don't know, just like unlocking this exponentially with crazy growth as we're hiring more Headcount.

My favorite thing is to have a guest like you who can talk like this. Because Mo, sometimes I'll ask that. Like, I asked that question because I 100 always hoping you would get there and say that. But like, sometimes you ask somebody that question, they're like, yep. And I'm like, no, no share. Like, that was amazing. Yeah. So what's interesting, something that I learned from you, even on this podcast, is almost like your approach to. It's almost like there's like a three pronged approach to understanding where customers come from. It's like you have attribution, which is the measurable, you know, funnel conversion stuff. You have Gong, which you mentioned, which is listening to what's happening on sales calls. And then you have this third thing, which is like asking people how they heard about this. Like, like the simplest form, you know, you go buy a pair of sneakers online and they ask you where you heard about it. I have like in my Exit 5 community it's like questions on the way in. You have to ask, like, where'd you hear about it? I don't have a number on that, but I just know that. Lick my finger. It feels like 80% of people tell me that they joined from LinkedIn. And so what I love is like, it's not this perfect thing. It's like being able to take all those, to calibrate from all those sources and be like, wow, it feels like a ton of people are coming to us from LinkedIn. Let's go. This is. It's exactly it. It's not like your page could have 10,000 followers and you could still drive results. It could have a hundred, it could have a hundred thousand. It doesn't matter. It's like, it's this. It's like, are you feeling it on the, on the other end or more people coming to you because of the stuff that you're doing? It's not this, like, direct response thing. And I've seen the chili pepper content over the years. You're just like, posting links to your, your webinars and like, and blog posts. That's not what drove this engagement.

Exactly, exactly. And it, like, it has evolved so, like, so much over time. And the closer we get that, like, feedback loop with our prospects and our customers and this, like, quote unquote community that we may accidentally built over time, it became this, like, inevitable flywheel that just. I hate saying flywheel, but it just happened so naturally. We were taking in, like, more learnings than we could reciprocate out for our content because the community was just growing faster than we expected, which is all the best problems to have. Like, early days, we had no idea. Right. We didn't have a podcast. There was no, like, sense of community. We, early days weren't focused on social. Right. We were doing paid for the first at least three to five months that I was there. So in that it was just like grinding figuring it out, me trying to identify, like, what was going to resonate with these people, what our value prop was, all those things. Right? Then when we got to this point where we were really almost like, building in public and being more transparent and vulnerable about, like, how I was using Chili Piper at Chili Piper as the Chili Piper admin. It just became this really natural cycle. And honestly, it was all led by the community and these people that were following me or following our brand in, like, a far deeper way than anything I could have ever produced on my own. Right. I think people, I mean, people say this all the time. But like, the words that you, like, create in your little incubator alone and then you publish them, they make no sense to the public. They're like, cool, but what does your product actually do? And so, like, being able to get this real time feedback loop from prospects and customers was like, undoubtedly the biggest unlock that we had.

It's one of the huge, like, it's why I get frustrated when people try to measure social as this, like direct sales roi. There are so many intangibles that you get from it, right?

Yeah. And it's never going to show up in your HubSpot report or your salesforce report. Like, hang it up.

Or like, because you did something on LinkedIn, you'll get an idea for some content you should go create or somebody that you should go partner with. Like, those things are harder to measure. So, okay, so you got paid, you got the funnel, you got paid organic. LinkedIn really worked.

Yeah.

I think you have to also commit to that. It can't just be like, we try. It's gotta be like, this is what we're doing. I feel like Chili Piper, I feel like you did a good job of not trying to be everywhere. So where else did you focus? Like, other than LinkedIn, how did you think about, you know, what were maybe one or two other channels that you used?

So on a paid front, we'd gotten to a place, we started paid on LinkedIn and we had gotten to a place where we felt that that was pretty operationalized. Like, our frequency caps were like, pretty good. We could produce content in a real enough time and get it published and go through the learning cycle of the campaign phase and then get new content out before it was like completely dead or overserved. And we were like, okay, well, our audience is kind of like tapped there. Like, our budget threshold is reaching our frequency cap, so we need to, like, expand to new channels. We ended up trying to expand natively to Facebook and the B2B targeting there was just not great. So we onboarded an additional software metadata, for what it's worth, to be able to unlock that functionality on Facebook, Instagram and continue to scale our paid efforts there, which was a huge unlock for us. But on the organic side in terms of like, community, social, we hired a field marketer next. We didn't expand to Twitter. We tried it. We were terrible. We, like, can't figure out marketing Twitter. Like, I'll raise my hand and say, I can't figure out marketing Twitter. Like, on my personal, like, brand. I don't get it. So we didn't have a ton of success there. Instead of trying to spend a lot of resources on Twitter or Facebook, like organically, we went the paid route again to kind of mimic the same success that we found through LinkedIn the first time and found tons of success through paid there. Hadn't gotten to a place by the time I left where we had started really to like try and do the same thing organically. But I would imagine that would be an okay next step once all the other like, you know, low hanging fruit is tackled. I think in every phase we have low hanging fruit. And so for us, instead of trying Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, we went the field route instead and started standing up local events.

Yeah, I love the approach. Like I think it's so easy to just like peanut butter and average marketing strategy across everywhere. I love that you were intentional. Like we're not doing Twitter, we're not doing X. I think Gong is a good example of like a company in the early days that just kind of only channeled their whole content strategy into LinkedIn.

Yeah.

And I think you see the best results when you can do that. If you have a hypothesis that like this is kind of working, let's go all in. Like you're way better off, especially in this space. Let's really be great at LinkedIn as opposed to trying to do LinkedIn and YouTube and TikTok and Twitter and Instagram, like just go all in on LinkedIn. Right?

Yeah. And it's not all going to work. Right. So it's like if you throw the same post up on another channel, it's not going to work the way it works on LinkedIn. And so instead of like grinding those gears and like starting, it almost needs to be used as like a test phase or something. Like it needs to be passed off to like a growth team or something.

Also to be intentional and being like. And we're doing field, which is completely different, but we have a hypothesis about how we're going to grow revenue and we think that the fastest way is not to just write a bunch of blog posts. We're going to do LinkedIn or our organic approach is going to be through LinkedIn through social. The way we're going to book other meetings is through these channels. So you do the field thing last. I'm going to get to Bright Wheel and I want to talk about like your philosophy on taking a new job and learning from second time stuff. But just last on this, let's talk about just demos. Like I say, most people listening to this, they need to drive More demos, sales meetings, you know, most B2B companies, that is the goal. That's how that's the leading indicator for pipeline. As a multiple time demand gen leader now in your career, what are some of the biggest wins you found that most people missed to drive more demos on a predictable basis?

Well, I feel like this is a softball, so I'm going to take it.

Is it great? I thought it was like, because it's not like people don't want to just hear like, yeah, just do more on LinkedIn, but I know you'd have something more methodical than that.

Yeah, no, I don't think that's the answer. I don't think that's the answer. I actually hear tons of demand gen marketers and marketing leaders that come to me and say like, oh, we really believe that, you know, Facebook is like an unlimited channel for us. Like we could just throw more money at it and get more out of it. There's like nothing that makes me laugh harder than that because I feel that is very far from the truth. So no, like throwing more money at it is never my solution. I think one, yeah, going back to like understanding your funnel and understanding points at which you have like potential, like drop points in your funnel areas to like increase conversion rates or like operationalize your handoff for whatever that means is gotta be on the priority list. Once you actually start getting to a place where you have any amount of volume, like every hand raiser is precious. So like if you're losing any of them, that to me seems very mission critical. Could like should be considered P0. So ironically enough, at what one two two B2B SaaS companies that I worked at before I worked at Chili Piper. I actually had the same problem where I was like, okay, well we don't have any more marketing budget. I can't throw more money at it. I need to figure out how to get more for what I'm actually like already surfacing on the table. That's like not getting to sales, not getting to sales quick enough, doesn't have a good customer experience once they hit our website, like all of those things, like what can I do? And I had actually bought an admin to Chili Piper at both of those companies, which is why it was a really natural fit for me to go and lead demand gen at Chili Piper. So understanding that, and obviously this is the pain point that Chili pepper solves, but understanding all of those potential stop gaps in your funnel between the time they get to your website and raise their hand to the time they Actually get to talk to not an sdr, but an actual account executive. The person that's giving them the demo they requested are all critical points. I think that should be considered early on in the phase of growth, whether it's chili paper or whatever. Right. I'm like, not here for a sales pitch, but what is the amount of time it's taking for your prospect to request, like, how hard is it for them to request the demo and how quickly can they actually get on a call with your account executive to get that demo and get them closed?

Yeah, well, I mean, also, I'm glad you went here because Demand Gen is not Facebook or LinkedIn. Right. It's. That's a channel. But it's ultimately like, this is like, peel everything away and start with like, well, what's happening today? How many meetings do we book this month? We book 50 meetings, but a hundred thousand people came to our website. That's a terrible analogy.

But.

But just like, okay, well, then there's a huge portion of people who, who have not. Why? And you, you're actually running like, Demand Gen is running the exercise. It's like the running the five whys on the funnel. And then you're choosing like, maybe we need a Chili Piper, maybe we need metadata, maybe we need new tools and technology. Maybe we need a different this or that. I think that's where you make those decisions. How can you come in and just know what to do this month, this quarter? Just go turn up Facebook. It's not that. It's Demand Gen owns, really, that, that whole funnel. It's about meetings.

Yeah, it's all about meetings and qualified meetings. Right. So it's like, yes, demos, but, like, how many of those are qualified at the point of which you hand them to your sales rep? Because that'll only create, like, a more natural relationship and feedback loop between you and your sales team. So it's like, not only are they qualified, but also are they being held. Right? Like, are we actually able to get these people on the demo in itself? Like, I don't think that that's a metric that's, like, highlighted enough within SaaS companies is like, yeah, like, meetings booked or whatever, but like, no, no, no. Like, meeting held. Right? How many of those people actually showed up and listened to what we had to say?

Because that also can simplify things. Like, what if you had is also like one way to flip the goals almost and like, reverse it. Like, if you had five more meetings held this month, what would that do to revenue? And then how are you going to go make get those five meetings as opposed to like it's very hard I think when you look at like the macro and you're like, how are we going to grow this huge number? It's like, well let's simplify down. All we need is and this is what the David and Leah said at Drift were awesome at just like hammering, like simplifying, like forget all this. We need 20 more demos that we need 20 more meetings held this month. How are we going to get there?

Yep, exactly, exactly. And understanding like your drive train to get there, like what things must be true in order for us to meet Whatever your ultimate North Star is, hopefully revenue this month. And like, yeah, think about it on a really like tactical level because if you take a step back and you're like, oh my gosh, we have to grow revenue 300% this year, you're never going to get there.

Okay, sorry, this is a different question but I need to come back to this because I want to ask you that now. A demand gen person who really believes in organic and social and building brand. You've seen that question that I get from a lot of demand gen people though when I talk about this stuff is like, well you know, we got a lot to do already. How do we, how do we also prioritize this? How do we get extra budget for this? Who's going to own this? But I know that you see it as part of what you do and you work across the team. So can you talk about how you, how those are not separate things? It drives me nuts when people are like, well how do we do this on LinkedIn and hit the number. Can you talk about how they work together?

Yeah. So I think it's super interesting actually. I come from a digital marketing background which I guess was like the older version of the demand gen title five years ago, seven years ago. And so I really was only focused on paid. My background is really in paid, which is like almost always why I start there because that's where I'm most comfortable. And back in the day organic was like its own thing, like almost always housed under a different function entirely, which is such a weird way of thinking. So I think this is just part of that evolution of just like questioning the status quo where actually you should think of your organic channels and your paid channels more as one of the same than of like two different functions. I don't know at what point in evolution those things got broken out to be considered two very separate levers. But really you should leverage paid as Like a way to ensure that whatever content you were going to put out organically is for sure being delivered to the audience. You want to make sure sees it. And then by way those people will be, oh my gosh, this content from such and so is really valuable. Like I need to go follow their page so that I can see it every time they post. Da da da. Like, I mean it should just be like one lever that you move together.

It also feeds like, it also can feed the like so much of demand gen is. Yes, demand gen kind of like runs the funnel, but so much of it is dependent on assets from other teams. Right?

Yeah.

A deck, a landing page, this or creative, a video. Like I remember doing webinars at Drift for example and we would take clips from our webinars and you can use that as creative for the ad. Right. Like you know, we could send this video to metadata. They sponsored the podcast. We could send them this video. They could cut out the clip and Chili Piper could do the same thing. They could cut out the clip from this podcast and that would probably be amazing. Ad creative or like you're always thinking about like what creative will work for conversion. Well, if you're pumping out content on social, you're going to have a better finger on the pulse of like what content might work on paid. I think they have to work together same.

Right. It's one in the same. Right. Because it's like we should be testing things like with your quote unquote community that you've built your followers on organic channels at this same time, testing things that are maybe like radically different through paid so that those two things are really like funnel fed, one feeds the other all the time.

Yeah.

So yeah, I think it's more important that like if you have your organic social manager or organic channel manager, whatever they're called today, living outside of your demand gen function, I would question that. Like I think that they should be one in the same.

Yeah, but just because they live in demand gen doesn't mean that they can post demand Jenny things. The goal has to be to understand the channel what's going to grow this.

Yeah, but if you're led. Yeah, okay, that's fair enough. But I think if you're led by a demand gen leader or whatever.

Yeah. If it was you. If it has to be.

Yeah, sure. Yes.

If, if the demanding leader gets it, it's like, oh, the way to grow organic social is to not. I just, I see a lot of bad stuff and it's like, oh, the demand gen leader thinks that the way to grow is by posting webinar links, you know, and that type of stuff. If you take this strategy and you understand how social works. 100.

Yeah.

Okay. I got more things to ask you. Thank you for doing this. This is awesome. You're a great podcast guest, by the way.

Thanks. Just because I, like, don't understand when to stop talking.

No, because you talk. Because you actually talk. And like, I don't just want it to be like, next question. Like, I like when people have opinions and, and like take, you know, I don't have to ask you a question for you to, to say something. All right, let's talk about Bright Wheel. Why did you join? Well, actually, I'm trying to think of something that's really relevant to everybody. Not so much why did you join? But now you've seen a bunch of different companies, you have the opportunity to take another job. What do you go and look for as a future CMO or whatever you want to be?

Yeah, I think that's a good, a good way to phrase it. I think when I was looking for a new opportunity and trying to understand, to be fair, I wasn't exactly looking. But LinkedIn's crazy these days. I'm sure everybody feels that recruiting.

Hold on, you don't have to couch this. This is for everybody who's listening out here. Is works in marketing and even if they're so happy at their job, you're always going to get messages from people. And so I think it's just. Let's be real. We can tell them it's okay.

Yeah, okay, okay, fair enough. So non couching things that you look for at a new company. One leadership understanding. Like who you're going to report to, how they think and operate, what is their. What is their background? Did they have something that you like? I mean, obviously you need to make this move for your own career too, right? Do they have something they've done in their past or believe in strongly or have been really good at that you could learn from, find energy and get joy from all of those things. It's like, what does your leadership crew look like? Yeah, what is the mission?

This is a better way to frame this, by the way. This is not even like, hey, why did you leave Chili Piper? This is more just like so many people in like the Exit 5 community and our space are like, how do I evaluate the opportunity? That's the way to frame this. So, okay, so you go in. You.

First is leadership.

Sorry, then go ahead.

Yeah, first is leadership and understanding, like what Your leadership panel looks like who you're going to get exposure to, who you're going to get to work with. Second is like the mission, especially in marketing. My very first gig out of college, I was trying to do marketing for a healthcare company. And let me say that was short lived because it's super weird to try and do marketing for a healthcare company. For me at least, like, hey, when you're sick, come join our hospital. That didn't work. So you have to feel really connected to the mission and whatever you're going to try and be marketing or else it's going to come off as very inauthentic because you're not connected to what you're trying to convince people is the better way, the new way, the solution, whatever the thing is. So leadership mission. And for me it's also just about disruption. Like how disruptive can this category or this software or solution really be for whatever sector or whatever industry that you're joining? Like are, do they have a definitive stance that's questioning the status quo in some way and has real potential to propel or unlock a major solution?

Yeah. Nice. I'm glad you said that. It's like you got to know what you're working with. Does this company have, I mean, Chili Piper had that, right? And then, and then you go, another company Drift had that. Privy had that. I think come. That is. It's so much easier when you have to make that up if you can like channel that. And this company has a strong point of view. So what was that with brightwheel?

Yeah, so for brightwheel, it's crazy. For whatever it's worth, on a personal note, I've got two little girls that are in the early education phase of their life, so pre kindergarten. And I feel this very much as a parent. I can only imagine how it's felt as a teacher or an administrator or a center director. But the space of early education is so far behind, especially when it comes to adopting technology. So I think just because of the phase of life I'm in. On a personal note, this opportunity really spoke to me. At brightwheel, pen and paper is where it's at today for centers, preschools, monastery schools, whatever it is, they're all still doing things on pen and paper, which is wild. What in the world? So like as a parent you're like picking them up at the end of the day and you're getting just like this packet of paperwork and you're like, you know, still paying bills through check or whatever they'll accept. Some schools are Doing things on Venmo, which seems super weird and sketch. So it's wild that everything is very disjointed and not connected. And so Brightwell is obviously a solution that brings everything together for your childcare management. But also, more importantly, like, allows these teachers to spend more time with your children, which is what they want to be doing in the first place and not managing all these disparate systems.

Yeah, I mean. I mean, you can't. It's obviously that. That's something that you feel. And so much easier when you can do marketing for a thing that you. That you know about. I always say, like, I would be the worst marketer for like a dev tools company or cybersecurity. You know, I mean, it really matters. You don't. You're not an expert in this industry, but you have an opinion, you know, you can know what to say. I guess it makes it easier.

Yeah, I agree.

And what's the marketing team like at Brightwheel?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So at Brightwheel, I actually report to our coo who comes from a marketing background. So in like, a former life, she was the VP of marketing at Masterclass.

Oh, cool. That's interesting.

Yeah, it's super cool. She's got an econ background a little bit too, but great leader, has done some really awesome things in her career. So it speaks to the point a minute ago about who's your leadership team? Who are you going to get an opportunity to work with? What can you learn from them? That my COO here, I was super excited to have the opportunity to work with her. So that was a huge, like, selling point for me. But we've got myself on the demand gen function. We've got a content marketing function and then we've got a PMM function. So very similar to what we had at Chili Piper, which also made sense to me at the time. Makes sense to me now. It's the structure I'm really familiar with and, like, is good for this stage of growth. So Brightwell's a little bit further ahead. There are Series C, but in terms of marketing structure, there are 10 of us today, which is very much so. The same stage that I left at Chili Piper.

That's a fun team size and stage. How do you manage up?

Ooh, what a good question. I think for me, proactive comms are huge. So getting ahead of any kind of situation, proactively communicating the tldr, no matter if it's good, bad or ugly, communicating that up is always key, like here or anywhere. Honestly, it lets them Know that you know what's up and you've got your shit. And there's like, no need for them to come over into you and monitor you or check in and make sure you're doing great. So just making sure that you're, like, proactively communicating has honestly always been like my key to successfully managing up a hundred percent.

High five through Zoom. Because 100%, it's like that you framed it exactly right. It's like the point of doing that is be like, look, I got my together. You don't need to know every detail. But as a COO or whatever, you start to be like, well, this seems really. Nobody's. This is a black box. This is a black box. Like, David Adrift was obviously. This is to me, like, this is a black box. I realized because I'm not showing him that I understand this by communicating at that level. And so you're like, look, here's all the stuff that you need about X below tldr. This happened. This is what we're doing about it. They're never actually going to look into that chart because they're like, oh, this is very clear that she's got this.

Exactly. And then to like, a plus one to that if you have a good peer set. So, like, here we have a really great functional leader on the sales team. He and I meet regularly. We slack way more regularly than that. And he is really great at managing up to his leader, too. So that's great because when he manages up to the CSO and they chat, obviously all the time, that's great. Then she's also hearing by way of him that, like, oh, Kaylee said this, that, and the other. So it just helps create this sense of like, hey, we understand maybe this thing that's, like, broken or, like, not going great, it's like, less than ideal, but we're on it. So, like, all good. No worries here.

Yeah. Okay. This hurts me to do it, but we have to stop because I don't have a real job. So I could talk to you for hours and I would be down to that. But you have a real job and you should go do it. Kaylee, thank you so much. This is awesome. I made a note. I really. We should do this more often. We can have you on every. Every now and then and just riff, let's do it.

I'm down for it. I honestly, like, draw a lot of, like, excitement from just, like, chatting about things that work and don't work. So I'm down.

Okay. Kaylee Edmondson, she's on LinkedIn. Don't you go to Twitter? Because she doesn't believe in Twitter.

I can't figure it out.

Y' all go to LinkedIn. She's Kaylee Edmondson. Kaylee, thank you so much for doing this. Everybody else at home on a walk, on a run, vacuuming, doing whatever you're doing, putting your kids in the car. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. Kaylee, you're awesome. I'll talk to you later.

Thank you so much.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also get go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the E email list. There you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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